3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Novocaine

2025, Dan Berk +  Robert Olsen (Stakelander) -- download

Another from the Meh Files. No, I am not starting another Tag.

Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid, Companion), called NovoCaine by his bullies, has CIPA, an apparently real genetic disorder that eliminates pain and the response to heat/cold in people. From the action-comedy perspective, apparent in the trailers, that means he can get shot, stabbed or punched in the face and keep on truckin. But the movie does deal with the very real aspects where, since you don't feel pain, you might not notice when you have hurt yourself. He has a baby-proofed apartment, is an extreme introvert, and only eats soft foods, just in case he bites his tongue while chewing. He doesn't have a lot of joy in his life, but he's a Good Man (as opposed to a Nice Guy) and cares for his customers at the bank in which he is Asst Manager. He also has a major crush on new bank teller Sherry (Amber Midthunder, Legion), who is inordinately nice to him. She takes him on a date, introduces him to cherry pie, has very careful sex with him. He is instantly head over heels. Nathan is finally living some life.

Then his bank gets robbed and Sherry is taken hostage. Nathan throws all caution to the wind and pursues the robbers to get the girl of his dreams back. Following the playbook in these kinds of movies, the police initially think he's in on it, but eventually start figuring things out. As Nathan catches up with the bank robbers, each in individual encounters, we get a bone-crunching, hot-oil cooking, punching, stabbing, shooting fight scene. We wince for each injury Nathan takes, because he doesn't. That's the gimmick, and unfortunately its not very successful. Eventually he does reach his final destination, to save Sherry and, entirely unsurprisingly, discovers she was in on it the whole time. But her foster brother is the worst and she is reconsidering her life choices, actually, truly liking Nathan. Because, of course.

If it wasn't for the easy charm in which Quaid and Midthunder carry the characters, the movie would be entirely boring, as in VHS bottom-shelf mundane. Along with Nathan's online, and only, friend Roscoe (Jacob Batalon, Reginald the Vampire) who comes out of his gaming cave to provide surprisingly nimble assistance, the movie is not without its moments. But the cops are cardboard, the villains are paper thin, the action scenes only somewhat inspired.

I wish I could say I am watching these movies because we have to, because we have to make a post about them. But no, its me, I am to blame, I do this to myself.

KWIF: Ash (+5)

 KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Ash (2025, d. Flying Lotus - AmazonPrime)
Kraven the Hunter (2024, d. J.C. Chandor - Crave)
Flow (2024, d. Gints Zilbalodis - Crave)
Dual (2023, d. Riley Stearns-  Tubi)
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (2019, d. Richard Linklater - Hollywood Suite)
Tombstone (1993, d. Panos Cosmatos - Disney+)

---

In making Ash, I suspect that Flying Lotus -- the moniker producer/writer/director/actor/composer Steven Ellis has been working under for nearly 20 years -- was attempting to channel David Lynch primarily, but also cribbing from the sci-fi horror films of Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and Paul W.S. Anderson, among others. These influences make a soup with identifiable chunks within but it has the feel of a first-time production from a director with something to prove.  

Flying Lotus has been a top notch music producer, beatmaker and composer for a long time and working within the entertainment industry for much of that, so he knows how to be in charge of a project, and he's familiar with executing a vision. It's likely how he was able to rope in the budget needed for this very not-cheap-looking film. The result with Ash a visually pretty production, grotesqueries and all, with a very even-tempered mood of simmering dread.

The plot finds Riya (Eiza González) regaining consciousness in a habitable station on an alien planet, her memory fuzzy, and members of the crew dead on the floor. The station is in a warning state, red and violet lights illuminating the space, the occasional voice of the station's systems providing updates and alerts. Riya has horrific flashes of people with melting skin, of vibrant halos, and of fleshy tunnels that she cannot make sense of. She's eventually joined on station by Brion (Aaron Paul) who had been in the orbiting satellite when things went down, and Brion's key objective seems to be getting Riya off-planet before the station completely collapsed. Riya, however, fluttering memories returning, cannot let go of needing to find out what happened, as well as search for a missing crew mate.

The progress of the story is the unfolding mystery of what happened via Riya's fractured flashbacks and some recordings of past events. It's not a convention that works well, as the violence has already happened and we've already seen the aftermath, so the tension of the conflicts in the flashbacks are effectively neutered. Though Flying Lotus' direction is strong, it's a film with misguided storytelling, believing that the mystery of what happened is more interesting in staggered hindsight rather that unfolding in a linear fashion.  It's the difference between, I think, doing a straightforward sci-fi horror and reaching for something more clever. 

Flying Lotus reaches, but doesn't fully succeed. While I mentioned the simmering dread, there's no escalating tension, and, honestly, no scares here, as if Flying Lotus did not want to make a horror movie out of this horror script. The score reflects this, with barely any punctuation in its shifting tones. 

The designs of the film are mostly pretty good. The space suits look incredible, the station itself is visually intriguing just enough to deliver the sense of sci-fi without calling too much attention to itself, and the Japanese portable robotic medical kit delivers a bit of cheeky kitsch into an otherwise sombre affair. The grotesque makeups are also pretty fun, but the "creature" designs very wildly between disturbing and incomprehensible cgi mess. The space ship, as well, is kind of uninspired.

At the end of the day, I've seen so many projects like this, so many sci-fi horror films that they all kind of blur together. Here, there was a "we got here first" angle that I wish had intoned a larger, maybe secret war between humanity and this other species, but there's not a lot of hints towards any larger context here, and the endgame of the aliens proves unclear. 

---

In the realm of big studio filmmaking there are films made from good ideas, films made from bad ideas (but ones that are still expected to make money from an undiscerning public), and films of desperation, made out of some seeming necessity to keep up with other studios output, to nab their slice of some perceived pie. Kraven the Hunter is a real desperate movie, but then that's nothing new for Sony Pictures.

Sony has held a tight grip on the Spider-Man license for 25 years, and it's been fairly profitable for them, but their attempts at shared-universe building have been absolutely miserable for over 10 years now. With the ludicrous swing of "let's build a shared universe in one movie" in Amazing Spider-Man 2 back in 2014 it was a failure so epic Sony had to relinquish some control of the character back to Marvel Studios to ensure their Spider-Man license had a future. They built up on that joint venture with Marvel by trying desperately to expand beyond just Spider-Man, first with Venom (a big hit at first, with depreciating returns ever since) and then with some of Spider-Man's extended supporting cast, resulting in Morbius, Madame Web and now Kraven the Hunter.

These SPASMs (Sony Pictures' Adjacent to Spider-man Movies) were just brimming with overconfidence. The shared universes had already imploded by the time Morbius hit, and the willingness for the mass audience to tolerate a film for any comic book hero and/or villain had long since waned. Kraven was already deep in the works when Madame Web failed, and the trailer foretold that Sony had yet another bomb on their hands.

There was a whole "It's Morbin-time" attempt at an ironic re-release to appeal to the meme crowd, but Sony quickly learned that memes can't generate box office (tell that to The Minecraft Movie...), at least not by themselves. And yet the absurdity of everything in the heavily retooled and edited Madame Web turned it into a near instant cult classic (though, not enough to make a success at the box office). 

Kraven similarly went back to the editing bay after the abysmal trailer, but whatever ludicrous arch madness went into recutting Madame Web did not make it into Kraven. Stuff happens in Kraven, but we're never given a single impulse as to why we should care. The character has a prolonged flashback story that seemed to make little difference in establishing who this character was. The moment where a mauled Sergei Kravenoff lays wounded on the ground and the shot-up lion that mauled him drips his blood directly into Kravenoff's open wound (one in a billion shot) is about as close to Madame Web's lunacy as it gets. One would think a portly, thickly accented Russel Crowe would bring a heavy load of absurd flavour to the production (not unlike his portly, thickly accented Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder) but there's not a hint of irony in the performance. He wasn't asked to play it up, so he played it straight. The result is, frankly, pretty dull.

It's a dull movie overall. Kraven with his lion-infused blood and a special magical serum given to him by a young Calypso, has super powers...super sight, super agility, super strength, which lets him crawl up walls and trees and shit, as well as leap distances well beyond mortal levels. He finds himself attuned with animals and hunts poachers but also mobsters, and people who get on his list only get scratched off when they're dead. He grows into the world's foremost hunter, and a big meaty slab in the form of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but then he needs a grown-up Calypso's (Ariana DeBose) help to track down some other bad guys? I though he was the world's foremost hunter?

There's bad guys upon bad guys in this film including an assassin called The Foreigner who can, I guess, hypnotize people for up to ten seconds and gives the appearance he's teleported or moving at super speed. It's actually a cool effect but to no real end.  There's also the Rhino, a crime boss who, if he disconnects his backpack full of serum from his liver plug, will grow super hard skin and...really... a rhino horn on the top of his head. It's absurd, but it's not fun absurd because they kind of refuse to have fun with it.

In the end, the worst of the worst guys is Kraven's dad, and so they have it out, but the stakes feel completely absent from the climax. The stakes feel pretty absent from the entire film. What's the point? Why are we even here? What's the story we're trying to tell? Why should anyone care...especially if we're not leading into Kraven hunting Spider-Man which is basically the only think he seems to do in the comics.

Just a waste of everyone's time. Hopefully this is the last nail in the SPASM universe.

---

I had not even heard of Flow until it was announced as one of the finalist for the Academy Awards' Best Animated Film this year, and it seemed only after it actually won did I start seeing write-ups on it. It was the dark horse contender against the summertime juggernaut Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot and the latest Wallace and Gromit outing (I suppose the real dark horse contender would be Memoir of a Snail, which I've still not heard about and I just wrote it down right there!!), a Latvian/Belgian/French co-production from Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis.

It is a dialogue-free production where not a single human character is seen in the film. The premise is simple, a lone black cat must survive a devastating flood with the help of a cadre of other survivors.  There is an absence of humans but there are signs of them, including statutes, habitats, and things like bottles, boats, mirrors, and the like. Is it a post-apocalyptic scenario? Are all the humans dead? Or have they just abandoned this space because they were warned of the incoming disaster.

As Cat finds herself with travelling companions (the assembly of these traveling companions is one of many of the major joys of the film) they voyage through the flooded lands to the tall spires and gilded riverside domiciles that infer that this is not Earth as we know it, but some other reality.  I truly was not expecting this.

There is a heavy weight to Flow as it puts our adorably mewing cat into so, so many perilous situations. If you're a cat lover, or even just a cat liker, it is unbearably heartwrenching to see our protagonist in such peril... not helpless completely, but at times situations seem seemingly hopeless, and you want to look away. But if you were to look away, you would miss the magic, be it some twist of fate, or moment of ingenuity from Cat, or the intervention of others. They are gloriously triumphant moments.

The setting of this world is flat-out stunning. It is an incredibly lifelike reality that could pass for an Earth-like alien world in a James Cameron movie. The camera work is incredible as it stays down at cat's eye view (or lower) for the majority of the picture, and frequently dips above and below the surface of the water, just magical animation and directing. If anything in the animation didn't work for me it was the gradient highlights on the animals' fur. Often the animation of Cat and friends looked...incomplete... or at least lacking proper detail. But it's made up for by the incredibly naturalistic movements of the creatures. If you've ever owned a cat, or even just binged cat videos on Instagram, you will recognize all the behaviours.

A slight spoiler, the ending is restorative, full of hope and promise, but with the reminder that often for the benefit of some, others may suffer. I flat out loved this movie even though I cried so many times throughout it.  Sometimes because it was so beautiful and sometimes because it just made me miss my dearly departed black cat Isis.

My second favourite movie of 2024 (behind I Saw the TV Glow), and I think what I'd hoped The Wild Robot would be.

---

Dual opens with a prologue in which a man kills another man in a premeditated duel on a high school football field in front of cameras and crowd, and is interviewed afterwards like in a televised sporting competition to assess his feelings of his victory. The other man looked exactly like him. The victor was his duplicate, but now, by rights of the competition, gets to take his name and live his life.

Minutes later we're introduced to Sarah (Karen Gillan). Her long-term boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koel) has been away from work for some time, and their remote conversations seem to indicate their affection towards each other is waning. At first I thought that the film was badly written, and that Gillen's performance was not great, that she was struggling with her American accent again, but quickly realized that this reality is very much an affected one, sort of like in a Wes Anderson film but cranked up a few notches. Everyone in this reality talks in a very frank and dispassionate manner, but even among all of them, Sarah still seems autistic/spectrum-coded. She misses a lot of social cues and her sense of appeasement or cordiality almost always misses the mark.  She is not a satirical character though, even in a heavily neurdivergent world she's still struggling, an outsider.

She wakes up one morning to find blood everywhere on her sheets and pillow. Her doctors tell her she is 100% terminal with a 2% margin of error. She is give no hope but is talked into the duplication process to leave behind a double of herself so that her loved ones won't be sad.  It's a terrible idea (with a hilariously bad sales pitch video online which even Sarah scrubs through). I think if she understood emotions better, this wouldn't have even been an option for her, but since she is who she is, this was presented as "the right thing to do" and so she did it.

Time passes and her double, legally named "Sarah's Double" has become a big part of her and Peter's life, to the point that Peter like this sponge of a person who seems so amenable and upbeat and vital in a way Sarah either can't be, or just hasn't been in a long time. Eventually Sarah learns she's not dying but her double has filed a suit to duel Sarah for her life, and the second half of the film is about Sarah training with Trent, to toughen up and take back what's hers (meanwhile Sarah's Double starts falling into Sarah's bad habits and attitudes).

This is satire, but of what, I can't rightly interpret, at least not yet. It's going to need another watch or two before I'm able to land on what this is really saying about our natures. Once I looked up the director, Riley Stearns, and realized it was the same creator of The Art of Self-Defense, it all really clicked for me. I really dug that film and its very weird vibe. Dual could very well be in that same reality.  Gillan's performance very quickly went from making me flinch into admiration, much the same way Stearns managed to harness Jesse Eisenberg's very specific energy and mold it in his own image for Self-Defense. She's so keyed into this role/these roles, but it's also quite clear the director is specific about what he wants. There's a humour and a pathos to Stearns' films, in that same abstract way Yorgos Lanthamos likes to present them, though with much less discomfort. I really dig Stearns' style overall and was rather elated to be in his unusual hands again.

---

I have seen a pretty good sampling of Richard Linklater's repertoire, but I have by no means been avid or fanatical about keeping up. His movies are generally pleasant, and offer something of interest worth watching, but I'd hardly call any of them exciting, at least for me (maybe School of Rock?). I'm never displeased watching a Linklater joint, but I'm also never champing at the bit to watch one, certainly not to rewatch one.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a Linklater film that really fell off the radar, making nary a blip in the public consciousness. It's a light drama about an upper-class family in Seattle, focused primarily on Bernadette, an antisocial, near agoraphobic wunderkind designer/architect who retreated from the field to raise her daughter. Bernadette is the fairly typical Cate Blanchett role of affluent, entitled, difficult personality, but Linklater's whole business here is helping us, the audience, see past these traits and instead see the traumas she's hiding from that have made her this way. She is, absolutely, an eccentric, something, again, Blanchett excels at, but we see "normal" whenever Bernadette is with her daughter, Bee (a terrific performance from young Emma Nelson), and we understand that there is a lovable person who doesn't mean to be the way she is.

Bernadette has a strained relationship with her husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup), a bigwig at Microsoft, and an even more strained relationship with her neighbours, led by queen bee Audrey (Kristen Wiig), and perhaps an even more strained relationship with Seattle itself. Things eventually escalate with both Audrey and Elgie, especially when ... out of the blue, the FBI gets involved. 

The third act takes a wild turn from suburban drama into green screened Antarctic adventure that definitely flexes Bernadette's off-putting entitlement (both for characters on-screen and with the audience) but also leads to an appropriate breakthrough and catharsis for the character.

It's a wild swing that is hard to hate on but also hard to really like a lot. There are good performances, but I have to wonder how long can we stand to watch affluent people live "difficult" lives of their own making. This whole "misunderstood genius" of the rich narrative isn't going to float very far in what's left of the 2020s, and I realize this was made prior, but were Link later reading the room, he might have understood this was all a bit much.

---

With Val Kilmer passing recently, I was seeing a lot of "must see" lists of Kilmer's performances. Tombstone was a mainstay on all those lists.  The 1993 western has been on the backburner of my "to see" list for a very long time, with Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earpp being the primary draw. I'm just not much one for westerns. The glorification of a very treacherous, uncivilized, and radically violent "might makes right" time never sits well with me. I need my westerns to be highly stylized and either feel like practically alien worlds, or get right down into the dirt of the human condition of living in such a free-for-all age. (I also realize that the glorification of the old west, particularly by Hollywood, has perhaps crafted an untrue image of the era, but an image that still informs the culture of the country quite prominently, and, methinks, negatively).

I didn't much care for this film. It meanders quite a bit as the character of Wyatt Earpp, having retired from law enforcement, waffles around whether he has any duty or responsibility for his new homestead of Tombstone, Arizona.  There a very large gang called the Cowboys have set up as home base, and for a time, at least, Earpp and his two brothers and their wives just try to roll with the general tenor of the place. But the Cowboys get out of hand, they push the Earpp boys too far, and if for justice, and not revenge, they take up arms against them.

It's not the story itself I object to, one which seems to be utilizing the legit framework of the Earpp brothers (Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton) and family's life, but the wildly uneven tone it progresses through as it sets up so many inevitabilities and foregone conclusions that we just wait to play out.  

The story is also routinely interrupted by a wholly unnecessary subplot where Earpp meets actress Josephine Marcus, a relatively liberated woman of the era who pursues Earpp flagrantly despite him being married, and Earpp seems transfixed by and can't help himself with.  This subplot goes nowhere and seems only included because, in the end Earpp did wind up with such a woman, or so the closing captions said. Each time Delaney is on screen, the momentum of the picture screeches to a halt, and they feel like tacked-in "we need a romantic subplot" decree from the purple suits.

Kilmer played Doc Holliday, a long-time friend of Earpps who joins him in Tombstone to find some last bit of excitement while his life ebbs away from tuberculosis. Kilmer's dewy performance is absolutely fantastic, easily stealing focus every scene he's in. He masticates the shit out of every moment he has on screen, and I see why people were praising it so much.  If only the film were built more around him, or the time we spend with Russell and Delaney were instead spent with Kilmer as the second lead.

If I don't try too hard to remember specifics, Tombstone would be a stand out western, but with the exception of Kilmer and some beautiful, luscious mustachios, it's decidedly mid.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Captain America: Brave New World

2025, Julius Onah (The Cloverfield Paradox) -- download

Why is it, only a week later, that I barely remember this movie? Sure, there was a Red Hulk and pink blossoms, there was Congressman Barnes and a not-as-surprising-as-they-thought lead villain. But beyond that, I don't remember much of a movie, and literally nothing hit home enough for me to care. Why?

Like Kent, I have a lot invested in my MCU watching. I have slowly been rewatching the ones that most would consider a dud -- still really like Shang-chi and despites its various flaws, I am still rather a gleeful fan of The Marvels. Still "meh" about The Eternals and still in dislike with Thor: Love & Thunder -- still not able to get entirely through a rewatch. But really, does every current MCU post I write now have to start with the lamentations of ages past? And if any movie leans me squarely into the "an era is dead", it is this one. Even if there wasn't anything particular about it I disliked, it was not much above the crappy action-ers that I constantly watch and repeatedly state "they were OK".

From here foreward, spoilers abound, if that matters so long after the movie released.

Marmy had no interest in watching this one, and this is probably her first skipped MCU movie, and its primarily because of the "rah rah American President" aspect of it. A previously thoroughly dislikeable character, General "Thunderbolt" Ross (is that why the Thunderbolts movie has the asterisk?) has shaved off his moustache, exchanged his body for Harrison Ford and been elected the President of the United (???) States of America. Despite it not really mattering to their continuity, I would love if someone created a post that showed the state of America in the MCU just before he was elected, based on the material we have been shown. Either way, even with the foreshadowed intent (Ross becomes a Red Hulk), much of the movie is centered around POTUS Reverence. It astounds me that the Real World depicts less respect for the office than Sam Wilson gives Ross; the man should thoroughly despise President Ross, and yet he gives him hesitant respect and deference and actually attempts to believe the asshole has changed. Marmy had no interest in that.

So, OK. General Ross (Harrison Ford, Shrinking) is President. Wilson (Anthony Mackie, Altered Carbon) is still struggling with being labelled Captain America, though his international escapades with Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez, The Gifted) have gained them enough notoriety that Ross sent them to Mexico to stop a terrorist group from selling a classified item to ... other terrorists? The sellers are Serpent (comics = The Serpent Society) and the buyer is a mystery. The opening fight is at the TV level, something reminiscent of the Sam & Bucky Show which I get is probably intentional, but ... meh.

After that success they end up at a summit arranged by Ross, where the opening bit is explained. The package was "adamantium" (gong volume foreshadow sound) which had been mined from the Celestial body in the Indian Ocean (see The Eternals). Ooooo, they are going to replace the hard-to-get Vibranium with Adamantium, which means unless they do some celestial level retconning, when they introduce the X-Men to the MCU, Wolvy will not yet have been abused by the Weapon X Program. Anywayz, Ross wants the world to come together to agree on how this new resource should be handled.

Exceeeept, there are a bunch of sleeper agents in the audience, including Sam's buddy Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly, Supergirl), the forgotten Captain America (Korean War era), and after hearing the song "Mr. Blue", they all attempt to kill the President. They fail, and when they capture Bradley, he has no idea why he did it. We also get introduced to Ross's head of security, one Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas, Shtisel), who previously one of the Widow agents from the Red Room. She's tiny but she's one tough cookie. 

Investigation Time!

Sidewinder (Giancarlo Espositio, Breaking Bad), leader of Serpent, attacks Sam, but gets captured. That points Sam and Joaquin to some hidden based called Camp Echo, one of those off-the-books sites. Ross is desperately trying to secure the goal of the summit, but the Japanese are not on board -- his house is obviously not safe. At Camp Echo, Sam & Joaquin discover that someone really really smart was housed there, someone who had devised a way to create sleeper agents and was responsible for the attack. Meanwhile Ross knows exactly who has been doing all this, the elusive Mr. Blue who if you remember the Not MCU / Yes It Is The Incredible Hulk movie, was the name of the villain who got himself dosed by Hulk Blood and whose head went all mushy. He has become a super villain with a big brain which Ross has had imprisoned for years, providing Ross with a serum to keep his faulty heart in check. Why Ross trusted the guy, who knows. But obviously he has gotten himself out of that pickle.

I was honestly hoping that they would somehow mix Skrulls into this, maybe have Sidewinder actually be a Bad Skrull, but I guess that spaceship has sailed.

Meanwhile in the Indian Ocean, where ships are converging on the Celestial, Mr. Blue takes control of two American fighter jets and attacks the Japanese. Wait, do the Japanese have a navy? AFAIK they were denied any actual military force and only have coastal defense ships -- I guess the MCU post-WWII treaties were different, and maybe in the post-Blip world, things have to be. Anywayz, Cap (for he is flying as Captain American at the time) and Joaquin stop the planes, but not without injury and an escalating, growing rage from within Ross. The man is doing his best to not Hulk Out.

Back in Washington, DC, Ross has a press conference where he finally gives fully in to the Mr. Blue initiated Hulk serum in his blood and ... Red Hulk !! He's a wee bit smaller than Green Hulk, enough so that Captain American and his Vibranium enforced armour can take the rampage head on, in the beautiful cherry blossom orchard near the White House, whiiiiich Red Hulk has pretty much destroyed. This whole battle is such a let down, and not the Olympus has Fallen impact they wanted from it. Its just a building smashed by Red Hulk in this movie; any emotional baggage has been drained by apathy and a complete inability for the movie to generate the reverence it wanted. Also, since Captain America is so obviously outmatched by a Hulk, he takes down Ross with guilt over his estranged daughter Betty, who has been MCU absent since the Edward Norton movie. 

Red Hulk defeated, Ross resigned and in The Raft along with Mr. Blue. Blah blah blah, sum up and ... well, I just don't care.

Kent comments on how the movie was Purple Suit Butchered, and while that was not obvious for me, the lack of commitment was apparent. I Just Don't Care should not be an emotion elicited from a MCU movie. And not one in this sub-franchise. Sure, the threading together of continuity was fun for the nerd, but... will anyone else care about this movie? I sure didn't.

1-1-1: Black Mirror Season 7

created by Charlie Brooker

It's been almost two years since the last season of Black Mirror, which, truthfully, isn't so long ago but also feels like an eternity (Brooker really needs to write an episode about how our perception of time changes as we get older...but, you know, with technology). We got spoiled in those early Netflix years where Brooker cranked out three seasons of six episodes (and a special) over four years. It's probably for the best he hasn't maintained that pace. Black Mirror can be an intense show, and we probably need a longer refractory period before we thrust back into the technological trauma of Charlie Brooker's demented mind.

Except Black Mirror isn't just about exploring technology's ugly downsides or worst-case-scenarios, not anymore. Starting with "San Junipero" in season 3, an oasis of loveliness in an otherwise sea of dread at that point, Booker usurped expectations as to what the show could be. He continues to do so, and it's not just once per season. He's really adapted over the past three seasons into big tone shifts, from playful to comedic to suspense to creature feature to existential horror to romance and on. Every episode is not an absolute nightmare, and every episode is not about the twisting of the knife. 

One still has to brace themselves for each episode of Black Mirror to present to them something discomforting or even upsetting, but the show hasn't so much as lost its edge in today's nightmare world as its ceded being edgy for the sake of sustainability. I think if the bleak worldview of the first two seasons persisted, the show wouldn't have sustained its mass appeal. Brooker has ventured much deeper into science fiction territory over the years, stepping back from horror and terror. From the beginning he's balanced high concept world-building storytelling with character-based storytelling very effectively, but his character-based episodes have evolved to let the characters set the tone of an episode rather than the technology or the "twist", such as they were.

Season 7 is the next evolution of Black Mirror, with Brooker connecting new stories with past stories, sharing technology between stories but in different contexts, and even dropping a direct sequel to a past episode. unconstrained by time commitments (there are two feature-length episodes here), this season is varying in quality from episode to episode, but I think none are particuarly bad, some just are subjectively better than others.

---

SPOILERS BELOW

---

Common People
d. Ally Pankiw

The What 100: Mike and Amanda are a couple very much in love, and completely devoted to one another. They have a very comfortable life together, until Amanda falls ill with a previously undiagnosed brain tumour. Enter Rivermind, a company that says it will be able to fix Amanda, and for free, with a daring new technology that replaces the damaged sectors of the brain. But this new lease on life comes at a cost of a monthly subscription that Mike and Amanda can barely afford, not to mention other limitations like "service areas". The enshittification of human brains begins to wear on their once happy life.

(1 Great) The chemistry between Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones playing Mike and Amanda is everything for this episode. It's pretty heavy handed in its messaging so it all rests upon these actors to sell the emotional component of the story.  In the background is a couple who have built a very loving life together, remaining strong after a series of miscarriages, and, even in its current trials with Rivermind, you can sense the frustration but the love is not lost. When the idea of this brain-segment replacement is proposed, I immediately knew what the progression of the story would be, but it's the characters' journeys navigating this life-saving, but also life-crippling technology that matter.  O'Dowd and Jones are pretty effective dramatic actors, but they know comedy too, so the tone capably switches in and out like in the situations when Amanda is forced to say "contextually relevant" ads out loud that are both hilarious and terrifying.

(1 Good) Frankly, I found the marriage of tackling the burden of for-profit medical systems, the non-stop upgrade cycle of cellular service, and the progression of every service becoming a subscription to actually cohere pretty well in this story. It's not subtle in the slightest, and it need not be. Subscriptions services suck as do for-profit medical systems. The lack of humanity involved in capitalizing on other people's ill fortune seems to only be getting worse in our ever-dreadful capitalistic society.

(1 Bad) There's a tertiary aspect to this story about how, when societies start to crumble, the first thing to go is our sense of empathy. We start to feel better about our own situations by observing the misfortunes of others, whether it be putting them into a gladiatorial pit or watching them denigrate themselves for money. This story has a side-hustle on-line "only fans"-inspired website called DumDummies where people go on to humiliate and/or abuse themselves for the meagre spend of others. It's a very Black Mirror concept, but it's also a bigger concept than is given time to be explored here. The DumDummies side plot tonally interferes with the pathos of the episode once it starts becoming a more relevant part of the story. It's also conceptually unpleasant, not quite "The National Anthem" level but still, clearly, Brooker hasn't completely grown out of that gross-out sensibility.

META: The end of Season 4 had an episode called "Black Museum" which intoned that there was some connective tissue between episodes in the series, and ever since Brooker has been adding more connective tissue between different episodes. It's clear that not all the realities are the same realities but a lot of them are, or at least adjacent (we'll cover this more with the next episode's "meta"). This episode, tonally, felt akin to "Be Right Back", but the brain technology used in this episode we haven't seen any logical antecedent to (at least not yet). However, Amanada is a school teacher who has been teaching her kids about the mechanical drone bees that were introduced in "Hated In The Nation", so they're possibly in the same reality.

---

Bete Noir
d. Toby Haynes

The What 100: Maria is a successful food scientist for a snack food company who has her world turned upside down by Verity, whom she went to high school with, who joins the company. Verity was not a popular kid in high school, and her sudden emergence in Maria's life makes her uncomfortable. Within short order, Maria gets the sense that Verity is there to sabotage her career, and not only that, either she is going mad or somehow Verity is changing reality.

(1 Great) This exploration of the effects of confabulation is an amazing starting point for a Black Mirror episode. What if suddenly things aren't quite as you remember them? Little things like the wording of an email, or the name of an old fast food chain... especially if it keeps happening. Bound to drive you mad, but what if it all correlates with the sudden re-entrance into your life of someone whom you bullied in high school? Would you think they were fucking with you? But they can't just rewrite reality, can they...?

(1 Good) ...In effect, yes they can. This story introduces to the realm of Black Mirror the idea of parallel realities, and the character of Verity has developed a quantum computer that has allowed her to shift reality around her on the press of a button an a whim. The power one can exude with such a device is enormous, and the episode touches upon that, but also the dissatisfaction of having a "cheat code" to life, and one's inability to escape one's trauma. Instead of therapy, Verity built a device where she could jump realities.

(1 Bad) I quite enjoyed the episode, but if I were to quibble, I would have liked it to sit even more with the terror of Maria feeling like her reality was crumbling around her. The thing is, it seemed like Booker's script was sort of on-board with Maria getting some sense of comeuppance. Was Brooker bullied as a kid?  I did guess that Maria, despite being our protagonist, was the villain of the piece, and while that didn't fully come true, she's not the innocent victim either. Had she had any outward sense of complicity or remorse (you could tell in Siena Kelly's performance there was some internal struggles and repression of her past misdeeds) then I think we would have been far more sympathetic towards her, and her terror would have hit harder, but this wasn't what Booker was after.

META: Spinning on the idea of Everything Everywhere All At Once and tapping into alternate realities, Brooker has opened up the concept that Black Mirror is a multiverse (Oh no! Multiverses are so 2023). As I mentioned above, he likes to loosely thread these pretty much stand-alone tales together in their own ways, but the only way to truly connect them would be as a multiverse, since some of the stories or technologies clash with known elements of other stories and technologies. I don't sense any grand architectural scheme out of this, I don't expect any sort of "Black Mirror Avengers Endgame" upcoming where worlds start colliding and crossing over. I think Brooker may be just playing with the concepts quantum dimentions or the theoretical powers of quantum computing (the series Devs used it to, in its own way, "time travel" through digital prognostication).  

---

Hotel Reverie
d. Haolu Wang

The What 100: The 1940's black-and-white classic "Hotel Reverie" is going to be remade, so to speak, but through the proprietary technology from ReDream where they've rebuilt the entire world and environment of the 1940s original, as well as its cast so that they can insert superstar Brandy Friday as the romantic protagonist of the piece. During the "filming" Brandy will enter into the digital simulated reality of the film, performing against legendary actress Dorothy Chambers, or an AI simulacrum thereof. Brandy must complete the film's prescribed journey or face potentially being trapped in the world forever, but, when an accident disrupts the system, and Dorothy obtains self-awareness, Brandy isn't sure she ever will want to leave anyway.

(1 Great) Emma Corrin as Dorothy Chambers delivers a very believable, era-specific performance that asks her to be a character in a 1940's film but also gain an awareness of that fact, and also understand that she was also a real person, not just a character in a film. Dorothy learns who that person was (mainly through digital news archives) and gains a sort of sentience as result, and Corrin plays that awakening so well. Corrin also is able to show how the character's real-life struggles influenced the performance in the film-within-the-film but also connect it to the story at hand. It's a really skilled juggling exercise which she handles impressively well.

(1 Good) The romance between Brandy (Issa Rae) and Dorothy was the heart of "Hotel Reverie" and it is a lovely heart at that. I liked the idea that Issa Rae as Brandy Friday could step into a 1940's reality where nobody would care that she was a black woman who winds up falling in love with another woman...nobody would care beyond the context of the story itself where there's a jealous husband involved, that is. For all the aspects of Rae's performance in the film-within-the-film that didn't work for me, the connection between Brandy and Dorothy really did.

(1 Bad) The conceit of this story does not work for me at all. "Remaking" a classic black and white movie, beat-for-beat, scene-for-scene just with a modern actor in one of the roles will not be a success. A curiousity, yes, but not something that would a sustainable vision for film releases going forward. Especially from what we see in this episode, the results of sticking a modern actor in a classic movie are not at all pretty, especially when you can't have multiple takes and your star is stunned or surprised by so much of what's going on around them.

META: The gang over at The Weekly Planet podcast suggested that the story here is not bad, but the reason for the story is, and I wholeheartedly agree. This could be a technology where *anyone* (with enough money) could get inserted into a movie and live out their dream of being part of the picture (could you imagine getting to play, say, Han Solo in a technological dreamscape where the Star Wars galaxy feels real and not a set? It's a real fantasy to be sure). Have the episode be it's expensive and some regular person has scrimped and saved only for the the experience to go a bit haywire, and this romantic thing happens as a result... it seems even more Black Mirror that way if it's a technology that the masses can access, even if it's somewhat out of reach.  I felt like this conceit could have tightened the narrative and slimmed the episode down, making for a more sweeping romantic tale.

I also thought, at one point, is this going to wind up being the origin story for the San Junipero technology ("Juniper" is mentioned both in this episode and in "Common People" and "USS Callister: Into Infinity" as well), but no, not really(?)

---

Plaything
d. David Slade

The What 100: A dishevelled man walks into a convenience store, tries to steal a bottle of liquor but is stopped by anti-theft automations at the store. When the police arrive they find out the man is also a DNA match for a cold case murder from the 90s. Taken in for questioning he tells his history of being an awkward, nervous, social outcast and gaming nerd. He worked for a video game magazine and was assigned to preview the latest offering from legendary programmer Colin Ritman, Thronglets...an anti-game about raising and nurturing a digital civilization of creatures that start to grow beyond their parameters. The unfolding of the story bridges past and present, and holds the key to the future in a very Black Mirror fashion.

(1 Great) Peter Capaldi holds the reigns of this episode from his first moments on screen and just carries it through. A lot of it is the knowledge his character Cameron has that nobody else (including the audience) does, but Capaldi is so charming and effective as a nervous tick of a man who has only somewhat outgrown his nerves with some very specific confidence. I never really did watch Capaldi as Doctor Who, but I don't think there's a performance of his that I've seen that I have not enjoyed.

(1 Good) Most Black Mirror episodes are very well directed but David Slade's episodes (previously "Metalhead" and "Bandersnatch") are standouts. The X-Files, Hannibal and Breaking Bad director has a history of making visually striking episodes of television, something which hasn't necessarily translated into a bold cinematic career, but damn does he make TV look good. This episode is set in the same world as "Bandersnatch" (the Black Mirror "interactive film" where the user can choose the direction of the story as it progresses) so much of the visual style was established with that production, but here Slade carries that style forward and has to juggle a second time period. It's all within an aspect ratio that doesn't seem to be standard widescreen, nor classic 4:3. And that interrogation room, the angles are just insane and captured perfectly. And, of course, Slade has real fun with Cameron's acid trips.

(1 Bad) I was anticipating a Bandersnatch sequel, and this isn't that, which is probably for the best.

META: Of all the Black Mirror episodes, Bandersnatch is the one I've returned to the most...for obvious reasons. It's a wild pick-a-path style story that is super fun to puzzle over all the alternate realities that it presents, and the way it lets you reset to "save points" (just noting that "save points" are mentioned in "Hotel Reverie") and back up to pick a different option to the abrupt story's end. As far as I know, there is no "true path", and so doing a direct sequel to Bandersnatch would entail ascribing one to that story, which would ruin it, so it's best they didn't.  

Brooker used to work as a video game reviewer for PC Zone magazine, so it's tempting to say there's a bit of himself in this one, but there's probably not much beyond having the same job as Cameron in the 90's.

---

Eulogy
d. Christopher Barrett, Luke Taylor

The What 100: Phillip is called up by a service called Eulogy to see if he would provide his recollections of a woman whom he once dated and has recently passed away. The service entails him interacting with a virtual assistant who steps him into the photographs he has of the era and helps him draw out his memories which would then be shared with those in attendance at the funeral. It's an emotional journey about the fluidity of love and memory.

(1 Great) 90% of the time Black Mirror is about the terror of technology, how invasive it is or how it can spin out of its intended use into something nefarious, but sometimes Brooker crafts an idea that finds technology providing something so beautiful as helping someone to remember the past. The start of this journey takes a distant trauma and reawakens it for Phillip (Paul Giamatti in all his masterful, jowelly power), as he hesitates to fully recall this woman from his past, and slowly transitions into needing, more than anything, to seeing her face again, only he has no photo reference of her.  The episode powerfully builds up the sensations of recollecting beauty and pain and longing and regret, amongst other emotions on a truely beautiful roller coaster ride.

(1 Good) The visual effect of the AI assistant bringing Phillip into the pictures he's looking at was absolutely terrific and I would 100% love to be able to explore photos like that. I loved how it could visualize only what was seen in the picture and any details it had to assume were kind vectored in, looking surreal and unnatural. I could watch any number of stories with this device in any number of genres.

(1 Bad) We find out about halfway through that the AI interface is a representation of the deceased's daughter. I struggle with whether this is a good choice or if it would have been more resonant if the digital assistant were actually connected to the deceased's daughter, to provide a new emotional connection between people, even if a short term one. Otherwise, no notes. A new Black Mirror favourite.

META: The temple device is back! I cannot remember all the places where the temple device is used (it's used again in "USS Callister: Into Infinity"), but it's one of the regulars of the world of Black Mirror. It's the device that connects one's brain direct to technology (although unlike in "Common People", it's easily removable) and it's one of the show's mainstays. The question to ask is every use of this technology in the same world, or is each use of it a deviation and thus a parallel reality?

---

USS Callister-Into Infinity
d. Toby Haynes

The What 100: Black Mirror's first true sequel picks up a few months after "USS Callister" left off. Their abuser Robert Daly is dead both in the real world and in the game, "Infinity", and having escaped his pocket dimention and into the full scope of the open world of the game, the digital clones aboard the USS Callister find they've left one sadistic abuser behind only to find tens of millions of others who will kill them in a digital heartbeat. Needing the in-game currency to survive, they're forced to ransack players for their credits, only their activities have set off alarm bells in the real world that something may be wrong. Where clone Nanette has become a confident leader, Nan in the real world is riddled with anxiety, particularly having been present in Daly's apartment the night he died. She takes on the role of finding the in-game clones, but corporate head honcho James Walton just needs them out of the game as fast as possible, and death will do just fine. Except Walton is hiding a very big secret about the heart of the game which the crew discover is their only way to escape their grim fate.

(1 Great) The longest episode of Black Mirror yet (by 1 minute over "Hated in the Nation"), "Into Infinity" is the episode of Black Mirror that most feels like a proper movie, epic in both scale and adventure with a big, big denouement and some very exciting, effective and weighty action sequences throughout. It's full of consequences and big moments which never feels like its being careful. Let's put it this way, I watched the first 3 episodes of Andor Season 2 the same night, something I had been buzzing in anticipation for a couple years now, and frankly I enjoyed myself more with "Into Infinity" (though still feeling a lot of love for Andor). 

(1 Good) It's been almost 7 1/2 years since "USS Callister" led Black Mirror's fourth season, and in that time, wow has the (American) cast kind of exploded. We've seen a lot more of Cristin Milioti, Jesse Plemons, Jimmi Simpson, and Billy Magnussen in the years since (sadly Michaela Coel did not return for the sequel) and so their increased profile lends much more to the sense of scale of the production, and they're all great playing duel roles in the "real world" and cloned versions of themselves.

(1 Bad) Did "Into Infinity" introduce anything new on top of the story of its predecessor, thematically at least? I mean, the visualization of "Fortnite"-style gaming into a "real life" setting was pretty great, but there was only a nominal commentary on the enshittification of MMORPGs. It hits the "corporate greed" and the toxic evil of the rich button much more than the first, but doubles down on toxic masculinity and white male entitlement (if you find yourself saying you're a "nice guy", ask yourself, do you actually respect women or are you just afraid of them. The answer will determine whether you're really a "nice guy"). 

META: I've had Galaxy Quest on the brain since the Blank Check podcast released a Special Features commentary on it this past weekend, and this episode felt not far off from Galaxy Quest. They're both satires of Star Trek with a meta story involving characters who are forced into a reality they did not ask for and step up to the roles they're asked to play. Honestly, I feel like this episode could have been a Galaxy Quest reboot/legasequel as much as a Black Mirror episode.

I also think Brooker did a pretty great job of sequelizing "USS Callister" without necessitating a re-watch. Most of the background to this episode is delivered in episode. And it's fun! 

[Updated] Black Mirror - Kent ranked

28 episodes, 6 seasons and Christmas special and an interactive movie (so far)

--------

Ranked from 1-10 each for:

T - thoughtfulness (how much it makes you think afterward)

WB - world building (how well the world building works and holds up to scrutiny)

H - horror (how scary is it)

E - enjoyable (it may be smart or scary or conceptually interesting, but is it a fun/good view?)

And finally Ranking 1-20
--------

s1-e1 National Anthem - the Royal Princess is kidnapped, and the Prime Minister is blackmailed into doing something really gross on live television to get her back. This one's uncomfortable as fuck.  Not the episode to start with (I didn't come back to Black Mirror for 6 months afterward)

T - 9 | WB - 2 | H - 10 | E - 2 or 8 depending on your disposition -- Ranking #31/34

s1-e2 15 Million Merits - in the future the average person's job is literally keeping the lights on.  As they work they watch entertainments and ads, and they gain credits.  When they're not working they live in tiny cubicles where every surface is a screen...gaming, entertainment, porn, and advertising, always..their lives are consumed by it.  The only escape for some: an American Idol-style talent competition.

T - 9 | WB - 7 | H - 2 | E - 7 -- Ranking #9/34

s1-e3 The Entire History Of You - an implant records every moment of your life for you to obsess over and play back.  There's no need to misremember things when literally everything is documented.  How does this access to one's past affect relationships...not well.

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 3 | E - 8 --  Ranking #11/34

s2-e1 Be Right Back - a woman loses her husband after moving to the countryside.  She can't stop grieving.  She catches wind of a service that will place her husband's memories (extrapolated from all social media and other digital records) in a bio-engineered version of him.  It gets a little awkward (stars Agent Carter herself Hayley Atwell)

T - 6 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 9  --  Ranking #3/34

s2-e2 White Bear - a woman wakes up, having been seemingly drugged and kidnapped.  Everyone she encounters refuses to talk to her, only monitoring her with their cel phones.  Then some masked crazies start hunting her.  WTF is going on!?! The world building kind of falls apart at the very, very end but still scary as hell

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E- 9  -- Ranking #8/34

s2-e3 The Waldo Moment - what if a foul-mouthed cartoon character ran for office? It basically predicted Trump.  Easily the weakest episode yet still worth watching.

T - 8 | WB - 7 |  H - 7 | E - 4 -- Ranking #34/34

Christmas Special - White Christmas - John Hamm tells a story to a coworker at a remote outpost, and the stranger tells one back.  There's a mystery here.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 6  -- Ranking #24/34

s3-e1 Nosedive - Bryce Dallas Howard is obsessed with her social media score, an app that allows people to rank each other that the whole world is obsessed with and makes every decision around, but it's not high enough to get into the living community she wants.  Her efforts to be a better person totally backfire.  So casually horrifying.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 8  -- Ranking #14/34

s3-e2 Playtest -  a man subject himself to playtesting an experimental, immersive virtual reality gaming experience, but what's the game and what's real start getting very confusing.

T - 4 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #33/34

s3-e3 Shut Up and Dance - a young man has his life upended when a hacker threatens to release compromising video of him to his entire contact list.  The only way out is to perform 24 hours of errands without fail.  The panic level is high on this one, and the ending is a total gutpunch.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 9 | E - 8  -- Ranking #10/34

s3-e4 San Junipero - people can retire into the virtual reality of their choosing, while the young can only visit.  Two women fall in love but their ability to find one another and stay connected is a challenge.  It's an absolutely beautiful, and hopeful, story.  Won two Emmys.

T - 8 | WB - 10 | H -0 | E - 10  --  Ranking #2/34

s3-e5 Men Against Fire - an alien enemy has taken over, they're seemingly everywhere.  Military tech help identify them, but what happens when one soldier's tech goes on the fritz?  Better taken as an analogy than literal.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #21/34

s3-e6 Hated in the Nation - it's a murder mystery, a police detective show mixed with a bit of X-Files or Fringe.  It's practically movie length, and enjoyable but feels so outside of the usual Black Mirror episode...more like a Law and Order episode, or a pilot for a new detective series.

T - 4  | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 7 -- Ranking #30/34

s4-e1 USS Callister - technology that allows you to live within a virtual fantasy scenario finds its incel creator living a totalitarian fantasy life within a Star Trek knock-off, where his servile crew are stolen mind-maps of people from his real life.

T - 4  | WB - 8 | H - 4 | E - 9 -- Ranking #6/34

s4-e2 Arkangel  - helicopter parenting taken to the next degree.  As a parent I can relate to the impulse to protect your child, but when does protection start leading to control?

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #20/34

s4-e3 Crocodile -  a hit-and-run in a remote coutryside returns to haunt a successful architect when an insurance investigation, using memory-reading technology, threatens to unravel her life.  It asks you to relate but it may be the biggest ask in all of Black Mirror.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 8 | E - 5 -- Ranking #25/34

s4-e4 Hang the DJ - a little hopefulness and romance nodding back to San Junipero.  It's a cute/sad look at on-line/app dating, how people meet and whether algorithms can truly account for chemistry.  The reveal/twist is maybe the most eye-rolling of all though.

T - 7 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 6 -- Ranking #29/34

s4-e5 Metalhead - oops, drone technology got out of hand.  Directed by David Slade in glorious black and white, these metal dog things are freaking terrifying.

T - 3 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E - 9 -- Ranking #5/34

s4-e6 Black Museum - a young British woman (Letita Wright!!) waits for her car to recharge, passing the time at the curious Black Museum.  There we see artifacts from across Black Mirror's episodes and are introduced to a few more curiosities.  Honestly, I forget how this one shakes out.

T - 5 | WB - 10 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #32/34

movie - Bandersnatch - in the 1980's a choose-your-own-adventure novel is adapted by a mentally troubled young man into a video game, but aspect of his past and events of the present threaten to drive him to madness, or murder...you decide.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 5 | E - 9 -- Ranking #4/34

s5-e1 - Striking Vipers - a married man and his estranged best friend from college reunite in a new virtual reality version of the video game they play, which leads to questions about sexual identity, marital fidelity and what constitutes an affair.
T - 8 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 8 -- Ranking #18/34

s5-e2 - Smithereens - a distraught widower takes a hostage in order to talk with the billionaire creator of a social media platform

T - 5 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 8 -- Ranking #19/34

s5-e3 - Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too - Ashley O is one of the world's biggest pop stars, but she's trapped in a life she doesn't believe in.  Rachel is a lonely teen in a new town and she gloms onto her Ashley O fandom as her identity, while her sister Jack is too rebellious for it all.  Rachel gets an "Ashley Too" robotic interface which winds up connecting the sisters with the celebrity in a most unusual way.

T - 2 | WB - 4 | H - 1 | E - 6 -- Ranking #28/34

s6-e1 - Joan is Awful - Joan pops on the in-world Netflix to find a TV show starring Salma Hayak who is styled like her and is reenacting moments of her immediate life. Joan's world is thrown into chaos. It gets pretty meta from there.

T - 6 | WB - 2 | H - 2 | E - 8 - Ranking #16/34

s6-e2 - Lock Henry - A young documentary filmmaking student turn his attention on his depressed Scottish hometown, and the murders that rocked it a decade earlier.

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 7 | E - 7 - Ranking #22/34

s6-e3 - Beyond the Sea - in a different reality of 1969, two astronauts are on a long-term space mission, but are able to send their consciousness between their real selves aboard the ship and the androids on earth that allow them to continue their lives. Things go unexpectedly bad and then get predictably awful.

T - 2 | WB - 3 | H - 5 | E - 5 - Ranking #26/34

s6-e4 - Mazey Day  - In mid 2000s, a reluctant paparazzo chases after a famous starlet who has seemingly disappeared after being fired from a shoot for unknown reasons. What she doesn't know is the starlet was involved in a deadly hit and run and is having a very hard time.

T - 5 | WB - 6 | H - 7 | E - 8 - Ranking #13/34

s6-e5 - Demon 79 - In 1979 England a young shoe sales woman of Indian descent experiences constant racism - overt, veiled, systemic, etc - but when she's accidentally tethered to a demon, she's given the opportunity to let out some of her pent-up frustrations...because she has to kill 3 people or the world will end.
T - 6 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 9 - Ranking #12/34

s7-e1 - Common People - She was dying with a brain tumour but a new technology saves her life by backing up her brain. But is life worth living when there's a subscription cost that, like all subscription services, just gets worse and worse and more expensive over time.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 8  | E - 7 - Ranking #23/34

s7-e2 - Bete Noir - A snack food developer finds her past comes back to haunt her when a nerdy kid from her old high school gets a job working with her. But even if she could get over the past, the fact that reality starts changing around her is bound to drive her mad.

T - 6  | WB - 5  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #17/34

s7-e3 - Hotel Reverie - A brand new type of movie production finds an actress taking the role of leading man in a classic 1940's film, reconstructed as a simulation. When the simulation glitches. the movie stops and time starts racing forward, the actress and her leading lady, who has gained a level of sentience, fall in love.

T - 6  | WB - 6  | H - 1  | E - 7 - Ranking #27/34

s7-e4 - Plaything - A man is brought in for questioning on a cold case murder from the 90's. He tells the story of being a video game reviewer, dropping acid, and helping a species within a videogame evolve, and how that led to the murder.

T - 6 | WB - 7  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #15/34

s7-e5 - Euology - A man is given a high tech package to help eulogize the recent passing of an old love. His journey into photographs help unlock memories long buried, opening old wounds but also finding a closure he never thought he could get.

T - 10 | WB - 7 | H - 2  | E - 9 - Ranking #1/34

s7-e6 - USS Callister - Into Infinity - a true sequel, the cloned crew of the USS Callister struggle to survive within the open world of the online video game Infinity. When they've drawn too much attention to themselves, the outside world starts to intervene.

T - 6  | WB - 9  | H -  6 | E - 9 - Ranking #6/34

---

Ranking Black Mirror

1. Eulogy

2. San Junipero (-1)

3. Be Right Back (-1)

4. Bandersnatch (-1)

5. Metalhead (-1)

6. USS Callister - Into Infinity (new)

7. USS Callister (-2)

8. White Bear (-2)

9. 15 Million Merits (-2)

10. Shut Up and Dance (-2)

11. The Entire History of You (-2)

12. Demon 79 (-2)

13. Mazey Day (-2)

14. Nosedive (-2)

15. Plaything (new)

16. Joan is Awful (-3)

17. Bete Noir (new)

18. Striking Vipers (-4)

19. Smithereens (-4)

20. Arkangel (-4)

21. Men Against Fire (-4)

22. Loch Henry (-4) 

23. Common People (new)

24. White Christmas (-5)

25. Crocodile (-5)

26. Beyond the Sea (-5)

27. Hotel Reverie (new)

28. Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (-6)

29. Hang the DJ (-6)

30. Hated in the Nation (-6)

31. National Anthem (-6)

32. Black Museum (-6)

33. Playtest (-6)

34. The Waldo Moment (-6)

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Mountain Between Us

2017, Hany Abu-Hassad (The Courier) -- Netflix

I have had this in The Hopper since 2017, having always had a fondness and dislike (yes, cognitive dissonance) for "trapped in the mountains" movies since I saw Survive! as a kid in a drive-in in the 70s. But I knew this was about a man and a woman, initially strangers, trapped together after a plane crash. And knowing the way Hollywood movies go, putting a man and a woman alone on a mountain together means romance, and I was hesitant about that. I should have stuck with my gut feeling.

Ben (Idris Elba, The Wire), a neurosurgeon, and Alex (Kate Winslet, Contagion), a photojournalist, are flying out of Idaho; he for an emergency surgery in Baltimore and she to her wedding in NYC. A snowstorm cancels all the flights but she has an idea -- a charted small plane with a capable pilot who can reach Denver, outside the storm's reach, before it gets really bad, and then they can grab connecting flights. Except, he has a stroke and dies as they fly over the mountains in Utah. The plane crashes; the pilot's dog survives. So do Ben and Alex.

Alex  is injured and their food is running out; most of the pilot's stash of food was stored in the tail which was torn off as they crashed. Ben wants to wait it out, wait for rescue, but Alex is adamant nobody is looking for them as the pilot didn't file a flight plan. Sure, people will miss them but where would they begin? 

Eventually his optimism gives way to a desperate need to get somewhere with food. But where? These are rocky snowcaps, but she believes if they can get below the snowline, then they can find something. After a handful of arguments, they finally head out.

The focus of the movie, and as it should be considering the leads, is the interactions between the two. These are two charismatic, capable actors and its believable when they go through so many emotions, eventually clinging to each other, grasping at hope despite the odds. 

What I should have guessed was coming, I did not, and after doing some BTS reading, seeing its based on a novel by a light-romance kind of pseudo-Nicholas Sparks kind of author, I see why it ended up where it did. They fall for each other. But that kind of desperate attraction always annoyed me. Well, not always -- there was a time in my youth when the idea of white-knighting a girl, rescuing her from danger and falling into each other's arms appealed to me. Now, knowing better, knowing the troubling aspects of such hookups, I find the trope annoying. Sure, you can be drawn together out of need, out of adrenalin, out of a connection born of desperation. But, once you are back to reality, once you are back in your lives, what will you have?  Sure, these are two powerful, independent, attractive people but... when what drew them together is resolved, can there be anything more?

The movie believes there can be, and it believes it so much, it ends with a walking-away-looking-back-running-into-each-other's-arms moment. Oh, there is a certain type that will gobble this up with wild abandon, and I don't judge them, but its not for me.

Oh, the dog survives, so there is that.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Paddington in Peru

2024, Dougal Wilson (a bunch of music videos & ads) -- download

The first Paddington movie not done by Paul King, and it shows. 

I realized something with a recent post, that since I have not embraced "reviewing movies" as the focus of this blog, for me, it has always been more a vehicle of me, through the lens of pop culture consumption. I am sure that says something about me already as well as the choices I make in my viewing. One could say that that has always been the intent of "journalism" or any non-fiction writing, to share your own world view through what you write about. With the loss of "personal blogs" I guess this became my forum.

And we won't go into the whole "writing as therapy" bit will we....

We didn't rush to see this one, as we knew it was not King. But in the advent of January 6 and the anxiety felt, and only increased, as the weeks of doom scrolling went by. We needed an antidote. We started by the rewatch of the first two.

This movie must have come out digitally in the UK before it was released in North America because non-cam copies appeared mid-February.

Has it really been eight years since the last one? Time flies when the world is burning down around you. Were those movies really, truly pre-Pause? It just seems that the relief they provided was so endemic to the pandemic. Now, that said, eight years is a lot of years, and that means teenagers grow up. But not eight years worth, just ... older teens. But I get ahead of myself.

Paddington (Ben Whishaw, Black Doves) gets a letter from Peru, and inside it states Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton, The Crown), who is now in the Home for Retired Bears, has been missing Paddington ever so much, and has been acting strangely. So, Paddington and the Browns and Mrs. Bird (Julie Waters, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) decide they will visit Darkest Peru. But first, we establish how everyone is doing. Mr. Brown is dealing with his company having some cameo laden management restructure, the kids are almost ready for college and dealing with growing pains and Mrs. Brown has been replaced by Emily Mortimer. Sure, she's a lovely actor, but she's no Sally Hawkins (as Mrs. Brown).

An adventure. Sure, number two was an adventure, but a proper adventure in an adventurous locale. Not a Bear Out of Water movie but the Browns Out of Water. I was reserved by hopeful.

In Peru they meet a nun, a sometimes singing nun (Olivia Colman, Secret Invasion) on the green grasses of mountainsides, but mostly a very amiable nun. Aunt Lucy has gone missing, leaving behind some clues, after which the Browns and Paddington must immediately chase. And that leads them to riverboat captain Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas, Uncharted), his charming daughter Gina (Carla Tous, 30 Coins), and his obsession for the gold of El Dorado (not the chicken shop) which is personified by the appearance of his ancestors' ghosts. So, yeah, a proper adventure up the river in search of the lost city of El Dorado, but really, searching for Aunt Lucy.

Retrospectively, I am less satisfied with the movie than I was during the watching. The tonal shift from King to Wilson is very apparent, and while I am happy he did not try to replicate the thousand little nods of charm that King did (my continuous smiling or chuckles) but he does put his own little mark on it, which include pop culture nods: The Sound of Music as nun Reverend Mother dances and sings, Steamboat Willie (Disney) music playing on Captain Cabot's player piano, an escape from a rolling boulder that I don't have to identify. Sure, they are fun and all, but.... not my Paddington charms. This is likely the Paddington movie that is more meant for the kids than for the adults that swarmed the other two. And just when we truly needed the charms. Pfaw.

I am sure I could say more about the plot and all, but I think I will find myself detracting more from it than it deserves. For me, you can put the bear back into the jungle, but that was beside the point.