KWIF=Kent's Week(ish) in Film. I've been getting on the mend health wise but wondering when my body is going to recover my typical energy levels. My happy place at the moment has been rewatching (or in the case of many, many episodes, watching for the first time) 30 Rock from the start. Wanting to be in book is not book. That said, the XMas Hallmarkies started dropping about a month ago and I've just stepped on my first one...and so it begins as it always does....
This Week at the Cine-mah:
Wildwood (2026, d. Travis Knight - in theatre)
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2026, d. Noah Segan - in theatre)
Disaster Corner:
Airport '77 (1977, d. Jerry Jameson - dvd)
Doc, You Meant Terry Corner:
SCTV: The Greatest Show You've Never Heard Of (2026, d. Jason Hehir - netflix)
The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley (2019, d. Alex Gibney - hbo)
Oh, Hallmark:
My Christmas Cowboy (2026, d. Peter Benson - w network)
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So it's kind of weird to be stumping for Travis Knight, the son of Nike co-founder and uber-rich dude Phil Knight, whose daddy basically bought him a stop-motion animation studio that he would eventually be CEO of. But the younger Knight wasn't a failed actor like David Ellison who then demanded his rich daddy buy his way into the movie industry and then continue to buy him more and more power and influence. Instead the younger Knight was already working at the studio as a stop motion animator when, effectively, the elder Knight bailed the company out of its financial troubles and kept the lights on. Travis wouldn't become the company's CEO for many years, instead working his way up through different roles. Behind it all, though, lies a genuine love for stop motion animation, the red-headed stepchild of the animation industry.
Travis Knight has said his live-action work, such as Bumblebee and Masters of the Universe were jobs he took only in part because of his nostalgia and affection for the toy properties. Mostly, he took on directing these projects as a means to learn new fimmaking tricks to apply to stop motion animation.
Wildwood is Knight's second stop-motion feature (after the well-received Kubo and the Two-Strings, a film that's sat on my "to watch " list for far too long and Toasty really liked), and it's a project that has taken well over a decade to make. It's the apex of what Knight has been hoping to achieve in the field of stop motion, and it's definitely a labour of love, not just from the director but from all the animators involved.
The story is an adaptation of The Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy's fantasy-adventure novel of the same name (illustrated by Carson Ellis). Set in Portland, Oregon, it finds teenage Prue McKeel left to babysit her baby brother Mac with but one rule - don't leave the house. Prue, of course, heads out of the house, Mac in tow, cycling around the painstakingly recreated Portland streets. She runs into a classmate, nervous and nerdy Curtis whom she barely tolerates. It's clear to Prue that Curtis has a crush on her and she is decidedly disinterested. But at a local, totally unsafe looking park, Mac is abducted by a murder of crows, and giving chase Prue and Curtis find themselves through the ivy into the wildwoods, a whole other realm where all its sub-cultures seem to be at odds with one another.
Prue is on a desperate journey to retrieve her brother, and is promptly separated from Curtis. Where Pru wades through the sub-cultures of the birds, the bureaucracy and the farming folk, Curtis runs afoul of the coyote army led by the dowager governess Alexandra, and is imprisoned with the warriors led by the Bandit King.
The dowager governess faced a tragedy years ago that she's hasn't gotten over. She's turned to dark magic and her last ditch stab at finding solace entails sacrificing Mac and potentially destroying all of civilization in the wild woods.
It's hard not to recall fantasy adventures like Labyrinth,as the whole "my [relative/friend] has been captured and I must brave this strange realm to find them" is basically a trope of the genre. The thing is, when done well, it always works. And here, it's done quite well, with the script from Chris Butler finding the fantasy, and the adventure, leaning hard into the tropes that work, abandoning those that don't and addressing head-on still others, and not in a winking fashion (ala Masters of the Universe) but in a fashion that makes the characters seem smarter and savvier, less naive.
The film is visually stunning. I don't know a tremendous amount about stop motion, but Knight indicated that they were shooting 1 image per frame, as opposed to the standard 1 image per 2 frames, effectively doubling the length it took to shoot (about 13 years). The scale of Wildwood is incredible, and my brain often couldn't reconcile that what it was seeing was reality... there are credits for CGI effects so clearly it was used, but I can't by sheer observation say whether it was simply erasure of wires and stands or if it was something more, like the rainfall in the opening, the fires in the big battle scene, the flowing river and waterfalls, or entire backdrops. As noted this isn't just a few settings like in Coraline, or contained spaces like in Mad God, instead the environments here feel unrestricted, unlimited. Even more so than in some live action movies you feel how all these spaces are connected, and the great distances that connect them.
If anything, the excellence in the animation, the painstaking frame-by-frame construction almost does a disservice to the stop-motion, as it's so fluid 99% of the time that it doesn't seem like stop-motion. Coupled with the character designs, which don't seem that far askew from typical CGI animation designs of the past quarter century (I'm so old! CG animated movies I still think of as "new"...Toy Story was released in 1995) one can forget they're actually watching stop-motion. I'm guessing that was Knight's intent, to make a stop-motion film that is so fluid and immersive as to not call attention to the wizards behind the curtain. It's probably more impressive that the film manages to hide its seams, but the reality is I like the seams. I find them comforting, whereas this uncanny valley is not creating a dissonance between reality and animation, but a dissonance between one form of animation and another.
Wildwood is an animated feature, the longest stop-motion film ever at 132 minutes in length, which is the first tip-off that this isn't necessarily meant for children. In recalling the fantasy-adventures of the 1980s, Meloy's fantasy isn't dumbed down by the filmmakers who have complete control over the end product. There are deaths, there's battles and violence that rival those from Gladiator or Braveheart if not even more harrowing and under the animators' complete control. And the peril is real, and never fatiguing. It's pretty astonishing how uncompromised this film feels.
Knight may be the child of privilege, but he's also a real artist and a real champion for an art form that doesn't have capitalistic ideas as its end goal. Laika is a studio with a mission, and it's got little to do with commerce. If only the world's richie riches loved making things more than making money.
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It's a very simple tale that could have wound up being another nerve-jangling intensity test like Uncut Gems or even something perhaps less in-your-face but still deeply uneasy like this year's Tuner. Instead, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a quiet, contemplative, tragedy that still is underpinned by a strange sense of optimism.
What is, naturally, a very loving "New York" movie, we see Harry navigating the streets and public transit of the city as he plies his trade, but the fruits of his labour are pretty slim, slimmer than they ever were. Nobody carries cash anymore. He looks for the marks who normally wouldn't be caught dead on subway or flouting their affluence in locations that aren't directly geared towards them. A guy, driving into a parking lot across from a dive bar in a fully restored and souped up 1969 Ford Mustang, becomes his biggest payday in a while, but also his biggest nightmare.
Turns out the young millennial he's stolen from, an obnoxious and entitled punk kid, Dylan, is part of one of the biggest crime families in the city. And he's not just a punk kid, he's Ivy League educated, and resourceful. It doesn't take him more than an evening to identify and locate Harry.
Harry, we've seen has a cozy life outside of his profession. He cares for his wife who is immobile, still alive but uncommunicative when awake. He loves her with tenderness and preciousness and seems his most valuable relationship. He has a friend in Ben (Steve Buscemi), a pawn shop owner, and even his relationship with old guard Detective Warren (Giancarlo Esposito) seems to be more like old colleagues than antagonists. But Dylan's come to disrupt all that. See, Harry has unknowingly stolen his crypto wallet, worth hundreds of thousands, but worthless without the decryption keys, and he disposed of with with a contact of Ben's who is an unwilling participant when Harry comes to retrieve it.
Harry's reclamation project is not, ultimately, to save himself. It's well established in this film that there are always consequences for stealing from the wrong family. It's only in how you make reparations that dictate how sever the consequence are. Harry knows his time is limited, it's only who gets hurt that drives him.
At a tight 88 minutes, TOLPINY does everything it needs to do with one exception, really detailing how the finale doesn't create further fallout. There's no action setpieces here, there's no big performances, there's no tense music to get your heartbeat up. Instead we're spending time understanding a man and the life he's lived, the relationships he's formed, and the type of person he is now with hints as to who he once was.
As noted at the top, this could have been pretty solemn, but Turturro carries the weight with grace and discipline, a seasoned actor who brings the same considerate thoughtful energy to even the smallest of roles, but shows what he can do when he's at the center of everything. He even gets a little dance in, signature Turturro moves.
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Disaster Corner
The opening act of the film, as per the disaster flick tropes, is all about introducing the various cast members that are to participate in the disaster. There's a pilot, played by Jack Lemmon, and his girlfriend, stewardess Brenda Vaccaro. There's businessman Christopher Lee, his neglected wife Lee Grant and his partner who regrets sleeping with her Gil Gerard, among many, many others.
The 747 plane is on its inaugural flight, privately owned by industrialist and art collector Jimmy Stewart who has it loaded up with millions in art pieces and invited business associates and friends on board. But he didn't invite the guys posing as flight crew who hook gas up to the oxygen supply and are carrying guns. They're in cahoots with the co-pilot, who all aim to hijack the plane, take the plane off course, fly low to stay off radar and land at an abandoned WWII naval depo on a forgotten island near the Bermuda Triangle where people will be waiting to off-load the most precious cargo.
The gas does its trick, and the plane disappears from radar, but it's flying too low and strikes an unsuspecting oil rig, and it crashes into the Atlantic, way off course where nobody will ever find it. It sinks but thankfully it's only a couple meters below surface. The plane is pressurized, but not forever. It will take a miracle or some ingenious thinking for them to be found before the oxygen runs out or the plane floods.
The first act is du rigueur, while the second is a pretty obvious riff on the Poseidon Adventure except with a plane. The third act is dullsville all the way as the producers of the film clearly partnered with the US navy to film their actual rescue operation procedures for such an event. The majority of the military players are played by actual servicemen, and you can tell! The exercise is a massive enterprise but obviously one the crew was told to sort of stay out of the way of. It's not even really a procedural so much as observational, like a grade school film reel sans narrator. It seems evident that Jimmy Stewart's involvement in this film was mostly because he was promised a trip on a Navy ship and a front-row view of the operations taking place. He doesn't serve much of a purpose otherwise.
The film also tries to shoehorn in Joe Patroni (George Kennedy), the only carryover in Airport 1975 from Airport, and thus the only connecting thread throughout the series. He has no reason for being here other than to spout the hoariest of exposition and doesn't really do anything of use.
The airplane sets are pretty great (total 70's vibe with circular furniture, carpet everywhere, and so much earth tones), and you do get a real sense of its layout. Famed costumer Edith Head provides the oh-so-'70's elegance to the guests on the plane where their performances (limited as they are) cannot.
Not nearly as fun as its predecessors.
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Docs soup
I don't talk a lot about documentaries because, for the most part, they are information vehicles. To write about such information vehicles is to try to regurgitate the information they provide. It's not a fun exercise and seems kind of pointless to really talk about most documentaries.
You Can See Everything has upended all of that. Documentaries might never be the same again after what Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim did with the story of theranos villain Elizabeth Holmes's weeks leading into her imprisonment (and what came after). That said, the last batch of super-successful docs were by Michael Moore where the director is as central to the pieces as the topic being covered. While there were imitators that were successful (Super-Size Me by Morgan Spurlock, for example), for the most part documentary has largely remained in a pretty staid formulae and pretty static expectations, if not gotten worse devolving into puff pieces produced by their subjects.
Documentaries like this, especially with their bold titles, are off-putting to me. Who is watching an SCTV documentary that doesn't already kind of know what SCTV is? And the title suggests that it will be making a case for how it's become the "greatest show you've never heard of". It does not. If anything it exemplifies that its comedic premises and the people its lampooning are of such a specific time that a great amount of the comedy the show produced would just sail over the heads of Millennials (or younger). For SCTV, the lasting value is in the performances and how specific and weird they can get... but my recollection of attempting to rewatch the series is that it's far more misses than hits in that department.
A documentary like this produced for Netflix is puzzling for one main reason: they don't have SCTV on their streaming service. So you watch the documentary and then have nowhere to go to see more except, you know, Amazon or Youtube. It's pretty bad business and explains why they've been having trouble. Also, not a single mention of Tony Rosato or Robin Duke who became utility players in the last season. Rude.
Cute. Fine, but not exciting. RIP Catherine, Joe, Harold and John.
I didn't engage with the Theranos story much before watching You Can See Everything, but as the infotainment panels in Starship Troopers would say "Would you like to know more?" My answer is "yes". This seemed the easiest access, and the second most infamous piece about the Liz Holmes/Theranos story outside the Netflix dramatized mini-series, The Dropout.
Here, director Alex Gibney assembles some of the key players behind the scenes at Theranos both as employees and investors, as well as the reporters who were documenting their rise and fall. All of their stories are largely told in the context of Elizabeth Holmes being found guilty of fraud. And so The Inventor is the story of Theranos but only as it pertains to Elizabeth Holmes' involvement in it. It barely touches upon Sunny Balwani and what influence he may have had on a teenage Elizabeth Holmes or the direction the company took. Obviously in the wake of You Can See Everything, there's more questions we know to ask now, but the largely white upperclass male talking heads seem to take some sort of glee about both lionizing and then tearing Holmes down. Yes, she may have been a master manipulator but this doc feels like it's got a Pepto Bysmol coating of misogyny in its stomach.
The first hour of the doc is the usual trumpeting of the person, but baked in a subtle, knowing layer of sarcasm. It speaks to Holmes' unusual rise and Theranos' big ideas and uses clips of Holmes' speeches and interviews to sell us on her "genius" before it starts stripping it all away and downright vilifying her. It seems a additional layer of spite is dished out here because she is a woman in the unusual position of raising hundreds of millions of dollars for a theoretical product that might never have had a chance of working to the level of ideas behind it. In some ways, 7 years later, Holmes bilking all these rich, important white men out of their money seems almost...heroic. Like, let her out, and let her do it again. If only he lies hadn't resulted in casualties, it could be a somewhat different story.
It's not a great documentary, and even as a companion piece to You Can See Everything (acknowledging that it was not designed to be such), it's only seems to leave more questions unanswered.
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It's the most wonderful time of the year!!!
HALLMARKIE TIME!!!
The story opens in 2006 in Austin, with Meg and Billy, journalism students, tops in their class, being given a plum shot at delivering a story on the Austin news. The only thing is Meg gets a phone call, thinking it's her mom who she always talks to before she's about to present or perform, to find out her mom died, leaving Billy to carry on without her, and to gain the glory from all her hard prep work.
During this opening sequence, I didn't recognize the two leads playing Meg and Billy, but then the credits popped up over top of the sequence touting its stars: Amy Acker and Luke McFarlane. Like, fuckin'...come on! No wonder I flagged this thing as a must watch. Acker is a favourite performer from Angel and Person of Interest among others, as well as the star of an all-timer Hallmarkie Crashing Through The Snow. I was wondering why we hadn't seen Acker in one of these things in a half decade, only to see her pop up again, and with a co-writing credit. McFarlane, as well, has become not just a favourite Hallmark hunk, but a superb utility player outside the genre, in winning supporting comedic roles in Bros and Platonic among others. This had to be good right?
Turns out not so much. 20 years later Billy is a national celebrity gossip reporter, not taken seriously enough to do real news, and while he seems to love flying by the seat of his pants (it's not quite ADHD, nor is he in "the bubble" where he's so handsome that it makes up for him being stupid) but it keeps getting him into trouble, and now the network is placing him on leave. He decides to go back to Texas to visit his sister only to find she's moved from Dallas to the small town of Fern where they've enrolled their trouble youth in an Equine Therapy program.
Turns out Meg is in Fern as well, where she's a producer for the local network news (Billy is shocked to find they have a local channel, as was I). When they meet, Meg is taken aback by his handsomness but remains cool to his presence. She holds some grudges against him. Billy, if he ever senses the tension, doesn't let on. He's not quite a human labradoodle...maybe more of a gleeful boxer, full of muscles and good intentions.
It also turns out that Meg's dad owns the horse ranch where Billy's nephew does his horse therapy, and they're holding their annual Reindeer Round-up celebration. It's a tradition Meg's mother started and she's damn well going to keep doing it for as long as she can. Her dad though keeps having troubles with horses, he's not a young man anymore. So in helping Meg with the round-up Billy gets close and she starts to warm up, until Billy's agent catches wind of what he's upto and brings a parade of national camera crews and all hell breaks loose. Meg's traumas rear up and throw Billy off her back for good.
Of course everything works out in the end. But it's a bad story. There's not really any Christmas involved aside from this "Round-up" (which, for all the hullabaloo is pretty tepid and lame when it comes right down to it), and the romance is pretty cold since Meg's supposed to be harboring a grudge. McFarlane's energy is the only think keeping the enterprise afloat, but his character is ill-defined, his wants and desires seem very simplistic and immediate. Meg on the other had is still moping about the death of her mom 20 years later (as is her dad... jeeezuz you two...obviously the Equine Therapy isn't helping...talk to a real therapist, not a horse).
It's not an entirely dour performance from Acker, and she's innately charming in a way that's difficult to hide, but her investment in her own script means that she sees something deeper in her character that's not otherwise obvious to the rest of us and it makes Meg a real drip to be around a lot of the time.
This movie went wrong by not just sticking with bickering news reporters with a past. The whole horse thing is so far removed from where they start the film and what their professions are, that it just seems out of place every time they're on the ranch. They also don't seem very Texan, like, at all.
If this were a manga it would be called "My Mom Died 20 Years Ago And I'm Still Sad (And I Want To Be A Reporter But I'm Scared To Be On Camera").
So disappointing.
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