KWIF(2): The Running Man (+3)

KWIF=Kent's "Week" in Film. I realized this past weekend that I had watched almost a film a day this August, so the goal has become to cram the last bunch of films in on the final couple of days. These are numbers 24 through 28.

This Week:
The Running Man (2025, d. Edgar Wright - crave)
Zodiac Killer Project (2024, d. Charlie Shackleton - hollywoodsuite)
City Hunter (1993, d. Wong Jing - tubi)
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970, d. Mario Bava - tubi)

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The Running Man falls into my beloved "most dangerous game" subgenre. The man-hunts-man-for-sport (and/or entertainment) never gets tired for me, although its entries are frequently not very well done. The Running Man, like The Hunger Games or Battle Royale, is kind of a brand in the subgenre, or at least notorious enough to be a name big enough to check-point (as in "Oh, it's like The Running Man").

While I've read the Stephen King-as-Richard Bachman novella three and a half decades ago, I don't recall it very specifically, and likewise it's been quite some time since I watched the 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger-starring adaptation. From memory, that film was definitely a product of Reagan-era economics, and was concerned about wealth disparity and social order, to a degree. It was concerned with crime, totalitarianism, and classism. 

We're now in an age where the wealth gaps are far more dramatically pronounced and we have government institutions that seem to only be serving to perpetuate that trend. We've given too much power to corporations, non-corporeal entities that have their own rights but seemingly no responsibilities. The people in charge of corporations seem to have free reign to influence government policy, and are not held liable for their actions and decisions made while running such organizations. Lands and waters are polluted and poised, people get sick or are killed, minds are manipulated and tainted by increasingly clever propaganda, and a token sum is only ever paid when they corporations are caught...and the execs still get paid.

Edgar Wright's new adaptation of The Running Man finds its protagonist, the angry and righteous Ben Richards (Glen Powell), blacklisted from the Network, which, in this dystopian future, pretty much controls all of America. They are the primary source of employment and entertainment in the country, and though they are not the government, their sheer economic power means they pretty much dictate policy. With a sick daughter at home and no income, Ben turns to his last-ditch option: Reality TV. Looking to get on any of the Network's many programmes except the brutal, life-threatening "The Running Man" program (the Network's most popular show), he, of course, is chosen for "The Running Man" because otherwise there wouldn't be a movie.

He's sweet-talked by the Network's head honcho into signing the deal to join the show. Surviving 30 days wins Ben and his family a cool 1 billion New Dollars, while he also receives a daily survival bonus, plus a bonus for killing any of the Network's security goons or the show's elite "hunters".  But from the jump, Ben sees that the Network doesn't play fair. They introduce him (and two other runners) with lies about being career criminals, disparaging their name, and denigrating their families, going so far as to have doctored clips (the use of deep fakes is central to this movie but it doesn't ever reckon with the general public's awareness of them).

Needless to say, Ben survives with the help of some activists and supporters, but it's never easy, and (once again) the Network cheats, tracking his location (duh) and manipulating the narrative of the show by coaching the hunters when, and when not to go in for the kill. The audience is also invited to participate, with the Network offering a hundreds/thousands of New Dollars for anyone who rats out a Runner and leads to a kill. It takes the audience out of being passive observers with, maybe, some moral responsibility for the perpetuation of this barbaric program, and turns them in to active participants in murder. And, of course, it's all propaganda, fuelling The Network's ideology of keeping the teeming masses stupid and hungry, and distracting them from the real cause of the problems in their lives.  It's up to Ben, who's really just doing this all for his family, to realize he's the catalyst for waking people up as to who the real enemy is.

The opening scenes of The Running Man are, to be blunt, really clumsy in how they set Ben Richards up. These scenes are meant to establish Ben as a rage-filled man, a man who fights injustice, and a man who desperately loves his family, but the writing and performances lack nuance, to the point that I was concerned that Powell was decisively the wrong guy for this part. He turns out to be fine, in the end, but Edgar Wright's script pushes and/or pulls Ben through the plot, without him doing much to instigate things on his own. He's a passenger in his own story, and through to the third act he's not consistently written. 

He's established as a man who does the right thing and then turns him into a murderer. He's established as a man who defies the order of things, but he denies being a revolutionary. He's a good person, and, for the most part, remains a good person...but Wright's script never quite finds the right balance for shifting between his anger and his kindness, and Powell seems to only be following direction. A likeable enough lead, but not clearly defined enough.

Similarly, the dystopia we find Ben running around in is fleshed out only so much. We don't get enough establishment between the different, disparate class hierarchies, but the film is very clear that the propaganda machine the Network employs is very effective across the class spectrum.

As a "most dangerous game" story, it's not unexciting or entertaining, and the film is asking people to hold the persons in charge of nefarious corporations accountable, but even still it's not the clearest message. It's still a retrograde story where T.V., and not the internet, or social media, is the primary form of audience engagement and how organizations manipulate the masses. As much as it's trying to represent modern concerns, the atmosphere of the story doesn't reflect our modern society enough.

I'm a fan of Wright's work, but couldn't exactly pin down the man's style (much of it is married to music or toying with genre tropes, neither of which is l'objet du jour here). In the piles of effects and craftsmanship needed to realize the dystopian future, I think maybe Wright's particular cinematic flair gets lost. As Toasty said in his toastypost "the movie is not over-the-top enough or biting enough to be a fun, corny romp. Neither is it dark & grim enough to reflect the Dark Urban Future it wants to rail against". We certainly agree.

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Zodiac Killer Project sounds like a cheapo Tubi-original slasher movie or possibly a Tubi-original pseudo-documentary with some weird right-wing bent (as befits the service's Fox Corp ownership). Turns out it's neither of these, though it's clear it's still a very modestly budgeted production.

Over a decade ago filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was prepping for a documentary based on the 2012 book, "The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge" by Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California highway patrol officer whose maybe-encounter with the Zodiac Killer sent him on a decades long crusade to bring the man he considered to be responsible to justice. It was unsuccessful and Lafferty, and his suspect, are little more than a footnote in the Zodiac Killer conversation. But as Shackleton was ramping up production on his doc, he lost the rights to the book, and all his investment in the documentary was for naught.

He couldn't escape it though. In the intervening years, true crime podcasts and documentaries have proliferated on every channel and streaming service, and with them a visual language all its own has developed. In Zodiac Killer Project, Shackleton relays what he would have done, how he would have shot the b-roll footage, the "backtors" (actors in true crime reenactments whose backs are all we see), the locations, and how it all would have been to serve an entertaining narrative far more than the truth.

Because Lafferty's accusations and investigations were not limited to his book, Shackleton has some clearance to discuss Lafferty's prime suspect and the situations that led him to believe his suspect was the killer as well as many of the details around his investigation in to the suspect (what he can only touch upon is why Lafferty suspects there was a cover-up to dismiss and not investigate his suspect, which leaves a big cloud over the whole proceedings here).

In detailing how he would have made what sounds like a pretty bog standard true-crime documentary, Shackleton drolly takes apart all the tropes we know from most other true crime docs... specific types of footage or editing style, the presentation of certain information, the cheats the productions do to condense the story or make it more entertaining that may be stretching or warping the truth.  What Shackleton doesn't really do is account for the ethics of it all, of making entertainment out of these real-life horrors, and his capacity for examining why the public is so enthralled by such media isn't very deep.

The Bay area location imagery that Shackleton and his team shot, mostly of empty or vast spaces takes on a slightly meditative nature, with Shackleton's voice over occasionally calling out whether the footage we're seeing is at all relevant to the point in the narrative he's discussing.

Dryly funny with a slight intensity and more than a little reserved playfulness, Zodiac Killer Project doesn't get us anywhere new with the whole Zodiac Killer thing, but it brushes back the fur on a genre and exposes its soft, and kind of ugly, underbelly.  

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City Hunter was a manga that ran from 1985 through 1991, while near-simultaneously an animate tv series ran parallel, between 1987 and 1991. I have a vague recollection of having watched some of this anime on Canadian TV, but I may be wrong.

Jackie Chan's starred in the 1993 Hong Kong adaptation, which I think is pulling more from the anime than the manga. Chan's City Hunter is a very, very broad comedy that's trying to be a live action cartoon, one of the most difficult cinematic challenges ever. 

"City Hunter" is the nickname of infamous private investigator Ryo Saeba (Chan) an affable, womanizing, and semi-capable man-of-action. He is assisted by his deceased former partner's little sister, Kaori, who he sort of had a hand in raising and now, as an adult, she's in love with him, and he has to resist his own libido and keep her at arms length. It's a gross dynamic that, for the most part Ryo is on the right side of, but not always.

Ryo and Kaori, through separate misadventures, wind up on the same maiden voyage of a cruise ship which gets taken hostage by a ruthless white American pirate, Col. "Big Mac" MacDonald (Richard Norton). The plan is to kill all the lower-deckers and hold the richest hostage for their money. Unfortunately for them, not only is City Hunter aboard, but so too is undercover officer Saeko Nogami (Chingmy Yau) and gentleman thief Kao Ta (Leon Lai) to aid in liberating the boat.

City Hunter is a goofy movie, one that is really leaning into comedy far more than action or adventure. This is no Speed, more of a Speed 2, if Patrick Muldoon stared at Sandra Bullock's boobs and imagined them as hamburgers.  Ryo is very charming but also a known cad, so women are as apt to bat him upside the head as to fawn over him or give him a kiss. Chan isn't really known for playing much of a romantic hero, and certainly not known for playing a sexual one, so here Ryo's horniness is tempered by the fact that the character spends much of the film starving and just hoping to eat something...anything.

The usual Chan flair for action and physical stunts seems to be scaled back pretty dramatically from his more infamous efforts, I think out of service to the situational comedy. There's less physical comedy overall for Chan to perform as well. He may be a bit of a goofball but we also have to believe he can turn on the charm as well and that ladies will not only fall for it, but actively pursue it (the who Kaori side-plot depends on it).

There are some very regressive (and, at one point, brutally offensive) jokes in this film, which shouldn't be surprising for any '90's comedy. The sexism or gay-bashing aren't persistent, but they are there. On the plus side, the women of the film are largely pretty strong, capable, independent and a diverse (personality-wise) group, and central to the film. I liked them all.

Trying to do animation-style gags in physical reality is very, very challenging and doesn't often work because, well, real world physics get in the way of having these things really happen, so special effects making them happen can look really awkward and corny.  As much as this type of gag in City Hunter doesn't work, through Chan's immense charms and a remarkably game cast of performers, it winds up being a fairly fun, if not fully successful production.  The extended set piece where Chan and his opponents become Street Fighter characters after getting electrocuted by an arcade machine is a highlight of the film though (lowlight, the painfully prolongued musical number at the midway point, made worse by the fact that it wasn't subtitled ... also, if I'm not mistaken, much of the film was performed in English then dubbed and subtitled...curious).

I had fun, but this isn't essential Chan by any means.

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Five Dolls for an August Moon is a last gasp of beatnik free-love-era filmmaking and sitting just outside of the Italian giallo wave. It's a murder mystery of sorts, but a film full of characters that seem pretty disinterested in the murders, and even more disinterested in the mystery.

Industrialist George Stark (Teodoro Corrà) has invited four associates and their partners to his remote island home for a weekend holiday, but really it was all a ruse to get the men facetime with Professor Garry Farrell (William Berger) and try to convince him to sell them a secret, revolutionary new formula for a resin that will redefine...something. Whatever.  

The next morning, the houseboy winds up dead, and you know what, nobody really seems to care. They wrap the man up in plastic and put him in the meat locker. They discover that Stark's boat has gone missing and the radio has been tampered with rendering it useless. Typically this would start sending people into a panic, a murderer loose on an isolated island, nowhere to go, no one to call. But, these upperclass twits keep on partying as if nothing is happening. Except, there's plenty happening, including each of the men propositioning Farrell to obtain the formulae alone, and two of the wives having a secret affair with each other, and another of the wives having affairs with, well, everyone else. And what's up with the island girl in the mini-skirt (Justine Gall) watching everything from afar?

The bodies start piling up in an almost comical fashion, new additions to the meat locker in pretty rapid fashion, along with a couple disappeared bodies that are even more puzzling. In a typical giallo, someone would be trying to figure things out. In a typical suspense thriller, everyone would be pointing fingers at each other and things would get tense.  Here, everyone's still just drinking and trying to figure out how to get that damn formula.

The ending reveals/twists are ... to be blunt... silly. But then the fact that no tension has built up around these reveals means there's little sense of stakes here. There's an organ-led jazzy soundtrack to the film from Piero Umiliani that is far too bouncy and upbeat for the events of the film.  And that the film is largely shot with gorgeous Italian seaside daylight and perhaps a slight overexposure, there's a vibrancy to the proceedings that leaves little hidden in shadows.  I'm really not sure what exact tone was trying to be set.

Bava's an incredible director, though, so his films, even the lesser ones, still have style and impact. Here he uses a lot of split fore and background shots with a character very close in the front of frame and other characters deep in back of frame all in focus. As well, he's exceptionally focussed on the eyes and letting the eyes tell the characters' stories of lust, love, suspicion, betrayal, intrigue, etc. And with such focus on eyes, also is point of view, most highlighted by the many whip-pans the camera does to shift our point of view... not in a first-person sense but a third-person. We will see a character staring off and the camera will whip across to see what they are looking at, and if someone else is looking back we'll whip back to see their perspective. It's a curious but effective technique, even if it's not perfectly deployed here.

Had maybe the island girl been investigating these murders from the outside, and her life put at risk for doing so, this would really feel like a true giallo. As is it's a mystery that barely lifts the eyebrow, and tepidly sexy. 

KWIF: 28 Years Later (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. One brand new movie and a lotta real old shit. Yes, stuff from the 90's is now real old.

This Week:

28 Years Later (2025, d. Danny Boyle - in theatre)
Earthquake (1974, d. Mark Robson - HollywoodSuite)
The Swimmer (1968, d. Frank Perry - HollywoodSuite)
Look Who's Talking (1989, d. Amy Heckerling - HollywoodSuite)
Sudden Death (1995, d. Peter Hyams - HollyWoodSuite)

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28 Weeks Later was my inauguration into the post-apocalyptic trope of "the worst thing about the end of the world are the other survivors". Ever since that film, any time I'm watching anything po-ap I've come to expect the worst out of the people we haven't met yet, the others alluded to off in the distance. It is, frankly, my least favourite part of po-ap, but also probably the most honest.  Zombies, aliens, natural disasters, giant/tiny monsters we can survive...but each other? We're showing ourselves Right.Now. we really can't do it, we can't learn a goddamn thing about peace and harmony and coexistence as long as there are people who want more than what others have and are willing to go to any extents to have it. But I digress.

So imagine my surprise when the spectre off in the distance is not what they are believed to be, and in the darkest of spaces we find humanity, and humanity not just caring about life, but caring about death. 

In 28 Years Later, the UK is closed off from the world and the survivors are left to the infected, and the infected are left to the survivors. Our protagonists Isla (Jodie Comer), Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) live in a busy, close-knit village on an island connected to mainland Scotland by a causeway. Tide goes out, one way in, one way out, tide comes in. Jamie is taking 12-year-old Spike to the mainland for his first hunt, a right of passage among the villagers. Isla suffers from an unknown malady and is only sporadically aware of the here and now. There is no medication and no doctors to aide her. So after a very tense hunt full of close calls, when Spike hears of a doctor, even one gone mad, out on the mainland, he takes Isla out by himself to get her care.

I'm skipping over plenty, but that's the glory of discovery in a film like this, where our protagonists (and the filmmakers, and us, the audience) have gotten to a certain comfort level with the setting, surroundings and threats... it's the unexpected, and scripter Garland and director Boyle have much up their sleeve in this regards.

This includes hints at the nature of the infected, survivor subcultures on the mainland, the status quo of the outside world, and a bookend that... well... let's just say there'll be a lot of discussion around it until the sequel comes.

I had no expectations when it came to 28 Years Later, so they were neither met, nor dashed. Boyle both impresses and frustrates with his choices in direction and editing, but more the former than the latter. His shots of wilderness (with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle) are incredible, but his zombie frenzies, full of quick cuts and abstraction, are the weakest part of the film, and the style pulls me out more than enhances the chaos and scariness. 

Garland's script takes a turn that pleased me greatly, as I worried Jodie Comer's whole role was to be the frail, discombobulated matriarch whose whole purpose and contribution to the story is to motivate young Spike into rash action. I mean, it's a bigger role than just that, but doesn't exactly serve a nobler purpose (in a turn in Garland's script that displeased me only minorly).

But, that ending is bound to baffle, or even infuriate some, especially if you didn't know there's more on the way. Even if you did... I mean... I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it, which, after nearly 2 hours of stone-faced severity in muted, grainy colours, to have this blast of pizzazz and vibrancy...it's jarring. It hearkens to British subcultures, nodding to the droogs of A Clockwork Orange and the Inglorious Basterds, and promises something quite different in the picture to come.

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The disaster movies were the superhero movies of the 70's. All spectacle, where big stars would grab their paycheque to entertain the masses with an eventful show of calamity and destruction. There are the ones with the lasting legacy, like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and Airport, and then there were the rest.

I don't think I had heard of Earthquake before this year (if I had, it definitely didn't stick in memory), the Charlton Heston-led production which attempts the same ensemble cast put though their paces through not dissimilar story beats in the aftermath of calamity. In this case, if it weren't evident, there's an earthquake in Los Angeles.

Of course, the first act is all about setting up our cast of characters whose personal drama don't really matter at all once the shit goes down. It's all just kind of about survival. Ol' Chuck plays an ex-football star with a trope-addled wife (Ava Gardner) one could only call "queen of the harpies". There's a young woman (Geneviève Bujold) with a pre-teen kid who Chuck likes to visit. The film plays it off as altruistic, Chuck helping the widow of a colleague, but his wife thinks he's having an affair.  

There's a good cop having a bad day (George Kennedy), the seismologists who, in Jaws-like fashion, warn the mayor of the earthquake, but refuses to sound the alarm, and there's a motorcycle stuntman (Richard Roundtree) and his team who are also here because Evel Knievel (only took me 3 tries to spell it correctly) was hot at the time. There's also a few other odds and sods, including a creepy grocery store manager and Lorne Greene playing Chuck's father-in-law (only 8 years older than him in Last Crusade fashion).

The earthquake kicks off the second act with a whole lotta miniatures, and Star Trek-caliber flopping about as the camera shakes and tilts and applies an in-camera distorting effect to make it look like buildings are wobbling. It's delightfully corny, but the titular earthquake is not the threat of the film... it's all the crumbling infrastructure, downed power lines, and, of course, the human component afterwards that are the real threat.

Earthquake is not a great movie, it's most definitely a product of its time, but it is tremendously entertaining. I loved all the creative effects and model work and set pieces and matte paintings. I also really appreciated how the filmmakers here really tried to think logically about what the threats would be in a post-earthquake scenario, and how normal people, not superheroes by any stretch, could work through their treacherous situations. In keeping with the formulae, not everyone comes out unscathed.  If only there were any real weight behind it all. The characters are so basic and average, you almost forget most of them are movie stars.

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When we first meet the titular Swimmer, Ned, he's running through the woods in his swim trunks... it's a 55 year old Burt Lancaster looking better than I ever did at my absolute fittest. He breaks through the clearing an dives into a pool. It's not Ned's pool, but he is also not an unwelcome guest, although he has missed the party by 8 hours or so. The hungover men love him, the hungover women love him even more, and Ned ably flirts with them all. He's far from home, but obsessed with pools and swimming and reckons he can "swim" home, backyard hopping from pool to pool.

As Ned progresses through his journey, hitting on anything with breasts along the way, it becomes clearer and clearer that Ned isn't right in the head. He's having some kind of existential crisis mixed with a nervous breakdown peppered with a psychotic episode.

The closer Ned gets to home, the more the real Ned comes to light. He's not that life of the party to those who had really gotten to know him, he's not the wonderful father he purports to be, and as a lothario he's left them wanting, but not wanting more Ned. He's a cad, a deadbeat, and probably broke.

The journey of The Swimmer is one of character discovery for the audience, the teasing out of information that paint the picture of the man, but leading to no decisive clarity as to what triggered Ned's break, and leaving dangling the question of "how did he get here?" (both in the physical and metaphorical sense).

It's at times a riveting journey, but also at times a tedious one. The film could easily shave 25 minutes of montages and kaleidescopic lollygagging and not be the lesser for it (it's s film padding out a short story and it shows). I have to imagine that Matt Weiner, creator of Mad Men is a huge fan of this film, as Ned's journey seems to have made the map that Don Draper would follow.

I never knew where The Swimmer was going. It opens with such jovial frivolity, that it seemed like it was just to be a simple lark of a movie, a real late-stage Rat Pack-style hangout film with good looking people in swim trunks having whatever kind of conversations people in the 1960's had. Instead it doglegs pretty sharply into uncomfortable and darker terrain that had me saying "nope!" out loud, only for the film to be fully aware of its impropriety. It is a fascinating film, one I knew nothing about as it played immediately after Earthquake (it self sort of a random find one evening) and so happy to have had the chance to watch it.  It's stuck in my mind more than almost any other film I've seen this year so far.

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My favourite film podcast, Blank Check, has been covering the films of Amy Heckerling the past two months. As is typical with me and Blank Check, I want to follow along, but if the films aren't readily available on the streaming services I have (or in my DVD binders), then I tend to fall off the "follow along" train pretty quickly. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is streaming nowhere at the moment, nor is Johnny Dangerously  (while National Lampoon's Euorpean Vacation seems to have just popped up on Crave, weeks after "the two friends" have ripped the movie a new one so I think I safely pass that one up)  Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too popped up on the cable package Hollywood Suite last weekend, and I couldn't set the PVR to record any faster.

I can't remember how many times I saw Look Who's Talking, but it seemed like a lot. I was pretty into Rebecca from Cheers at that time -- hot messy women were my thing as an adolescent -- but even so, this Kirstie Alley-starring vehicle about a woman who has a baby as a result of an affair with a married man was such a quintessential 1980's "chick flick", I really shouldn't have cared. But for that baby to have an inner monologue voiced by Bruce Willis, suddenly this "chick flick" was the comedy sensation of the decade, drawing in people from pretty much every age group.  I mean, can you believe the things Baby Mikey is thinking?

Honestly, it was a revolutionary concept at the time, one which very quickly got beaten into the ground with subsequent sequels, TV spin-offs, and other shows and movies and commercials pilfering the gimmick.

The reality is Look Who's Talking is a sort of charming film about a woman, Molly Jensen, becoming a single mother and struggling real hard at it, trying to date and find a dad for her baby (the wrong way to date), while she strikes up a weird alliance with a hairy taxi driver (John Travolta) who agrees to babysit for her so that he can use her address to set up his grandpa in a local care home. There's definite chemistry between them, but she doesn't see him as being a good baby daddy, even though he's awesome with kids. *Shrug*.

The fact that baby Mikey has his inner monologue said aloud it Willis' playfully wry cadence kind of gets in the way and undercuts the journey Molly is on by more than half. At least a third of Willis' interjections were jarring in their insertion and, since we've all long gotten over talking babies, not contributing anything of real merit to the plot or story.

It is a strangely personal films for Heckerling, who found herself pregnant as a result of an affair, and George Segal's character reflects Heckerling's frustration with her real-life baby daddy, and doesn't paint a very kind picture.

It really is a hard film to hate. It's bright and filmic with two leads who are the opposite of unappealing, but whatever it was about its gimmick that made it such a phenomenon in 1989 has mostly worn off.  My apathy towards this one has left me with zero desire to watch Look Who's Talking Too.

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Director Peter Hyams has not gotten a series on Blank Check, where they review directors' filmographies one film at a time, nor will he likely ever. He is a journeyman director, one who had a stable career for over 30 years, and he quietly made some of the sleepiest of sleeper cult hits during that time. Three of his films have been covered on the Quentin Tarantno/Roger Avery podcast Video Archives (Bustin', Narrow Margin and The Relic) all with largely favourable critiques, and they haven't even touched 2010, Outland, Capricorn One, Timecop or Sudden Death.

It's almost too easy to look at the cover of any 90's Jean-Claude Van Damme flick and snicker, at least just a little, but Sudden Death is probably the least JCVD-esque vehicle of all JCVD films. In what can only be called "Die Hard in a hockey arena", JCVD is playing a fire marshal at Pittsburgh's Civic Arena, and he's scored seats to the Penguins' Game 7 Stanley Cup final against the Chicago Blackhawks bringing his pre-teen son and younger daughter. In attendance at the game is the vice-president so security it high.  But not high enough.

A large, well prepared team of mercenaries have descended on the stadium and successfully taken the vice president hostage, murdering plenty along the way. A deeply complicated money transfer scheme is their aim, based on seized off-books reserves the US government has access to, and their leader, Joshua Foss (Powers Booth), will stop at nothing to coerce the VP into getting it for him, including blowing up the arena.

The surprising thing is that there's really only one lengthy choreographed fight sequences (between JCVD and a stuntwoman in the Penguins' mascot costume) that shows off JCVD's usual fighting prowess. In this, his fire Marshall isn't an ex-marine, or has a black belt in tae-kwon doe, he's just a scrappy person with a few power moves, but he still gets his ass beat up quite a bit.  Most of what JCVD is asked to do is look stressed and panicked as he tries to disarm bombs and figure out how to rescue his kids, all while a big-time hockey game goes on inside, and the Secret Service attempt to reign in control on the outside. Is it the best use of JCVD's talents (and butt)? No, but he serves it just fine.

It's all second-tier Die Hard stuff, but it's still really damn enjoyable. Booth may not have the same gravitas as Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons, but you want a big bad on a budget the man can deliver.. He's absolutely vicious, and the death toll he and his team are responsible for is ridiculous. They really don't care (they even pull the trigger on a child at one point!).

Hyams and crew use the Civic Arena to its fullest. The arena sports a moon roof feature where a wedge of the roof retracts to reveal the night sky and fireworks.  It also is wide enough to, infamously, drop a helicopter into. There's such an energy added to the movie by having a hockey game going on in the middle of it, with the big roar of the crowd and the excitement of the goals being scored. It's a film taking its threat and its scenario seriously while also remembering to have fun with it (at one point JCVD needs to go out on the ice disguised as the Penguins' goalie, to which he keeps repeating "oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit" as the play starts streaking towards him).  

I delighted in this movie. Hyams is such an ultra-competent director, he keeps the suspense suspenseful, the action actiony, and paired with JCVD manages to keep the protagonist of the film the underdog throughout.

KWEIF: Will & Harper (+the Bounty Hunter Trilogy)

KWEIF=Kent's Weekend in Film, because I did a Kent's Week in Film already this week (twice!). I took a couple days off work to decompress an watched a pile of movies, and that continued over the weekend.

This Weekend:
Will & Harper (2024, d. Josh Greenbaum - Netflix)

Killer's Mission (1969, d. Shigehiro Ozawa - bluray)

The Fort of Death (1969, d. Eiichi Kudo - bluray)

Eight Men to Kill (1972, d. Shigehiro Ozawa- bluray)

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Tactic number 1 of the conservative political playbook is to make the people afraid. Make them fearful, make them hate. Give them an enemy as the root cause of all their problems. Distract them from the real and exceeding complex issues of sustaining a democracy. Distract them from the glad-handing  deals, from the dissolving of social infrastructure, from the capitalism-run-wild that favours the few at the expense of the many. Keep them pointing fingers at anyone but the (primarily, but not exclusively) conservative political powers that are the true root of the problems.

Conservative politicians, and their public mouthpieces (from talk radio, to social media feeds, to 24 hour cable news channels) keep a large swath of populace under their sway through tactic number 1, and have been doing so for generations. They do so because it works. People want easy answers in a complex world. Explaining global economics or spelling out the complex chain of events that lead to a small town falling into ruin or understanding how a prosperous country slides into negative population growth and thus needs immigration to bolster it's economic infrastructure...well, the average person doesn't want to sit through that lecture. They just want to know who they should be angry at, and most conservative politicians have no moral compunction about pointing a finger. At any given time it's been Blacks or Mexicans or Asians or Muslims or gays or all of the above. It's only been recently that it's been trans people, and more specifically it seems to be pointing a finger at trans women.

The largely patriarchal world is a dangerous place for women. It always has been. Men have objectified and othered women as something less-than for centuries. Objects of desire, prizes, possessions, muses, tools, toys. When men don't see women as human, as equals they can do horrendous things. 

So imagine how scary it is when you've got politicians and political mouthpieces shouting to a massive and receptive population that you, as a trans woman are not even worthy of being an object of desire, a prize, possession, muse, tool or toy. That if you are not a man than you are nothing. It says a lot about how these men not only perceive trans women, but women in general.  But it's not that politicians and political mouthpieces are saying that trans women are nothing, they are actively saying trans women are predators, they are perverts, they are the root of leftist blabbetyblah (and these are the nicer things they say). They are making a populating dehumanize, hate and be angry towards a population that just want to be free, to have the liberty to live in a skin the is comfortable, to be who they feel they are inside on the outside rather than be trapped in a construct, in the confined definition that the patriarchal society has determined they should be.

Most trans people go through a period of deep depression and suicidal ideation before they come out. Most of us cannot truly understand this struggle, to feel so trapped by one's own skin by societal expectations that death seems like the most straightforward answer to it all.  And then imagine when a whole political segment is saying they would rather you kill yourself than wear the clothing of the opposite gender to what you were born with. It's frankly repulsive.

I have trans people in my life. I love, support and accept them unconditionally. Radical empathy should be mandatory teaching, not just in school but at work and throughout everyone's life. It's a health and safety issue. Not everyone has trans people in their life, or has encountered trans people socially, and so if you don't have exposure, it's easy to other, to give any credence to the inane ramblings of those political mouthpieces.  

Will Ferrell has made many movies which play well in conservative spaces. His comedies have rarely been political or exclusionary, they're usually pretty silly and play pretty broadly. He knows films like Step Brothers, Anchorman and Talladega Nights have earned him a wide audience of fans, and now he wants to attempt to engage that audience and introduce them to a trans woman, his dear friend Harper Steele.

Harper was, in her masculine disguise, a writer for Saturday Night Live when she met Will and they became fast friends, and remained very close over the decades. During the pandemic, Harper came out to everyone in her life as a trans woman, no longer able to tolerate living the lie she was living. Post-pandemic ("post"), the friends decided upon a road trip for the two of them to get reacquainted, for Will to meet Harper properly as the friend he's always known but now could truly know.

But the film is only half about Will meeting his friend in total, the other half is Harper coming to terms with being a trans woman in America, of exploring the spaces she used to freely engage with as a man...spaces that, by all accounts from news reports and political discourse, would be dangerous for her to enter.

With Will's celebrity presence acting as buffer, they set forth on a New York to L.A. trip that takes them to some of the most gorgeous vistas the world has to offer, and to some formative spaces in Harper's life, and to those rural red state places where she gets those leering looks that, if not for Will or the camera crew, could spell danger for her.

There are genuine moments of connections with people that Harper has that surprise her, but there are fresh wounds made by daring to even enter a space where she knows she's not wanted. I'm sure Will okayed it with Harper, but every time he announced her publicly as his friend who transitioned, I cringed. But it came from both a place of pride, and from of place of hope, that simply by stating he, Will Ferrell is an ally, he might get others to be so as well. It's bold, perhaps brave, but also naive. 

This is a funny, sweet, heartwarming film about friendship, but also intense, painful, and, at times, dispiriting film about Western society and its constructs, and the pain its very arbitrary and imaginary boundaries inflict upon much of the population.  

There were few times where I felt Harper was safe.  When she was among friends or family or alone with Will, I felt she felt at ease, and it was lovely to see. Every other public space felt extremely loaded, just bracing for someone to say something, to incite.  It makes me sad. I am worried for the trans people in my life, but also for those that I don't know. I'm most empathetic towards those who witness the discourse about them and decide not to come out, to stay trapped. I wish society wasn't so primitive, that it would evolve enough to see through patriarchal  rhetoric and conservative dogma, and see the spectrum of humanity for the beautiful thing it is.

I hope this film is effective, that cisgender people engage with it (I think it's much less vital for trans people, as it's not presenting them with much they don't already live or know), and learn and grow and become more open and empathetic. It's truly lovely.

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I had never heard of The Bounty Hunter Trilogy before, a trio of films in Japanese genres of jedaigeki and chambara from the late-60's early '70s starring Lone Wolf and Cub's Tomisaburo Wakayama.  (If you don't know these terms, that's okay, because I don't really either.  "Jedaigeki" are basically period dramas, where "chambara" are the subgenre of sword fighting films. Both are kind of used, maybe inaccurately (?) as a general term to reference samurai movies.) I'm not well versed in these genres largely because they weren't very accessible when I was younger. Outside of Kurosawa and Godzilla, there wasn't a lot of access to Japanese cinema until the double-boom of Power Rangers and Pokemon started a whole mass wave of interest in Japanese entertainment, primarily manga and anime.

The chambara I started with were the Kurosawa movies, mainly through the references to them in my readings about Star Wars (if you look at the genre terms above, you see where Lucas got "Jedi" from). Kurosawa's samurai films are gorgeous, intelligent, and masterful cinema. But what I glommed onto most immediately was the pulpier, more violent, more stripped-down Lone Wolf and Cub. I watched most of the films and some of the TV series in the early 2000s thanks to an incredible local video store when I moved to Toronto (no longer exists sadly).  I coveted the collection for years, and finally acquired the six-film series on blu-ray last year. I really need to review it. I got halfway through before I got distracted. 

Outside of Kurosawa and Lone Wolf and Cub I haven't explored the jedaigeki much, in part because there's just so much of it out there, and also because it's still not extremely accessible. Unlike Chinese martial arts films, the jedaigeki and chambara films haven't been Sunday afternoon cable classics, video store hallmarks, or Tubi essentials. If you want to watch them, you have to seek them out, and if you don't really know what you're looking for it can be difficult (and expensive) to traverse.

I only learned about The Bounty Hunter Trilogy by visiting one of my local video stores (we have a few in Toronto, thank the gods - Bay Street Video, Eyesore Cinema, and Vinegar Syndrome, to name three) and spying the boxed set on the shelf. Released by Radiance and limited to 3000 copies, it features a quarter-sleeve on the box that tells you what this is: "Tomisaburo Wakayama [stars] in this triptych of violent samurai spectacles inspired by James Bond and spaghetti westerns." 

Films blending the genres of samurai, British super spy and Italian westerns...plus Wakayama in the lead? I had to see these.

Killer's Mission most fully realizes this promise of genre-blending. Wakayama plays Shikoro Ichibei, a doctor who moonlights as a "bounty hunter" (we'll get to that), taking missions to help fund his medical practice. The premise of this first in the series seems to stem from the same historical incident as James Clavell's story for Shogun. A Dutch ship is possibly selling firearms to a rogue state that could give them the potential power to overthrow the Shogun.  Ichibei is hired to prevent the sale from happening by any means necessary.

Ichibei suits up, assembling his armory of transforming weapons and hidden gadgets like an 18th century Japanese super-spy. It could only have been better if there was actually a quartermaster there who were devised these gadgets and explained their use to him.  He sets out on his mission using disguises, lies, and trickery, as well as lightning fast reflexes, expert swordsmanship, and a butt load of super-spy testosterone to make his way to his destinations.

Much like Sean Connery's Bond, Ichibei is a lustful being who thinks he's god's gift to women. In this same movie he tricks one woman into sympathy fucking him by pretending to be a blind man, and fights a female ninja who he'd rather be kissing.  There's a lot of that "the lady doth protest too much" attitude here where Ichibei forcefully kisses someone but though they initially resist, they ultimately cannot resist his manly manliness (and what a man, as a clowning, Don Knotts-esque sidekick catches a look at Ichibei's dick in the lavatory and is beyond impressed and effusively complimentary). This film, and the series, is not the best at serving its female characters, though Ichibei is less handsy in the subsequent films. It's one of the unfortunate ways in which it's in fitting with the Bond-ian stereotype.

Also like Bond films, Killer's Mission gets pretty convoluted plot-wise, as the political side of things weaves its way through multiple double-crosses and some shifting of allegiances where the motivation isn't entirely clear.

What the film lacks in plot clarity and respect for women, it almost makes up for in style. It's score is so 60's espionage with emphatic, propulsive guitars and horns (with just a little bit of surf energy), that it sets the vibe. The character, the swagger, the "romance" and even the almost free-flowing nature of the mission all have that 60's super-spy tinge to it, but in the guise of Japanese samurai tropes.

It's the staging though that evokes Westerns. The fights all have a dusty showdown nature to them, the camera closing in on Wakayama's eyes like he's Clint Eastwood, he will quickdraw his sword and return it to his sheath like a sheriff will his six-shooter in a showdown shootout.  It's hard not to be charmed by the mishmash.

The subsequent films in the series, then, are that much more a disappointment in their abandoning or the spy genre. While the music cues remain very brassy, the second, and especially the third in the series lean more into to the samurai-meets-western.

Of the three, I think The Fort of Death is my least favourite, primarily because it is effectively a lower budget, more primitive riff on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. It's the knock-off version, like Orca to Jaws, or Battle Beyond the Stars to Star Wars. It seems cheaper, more exploitative, and yet it's also not without its excitement or charms. While it mostly abandons the super spy element it adopts the 50's/60's British-esque war movie into its repertoire.

A coalition of farmers is being taxed literally to death by its regional lordship. They've protested and pleaded but their lordship has his own political aspirations, and whatever he achieves will be on the backs of the working class. They either fall in line, or get shut down. Though it doesn't pay much, and Ichibei is not a man to interfere in politics, he cannot dismiss the suffering of others, nor can he abide bullies.

He gathers a team, including his ninja love interest from last film (though their relationship has seemingly gone largely platonic since then) and they descend upon the fortified wall. Ichibei takes command and organizes the people, their few fighters, and the unruly ronin who have gathered.  They would be overwhelmed by the lord's forces if not for the gatling gun Ichibei has brought with him (possibly recovered from those Dutch traders he defeated in the prior film?)

There's something about gunplay in a samurai film I really, really don't like. Obviously guns were a game changer after ages of swords and arrows, and this ugly progression naturally would hit Japan's shores, but there's something so much more elegant and tangible to swordplay and arrows that is lost when you have people falling over after being hit with invisible bullets. The special spray of arterial blood is lost as hammy extras overplay their falling-over-after-being-shot moments.

That said, it's still pretty exciting, and has kind of a first-person-shooter feel to it when the forces are just so overwhelming that they're pretty much flooding the frame of the camera and being shot by Ichibei's gun at point blank range.  It does feel effectively overwhelming.

In terms of Ichibei being the number-one-lover-man-in-Japan, the film turns the tables. A widow in the village assaults Ichibei, taking his pants off while he sleeps and tries to force herself upon him repeatedly as he attempts to flee. It's played semi-comedically, but assault is assault. It's not right when Ichibei was doing it in the prior film and it's not fair play to have the tables reversed.  Another widow, who has gone mad following the deaths of her husband and baby, also assails Ichibei, and literally throws him around, mirroring his first encounter with his ninja love in Killer's Mission.

The film ends with a field of dead and the ruins of a community. An inspector from the Shogunate finally arrives to assess the conflict, but obviously too late to do anything about it. It's a dark note, left with the little promise of the children of the village emerging and being embraced by the farmers of neighboring communities.

These films do not shy away from being critical of government, and the corruption that lies within. Ichibei is often an agent for the government but he is not of the government.

Eight Men to Kill opens with a gold heist, which makes its way to Ichibei doubly so. First the government implores his assistance in recovering the gold as it's crucial to staving off an economic collapse. Second, a witness to the heist found a gold piece and swallowed it, but it's causing severe intestinal issues and Ichibei needs to operate on him.  Operations on screen before sterile environments really wig me out.

So Ichibei suits up and heads out to discover the whereabouts of the gold. He meets and kills and helps many people along the way. Unlike the first film, which establishes Ichibei as a sort of solitary badass, and the second film where he's like a military general, here he's a man for the people. His mission to recover the gold is so he can get a cut of it to fund more medical outposts in the region, something he criticizes his government contacts for not doing.

Eight Men to Kill is framed almost entirely as a western. The score still retains its super-spy tenor, but mixes in a lot more Morricone influence than before. The visuals are exceptionally dusty, and even the Japanese villages seem to be staged more in a way like Western towns, ready for a showdown.

There's also a lot more gunplay. While The Fort of Death was wartime gunplay, along with swords and arrows, there's more gunplay than swordplay here, a lot of horse chases as well. It's more American/spaghetti western than jedaigeki. Even Ichibei's outfit looks more gunslinger than samurai (he actually looks more like the Friendly Giant, if I'm being honest.) The mustard coloured outfit and the shaggy near-afro screams early 1970's.

While the first film was complicated by its political intrigue, here's its complicated by the ever-shifting allegiances of the characters. Everyone's shifting who they are aiding and it's not like they're double-agents, they just keep shifting sides. In the end I really lost track of who was supporting whom and what individual motivations were.

On the women front, again, not great. Ichibei threatens a sex worker who has info about the gold. She refuses to give up her knowledge and offers herself to him basically as a distraction. About the only Bond-ian element remaining in this film is the fact he fucks the villainess so good she immediately falls in love with him and leads him to the man with the gold, and she starts acting irrationally out of her uncontrollable affection for Ichibei.

The end of the film is very dark, and once again reiterates this films seemingly connective tissue about governments needing to be for the people and not exist for power, wealth and control.

Despite being the most misogynistic of the three films, Killer's Mission was the most successful at what it promised on the box (and honestly the misogyny of the film is absolutely aping James Bond, in an almost child-like, they-don't-really-know-what-they're-doing fashion) and the one I liked the most. I wished they had stuck with the super-spy genre and leaned into its tropes more. Period-specific super-spies may not be all that accurate but it's pretty goddamn fun. 

Chambara films already have a western feel to them as is, so leaning more into the Sergio Leone of it all isn't really redefining the boundaries of samurai movies... or maybe it's that I just care less about westerns than I do about spy movies.

These three films aren't great cinema, they aren't giving Kurosawa any challenges. They're pulp, their entertainment, and much like Ichibei himself they get the job done pretty efficiently (all of them clocking in around 90 minutes).  Yet, I really would like there to be more of these. It's surprising there weren't more of these, or that they didn't go on to be a TV series like Lone WOlf and Cub or Zatoichi. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): For a Few Dollars More

1965, Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West) - Amazon

The Man With No Name is now called Manco (Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry) and he's a bounty hunter, not some itinerate wanderer. Grab a poster off the sheriff's office wall, track down the criminal, shoot him and drag the body back to claim the reward. That is the way of the Old West.

This one was alright. If the last one surprised me by having more plot than I expected, this one had ... less? If it did anything, it allowed the villain to be more than a dummy who is foiled by our daring & clever Good Guys.

So, El Indio (Gian Maria Volontè, Hercules and the Captive Women) has broken himself from jail and reconnected with his notorious gang. He has exited the jail with a plan to rob the bank in El Paso, Texas, This bank's vault is said to be unbreakable, with lots of armed guards and many layers of barred rooms within the bank itself. Also, the real vault, as in the place that has all the gold, is not a vault at all, but a single safe hidden behind a pretty wooden cabinet. Indio got this knowledge from his cellmate.

After some initial rivalry, Manco and fellow bounty hunter Col Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef, Escape from New York) decide to team up to get Indio and his gang. Rough looking Manco will insinuate himself into Indio's gang while pristine & precise Mortimer sets himself up in the hotel across from the bank. The plan goes decently enough but Indio is smarter than both of them -- he doesn't go in the front door as they expected, but just blows up the wall at the back of the bank, roping and dragging off the safe/cabinet.

The gangsters  run away with their loot, and Mortimer gives chase, anticipating their destination. He shows Indio how to get into the safe without blowing it up. Indio promises the cash will be divvied up after the dust, the ever present dust, settles in a month. Manco and Mortimer both have the idea they can steal the money under Indio's nose but are caught, but not before they actually do steal it, and hide it... by tossing it into a tree. Good thing it wasn't actually gold, but... promissory notes? Anywayz, Indio reveals he knew that both of them were bounty hunters.

Indio is a sly little fucker who has even further plans, including the betrayal of his own gang, framing one for freeing the bounty hunters and setting others against each other. And he knows the bunch he sends after the bounty hunters will just die at their hands. It all ends with the inevitable stand-off, but primarily between Mortimer and Indio, where its revealed that "you killed my sister, prepare to die!"

If anything, this movie suffered from trying to be more. The greater budget is very apparent in the number of extras, the full taverns, the number of characters with speaking parts. And the construction of the El Paso town, a full town that is apparently now a tourist attraction in the wilds of Spain. But in trying to be more, it seemed to have lost some of its focus, on the characters, on the styles that made the first so compelling. 

I realize I am not taking to these "spaghetti westerns" as much as I thought I would, and its primarily the loss of the majestic landscapes of the "proper" America westerns. In my mind, a good Western is about the journeys as much as the action and gun play. The overseas films are distilling some pretty specific stylistic choices which do make for great characters but maybe are not my interest. But still, my long meandering way, I am still interested in exploring the sub-genre.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): A Fistful of Dollars

1964, Sergio Leone (Duck, You Sucker!) -- Amazon

Weird, but The Man With No Name is named Joe. In fact, he is named in all three movies.

During the backend of The Pause when I was working from home more often, I did some lunch-time movie watching. I professed a desire to be exposed to the Spaghetti Western genre, but was frustrated by Amazon's lack of titles -- it was a scattered collection at best. And it did not include the seminal Clint Eastwood movies. The series did not start the Spaghetti Western concept, but it brought it to commercial success and audience attention. And then, lo and behold, here they were.

So, if Rashomon spawned a bunch of movies where a story is told from multiple viewpoints, then Yojimbo tells the story of a beleaguered village where a Lone Wanderer comes in and pits two gangs against each other. Leone's unofficial adapting of the Kurosawa movie spawned a lawsuit, which did point out that even Kurosawa didn't originate the trope, even going back to a Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest. But that didn't stop the suit and Leone's payout to Kurosawa. And I am sure most would agree (even me) that people now attribute this plot concept to Westerns more than anything.

So yeah, a small town just over the Rio Grande in Mexico where two gangs stare each other down from opposite ends of town. Its not much of a town, basically their two haciendas and a ramshackle cantina in between, as well as some beleaguered villagers constantly hassled by the gangs.

And then rides in The Man With No Name, seeking work. Or The Stranger. Or ... Joe (Clint Eastwood, Lafayette Escadrille). He gets a quick rundown from Silvanito (José Calvo, The Twelve-Handed Men of Mars) the cantina owner, and immediately enters the fray by gunning down four Baxters, the American gun-running gang. That allows him to make friends with Don Miguel Rojo (Antonio Prieto, Los dos golfillos), of the alcohol & illicit substances smuggling gang. 

Later, Joe witnesses the Rojos betray a company of Mexican soldiers who thought they were buying guns from a group or renegade American soldiers. Esteban Rojo (Sieghardt Rupp, Don't Look Now... We're Being Shot At!) hopes to frame the Baxters for the massacre, but Joe messes the plan up by snatching two bodies and selling the news that two Mexican soldiers survived the massacre and are holed up in a cemetery -- to both sides. That leads to a gunfight where many die and one Baxter is captured.

Meanwhile Joe is poking around the Rojo hacienda looking for the gold, that was being used by the Mexican soldiers to buy the guns, when his fist bumps into Marisol (Marianne Koch, Death Drums Along the River), a beautiful local that the Rojos have absconded with. She stays with the Rojos knowing they will kill her husband and son should she try and escape. That kind of pisses Joe off, and since he owes her for the boop in the nose, he arranges for her escape the town, but the Rojos figure out he is responsible and beat him within an inch of his life. He does escape and is smuggled out of town by the undertaker (casket maker? you know, the classic guy who looks at you odd in order to measure your height for the impending casket!) to recover in a mine.

Meanwhile, the Rojos use this attack on them, and loss of Marisol, as an excuse to massacre the Baxters, right down to the true leader of the gang, Consuelo Baxter (Margarita Lozano, 15 Scaffolds for a Murderer). But they still want Joe, and end up torturing Silvanito to find out where he is. Joe has been hiding long enough and comes to town, to finally deal with the remaining Rojos. 

Despite my somewhat snarky recap, I kept on marveling how well paced and executed this movie was. This was the era of the American Western, with dozens of cheesy movies and TV shows out. I expected this incredibly badly ADR-ed movie to suffer from a terrible script, and terrible acting and was pleasantly surprised at how reigned in  the cheese was. Eastwood embodies the cool, composed expert who seemingly is in it only for himself, but sacrifices almost everything because a child is crying for his mother. Leone was known for establishing a lot of style in this movie that ended up defining action adventure movies for decades to come, such as the focus on characters' faces.

I hope the remaining two live up to expectations. I have seen The Good, the Bad & the Ugly before, but I barely remember it, and it was probably on Saturday afternoon TV.

KWIF: Tokyo! (+4)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week Kent has a spotlight movie of which he writes a longer, thinkier piece, and then whatever else he watched that week he attempts a quick wee summary of his thoughts (and fails...in the "quick" part).

This Week:
Tokyo! (2008, d. Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-ho - Tubi)
Shiva Baby (2020, d. Emma Seligman - Netflix)
First Men in the Moon (1964, d. Nathan H. Juran - Silver Screen Classics)
Rolling Thunder (1977, d. John Flynn - AmazonPrime)
Miami Blues (1990, d. George Armitage - AmazonPrime)

and go.

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I don't know how I've gone this long without having heard of the French-funded anthology film Tokyo!  which features three exceptionally notable modern auteurs of cinema. Like, you would figure it would have come up in any conversation about the repertoire of these visionary filmmakers. But no, I had to find out by spending 20 minutes thumbing through the "free to me" movies section of my cable provider. 

Yes, I still have cable, because... shut up.

Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho? I've said many places about how I hate anthologies (usually in relation to comic books) mainly because they're usually nominal works from their creators, but to watch three short films from these luminaries, there can be no disappointments here. 

Gondry cut his teeth making impeccable music videos that tell wildly imaginative stories in a very short amount of time, so it's almost like 30 to 40 minutes may be more his wheelhouse than actual feature films.  His entry, Interior Design, is based on the sequential art short story Cecil and Jordan in New York by Gabrielle Belle.  The story finds a young couple Hiroko and Akira coming to Tokyo to screen Akira's first indie film. They stay with Hiroko's college friend in her tiny apartment, but it's supposed to be very temporary. It is not. While Akira finds a menial job immediately, Hiroko can't even manage that. Akira says she's has no aspirations, and Gondry very effectively captures her aimlessness, which is truly the heart of the story. Hiroko wanders the streets of Tokyo, looking at apartments, but always feeling a step behind, hopeless and homeless. After Akira's screening she's chatted up by another woman who tells her how important it can be to solely be the support base for an artist, to have no purpose than to ease another's burdens so that they can be creative. It hits Hiroko in her core being. Who is she? What is she?

I can't really talk about what puzzles me about this film without spoiling its very Gondry-esque twist. So skip this paragraph if you don't want to know...  ... ... Hiroko starts turning into a chair. The classic wooden type with the spindled back. She's utterly distraught and very publicly transitions, her clothes falling away as her legs become wooden stilts, until eventually she just is a chair. But she can also not be a chair, emerging fully naked in the evening streets of Tokyo is a scary place. She transitions in and out of being a chair, until a musician, just takes chair-Hiroko home. The musician's place is gorgeous, the perfect apartment she failed to find in her own search. When the musician leaves, she starts tending to the space, watering the plants, cleaning the kitchen, and when he returns, she's a very useful chair.  I mean... what?  It seems that Hiroko finds a sense of fulfillment out of being a piece of useful furniture, not just taking up space, but having purpose, but the sort of regressive domestication and becoming exactly the support base for an artist had me scratching my head at the messaging (especially since the night before we were watching comedians make fun of the "Tradwives" of the internet). Not that there's anything wrong with a woman finding fulfillment in such a life, so long as she doesn't advocate it as the *only* option for women. Anyway, it threw me for a loop that I'm still circling.

Carax's story, Merde, starts out darkly comedic, as a milky eyed, long-nailed leprechaun with an oddly-groomed red beard and green corduroy suit (no shirt, no socks, no shoes) emerges from the sewer and proceeds to walk down this busy Tokyo street disrupting everything, with Carax doing a long rear-facing take tracking the action. He steals things out of peoples hands, tosses lit cigarettes into baby carriages, eats people's money and flowers, licks a woman's armpit, and is generally just an ugly, uncultured nuisance. Oh yeah, and it's all set to the key theme of Godzilla. The local TV news (which Carax depicts as being, like, cable access) has eyewitness statements and begins calling him, as subtitled "The Creature from the Sewers" (and my keen ears did hear the actual use of Kaiju in his name).  The leprechaun explores the underground of Tokyo and finds an old WWII military depot, including a crate of grenades, which on his next exploration of the surface he begins lobbing everywhere, murdering dozens. A task force is sent into the sewer and captures him. He's put on trial where a French attorney, with a similar oddly-groomed red beard and long nails is one of only three people who speak the same language as the creature, who we learn is called Monsieur Merde (or "Mr. Shit").  M. Merde is a terrible racist and hates the Japanese, but he explains he is as his god made and delivered him, and he is cursed to be in places where he is at his most uncomfortable. 

The trial find Carax using one of his favourite tricks, split and multi-paneled screens. He does this I think because otherwise the trial is rather interminable to watch as any statement to or from M. Merde needs to be translated from Japanese to French then French to Merde's weirdo language, or in reverse.  It's a bit of a trifle, this neo-kaiju story, as far as I can tell, there's not really much of a statement being made here. In referencing Godzilla through the music, a heavily allegorical film, it implies there may be an allegory here as well, but I can't seem to find it. If anything I was made uncomfortable by M. Merde's similarities to those unhoused or addicted experiencing a mental health crisis very prevalent in Toronto, which is definitely coincidence but really puts a damper on this as just a bit of an odd lark.

The final story is Shaking Tokyo from Bong Joon-ho. It begins with a title card defining "hikikomori", sort of a shut-in/agoraphobe/hoarder, but really young (like teen or 20s). Teruyuki Kagawa plays our hikikomori here, who describes his routine in every detail, nothing that he hasn't been outside in over ten years, hasn't looked another person in the eyes in as much time and gets everything delivered. His house is piled high with books, magazines, pizza boxes and toilet paper rolls, but they're all immaculately stacked in a very orderly way. His comfortable, familiar world is usurped when receiving his usual pizza delivery, he catches a glimpse of the driver's garter belt, which instinctively causes him to look up, and he meets the young woman's eyes. The awkwardness is palpable for both but, just then, an earthquake hits. The young woman falls over unconscious. Panic stricken, the man first keeps his distance, then grabs her a glass of water (which he then drinks) then checks (without touching her) if she is still breathing. He notices she has tattoos on her arm, buttons, with labels ("sadness", "hysteria", "headache"). Then he notices another on her leg that says "coma". He presses the "button" and she awakens. She takes in his space, compliments him on it, and notices a flaw in his pizza box stacks before departing. He is clearly smitten. Days later, off schedule, he nervously orders another pizza, only it's delivered by a very gruff man who barges into his space leaving pools of rainwater behind him. The girl has quit, become hikikomori herself.  He psyches himself up for days to go out into the world and save this young woman from her fate.

Director Bong is such an immaculate craftsman, not that Gondry and Carax are not very specific in their productions, but there's such a crispness and exactness to all of Director Bong's productions and that is just as evident here. The short is beautifully shot, every frame seemingly perfect in its composition. His spaces, even his messy spaces, seem so refined, but here we have a hoarder who is so orderly. Just like with Interior Design and Merde, there is one element that just makes me uneasy, and it's the fact that our hikikomori is clearly older then the seemingly very young delivery woman. Their "meet-cute" is hella cute, brief as it is (and teetering dangerously on manic pixie dream girl territory, if not for the fact that he's sort of a manic pixie dream man himself), but the age disparity (I looked it up and there's a 20-year age gap between the performers), particularly in the end where he is groping at her arm and forcebly pulling the young woman out of her house to, in his mind, stop her from becoming like him...well, it's a deeply uncomfortable level of physicality. It speaks to the man's desperation, but there's also a fixation paradigm here that the physical engagement, despite intention, is a step too far.

Each of these three stories I was immersed and immensely compelled by. These are great storytellers and directors each really interested in abnormalities of society. But at the same time they're very 2008, and each story, as noted, has an element that, by today's standards, would have to be reconsidered. 

As a whole, these are stories that take place in Tokyo, and use Tokyo as their environment effectively, but I wouldn't say that Tokyo is necessarily a character, or that these three outsiders are representing anything foundational or even observational about the massive city (heck, Gondry's is a transposition from New York-based source material). Their weirdo vibes are always welcome though, and I think overall it's a successful anthology, with an asterisk.

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I love this spin on the classic
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana
Brass "A Taste Of Honey"
album comver

Lady Kent and I very much enjoyed Bottoms, last year's absurd high school outsiders comedy that plays with the trope of marrying sex and violence with immensely delightful results. It was the second feature from writer-director Emma Seligman and co-writer/star Rachel Sennott. I had heard of this duo as a result of their highly praised debut Shiva Baby, a film I have had every intention of watching since it's pandemic era release...but I had heard it was a cringe-comedy and I've become really averse to the subgenre. With the evening running short and nothing more pressing to watch one night, the 1-hour 17-minute runtime, more than anything fit the bill. 

The film opens with college-age student Danielle (Sennott) having sex with older man Max (Danny Deferrari). It's very clear he's her sugar daddy, though maybe not clear to him. She's missed the funeral of an elderly relative, and she meets up with her parents (Fred Melamed [Lady Dynamite] and Polly Draper [Thirtysomething]) for the shiva. Her mom is very concerned with social status and preps manufactured talking points for the family when friends and relatives engage them on what Dani has been up to (and everyone is into everyone's business). he family dynamics are very quickly, concisely, and clearly conveyed. It's masterful scripting and tremendously funny.  Dani spies Maya (Molly Gordon, The Bear) and avoids her. Turns out they were best friends-turned-lovers gone sour, in what Dani's mom calls "a phase", but if lying about her schooling, career goals, work history and romantic life while avoiding her old flame isn't enough, who shows up to the shiva but sugar daddy Max...who is married (to a shiksa no less) and has a baby ("Who brings a baby to a shiva?").

While the proceedings are frequently uncomfortable (Dani's fixation on Max, and, moreover Max's tall, hot blonde and very successful wife, lead her to say and do some very ill-advised things), it's kind of clear that Dani is in a bit of a crisis. The comedy is Dani doing and saying the wrong thing, but there's a deeper meaning to it all that Maya clocks right away. They have their own baggage they need to sort through, but at the heart of it, there is love and affection. Even Dani's mom, judgemental as she is, clocks something is off with her, but is too busy circulating to really drill down. She just wants Dani to pretend she's someone else and behave herself for a couple hours, unaware of the toll such repeated requests is having on Dani's ever-fracturing psyche.

Particularly the last act, when Dani's unconscious competitive and vengeful streaks start to manifest, directed at Max's wife (who, once we are separated from Dani's POV of her, actually seems very nice, and very much the victim of a husband taking advantage of her), the film does venture into "cringe" territory, but for the most part it's not interested in doing something funny without it having a character purpose. Cringe characters are those that make bad choices either unconsciously because they are narcissist or idiots incapable of self-reflection. Dani is neither of these and Sennett, the full-fledged, ready-made star of this movie, delivers every nuance, while Seligman's use of focus and lenses enhances what Sennott is delivering, really capturing the mental breakdown she's going through. What a debut.

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I was browsing cable (yeah, yeah) one day and I stopped on a channel, utterly perplexed by what I saw. Big expensive sets of alien landscapes, gorgeously lit, with men in sci-fi spacesuits...this wasn't some low budget B-movie from the 50's or 60's that of course I've never heard of if it wasn't MST3K fodder, no, this was a beautiful technicolor (sorry "dynamation") production that clearly had some coin behind it. So what was it and why had I never see it before? Turns out it was the 1964 adaptation of H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon, a film for all my years of nerditry, I'd never, ever heard of.

I say this so confidently, but it's probably more a case of "if I ever had heard of it, it clearly didn't make an impression")

Released 5 years before man would actually land on the moon, the film begins with the first moon landing, a laughably cooperative effort between the U.S., Russia and Great Britain. It's quite the slog of an opening sequence before we actually get to the men on the moon, pretending to be all realistic but comes off as unnecessary filler. Once we see the shuttle descend towards the moon, a not-too-shabby effect for '64, and then the really nifty space suits in action, it definitely picks up. Until one of the astronauts finds, of all things, a ratty old Union Jack flag and a degraded note sitting on a rock. 

The note claims the moon in honor of her Majesty Queen Victoria but written on the back of a court summons. A curious mystery that leads to a ground pursuit for the name on the summons, that leads to a kooky old man in a care home. He then tells the story of how he wound up as one of the first men on the moon...in 1899!

We flashback to rural England, where flim-flam artist Arnold Bedford is hiding out from his creditors. His American fiancee, Katherine Callendar, has come to join him, unaware of his tumultuous financial position. They become entangled in a real estate scheme with their neighbour, Joseph Cavor, a mad-scientist of the Doc Brown persuasion. He's invented a solution called Cavorite, that, when applied to an object, and hardens, it eliminates all mass from the object.  It makes no scientific sense, but it's the conceit of the story so we just go with it. Cavor's whole goal is to take a trip to the Moon, and Bedford wants in on the product for commercial gain... the trip to the moon will be the ultimate selling point. As their preparing to leave, Bedford's creditor's show up, and an incensed Katherine goes to confront him, only to be pulled into their vessel on their mission.

The trip to the moon is riddled with scientific inaccuracies, but for a tale written before aeroplanes were even a thing, there's a lot of good guesses to the science needed behind such a journey. Once they get to the moon, though, it's a whole other story. For example, they're using deep-sea diving suits, but gloveless so their hands are fully exposed. 

On the moon, they encounter an alien race of bug-people who, despite Cavor's insistence on peace, Bedford can't help but just keep killing. The film waffles between both men's perspectives of these aliens they encounter. Cavor's scientific curiosity leads him to extend his best graces to this unknown civilization (who have the technology to adapt to communicating in a shared language). Bedford just sees the unfamiliar-as-enemy and can't help but kill and keep killing, and wanting nothing more than escape and their complete destruction.  

As a viewer, I really wanted the Star Trek solution here, the diplomatic pursuit of peace and sharing of culture, and Cavor is the vessel for that desire. But the film seems to settle much more into Bedford's panic, and we never escape the fact that Bedford can only see them as a threat. It's so ugly and colonial. Katherine, for her part, doesn't seem to give a shit either way and just wants to go home. She wasn't wanting to be on this journey to begin with.

Cavor stays behind, but send Bedford and Katherine on their way, to which we return to "present day" where Bedford warns of the threat the astronauts currently on the moon will face. They turn the TV on to discover the astronauts have found the insects' lair, but it's abandoned and crumbling. Turns out Cavor's germs killed them all years ago. It's unclear if this Twilight Zone-wannabe ending is supposed to be a happy or sad ending.

As I said, it's a pretty posh production that features stupendous Ray Harryhousen effects, so it's really easy on the eyes. The story, as sci-fi, is very rudimentary but then it is based on a story decades old by that point. It's got tinges of modern science fiction of the time, again Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Quatermass (the latter also a creation of this film's screenwriter Nigel Kneale), but it's holding fairly true to the tepid structure and plot of sci-fi from a more naive time. It's also going for the uniquely British 60's styled fantasty-adventure romp that dials up the slapstick and pithiness (especially in Caver) to a nearly unpalatable degree. 

I also have to admit the viewing experience was not served well by the lengthy commercial breaks that interrupted it every 25 minutes or so

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I had heard of Rolling Thunder back in the '90's when I went gaga over Pulp Fiction and was consuming every Quentin Tarantino article and interview I could find. Tarantino has mentioned it was a favourite, if not the favourite film of his. I had just assumed, for years, given his predilection towards Grindhouse, that it was, like, a trucker revenge fantasy maybe by a quality director but from their early days working for Roger Corman...or something like that. It wasn't the most readily available film at the time, and it somehow never made my "to watch" list (or if it did, it was a list from many generations of lists ago).

My expectations and what Rolling Thunder actually is were two very different things. From the description on Amazon Prime, my expectations were immediately readjusted to it being what Tarantino calls a "revengeamatic" - those 70's-era films of a man or woman wronged and the great lengths they go to get revenge that seem to all hit the same consistent story beats. So, when I hit play I was now expecting a heightened pulpy, gritty, film with actors. making. choices. I still was so far off.

For 90 percent of Rolling Thunder we get an incredibly sensitive portrayal of post-Vietnam veterans, in this case late-stage released prisoners of war, returning home and finding a world that is both unfamiliar to them and to find they are emotionally unequipped to engage with it.

The film opens at a San Antonio airstrip with a vast welcome party waiting for Major Charles Rane (William Devane, Payback) and other POWs while plane is making its descent, over which Charlie Pride's "Is Anybody Going to San Antone" plays. Charles is greeted by his wife, and the son he's not seen in 7 years since he was a baby. His wife admits she's been with another man, a policeman she's now in love with, and Charle's son admits he doesn't remember him at all.  Charles has a therapist and is coping with this world that's changed since he's been away, but he's numb inside.  He's been gifted all sorts of presents, including a gorgeous red convertible Cadillac, and 2,555 silver dollars (one for every day he was a prisoner), and he's garnered the affection of a local taven waitress who calls herself a Major Rane groupie.

Half the film is just Charles' sense of reality, his trying and having extreme difficulty connecting with others. Only his groupie, Linda (Linda Haynes), doesn't seem to mind but also Charles isn't really ready for what she's serving. All these performances are remarkably restrained, and honest. These feel like people and not caricatures. They have adult conversations and don't avoid difficult subject matter, which, as a result, takes all the usual dramatic stakes right off the table. Charles being cuckolded isn't even a thing. He gets it, and he doesn't care, so long as his kid is getting treated well in it all.

But some goons come looking for the silver dollar collection they saw in the news. They think they can beat and torture Charles for the collection's whereabouts, not realizing that Charles. has some incredible coping mechanisms for dealing with such things after 7 years as a POW. Even when they stick his hand in the garbage disposal, he doesn't crack. It's only when his wife and son return home, that the men have leverage, and the kid gives up the coins. They are all then shot, and only Charles survives.

He has extensive rehab and extensive questioning from the police (especially his wife's fiancee), and he gets closer to Linda (or, at least, she gets closer to him). He's still mostly dead inside, but there's a little fire burning. Where most films would move into the obvious revenge plot, the stalking and killing of the individual goons, Paul Schrader's script for Rolling Thunder doesn't work that way. It's not in any way a revengeamatic, it refuses to follow the flow. Charles prepares his cache of weapons, sharpens his hook hand, collects Linda (who at times seems to get Charles' mission, but has trouble staying on board) and heads south to track down the men that murdered his son. It goes pretty awry, and Charles has to recalibrate.

In the end he ditches Linda from his mission, recruiting his POW comrade (Tommy Lee Jones, U.S. Marshals) and they plan a sneak attack at a brothel (in a scene Schrader repeats, though a different impetus, in Taxi Driver) that goes about as expected. It's neither clean, nor heroic. It's not to be celebrated, it's just what a broken man with the help of a broken friend feel is all they can do in this world.

There is an uncomfortable anti-Mexican undercurrent to the final act, only really palpable in the way the film thinks these white American men should just be able to walk into Mexican spaces and have a right to do whatever they want in them. The bad guys are a mix of Americans and Mexicans, the worst of which are the white men, so it's not framed in any way as an anti-Mexican picture.  It does seem unintentional, but just a product of the superior-by-default whiteness that has dominated pop culture in North America for centuries. It doesn't spoil the film overall, as its character focus is tremendously compelling, plus I find it fascinating that even before the revengeamatic was in full swing there was already a film that was a subversion of it.

Pairs well with First Blood?

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Real badge
Real gun
Fake cop
Bad poster

I don't remember in what context Miami Blues was recommended as an underrated, maybe even forgotten picture, but worthy of reassessment, but it's been on my radar for the past few months.

It was probably the Blank Check Podcast episode on The Hunt for Red October talking about Alec Baldwin's career...but don't quote me on it.

It is a very brightly lit, 90's pastel-soaked production that looks like a comedy but has a deep dark heart. We meet handsome, shifty grifter "Junior" (Baldwin, Match Game) on an airplane to Miami. Within seconds of landing, he's stolen a suitcase and broken the finger of a Hare Krishna...unknown to Junior, the shock of which kills the young man.

Junior arrives at a hotel where he has a contact, and has her send a girl up to his room. So arrives Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh, eXistenZ), a perky, naive (but not unintelligent) college student, who is there for sex work, but Junior is basically there to scam. He seems to take a shining to her, but it's evident Junior can't ever get his brain out of grifter-mode to fully understand emotions. They do start a relationship but one in which Junior is in full control. He's not physically abusive, but he is fully manipulative and doesn't care an ounce about what Susie thinks about anything or her aspirations.

Detective Sergeant Moseley (Fred Ward, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins) is on the case of the dead Hare Krishna, and in tracing witnesses finds Junior (under whatever stolen ID he was using at the time) and Susie. He winds up at their apartment and shares dinner with them. It's an amazing cat-and-mouse scene of Moseley picking up on Junior's habits, analyzing them very vocally and Junior having to quick-think his way into explanations (Junior eats the meal with his shirt off, the combo of Baldwin's incredible pelt of chest hair and food making me feel very uncomfortable). It's clear to Junior that Moseley has his suspicions so he later finds Moseley's apartment, sneak attacks him, beats him half to death, and steals his badge and his false teeth. 

Then Junior starts parading around town as a fake cop, interrupting crimes in process, only to finish the crimes off himself. It's a rampage that has not gone unnoticed by the police, and Moseley, still recuperating, is obviously very invested in resolving.

The tone of this film is the hardest part to glom onto. Junior is a horrible, horrible person, but it's a film that's daring us to like him. We've seen plenty of anti-heroes over the years, but director Armitage never commits to the label. If anything as we get to know Susie we become more keenly aware of how much of a villain Junior really is. There's no high drama, no pulse-pounding suspense, no over-the-top action, but it's a comedically punched-up story of a sociopath and the cop and young woman both in over her head with him. I think I like this film more in retrospect than I did watching it, and now I think I'll need to go back to it sometime, there were some really, really great lines that I need to pin down.

I just realized, at the very end of this review, that this reminds me sort of a Coen Bros. movie. I wonder if Armitage was riffing off of Raising Arizona when he was making this. It shares vibes with the Coens' crime comedies, but it's not stitching along the same seams.  I would almost say it pairs better with American Psycho, but I'm two decades removed from viewing ol Patrick Bateman so I can't fully say.