31 Days of Halloween: Handsome Guys

2024, Nam Dong-hyup (feature premiere) -- download

Or Haenseomgaijeu.

This Korean movie is billed as a remake of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which we are huge fans of -- my post does not give it justice, and I think its time for a rewatch and a new post. In the original movie, the "evil" turns out not to be some supernatural entity in the "cabin in the woods" but more along the psycho lines that the college kids assume should be attributed to Tucker and Dale, but ends up being One of Their Own. This remake decided to embrace the classic cabin aspect of the movie and ... well, I will get to that.

Kang Jae-pil (Lee Sung-min, The Moon) and Park Sang-goo (Lee Hee-joon, Badland Hunters; weird; I wouldn't paste "full names" if they were English names, but I somehow seem compelled to do it here) are not hillbillies, in the traditional sense... is there even an equivalent to Alabama or Tennessee in South Korea? Would I even recognize the cultural tropes, if there were? Either way, the guys are definitely weirdoes -- odd haircuts, weird style and socially awkward to the extreme, without even noticing it. Especially to the group of influencer kids they meet at the rest stop / convenience store -- wow, South Korean rural roadside convenience stories are pretty much small department stores. The influencers are on their way to a majestic lakeside "cabin", a trope influencers have spread world wide, while the two friends, carpenters by trade, are on their way to a weird house, entirely not traditional Korean-style, that Jae-pil sunk their savings into. The kids are there to pickup snacks and booze, while the boys are picking up reno gear, all sharp objects that could be used to kill people. When one of the girls is startled by Sang-goo, and she is further frightened when he tries to help her up, the tone of conflict is set between the two groups.

It should be noted that the movie has a Satanic exorcism preamble where an American priest fails to exorcise Baphomet from a young woman, and we see a pentagram carved into a stone in the basement of an old .... cabin in the woods. Not like I need to fill in blanks for you, but it does show a distinct departure from the original movie, in that their will be real supernatural Evil here.

I commented that should "Tucker & Dale" ever be remade, the kids would definitely be "influencers" and we would take even greater glee in watching them jump into a woodchipper. Why is it we so dislike influencer kids? Its almost like they have influenced us into thinking that.

So, the boys get to their house, and begin cleaning it up, while the influencer kids do what they do best, snipe at each other and pick favourites. Oh, I forgot to mention, on the drive up earlier, the kids hit a goat in the middle of the road, and just leave it there. When the boys come by soon after, they are found by a pair of buffoonish cops, carrying the tarped dead creature out of the road. The lead buffoon assumes they are doing some illegal, in fact, he needs them to be doing something illegal, as two so completely ugly, clownish dudes cannot not be doing something illegal. But they aren't so they have to be let go. Goats, Satan worship, you get it.

Now where was I ? Oh yes, both groups at their houses doing what they do, which ends up with Mi-na (Gong Seung-yeon, Aloners), the girl who got frightened by Sang-goo, the "nice girl" who is ostracized by the rest, down by the lake while the boys are fishing and, again, they startled her and she falls in. Let's just say the lake has a drop and she sinks like a stone, requiring Jae-pil to dive in to save her. She also requires some resuscitation, and the next morning she awakens in their somewhat-cleaned-up house, initially scared at what these weirdos are doing with her in their house, but quickly charmed by Sang-goo's harmless friendly behaviour and the massive breakfast spread laid out. The two end up getting along swimmingly while Jae-pil goes out to do yard cleaning (wood chipper, chain saw, etc.). The kids have noticed she is missing and wander around looking for her, coming across the boys cabin. They are immediately convinced the boys have kidnapped her, but one of the kids, the Mean One, really only cares that Mi-na has his phone. And he's an influencer that cannot be without his phone.

What follows is a tragic black-comedy of errors. Its not presented as well as the original movie, but basically each of the kids are compelled to attack the Jae-pil, starting with just after he (chain)saws into a log full of wasps, those big nasty Asian wasps. The kids run screaming as he runs screaming from  the wasps, waving his chainsaw around like the mad man they all assume he is. One of the girls is impaled. The horrified boys attack, but a mislaid power cord electrocutes one, and trips the other, who falls into the planter box, which looks like a coffin Sang-goo "made" Min-na build (for herself) -- said planter box has lots of exposed nails. Ouch. And then the final kid jumps at Jae-pil, who has made it back to his wood pile, chipper munching on the rotting wood he has cleaned up, and the kid misses Jae-pil and .... grrrinnnnnnnd .... tomato paste.

All of the kids have very quickly died due to their own ineptitude and misunderstandings. And, well that pentagram in the basement under the boys cabin is suddenly lighting up with fiery symbols  -- one symbol for each dead kid. Except, the count is off and ... ohhh, electrocuted kid is not dead. And his awakening, as well as the return of the kid I forgot to mention has an unfortunate run in with the not-dead goat (I admit, I nodded off during that brief sequence) leads to the final act that is ... well, if this movie is a remake of "Tucker & Dale", then the final act is a very blatant nod to the original orginal Evil Dead complete with cackling possessed people in basements. And drawing on some pretty common tropes from Asian horror that I have commented on before (religion, destiny, legacy, family), the just-woke-up-from-a-coma younger brother of the original possessed women from the preamble has to fight off the proper now-raised Baphomet devil kid. Oh, and the buffoonish cops get mixed up in it as well.

It was actually a pretty decent remake of the original, capturing enough to make us smile, and being new and culturally appropriate to probably appeal to an entirely different audience. It doesn't have the bite of the original, and that is mainly because it does draw upon horror tropes as being actual horror, instead of all just a "ooops, we misunderstood" comedy of errors.

KWIF: Hope (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Hope (2026, d. Na Hong-jin - in theatre)
Is God Is (2026, d. Aleshea Harris  - amazonprime)
The Christophers (2025, d. Stephen Soderbergh - amazonprime)

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I knew three things going into Hope:

1) it was the biggest budget Korean-produced film ever
2) the opening hour is an epic, action tour-de-force
3) the poor CGI for the film's creatures many say spoiled the film for them.

The first item is just a fact, the other two are subjective statements. What I had heard about the opening sequence, which again, is about a full hour in length, is absolutely true. It is an incredibly paced, beautifully shot, exceptionally well-structured sequence that spends the majority of its time using deft camera positioning and brilliant practical and digital effect to hide or obscure the creature at the centre of the chaos in this small Korea border town of Hope Harbor.

The set-up is phenomenal. Local police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, providing a believably harried performance) arrives in the very rural farmland scene where hunters point out the very large, dead bovine in the middle of the road. It's been mauled severely, but not eaten. The hunters and the chief puzzle over both its placement (far enough from any grazing land) and the claw marks, which are not bear nor, as suggested, tiger. 

The parties split up with help called for, but unable to arrive due to regional fires being fought. Bum-seok enters the main street of the eerily vacant town and screeches to a halt when he spies a massive, destructive hole straight through the center of a shop, its proprietor dead under the rubble within. And then off in the distance, smoke, then gunfire, and it all pops off. 

Bum-seok races through town on foot, shotgun in hand, witnessing carnage as flung items crush people, people are tossed dozens of meters down the road, roving pickups loaded with ammo and men and women chase, then flee from whatever it is they're attacking. Bum-seok meets people and then separates from them, loses some of them, and generally is overwhelmed and questioning his own bravery.

It's an exhilarating hour of cinema, and, then the creature is revealed, and, even being forewarned and prepared, it's still a let down. In the preceding hour, minute-by-minute, the mind races at the possibilities of what the creature could be. Even knowing beforehand that it would be a disappointment, I still had (ahem) hope that the creature would at least be interesting. 

And you know what...it kind of is. It's definitely not what I was expecting (and I'll save said description for spoilers below), and it did kinda take me aback, both in its composition and in what's best described as excellent-for-2002 CGI effects.

It's clear that Hope Harbor is close-ish to the border with North Korea. There's signage about reporting spies and talk of heavily mined fields to the North. I suspected that there might be some form of North Korean-invasion or panic angle to this film, in metaphor if not literal, but no. It's just backdrop. I guess it explains why everyone has so many guns (or is it just an aping of American action cinema and going intentionally overboard?) 

The creature is taken down, and the second hour of the film cuts back and forth between the fallout of this epic rampage in the town, and what the hunters are discovering out in the woods. Bum-seok and his deputy Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) independently find out more about what others have discovered in the woods, as Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and his posse of hunters encounter some pretty fascinating and gnarly scenes in the trees.  

This process of discovery, which also includes a very gooey impromptu autopsy on the creature, is really, really good. It's the appropriate cool-off from the pulse-racing opener, and really gets you invested in the story a very fun, 1980's creature-feature kind of way (and Hope borrows more than a shots from such films throughout). There's not much CGI to speak of in this so the small let-down of the creature starts to fade (especially as it's a big, rubbery, practical piece for the autopsy).

Everything converges in the woods in the third act, and, well, this is where the film loses me. It's not the CGI. We've been dealing with unreal-looking computer generated images for over 30 years in movies and television, I can accept a lot if the story earns my trust...so long as the effects aren't unbelievably awful (which they aren't here, they just don't have Hollywood money to put into them to refine them over and over). No, what loses me in the third act is the tedium of it.

The second act give us enough of we need to know, the creatures motivations seem somewhat clear, providing a path to resolution. But the third act seems to disregard that we have this knowledge, and instead is another hour of shooting guns and chases and ugly cgi monsters crashing through trees and that hoary trope of going into slow motion as something near-misses biting or grabbing as it passes mid-air (we only see this about a dozen times in the film, mostly in this third act, ugh). It culminates in what should be a breathless chase sequence on the highway, Sung-ki on a horse and the rest of the gang in a police car fleeing the creature, but it feels just so staged and pointless and it goes on so long. Where in the first hour, each minute that ticked by seemed to open up new possibilities in your mind, really stimulating the imagination, every minute of the last half hour had me wondering if it was over yet.

The third act introduces that the creatures can talk, but in a language that isn't Korean (or English). But late, late in the third act, we start cutting to the creatures, independent of what else is happening to our main characters, and we start seeing subtitled conversations with them.... WTF!?! You can't just all of a sudden thrust on the audience that these are fully sentient creatures who we now need to invest time into understanding the meaning of what they're saying this late in the film (the creatures are voiced -and maybe motion capture performed?- by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Cameron Brittan and Taylor Russell). 

And the film just ends on a conversation between these creatures, unresolved. After nearly 160 minutes, and a dire and truly pointless third act, there isn't a resolution, but instead the cliffhanger (but not really a tried and true cliffhanger) for the sequel.

I do not recall the last time I bought into a film so hard and then was so off board by the end. I can forgive overly-ambitious-for-its-budget digital effects, but I really can't forgive poor story planning and even poorer execution.

The cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite) is outstanding from frame one, some absolutely gorgeous vistas of this Korean terrain, and just making the immaculately decorated/destroyed streets and buildings of this town look incredible (I can't help but think of the devastation in Godzilla Minus One and think that, even if it is on a smaller scale, they one upped it here...this town got wrecked, or at least we truly are give the feeling that it's just been demolished). Even the highway chase, as overworked a sequence as it is, still looks incredible.  The score from frequent Jordan Peele collaborator Michael Abels will get your blood pumping. 

There's so much to like about Hope that is could have...it should have been incredible. This could have been next-level Attack The Block even with its middling-looking creatures, but it's clear Director Na has lore and mythology for the creatures that he wants to get into, just in another film next film. I would be fine with that, but finish. this. one. first.

Spoilers at the end of this post.

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Is God Is, directed by first-timer Aleshea Harris, is an adaptation of her own multiple-award-winning off-Broadway play. When you hear that a film is an adaptation of a play, you think more of a chamber-piece, more of a two-hander, or something rather...upscale... meaningful... contemplative... important.  You don't generally think of plays as being revenge thrillers with an elevated grindhouse aesthetic (now that we've finally laid the term "elevated horror" to rest, I'm trying to pomp up a new term to annoy people).

We meet twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaya (Mallori Johnson), whose first trait we notice is their scars. Anaya, the quiet one, has extensive burn scars on her face, while Racine's right arm is horribly disfigured, carries a fire in her just waiting to erupt. The twins live together and work together and have a sort of synchronized routine to their day, including icing down each other's burns with extreme tenderness. It seems like it's the highlight of their day, despite all it may connote.  They also have a way of communicating non-verbally that is presented in distinctive subtitling on screen.

Their lives, obviously, have not been easy. Racine's rage as much, if not more of an impediment than whatever prejudices their appearance may elicit. One day they receive a letter from their mother, who they've long thought dead (having spent their childhood in a series of abusive foster homes), but turns out is now dying. She summons them and they hit the road heeding her call. Also horribly scarred (far, far more) and tended to by what seem like cherubs-in-disguise, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) tells the children of their horrendous origin story at the hands of their even more horrendous father (Sterling K. Brown, just seeping sociopathic nefariousness). She then tasks them with but one goal: "make your daddy dead".

And so they're back on the road, trying to track down their father, along the way discovering the impact this despicable human being has had on the lives and minds of the people who have had the misfortune of being around him, including a few half siblings along the way.

The film side-steps any racial violence against Racine and Anaya (in fact, I think there's not a single speaking role not played by a Black actor here) because there's more than enough threats that Racine and Anaya have to face in trying to hunt down their father.  Along the way, Racine's fury, her lust for violence starts to conflict with Anaya's demure sensibilities, and suddely they're not in sync anymore. There is, one more than one occasion, a reason to question nurture versus nature, but also examine the context in which Racine and Anaya were raised. It becomes a complex idea to fully grasp, what's fueling the fire in Racine at any given time.

Is God Is may not have been a commercial hit, but it's a very successful movie. It isn't the naval-gazing, highbrow art that one might thing going into a stage-to-screen adaptation. It's a sprawling, intense, violent, pulpy romp that also has a sense of theatricality and thoughtfulness to it that distinguishes it and, yes, elevates it from typical B-movie fare.  But you can meet it at either, or both levels and be satisfied. Or maybe exploring this kind of darkness, even with the lighter elements and stylistic flourishes, might just be too off putting.

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A friend attended the world debut of The Christophers at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and raved about what a great movie it was. They had never seen Michaela Coel before and were blown away. 

I assumed, given how critically well-received it was coming out of TIFF, and also it being a Stephen Soderbergh production that it was going to be released in the fall of 2025 for awards contention.  I eagerly awaited its release. And waited. And waited. 

When it finally was released early this Spring, it was not released very wide, and screenings around Toronto, a very movie-friendly city, were not as regular as your average release, nor did it remain in theatres long enough for Lady Kent and I to catch it on the big screen. 

Next think I know it's on Amazon Prime, which I don't regularly subscribe to and which continues to have a pretty user-unfriendly interface (it's designed to sell you stuff, as well as gather data on you, not give you movies to watch). Point being, it took a lot longer to get to seeing The Christophers than I wanted. 

And, holy cow... this is one of Soderbergh's best films in a very lengthy filmography of good-to-great films... it's also one of Ian McKellan's best performances in a very long career of good-to-great acting, and, well, Michaela Coel whom I already liked a lot (while unfortunately admitting I've not followed her career closely enough) is just one of the most captivating performers in film and television today.

McKellan plays famous artist Julian Sklar, a notable painter of the modern age, but who hasn't released much work in decades, and has become more of a media personality in recent years. His most famous works are the two series of paintings of his lover from the 1990s, labelled The Christophers. Rumours have long held there is an unfinished third series that, despite how his reputation may have fallen off, audiences are still anxious to see finished... including Sklar's own son and daughter.

Barnaby (James Corde) and Sally (Jessica Gunning) see the third series of The Christophers as their inheritance. They look to Lori Butler (Coel), an art restorer and former classmate, to become Julian's assistant, and, more specifically, they want her to covertly finish the paintings. 

That's the set-up, but the execution is a complete two-hander between McKellan and Coel as Julian waxes poetic to the sound of his own voice, barely letting Lori get an word in edgewise. He dismisses her and is disinterested in her, until he does a web search and reads her critical think-pieces on him which take on his ego and take him down more than a peg or two. And he is intrigued, and also more than aware of the ploy his shiftless offspring are trying to parlay.

With the jig up, Lori doesn't need to hold back as her already tenuous employment is now obviously severed, and she proves herself to be, at the very least, his intellectual equal, if not artistic one.

With two fascinating characters played by two incredible actors, the script serves them both, Julian with a sharp, self-satisfied, erudite wit, while Lori is reserved but tactical in her words. McKellan gets bold with his body, embodying Julian half-robed, as much for his own comfort as for the discomfort of others. Coel, meanwhile, delivers some of the slyest glances in the film, at times telling more with her facial expressions than with her words.

For Soderbergh's part, it's all about capturing a space, being Julian's London double townhouse, which is the home of a disorganized artist. There's no reason for Julian, who hasn't worked with any proficiency since the '90's ended, to have a home in such disarray, but it's clear he hasn't managed his money well, and that how he lives is of no bother (his sectional corner sofa looks like it's from the 70's and hasn't been used in years, but was very well used at one time). Soderbergh captures and sometimes focuses on the surroundings as his characters negotiate them, making the space a major component of every scene.

I was expecting an almost psychological drama out of The Christophers for some reason, not a surprisingly fun and immensely enjoyable while still emotionally resonant picture. What a true delight with just the most satisfying ending.

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***SPOILERS FOR HOPE***

As I said, you're just not at all prepared for these creatures when you see them, and yes there are multiple creatures, and no they are not the same. The first creature, the one wrecking havoc on the town, is teased so exceptionally well. It is a mystery to us, and we're given clues, like the goopy, goopy blood, the fishy smell, the cut in on fish here and there throughout the chase, the description that it looks like a pile of beans? But also, it's clear that the way this creature is fighting, and the speed at which it's moving around, it's not running on instinct, it does have some kind of thought. It's using tools to kill people, and it seems like its on a distinct mission to kill every human in town. It's like the cow was a mistake, and it learned who its enemy was, and it was going to destroy every one of them. And when it's revealed, it's large (as expected) but shockingly humanoid. It's got green skin, looks a little slimy, a human-ish face, long scraggly hair, human-ish limbs and hands, but triple-jointed legs like an animal. I was thinking that it was maybe a sea hag, hence the fishy smell, and that its skin would be so tough and dense because it has to be able to withstand the crushing depths of the Pacific. But no, it also turns out that it's an alien. We see at least four more alien creatures, and each one is different than the others, still humanoid but their bodies are differently composed. One of them can transform into something that looks like the dog-alien from Alien 3 while another has two massive racks of horns growing out of their shoulder blades that makes you wonder about the logistics of living with those. We also see their space craft, which is a gigantic orb, and it looks fantastic, both outside and in. The interior is clearly cribbing from the Geiger school of ship design, but it has its own distinct feel from the Alien/Prometheus tekno-organic look. Again the discovery process exploring all this in the second act I genuinely enjoyed as much as the hyper first act. It just falls all apart in the third act.  The second act finds sympathy for these creatures, so when the third act just starts shooting them all up again over and over and over again, you keep wondering where the sympathy plays into this. There's clearly been a misunderstanding between species, but nobody is keen to resolve it, certainly not the director, not in this film. Sigh. The only possible route for the second film is to redo much of the first film but from the creatures' perspectives. But that would take beaucoup bucks (or a heavy reliance upon AI-generated effects, which double gross), so I don't think it's going to happen (and I'm not sure I would even see it if it did).

***END SPOILERS FOR HOPE***

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Colony

2026, Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan) -- download

Called Gunche in Korean. 

Yes, another zombie movie from the guy who did Train to Busan and its sequel, except this time he's riffing off the fungus among us idea from The Last of Us which I guess, I didn't write about. But, that's pretty much what I said for his first zombie movie, but that he was riffing on World War Z that time.

Despite its acclaim, I do recall saying that Train to Busan was not a very good movie. I also recall that I changed my viewpoint all from changing the subtitle track. It was a fun movie. Not great, but in the zombie sub-genre, what ever really is?

Again with the family. Part of me wonders whether other cultures family tropes stand out more clearly to me because they are slightly different from ours, more focus on some parts, less so on others. Almost every Hollywood movie is going to give you the divorced family trope, the family drama trope, the father doting on the daughter trope. They are background, familiar setup that we ignore as we get to know characters. But in other cultures, it is not an inherently known dynamic being displayed. to us from outside the culture. 

I mean, what's so amazing about the two family dynamics shown in this movie? Nothing really. A divorced couple, Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Hi-hyun, Blood: The Last Vampire) and her ex-husband Han Gyu-sung (Go Soo, The Flower in Prison) are amicable; he's even trying to find her a new job, despite her being difficult -- there's probably something cultural to unpack there; or it could just be general run-of-the-mill misogyny. And there is security guard Choi Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook, The Manipulated) and his disabled sister Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rock, Hellbound). He dotes on her, she wants independence. Nothing spectacular going on here, but they are character highlights to the movie, dominating how things go.

What goes on is that a loony disgraced biologist (Koo Kyo-hwan, Parasyte: The Grey) calls in a biological terrorism threat and then shows up at tech conference hosted by a bio-tech conglomerate in a highrise that also happens to have a multi-level shopping mall. He injects himself with "the vaccine" while injecting the CEO of the company, who happened to have dismissed him for unethical experimentation, with The Virus. Instant white-goo vomiting zombie. And you know how it goes from there. One red dot becomes two, two becomes four, and so on. Between elevator floor trips, much of the conference floor is turned. 

Yeon takes a nod from Rec and quarantines the building, trapping everyone inside, while inept authorities outside try to figure out how to deal with the emerging threat. They all know if it gets out, South Korea is doomed. They also have a cop on the inside who is instructed to keep the loony biologist safe, as the only source of a vaccination. So, for the survivors, it becomes a struggle to find said loony, and escort him to the roof, where evacuation will be had. On the outside, scientists working for the government are trying desperately to understand what this is all about, and one happens to be the new wife of Han Gyu-sung. FYI, he doesn't last long, as is the first sacrificed to zombie tragedy, so now the two wives have to work together to solve the problem.

So, yeah the zombies themselves. The title of the movie implies everything. There is a fungus among us that controls ants, turning them into zombies, but this movie mashes it all up with natural ant behaviour, in that a colony all communicates with each other easily, all working as one, and the loony scientist believes the next stage of human evolution will be as one big colony of "perfect communication". The zombies spray their white fungus goo everywhere, it quickly growing, forming a vast network that allows the zombies to transmit data to each other, learning, evolving. And loony scientist gets himself bitten, putting himself (I guess, along with injected vaccine) at the centre of the network. What they see, he sees, what he knows, they know. Fun little functional piece.

Its a good little movie, nothing spectacular, with production values enough to make it compelling.

Three Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Old Woman with the Knife

2025, Kyu-dong Min (Whispering Corridors 2: Memento Mori) -- download

Also called Pagwa in Korean, which is a reference to bruised, and usually discarded, fruit. That is a theme in the movie, and was the name of the original novel from which the movie is adapted. So, are American English translations of Korean movies now going to be named so plainly? Next up, Guy with a Gun Kills People and its sequel, Guy with Many Guns Storms Tower.

That said, there is a phenomena in Manga / Manhwa (Korean manga) where the titles are ludicrously long and descriptive. Example, translated into English, "My Little Sister Stole My Fiancé: The Strongest Dragon Favors Me and Plans to Take Over the Kingdom?" and its very minorly attributed to translation issues; the actual original title is just as long-ass.

Cough. I watch so many of these "revenge movies" I wonder who my brain desires to take revenge upon?

The world baby, the entire world.

But to be fair, this is more an Aging Assassin movie than it is a revenge flick. Except, like the latest in the Liam Neeson "Aging ____" movies, this character is properly old, likely in her late 60s to mid-70s. Sure, that's only a decade away for me, but in the world of hand to hand combat, I am sure anything over 40 is downright ancient. Of note, the actress playing said Old Woman is 62; take that as you will.

The movie begins in the past, a young woman has escaped.... something. She is beaten and bloodied and struggles to walk bare-footed through the snow when a young couple chance upon her and bring her to their run-down little diner. The young woman begins to work the diner which is frequented by American soldiers, and on one night, a soldier attempts to assault her. She kills him with a hat pin (knitting needle? chop stick shaped cooking implement?). The husband discovers them and the young woman is upset she has ruined her situation, until Ji-wo explains the diner is a cover for an assassination organization that deals with "vermin" -- they only kill horrible people that deserve to be killed. The young woman, whom he named "Nails" is trained and brought into the organization.

Strangely enough she is called Hornclaw by credits and by herself, but her original Korean name in the novel was Jogak, which means a fragment of a whole, like a scrap of cloth left over from a greater finished fabric piece.

Now older, we are given the "example" of a kill -- a crowded subway car, a middle-aged man drunkenly verbally accosts a young woman, and everyone just pretends its not happening, literally shying away from the situation. When the train comes to a halt, Hornclaw (Lee Hye-young, Can You Hear My Heart?) slides out a hairpin and ... a very light poke as the train jostles and the crowd at the door rocks. She leaves, he falls down dead. Vermin disposed of.

As a commuter, I get that little scene as a fantasy -- horrible people should be dealt with. As a pedestrian I visualize terrible drivers getting their come-uppance, as they ignore cross-walks, cut people off and never-endingly lean onto their horns. Maybe I don't desire a agency to get rid of them, but... well, maybe sometimes.

And it turns out he was a case. Someone knew this man's reputation and wanted him gone. Back at the agency, a woman at the door wails and cries begging them to take on her case, which the current leader (not Hornclaw) denies. The wailing woman's case is not lucrative enough and Hornclaw argues it, claiming they have moved away from their original mandate. He just argues that she has become old and soft. That hits home.

Hornclaw rescues an old injured dog, takes him to an all night veterinarian where the tech explains that because he is a stray and old, no one will take him in, so he will be euthanized right now, if Hornclaw doesn't give him a home. She sees a mirror of her own life -- is she no longer useful, is she just going to be put down? She takes the dog home.

Not long after, after a botched job, where she was required to put down one of her own "co-workers", Hornclaw staggers into the vet's place asking for help. He stitches her up and promises to stay quiet, despite the odd situation. That puts her at odds with her agency and their new recruit, an arrogant young man named Bullfight (Kim Sung-cheol, Hellbound) is sent to deal with her, and the vet & his family. Hornclaw does not take kindly to that.

Given my recent penchant to not properly recap, I will just say that the movie climaxes with Hornclaw vs Bullfight, and a few reveals: her agency has been cherry picking jobs to work alongside a local crime organization, which means its own leader has to go, and it turns out that Bullfight was the subject of this "revenge movie", not Hornclaw herself, as she had eliminated his father many years before, BUT that's not what the revenge was for, it was because she left the kid behind, left him to deal with his father's killing and grow to a broken man all on his own. 

There was a lot going on in the movie, which I only realized as I thought back on it for the writing. The plots and sub-plots, the layers of story and character make it more fascinating in hindsight than in viewing. Sure, it is well done, and unlike many of these "assassins with regrets" flicks, the melodrama of the non-killing acts is not grating and/or boring, but in watching, piece by piece, nothing really stands out stylistically. Did it deal effectively with the conflict between aging and usefulness? I am not convinced, as despite relying upon the idea that in Korea, the old are considered worthy of only being cast away (meanwhile, we in North America make them heads of the country or corporations....) Hornclaw was never lacking in capability. Her physical challenges put aside, she was keen and aware, and even made use of the idea that aging Korean women become invisible to society, allowing her to disappear into crowds with ease. Her emerging "softness" was not a weakness, just a memory of what the agency had originally stood for, to protect the little people from evil.

KWIF: No Other Choice (+3)

KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. January's here. It's real movie time. 

This Week: 
No Other Choice (2025, d. Park Chan-wook - in theatre)
Train Dreams (2025, d. Clint Bentley  - netflix)
F1 (aka F1: The Movie - 2025, d. Joseph Kosinski - appletv)
The Young Magician ("Tales for All #4") (1987, d.  - crave)

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With No Other Choice, director Park Chan-wook is in full control of his craft as he presents a viewing experience that is so emotionally twisting that for pretty much the entire runtime (just shy of 140 minutes) the audience is proactively and continuously meant to ponder their allegiance to and affinity for the film's protagonist. 

Adapting Donald Westlake's 1997 novel "The Ax" with co-writers Don McKellar (with whom Park worked with on HBO's *The Sympathizer*), Jahye Lee (with whom Park worked on Netflix's *Uprising*) and Lee Kyung-mi, No Other Choice is a tale of corporate downsizing and the satirically desperate extremes people will push themselves to in order to perpetuate their status in the toxic and uncaring reality of capitalism.

Lee Byung-hun stars as Man-su, who, as the film opens, manages a specialty paper factory. The factory has just come under new American ownership and he's been told that staff needs to be cut by twenty percent. He's preparing to rally and fight for the men he's been working with for years, only to find that he is among the twenty percent. He has invested a tremendous deal into his role, sacrificing time with his wife (who also give up her career), his stepson and his daughter to educate himself to be a leader in his field. But finding work in the field of paper, when demand is down, automation is up, mergers shrink the number of available employers, and competition from similarly out of work people is fierce, it all means Man-su is lost and, from his vantage point, out of options. 

His beautiful house, his upscale cars, his dance lessons, his Netflix...even his dogs are all on the list of potential cuts if he can't find work before his severance package runs dry. His loving wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) is ready to make sacrifices but Man-su is not. After 18 months of desperate hunting, Man-su lands on the idea of killing the man in really the only position he is suitable for, but stops himself... and not because he cannot bring himself to murder another man, but because he can't guarantee that there aren't more qualified men who would get the available position before he does.

Thus ensues a pitch-black comedy of errors that runs concurrently with a grim, distressing existential journey where Man-su's whole sense of self and where he fits in his own life falls out of step with his ambition and self-determined necessity. It's a masterful exercise in defying expectations and audience manipulation. The Man-su we meet at the start of this journey is a very different man than the one we see at the end, as is Miri who is about as devoted a wife as we ever see in secular, modern stories without ever undercutting her agency or intelligence.

But for spoilers, this is a film I would really like to deep dive into writing about, because it is rich and complicated in theme and subtext, a lot of which is masked by its wicked sense of humour and the nastier, distasteful side of humanity it takes us through. It's a long movie, but we're always allied with Man-su on his journey even when we've stopped sympathizing with him (it's a film that warps the audience greatly in that "he really shouldn't get away with this, but we want him to get away with this" fashion).

Director Park's visual acumen is incontestable, with his cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, this is as good as any of his films have looked, and they pretty much all look fantastic. Here, he stays on the warm side of the spectrum, even as our affinity for Man-su cools. The director wants us to know that no matter what twisted extremes Man-su has gone to, the film is still showing him in a favourable light (if not always positive). The film never wants us to fully disengage from Man-su. The refrain of "no other choice" goes from a laughable excuse for corporate greed to the aching plight of a desperate man to the words of a selfish and myopic person. The title of the film itself has its own journey.

I honestly cannot tell you if I liked this film, or if I enjoyed it. I am impressed by it. I was fully engaged with it, and in unpacking it, even just this little bit, I see much more of its depth that I was too emotionally distracted to fully take in during my first viewing. I have a feeling it will play much better upon rewatch.

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Without specifically spoiling the end of No Other Choice, it's final images are sights inside a fully automated paper factory, which juxtapose sharply against the busy, populated factory we see at the start of the film. In the last images we see, we are taken to a forest where we observe as a logging crane (excuse my lack of knowledge of the technical term) as it picks up a felled tree and relieves it of its branches in seconds. The scale of the machinery, its power and efficiency, and its dominance over nature was a surprisingly visceral visual, one I was surprised to have such an uncomfortable reaction to. Much like the factory scene that precedes it, there is not another person in sight and the message of consumerism and capitalism and its increasing disconnect from humanity is a potent one.

Train Dreams is the life story of a logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) working on clearing the way for railways in the summer months. At the film's start, logging is a fully manual profession, one man on either side of a massive hand saw cranking back and forth through a tree, their sweat moistening the ground beneath them. On a felled tree, men take their axes and hack away at the branches in just as demanding a physical effort. And then they need to section the tree. It's a labor intensive process that pays four dollars a day (minus expenses). It's extremely physical and dangerous work, but the need to expand the rails, and then the demand for paper during the second world war was great, so the job was dependable and the work steady. Robert would toil summer months, missing his beloved wife and later his young daughter and their remote cabin by a creek, but the money was good enough to keep them stable through the winter. Options, otherwise, were limited, as Robert would find out.

The film, through narration by Will Patton, is largely gentle and meditative, but personal and investing. It takes us through Robert's life, from his earliest memories as an orphan shipped out on a train, to his final year, without being at all pedantic about it. The narration helps step us back and forth through his life, with brief capsules of interest, some relevant to the moment on screen, some not. Robert's journey could have just been centered around tragedy - his earliest days on the logging crew he was confronted with the horrors of anti-Asian racism, as a Shanghai-born crewman is grabbed suddenly by a trio of men who drag him kicking and screaming before tossing him off a train bridge. Robert's brief motion to intervene is fruitless and he can do little but stand by, and then return to work with a seemingly disaffected crew. Robert is haunted by the man for the remains of his days... not perpetually, but the spectre never leaves him. The ghosts, in a manner of speaking, begin to pile up. 

Tragedy would befall Robert, and he would not return to logging for some time. His grief and misery would take a long time for him to come to terms with. When he returns to the work he did for so long, he's met with the future. A steam-driven truck roams the terrain, and the crew is stocked with chainsaws which Robert finds foreign and difficult to manage. The young crew treat him like a relic, but he wonders if he was the same in his younger years. Time marches on.

We spend most of Train Dreams in nature in various forms. There's not a lot of what you might call civilization in Robert's story because it seems like he avoided it. In Edgerton's portrayal, he's not the stoic, silent type, and he's not the cordial over-sharer, he's unremarkably average and he's so aware of the fact that nothing that happens in his life makes him any more special than anyone else. He's not a deep thinker, but he does contemplate existence, and meaning. His elder colleague in his early years (a remarkable William H. Macy) imparts on him the idea of nature and humanity's connection to nature and how our interference in nature has unknown consequences, ripple effects. Our understanding of the connectivity is still so very primitive, we evolved bipeds with our big brains think nature something to dominate, to control, to use and abuse without giving back. Robert fears nature also takes, and it's taken from him.

The end of Robert's journey takes him to civilization, and when we encounter a big city it's a shock to the system. It's the 1950s already (otherwise we have few guideposts as to the actual time periods within the film), there are cars and televisions and everything seems electric. Robert is a man out of time who just stepped into the future, but he's curious rather than frightened by it all. 

Reflecting upon capitalism and its effect on our conceptualization of standard of living is the centerpiece of No Other Choice, in Train Dreams it's more the byproduct of the story being told, but there's a curious sympatico between the two films. Robert does not want to be logging, but there are no other real choices for him. Similarly, the ending of No Other Choice informs the theme of Train Dreams unexpectedly. Where No Other Choice's ending visualization of logging specifically points to the lack of people involved in the largely mechanized process, Train Dreams makes us consider whether we should be logging at all, at least on the industrial scale we do.  No Other Choice bemoans the loss of jobs, while Train Dreams contemplates the impact of a whole many other kinds of losses.
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Earlier this year Toasty reviewed Joseph Kosinski's 2017 wildfire fighters biopic Only the Brave, with some commentary around whether he was going to be a Kosinski completist or not.  Spoiler, despite being somewhat affected by the film, he's opted out.

Kosinski's Tron: Legacy and Oblivion were visually captivating projects that boldly announced an exciting new director, one who is very design-centric and has an aptitude with kinetic movement and special effects. But, after Oblivion's less than stellar performance, Kosinski seemed to either abandon sci-fi, or he never wanted to be working in that genre in the first place. From Toasty's description it doesn't sound like there was much opportunity for design or kinetic action in Only the Brave, and his pandemic film, Spiderhead, didn't offer anything near to the scale of Tron or Oblivion.

He worked with Tom Cruise in Oblivion, and if Cruise likes you and works with you well enough on his terms, you become one of his guys. So he was tapped for Top Gun:Maverick, which, despite being held back by Cruise for two years until the pandemic lockdown was lifted, was a massive success, one of the highest earning films of the year. Largely because of Kosinski's camerawork on the flying scenes, he was widely praised as a key part of the film's success.  The status that Tron and Oblivion should have given him was now bestowed upon him. He's a premiere filmmaker. But before he's handed the reins to anything completely, he had to prove himself, thus F1, to show that it wasn't just the name brand of Top Gun and the starpower of Tom Cruise, that he brought something to the table as well. 

For the record, I love Tron:Legacy. It is one of my comfort films. There are a lot of elements to it that I love, but Kosinski's visual adeptness is a key part. I really disliked Top Gun: Maverick, but didn't blame Kosinski for its script, which was all about inflating Tom Cruise's ego, and appealing to boomer dads and grandads by having an old guy strut into a room, ignore everyone else's opinions and abilities, and let the praise heap upon him as the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled person alive.  It was a wish fulfillment power trip for an aging generation and it suuuucked. I guess the flying sequences were good, but they didn't do enough to pull me out of the ego boost/pander porn that was the film's story.

From the trailers for F1, it looked to be pretty much the exact same plot. Brad Pitt plays an aging driver who is brought in to help a struggling F1 team, only to steamroll everyone without consequence because he's the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled driver alive. Same plot, but race cars not planes, and race courses not military strikes. Why would I watch this? I really do not care for racing as a sport, and those Maverick vibes are very off putting.

When I loaded AppleTV, well, call it a moment of weakness. I saw it's 2h35 min runtime and nearly spat out my kombucha. I said I would give it 20 minutes and dip out. Then I watched the whole thing sitting on the edge of the couch, never bored, never intentionally doing a time check to see how long until it was over.

There are a few differences here between Maverick and F1, the first being Brad Pitt is not Tom Cruise. Without getting into Pitt's abusive alcoholic private life, the man has remained a pretty terrific actor, capable of letting go of ego and disappearing into a role. Tom Cruise, for the past decade (or more), just seems to be playing Tom Cruise, and the ego is inescapable. Pitt does not need his characters to be humanity's apex, so when he steps into a role like Sonny Hayes, an aging phenom who the script needs to walk into a room and take charge despite being the "new guy", well, Pitt doesn't play him with bully and bluster, but rather a sort of glib zen-ness. 

Sonny hasn't driven F1 in 30 years. In the meantime he's been a driver-for-hire across various motorsports. This movie postulates that anyone can just step into an F1 car and race and drive it without extensive time behind the wheel and qualifying trials, but we let it go, because the gist is Sonny is just that good at feeling things out. All the sensors and cameras and algorithms just can't tell you what gut instinct can.

But in Pitt's hands Sonny isn't perfect, he isn't flawless, he isn't so good his skills can defy all logic...just most logic. He makes mistakes that hurt others and hurt himself. Yet, it is a script that does pop in and out of making him magical sexagenarian but it's only eye rolling juuuust a little bit.

The film's plot is colour by numbers, there's pretty much no surprises in what happens here, and yet, Kosinski is not precious with it. He built a story that services the action in a way that builds tension for the characters, their relationships, the team and the race their in all at once. The stakes are presented, they're evident, and they just help lubricate the whole thing to move it forward without any resistance.  Hans Zimmer's score is symbiotically propulsive and, not unexpectedly, bombastic in Zimmer fashion, but he never gets cloying in his score around the drama, which I think may save the film.

It's all about the racing, and Kosinski levels up not just what he accomplished with the flying sequences in Maverick but also takes car racing cinematography to another level. It's maybe not quite as zany as Speed Racer, but there's a visceral and tangible nature to it that is undeniable. It made me a bit sad I didn't see this in theatres. As I said, I don't care about cars or racing, and the racing sequences in this are thrilling. Turns out, car races are fun when they edit down 60+ laps of a race to a 10-minute action sequence.

In some respects, both Top Gun:Maverick and F1 are like extensions of Tron:Legacy and Oblivion. Legacy had various racing and flying (and competition) sequences, while Oblivion had some great flying sequences. The former two and the latter two are otherwise quite unalike styilistically, but the DNA of propulsive filmmaking is there.  I half expect Kosinski's next project to be a Waterworld legasequel just to bring it all back around.

I think Kosinski is an exceptional technical director, another guy who can produce big screen-worthy, widely appealing productions. The aesthetic flavour that initially drew me to him is not a constant in his work, but it's clear he is very skilled at providing wow-inducing action sequences. I think the disappointment both Toast and I are feeling is we thought Kosinski would be one of us, a guy who liked nerdy shit and would be capable of getting big budgets and big names to make them. Instead he's like the nerdy teenager who started hitting the gym during the summer and now hangs around more with the meatheads and tries to hide his geekier tendencies.

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The fourth entry in Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" is the highly bizarre Poland-Canada co-production of The Young Magician ("Cudowne dziecko" in Polish).  I mean, so far all of the "Tales for all" have had some aspect of "highly bizarre" to them (and The Peanut Butter Solution is straight up bonkers), but they all have an internal logic to them, no matter how weird they get.

Writer-director Waldermar Dziki was clearly inspired by American kids adventure cinema of the mid-1980s as this feels like a funhouse mirror reflection of its glossier across-the-sea counterparts. 13-year-old Peter (Rusty Jedwab) is having a challenging time...he's quit the hockey team because the captain won't play him, the girl he likes seems to like the hockey captain better than him, and, well, his parents take him to a magic show where he's pulled up on stage to help out with a trick (he "helps" by doing nothing).

After the magic show Peter becomes convinced that he should have telekinetic powers, so he keeps practicing until, eventually, he develops telekinetic powers. Only thing is, his telekinesis tends to make things go haywire. Being a teenager, he of course uses his newly developed superpower to show off, and then it gets him in trouble and then the military comes and takes him away for testing. They can't figure out at all how his powers manifested, so they want to drill into his head. Peter escapes and meets Alexander (Edward Garson), a young orphan cello prodigy who shows Peter the way to harness his power: practice.

Peter gets absolutely no practice in before they're off on another adventure, and then contacted by the police to help deal with a deadly canister of highly volatile material. Yup, let's get the kid with uncontrollable telekinesis who makes things explode all the time try to move the canister of highly explosive stuff. Genius. Turns out, it was genius. Peter removes it safe and suddenly the military doesn't want him anymore and he's a town hero. He helps Alexander get a philharmonic gig, the end.

What?

Yeah. This movie feels like it was made by taking a pile of note cards with plot points and character markers on them, shuffling them, cutting the deck in half and then tossing the deck in the air so that they land in a random order. Nothing about this story makes logical sense, beyond Peter being a teenager and using his power to do petty things. 

This is a dumb movie that introduces its secondary lead (Alexander) at the end of the second act. It probably had three times the budget of any of the previous "Tales for all" productions. I mean, there are so many helicopers in this film, and not always the same helicoper, and not stock footage.

It's clear this was made in Poland (even before seeing the credits, where most of the participants outside of the Canadian leads have Polish last names) but pretends to be Canada despite not looking Canadian at all.  There's no Polish audio track and I spent the first 20 minutes switching between the English and French dubs trying to see if either would synch up, and at times the English would mimic the movements of a character's mouth, but I suspect that there's not a version of this film with the original on-set dialogue. 

 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Great Flood

2025, Byung-woo Kim (Reborn) -- Netflix

South Korea has the world's lowest birth rate, caused primarily by a change in focus from marriage & family to careers & personal growth. Support for women doing both is almost non-existent, and that combined with traditional value systems is forcing more women to delay having children. These are stats drawn from a brief scan of the topic, which of course is expected to be biased in one way or another. But of course, there is always a kernel of truth to it, and pop culture will reflect what society is thinking. Eye-Eee, movies reflect what is going on in the culture.

This movie displays as a disaster movie, the ending of the world as an asteroid strikes Antarctica and almost instantly melts the ice shield, raising the ocean levels within hours, tsunamis ending human life as we know it. There is a toss away comment about the world governments knowing, but doing nothing as there was nothing to be done. Our main character, Koo An Na (Kim Da-mi, The Witch: Pt 1 - The Subversion), lives in a cramped apartment complex, a widowed mother of a single child, and as the flood happens, she is racing to get the boy to the tower roof. A government agent appears, there to assist her, as her job is important and a helicopter awaits them on the roof. Challenges abound, from panicking people to has explosions to the crashing tsunami.

And then she dies.

And then it starts over again.

From here on in, spoilers abound.

And no, not a time loop movie, but it does bear resemblance to the genre. Of course, we know something hinky is going on here, but we don't know what, but the movie has very decisively slipped away from the disaster to the ... iterations. Yes, more than one, MANY more than one. And along the way we get insights into An Na's job and her ... son, and her life choices. By the time we are deep in the repetitive flow of An Na trying to, unsuccessfully, reach the top of the apartment tower, we know we must be in a simulation, because how else could the same disastrous events keep happening and happening over and over again. But things are changing, such as discovering the boy is ... not a boy. He is an... artificial life form? An Na was part of a government program working on the emotional construct housed in a jar grown body. The entire movie focuses on the emotional component, and to that, on the relationship between a mother and her son. As iterations pass, the boy in the simulation has become aware he is not real but still throws a very child like tantrum, running from his "mother". And she has become desperate to find him, again and again, so they can reach the top of the tower and "escape".

This is where the movie lost its integrity, as it wants to be a speculative scifi movie about the idea humanity's last hope hinging on whether a mother will abandon all sense of self for the safety of her son, but it loses its own threads in the scifi behind it. If this is all a simulation, why does it matter if their is an artificial boy becoming self aware? I mean, he's not a construct but just a factor in the simulation. I get it is meant to further the goal of making the perfect, self-sacrificing mother, to be mythical mother to a new next-evolutionary-step artificial human race, to come back and re-colonize an abandoned, watery Earth, but then why even have the plot point of the boy becoming aware? If the idea is to enforce that an Artificial Mommy will protect her Artificial Son, then the only important part is the Simulated Mother. Also, once she knows its all a simulation, and is making all her choices based on that knowledge (Hell, she has 21,314 printed on her tshirt, showing how long they've been at it) of being simulated, doesn't that taint the results? 

Like other lofty scifi movies, they often lose themselves in their agenda and end up shoe-horning in the speculative elements to just let the desired point come through. The whole movie seems to be screaming out loud, "The human race will just end unless women remember that being a mother is the most important job on the planet !!!" ? Everything else is just tacked on for disaster-y, scifi-y and emotional-ly brownie points.

Oh yes, as for the "disaster movie", the parts we do get, the expanded locked room, in that the movie takes entirely in the stair wells and the cramped apartments and the watery depths of a drowning world, it was incredibly... visceral? A Korean movie about an apartment tower cannot help but comment on the cultural construct of villages transposed to apartments.

While watching this movie, part of my brain harkened back to Hollywood-ish takes on the idea of artificial life forms vs motherhood, in Mother/Android and I Am Mother, both of which went the other direction, in that they have a plot point ("motherhood is good!") but were dazzled by their own scifi. Their "agendas" are less at play, but they are all in the same place, a focus on the power of motherhood.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): KPop Demon Hunters

2025, Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang (animation dept type folks) -- Netflix

Yeah yeah, I watched it. It was getting so many surprised "it's actually good!" reactions out there, that I just had to see for myself.

Aaaand so did Kent, and wrote about it before I did, because he is focused and works hard on his posts,  while I procrastinate and question my purpose and .... oooo shiny new thing !

I have nothing against KPop, but like Kent I am most definitely not its demographic, and even if I was a Gen Z'er, I would not be interested in a key example of manufactured genre music. KPop, and its predecessor JPop (which never took off like KPop did in North America, where I live), as well as many of the other imitators (not just Asia, there are such in the US as well) is at the other end of the spectrum of music I admire, enjoy or even tolerate. And really, the only time I have ever been truly exposed to it was on the screens in the KFC restos (Korean Fried Chicken) where coworkers and I have gone after work. 

Don't forget to mention that you surprised a bunch of Gen Z coworkers by actually recognizing BlackPink (sorry, BLACKPINK) in their little "can the old people identify Gen Z phenomena?" game. What can I say, I absorb pop culture even when I am not trying. P.S. Rosé over Lalisa.

At first glance, first frames, KPop Demon Hunters is more Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse than anime (or Aeni in Korea; but really, Manhwa/Webtoon [vs Manga] dominates over animation in Korea; at least, from a Western perception....) but also, in style and the tone of the story telling, it was reminiscent of Trollhunters, the Netflix animation based on children's books from Guillermo del Toro.

This is where I admit, I barely remember the story.

The background is that in the olden days, demons hunted human souls to feed their master Gwi-ma, but then three women warriors rose up to fight the demons and banish them back to their demon dimension behind the Honmoon barrier.... via... song. Think the Buffy musical episode but that's their strength, not their curse.

Into each generation a new trio is born, until now, we get the Kpop group Huntr/X, a typical mega-popular phenomena who are close to conquering their world with a Golden Honmoon, masked behind a live performance of their mega-hit "Golden". 

The girls are Rumi their leader, with a dark secret -- she is part (gasp!) demon, Mira the intense, gothy one, and Zoey, the nerdy, booky one. To foil their plans, Gwi-ma creates a demon boy band called Saja Boys, which are typical effeminate dreamboats and who start to pull fans away from Huntr/x. Saja Boys is led by the emotionally sympathetic once-human Jinu. The two leaders are immediately attracted to each other, and to further complicate matters, Rumi is losing her voice as her demon heritage emerges. The battle for supremacy, the establishment of the Golden Honmoon, or it falling entirely, will all be via the Ultimate Battle --- a sing off at the Idol Awards ceremony !!!

Its a fun movie, mercifully minimally "musical" stylized -- one spontaneous song is Jinu and Rumi pining for each other, but the rest are the actual pop numbers with flashy dance moves. The animation is top notch as are the characters, but despite the lauded opinions of the Internet, it was just OK. I was honestly hoping for more, something more, something properly epic, something that would wow me like Spider-Verse did but what I got was just passable. If anything, the music was leaps & bounds above anything Disney has produced of late.

KsMIRT: step timber

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (ahem) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.

This Month:
Bad Monkey Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Apple TV+)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 (2024, 8/8 episodes, AmazonPrime)
Nobody Wants This Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Netflix)
Slow Horses Series 4 (2024, 6/6 episodes, Apple TV+)
Squid Game Season 1 (2022, 9/9 episodes, Netflix)
Unsolved Mysteries Volume 5 (2024, 4/4 episodes, Netflix)

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Bad Monkey Season 1 

The What 100: Andrew Yancy is a police detective with a problem... he can't let go. It's got him in trouble before, and it will get him in trouble again. Having been booted from the Miami PD to a small cape on the southern tip of Florida, Yancy's motormouth and unwavering conviction that the worst should be punished have now got him suspended and working as a health inspector. When a severed arm is reeled in by a fishing tour boat, Yancy can't just follow his chief's directions to just get rid of it. Instead it takes Yancy on a winding whirlwind of romance, action, deceit, and even a little magic.

(1 Great) Vince Vaughan. I was reticent to watch the show, mainly because I haven't watched anything with Vince Vaughan in it in a long, long time. Sometime after Made I just realized I didn't like his energy, his arrogance. But either I have softened or Vaughan has, because the energy he gives off as Yancy is astounding. Yancy is a very upbeat guy, very positive even in the face of bad things happening. Even if he genuinely dislikes someone he still tries to go at them with positive vibes, kill them with ...well, not kindness...affability. He's a lot. He's always talking, but the way in which Yancy twists moments, changes the timber of a situation...it's not that he de-escalates (though I think in his mind, that's what he's doing) but instead of making people want to shoot him, they just want to smack him.  It's a skill. He's charming in a way I haven't seen from Vaughan.  He carries a high energy vibe that still seems, somehow, chill.  And I like the way he wins people over with compliments, just as much as I like it when he pisses people off with the very same tactics.

(1 Good) It's so hard to limit myself to just 1 Great and 1 Good thing with this show. I enjoyed it so, so thoroughly. I haven't mentioned that the show hops between South Florida and The Bahamas, where an unscrupulous land developer has impacted the small coastal town there. Jodie Turner-Smith was a real surprise for me in After Yang, a stunning woman but also a strong performer who, seemingly out of no where is acting alongside Colin Farrell. She turned up again in a smaller part earlier this year in Star Wars: The Acolyte and had real presence. Here she's The Dragon Queen, the mystical protector of the island who doesn't quite believe in her practice. Her role in the whole proceedings seems very outside the centre, but she gets her own story arc that weaves in and out of the main thread and it is both beautiful, intense, and tragic. 

(1 Bad) If I had one complaint, which is not even really a complaint because I enjoyed this show pretty thoroughly, it's that it felt maybe an episode too long. The eighth episode felt like it was barrelling towards its conclusion and the ninth episode felt like it was resetting for the finale.  In actuality the ninth episode was more about setting up character resolution where the finale was about closing out the plot, so it has its place...I think in this modern age of shortened seasons, any sort of breathing room feels like wasted space, even when it's certainly not wasted. It speaks more to changes in modern storytelling on television and how we consume it, than it does about quality of storytelling or even purpose of storytelling.

META: What got me into Bad Monkey, past my Vince Vaughan reticence, was Bill Lawrence's name in the trailers. I liked Scrubs, I loved (still love) Cougar Town, I really liked both Ted Lasso and Shrinking, so he has a very winning track record with me.  I knew that there would be something here that I would enjoy, as I always do in his productions...I just didn't think I would enjoy pretty much everything.  This may be, I'm boldly stating, Lawrence's best show.

There's a minor character, the owner of the charter fishing boat that opens up the series played by Tom Nowicki, who winds up being the narrator for the series. He's somehow in the head of every character (including Neville's pet monkey Driggs) telling you there innermost thoughts, sometimes at inopportune times. He also provides the best "previously on" recaps maybe ever, or close to it. The bit is he hates doing the recaps, and he lets you know this. They're spiteful recaps.

I could see some people finding the show a little unfocussed, the way it darts between Yancy's story, the Dragon Queen, Neville, Yancy's sometimes-girlfriend Bonnie, and others in ways that don't directly connect to the central crime story that Yancy is working on... but I love the fact that this show is more interested in the characters as characters than it is in them as agents servicing the main story. It a show where the world doesn't exactly gravitate around its main character and the main character's interest, and that's damn refreshing.  

The cast is uniformly phenomenal, with Vaughan, Turner-Smith, joined by Michelle Monaghan, L. Scott Caldwell, Rob Delaney, Meredith Hagner, Natalie Martinez and so many more. Even minor players in the story make multiple appearances, and it's always a delight to see them pop up again.

I imagine a second season will only see some of these players return, for obvious reasons, but the experience to see how it jumps around a whole new ecosystem of characters Yancy endears himself to (or pisses off)  absolutely puts a smile on my face just thinking about.  

An utter treat of a series.

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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2

The What 100: Lord Sauron has disguised himself as an elfin deity and wormed his way into Celebrimbor's forge, encouraging him to make more rings of power, rings that he himself will taint with his darkness, thus eliciting control over their wearers. The dark elf Adar and his army of Orcs, aware of Sauron's return, are on the warpath to find and vanquish him once and for all, and they don't care what they have to destroy along the way. King Durin, wearing one of the tainted rings of power starts making some terrible decisions for the Dwarven realm, leaving his son Durin conflicted over his devotion to his father and doing what's right. The Stranger and his Harfoot companions get separated but each find new allies who are somewhat familiar. Back in Númenor, following the awful defeat against Adar's army, the queen finds herself challenged, and her throne wrested from her by the most evil-looking guy in history. And other stuff.  A lot going on in Middle Earth.  

(1 Great) I could have just watched just a whole series about Prince Durin IV and his turmoil over, first, his spat with his father following his actions last season, and then the dire situation as Khazad-dûm enters a dark age following a tremor. And when King Durin III puts on that ring, and starts getting money hungry and going mad with an unquenchable thirst for riches, it's just really wonderful melodrama. I love all the dwarf actors - Owain Arthur is probably my favourite performer on the show. Just real soulful, deep-thinking performance in such a heavyweight layer of makeup and prosthetics and wigs and wardrobe.  

(1 Good) I've been strangely invested in the journey of The Stranger and the Harfoots Nori and Poppy in both seasons, even though their trials have kind of been the most gentle and most disconnected from the central plot. As disconnected as they are, they also provide a very whole-view look at Middle Earth, a "what else is happening" outside of the main conflicts, and their Hobbitsy adventures are so much more gentle than what's going one elsewhere, it's a nice respite.  But that gentile nature of their story means that any threat seems that much more severe.

(1 Bad) There are entire character plots that just get shoved aside, like Isuldur seems to be an afterthought every time he pops up. It's like "oh right, him!" His story gets tied up with Arondir, the ronin Elf, who I loved in the first season, but has no storyline at all here. His human love interest died last season, and his attempts to connect with her son don't work out, so he takes off and just roams realm looking for action. He's a badass fighter with the coolest chest plate ever, but he gets nothing. Ok, that's actually 2 Bad...well, here's a third... I freaking hated everything going on in Númenor.  Just the most blatantly evilest group of fucks with the most obvious tactics of riling up crowds into supporting them in overthrowing the queen.  They're goddamn Republicans and it was just too real.

META: At about the midway point of this season of The Rings of Power I was starting to stretch a leg out, ready to step away altogether. I didn't but so much of the show was about the corruption of power, of the people in charge, and how it was all so inevitable that it was all going sour everywhere. Given that this show takes place, what, 1000 years before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it just means that it all goes very dark, very quick and doesn't come out of that darkness for a very long time.  I don't know if showing people the descent into darkness works as a cautionary tale or just reinforces the hopelessness of opposing it when people are acting so irrationally. There really isn't any light this season to guide the way and it's feeling quite oppressive...and feels like it's only going to get worse from here.

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Nobody Wants This Season 1

The What 100: Joanne hosts a successful dating and sex-themed podcast with her sister, Morgan. She's been very unlucky in love and her frankness about talking about it has garnered her a sizeable audience and a pretty relaxed lifestyle.  Noah is a rabbi -- some might even go so far as to call him "Hot Rabbi" -- who has just exited a long term relationship with his very devoted (and attractive) girlfriend after she dug out an engagement ring out of a locked drawer. Everything was perfect on paper, but the sparks were not there. At a mutual friend's get-together Joanne and Noah meet, and sparks fly, but can a rabbi really be with a gentile and keep the respect of his family and congregation, and will being in a stable relationship impact Joann's podcast success?

(1 Great) One of my favourite aspects of the delightful friends-sans-benefits sitcom Platonic was how low stakes it was. It didn't spend much time at all revelling in drama or tension. It presented its characters as conscious, conscientious, thinking human beings who don't immediately always jump to the tropey sitcom conclusion to create tired hijinks for our amusement. It's a comedy of rapport, and I'm on board for any show that wants to be such. Here, not only are the characters presented as thoughtful, but they're also observant, and they're open to conversing about difficult topics. Sitcom comedy was borne out of withholding and misunderstandings. Cringe comedy exploded out of the rise of Seinfeld which was not just withholding, and misunderstanding, but genuine selfishness and bad behaviour. It's really time for our entertainment to show us a new way of coexisting, a new way of engaging with one another, a way that shows us that bringing up a mistake or a shameful emotion with a loved one is far better than hiding it, only for it to explode like a time bomb.

(1 Good) The cast here is uniformly awesome. Kristin Bell is a bankable and reliable comedic presence at this point, and though it's sometimes hard to shave the Eleanor-from-The Good Place feels from my brain, she's really fun. Adam Brody is charming, funny, and thoughtful, very aware and receptive and open. He is the ideal dreamy nice-guy boyfriend, who happens to be a rabbi. As a duo they're exceptionally cute together and they play off each other well. They're both over 40 now, but playing like they're in their late 30s, which works, but just barely.  The real flavour of the show though comes from their respective siblings. Morgan (Justine Lupe, Mr. Mercedes) is both fearless and shameless and will shake up any room she's in, usually for the better, but not always. Sasha, Noah's brother, (Timothy Simons) is less fearless and shameless than he is kind of oblivious. He's desperate to be included and so he includes himself in everything whether he's invited or not, wanted or not. Morgan and Sasha become platonic buddies is one of the most far fetched but delightful spins of the show (a lesser show would create some weird secret romance, but here Sasha clearly loves his domineering wife [probably because she's domineering] and family, he's just happy to have a new friend who actually wants to talk to him).

(1 Bad)  Nobody Wants This does a great job at showing the stakes for Noah: he's up for head Rabbi at his synagogue, and the faith has a very strong edict to congregate and procreate, so his relationship with Joanne, while providing him the sparks he's always thought a relationship should have, threatens his professional life, as well as creates friction with his family (his sister-in-law is best friends with his ex, his mom is really against the pairing). For Joann, there's less intense focus on what she's risking.  According to Morgan, at least, her being in a happy relationship is having an effect on the podcast (she's telling boring stories), which is being eyed for purchase by Spotify. Most of the gamble here is the romcom threat of "losing the guy". It's a fairly savvy show, but (from my very male perspective) it doesn't adequately emphasize what she's giving up or sacrificing, it rather seems to only imply that she should.

META: A very quick blast of research finds that show creator Erin Foster a) looks a lot like Kristin Bell, b) worked a lot with her sister (including as Insta influencers and as creative heads for the dating app Bumble among other things), and c) converted to Judaism before getting married.  So this show, while not autobiographical, comes from a place of authenticity and truth. It's a really charming romcom that isn't about the act of getting together, but about what it takes to stay together.  It's not even that interested in the drama of tearing Joanne and Noah apart but instead the joys and rewards of unifying and being together.  I feel like this is such an antidote to Hallmarkies, and we're still a week away from those things ramping up.  EEP

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Slow Horses Series 4 (aka "Spook Street")

The What 100: There's a terrorist attack in central London. Meanwhile River Cartwright's grandad, suffering from dementia, shoots a man he thinks is River in his house. River fakes his own death and takes the place of this man, heading into France on a passport that's actually a "cold body", one of many MI-5 fake identities created for their field agents. But how is this one "in the wild" so to speak, and now in River's hands? It all billows out into something very personal and very dangerous.

(1 Great) This is the first season where it feels like Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb is a supporting character and not the lead, and that's actually a good thing. Lamb has been so front-and-center that it's left him a little exposed as a character, as someone who is very much who he is, and not likely to change. River's always been the secondary lead of the show, and giving him the full spotlight here reveals the wild depths of his history and, in learning his origins, has potentially disastrous ramifications for The Park.  It's the most character-centric of the series yet, and it really, really works.

(1 Good) Nothing is stagnant in this show, things are always moving. When we ended last series, Taverner was looking to finally be accepting her place as First Desk, but this season we learn she's right where she was last season, with instead new First Desk Claude Whelan, a died-in-the-wool bureaucrat appointed to the position. He's an idiot, and an idiot is dangerous in his position. Taverner's used to playing games with other very intelligent intelligence officers, so manipulating an idiot is surprisingly difficult.  Whelan is played by James Callis who played the conniving Baltar in Battlestar Galactica... his character here is not that different than Baltar in ambition, but Callis plays him much, much differently. Kristin Scott Thomas as Taverner really revels in that steely, all-business, woman-with-secrets-that-you-will-never-know energy. I really hope one of these series deep dives into her life and history.  The games at the Park were some of my favourite bits this season.

(1 Bad) Oh God, I get angry watching this series week-to-week. I just want to eat it all up in one bite. It's so consumable, and it just pulls you through its story.  You can tell these were crafted out of novels because they're so perfectly structured to deliver the right amount of story and character moments for every ongoing character. We lose some, we gain new ones, and it's a roller-coaster where you're not sure what's happening to start with and it unfolds alluringly and brilliantly.  So yeah, it's great, but I don't like being confined by AppleTV's pacing (I could always wait...but I can't, I look forward to it too much).

META: Mick Herron's Slough House series currently consists of eight full length books and five novellas. I really, really wish that they would produce the novellas as like a standalone episode or extra-length episode between the series'.  So far we've only missed one, between series two and three, and there's two more series before there's another one, so we'll see... or maybe once they tap out of the eight books, they'll just do the novellas as specials to keep it going... I dunno, I just want it all...without having to actually read. Yuck!

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Squid Game Season 1

The What 100: You know what Squid Game is already. I'm just that fool who waited two years to watch it. Ok, quickly... 456 desperate individuals sign up to play games in hopes of winning a massive cash prize. Once they learn it's games of death, well, it ultimately doesn't change much, and the people enlisted will see it through to the bitter end. A detective, looking for his missing brother, infiltrates the compound and starts to uncover what, or who, is behind it all.

(1 Great) Despite this series being absolutely something right up my alley, it got real popular, real quick and you know me with popular things...I bristle. Well, if that many people like it, then it can't be any good, because people who make things popular generally have terrible taste. It was watching Lee Jung-jae in The Acolyte (second Acolyte references this post) that drove me to finally watch it. He was such a charismatic and soulful performer in The Acolyte that he really made an impact and I wanted to see more from him. And yeah, he's absolutely great in this. Here he's Gi-hun, a man in debt, divorced, and just mooching off his diabetic mother. He's not a good guy. It's not even that he wants to be a good guy, but he knows he should be. If he wants his daughter to respect him, if he wants his ex (whom he obviously still loves, but knows she's better off without him) to respect him, if he wants his mother to live and have a good life... then he needs to be a better man. But he doesn't have the tools for it.  And then he's offered an opportunity. It's within the confines of this horrifying environment that Gi-hun learns to be a better man, supporting other players, trying to understand people and help them survive, and giving most people the benefit of the doubt when it's obvious he shouldn't.  He's obviously going to be the victor, because the show is centred around him from the beginning, but can he actually live with himself if he does survive? 

(1 Good) So much of the show, being such a phenomenon, was spoiled for me before I even watched it, but  even if it hadn't been so popular, I probably could have guessed the rhythms of it. It's a formulae for a group of people in a confined space. They tribe up, there are betrayers, there are people who appear one way but are revealed to be something else...there are archetypes to these things and this plays right into them. But, the Squid Game offers the contestants an out...if they collectively, by majority vote, decide to end the games, they all get to leave. And after the first game, in which over a hundred of them are murdered, they decide to leave. So the second episode finds them back in their lives, back in their abysmal lives which have no hope, no promise of reward, just more misery. It's its most bold critique of capitalism in this second episode showing how without a social safety net people fall into despair and ruin with no opportunity to get out. As such, the Squid Game, with its death-or-prizes alternatives, seems like the more appealing option. It's unfortunate that it's the high-point of the season only two episodes in, but it's a great episode.

(1 Bad) Like I said, Squid Game relies upon tropes for character drama and conflict so it can feel pretty routine. It's only the games themselves that electrify the series, but even then I found the games to be oddly primitive, and designed with a lack of competitive spirit in mind.  They're games of death designed to kill, not to be won. The way the games masters manipulate their players especially outside of the games is all part of their fun, which is less fun to watch knowing that it's all stacked against them.  it feels like the games masters are just the writing staff who want to see as much death and misery and heap it upon the audience It should be a poignant commentary, about our fascination with observing human misery from a distance, but it never really does ask the audience to consider their role as spectator in all of this. So it loses its juice, its motivating factor if it's just entertainment and not asking anything of its audience in return.

META: I've said before how much I like the "man-hunting-man" subgenre of thrillers, your "Most Dangerous Games" and "Hard Targets" but this sort of "game show" version is another sister subgenre in the "Running Man" or "Hunger Games" style where it's a spectator sport. I thought it was going to be more of a spectator sport, much more public in a dystopian future, but no, instead it's a secret spectator sport for only the richest of rich to observe.  The detective who finds his way into the back-end of the Squid Game, and starts digging into its secrets unfortunately demystifies it too much, in a way that breaks the logic of it.  If they're stealing 400+ people off the streets of Korea each year for decades, leaving behind a lot of trace evidence like their weird cards, surely people will take notice.  I dunno, I found the more I learned about the behind-the-scenes, the less I bought into it.

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Unsolved Mysteries Volume 5

The What 100: An upsetting double homicide in broad daylight in a public park in Cleaveland. Roswell revisited. A paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion. Cattle mutilations are back (and really haven't ever left).

(1 Great) "Great" sounds too enthusiastic to talk about the very upsetting story of the two friends murdered in Cleveland. It's not great, it's fucked up and horrible, and the interviews with the loved ones of the victims is heartbreaking.  But it's also compelling the circumstances around it, and just how bizarre the situation is. Each season of Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix has had one of these... a murder case so unusual that it kind of breaks one's brain about how it could happen in the first place... and they linger with you, unanswered questions that, were I closer to the case, would drive me mad.  In this case, two friends of about 40-years-old meet up on a park bench. Within clear eyeshot is a parking lot where sits a truck. The two friends are executed, shot in the back of the head, and the guy in the truck sees and hears nothing. Less than 15 minutes pass between the time the woman last used her phone and their bodies are discovered. There's a busy road that goes right by there. Any suspects that knew the victims have been ruled out. Gang related? Hate crime (the man was black, the woman white)? But how brazen an act, and how is there nothing to go on? It's viscerally upsetting.

(1 Good) The investigation into the rash of cattle mutilations in Oregon in between 2019 and 2022 is just freaking bizarre on its own, but when put into the context of thousands of reported cattle mutilations across the US and Canada since the 1960s it's the silent epidemic that nobody talks about. The surgical precision of the removal of skin and the tongue and, often, genitals, why? To what end?  And the weird states that the cows are found in, sometimes upside down on fences, or sitting upright in full rigor, with very little blood on the scene... just completely eerie.  A true unsolved mystery that wants to lean into the "alien abduction" of it all but holds itself back at least somewhat by talking all angles.  Just wild.

(1 Bad) As much as UM gives us some upsetting cases of murder, and mysterious mysteries, sometimes its exploration of the paranormal just seem like weirdos or mentally unstable people putting on a show, being excited about things they're making up. The case about the paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion just made me giggle. The revisiting of the Roswell crash made it seem more and more like "this is a thing because people want it to be".  Here's where I've settled on Roswell... if there were actual aliens, and the President of the United States is advised about it, do you think Trump could shut up about it. He's worried about Mexicans, you don't think he'd be stirring up shit about grey aliens if they were real? He would not be able to contain himself. 

META: The past couple UM volumes have been more paranormal-heavy than I'd like. It's always been an aspect of the show, but I like the weird crime (doesn't even have to be murder) aspect far more, and it seems far more helpful to talk about unsolved crimes than it does about sasquatches and aliens.  But I love how the show upsets me with the horrors of humanity, and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for entertaining these flights of metaphysical fancy. I wish this were a weekly show again.