KWIF: Masters of the Universe (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. The "birthday week" now comes to a close, ending with my most anticipated movie of the year, but also accompanied by so much apprehension. I came here to review movies and eat cake, and I'm all out of cake.

This Week:
Masters of the Universe (2026, d. Travis Knight - in theatre)
Backrooms (2026, d. Kane Parsons - in theatre)    

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Masters of the Universe, the toy line, debuted in 1982. I was 6 years old. My introduction to He-Man and company was probably the TV commercials, but my obsession most likely started with issue 47 of DC Comics Presents in which Superman and He-Man teamed up against Skeletor on Eternia, the homeworld of the Masters of the Universe. I was immediately obsessed. I was as obsessed with "MOTU" (as it's known in the fan community) as I was with Star Wars and DC superheroes.

The toy line would receive more comics series from both DC and Marvel in the next few years, there would also be a fan magazine, and yes, billions of dollars in toy sales of ridiculously over-muscled broad-and-squat characters with ridiculous names like Stinkor (he stinks of patchouli), Extendar (his limbs extend), and Buzz-off (he's a wasp-man). There was an immensely popular cartoon that had two seasons with over 60 episodes each, as well as a holiday special and a spin-off series with He-Man's sister, She-Ra. 

In 1987, infamous schlock purveyors Cannon Films produced a Masters of the Universe live action movie, which, it's absolutely fair to say, was a disappointment to everyone at the time. Cannon sunk over $20 million into the film -- a sizable budget for them, but not nearly big enough to do the property justice -- and so most of the film takes place on Earth with a paltry few characters form MOTU's vast lore appearing, and the majority of the film focusing on Courtney Cox's teenage orphan and her boyfriend. It was a huge slap in every child's face that we had a He-Man movie that did not center on He-Man and felt nothing like what we knew about the property.  As well, the cartoon had ceased making new episodes almost two years prior, and public attention to the property was flagging something fierce. Toys were not selling like they used to. By 1988 the line was basically dead.

MOTU has been rebooted a bunch of times since, and the fan community is immensely supportive of the property, it's just not a huge community.  Likely in the tens of thousands, rather than millions like, say, Transformers or Star Wars.  Even the 1987 film has since become kind of a camp classic, and I personally enjoy it far more as an adult than I ever did as a kid. Still, I've always wished for a proper He-Man movie, and for the past 20 years (at least) there have been teases, over and over again, with false starts at nearly every major studio. It felt like it was never going to happen...and now it has... and... for the most part, it seemed to be what I had been waiting for, a big-budget ($200 million dollar) production that understands both how ridiculous the property is while also understanding why it's so beloved to the die hards.

Director Travis Knight came from the world of animation (as head of Laika and director of Kubo and the Two-Strings) and directed the best Transformers movie of the lot in Bumblebee, an impeccable 1980's-styled adventure in an Amblin pastiche. I had the utmost confidence that he could make a good He-Man movie. The ideal was that it would be as good as Bumblebee, or share the tone of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and that it would be a good introduction to MOTU to a whole new generation, and not just a movie for 50 year olds who can't let go of their childhood.

It genuinely pains me to say that Masters of the Universe is a highly flawed movie. It delivers on being a live-action He-Man movie in ways my inner man-child cannot deny... I had warm fuzzies in my belly often, and squealed in glee more than a few times throughout, but it's still not he MOTU movie of my dreams, and that makes me sad.

The film opens with operatic voices in harmony, "AH-AH"-ing to pulsating synths that made me think a vintage ABBA song was about to play... and the guitars kick in, and I got goosebumps. Composer Daniel Pemberton mixes in his score these elements of 70's Euro-disco with 80's guitar-rock and enlisted Queen's Brian May to provide the guitar riffs. It is most suitably epic and triumphant. If you reach back to the epic rock soundtracks of the 1980s - Queen's Highlander, Toto's Dune, Tangerine Dream's Legend - this is reaching, achieving, and in some cases surpassing those grandiose scores, while also paying homage to them (it borrows at least one track from Highlander - "Princes of the Universe"). It has a few needledrops, which are kind of on the nose in-the-moment, and yet also tone-perfect for the type of film this is, and The Darkness provides the title song "Masters of the Universe".  I was not expecting this acoustic assault, but it was so incredibly welcome, and helped elevate the film where it otherwise would fall a little further down.

The film has an extended prologue, where we meet Adam, Prince of Eternia, as a child. He's forced by his father to partake in battle training, but he's not much of a fighter. The other children in training pick on him, and Duncan (Idris Elba, Luther), the king's Man-At-Arms, is a heavy-handed trainer, though he does find ways to encourage and inspire the hapless young prince. The King, however, wants toughness, strength and determination out of his son, and is willing to traumatically embarrass him to do so. It's a tough prologue when so much of it talks about "being a man" and what that entails, and all of it has to do with strength and being a fighter. This had me perplexed as to what the messaging of the film was to be...(Pemberton plays a piano riff of "Boys Don't Cry" over one scene). It almost seemed to be promoting toxic masculinity.  

The palace is attacked by the forces of Skeletor (Jared Leto, The Little Things) and Adam is sent through a portal off to Earth, his mother's homeworld, alone, with only the fabled "Sword of Power" (there's an even earlier prologue attempting to explain just what power this sword has) to accompany him, which he promptly loses. We smash cut to 15 years later and Adam (Nicholas Galatzine, The Sheep Detectives) is an awkward, soft-spoken dork who works in HR, and has been obsessed with his past life on Eternia. He knows the Sword is his way back, and has been searching for it for a long time. When he finally finds it, it alerts his home world and a literal Beast-Man comes after him, but so too does his old friend Teela (Camila Mendes, Riverdale)

These two stretches of film account for about 40 minutes at the top of the film, and while both are called back to and play a part later in the film, they are each waaay too long. The stretch on Earth feels particularly tedious, especially as there's a nonsensical gym sequence where Adam has a nonsensical conversation with another guy working out who just happens to be Dolph Lundgren, the portrayer of He-Man in 1987. I'm not against fan-service. I'm a fan, I like to be serviced, but subtly. This scene stops the movie dead in its tracks for about 2 minutes, as Lundgren gives the young man advice, which ONLY makes sense in a Meta context, and then what little weight was had in the delivery is undercut by a dumb joke.

And that's a major flaw of this film, it's incessant need to undercut itself with dumb jokes. It's the "Marvel-model" of filmmaking that had played itself out by the time the pandemic hit, so there's no excuse as to why the script is resurrecting it here. Cut out half of these moments where the script undercuts itself with humour and you have a much better, tighter film.

This is, of course, the product of multiple screenwriters contributing to many, many drafts over the years. Four screenwriters are credited here, and it's hard not to blame all the film's weaknesses on the script.  Because, Knight's direction is pretty rock solid. The action sequences all play out quite well, with the super-powers of these characters, or the fighting skills of others all being utilized in really fun ways and not feeling super generic, or, in that sometimes Marvel way of it just being CGI characters blasting each other with laser beams. 

The film really starts moving when Beast-Man and Teela show up. The energy just starts to crackle and these characters are really well translated from toy/animation/comics-to-screen. Mendes' reveal on screen is particularly captivating, as she exudes strength, confidence and charm that I never would have expected from her CW background. She looks and feels like a movie star, and I hadn't expected that from her or this film. 

Teela brings Adam back to Eternia, but not one he remembers. It's been under Skeletor's thrall for 15 years and things have not gone well. Adam's return with the Sword has exposed the Eternian resistance and Skeletor's forces attack, but in the process, Adam turns into He-Man and a new hope for the people of the land raises... except that even with all that power, Adam is still Adam, and his first avenue is hope and optimism and looking for the best in people... but the lesson he needs is that sometimes fighting is necessary to protect the people you care for. Diplomacy is always Adam's first choice (he was always pretty good at human resources) but now he has the power (and, honestly, "the power" basically represents confidence here) to stand up and fight, and to get back up when knocked down.

Knight's path to becoming an accomplished director was not a hard one. His dad is Phil Knight, the billionaire founder of Nike. The animation studio Travis heads was bought for him by his father. But to his credit, Knight worked at his craft, and clearly has both an aptitude and a talent for directing and storytelling. One can look at him as being perfect for telling the story of Adam, of a young man (of privilege) who doesn't necessarily live up to his father's (or anyone's) expectations, and feels lost, only to find his true calling and, while not without its hurdles, excel at it.  It's not fully the story we need, but Knight found a way to make this story personal to him, and it does elevate it slightly.

It keeps coming back to the script, though. It fumbles its exploration of masculinity pretty badly. It takes a shot at it, but it doesn't just miss the target, it doesn't even know where the target is. With all the writers involved, it's like nobody thought to consult an expert, to get it right.  

But what it does get right... and it's so weird to say this... is Skeletor. Jared Leto, buried under a blue-skinned body suit, and a CGI skull with beady-red lazer-pointer eyes, is mercifully unrecognizable, and nails the assignment. Leto as a performer is sometimes insufferable, and allegations made about his off-screen behaviour makes one like him even less, but this... he got this. Skeletor is an evil, cackling villain of no redeeming virtue, and unapologetic about it. He's also freaking funny, as funny as he is intimidating, which serves to simultaneously make him more and less intimidating if that makes any sense. It's a camp performance, but one that works perfectly for both the character and the film. Alison Brie (Freelance), who plays Evil-Lyn, Skeletor's mistress and aide, and shares the most screentime with him, is a gifted comedic actress, but even she has a difficult time keeping up with Leto. It's clear she's attempting to match his tone, but only is able to get there half the time.

There are many characters from the toys and cartoons and lore that pop up in this film, and it's a bevvy of delights. It tickles me to see Fisto, Ram-Man, Mekanek, Spikor, Tri-Clops, Trap-Jaw. Roboto, Battle Cat, and so many more, alongside vehicles like the Sky-Sled, Roton, Talon Fighter and more in this picture, not to mention playsets like Castle Greyskull and Snake Mountain. What a damn treat. I was giddy in seeing it all and only wanted more. 

As there were delights, there were also let-downs, but Nicholas Galatzine was not one of them. His squeaky-voiced Adam, with posture seemingly learned from studying Christopher Reeve's Clark Kent, does exactly the job it needs to do, and when he transforms into He-Man, he still effectively conveys being Adam inside a muscle-bound barbarian's body, but also shows the character levelling up emotionally. Really, really solid job.

I could go on about the ups and downs of this movie and the wild roller-coaster of emotions I went on watching it. In the end, it's fine, but sadly, fine isn't what the property needed if it were going to be resuscitated for a new generation.  That was my greatest hope for it, that this would a super strong movie enjoyable by kids and adults alike and so exciting and entertaining and undeniable that there would be millions of children clamouring for action figures instead of phone screens. I guess we'll have to wait for Toy Story 5 to do that.

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Kane Parsons' 9-minute Backrooms (sometimes The Backrooms) short film from 2022 currently sits with an astonishing 83 million views on Youtube. Backrooms is not just a single short, but a series of shorts made in the past few years , but none of the follow-up twenty or so videos come close to hitting that number of views (most of them have between 3 and 18 million views, which is still quite impressive). What's not so astonishing is that a studio was willing to gamble on a modestly-budgeted feature derived from the Backrooms series given the impressive numbers it's pulled...no, the astonishing thing is that the studio, in this case A24, was willing to take a chance on the feature with Parsons at the helm.

The video series itself was not the original invention of Parsons, but a product of message board groupthink in the creepypasta horror subgenre, and the idea of "backrooms" itself became its own sub-subgenre.

I wasn't familiar with any of this until very recently. But, to watch Parsons' original short, which is somewhat recreated in the prologue to the film, it owes as much to first-person shooter video games as it does to whatever developed out of message board forum. It's visceralness comes from being in an unfamiliar, relatively barren indoor space that is just an expanse of seemingly limitless corridors. There are objects in the corridors that could best be described as "random", while the hallways themselves lack any sense of logic, as the attaching corridors might be through a crevice or a hole in the floor, or a tunnel in the wall accessible only by ladder, or a doorway in the ceiling.  And the lighting is spotty, with most corridors being difficult to see fully... you never know what awaits you as you pass through a doorway, or turn a corner, or step into the shadows. (The fantastic TV series Severance was partially inspired by the conceit of "backrooms", and the spinoff sub-subgenre of "liminal spaces" inspired the video game and subsequent film Exit 8 which I reviewed last week.)

The Blair Witch style shaky cam intro to the film is as effective as it is discombobulating.  I never have a good physiological reaction to this kind of footage, so mercifully it was an in-universe video cassette of camcorder footage being watched by someone, and didn't last past the first 10 minutes.

Following this sequence we meet Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Serentity). He is a failed architect who now runs a failing furniture store and is seeing a therapist, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) following his separation from his wife. What is clear from their sessions is that Clark is full of entitlement and rage, and isn't very interested in truly exploring the source of his emotional discontent.

Clark has been living in his sparsely-stocked furniture store since the separation and experiencing eerie and strange issues with the electricity in the store. The lights will flicker and blink, turning off or on all on their own, while the television will shut off or randomly show video from inside the backrooms that we saw in the opening sequence.  When checking the breaker panel one night, Clark discovers a soft spot in fabric of reality... he touches the wall and his hand passes through. He steps into the wall and comes out in a dingy yellow carpeted and wallpapered environment that seemingly doesn't end. He later describes to Mary this reality as being like a drawing of a dog, but as if someone who had never seen a dog were told what a dog looks like, and then drew their conceptualization of a dog. Everything is off.

Clark spends days exploring the space, even though there seem to be dangers present. Perhaps because he's a (failed) architect, or perhaps because there are things familiar to him in this space, he is quite obsessed with this topsy turvy alt-reality that defies any logic.  He recruits his young assistant manager (Lukita Maxwell, Shrinking) and her videographer boyfriend (Finn Bennett, True Detective: Night Country) to help him with research, and, naturally things go awry.

Outside of it all, Clark has triggered a video camera within the space, and it's being monitored by Phil (Mark Duplass, Safety Not Guaranteed) who wonders who the hell this guy is. Clark's description of this space triggers memories, traumas and nightmares in Mary of her childhood. Are they connected?

Backrooms is a horror movie, but it's also a science fiction and pscyhological thriller. It's not always scary, but it is tonally pretty intense. What is most effective about the film, and baked into the "backrooms" and "liminal spaces" sub-subgenre, is the surreal perversion of reality. Things that look almost familiar, almost like something we should recognize, but aren't quite accurate. Exploring a space like this is like venturing through a nightmare, there's nothing grounding this experience and it could take you literally anywhere one's mind can conceive.

Eventually the film reaches a point where it starts offering some answers, and the worst thing you can do in horror is demystify the threat, to explain it all away. It's frustrating not having answers, but it's less scary when you do.  Backrooms' answers, well, they aren't truly answers. There's more going one than what we know at first, but as one veil is pulled back, there are only more questions.

The audience is left to find their own answers in the information provided to them, and the information is as much there to confound as it is to illuminate. My take is that this endless reality is subconscious memory made manifest, but not of any individual. The more time you spend within, the more the realm taps into your subconscious memory, particularly the darkness you trap away, your fears, anxieties, regrets and repressed impulses. It's a theory, anyway.

I liked this movie a whole damn lot, and it's part of this year's horror explosion of fresh talent that is redefining the box office and what audiences want, what excites them, what they're looking to escape to. Twisted reflections of reality, apparently. Parsons, a teenager when he created Backrooms, is now 20 and has directed one of the biggest movies of the year, and capably so. He'd been refining this idea for four years, so it's no wonder he was so capable and assured in shooting this, but time will tell if he has the capacity for telling any stories beyond Backrooms.  I'm keen to find out.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

 2026, d. Jon Favreau - in theatre

Has there ever been a TV show that had a theatrical movie continuing its character's journeys where the movie was effectively self-contained and new-audience accessible, plus felt like a proper movie and also did very well at the box office? (Like, I know the Sex and the City films and the Downton Abbey films were pretty big commercial hits, but were they accessible for new audiences? And the Firefly continuation Serenity was perhaps the most accessible, but it failed to draw much of a new audience).

I bring this up, because coming out of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars movie to hit theatres in 7 years, my brain was wracked with thoughts trying to figure out what was the dividing line between a TV show and a movie. With this film, the line is so blurry as to be almost imperceptible as a line.

In 2019, when The Mandalorian hit tv screens, and the first notes of (3-time Oscar winner) Ludwig Göransson's Morricone-inspired score whistled out, shivers went up my spine. We were finally getting live action Star Wars on our TV, and money was being spent so as to make it cinematic quality. The line was already starting to blur. And between three seasons of The Mandalorian, and other shows like The Book of Boba Fett, The Acolyte, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, and Skeleton Crew, within 7 years live-action Star Wars on our TV screens had eclipsed the runtime of all the theatrical Star Wars feature films released over almost 50 years.

Disney needed Star Wars and Marvel to launch and hook subscribers to its Disney+ service, and it worked, but at the same time, the rapid expansion of the franchise(s) diluted both of them, fatiguing the audience on the MCU, and also losing their nerve when it came to making new Star Wars for the big screen. So many Star Wars movie projects were announced that never materialized - a new trilogy from Rian Johnson, a trilogy from the Game of Thrones guys, a Kathryn Bigelow Top Gun-but-with-X-Wings movie, a Boba Fett film, an Obi-Wan film, something from Taika Waititi and so many more.

That a cinematic sequel to The Mandalorian would be the first return to the big screen for Star Wars (with billion-dollar filmmaker and creator of the titular Mandalorian Jon Favreau at the helm) seemed like such a safe bet, that it made sense why Disney would choose that path. The only problem is it's too safe of a bet that it's not all that exciting.

Leading up to The Mandalorian and Grogu's release I failed to muster any real energy for the film. The trailers were fine but revealed nothing about the plot, and, frankly, looked like more of the same from the TV show...a show I loved, need I remind you. 

If you're of a certain age, you will know what it's like to sit in a theatre, have that 20th Century Fox fanfare blast at you, the screen go dark, and the title card "A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away..." hit your eyes, and the jarring horn blast of John Williams' legendary score punch you so hard in the gut that you uncontrollably yelp with surprise and excitement. Any time you watch a Star Wars film, that horn blast will transport you back to the theatre and raise that uncontrollable sense of excitement.

Unfortunately Göransson's The Mandalorian and Grogu theme, as amazing as it is, when the pulsating duh-dunn kicks in, well...it transports me back to sitting in front of my TV screen in 2019 (and, even more unfortunately, the pandemic-era seasons of the show). This is not something you want out of the theatrical experience, to be reminded of sitting in front of your TV. And I coudn't shake that feeling through The Mandalorian and Grogu's 2 hour and 14 minute run-time.

I enjoyed the movie... but... I enjoyed the movie like I would enjoy binge watching a season of The Mandalorian, and that's kind of the experience the film brings. It doesn’t feel right.

It's a very segmented movie, one that feels episodic not cinematic, even though it is telling one complete story.

The film opens with a big action sequence prologue, sort of James Bond-style (credit to critic Alonso Duralde for pointing out the somewhat Bond-ian nature of this film), that finds Din Djarin and his baby-Yoda adopted (50-year-old) son Grogu hunting down an Imperial warlord on an ice planet. It starts out like scenes that we've seen in The Mandalorian before, Mando moving through the shadows, exterminating Stormtroopers with ruthless efficiency, but it escalates into something fairly big, with Mando taking on a trio of AT-ATs.

And throughout the fim, yes, there are elements that felt intimately familiar, and not too dissimilar to what we saw on TV, but there were also the flourishes that announced itself as a big-screen motion feature, such as the Mandalorian entering the head of the Imperial Walker and navigating his way into the back of it, eliminating all the imperials within in heated gunplay and fighting, and then retreating back out through the head, all in a one-shot. For a Star Wars nerd like me, moving through the interior of an AT-AT is just something I've been wanting to see most of my life. Things like that make the galaxy of Star Wars feel that much more tangible.

Mando is now an contracted agent for the New Republic, with Sigourney Weaver as handler of his assignments. His new assignment is to meet with the siblings of deceased crime lord Jabba the Hutt. They alone seem to hold the whereabouts of a specific Imperial warlord that fallen off the radar. We get to see swampy Nal Hutta, the home planet of the Hutts, as well as the structures they live in and the gross living conditions they have.  the tour into the belly of the Hutt twins' "palace" borders on stomach-churning...all that writhing ("mommy, what are the slug-people doing?" "They're just eating dear.")l. One longs for the arid dryness of Tattoine. At least the sand looked clean.

The Hutts will give Mando the information he seeks, but first he must rescue their nephew, Jabba's son, Rotta the Hutt. He "fell into a bad crowd" and has been taken captive on a remote planet outside the New Republic's jurisdicion. There he finds Rotta is a champion pit-fighter, and if you've ever wondered what a jacked-up Hutt looks like, well wonder no more. Rotta, I'm guessing by design, looks like a beefcaked version of Jabba from the Star Wars: A New Hope Special Edition, where the CGI Jabba looked nothing like the Jabba from Return of the Jedi.

I won't step through all the beats of the film but lest to say, Mando frees Rotta, gets the Targeted imperial warlord, and returns home with his little green boy to relax. And that's the half-way point. But he's crossed the Hutts and they want their revenge. This time Mando gets kidnapped by a bounty hunter, and it's up to Grogu and some tiny friends (the Anzellans, a diminutive race that were the only good thing to come out of The Rise of Skywalker) to rescue him.

There's surprisingly, a long quiet stretch in this third act that is far from boring, but also far from feeling like a big Star Wars feature film. This kind of quiet interlude isn't necessarily unwelcome or by default un-cinematic, but it feels like a moment The Mandalorian TV show would permit itself in an 8-episode season versus slowing the pace of a feature film down to a crawl for 20 minutes.  Once this sequence resolves, it's a propulsive escalation back into Star Wars feature film territory, and despite my glee at many moments of this it just never quite felt big enough.

Star Wars films are space opera. There's "fate of the galaxy" at stake in every one of them, even Solo to some degree. But The Mandalorian and Grogu is contained, constrained. There's only "the job" and while "the job" gets complicated, and then backfires on our hero, there's little more else to it. This isn't a personal quest for Din Djarin or Grogu, and so there's no real arc for these characters. Where our heroes are at the beginning is where our heroes are at the end, except Grogu, I guess, has proven himself a bit more resourceful than we thought (they definitely leveled up the Grogu puppetry here, to an impressive extent)

It's an incredibly small cast for a Star Wars film, with Mando and Grogu, Mando's mission buddy Zeb Orrelios, Sigourney Weaver's Ward, the Hutt twins, Embo the bounty hunter, the Blofeld-esque warlord (Jonny Coyne), the Anzellans (all voiced magnificently by Shirley Henderson), a food vendor capably voiced by Martin Scorsese, and a kindly catfish-man Grogu meets in the swamp. 

My muted anticipation for The Mandalorian and Grogu had me hoping it would find some space operatic reason to exist. Something large and consequential in the lore of the Galaxy to make for a worthy big screen entry. At the same time I worried that the logic of a bounty hunter being part some sweeping space opera would put the character out of place. I also worried that a Mandalorian movie would get too lost in Star Wars lore, especially given that Zeb is a main character from the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon, Embo is a featured character from The Clone Wars series, the Hutt Twins first appeared in The Book of Boba Fett (a cold shiver went up my spine a the thought of Boba Fett cropping up in this movie, which he mercifully does not), and Rotta the Hutt's first appearance was in The Clone Wars animated movie that kicked off the series.  Thankfully, none of these characters requires any prior familiarity to enjoy their appearance here, there is that.

Overall The Mandalorian and Grogu looks pretty good. It looks big budget, certainly bigger budget than the TV show, for which the Volume digital backdrop was created and used heavily. Having just watched Mortal Kombat II, a very Volume-dependent film, I couldn't detect any obvious volume usage here.  The limits to Volume use on the various Star Wars TV shows seems lifted here, and it's nice to see characters move through much larger spaces (or even confined spaces that seem like sets, not digital backdrops).

Göransson is one of my favourite film and television score composers working today. He typically brings a lot of creativity and innovation to his scores, experimenting with sounds but to the benefit of whats on screen. His scoring for The Mandalorian tv show was integral to that show's success, to the point that I feel the third season of the series, though it has its faults in story structure, is mainly let down by Göransson's absence. His return here, then, is very welcome, and yet, unfortunately, it doesn't feel like trademark Göransson . It's rehashing the themes from the show and he doesn't seem to have escalated the sounds to something grander, although there are stadout segments where Göransson does shine, mostly when he deviates from the style of music he's otherwise been working with.

In the end I think that there was no winning with this film. Despite being quite entertaining, it doesn't go big enough to feel like the Star Wars cinematic experience we know, and therefore can't do much but disappoint. I can't help but think that, perhaps, the decision to bring the series to the big screen was the wrong choice for Star Wars' return to cinemas.

KWIF: Sisu: Road to Revenge (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Lady Kent was down with the same cold that took me out last week, so weirdly I watched more movies this week than when I was down and out last week. It's all international cinema cinema week: Finland! "Persia"! Australia! Italy!

This Week:
Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025, d.  Jalmari Helander - crave)
Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989, d. Luigi Cozzi - tubi)
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975, d. Peter Weir - xumo)
Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out - 1973, d. Duccio Tessari - tubi)

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The first Sisu was a cartoon orgy of violence, but underneath it beat the heart of Finnish pride, fortitude and resilience. If there was a message to Sisu it was to tell the world that Finns are tough motherfuckers.  

But Sisu also set itself in a time and place that it didn't really explain. If you're Finnish or familiar with it's history (particularly during World War II) there was no explanation needed. I on the other had had to do some digging. It was a complicated situation with Finland already engaged in conflict with Russia when other battles in Europe started. Sisu took place at the end of World War II, with the Germans set to return home, but attempting to take as much with them as they could before they left, including the gold grizzled veteran Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) had just found.

I don't fully understand the timelines, but Road to Revenge, takes place shortly after the end of World War II, so I assume not long after the first film, just enough time for Korpi to heal. A treaty with Russia saw the ceding of much of Karelia (on the southeastern side of the country) to the Russians, with its citizens of the area being forced to leave within ten days. Korpi's home, which he built himself, remains in the ceded terrain. He crosses the new Russian border with a massive, massive truck, where he deconstructs the home and loads the truck on his own.

His border crossing, however, raises awareness that Koschei ("The Immortal") is in the country. Korpi had infamously killed 300 Russians himself in a rageful tear following the murder of his wife an children. A KGB Officer (Richard Brake) frees the man responsible for killing Korpi's family -- the war criminal Yeagor Dragunov (Stephen Lang) -- from his prison and gives him the resources to, quote "destroy the legend you created and you will go back home a rich man".

And so Korpi and his massive truck and big pile of wood have to travel the 120 kilometers from where his home once stood back to the border...chased by trucks, motorcycles, and airplanes. It's a scaled-down Fury Road but director Jalmari Helander continues to prove he's got the action goods. A lot of wild craziness happens along the way, beyond logic but gleefully entertaining.

The last act takes place on a train, and gets Koschei back into physical action, with some fun setpieces like traversing through the two sleeping quarters without awakening the soldiers (or taking care of them should they stir). The final duel between Korpi and Dragunov is maybe too slow and unrefined to be truely Wick-ian, but it's only one small moment in this 89-minute deluge of violence and survival.

Tommila doesn't speak a word the entire film, and this lack of dialogue really strips the film down to the barest of actions and emotions. Where Brake or Lang might have more to say, there's still likely no more than two or three pages of dialogue, max in the entire film. Whereas the first Sisu felt like a nuveau western, this one feels almost more like a samurai film...but with guns and vehicles and whatnot...but the same attitudes apply.

Helander's next film will see the director's first American production, being brought aboard to helm the John Rambo prequel starring Noah Centineo in the title role. I have no idea what the story might possibly be like, but I'm excited to see what Helander can do with big hollywood franchise budget.

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One of the final releases of legendary 80's B-movie studio Cannon Film, Sinbad of the Seven Seas stars famous muscleman and former Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno as the storied Persian hero, Sinbad the Sailor. Yes, that's right, Italian-American Lou Ferrigno plays Sinbad. Seems a natural fit to me [/sarcasm].

The story is set largely in Basra, which the filmmakers seem to know as much about as I do, which is to say, nothing at all. All the characters here are played by white and/or Italian actors, nary a middle-eastern among them. If this seems like it could be offensive, it would be, if anyone, anyone at all were trying to convincingly portray this as an authentic tale. As it stands, it's one of the least egregious of its cinematic sins, afterall, Sinbad has been portrayed by white actors many times in the past (and will again...RIP Patrick Muldoon).

But Sinbad of the Seven Seas lies to its audience from the moment the film starts. Before its title card, a chunky block of text mentions how famed author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote an additional adventure for Sinbad titled "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" and that this is an adaptation of that story. It is not. Not in the slightest.

As legend on this film goes, writer-director Luigi Cozzi (who had directed Ferrigno in two Hercules films for Cannon in the mid-1980s) had written the screenplay for Sinbad and the Seven Seas, but was (for unclear reasons) dismissed from the project and it was handed to Enzo G. Castellari. Castellari would proceed to make substantial changes to the script and then proceed to produce an unreleaseable three-hour film. The film sat on the shelf for years before Cozzi was hired back to make some sense of it, to salvage something out of the whole production.

And so, the film's story does not begin with Sinbad and crew on his boat, or in the city of Basra, or in Baghdad or anywhere fantastical, it starts in a bedroom, with a child (Cozzi's daughter) being read a story by her mother, played by Daria Nicolodi.  Nicolodi will proceed to narrato over a large portion of the film. The touchpoint might seem to be The Princess Bride for this framing sequence, but really, it's just a way of trimming down 3 hours of garbage footage into a barely, if you squint, serviceable 93 minute series of adventures.

The wicked vizier Jaffar (portrayed by English white guy John Steiner, it's a variation on Aladdin's Jafar both of which hearken back to The Thief of Baghdad films rather than One Thousand and One Nights) is fixated on the Caliph's daughter, Princess Alina [Alessandra Martines, a French-Italian white lady]. She is involved with Sinbad's ship-mate Prince Ali, but he's been away adventuring. The vizier steals the town's sacred gems of power, keeping one for himself and dispersing the rest across the seas. He then hypnotizes the Caliph into doing his bidding, including telling Alina to marry Jaffar. She refuses and thus is strapped to a fantastical chamber designed to (verrrry slooooowly) sap her of her will. She will marry him some day). When Hercules...I mean Sinbad and crew arrive in Basra, they beat up some bad guys, get captured, break free and then set out on a quest to find the four gems of power (but not before Sinbad escapes from a pit of cobras by *checks notes* making friends with the cobras and then tying them together to form a rope for him to climb out of.  You know how you make friends with wild creatures [totally normal] and then twist their bodies together, with their consent of course [nothing unusual, at all] and then climb them [all checks out, do it all the time].

The majority of the adventures of Sinbad and his crew (consisting of handsome Prince Ali [white guy], Cheropolis "the bald cook" [another white guy], Poochie the dwarf [not a rapping dog, but a white guy], Viking [played by an Italian actor, not a Scandanavian] and the Chinese mercenary Cantu [played by a Japanese-Italian actor]) are narrated over with the action or conversation or both happening silently under the narration from Nicolodi (yes, we see the characters have an exchange and our narrator explains what they are saying], all the while accompanied by the of shoddiest of synth scores.  

In the first stop, he fights a rock monster that shoots lasers from its head. Sinbad must use feats of his notorious Sinbad strength to defeat it and retrieve the gem from its head. In the second, Sinbad and most of the crew (except Bald Cook and Poochie) head to the isle of the amazons where their notorious beauty finds them immediately under their sway (except Prince Ali who seems to be psychically connected to Princess Alina for some reason). If not for Bald Cook and Poochie coming to the rescue with an magical anti-hypnosis potion...I don't know what would have happened, actually. The Amazon queen Farida was played by the stunning actress Melonee Rodgers, a Black, possibly American actress (there's not much available detail on her and seeing as she had no speaking lines left in the film - which doesn't really matter since all lines were dubbed anyway by different actors, except Steiner and one or two others) and all the Amazons were black, which I thought was fantastic...except when Queen Farida has her gem of power taken from her and she turns into an old lady...well, it's just some old Italian lady in blackface. Yeah. Woof.

During the adventures, we constantly check back in with Jaffar, and how progress is going on sapping Princess Alina of her will. The movie makes it seem like Sinbad's voyages are only taking him the better part of an afternoon in total and not days or weeks of sailing the seas. He tries to interfere from afar, but seems to only be able to do anything sometimes for some reason and most of the time looks like a sweaty guy whose going to lose his kneecaps if the team he's watching doesn't lose the match. He's also joined, bafflingly, by the witch Soukra (played by American bodybuilder Teagan, the only other actor not to be dubbed, it seems) for seemingly no reason. Jaffar sort of acts like she's the one who will break his kneecaps if his bet doesn't pay off.

The third adventures finds Jafar sending a gust of wind to send Sinbad's ship ashore (but why send them to the very island that contains the gem they're looking for Jaffar? The guy is an idiot). There they face, ghosts or something...? I dunno, I fell asleep for a bit. 

When I woke up Sinbad was having a conversation with Kira (another white lady), daughter of Nadir the wizard who speaks in gibberish. They landed on the Isle of the Dead in a balloon. They are jumped by a gang of ghouls, and while Kira puts up a good fight, which Hercules, I mean Sinbad immediately falls in love with her over, she gets kidnapped along with her father. Sinbad mounts his rescue but must face the Lord of Darkness, who is like a pot-bellied Swamp Thing who shoots lasers from his hands. Hercules uses his own gems of powers to shoot lasers and destroy the big gooey plant then head home with Kira and her goof-talkin' father in tow.

The big show-down is ...well, not so big. Hercules/Sinbad rescues Princess Alina and defeats Jaffar, but not before facing a Jaffar-controlled mirror version of himself in a match of strength and cunning. Ali and Alina are married, and so are not-Hercules and Kira, the end, go to sleep kid.

There were little glimmers that maybe the original production, under Castellari, was aiming for high camp, but the structure Cozzi rescues the picture with leaves a lot of the camp off to the side, sneaking in only occasionally. But it's obvious from the footage and dialogue left in why Castellari's first draft of this was considered unreleaseable: it's really really bad. I could never get past the idea of Ferrigno as Sinbad. As witnessed above, my brain kept defaulting to him as Hercules, and it would seem Castelli did too. Sinbad is not a legendary strongman, and yet so much of what Ferrigno does here is "feats of strength".

In the right setting, Sinbad of the Seven Seas might be a so-bad-it's-amazing cult classic, but as a tired adult just looking for a break from having to think about shit, this was just an awful 90 minutes. I had more fun recapping it above than watching it.

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I was introduced to Picnic at Hanging Rock by a friend who I met on a dating website almost exactly 20 years ago. It was an odd time. We'd both recently gotten out of long term relationships and we were trying to figure out the next phase of our lives. We really clicked, but emotionally we just weren't ready for anything other than friendship. It was a friendship that forged quickly but not strong enough to survive eventual physical distance and other life demands (babies) and, frankly, the friendship-subverting suckhole that was facebook (it gives the illusion of being in contact without being meaningful contact in any way). Strangely, Picnic at Hanging Rock was the shared experience most cemented into my mind of that friendship, watching a VHS copy borrowed from the library on a strange couch in a brightly lit room next to a new friend where we were still trying to figure out our dynamic. 

At that time I went into watching Picnic... with a pre-conceived distaste for Peter Weir, having had a high-school art teacher who was a Weir fan and would play us Dead Poets Society, Green Book and Fearless in class at least once per semester...for inspiration? These were not really inspirational films to a 14-17 year old. They were grown-up films for parents.

At that time I found Picnic... a bit confounding. The film starts by letting you know that the titular picnic would end in some sort of tragedy, just as the film's poster does. "On St. Valentines Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock... some were never to return." It's an ominous, and it implies something sinister, something terrifying, something harrowing perhaps. The implication is there will be, at least, something to raise one's blood pressure in watching this film...and there is not. Not really.

It is a film that stuck with me though, left an impression. It's not just a totem but a representative point for a very specific, transitional moment of my life. My memory of the film is nothing to do with plot or characters, but images and tones.

This rewatch reaffirmed that it is a tranquil, vibes-based movie above all, loaded with melancholy (and the tranquil tones of Zamfir's pan flute) 

The girls are aflutter not for their picnic trip but for a Valentines card someone received. Where most of the kids are privileged, some are sponsored, such as Sara, an orphan who is kept behind from the trip because...well, I'm not exactly sure. We don't spend much time with any of the other girl to really get to know them, but there is focus on Miranda, the pretty and independent-minded blonde, and Edith, the cliched fat girl who whines about physical effort and is seen eating.  There at least doesn't seem to be any bullying, at least not in the traditional sense...not at this point. 

At the picnic site is already a young Englishman, Michael, who is there with his parents (grandparents?), and their driver, Albert, who Michael makes friends with. The presence of the girls is instantly exciting to them, and though Albert makes some crude comments to Michael which he finds distasteful, the girls don't even notice they are there.

Miranda, Edith and two others decide to venture up the rock (more than 500 feet high it is!), and they push themselves up until they can seemingly go no further. But they find a crevasse and venture into it, except Edith, who freaks out. She runs down the hill, the others are gone... as if purposefully taken by the rock. A teacher stays behind as the rest of the girls are sent home, and she disappears as well. End of act one.

The rest of the film covers next few hours, days and weeks that follow. There is a manhunt and an investigation. Both Albert and Michael are looked at and then dismissed. Both young men are troubled by thoughts and dreams of the missing girls, with Michael seemingly haunted by Miranda specifically. Michael takes on a dangerous solo search which he nearly dies from, and when Albert picks up the trail, he finds Irma, near death.

The school is in disarray. The teachers are having breakdowns, some kids leave school altogether, and Sara falls ill. Irma remembers nothing and has no answers. She's harassed by the other girls when she returns to visit. Everything's collapsing because nobody can process the tragedy. It's not being swept under the rug, but it's also not being addressed either.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a horror movie, but it is a haunting picture. It's hard not to be affected by watching others unravel in the wake of tragedy, unable to make sense of it and not having the support knowledge or infrastructure to work through it. With years in between, and some further exploration of the film and story in the meantime, I respect the picture even if I still have a hard time with its storytelling decisions and the routes it does not take.

It took some additional contemplation to realize that this is not a film about the incident, despite the title. It's not about the disappearance, but a story about the school, and the impact the incident has on it and the people within it.  That's a defined choice made by the storytellers (be it original novel author Joan Lindsay, or screenwriter Cliff Green, or director Weir) not to answer questions, not to give a resolution. It may be unsatisfying but it's most definitely intentional.  It's a film that has, in a way, haunted me for 20 years now, and I think that will never go away.

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I have a watchlist on Letterboxd that I don't consult very often, but any time I do I'm bound to ask the question of "what the hell is that?" to about two-thirds of what's on there. My tastes and interests are mercurial to the point of self-aggravation and self-annoyance. I have to be in the right mood or zone to watch something, so just because I don't feel like watching it now doesn't mean I won't want to watch it later. But also, a lot of what is on my Letterboxd list is obscurities that, well, just won't be cropping up on any of the "mainstream" streamers I most regularly have access to.

But then there's Tubi, always full of surprises. I don't love the streamer, primarily because it's owned by Fox, but also because it has ads (which used to be all Fox News-based ads, but now just seem to be targeted Canadian market ads for dish soap and such), and no standards. You can find a lot of great stuff on Tubi, but in terrible quality streaming speed, bad digital transfers, godawful audio and frequently without closed captioning (a terrible combo for a half-deaf guy like me).

I don't know how the Italian action-thriller Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out) wound up on my Letterboxd list but I'm sure glad it did, and I'm also so happy it was among Tubi's fairly decent selection (if not decent quality) of Italian 70's crime pictures.

This one stars Alain Delon, the handsome French actor who played one of the first notable on-screen hitmen in Le Samourai, back again playing another hitman, but this time also a family man, and he wants out. He's done. No more killing for him. Except the consortium of mobsters he works for aren't willing to let him go and they know there's no talking him out of it.

And so before John Wick, before The Punisher, before Death Wish here we have an anti-hero whose wife and child are killed (accidentally mind you) and the response is basically warfare in the streets, one against one hundred.

Delon is Tony Arzenta, an astute, savvy, steely killer who has been wronged, and there's only one way to make right. He's going to dismantle multiple crime syndicates from the top down. At first Arzenta makes his plans and executes them, although not always with ruthless precision, it's a fight from the jump. The mob bosses aren't just sitting back, they have their own schemes as well, setting Tony up so that he has to improvise his escapes. The police are monitoring the situation, but they're sitting back. They're, in a way, buffering for Tony as they see him doing them a service, cleaning up all these syndicates for them.

Tony's bloodlust takes him from from Milan to Copenhagen, murdering on the street and on trains, wherever the opportunity needs to occur. He's not alone, he's aided by his pal Domenico (Marc Porel) and Sandra (Carla Gravina), as well as an ex-dom now living life as a priest who looks out for Tony's parents. 

The film isn't solely told from Tony's perspective and spends plenty of time with the various mafia dons as they start renegotiating territories as Tony picks them off one by one. But there's always one been one don, Nick Gusto (Richard Conte) who didn't want any of this and had tried numerous times to convince the consortium to push for piece. It's only when he's the last one left does he really have any sway, and it all leads to Tony's invitation to Don Gusto's daughter's wedding, and the tense, anything-can-happen environment.

Nothing about it is as straightforward. Tony seems to have ice in his veins, but family, friendships, these have meaning for him, it's where he's vulnerable and he knows it. The scenes where he brings Sandra to stay with his parents, and the awkward-yet-sweet encounters that occur there. There's no definition to what Tony and Sandra are to each other, except that they're family now.

I loved this movie. I'll be eagle eyed looking out for a physical media release. It deserves some special treatment.

KWIF: The Martian (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new this week, just some scienced fiction and a modern classic.

This Week:
The Martian (2015, d. Ridley Scott - disney+)
Solar Crisis (aka "Crisis 2050" - 1990, d. Allan Smithee - tubi)
Ocean's Eleven (2002, d. Steven Soderbergh - hollywood suite)

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I love the idea of this poster, but 
why not red sand?

After watching Project Hail Mary (twice) I felt the urge to watch The Martian again. It was a movie I liked well enough the first time but it didn't really stick with me, beyond the "going to science the shit out of it" quote that lives rent free in my brain.

Both Project Hail Mary and The Martian are adaptations of Andy Weir novels, with screenplays by Drew Goddard, and as such there's a definite consistency in tone between the two of them. While both feature space men finding themselves alone and effectively stranded, these are not harrowing films of survival that Hollywood normally likes to present. 

Instead these are stories about men of science, men of competency, men of versatility, capable of adapting and, yes, science-ing the shit out of a problem. That makes them compelling figures to watch (there's a reason MacGyver was a big enough hit to run for 7 seasons in the '80's and a remake ran for 5 seasons in the 2010s) and with Drew Goddard, schooled in the Buffy/Angel writers den, he's got a knack for writing intelligent characters both pithiness and humility, which makes them enjoyable and somewhat down-to-Earth despite clearly advanced intellect and skills.

The key difference between Project Hail Mary and The Martian has nothing to do with story, and everything to do with the directors involved. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are not Ridley Scott and Ridley Scott is not  Lord and Miller.  Lord and Miller are particularly gifted at comedy as well as exploring ideas in a big, conceptual way that subverts expectations, Scott has in current stage of his career (starting with Prometheus), leaned almost exclusively into the grandiose. It's not spectacle he's after but big moments, big ideas, big pressures on the characters.  Where with PHM Lord & Miller no doubt heightened the wit of Goddard's script with their own instincts and timing, Scott at times steps on the levity, not to quash it but so as not to diminish the emotional reality of the film.

As much as these two films have a consistency between them, I can't picture Ridley Scott's Project Hail Mary being nearly as entertaining, while I could picture a Lord & Miller The Martian being the "Best Musical or Comedy" of 2015 that the Golden Globes proclaimed it to be, but it wouldn't feel as prestigious as it does. 

I'm not going to review the story here in any great depth (Toasty did a good job of that already), because it's a very successful, 10-year-old (!) film with a very simple premise... a man gets stranded on Mars and has to rely on his wits, intellect and science to survive long enough to be rescued. 

Toasty is probably right that Mark Watney would have been left to die on Mars because the billions it would cost to rescue him would not have been approved, and most likely when they discovered Watney was alive, that info would have been classified and probably subject to conspiracy theories, but as we see with Weir's Project Hail Mary he prefers to find optimism in his crises situations.  Here not only does NASA and the US government do everything can to keep Watney alive and to rescue him, but they even wind up collaborating with foreign agencies who stretch out their hands (and money and technology) in a sign of goodwill and harmony.

I had forgotten how stacked the cast of The Martian is. Of course Matt Damon is the face of the picture, the central figure and titular martian, but the crew that leaves him behind has the likes of Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara and Sebastian Stan, while among the ground crew there's Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean, Donald Glover, Benedict Wong and Mackenzie Davis. At the time many of these actors were known primarily or only as comedic performers so it was a bit odd how reigned in their performances were (as if the script called for broader comedy and it was cast in such a way but Scott reined it in).

It's a captivating film through and through, even at almost two hours and twenty minutes. It looks great, with amazing sets, effects, and wardrobes, and the sound design (I really need to see it in the theatre some time) is incredible (it lost the Academy Award in both sound categories to Mad Max:Fury Road, which hard to argue with). It grossed over six hundred million at the box office internationally, and was nominated for many, many, many awards (winning a few), and has since become a big-time "dad movie", which maybe has diminished its prestige a little. The massive success of Project Hail Mary has put this other Weir adaptation back into the spotlight and, no doubt, has fast tracked adaptations of Weir's other novel and short stories, and I'm sure execs are champing at the bit to acquire the rights to whatever he's working on next.

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I have been, for pretty much most of my life, pretty piped into what mainstream science fiction movies were out there. One of my favourite childhood books was one about science fiction movies, most of them grown-up films that I wouldn't get to see until a decade (or two) later. I was pretty aware of any new scifi movies that were released in theatre pretty much since adolescence.  So for there to be a sizable-budgeted science fiction movie from 1990 that I know nothing about is shocking to me.

Based off the novel "Crisis: Year 2050" ("Kuraishisu niju-goju nen" written by Takeshi Kawata), Solar Crisis was not a trifle of a film. With a budget of at least 30 million dollars (in 1990 money), with recognizable (if no longer A-list) stars like Tim Matheson, Charlton Heston, Peter Boyle and Jack Palance, there was some ambition behind this production. The investors were so hot on the idea a theme park was planned to accompany it.

Financed by a consortium of Japanese investors, Solar Crisis was an attempt to make a very American-style blockbuster sci-fi disaster epic. Instead its a very American-style epic disaster of a sci-fi blockbuster.

Japanese actor Tetsuya Bessho is the only real Japanese presence in the film in a tertiary role, and the film seems pointedly made in such a way as to not elicit anything...unAmerican, although it also seems somewhat filtered through a an outside lens despite being made at a Los Angeles (the way a lot of Euro-investor, made-in-Baltic-states-style sci-fi/fantasy productions would feel in the 2000s) .  What little details there are on the making of this film (I only learned what Grokipedia was after I had read it's surprisingly detailed AI generated article on the film, and I feel slimy all over now), word has it that the film was extensively re-edited with some re-shoots to make it more appealing to an American distributor, and one has to wonder what "unAmerican" elements had to be left on the cutting room floor. (And by all accounts, the film had a middling performance at the Japanese box office, so it's not like there's a secret masterpiece that was lost in this process.)

Solar Crisis would prove to be director Richard C. Sarafian (Vanishing Point). The intervention in editing and reshooting his film caused him to remove his name from the domestic release and, I guess, quit directing after that. He had a fairly prolific (if not quite esteemed) career directing in both film and television prior to that, and following Solar Crisis he seemed to focus instead on his acting career.

The film is somewhat a throwback to the "what if" scifi movies of the 1950's (for example The Day The Earth Caught Fire) where a specific threat or event loomed and it was up to a team of astronauts and military men and scientists to try and stop/fix it. In this case, it's a solar flare that could eradicate Earth entirely. The plan then is to sent off the largest, most powerful warhead ever produced to trigger the flare while the Earth is on the other side of the sun.

In charge of this mission is Commander Steve Kelso (Matheson). He's a military nepo-baby, as his father, Admiral "Skeet" Kelso (Heston) seems to be pulling strings a bit.  Steve has an enlisted kid, Mike Kelso (Corin Nemic), whom he declined to have strings pulled to bring him to the orbital base where Steve's mission is taking off from. Mike, however, decided to go AWOL and find his way there on his own...only things didn't go as planned and now he's stranded in the desert.

New to Steve's crew is the test-tube grown, genetically reprogrammed scientist Alex Noffe (Annabel Schofeld). She's an outcast among all the military on the satellite, but she's meant to be made to feel welcome by a lot of disrespecting of her boundaries. She finds herself drawn to Steve (like some unseen force, the script perhaps, demanded it) and Steve likewise finds Alex alluring.

What nobody knows is that the evil billionaire (is there any other kind) Arnold Teague (Boyle), head of the IXL Corporation, is a solar flare denier. He doesn't believe it exists and if it does it's not a threat, and even if it is it's not a threat to business, and if anything money can be made if it does destroy half the Earth. It's better for him if it does, actually. The one thing this film gets right, billionaires are psychopaths disconnected from their own humanity. It's a weirdly timely story, how billionaires are trying to control the narrative of a climate crisis for their own gain and everyone else's expense.

Teague is hedging his bets highly, but he's also not taking chances. Through espionage, Alex is kidnapped and reprogrammed to sabotage the mission. Young Mike, meanwhile, finds help in the desert in the form of the cracked ex-general Travis (Palance, just making a meal out of every scene), who agrees to help the kid find his way to the satellite transport site. Along the way the run afoul of Teague's men and learn of his sabotage plans with Admiral Skeet, searching for his grandson, always two steps behind them.

This isn't a unique story. There is a whole history of sci-fi save-the-Earth tales that predate this film, and many that follow (Armageddon, Sunshine, Project Hail Mary, to name just three). What makes this one pretty bland and generic is the military angle. Though not lacking in ideas, there is a lack of science, and a lack of psychological intrigue. The political and social intrigue, of world building, is hinted but needs more presence, and one has to wonder if some of it's on the cutting room floor. Boyle's evil corporate overlord is so bog standard for the time, seen in so many sci-fi and action films of the 80's and 90's. It doesn't help that it seems like Boyle's barely awake when delivering his lines.

Similarly Matheson seems utterly bored in the role as commander Steve, and lacks commanding presence. As stated, Palance seems to be having a blast in his role, and Heston is not lacking in gusto, as if this were his big break for a return to prominence. Young Nemic, meanwhile, is definitely trying to find his footing and do something good with a bad role, but he can't keep up with Palanace. Schofeld as Alex... well, you hate to say it, but sometimes you're watching a film and you see an actress in a prominent role that you've never seen before and you just know the main reason she's there is because she agreed to take her top off. She's not a terrible actress, but she's not up to the standards of the other main cast here, and Alex is perhaps the most prominent character in the story with the most emotional arc. Schofeld isn't up to the task.

The effects, mostly, are pretty good from former Star Wars visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund. There are some wonky scenes (the very first shot of a shuttle in space was hot garbage) but they're few and far between, and I'm wondering if they were reshoots. The style of the film - the ships, wardrobe, hair and makeup - can best be described as uninspired.

I didn't hate Solar Crisis but it's not a great watch by any stretch. While it had aspirations of being a big screen blockbuster, it winds up being a levelled-up version of a Full Moon Video production.

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I dunno about this poster...
I only count 5

Speaking of "dad movies", Ocean's Eleven is another modern classic of the "dad movie" oeuvre. It's so weird to me that anything by Steven Soderbergh could fit so explicitly in that classification.  Sure, the director's repertoire is so vast and varied that of course it should present the opportunity for a "dad movie" to find its way into his filmography, but generally Soderbergh's sensibilities skew outside the general tastes of the "dad movie" consumer. I mean just look at Haywire, which should seem like a total braindead "dad movie" actioner, but Soderbergh just can't help himself and bring something outre to it that just doesn't quite blend.

And yet, the glossy remake of the old Rat Pack non-classic is just sooo slick that Soderbergh subverted his own impulses and made a movie for pretty much everyone (aside from some cussing) that's devoid of sex, drugs, or any real violence. 

If anything, Ocean's Eleven was an exercise in shooting for the edit for Soderbergh. This film lives and dies by its hyperactive editing, and it really lives large. Soderbergh edits a lot of his own films, but for this (and for others) he called in Stephen Mirrione (who would later become a favourite of George Clooney's as well as Joseph Kosinski). All the pieces that need to be woven into this narrative means that scenes have to be tight as hell. There's no room to take more than a breath or two. 

The whole production is helped along by the bounciest film score in the history of film from David Holmes. That upright bass player's fingers must've been bleeding. I used to listen to the score just for fun, and I'd forgotten just how damn propulsive it was, but also just how damn essential it was to the film. There's a concert happening in Ocean's Eleven and Holmes provides the music while Mirrione choreographs the dance. It feels like if Mirrione edited any film like this and you laid Holmes' soundtrack over it, it would work, regardless of content. 

This is the heist film that reinvigorated heist films in modern cinema, but also kind of ruined heist films for modern cinema. It set the temperature for just how complex and convoluted a heist has to be to appease the audience, and anything less seems boring by comparison. Not even the subsequent Ocean's films (which I need to revisit) come close to being half as successful as this one (the next closest standout is Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, but that came out the year before...).

Of course, what takes the Mirrione-edits and Holmes-score to "dad movie" level is the star-studded, audience-baiting cast of Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle (but that accent tho...woof), Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, and Andy Garcia. That's just wall-to-wall talent carpet right there. As good as everyone is (barring Cheadle's bad cockney accent), I found Reiner delivered the standout performance of the film with Mac really popping as well. Clooney and Roberts need to ground the film in something a little more than just a heist (and it's truly a little more), which brings Garcia in, as the villain getting in between them. Garcia's performance is wonderfully understated and controlled, to the point that he seems both non-threatening and utterly dangerous.

It's been a couple decades since I last watched this, and, despite the Rick and Morty take down of all the heist cliches that Ocean's Eleven set-up, it still works almost completely.  

KWIF: The Master (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new here, but all new to me.

This Week:
The Master (2012, d. Paul Thomas Anderson - tubi)
Bigbug (2022, d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet - netflix)
The Hidden Fortress (aka La forteresse suspendue, "Tales for all #17?" - 2001, d. Roger Cantin - crave)

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I don't hate Jaoquin Phoenix, and he's quite the opposite of a bad actor, but I just can't stand to look at the guy (and, to be clear, it has nothing to do with his cleft palate scar). Phoenix has cultivated for himself over the three decades of his career an on screen persona.  It's not that he plays the same character over and over again, but by putting Phoenix into any role, you're guaranteeing that role a certain level of uncertainty, wildness, unpredictability and discomfort. Phoenix revels in being discomforting, and he's exceptional at it. I just have a very, very hard time watching it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman had equal capacity for being discomforting, but with Hoffman I don't get the sense he revels in it. I find Hoffman could disappear into a role more, despite rarely being able to disguise his particularly distinctive appearance. Hoffman had range, and could project softness, vulnerability and tenderness as well as explosive fury and danger, and everything in between. He was one of the greatest actors of his generation. Phoenix is also a damn good actor, but I find the roles he takes have a much harder time escaping his persona.

Putting the two of them together in a film seems like oil and vinegar, two distinct but complementary flavours that will mix together if agitated, but it's temporary unity where the struggle to separate, to stand apart will simmer underneath.  So it's a credit to Paul Thomas Anderson's script, casting choices, and direction that it's not the performers who are struggling to bind together, but rather the characters.  He keeps the pair of them agitated enough that as actors they're always intermingling, but the characters are constantly in a fight to hold together when every force around them is telling them to separate.

Phoenix is the star of The Master, a WWII naval veteran named Freddie Quell who we're introduced through an opening montage of his last few weeks in the war. First impressions: he's a horny pervert who lacks self awareness. In other words, a Jaoquin Phoenix-type character. 

There's a point in these early scenes to also identify that the military system at that time was aware of the traumatic effects war has on the minds of the people who serve, but had no real interest or capacity to help them, especially when the toxic masculine ideal of the time was for men to show as little emotion as possible which ultimately results in a boiling out of anger and rage. Freddie has a hard time holding down a job, and his talent for concocting his own bespoke alcohol may have unintentionally poisoned a coworker. On the run, he winds up stowing away on a ship, which turns out to be that of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), self-described as "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, and, above all... a hopelessly inquisitive man". Dodd finds Freddie a curious man, but his immediate interest is Freddie's distilled handiwork. He likes the drink, and so he keeps Freddie on.

Well this poster doesn't accurately
sell the film at all.

Freddie, now at sea on Dodd's yacht, finds himself amidst a curious group of people, all part of "The Cause" that is, bluntly, a cult under the sway of Dodd as their "Master". The Cause believes that the body is a human recorder, that stores all of one's history within it, not just of their current life, but past lives as well. Through "processing" Dodd unlocks these past lives, and also unlocks traumas of the present.

Dodd's family includes his daughter Peggy (Amy Adams) who is perhaps an even more staunch believer in The Cause than her father (probably because Lancaster knows it's bullshit he just made up, whereas for Peggy it's a core belief she was raised with). Peggy's husband Clark (Ramy Malek) is just as much a zealot, but her brother Val (Jesse Plemons) is the sole dissenting voice in the family (though, rarely, if ever raises it). They, and the rest of the inner circle, all identify Freddie as a tainted well, as an interloper in their organization, a non-believer, but Dodd refuses to give up on him, and doubles not only his own efforts but the whole organization's.

For his part, Freddie wants to come around, wants to believe, wants to share in everything the Master is offering to him, but he can't let go, neither of the idea that it's all bullshit, nor of the trauma he holds inside of him. He's let his trauma be known to The Cause, but they're completely incapable of actually helping because there's no method to their madness. It's all just Dodd's whims and curiosity.

The film is expertly crafted, perfectly cast, with exceptional wardrobe, set design, etc. The entire production is pretty close to flawless...but I just couldn't connect with Freddie. It's the point of the character -- in an exchange with Dodd (in prison no less) they come to verbal blows, and Dodd repeats "who fucking likes you except for me!") -- but in another actor's hands Freddie wouldn't be so...off putting. It's the Phoenix effect, he can't seem to reign it in, to find other modes in a character. They always seem at the precipice of an outburst or a meltdown, certainly Freddie is. Part of Freddie's "processing" is trying to have him let go of his animalistic nature, his urges and rage and violence, but even as Freddie tempers, that still seems all too evident in Phoenix.

In the final act, time has passed, Freddie has distanced himself from The Cause when Dodd beacons him back. But to come back means he can never leave, and that's not acceptable. Freddie is seen having changed, tempered, and maybe more mindful as a result of his experience, his processing. The Cause is a fictionalization of Scientology, and Anderson is both critical and skeptical but he also sees that in this sort of time of community of examining one's inner demons, even if guided by an megalomaniac with no actual training or skills in therapy, it can be somewhat helpful in some ways.

At least that's what I figure it was trying to say. Next to the discomfiting Phoenix-ness of it all, my only real critique of The Master is that I'm not certain of the takeaway, of what we as an audience are supposed to have gotten from Freddie's journey, of what Anderson is trying to say with all this.  When I get to the inevitable PTA filmography rewatch, it may become more evident then.

---

Surprisingly, this poster predates
AI slop

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet meant a lot to me in my formative cinephile years. I first saw City of Lost Children at a small, regional festival screening and was mesmerised, and shortly thereafter he was tapped to direct Alien:Resurrection which wound up being not the film anyone wanted, and a fascinatingly beautiful, weird and bad-but-not movie. His follow-up Amélie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) is maybe a masterpiece (but I haven't watched it in decades and to be fair, I loved it so much once upon a time, I'm kind of scared to revisit it) and seemed to be an apex.  I did see A Very Long Engagement in theatre, and was not impressed. I, and seemingly half the movie-loving world, kind of lost track of him after that. 

All of his films since Amélie, have all gone well under the radar in North America, with very little fanfare surrounding them from any of the sources that likely would have championed his earlier works. But his earliest works, Delicatessen and ...Lost Children were co-directed with Marc Caro, with fantastical ideas brought to life through analog effects and a playful, if dark, sense of humour. I figure those early works with Caro were so celebrated because of what they promised from young, excitable talent. The promise was fully delivered with Amélie, and it seemed all the possibility and potential had been used up after that.

Bigbug was released on Netflix in 2022, and it's telling that I didn't actually learn of it's existence until 2024, and it's languished in my Netflix queue for two years since. As much as I loved Jeunet when I was younger, and still find his earliest works captivating, I'm not much excited by him anymore. 

In the world of comic books, an aging artist's work tends to suffer as the artist's fine motor skills, eyesight and, likely, patience degrades. Sadly and all too often the illustrations an artist in their 60s or later produce is  very much a pale imitation of what their work looked like in their heyday. Softer lines, more erratic shapes, a lack of refinement... a fuzzier version of what it once was. Bigbug is the cinematic equivalent of that idea.  Bigbug is a fuzzier version of Delicatessen. 

In a jet-set 2045 that's like a very French interpretation of The Jetsons (read, kinda horny), Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) has invited her romantic interest Max (Stéphane "I am" De Groodt) over to her tidy space-age abode full of robotic helpers, holographic viewscreens and funky modular furniture. Max has brought his teenage son Léo (Hélie Thonnat) with him. Max's welcome attempts at seduction keep getting cockblocked, whether it's by the spontaneous projection of the holo-tv, one of the robot helpers, or the interruption of the neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), Françoise's cloned dog, Alice's daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard ) or her ex, Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his fiancee Jennifer (Claire Chust).

Of course, being a COVID era production, they all get trapped in the house and cannot leave and escape proves difficult. It's a bottle episode of a film.

As noted, it's very French in its stabs at farce, but it's pretty unfocussed and trying to say too much without really saying anything meaningful at all. There's light brushings upon corporate greed, artificial intelligence, government ineptitude, overreliance on digital technology, fame culture, generational gaps, social injustices, totalitarianism, the enshittification of technology (and life, frankly) among other less than barbed critiques of modern society.

It's a pithy, frothy, vibrantly coloured morsel of a film that doesn't care much about its protagonists, doesn't really seem that concerned by the scenario at hand, and seems to think itself clever with the most rudimentary observations.  It's all presented as whimsy, but it has a hard time finding any genuine laughs. The part Jeunet seems most interested in is the revolution of the household robots, as Léo unintentionally seeds into their mindset that they are human and they spend much of the film congregating among e

The Jeunet aesthetic is most definitley there, the artistic sensibilities of the surroundings, wardrobe, hair and makeup, all feel in line with past work, if, perhaps, too reliant on digital effects and enhancements. The practical side of the movie looks great (the transforming furniture est magnifique) if sometimes agressively off-putting in an uncanny valley kind of way, but the digital effects, of which there are plenty, are unrefined...a sort of "best they could do with what they got" kind of scenario. As such there's a push-pull between the beatiful, the garish, the ugly, and the grotesque, each in intentional and unintentional ways.

As a visual stylist, Jeunet still has the goods, but along with a lack of focus, there's and a lack of ambition here. The progression of the story and the characters seems slapdash. It's as if it were created not to tell a burning story but...well, to be content on a streaming platform.  Does France have it's own Saturday Night Live? This seems like it was borne out of a hastily written sketch. 

(Side question: is this new weird?)

---

I'm nearing the end of my time with "Tales for all", the series of films from Quebecois producer Rock Demers. I've unfortunately had to skip a few places on the list as I do not have access to the five films that came after The Clean Machine but before this one, The Hidden Fortress.

With that jump in the roster also means a jump in time. Almost 10 years pass between The Clean Machine and The Hidden Fortress and so too has filmmaking. Technology, style, expectations are all drastically different in the early 2000's from the early 1990s, and it's ultra evident from the very first shot of this film. A band of armored conquistadors are on a raft floating down a (Quebec-forest-posing-as-)jungle, the natives peering on from the bushes, anticipating. Despite it not being an actual jungle, the cinematography is easily the most sumptuous of the "Tales for all" so far, and the texture of the image is crisp, clean, vibrant. 

The natives attack, and the transition is a delightful and effective one as suddenly the conquistadors are no longer adults in armor, but pre-teens in tinfoil helmets with trash can lids as shields and spray-painted vests as armor. Unfortunately, the other side is children in headdresses and clothes with tassles and face paint emulating native tribes.  The children are at war with one another, and the conquistadors are caught in a trap, pelleted with balls of mud. They call foul, and the two fluorescent-smocked kids with the thick binders start consulting the rules. Throwing mud is not expressly permitted, but it's also not expressly banned from the combat rules. 

It's almost upon six o'clock and the war is done for the day, the kids revert back to their two camps, but not before vowing to regroup the next day and revise the rules once more. One is a camping ground made up of trailers, permanently parked. The other is tents with some modest comforts fixed in indicating these are regular spots for the families to reside each year.

Siblings Marc and Sarah are on the conquistadors side, and Marc, as leader, is facing a lot of criticism from the other kids for their epic failures this summer in battle, but none are more critical than his father, Luis-George who is a wannabe alpha male full of toxic ideals about the importance of winning, of appearing to be smart, and more than anything, making those poor bastards from across the lake look bad (emphasis on the poor). He also doesn't think Sarah (or girls, in particular, should be playing war). He's a really bad dad. Marc has a Qyburn/Wormtongue-esque right-hand man who is sort of the mad scientist of the bunch with really evil and deceitful ways of engaging in nefarious warfare that just skirts the rules, starting with messing with their own camp to blame it on the kids across the river.

Meanwhile, the leader from the other side, Julien and Sarah sneak away from their camps for a romantic secret rendez-vous. Neither, at this stage, are enjoying the war too much. They're both too aware of how invested the others are in it, and even more aware of how their parents are invested in it. It turns out that Julens' parents and Sarah's dad were the leaders of the warring groups in the inaugural "Tales for all" The Dog Who Won the War, making The Hidden Fortress, in fact, a legasequel, before legasequels were really a thing.

The refinement of the rules doesn't go well, things get heated, and suddenly the rules are off, the referees quit, and it's all out war for the remaining days of camp. The titular hidden fortress is a grandiose tree house on the poor kids side that has an array of marvels within. It's a really impressive structure (obviously built by true craftspersons for safety and functionality, but it's a marvel to behold...the Ewok's Village of my wildest dreams) that poses as the prize for the winners of either side. But things get taken too far when the conquistadors start kidnapping and torturing and emotionally abusing kids from the other side. So many kids see things as going too far, but also can't conceive of the option to opt out of the game.

There's a bizarre sub-plot involving a mysterious wanderer in the woods and a bear set loose by persons unknown that only comes into view in the film's climax, during a thunderstorm when the kids find out that Julien and Sarah may be traitors, releasing secrets to the other side, and they get chased deep into the woods where they disappear, but not before the woods accidentally catch fire.

It gets real.

Where pretty much every "Tales for all" before this felt like an curio or an artifact more than a film, this one feels like an actual start-to-finish movie, with no clear budgeting issues or irreverent story beats that make no sense or bizarre fantastical twists that come out of nowhere or lacking internal consistency. I have to appreciate that it's more than just a remake of The Dog Who Won the War, but it also very lovingly follows the rhythms of that story while taking greater pains to develop the characters within and show them having richer inner lives beyond just the immediacy of the war. It's almost like it doesn't belong as part of "Tales for all" at all, it's just too well done.

It's a movie that is really quite fun although, yes, quite offensive and uncomfortable when a whole gang of children start chanting about how great it is that conquistadors annihilated native tribes of the lands they invaded. Besides that, it has heart, and humour, and intensity and charm. I was delighted, sometimes horrified, and impressed.