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: a double dose of 1985 (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Well, the world sunk deeper into the shitpile this week. Everything is rank, and I feel like I've gotten numb to the horrific smell of it all, but I know deep inside I'm in full-on existential crisis. So I'm watching a lot of media that is outside of political talking points and instead is focusing on what is being done and said by whom, and why...exposing agendas and providing points where people can fight back (it all starts with awareness and education). And when I'm not doing that, I will watch a movie to escape. 

This Week:
To Live and Die in LA (1985, d. William Friedkin - Tubi)
After Hours (1985, d. Martin Scorsese - Netflix)
The Case of the Witch that Wasn't (aka "Pas de répit pour Mélanie" - "Tales for all #10", 1990, d. Jean Beaudry - Crave)

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Longtime friend and reader (and radio host extraordinaire), GAK, directed me a couple weeks back towards To Live and Die in LA, a mid-'80's underappreciated seemingly coke-fuelled gem in the self-aware ACAB subgenre, with director William Friedkin seemingly resurrecting the tone of his 1971 hit The French Connection but with 1980s Los Angeles vibes.

And, I'm glad I took that recommendation (frankly, GAK rarely, if ever steers me wrong), because...wow. What a wild movie that, somehow, 40 years later, still had more than a few great surprises in store.

In 2022, Girls5Eva coined the acronym "B.P.E.", standing for "Big P*ssy Energy", not realizing that it already had a meaning from way back in 1985: "Big Petersen Energy" (and not just because we can see the outline of William's petersen clear enough in those tight, tight jeans to tell if he's circumcised or not (he's not).

I don't know what to call Petersen's performance here. The most common attribution I see on Letterboxed is "coked-out" but that doesn't feel quite right. It is a "much" performance, and yet it's not too much. He's hopped up on something, but it's not cocaine. It's high, aggro energy, and the dial on the asshole vibes just keeps getting turned up on his Secret Service agent investigating a counterfeitter that killed his partner. But Petersen's Agent Richard Chance is not out of control, he's searching for something and it's not quite vengeance, and it's definitely not justice.

Adrenaline. Chance is a adrenaline junkie, which leads him to push himself and his partner harder and deeper into the case than his superiors have signed off on, and ultimately leads Chance into not just skirting the law but creating outright chaos on the streets and freeways of L.A. All to get what he wants. He thinks he's doing his job, but really he's chasing a high.

Peterson runs (and runs and runs), he rolls and action hero poses with his gun, he casually hooks up with his informant, Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel) and just strutting with B.P.E. in every damn scene. His Secret Service agent seems, in the opening scene, to be a decent guy, trying to do the right thing, then he does a base jump off a bridge and chases that sensation over all else and it consumes him. 

After his partner dies, he gets a new partner, Agent Vukovich (John Pankow) who winds up being completely under Chance's sway, much like Ruth. In each, it seems like they probably started a relationship in earnest, but as Chance becomes more and more fixated on the thrill of the chase, of taking down Willem Dafoe's Rick Masters, the more callous he becomes towards everyone else. He basically negs Vukovich into helping him operate outside the law and with Ruth he start to wield his "throw her back into jail" leverage in more and more unseemly ways.

The most amazing thing about Petersen's performance is how unlike him this performance seems. A typical Peterson performance is pretty subdued, I frankly never would have thought he had something like this in him. It's disgusting and fabulous at the same time.

The Dafoe of 40 years ago does not feel all that dissimilar to the Dafoe of 20 years ago, 10 years ago or today. That man had his thing figured out early and he's so astute a performer that, while perfectly capable of making Rick Masters a larger-than-life character, it's apparent that he and the Williams figured out that Petersen's performance should be the scene stealer.  It's the magic trick of the film that by the end you basically feel like Secret Service Agents Chance and Vukovich are worse guys than Masters. At least Masters seems to have respect for women.

I would just love to scream out the biggest surprise of the film, but it's still an amazing thing to discover, and still such an atypical move for any film to make, I don't want to spoil. I loved it, I cheered out loud, it gave me a mini-adrenaline rush that would make Chance envious.

All of this accompanied by Friedkin's oversaturated lens that makes L.A. feel like an alien world (which fits with Petersen's practically inhuman vibe). There's a grit and dirt to this L.A. that, unlike, say the grimy shadows in New York of The French Connection, here the sun is baking down and exposing that grunge everywhere you look. This skeevy feeling story is only bolstered by a fully of-the-era Wang Chung soundtrack that is somehow  atrocious and really, really rocks. 

The Miami Vice influence is so goddamn strong that you can see why this may have gone under the radar as a knock-off or try-hard. But it doesn't just try, it succeeds, and you could make an argument that maybe it does it better (you would probably lose that argument but you could still make it). Radical.

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From the West Coast of 1985 to the East Coast, Martin Scorsese takes us on a trip into the wild nightlife of Manhattan's artsy SoHo district.

Me and Mr. Scorsese's films don't really get along. Whatever wavelength that man is operating on, I just don't have a receiver for.  He may be one of the maestros of modern American cinema, but I remind myself that I am not an American, and that may have something to do with it. (Toasty and me, we row the same boat.)

But maybe there's something else to it, and After Hours may be the key.

After Hours was sold to me as a comedy, an grandiose one-crazy-night spectacle of chaos I would most assuredly delight in. I was not amused.

I think in most any other director's hands, After Hours would be a farce, but between Scorsese's fingers he can't help but try to squeeze for blood in this stone to prove it's human. What I mean to say is Scorsese doesn't seem capable of comedy, he can't see past the humanity in a scene or sequence, and so what should be a broadly comedic set piece winds up feeling far more dramatic than what the script intended.

The few Scorsese pictures I've seen are relatively humourless affairs (The Wolf of Wall Street seems the closest he can get to comedy, and that's appears more a satire than a straight-up chucklefest...but I haven't seen it). After Hours was clearly drafted as a comedy and even casted as one. You don't have people Teri Garr, Catherine O'Hara, and Cheech and Chong in a film like this unless you're aiming for funny... and yet, Scorsese's aim is so far off it's like he didn't even know where the target was. The few chuckles I did get in this thing seem almost accidental.

The situation finds a somewhat hapless, lonely, professional word processor Paul (Griffin Dunne) meeting a flirtatious young woman, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a restaurant one lonely evening. They talk about the book "Tropic of Cancer" and she tells him about a friend of hers she's staying with selling plaster bagel paperweights, and to call her if he wants one. So when he gets home, he calls, and is invited over. Along the way he loses what little cash he has on him when it blows out of the cab window. At the apartment, Marcy is missing and her friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) is shirtless making a papier mache sculpture which she then enlists his help in. Things get a bit flirtatious there, I guess, and Paul makes move on her but she passes out from exhaustion. Then Marcy shows up, and ultimately she turns out to be more on the manic end of the manic pixie dream girl spectrum than the dream girl end, and he runs out fleeing in the rain.  Things just escalate from there, until he ultimately winds up running from an unruly mob looking for blood and into the den of a woman who seems like a spider who just trapped a fly.

All of this should be played as heightened and crazy as possible, but Scorsese keeps subduing his actors, having them find the humanity in the character, in the scene, and it constantly deflates the comedic tension. Instead the feeling is more...anxiety, and a bit of pathos, which aren't very funny emotions.

All the women in this film that Paul meets are on some spectrum of insane, and it reflects rather poorly on Scorsese that this is the case. (I don't know of a Scorsese story that is female led, now that I'm thinking of it. A quick look at his filmography, the only possible contenders: Boxcar Bertha, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and The Age of Innocence... I haven't seen any of them.) I can't make any sweeping statements about what Scorsese's viewpoint on women are, and I wouldn't fully judge him based solely on this film alone, but the women here are sketches and had they been allowed to be dialled into a broad comedy, they would be (mostly) pretty funny, but here we are. 

Paul, as a character, is at first driven by his libido. He's looking to hook up with Marcy...or Kiki...or whomever, but eventually that drive is overruled by his desire to just go home, but he can't seem to leave SoHo. Is he in some form of purgatory because he had lusty thoughts? Despite thinking too deeply about how Paul would be feeling in any given moment, it doesn't seem to be thinking that deeply about what got him there in the first place. It seems like Scorsese's wants to play into comedy tropes that he knows from watching so many movies, but he just can't let himself...he can't fight his instincts. I mean Marcy winds up dying from a drug overdose, and then Paul can't help but pull the sheets off her naked body (whether it's to ogle or look for burns, I don't really know, but either way, it's just too much for the moment). Paul does call it in, but he does also leave the scene, and leaves up "Dead Body" with arrows signs up in the loft, which is almost funny.

After Hours seems like one of Scorsese's biggest struggles. He's attempting a genre that is not a natural fit for him. He has this script that is, really, really quite tight, so much so it seems impossible to fail. But it does fail, and it all comes down to the director. It seems every actor is giving Scorsese exactly what he wants, but he doesn't know how to establish a tone outside of gritty realism at this stage. For Scorsese, heightened realism is maybe a half notch higher than what he normally does, at least at this stage in his career and that's still way too earthy for this material.

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The Case of the Witch Who Wasn't, or, rather, "No rest for Mélanie" mercifully finds the tenth entry in the "Tales for all" series back in Quebec with a legit French audio track rather than the weird dubbed melange of languages dubbed fully into one French or English without any real sense of syncing.

While the English title might hint at something supernatural in play, the French title is certainly more appropriate, as the story finds Mélanie's pen pal Florence, visiting her on her farm for the summer and the two wind up trying to "tame" the grumpy old witch lady, Madame Labbe.

Their method of "taming" her are acts of kindness, bringing her flowers or a hanging plant, knitting her a scarf, putting a bow on the collar of her pet pig Rose. Eventually they befriend Madame Labbe, just in time to find her hog tied on her bed after being robbed and Rose being stolen. The girls, along with Mélanie's brother and some other area kids, start investigating the break in and tracking down the thieves. Meanwhile, Mme. Labbe has become despondent and is not eating or caring for herself, and when she catches ill, the doctor says she'll likely have to be put in a home. 

Mélanie basically treats Mme. Labbe as she would treat her pet llama, or their dog or any other farm animal. She knows Mme. Labbe is human, but she reacts to her and how others react to her as if she were a possession. It's truly bizarre, but then I expect nothing less out a "Tales for all" at this point. It's like watching an alternate dimension where people in these films don't act or react like people do on our earth.

The most bizarre, and the most challenging aspect of the film is not the "taming" of Mme. Labbe, nor is it the intense moment of discovering her tied up after a robbery, or the amateur sleuthing of young children, it's the handling of Florence's arrival to town.

Florence is black, which the film doesn't treat as a capital "I" Issue, merely a lower-case "i" issue. At first, Mélanie's response to Florence's appearance is one of shock, only because we learn that Florence had sent Mélanie a picture of her white friend and has basically been writing to her details about her white friend's life...catfishing her to some degree (it also turns out Mélanie had left many details out about her life and family as well, so it's a two way street...of lies!).  And then the microagressions come out. On the face of it they seem like the good intentions of a nieve production company, but from a very modern standpoint it's absolutely cringe-inducing some of the questions poor Florence has to field. (Oh, and not to mention the scene where Mélanie accidentally takes something from the antiques shop they were investigating and when the cops roll up behind them Mélanie hands the stolen item to Florence to hide in her dress. Mélanie is not an ally.)

There's obviously a far more interesting story to be told from Florence's POV here, but that just wasn't something that the late 1980's were capable of, and so instead Florence's visit to rural Quebec winds up being a rather tertiary aspect of this trying-to-be-sweet movie.

But it's not a sweet movie. It objectifies people in a very weird way and it features a lead character whose sketchy behaviour ultimately has her rewarded with everything she desires in the end. If it didn't make me so uncomfortable, I'd be kind of impressed by it.

 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Knox Goes Away

2023, Michael Keaton (The Merry Gentlemen) -- Amazon

Two movies directed by Keaton, two movies about hitmen. I wonder what's up with that.

Another movie about a hitman diagnosed with memory issues, though John Knox's CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) is definitely the worst. By the time he is confirmed to have contracted it, he is in the last few weeks. I said, in my write up of The Killer's Game that it generally has something to do with having consumed "mad cow brain" and articles do say, "only through an injection or consuming infected brain or nervous tissue." But a bit further reading says just the consumption of infected meat can cause. The little detail in the movie of having an opening scene with the two killers, John (Michael Keaton, The Founder) and his partner Muncie (Ray McKinnon, Mayans MC), eating steaks in a shitty diner, was nice.

Memory issues are on my mind of late (until I forget) because dementia is around me. Being of an age where most of my peer group have aging parents, its not surprising their are such things happening, but also being of an age, my brain is no longer storing more than it should. I notice that more and more I am having "those moments" where I lose names of people or things, especially when put on the spot. I just blank out entirely, lose the word, sit still and struggle to put together a trigger for the word, or just plain give up. And let's not get into the "nope, I have no recollection of that..." conversations with Marmy. I am sure its just age, stress, diet, stress but it chills me to the bone when I see these depictions of it.

Two things happen after the diagnosis: he accidentally kills his partner, after having a moment, and his estranged son Miles (James Marsden, Paradise) shows up on his doorstep, covered in blood and panicking. Miles has killed the 30sumthin supremacist who has been sexually assaulting his 16 year old daughter. If anyone knows how to deal with a murder scene, its his father. Knox goes to a close friend and fixer, Xavier Crane (Al Pacino, The Irishman), to build a plan, not just for putting his final affairs in order, but also to remove his son from suspicion forever.

A nice detail that the movie skips the typical hitman / enforcer tropes where its a challenge to get out of the business. Its not like they have a choice, but in other examples, the only way out is death. But Crane presents as a true friend, knowing Knox will not be able to keep on track without help. There isn't a lot of emotion in their relationship, just two criminals saying, "Yep, let's do this." Loyalty. Understanding.

In many ways this is a more thoughtful movie than others of its ilk. Keaton puts a sympathetic hand on Knox but doesn't shy away from exactly how terrible it is to just ... go away. Eventually the disease will not only steal away his memories but also his body's memories on how to function, and he will die. Knox has a lot to do in that short time, in order to clear his son's name, and setup the people he cares for with the money he has made. I still marvel at Keaton compared to how his career started as there is not a hint of funny man here. This is a sobre, focused movie, and while not groundbreaking in any manner (I again repeat, things don't have to be new to be good) it does its job well.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Absolution

2024, Hans Petter Moland (Cold Pursuit) -- download

I went into this to see another "Liam Neeson as aging ______" (no tag) and, yes, it is that, but it was also something .... more. Not perfectly so, but it at least had the conceit of trying to be more than just its premise, which is, "said aging thug discovers he has ill and will see his memory & functionality drastically fade in less than three years." This is not the first time Neeson has played a version of this character (not literally, but a man of violence with memory issues), but this time, its not as slick, which lent itself to credibility for me. 

Neeson's "Thug" (Liam Neeson, Derry Girls) doesn't even get a name, and he is called just that in the credits, and apparently that was also the original name for the movie. He works for the Conners, one of those low rent gangsters that eke out an existence doing work for other more connected criminal organizations. As we see them, there is just Charlie (Ron Perlman, Poker Face), his son Kyle (Daniel Diemer, Under the Bridge), and Thug, who spends most of his days walking around collecting protection money from business owners who treat him as much as one of the neighbourhood, as anything. He's tough but you can see that he's losing it, forgetting basic things like his boss's name and where he lives. And after seeing specialist, where he learns he has CTE for years of head injuries, he decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

Thug is not a good man. He knows he comes from a legacy of angry, abusive men and while he regrets what he let himself become, he also doesn't really try to change it. But his clock is ticking so he takes the gun out of his mouth and does the work to reestablish a relationship with Daisy (Frankie Shaw, SMILF), his daughter, and his grandson. Her life hasn't been much better than his, but everyone seems to be looking for connection no matter how tenuous. This isn't a movie of grand gestures and emotional awareness, but it gets the job done.

Memory loss is all around me these days, as I age, as parents age even more. I see myself going from the guy who could remember the face and name, instantly, of someone he met 20 years ago to doing the "you know, that guy in that movie that came out last year...". Sure, the stress of the past decade has lent itself to that, and its expected to diminish somewhat as you age, but .... it frightens me. I have never been the most lucid guy to begin with, prone to letting my brain go down rabbit holes, staring into space, losing time, but the idea of losing entireties of myself is ... terrifying.

There is now one more "aging hit man" movie to watch, "Knox Goes Away", on Amazon, with Michael Keaton.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Wolfs

2024, John Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming) -- download

Weird, but the main thing I liked about this movie was how it was shot.... the winter happening in NYC, snow coming down, turning to slush in the next scene, being depicted as heavier & sticking around the further from Manhattan the characters got, the emptiness of the city close to Xmas. Also, Aging Men with Guns which is my thing, but I refused to attach a tag to it. 

Again, with the inserting into October and the "I Saw This!!" vibes.

Margaret (Amy Ryan, The Wire) is somebody, a woman with the pull to call someone else to clean up her mess. This particular mess is a dead kid in his underwear and her covered in his blood. "Margaret's Man", as he is called in the credits but we will call Clooney (George Clooney, The American) from this point on (maybe he comes from "Margaret's Museum" ?) as that nomenclature is too bulky (like the word "nomenclature" isn't?) shows up -- an Aging Man with Gun, black jacket and a fixer's kit bag. She called a number, he came, he has a plan.

Then "Pam's Man" shows up, whom we will call Pitt (Brad Pitt, The Mexican) from now on. Pam is the hotel's owner who saw everything in the not so hidden camera and activated fixer Pitt to clean things up. He's a veritable clone of Clooney and they instantly see it and instantly dislike each other. That is the elevator pitch for the movie. Well, that and the body or "The Kid", who we will continue to call Kid (Austin Abrams, Dash & Lily), is not dead, just really out of it due to the amount of pure heroin he put up his nose. Said heroin is the actual focus of the movie, the MacGuffin the characters have to get back to its original owner before all shit hits all fans.

No point in going over the plot, as its all fun chase scenes and "old married couple" banter between Pitt and Clooney and Kid, a kid out of his depth, just being weird. Kid is really the highlight of this movie, running around either in his underwear or in the not-chosen outfit for Margaret. He starts off as all grunts and energy to spare which he burns off running from Clooney and Pitt. But eventually he is onboard with the plan.

"It was fine," as I am wont to say. Amusingly this was more Clooney and Pitt from the coffee commercials than it was cranky, crafty, aging fixers. But still, they are always charming. And I like any opportunity to visit the somewhat-comparable-age of an "action hero" character.

Kent's view -- we agree.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Retribution

2023,  Nimród Antal (Predators) -- download

I honestly expected I would have a few posts of movies with Antal, lumping him into the category of "European directors provided the occasional Hollywood flick because they made a name for themselves", but, really, Predators was the only one I wrote about. But I do recall seeing and really enjoying 2003's Kontroll which means here, in Toronto, so likely Toronto After Dark or TIFF ? Also, he has done more in Hollywood than he ever did when he moved to Hungary to build a film career, actually have been born in California.

Anywayz. Another Liam Neeson as aging ____ movie (never really did the tag) and I still think they are being muddy with his supposed age in these movies. Neeson is 71. In the movie, he has two teenage kids and worked as a financier for his German company for 18 years. That would have made him 53 before he started working there and had the kids. I shouldn't be ageist, as it is possible to start a life in your mid-fifties, but ... likely? Let's just chalk it up for my own age and identity issues.

Anywayz. Matt Turner (Liam Neeson, The Ice Road) is a financier who very quickly is portrayed as a bit shady, a bit manipulative and is used by his CEO Anders Muller (Matthew Modine, Stranger Things) to get clients to do as is needed. And there is tension in his family. On his way driving his kids to school, something he never does, he is contacted via a planted mobile phone and alerted there is a bomb under his seat. If he stops driving, calls the cops or gets out of the car, it will blow up. To confirm the authenticity of his claims, the masked voice on the other end of the phone blows up one of Turner's colleagues in front of him, which also frames Matt as the bomber. The masked voice wants money, because of course he does, from a hidden slush fund that Matt and Muller have hidden away in Dubai.

The movie is typical cat & mouse, misdirection and chase scenes. Neeson is, of course, very capable as the man trying to wrest back control of a terrible situation and very believable as the fearful dad. The rest is just the usual playbook of these movies, which is not inherently bad, for I did enjoy watching it, as I almost always do, but I wouldn't have complained about a bit more meat to the story.

KWIF: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (+4)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, where each week (or so) I have a spotlight movie, of which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I have watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This week:
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023, d. James Mangold - in theatre)
Asteroid City (2023, d. Wes Anderson - in theatre)
J.S.A.: Joint Security Area (2000, d. Park Chan-wook, tubi)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002, d. Park Chan-wook, plex)

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With the Mutt-tinted, jungle-vine-swinging, giant-fire-ant-crawling bar set pretty low, the latest Indiana Jones adventure delivered a far more engaging and entertaining movie than I thought possible with an octogenarian Harrison Ford. Although he does seem pretty creaky, the still dashing and far from frail-looking Ford seems to be delighted with some of his more recent co-stars, like the cast of Shrinking (most specifically young Lukita Maxwell) and definitely Phoebe Waller-Bridge. He seems to - like we all should - bask in the luminous presence of a fiery, energetic talent, absorbing their energy like rays of the sun (I haven't watched 1923, but I can only imagine he does the same with Helen Mirren).

Waller-Bridge here plays Indy's estranged goddaughter, Helena Shaw. As the film reminds us, Indy is terrible at family, and if you pay close attention to Raiders of the Lost Ark, he's kind of not a good guy, despite being the hero of the piece. Helena enters the picture as a seemingly chipper acolyte of the Indiana Jones brand, but very quickly proves that her allegiances are her own, as are her less-than altruistic intentions. She draws a mournful, self-loathing Indy out of his funk and back onto an adventure that he wouldn't otherwise survive if not for having good fortune, good friends, whip-smarts and a smart whip. 

Helena gets to be the action hero stand-in for moments where old-man Indy would otherwise seem far-fetched (and has to play the rescuer of her aged godfather on multiple occasions, not unlike Indy had to with a still robust Sean Connery back in The Last Crusade), but that does not deprived Ford of his own adventurous moments as well. Indy is definitely not "along for the ride", but the film, both in world and in a metatextual sense, is well aware Indy is not the man he used to be.

If that's a sticking point for the fans, I get it. It's painful to watch your heroes age and be sort of shadows of what they once were. One could look at Star Trek: Picard, or Rick Flair wrestling at 75, or Top Gun:Maverick (or, as a recent knock-off action figure called it, "Top Pilot Maverich"), these kind of sad attempts to recapture the boomer magic, or one's youth, or to validate ones worth as they see themselves replaced. I didn't feel that with Dial of Destiny. Mangold, with Logan, seems to understand the melancholy of aging, how to let it exist within a story without ignoring it when it nor overwhelming it. He seems to get how to present it as the flavour text of an action-adventure film. If you just don't want to see it, or dislike seeing it, that's understandable, but it is well done here.

The film opens with a cracking half hour, an end-of-war 1945 set piece that feels like prime Indiana Jones. It's a pretty satisfying short on its own. After the terrible, godawful, upsetting CGI face-swapping effects of The Flash, the deaging/deefakery of this film is pretty solid (seriously guys, we need to stop complaining about the quality of deepfaking in films, because it's just going to incentivize "them" to try and perfect it, and then we'll be in serious trouble when we can't actually tell). The alternative would be throwing Alden Ehrenreich in there (former Young Indy portrayer Sean Patrick Flannery is almost 60 now, and River Phoenix would've been 55). It's *barely* distracting, at least to me, your milage may vary.

With both Crystal Skull and Dial of Destiny I've heard heaps of complaints about going too far with the finale, as if aliens or time travel are any more fantastical or unbelievable than the wrath of god, hearts being pulled out of chests in ritualistic sacrifice, or meeting a centuries-old knight guarding they holy grail. What Dial of Destiny maybe doesn't get right is it spends too much time there, and the longer it spends the more problematic it becomes (especially from an archeological standpoint). It could have been more swift and clever but it ultimately didn't bother me in the viewing, nor in hindsight

Timing is a problem with much of the film, action sequences or set pieces do have a tendency to  overstay their welcome. There's a chase to kick off the second act that takes us through the streets of Tangier that seems to be exploring every street and alley the city has to offer. Earlier this year, Dungeons & Dragons put on a masterclass on setpiece economy, and a lot of films could stand to learn from it, this one included.

Like with the sequel trilogy of Star Wars, this film will please or displease depending on your ability to accept characters having moved past their heroic archetype mode into more complex people. If you love the Indy series from the 80's and always wished there were more adventures of the characters you love from the time when you first loved them, well, that's really not going to happen, at least not on film, and not with the performers who made the roles what they are. Is it better to let sleeping dogs lie than to watch your heroes become old and fragile, and possibly die on screen? Why are we okay with heroic sacrifice of the young in films, but seeing them age, and confront their flaws is a step too far? Does it ruin what came before to see where they wind up? Or does it just expose our own discomfort with acknowledging the years have crept up on us too? Should our escapist movies be total escapism, or can't something real, even meaningful, not slip through? 

This is a legitimately fine, enjoyable, often fun adventure movie, with sharp dialogue and John Williams giving one last horn-filled kick at the can (it's not his best or most memorable work, but it helps carry the through line of the series). Even better, it's a legitimately fine, enjoyable, often fun Indiana Jones movie that at least closes out the series with a truly beautiful moment that made me weepy.

Letting go of nostalgia, this is total middle of the road, but having seen Indy at its most offensive, middle of the road will certainly do.  I'd rank it 3rd in the series. Certainly not better that Raiders or Last Crusade, but Far less problematic than Temple of Doom, much less aggravating than Crystal Skull, and far less ridiculous than either (but with the right level of ridiculousness for an Indiana Jones movie).

The Flash Scale: better than The Flash

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Asteroid City is the new Wes Anderson movie. If you like Wes Anderson movies, there's a pretty good chance you'll like this one as well. If you despise Wes Anderson movies, this won't change your mind.

Where often an Anderson movie can dazzle with ornate imagery, full of precision details that kind of boggle the mind, the nesting-doll structure of Asteroid City with it's mid-50's setting, is much more spare but exactly as precise. In the theatre setting that frames the film, the stage is evocatively decorated, rather than built up to the nines in usual Anderson fashion, all coded perfectly to pop in black and white. In the story-within-the-story of the town of Asteroid City, it's a very orange-saturated midwestern desert landscape with not a lot to see along the vista but a few clouds and mountains.  A (puppet? stop-motion? cgi?) road-runner darts across the screen from time to time, eliciting a "meep-meep" implying this exists within a surrealist Looney Tunes environment.

The massive cast of Anderson devotees and new conscripts descend upon the town where five brainiac children who have created wild inventions of science are being given an honour from science and/or military (there's a point to be made about how often advancements in science tend to be as a result of military backing) as well as gathering to witness a unique solar phenomenon.  When that solar phenomenon attracts a strange visitor, and word leaks through the military lockdown, pandemonium happens. But that's all the story within the story. The ur-story is about the writer of "Asteroid City", his casting process, fears and triumphs, which are displayed as a stage play that surrounds the making of "Asteroid City" as a stage production itself. This tier has Bryan Cranston in a Rod Serling-esque role standing outside of it all, narrating from a distance creating yet another level of separation from the telling.

The common thread between both the story and the story within the story is the connection between characters, how they interact and relate, which is all in that expected Anderson dead-pan snappy patter. The fact that both levels are still presented as fiction seems to allow Anderson to push this rapid-fire dialogue even further away from emotional performance.  What I noticed here, and can likely be applied to most, if not all Anderson films, is everyone is forthright and honest. There's little to no inference nor subtext to the dialogue. People speak their truth in an Anderson world, which I think is what makes it so disarmingly funny, but also what Anderson haters likely rebuke.  If one were to accuse Anderson of artificiality, it's not a false accusation, it's kind of the whole point. I have to wonder if Anderson is trying to understand human emotion, or if he understands it so intimately it allows him to explore it with such dispassionate interest.

I found Asteroid City an absolute delight, full of all the usual hallmarks, but also many, many surprises. I came out of it wondering what exactly Anderson was trying to say through the artifice and still have no idea. But I have no problem just enjoying what is presented at face value, and maybe, upon repeat viewings, it will unveil itself.

The Flash Scale: you better believe it's better than The Flash

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Being a comic book nerd, I took notice of J.S.A many many years ago, because to me "J.S.A." means "Justice Society of America", the original superhero team from the golden age of comics. Here, "J.S.A." means "Joint Security Area" as in the bordering area between North and South Korea where each side have their own military police, but the location is administered by United Nations Command.  Not quite the same thing.

I don't think I ever knew, until quite recently, that J.S.A.: Joint Security Area was a Park Chan-wook film, nor did I have any concept of what the film was about. I knew it was a record-setting film from South Korea, but I gauged that film against the typical American blockbuster, which is my own dumb bias. The poster/DVD cover looked pretty drably like S.W.A.T. or some other cliched police action drama, so I never bothered to explore what the film was actually about.

Turns out its a fascinating dramatic tragedy about cross-zone agents from both sides who wind up becoming incredible friends, but can't ever seem to fully shake the conditioning that each of their respective governments have instilled in them about the "other side". Eventually they are discovered, and an incident erupts.  This brings in neutral forces from the U.N. to investigate the incident.  

The film opens with Lee Young-ae's Swiss-born, but of Korean descent, Major Sophie E. Jean as she starts her investigation, with persons of interest on both side of the border having delivered clearly fabricated, conflicting reports of the incident.  Sophie's investigation takes up the first act of the film, but is almost an extended red herring as to what the film is actually going to be.  Where we think it's to be some form of investigative procedural, the second act backtracks to the beginning and through the development of the friendships between the North and South Korean men, and then the third act is largely about the incident, and how the fallout impacts the men, as viewed through Sophie's eyes.

It's a surprisingly delicate story that ponders the complicated history between the Koreas, and really wants to assess how the two countries view each other. The point, I think, is to portray both sides as human, and not as something "other".  I don't know that the procedural element of it is fully necessary, and, aside from providing some key history about the post-war division tied to Sophie's origins, I don't think it contributed much.  But, overall, a captivating, enlightening, and heartbreaking film, though light on the visual flourishes that would become benchmarks of Park's directorial style.

The Flash Scale: better better than The Flash

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Park had done two poorly-received films prior to J.S.A. which caused him to quit directing for a time (during which he returned to film criticism).  The success of J.S.A. really bolstered his confidence and boosted his career, and led him into the torturous revenge dramas that would come to be known as his "Vengeance Trilogy".

Old Boy is Park's most famous film (in North America, at least), the one that crossed over, and Lady Vengeance is seen as the, let's say... enjoyable one of the trilogy, but Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance really set the tone for what Park's career would become. It's clear from J.S.A. and Sympathy that Park is really fascinated by tragedy, and while J.S.A. takes it very, very seriously, Sympathy is a whole different beast altogether.

The "Mr. Vengeance" of the title isn't a single individual. The story of the film is a two sided coin, always connected but one side cannot see the other. The first side finds Ryu (Shin Ha-kyun), a deaf-mute factory worker laid off just as he's trying to save his ailing sister with a necessary kidney transplant. Ryu is not a match, and so he "trades" his liver for another, only to wake up post-surgery to find he's scammed. Ryu's anti-capitalist, revolutionary girlfriend, Yeong-mi (Sens8's Bae Doona) convinces him to kidnap his ex-boss's daughter, with the promise that they won't be evil kidnappers but to have the child love hanging out with them.  Without saying too much, things don't go well. 

The flipping point finds the boss, played by the impeccable Song Kang-ho (also from J.S.A. and Oscar-winner for Parasite) out on his own mission of vengeance against the Ryu and Yeong-mi, with its own disastrous consequences.

It's all just a pile-on of misfortune and misery, but it's (attempted at least) to be tempered with an exceptionally irreverent sense of humour throughout. This would be devastatingly funny if director Park weren't so good at elevating the tragedy out of the surreal. As is, it's too painful to laugh.  It's a visually stunning picture, with shot composition and colour sense that still seem utterly unique 20 years later.  Park is clearly criticizing the health care system in South Korea with this film, as well as satirizing its capitalistic nature. It's clear he's not a fan of either, but without more knowledge, I'm not well versed on the true impact of the critique, except to say that I felt it.

I didn't like watching this movie, I found it challenging to enjoy, but it's so purposeful and well crafted that  it's really, really hard to dislike, and impossible to dismiss.

The Flash Scale: can't really even be put in the same conversation as The Flash. It's like comparing apples to The Flash.

I Saw This!! Bid Adieu to '22 (TV Edition)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent (me) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Or, maybe not so bad.  What's the worst that could happen?

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Parallels - Disney+

I watched Parallels so long ago that it feels like I watched it in 2021.  Is that possible?  (No, it debuted in March).  So far on Disney+ I've not encountered many foreign language D+ "originals", and yet Parallels is a French production, but promoted as a D+ original.  Curious.  

Anyway, the show is a 6-episode sci-fi drama that clearly was inspired by Netflix's smash German time travel mind-fuck, Dark. I was expecting, given this being a Disney production starring teenagers, that this would be a stripped-down drama, one with more teen angst in the Young Adult mode, but to my surprise it doesn't hold back from some heavier emotional implications.  A group of four friends head to an old bunker they've turned into a hang out space, only to get caught in the side-effects of a supercollider experiment.  After the experiment, two of the teens are missing, Bilal and Sam.  Sam's troubled younger brother, Victor, and his crush, Romane, are left behind, unable to explain to their families what happened to the others.  Meanwhile Sam finds himself in an alternate reality where everyone else is gone and a cloud of suspicion surrounds him and Bilal shows up, but a 37-year-old man.  What happens after I've basically forgotten at this point, but I recall being impressed with the mystery while at the same time being completely unable to shake the feeling that this was all familiar territory.  It really did have so many shades of Dark that I couldn't help but compare the two.  Dark was an ambitious multi-season epic that required deep investment into the plot, characters and timelines.  Parallels is a much slimmer affair, to the point that its finale, while providing closure, doesn't seem wholly satisfying to what it built up to.  Then again, with only six episodes, most clocking in between 30 and 40 minutes, there's not a lot of runway to really build up to something big.  

If you haven't seen Dark, this is like an entry level version of it, if you want to test the waters to see if you can both handle the timey-wimeyness of it, as well as subtitles.

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The Old Man Season 1 - FX

Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow together again, for the first time?  Without doing a minimum amount of research, it seems like Bridges and Lithgow should have been in a whole string of movies together and that this series was a marked "reunion" of the two.  Kind of like how Heat brought DeNiro and Pachino together for the first time, but it seemed like the two had been acting in films together for years.  Anyway, the Old Man should have been EVENT television, but we're in a serious golden age of TV, an abundance of riches, and as such, this union of two massive acting talents kind of fell under the radar.

The Old Man finds Bridges as an old time operative who has been operating off the radar for a very, very long time.  But, just because he's been carefully working in the shadows doesn't mean that people aren't still looking for him.  When his current guise is compromised, he runs, and winds up sheltering as a border with Amy Brenneman.  The two have a bit of a thing, but when she's threatened by her association with him, he essentially kidnaps her to keep her safe.  This dynamic is the most potent, as well as the most difficult aspect of the series.  Bridges genuinely likes her and is affectionately trying to keep her out of harm's way, but at the same time Brenneman is completely at his mercy in a very much damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't way.  But, she also proves herself adaptable with her own level of cunning and shrewdness and I do quite love how her story plays out.  Meanwhile, we learn about Bridges' daughter (Alia Shawkat) who is his inside man at the CIA, working directly under Lithgow as his protege, and close family friend.  There's definitely conflicted emotions in all of that that do get explored rather nicely.

And then, this whole time, we're thinking "The Old Man" is Bridges, or possibly both Bridges and Lithgow, but no...they were both working together for a time under The Old Man (Joel Gray) who is both above and beyond the normal pecking order of operations in the world of espionage they exist in.  Add to the mix a hitman and his handler (Gbenga Akinnagbe, Ecko Kellum) who have their orders and their own objectives, and it all swirls into a grand mess of who's-really-in-charge and what's-the-real-threat.  It's a twisty, exciting, gripping series that would maybe have been tighter as a film, but it's never a bad time with either of its two leads on the screen (it keeps them apart for the bulk of the first season, save for a scintillating phone call or two, so that when they do eventually come together it feels like a suitably massive moment).  

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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1 - Amazon Prime 

I tried reading The Lord of the Rings once.  I got bored very, very quickly.  I've watched Peter Jackson's films a couple times.  I do get bored, frequently, watching those (most of The Two Towers holds my attention, though).  I skipped The Hobbit films, because I knew if I found the LOTR trilogy boring with all the intricate details from Tolkien's books filling out the world, that a trilogy based off one much slimmer book would be dicey viewing.  I was not at all excited for The Rings of Power, if based on Tolkien's works at all, it'd be loosely off the materials collected and expanded upon posthumously.

But, the wife, she likes her fantasy.  And there's the curiosity factor of seeing Bezos put his money where his nerdy heart lives, putting a billion dollars into a season of television like a man for whom money has lost all meaning.  So I watched The Rings of Power and found myself...surprisingly...invested.  Where others, for valid reasons and for toxic ones, have found LOTR:ROP unwatchable, I actually looked forward to that hour every Friday where I would be transported to Middle Earth, watching hobbits and orcs and dwarves and elves explore their religious beliefs, call into question their societal tenets, confront their prejudices, all in the name of quests, quests, quests.  Like the slow sci-fi of Andor, this is slow fantasy, taking its time, exploring its world, the people that live in it, and how they live in it.  How they choose to accept or defy the order of things.  I thought, based on the trailers, that LOTR:ROP would be populated by a cast of not-ready-for-primetime-players, the type of fantasy cast you'd see on the syndicated productions like Xena or Hercules but I was surprised there too.  They may not be big names or recognizable faces, but they are talented, attractive people who buy into the world, and make it all come to life.  And jesus, do they ever look great doing it.  The sets, the costumes, makeup, hair, armor, weapons, decor, all of it is to.the.nines.  It's gorgeous, and the razzle dazzle of an opulent production does go a long long way.  Do I remember a single character's name?  No.  But I can picture the whole season pretty vividly in my mind.  As much as I can get bored by fantasy, I really did like every story in this (but the stuff with the dwarves was my favourite).  Your mileage may vary.

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She-Hulk: Attorney At Law Season 1- Disney+

I really dig She-Hulk as a character. Since John Byrne's meta-adventurous run in the late 1980's with the character, Jen Walters has been mainly positioned as a fun character in the Marvel Universe.  Before Deadpool was addressing his audience in the comics, She-Hulk was breaking the fourth-wall, but not in an imp-ish way that other comedic characters would in comics.  She-Hulk's adventures still mattered, still had stakes, but there was a narrative device, and an injection of Looney Tunes into the proceedings that really made her title stand out.  The 20 years later, the Charles Soule run of She-Hulk, on which the TV show is loosely riffing on, focussed on Jen as a lawer, and on making a workplace sitcom set in a law office and courtrooms, basically a superheroic Ally McBeal, with only a minimal amount of fourth wall breaking.

I was really into the idea of a She-Hulk TV show, especially with Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany in the lead (she was outstanding in that show, and having heard her on comedy podcast, knew that she could more than handle a sitcom leading role).  But then the trailer came out, the one with the unfinished Shulkie, and the trailer wasn't selling the comedy very well either.  I was nervous.  And that nervousness bled through to watching every episode, week-by-week, and it never let up.  I was not relaxed watching the show the first time around, and I was nitpicking it to death, to the point that I had convinced myself that it was a show that tried too hard and failed.

But, I gave it a second shot, binged it in one sitting, and found myself absolutely delighted almost every moment.  Knowing what was going to happen, knowing who the players were, not anticipating any surprises, taking myself out of MCU-SPECULATION-MODE (which is a horrible place to be sometimes) and just sitting back with the show, it's super-duper fun. It's really not trying too hard.  It successfully negotiates adapting the character, adapting the Soule run, integrating different aspects of the MCU, introducing new aspects to the MCU, playing with the fourth wall, and getting more than a few laughs every episode, while also investing you in the character and her journey in a big-budgeted sitcom kind of way.  It's impressive.  Sure, not every scene with She-Hulk looks perfect.  It's a tough effect to pull off even on a heightened Marvel TV budget, but, once you're used to it, it's mostly good enough for now.  I mean, do I have the hots for the big green lady?  What I think is the biggest contributing factor She-Hulk brings to the MCU is sexuality.  With the exception of Tony Stark's more lecherous tendencies in the early Iron Man movies and a tepid love scene in the Eternals, sex is almost never acknowledged in the MCU, but here Jen is sexually active, and sexually proactive. In perhaps my favourite turn of events, she wheels Matt Murdock (so great to see Charlie Cox again, and playing the character in a lighter capacity) who then is the next morning seen doing the walk of shame barefoot in his Daredevil costume, boots in hand.  My favourite single moment of the series (it makes no logical sense, but it's still brilliantly executed).  It's great fun, with a great cast (love Ginger Gozaga and Josh Segarra, and Patty Guggenheim's Madisynn is the ultimate scene stealer), and lots of epic moments all pointedly fun.  I went from thinking this was maybe not good to now thinking it's maybe the best Disney+ Marvel show.  Can't wait for more, but also can't wait to watch it again.

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Lego Masters Season 3 - Fox

Lego Masters Australia Season 1&2 - Discovery

Lego Masters UK Season 1 - AmazonPrime

I've written about Lego Masters a few times now on the blog, and I'm unabashedly a fan of the show.  The third season of the North American version, hosted by Will Arnett, I was so excited to watch week to week, and I was bursting with Canadian Pride as we had a few very strong teams in competition this year.  What I genuinely like about the show is how, despite being a competition, the competitors clearly begin to bond with each other over time and there's a real sense of comraderie between them, as well as the judges (Lego certified builders Amy and Jamie) who clearly respect the talent as well as the people.   Some of the challenges this year included building life-sized dogs for a dog show, playable mini-golf holes, recreating a Marvel scene, and building a workable water fountain.  After the first four or so teams are eliminated it becomes pretty clear who the top teams are, yet there are still surprises that happen, technical failures that were unpredictable that can sink even the most talented team.  As always, the editing format of the show can be grating.  I HATE that the show opens with a preview of the show, teasing the challenge and which teams might be having trouble with them, rather than just letting the show play out, and I also, direly, detest the cut to commercial when something dramatic is about to happen and the 30 second replay when it comes back from commercial.  It's maddening.  As well, the editing of the timing so that we hear Arnett call out how much time is left, but it's clear when it cuts to different teams and their builds, it's not aligned with the actual time.  I don't appreciate the deception for "dramatic storytelling purposes".

Which is just one of the reasons why Lego Masters Australia has proven to be the superior entry of the Lego Masters franchise.  Lets get this out of the way, the first season of Lego Masters Australia was a bit of a gong show, with some of the participants being way, way down the talent ladder compared to what we'd seen on Lego Masters in North America for 3 seasons. But Season 1 of LMAus also pre-dates Lego Masters in North America by 2 years so it really set the template for how the show should run and I bet at that time the Lego Community was maybe a little dubious about a talent show of Lego building.  The second season of LMAus, though, wound up with three teams in the final that produced a build that could have bested the winners of any of the three seasons of LM in North America, so it was a huge step up for season 2.  

What makes LMAus stand out, though, is its host, comedian Hamish Blake.  Where Will Arnette's on-screen personality is full of fake ego and braggadocio that kind of keeps him at a bit of a distance from the competitors, Hamish is utterly boyish and playful, frequently doing bits with, and around, the competitors.  Blake also does a talking head confessional to the camera (something Arnett doesn't really do) and really brings a hugely comedic aura to the show (it's no wonder he's won awards for his hosting of the show) that is infectious.  The show's format also is different, and took a bit of getting used to, but I like it more.  Rather than 10-12 teams starting off, the show only starts with 8 teams.  They do an initial, non-elimination build to compete for the "golden brick" (which the team can use at a later date for immunity from an elimination challenge), then they do a build for which the winner gets to skip the next elimination build, and then it's only on the third build that a team gets eliminated.  This way we get to see each team produce at least 3 builds before one is eliminated.  It's more focussed on the talent than the competition this way, and I do love it.  Also with the smaller starting roster it lets the teams develop their sense of camaraderie with each other faster, and we as an audience get to know them more easily.  The first season had one team with a super-talented but utterly maddening, ego-centric twerp that pushed around his partner who went maddeningly deep into the show, which fuelled the show when maybe the builds weren't as strong as we're used to.  Season 2 had a lot of surprises, including an underwater build, and designing a brand new Star Wars ship, among others, which really pushed the challengers to pretty amazing heights.  The finale of Season 2 was easily the best of the 3 North American and 2 Australian series.  I'm eagerly awaiting the domestic release of seasons 3 and 4.

Less exciting was Lego Masters UK.  The format of the show is decidedly different, at 4 episodes the first season.  Though I should stipulate that Season 1 predates even the first season of LMAus it's still wild how drastically different the show is.  Starting with a roster of 48 teams, quickly winnowed down to 8, and then eliminating two more in the first episode, it's a dodgier talent pool than the first episode of LMAus.  Like, two teams of kids under 12 made it through to the top 8.  It seemed clear to me that this was an early prototype for the Lego Masters format, and there wasn't much figured out, in terms of how they wanted to present the show, who they wanted to have on the show, and what the target audience was.  It's structured like a tepid British all-ages documentary, with the host narrating what's going on and providing lame puns as transition points.  It borders on painful.  The "brick pit" were kind of majestic places in the North American and Australian versions, here, it's all just Rubbermaid towers...so many drawers really making it hard to find things and build fast.  And the challenges were cute, but super short, with 3 hours, or sometimes no prescribed time limit, leading to mostly pedestrian builds across three episodes.  The final episode provided the two finalists something like ten days to create their builds, which did lead to some pretty massive displays, and they were pretty nice, but I couldn't help but wonder what any of the top three teams from any of the other LM  series would have done with 10 days of building time.  There's a two more seasons of LMUK floating out there (I'm hoping they improve the format but if they didn't it's probably why there's only 3 seasons) and apparently 3 seasons of a Dutch LM series (which looks to be more in the NA/Aus format)

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For All Mankind Season 1 - AppleTV+

As far as streaming services go, AppleTV+ has the hardest time selling me on their wares. I've been hesitant to explore what they're offering, if anything because they don't promote what they offer very prominently.  I think of all their shows the only one I recall seeing a trailer for was The Morning Show which only seemed to be selling the idea of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell, no other indication as to what it was about.  I found Severance (my favourite show of '22) via Adam Scott promoting it on a podcast, and Mythic Quest was trumpeted highly by tv critics during its first season, but not promoted well by Apple.  For All Mankind is something that should have been an easy sell to me and other nerdy based on it being the product of Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica fame (with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi)...plus, it's sci-fi, in that it presents an alternate history of the space race.  It really starts with the conceit of "what if Russia landed on the moon first?" and takes its cue from there.

The first season rockets through the late-1960s and 1970's, taking a big jump through time and progress every few episodes.  It mixes fictionalized version of real life individuals with wholly new characters fleshing out that the Cold War became a lot more about the Space Race.  Joel Kinneman (Suicide Squad) is the de-facto lead character of the series, playing Ed Stafford, as a fictional Apollo 10 astronaut who orbited the moon, and felt the pull to land, but followed orders instead, costing them the "first man on the moon" status.  Ed and his old guard of astronauts find themselves in a heightened environment, flush with funding and keen to compete to achieve the next great milestone.  From the onset, the idea is that the moon was just the beginning, that Mars is next.  The series has a pretty large cast - astronauts, ground support, administrative, housewives and children.  Shantel VanSanten (The Flash) plays Ed's wife Karen, and at first I judged the role as being a real thankless one, just another stay on the ground, anxiously watching TV cut to as the men do the derring-do, but the role becomes much more that of who's left behind, particularly late in the season when Ed is effectively trapped on the moon base (yep, this season ends with a moon base having been established) and she's having to deal with increasingly difficult situation at home, alone, and make the decision on whether it's good or not for Ed's mental health to know what's happening.  There's also some spotlight roles for female astronauts, with the episode "Nixon's Women" probably my favourite of the series so far, with one wife of an astronaut joining the program (logically, and being pushed through because of her attractiveness, plus the marketability of a husband and wife astronaut crew) and the pleasure of unflappable Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger - Lost) joining the cast full time.  

The first season works so well because of its rapid pace, burning through time and letting the audience keep catching up to them and all the benchmarked changes to the timeline compared to our own.  That tracking of the changes in the realities is probably my favourite part about watching the show, but I also enjoy how grounded and methodical it is, not afraid to just wallow in jargon if it means maintaining the air of authenticity.  It's a good looking show, probably a pretty expensive first season of television.  We've started season 2 which starts with a 10 year time jump, but I found it gets bogged down in petty drama, rather than the exacerbated pace of rocketing through time and teasing out the alternate reality.  We stalled out on it at the half way point but have been encouraged to stick with it for an apparently dynamite season 3.  Will report back.

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The Resort - Showcase 

I was drawn in with Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs) and William Jackson Harper (The Good Place), as they're two very likeable personalities who I was thinking I should be paying more attention to.  Together in one place is a good a starting point as any.  Very quickly, as Emma and Noah, we're introduced to the idea that their 10-ish year marriage is on unstable foundation.  Emma seems particularly detached and Noah can't seem to get through.  The resort they're headed to is on a tropical island, and Noah hopes it's enough of a break from real life that things can be shaken up.  But I don't think what happens was the kind of shake up he had in mind.  During a quad-runner tour of the island Emma has an accident, spraining her wrist and getting banged up...but she also finds and old Motorola Razr flip phone.  She starts to obsess on its origins and, after locating a power supply and replacement battery in town, finds out that it belongs to a college-aged American kid who disappeared from another resort that was destroyed in a storm 15 years earlier.  Emma convinces Noah to let her investigate things before turning the phone over to the police, and it draws them into something much bigger and more confounding then they could have imagined.

The series jumps back and forth in time, between Emma and Noah's often fruitless and certainly amateur investigation, and Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden) meet-cute romance that has the spectre of tragedy looming over it.  Emma and Noah's investigation seems to only do enough to provoke people who thought this story long since forgotten, and the show keeps asking the question does it actually spell danger or does it only feel dangerous?  Then, in the mix of it all, is a third storyline about the mysterious, unhinged Alexsander Vasilakis (Ben Sinclair), owner of the doomed resort, who claims to be a man displaced from time, and his memories are leaking out of his ear.  His friend Baltasar (Luis Gerardo Méndez) is the lynchpin of both timelines.

What's quite wonderful about The Resort is how it upends its status quo every episode.  You're never quite where you think you are with the series, and each episode ends in a way that provides you with no clue as to where its going.  It's not a puzzlebox mystery, so there's no frustration with these pivots, just surprise. The tone of the show shifts as well, from dramatic, to comedic, to suspenseful, to serene and back as it weaves its story, that, slight spoiler, does take a metaphysical turn, but also earns what it asks of its audience.  It knows what its showing is hard to comprehend and its characters reflect that.  And along the way, we get a pretty intense dissection of Emma and Noah's life together, and it's quite affecting.  As well, I was very, very pleased that the show concludes, decisively, at the end of its 8 episodes.  It's a mini-series, not a franchise or left with any dangling loose ends.  It's kind of rare that we get such a concrete and satisfying conclusion to a story.

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1899 Season 1 - Netflix

Speaking of Dark and puzzle boxes, the creators of Dark return to netfilx with another compelling puzzle box mystery, this time set on a turn-of-the-century ocean liner, with a multicultural, multi-lingual cast, and the ominous disappearance 4-months earlier of a predecessor ship.   Truth told, I had a lot to say about this series when I watched it and started writing about it over a month ago, but a blogging mishap to my words, and enthusiasm to rewrite those word, away

So, in brief, 1899 is a bit of a marvel resulting in part from Netflix's global outreach. There are no less than 6 languages at play on the ship, and there's nearly no storytelling gymnastics at play to try and get all the characters to speak English.  This is a show from German creative team, so if anything, it seems to jump into German a little more often than I expected.  The opening moments of the film are a dream sequence which triggers the puzzle box into motion, but it's only once our Captain makes the unpopular decision to turn off course to see if an emergency broadcast is coming from the missing sister vessel that the mysteries start to unfurl.

What Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar are so adept at is not just negotiating their puzzle box elements (it's apparent that they learned from Lost's mistakes, and they have the answers to all their mysteries, but also that the mysteries are only important as long as the characters care about them) but in having them service the story and characters, not just fill space with intrigue.  Across 8 episode they blitz through so many of the confounding things they introduce, and at the midway point, they have a massive event that shakes up the cast quite dramatically.  

I was all in on the series right up until the end when we get a reveal that...spoiler...isn't too dissimilar to the ending of the American version of Life on Mars (and that one left a bad taste in my mouth, so it was an unwelcome reminder).  My hope is that, like with Dark, Friese and bo Odar's big reveal in this finale is just another upending of the status quo and our expectations, and that there's an entirely other drama and purpose to come.

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Atlanta Season 4 - FX

Season 3 of Atlanta, produced during the crest of the pandemic and in Europe took an almost detached form from what Atlanta had been before.  It was almost more of an anthology of detached stories than any sort of serialized production.  I mean, Atlanta has been operating in this mode almost from the beginning, but it sort of forgot about its connections between its characters, and certainly it felt set apart from its titular home city.  Season 4, then, returns home for 10 episodes that, at least in the first half, reach for a more comedic tone, while still doubling down on the surrealism and still steeping itself into the topics that seem to be weighing heavily on Donald Glover's exceptionally talented mind.

There's Earn's going to therapy and making decisions about his future in both career and family, Alfred facing both his own mortality and that of his career's (literally buying a farm), Darius' adventures in trying to return a bad gift or take a spa day in a sensory deprivation tank, Van confronting her parenting skills after taking her daughter to a casting call only to have Lottie get trapped in a crazy-time version of Tyler Perry's Atlanta-based studios.  The only one-off episode is a wild modern-style documentary about "the Blackest movie of all time: A Goofy Movie" which is as compelling as it is fake, which is to say completely.

With the exception of the very serene, laid back and nonthreatening "Snipe Hunt", Glover and company reach for greater comedic highs, and even greater absurdity than ever before (and they reached pretty high before), and mostly accomplish it.  I enter every episode of Atlanta with a pit of dread in my stomach, and I need a good 10 minutes with every episode before I know what I'm sort of in for, tone wise.  But at the same time, I've been watching long enough that I know Glover loves a good rug pull.  In the second episode, "The Homeliest Little Horse", the rug pull is one of Atlanta's biggest laughs, but, in typical fashion, one that really makes you think about the implications of it all and make a decision on how much you agree with it.  It's an absolutely fabulous, hilarious, utterly compelling, thought-provoking, frequently challenging show, one that I wish could continue forever, but at the same time one that I know we were lucky to even get 4 seasons of.  Each episode is a mini-movie, often playing with genres, and most are worth coming back to on their own merits, as well as part of the whole.

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Letterkenny Season 11 - Crave

For the past two years, new seasons of Letterkenny have been released on Christmas day, and for the past two years, the wife and I would blitz Letterkenny in its entirety prior to the new season dropping.  I love the show -- I'm a huge fan -- and I do like how connected I am to it as an international success, dripping in Canadiana as it is.  But I have to say, 11 seasons of Letterkenny may be too much in one concentrated dose.  I'm so familiar with the first 7-8 seasons that I know most of the beats (but by no means all the jokes) by heart.  The more recent seasons, 9 and 10, are a little more mysterious, as I've only seen them once or twice prior, and then the new season, bingeing all 6 episodes at once, becomes a bit of an overload.  As my wife and I slip into Letterkenny-isms throughout the month of December -- telling each other to "figger it out" or "pull your finger outta your ass" or "skoden" -- it becomes to much to take in the new things, to properly absorb the new content in any meaningful way, to the point that I start to wonder if the new content isn't maybe not as up-to-snuff (up-to-schneef?) as prior seasons.

Did I laugh at Season 11? Heartily. But, because the latest season is so overpowered by my entrenched familiarity of what came prior, it doesn't feel as good, it doesn't yet feel a part of the whole.  Is it just that? Or is there something, maybe, lacking about an episode that spends its time debating which Old Dutch potato chip flavour is its best (especially when All-Dressed, the most Canadian chip of all, is excluded from the running).  It's kind of an one-note joke that has peaks and valleys within, but it's only elevated by the "what the actual fuck is going on here" questioning of an outside party stepping into the proceedings.  

Prior seasons in the middle would end with a bit of a little emotional cliffhanger, whether it's Wayne getting suckerpunched by another local bruiser, Tanis beckoning Wayne to the barn, or that Marie-Fred moment (or that other Marie-Fred moment). The past two seasons have been missing that little end-note cue to wonder about when the show returns, that little character moment to contemplate the implications of.  This season has a runner of Wayne helping out a local degen who wants to turn over a new leaf, but ends with a very melancholy failure to do so, and it's a kind of heaviness the show's never had before that maybe almost breaks its reality.  It points out a sort of in-world, small-town justice system that calls into question the whole order of things (Stuart telling Wayne about the rumours Jivin' Pete was spreading when he was buying drugs off him makes Stuart complicit in Jivin' Pete's drug addiction, and it's odd that Wayne doesn't do anything about that, more over is seen hanging out with the skids on a regular basis).

I'm probably overthinking it. Someone needs to tell me to pull my finger outta my ass.

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His Dark Materials Season 3 - HBO

My final viewing for '22: the finale of this adaptation of the Philip Pullman His Dark Material trilogy.  It ends a long way away from where it started, and it feels like it's grown up so much, in part because of the bigger break between seasons as a result of the pandemic which means young Lyra (Dafne Keen) and Will (Amir Wilson) have visibly grown out of childhood and into young adults.  It also is much heavier, more head-on in its critique of blindly following religious leaders and treating stories literally. The series has been leading to a literal war between heaven and Earth, but it posits Heaven and Hell as just other dimensions, angels and demons as just other forms of beings unlike our own, but still struggling with the same quandaries we all do.  

As it builds and builds towards an epic confrontation, its a story that's constantly taking a step back to look at its characters and the context of the situation, and how it's shaping them, it's a series that wants us to think of the past as we consider the future, to look at how we've changed as people before we decide that others cannot change.  It's a series that sends the message of live life, be curious, explore, but do good when you can and be mindful of what harm you are capable of.  There's not explicitly an anti-war stance, but it clearly is a story that embraces love and peace as answers far more than fighting and death.

My favourite aspect of the story is the idea of us each having our own death, a spirit so to speak that follows us from our birth, and knows us like no other.  When our time comes, we meet our death, and reflect on life as they move us to the next stage of existence.  That next stage, in Pullman's worlds, can be a number of things, but ultimately it's a return to everything, becomeing one with it all.  Dust.  It's much the same conceit as in the finale of The Good Place and this connection between the two series made me feel all sorts of warm tinglies.

I worried about the third-season yips with HDM, that the series would be hamstrung by declining viewership and tightening budgets, but there was clearly an investment that was made by HBO and they delivered where it mattered most.  The world of Mulefa, and it's elephantine inhabitants really came to life on an impressive scale, and the angelic battle in the sky was stunning in its presentation.  Though I haven't read the books, but I understand the reputation they have now.