KWIF=Kent's "Week" in Film. I realized this past weekend that I had watched almost a film a day this August, so the goal has become to cram the last bunch of films in on the final couple of days. These are numbers 29 through 31.
This Week: City Hunter (2024, d. Yuichi Satoh - netflix) Seven Psychopaths (2012, d. Martin McDonagh - tubi) What's Up, Doc? (1972, d. Peter Bogdanovich - tubi)
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After watching Jackie Chan in City Hunter, I started to inquire into what other City Hunter adaptations were out there. I had no idea there was a Netflix-produced mid-budget feature released just two years ago... but then again, why would I? Anime/manga properties are not my wheelhouse by any means, so why would I be paying attention to adaptations of them?
Anyway, here we have a modern take on the franchise which finds Ryohei Suzuki playing horny PI Ryo Saeba. We're introduced to him via a hero shot of him standing on a rooftop..but with binoculars ogling girls in bikinis at the bath house across the way. Acting as a sort of origin point for the City Hunter story (as so many comic or cartoon adaptations like to do, rather than, you know, just present a new adventure of this already well-established character), Ryo's partner, Makimura is killed as fallout from a case they are working on together. Makimura asks Ryo to look out for his sister, Kaori (Misato Morita). Makimura's death relates not just to the missing persons case they were working on, but a larger story about an experimental drug that gives its users super strength and agility, but also extreme rage, temporarily, before killing them, and it's being tested on street kids. This is all the product of an international criminal cartel called The Union, and, the story relates, improbably, to Kaori origins as Makimura's adopted sister as well (this is really a nothing thread and did not need to exist).
The film jostles back and forth between being a goofy, horny comedy, with Suzuki ably letting his freak-flag-fly (this is after all the star of Hentai Kamen: The Forbidden Superhero, look it up...or better yet, don't?) and heavy melodrama, and the two do not mesh well together. It feels so emulative of the the last 20 years of comic book cinema, all the hoary overused tropes are there...and it would be one thing if this adaptation of City Hunter were lampooning such tropes, maintaining a consistent comedic bent throughout, but it does not. So when a depressed and angry Kaori starts following Ryo around the darker edges of Tokyo society, he winds up bringing her into his world...which involves showing him performing a "Mokkari Dance" on stage, a hyper, horny male burlesque show of sorts. While the Chan version of City Hunter may have not been the purest adaptation either, it at least found a tone and stuck to it.
Suzuki is perhaps the ideal Ryo, a very, very good looking guy with charm to spare who can easily flip the switch to salivating pervert and flip it off again to look the dashing hero and very ably perform some really fun choreographed fight sequences (one sequence finds him fighting an assassin while also fending off tranq darts fired by a sniper, all taking place at a cosplay modelling show, while having a giant stuffed horse head mounted on his crotch... it's the right tone, loaded with inventiveness and humour that most of the other fairly well-done action set-pieces lack, instead making them too straight.)
Also unlike the Chan movie, the women of this adaptation are a little less capable, a little more damsels...maybe not in distress, but also not the ass kickers we saw in the Hong Kong adaptation. It is pretty funny though that the only women in this movie that seem legit charmed by Ryo are the many, many sex workers he obviously frequents (and who are paid to be charmed). Every other woman seems somewhat put off by him, if not immediately upon meeting him then soon thereafter.
The things that work here really work, and when they're working it's quite a lot of fun. But whenever it falls into the trap of trying to be "real" it just comes undone. A sequel has been greenlit, which I hope means that they get a second chance to try harder at making this a full-on action-comedy series about a horny detective and the women who tolerate him because he's so damn capable.
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Martin McDonagh is primarily a well-regarded Irish playwright. His turn to film -- which is almost like a hobby he's dabbled in over the past 18 years -- has been likewise pretty well-regarded. His first short film, Six Shooter, won him an Oscar, which led to his first feature length film, In Bruges. It was a film I didn't respond to at the time but has a sizable cult following (plus I've heard at least a few film nerds cite as their favourite film, ever). His third film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was a major awards contender in 2017 and a massive success despite its dark subject matter (I didn't see it, but Toasty did) . The Banshees of Inishirin was a critical darling in 2023, and I liked it quite a bit. His second film, 2012's Seven Psychopaths is kind of the outlier, a bit pulpier and more divisive.
The setup here finds L.A.-based screenwriter Marty (Colin Farrell) who has literally nothing but a title for his overdue screenplay, "Seven Psychopaths". He's best friends with Billy (Sam Rockwell) whose current job is stealing dogs from parks, waiting for reward posters to go up, and his partner, Hans (Christopher Walken in prime form) returns them. Billy steals the wrong dog one day, taking the beloved shih-tzu of mobster Charlie (Woody Harrelson).
Of these characters I mentioned, only one of them is labelled as one of the seven psychopaths when we first meet them, but eventually a couple more will be a part of the seven. The remaining psychopaths are part of the stories told to Marty as he's trying to fill out his screenplay, with Billy providing a story or two and a stranger, Zachariah (Tom Waits), responding to an ad, tells his dark tale.
The script is, at times, very funny, quite punchy, but also at times too clever to the point of cutesy and annoying. I'm frankly tired of stories centred around script writers, because all too often stories about script writers start to get meta about talking about the actual scriptwriter, and get too lost in the idea that there's something laborious or glorious about the process of writing. Here, more than once, Marty talks about how he wants a certain type of pacifist psychopath protagonist or placid tone for his movie, while Billy desires much more a splashy, guns-blazing type of tale. So naturally we get both. *Wink*
McDonagh also blurs the line between screenplay and screenplay-within-a-screenplay a few times, telling stories that are just tales that turn out to be true within the context of the film, or a story that just can't be cracked. As sharp as McDonagh can be, the agonies of a writer are not that exciting.
Farrell is sort of promoted as the lead but is a passive passenger in the film. A somewhat hapless guy with a drinking problem that he refuses to admit is a problem, he kind of lets things happen around him without intervening. Rockwell is more in charge, certainly spewing the most lines and having the most fingers in the plot pot. Walken is magnificent, and there's probably a better movie if he's just our central figure.
It's definitely not neo-Tarantino, and we should be thankful for that. There's something more at the root of it that McDonagh is looking for with this story than just a off-brand Coen Brothers mobster picture, but I don't know that he ever finds it.
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I have only ever seen one other Peter Bogdanovich film. It was The Last Picture Show, a "new Hollywood" classic which I watched, and neither enjoyed nor appreciated much back in 2019. I don't think I've ever seen a Barbara Streisand movie before, but, growing up, Streisand was still an important pop culture figure even if you didn't listen to her music or see her films. You just knew who she was.
I have, however, seen quite a few works of screenwriter (and also actor and director) Buck Henry. Get Smart was fundamental to the development of my sense of humour. He's one of three screenwriters credited on the Bogdanovich-directed, Streisand-starring What's Up, Doc? (with story by Bogdanovich) but you can definitely tell what Henry contributed to the film.
The story finds Ryan O'Neal's handsome but drab musicologist Howard Bannister arriving in San Francisco with his drab and dour fiance, Eunice (Madeline Kahn) to attend a special dinner party where he will lobby for a research grant. Upon checking in he's spied by Judy Maxwell (Streisand) a creature of id, who cherchez l'homme right into a drugstore where she forces a meet-cute upon them and proceeds to both attempt to woo and grift him. We were introduced to Judy mere moments before as she followed a man carrying pizzas perhaps through San Fran traffic causing many a scene...her stomach motivating her more than common sense.
Judy and Howard just so happen to have the same plaid duffel bag, and it also just so happens that another hotel guest also has the same bag. He's just arrived from the airport where he's collected the bag, which is revealed to be full of top secret documents. He's been followed the whole time by a man who is very poor at being discreet and yet still doesn't blow his cover (we're not sure for some time who is the good spy and who is the bad spy in this scenario). Meanwhile a fourth guest at the hotel, a posh, upperclass elderly woman also has the same overnight bag, only this one's stuffed with jewels. The hotel clerk has shady colleague who he is colluding with the steal the jewels before they're locked up in the safe.
So the thrust of the film is two-fold, Judy is almost criminally forcing herself into Harold's dull, dull existence, shaking everything up and spraying it all over the walls, floor, ceiling and anything touching them. And then there's the game of bags being played like three-card monte, as people come in and out of the hotel rooms mixing up the bags that makes it almost impossible to keep track of which one's where at any given time.
The Buck Henry influence finds a tremendous amount of quick-talking characters who have the snappiest responses, taking them out of the sphere of normal and into something quite other. And then there's the situational comedy of it all, which together with the dialogue, feels so Get Smart adjacent to me. The film escalates into a chase sequence across San Francisco which doesn't get into Blues Brothers level of chaos (nothing else really does) but still is quite chaotic and features an extended sequence within playing with the gags of smashing a pane of glass and knocking a guy off a ladder.
Streisand as Judy is iconic. Her blue eyes have such a majestic twinkle, a little devilishness that is very flirty and sexy. She is a poster child for ADHD. There's not as much chemistry between her and O'Neal as one would hope, mainly because he's meant to be fighting his attraction for the entire picture (but mid-way, when a kiss just so happens to occur, well, it's an all-time cinematic kiss, as opposed to the one at the end pales direly in comparison).
What's Up, Doc? is straight up a zany comedy that just so happens to have a little bit of romance. It's not a romantic comedy, which is truly unfortunate. We don't ever really see the moment where Harold falls in love with Judy, just the moment where he gives in to her, mostly because they're too busy dealing with the swapped bags and angry gangsters and other sub-plots that have nothing to do with the romance.
There's a lot to like, little to dislike, just a desire for a little more of what we don't get.
KWIF=Kent's "Week" in Film. I realized this past weekend that I had watched almost a film a day this August, so the goal has become to cram the last bunch of films in on the final couple of days. These are numbers 24 through 28.
This Week: The Running Man (2025, d. Edgar Wright - crave) Zodiac Killer Project (2024, d. Charlie Shackleton - hollywoodsuite) City Hunter (1993, d. Wong Jing - tubi) Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970, d. Mario Bava - tubi)
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The Running Man falls into my beloved "most dangerous game" subgenre. The man-hunts-man-for-sport (and/or entertainment) never gets tired for me, although its entries are frequently not very well done. The Running Man, like The Hunger Games or Battle Royale, is kind of a brand in the subgenre, or at least notorious enough to be a name big enough to check-point (as in "Oh, it's like The Running Man").
While I've read the Stephen King-as-Richard Bachman novella three and a half decades ago, I don't recall it very specifically, and likewise it's been quite some time since I watched the 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger-starring adaptation. From memory, that film was definitely a product of Reagan-era economics, and was concerned about wealth disparity and social order, to a degree. It was concerned with crime, totalitarianism, and classism.
We're now in an age where the wealth gaps are far more dramatically pronounced and we have government institutions that seem to only be serving to perpetuate that trend. We've given too much power to corporations, non-corporeal entities that have their own rights but seemingly no responsibilities. The people in charge of corporations seem to have free reign to influence government policy, and are not held liable for their actions and decisions made while running such organizations. Lands and waters are polluted and poised, people get sick or are killed, minds are manipulated and tainted by increasingly clever propaganda, and a token sum is only ever paid when they corporations are caught...and the execs still get paid.
Edgar Wright's new adaptation of The Running Man finds its protagonist, the angry and righteous Ben Richards (Glen Powell), blacklisted from the Network, which, in this dystopian future, pretty much controls all of America. They are the primary source of employment and entertainment in the country, and though they are not the government, their sheer economic power means they pretty much dictate policy. With a sick daughter at home and no income, Ben turns to his last-ditch option: Reality TV. Looking to get on any of the Network's many programmes except the brutal, life-threatening "The Running Man" program (the Network's most popular show), he, of course, is chosen for "The Running Man" because otherwise there wouldn't be a movie.
He's sweet-talked by the Network's head honcho into signing the deal to join the show. Surviving 30 days wins Ben and his family a cool 1 billion New Dollars, while he also receives a daily survival bonus, plus a bonus for killing any of the Network's security goons or the show's elite "hunters". But from the jump, Ben sees that the Network doesn't play fair. They introduce him (and two other runners) with lies about being career criminals, disparaging their name, and denigrating their families, going so far as to have doctored clips (the use of deep fakes is central to this movie but it doesn't ever reckon with the general public's awareness of them).
Needless to say, Ben survives with the help of some activists and supporters, but it's never easy, and (once again) the Network cheats, tracking his location (duh) and manipulating the narrative of the show by coaching the hunters when, and when not to go in for the kill. The audience is also invited to participate, with the Network offering a hundreds/thousands of New Dollars for anyone who rats out a Runner and leads to a kill. It takes the audience out of being passive observers with, maybe, some moral responsibility for the perpetuation of this barbaric program, and turns them in to active participants in murder. And, of course, it's all propaganda, fuelling The Network's ideology of keeping the teeming masses stupid and hungry, and distracting them from the real cause of the problems in their lives. It's up to Ben, who's really just doing this all for his family, to realize he's the catalyst for waking people up as to who the real enemy is.
The opening scenes of The Running Man are, to be blunt, really clumsy in how they set Ben Richards up. These scenes are meant to establish Ben as a rage-filled man, a man who fights injustice, and a man who desperately loves his family, but the writing and performances lack nuance, to the point that I was concerned that Powell was decisively the wrong guy for this part. He turns out to be fine, in the end, but Edgar Wright's script pushes and/or pulls Ben through the plot, without him doing much to instigate things on his own. He's a passenger in his own story, and through to the third act he's not consistently written.
He's established as a man who does the right thing and then turns him into a murderer. He's established as a man who defies the order of things, but he denies being a revolutionary. He's a good person, and, for the most part, remains a good person...but Wright's script never quite finds the right balance for shifting between his anger and his kindness, and Powell seems to only be following direction. A likeable enough lead, but not clearly defined enough.
Similarly, the dystopia we find Ben running around in is fleshed out only so much. We don't get enough establishment between the different, disparate class hierarchies, but the film is very clear that the propaganda machine the Network employs is very effective across the class spectrum.
As a "most dangerous game" story, it's not unexciting or entertaining, and the film is asking people to hold the persons in charge of nefarious corporations accountable, but even still it's not the clearest message. It's still a retrograde story where T.V., and not the internet, or social media, is the primary form of audience engagement and how organizations manipulate the masses. As much as it's trying to represent modern concerns, the atmosphere of the story doesn't reflect our modern society enough.
I'm a fan of Wright's work, but couldn't exactly pin down the man's style (much of it is married to music or toying with genre tropes, neither of which is l'objet du jour here). In the piles of effects and craftsmanship needed to realize the dystopian future, I think maybe Wright's particular cinematic flair gets lost. As Toasty said in his toastypost "the movie is not over-the-top enough or biting enough to be a fun, corny romp. Neither is it dark & grim enough to reflect the Dark Urban Future it wants to rail against". We certainly agree.
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Zodiac Killer Project sounds like a cheapo Tubi-original slasher movie or possibly a Tubi-original pseudo-documentary with some weird right-wing bent (as befits the service's Fox Corp ownership). Turns out it's neither of these, though it's clear it's still a very modestly budgeted production.
Over a decade ago filmmaker Charlie Shackleton was prepping for a documentary based on the 2012 book, "The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge" by Lyndon E. Lafferty, a former California highway patrol officer whose maybe-encounter with the Zodiac Killer sent him on a decades long crusade to bring the man he considered to be responsible to justice. It was unsuccessful and Lafferty, and his suspect, are little more than a footnote in the Zodiac Killer conversation. But as Shackleton was ramping up production on his doc, he lost the rights to the book, and all his investment in the documentary was for naught.
He couldn't escape it though. In the intervening years, true crime podcasts and documentaries have proliferated on every channel and streaming service, and with them a visual language all its own has developed. In Zodiac Killer Project, Shackleton relays what he would have done, how he would have shot the b-roll footage, the "backtors" (actors in true crime reenactments whose backs are all we see), the locations, and how it all would have been to serve an entertaining narrative far more than the truth.
Because Lafferty's accusations and investigations were not limited to his book, Shackleton has some clearance to discuss Lafferty's prime suspect and the situations that led him to believe his suspect was the killer as well as many of the details around his investigation in to the suspect (what he can only touch upon is why Lafferty suspects there was a cover-up to dismiss and not investigate his suspect, which leaves a big cloud over the whole proceedings here).
In detailing how he would have made what sounds like a pretty bog standard true-crime documentary, Shackleton drolly takes apart all the tropes we know from most other true crime docs... specific types of footage or editing style, the presentation of certain information, the cheats the productions do to condense the story or make it more entertaining that may be stretching or warping the truth. What Shackleton doesn't really do is account for the ethics of it all, of making entertainment out of these real-life horrors, and his capacity for examining why the public is so enthralled by such media isn't very deep.
The Bay area location imagery that Shackleton and his team shot, mostly of empty or vast spaces takes on a slightly meditative nature, with Shackleton's voice over occasionally calling out whether the footage we're seeing is at all relevant to the point in the narrative he's discussing.
Dryly funny with a slight intensity and more than a little reserved playfulness, Zodiac Killer Project doesn't get us anywhere new with the whole Zodiac Killer thing, but it brushes back the fur on a genre and exposes its soft, and kind of ugly, underbelly.
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City Hunter was a manga that ran from 1985 through 1991, while near-simultaneously an animate tv series ran parallel, between 1987 and 1991. I have a vague recollection of having watched some of this anime on Canadian TV, but I may be wrong.
Jackie Chan's starred in the 1993 Hong Kong adaptation, which I think is pulling more from the anime than the manga. Chan's City Hunter is a very, very broad comedy that's trying to be a live action cartoon, one of the most difficult cinematic challenges ever.
"City Hunter" is the nickname of infamous private investigator Ryo Saeba (Chan) an affable, womanizing, and semi-capable man-of-action. He is assisted by his deceased former partner's little sister, Kaori, who he sort of had a hand in raising and now, as an adult, she's in love with him, and he has to resist his own libido and keep her at arms length. It's a gross dynamic that, for the most part Ryo is on the right side of, but not always.
Ryo and Kaori, through separate misadventures, wind up on the same maiden voyage of a cruise ship which gets taken hostage by a ruthless white American pirate, Col. "Big Mac" MacDonald (Richard Norton). The plan is to kill all the lower-deckers and hold the richest hostage for their money. Unfortunately for them, not only is City Hunter aboard, but so too is undercover officer Saeko Nogami (Chingmy Yau) and gentleman thief Kao Ta (Leon Lai) to aid in liberating the boat.
City Hunter is a goofy movie, one that is really leaning into comedy far more than action or adventure. This is no Speed, more of a Speed 2, if Patrick Muldoon stared at Sandra Bullock's boobs and imagined them as hamburgers. Ryo is very charming but also a known cad, so women are as apt to bat him upside the head as to fawn over him or give him a kiss. Chan isn't really known for playing much of a romantic hero, and certainly not known for playing a sexual one, so here Ryo's horniness is tempered by the fact that the character spends much of the film starving and just hoping to eat something...anything.
The usual Chan flair for action and physical stunts seems to be scaled back pretty dramatically from his more infamous efforts, I think out of service to the situational comedy. There's less physical comedy overall for Chan to perform as well. He may be a bit of a goofball but we also have to believe he can turn on the charm as well and that ladies will not only fall for it, but actively pursue it (the who Kaori side-plot depends on it).
There are some very regressive (and, at one point, brutally offensive) jokes in this film, which shouldn't be surprising for any '90's comedy. The sexism or gay-bashing aren't persistent, but they are there. On the plus side, the women of the film are largely pretty strong, capable, independent and a diverse (personality-wise) group, and central to the film. I liked them all.
Trying to do animation-style gags in physical reality is very, very challenging and doesn't often work because, well, real world physics get in the way of having these things really happen, so special effects making them happen can look really awkward and corny. As much as this type of gag in City Hunter doesn't work, through Chan's immense charms and a remarkably game cast of performers, it winds up being a fairly fun, if not fully successful production. The extended set piece where Chan and his opponents become Street Fighter characters after getting electrocuted by an arcade machine is a highlight of the film though (lowlight, the painfully prolongued musical number at the midway point, made worse by the fact that it wasn't subtitled ... also, if I'm not mistaken, much of the film was performed in English then dubbed and subtitled...curious).
I had fun, but this isn't essential Chan by any means.
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Five Dolls for an August Moon is a last gasp of beatnik free-love-era filmmaking and sitting just outside of the Italian giallo wave. It's a murder mystery of sorts, but a film full of characters that seem pretty disinterested in the murders, and even more disinterested in the mystery.
Industrialist George Stark (Teodoro Corrà) has invited four associates and their partners to his remote island home for a weekend holiday, but really it was all a ruse to get the men facetime with Professor Garry Farrell (William Berger) and try to convince him to sell them a secret, revolutionary new formula for a resin that will redefine...something. Whatever.
The next morning, the houseboy winds up dead, and you know what, nobody really seems to care. They wrap the man up in plastic and put him in the meat locker. They discover that Stark's boat has gone missing and the radio has been tampered with rendering it useless. Typically this would start sending people into a panic, a murderer loose on an isolated island, nowhere to go, no one to call. But, these upperclass twits keep on partying as if nothing is happening. Except, there's plenty happening, including each of the men propositioning Farrell to obtain the formulae alone, and two of the wives having a secret affair with each other, and another of the wives having affairs with, well, everyone else. And what's up with the island girl in the mini-skirt (Justine Gall) watching everything from afar?
The bodies start piling up in an almost comical fashion, new additions to the meat locker in pretty rapid fashion, along with a couple disappeared bodies that are even more puzzling. In a typical giallo, someone would be trying to figure things out. In a typical suspense thriller, everyone would be pointing fingers at each other and things would get tense. Here, everyone's still just drinking and trying to figure out how to get that damn formula.
The ending reveals/twists are ... to be blunt... silly. But then the fact that no tension has built up around these reveals means there's little sense of stakes here. There's an organ-led jazzy soundtrack to the film from Piero Umiliani that is far too bouncy and upbeat for the events of the film. And that the film is largely shot with gorgeous Italian seaside daylight and perhaps a slight overexposure, there's a vibrancy to the proceedings that leaves little hidden in shadows. I'm really not sure what exact tone was trying to be set.
Bava's an incredible director, though, so his films, even the lesser ones, still have style and impact. Here he uses a lot of split fore and background shots with a character very close in the front of frame and other characters deep in back of frame all in focus. As well, he's exceptionally focussed on the eyes and letting the eyes tell the characters' stories of lust, love, suspicion, betrayal, intrigue, etc. And with such focus on eyes, also is point of view, most highlighted by the many whip-pans the camera does to shift our point of view... not in a first-person sense but a third-person. We will see a character staring off and the camera will whip across to see what they are looking at, and if someone else is looking back we'll whip back to see their perspective. It's a curious but effective technique, even if it's not perfectly deployed here.
Had maybe the island girl been investigating these murders from the outside, and her life put at risk for doing so, this would really feel like a true giallo. As is it's a mystery that barely lifts the eyebrow, and tepidly sexy.
Remember the first trailer for Alita: Battle Angel? The one where Alita's eyes are so huge they're legitimately upsetting...the kind of unnatural visual that gets the villagers rallying with their torches and storming the castle ready to kill the beasts. In case you forgot:
Looking into those huge CGEyes, the trailer is a horrifying and unsettling journey beyond the uncanny valley. But once you actually start watching the you can possibly look past the eyes and instead be tangibly upset with the tangibly unreality of Alita's entire computer animated face that is on screen throughout over 80% of the film. You'll never ease into it's not-human nature...the way the mouth moves primarily, especially when it contorts into a pinched, fangy smile. *Shudder*
In the year-ish since Alita's debut and unsuccessful domestic box office venture (though it did make considerable bank globally), the film has garnered a rather cult-like collection of supporters (*cough*Toast*cough*). I won't ever deny anyone something they enjoy, but dear god this is a terrible, terrible movie.
I don't know the source material since I'm not an anime fan. There's something structurally about most anime that I find grating, so I just avoid most of it (which isn't to say I dislike all Japanese animation, like Studio Ghibli and non-genre anime tend to be ok, but I just can't summon the energy to wade through it all to find the ones I could tolerate). What bothers me about this westernized "live action" re-envisioning of the anime isn't the aspects that feel anime. No, it's the godawful dialogue, character dynamics, story progression and, grrr, futuresport. I hate futuresports.
The relationships between the characters only exist in
cliche. There's not a single dynamic here that feels unique, and every
one of those relationships progress in the film in completely
predictable fashion. Like memory-less Alita, the waif-ish ingenue, immediately falls in love with Hugo, and accepts Dr. Dyson as her father figure, and makes "the big speech" to try to rally the antagonistic hunter-warriors to her aide against the bad guys.
As a result, the dialogue in this film is clunky as hell. The characters only ever speak like they're reading lines in preparation for a series of very bad plays. I can't think of a single moment where it felt like two characters shared anything real between them. All dialogue here seems to have intent, whether it's overt exposition or pensive pondering or brutal, Hallmark-ian romantic exchanges.
The film's visuals are very unique, and the world is rather distinct (it's a far future society that has all but collapsed, where there exists only one remaining city, "Iron City", surrounded by trash, and above it a hovering golden city Zalem, the dream of every lowly person to achieve status to go up there. But rather than this acting as any sort of tangible class metaphor, the story ignores it for a cliched adventure about a cyborg girl and her missing memories and a lot of stupid futuresport.
The source material was originally serialized manga, and even the original anime was multi-part. The film reflects this with it's many, many, too many plot threads, like the murder mystery plot, or Hugo's dreams of being a Motorball star and going to Zalem, or Alita's missing memories, or Dr. Dyson's tension with his estranged ex wife over the use of their dead daughter's body (and name) for this amnesiac cyborg... the "hunter warriors" league, the influence of Nova from high up above, the curious case of the missing limbs, etc etc. This film has so much going on, and almost all of it is exhaustingly cliche.
The reality of Alita revolves around its futuresport, called "Motorball". The biggest champion of Motorball has the potential to elevate to Zalem, so everyone is obsessed with it. People body mod with cybernetics to give them an advantage in Motorball, and it's an "anything goes" sport. It's people wearing rollerblades with rockets on them racing after a ball in a circular track, trying to slam the ball into a repository. It's just cyborg Rollerball. God I hate futuresports. Films can get too mired in explaining futuresports rules, or they can forget to really explain the futuresport and just let it happen, and in either case it's annoying...does anyone *really* care about the result of any futuresports game ever? It's never playing out in real-time so the drama of a sports match can never capture the feeling of watch a real sport, so what's the point? (Yes, Quiddich is a futuresport and I hate the amount of space it takes up in those books and movies too).
Most of Robert Rodriguez's films are enjoyable, even if they're not great films . There's a consistent style shared among most of his films from the Desperado trilogy through to the various grindhouse-inspired work and his kids movies. The outsiders are Sin City and Predators, where the director is working on an established property that isn't his own and seems to create a tighter, more careful production. This is definitely in that outsider territory, to the point that I didn't remember he was the director until the end credits.
Likewise I forgot that James Cameron was involved with this. It was seeing Cameron's script credit (with Laeta Kalogridis) that it all made sense. Cameron trades almost exclusively in big showy productions filled with boring stock characters who never remotely feel or act like real people. I can accept those types of characters in a cheap, intentionally stupid Hallmark movie, but in a film costing over a hundred million dollars, I want characters that believe their reality.
I have this list of films (& tv) I watched, and yet did not write a review for. I thought perhaps it was a list made up of films (and TV too) I watched in 2018 (the dark year), but in 2018 (the dark year) I actually did much of my film writing on ye olde Letterboxd account (no tv writings though). Letterboxd was a dalliance with dark app magic that hasn't really stuck... not like this hire trusty blogge. But I digress... the list below represents many things watched, mostly, in 2017 (maybe a little before, maybe a little after [the dark year]). Toast was keeping the blogge spirit alive back then, I was too mired in some bullshit or another to put thoughts to 1s&0s. I may have made comments in the blogge about such movie (und T.V.) thinges hence, but perhaps not. I am too lazy to do a search at this time.
Given the passage of time, most of these things will not have taken up much space in my memory, so I may not have much to say... but then again, I may have far more to say than I think. So in this grande experiment, I present to you, quick and addled musings of mostly-forgotten experiences of 2017 (and beyonde!).
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Fast & Furious Franchise - I got into F&F with Fast Five, and was quite taken with its rather brazen tomfoolery. It's big budget action filmmaking that started off as one thing, tried to morph into something else and then wound up becoming something much different, much bigger and much better than its origins would insinuate:
- The Fast and The Furious(2001, d. Rob Cohen - blu-ray) - it started off as a knowingly cheesy Point Break knock-off with illegal drag racing and substitute penises instead of skydiving and other extreme activities. Little wooden boy Paul Walker (RIP) goes undercover with Vin Diesel's criminal gang of souped up street race drivers as they steal truck loads of dvd players (yeah, it ages real well). There's lots of car porn in here and a lot of short shorts and halter tops. Cohen spends most of the movie using his camera to ogle tires and titties. Yet knowing where it's heading it's already got its stupid charms in place. It's all about family, bro.
-2 Fast, 2 Furious (2003, d. John Singleton - blu-ray) - yeah, fucking John Singleton directed this stupidly titled movie. I honestly can remember what happens in this one (and if I'm being honest, I can't really remember what happened in the first one...as with most of the entries in this entire post, I won't remember most of what I watched), but I seem to recall enjoying it more than the first one. I think it uses a lot more CGI, and the absence of Vin Diesel means the acting game is actually stepped up a little in this one (Diesel has screen presence, I'll give him that, but he's a terrible actor). It goes against the grain but I think I would watch this one over the first one.
-Fast and Furious(2009, d. Justin Lin - blu-ray) - I skipped the third one (Tokyo Drift) because it's not really part of the series. Not to get too stuck in the weeds but Tokyo Drift takes place after Fast & Furious 6, if you're trying to sort out the chronology. But really Tokyo Drift is kind of the Halloween: Season of the Witch of the F&F franchise, the one where they tried to do a standalone anthology type thing that just didn't work.... BUT, with his feet already wet, Justin Lin was (ahem) fast figuring things out and set the real prototype for the franchise to follow with the murky fourth entry Fast and Furious, in which he tries to bring together all three of the previous films canonically, while also pushing forward into globetrotting espionage type storytelling with a gang of streetracing thieves with a code of ethics and a strong makeshift familial bond. It's a messy, messy movie, but it certainly started something that Fast Five paid off like gangbusters (...you know, gang busting, like Paul Walker in the first film).
- Fast and Furious 6 (2013, d. Justin Lin - blu-ray) - Fast Five is a legit good time for anyone who has never seen any other F&F movie and it's the legit entryway into it all. Viewing order of F&F should be 5, 4, 6, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8. But anyone coming into F&F may immediately want out with F&F6 since it really ouroboroses it up. Lin just goes for broke and makes a crazy dumb (yet fun) spy movie that brings almost everything from the past right back up front, including resurrecting the dead and tying things back together from Tokyo Drift. It's a film that needs more out of Vin Diesel than he can give, and it overstretches itself with its universe building, yet still certainly enjoyable.
- Furious 7 (2015, d. James Wan - TMN) - And this is where the shit hits the alchemic fan and turns to gold. Jason Statham and Kurt Russell enter the fray of an already ballooning cast. Sadly, Paul Walker died while filming was ongoing and his specter looms hard over the proceedings, creating an honest to god sentimental moment about family in its finale. It's a big, big movie and it goes for broke quite spectacularly. Again it ties itself heavily with the previous three entries, but at this point this ongoing "family" thread is what gives these films connective tissue when otherwise it would just be ridiculously entertaining car stunts.
- The Fate of the Furious(2017, d. F. Gary Gray - TMN) - they may have lost Paul Walker but they gained Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren (yes, fucking Helen Mirren). Never one to let a good adversary stay a good adversary, the bad guy of the previous film (Jason Statham) is reformed as a good guy here (setting up the Hobbes and Shaw spin-off) and it's easily the Statham/Dwayne Johnson chemistry that carries the bulk of the entertainment factor here. Vin Diesel is blackmailed by Theron into being a bad guy who the rest of the team has to take down, and it's kind of a drag, because Diesel, the stunted bad actor that he is, can't play the character as a man trapped pretending to "break bad" but instead just plays a shitty heel figure in the proceedings.
These films, at this point, exceed James Bond levels of action set pieces, and this is the first one that takes major pains to kind of lose the car shtick.... to do other big action set pieces that aren't *only* about cars. It's another turning point in an ever evolving and expanding franchise. There's no way, looking back at that kind of dumb, DVD-stealing crew from the first feature that it would wind up in to the almost-superhero universe it's become. I don't blame anyone for thinking these things are totally stupid dumb and not worth the time. They are totally stupid dumb, but that's what makes them so entertaining. They have absolutely no pretenses about them which is why they are so successful. ---
It's been established that I'm not a big horror movie guy. I can dabble but I'm not very entertained by the cruel nature of horror. I don't get a lot of pleasure out of seeing people tortured or the gags of guts and viscera meant to shock and/or amuse. So when I say that these two films are the best horror films of the decade, you have to qualify that as, like, the sentiments of a guy who really hasn't watched that many horror films this decade. And yet, not only are these two of the best horror films of the decade, they are two of the best films, flat out, of the decade. Two masterfully crafted productions that will stand up for decades to come.
Get Out (2017, d. Jordan Peele - In Theatre) channels so much racial tension, modern and historical, that it's at times unbearable and viscerally upsetting. It's psychotropic horror, a film that doesn't so much as startle you as keep you in a perpetual state of uneasiness. It's a masterful debut from Peele that may have been a big surprise to Key & Peele sketch comedy fans who weren't paying close enough attention to how often those skits descended into some kind of absurd terror.
It Follows (2014, d. David Robert Mitchell - Netflix), in the loosest sense, is about a killer STD. But that's way oversimplifying things. It's a metaphor for shame and guilt around sex, especially in teenage years. Mitchell crafts a film that feels like it's part of the 80's horror explosion, a saturated blueish hue and very specific styles, locations and vehicles all create a bit of a throwback aesthetic with a pulsating synth soundtrack that is brilliant on its own but even more effective in combination with the film. Yet for all its retro homage, it's still a very modern film, thoughtful, sensitive, yet still very, very frightening. An absolute classic.
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*Smooth transition from horror to children's movies*
Finding Dory (2016, d. Andrew Stanton - blu-ray) - Finding Nemo is a brilliant, beautiful, highly entertaining film with a huge heart, an animation classic. A sequel was probably inevitable but hardly necessary. While not quite the equal of its predecessor, Finding Dory does manage to hold up to Pixar's highest standards, delivering another beautiful, highly entertaining film with a huge heart. Dealing with Dory's forgetfulness/disorder and retracing her past makes for a different experience than Finding Nemo while holding onto its structure.
Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie(2017, d. David Soren - in theatre) over the past dozen years of my kids' lives I've been exposed to the rather wondrous worlds of cartoonist Dav Pilkey. The Captain Underpants series is absurd humour for younger readers, but still quite entertaining for adults reading along with their child. The "First Epic Movie" has moments of real inspiration but exposes kind of how juvenile the concept is. It seems to aim for a sort of Spongebob or Lego Movie vibe but misses the mark.
Despicable Me 3 (2017, d. Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda - in theatre). I haven't actually seen any other Despicable Me movies, so perhaps this one was just lost on me without prior investment, but I find the animation ugly, the minions annoying, and the humour tepid. I recall asking myself frequently "who is this joke for?" In a word: inessential.
Moana (2016, d. Ron Clements, John Musker - netflix) There was a period there where my daughter was refusing to go to the movies, so we didn't see Moana on the big screen. We didn't even wind up seeing it together. She saw it at school or at a friend's birthday party, so I watched it without her. I rather adored it, but the vistas and scale of the picture would have been so much more impactful watching on a big screen. It's an absolute darling of a movie though, truly lovely and adventurous.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968, d. Ken Hughes - rental) I don't remember what the impetus was for watching this. I think the wife and I were talking about films that scared us as a child (see next entry) and she mentioned how terrifying Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was for her as a young'un. This is a weird 145-minute long (!) quasi-musical live-action children's film about a possibly sentient super-car that helps a family survive their ramshackle adventure through a despotic alternate reality. From James Bond creator Ian Fleming, adapted to screen by Roald Dahl, it's fucking bizarre. It's not great, but there's absolutely something surreal and captivating about it. I can see how that surreality was terrifying to kids, for sure.
The Peanut Butter Solution (1985, d. Michael Rubbo - blu-ray) There was no tit-for-tat in our traumatizing childhood movie exchange. I had to watch this one on my own. But I did so happily. To rediscover this film -- about a kid who goes bald after getting massively frightened when exploring an abandoned house, then receiving a mysterious recipe for hair-growth formula (the titular peanut butter solution) from a ghost, and then being kidnapped by his nefarious art teach so he can use his perpetually-growing hair to make the world's softest paint brushes -- was an absolute blast. I saw this film many times as a kid, as it was frequently played on Canadian television, and it was great to be able to fill in the gaps of my memory on it. It's a weird-ass movie, with typically Canadian production values which makes it almost more endearing. It's like Cronenberg-for-kids.
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I can't be bothered to sub-categorize the films any longer. Hot takes a-comin:
Oh Hello on Broadway (2017, d. Alex Timbers, Michael John Warren - netflix) Nick Kroll is responsible for two of the best shows of the past decade, the hilarious coming-of-age-and-sexuality animated Big Mouth and the reality TV satirizing sketch comedy of Kroll Show. The septigenarians New Yorkers George St. Geegland (John Mulaney) and Gil Faison (Kroll) emerged from Kroll Show (as well as other appearances online, in podcasts and elsewhere) as a fully baked comedic duo, telling ribald stories of past glories, and questionable decisions they've made along the way. A stage show on broadway was a surprising next level for these hilarious and unlikeably charming characters... I wouldn't think the mass appeal would be there to sustain such a run, but toss in a loosely structured script for Kroll and Mulaney to bounce around inside of, and bring out a surprise celebrity guest interview each show and it just started buzzing. If filming it for Netflix has a problem, it's that one wouldn't want to watch the same show twice, but instead see as many of the shows as possible. It was probably more fun live, but it's still a great time.
GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (2012, d. Brett Whitcomb - netflix) This doc cropped up on Netflix in the lead-up to their original scripted comedy-drama GLOW. I watched and loved the first season of GLOW and was intrigued to see what they actually took from the source. Not surprisingly, they took very little, beyond the comraderie, a few of the archetypes, and the sense of struggle. But seeing the real performers reminisce and then reunite creates for a quite enjoyable and emotional ride. It's a sweet documentary even if you're not sure how much wrestling matters in the grand scheme of things. Mountain Fiji's story is the centerpiece of much of the movie, as she's so loveable and her struggles so touching. There's never a wrong way to celebrate an absolutely endearing, wonderful, kind-hearted person like her, and where it could feel like it was focusing on her at the expense of the other performers, it actually brings them together and further exemplifies their sense of community.
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016, d. David Yates - blu-ray) I thought for certain that I had already written at least once, if not twice about FB&WTFT, but no dice. I only have a letterboxd entry for The Crimes of Grindlewald. I like Harry Potter fine, but I'm not a huge fan, magic just isn't my thing, y'know. And the first time around with FB&WTFT I thought it was trying too hard to be something different, and to be something bigger than it really was. But the second time watching it, I actually responded rather intensely to the characters and their journey, to the point that I was really, really, really looking forward to seeing them again in the sequel. Well, here's how that went. Anyway, I quite like this first one. It really grows on you.
Trump: The Art of The Deal (2016, d. Jeremy Konner - netflix) Johnny Depp plays Trump in this satire of the man's life and his business ethos. It's not as funny or scathing as it needs to be, and it's only clever by half. Perhaps if he didn't become president it would have been more amusing.
Girlfriend's Day (2017, d. Michael Stephenson, - netflix) A cheeky detective noir starring Bob Odenkirk about a down-on-his-luck greeting card writer who gets embroiled in murder and conspiracy around a new fake holiday, Girlfriend's Day. There's probably a good short film in here, but it makes for a bit of a slog at full-length.
The Polka King (2017, d. Maya Forbes - netflix) / The Man Who Would Be Polka King (2009, d. John Mikulak, Joshua Brown - netflix). Jan Lewan was practically a legend when his extravagent lifestyle and inflated ego started overtaking his reality. Unable to sustain himself with his music or business, he starts grifting his fans and his community with a Ponzi scheme. The Polka King is a lightly dramatic retelling starring a delightful cast -- including Jack Black, Jenny Slate,Jason Schwartzman, and JB Smoove -- while the documentary is a little dry but still heartbreaking when it affirms the reality of the hurt Lewan inflicted on people's lives (but also a little frustrating how trusting people were in giving him money to start with). Not essential viewing but rather engaging as a pair (the doc runs just over an hour)
Don't Think Twice (2017, d. Mike Birbiglia - netflix) Comedian Mike Birbiglia is a very gifted storyteller. He's a captivating and hilarious orator and author. It's a bit surprising then that he's rather far from that as a filmmaker, but maybe it's just the story he's trying to tell. Don't Think Twice is a story about an improv comedy troupe dealing with reality when one of their members becomes famous but the rest are left struggling. It's such a narrowly defined reality that even someone like myself, who loves standup, sketch, improv comedy in all its different distributions, could care less about this story or the characters within it. The cast is a great one, with Gillain Jacobs pulling the MVP role within it, but it has no real meat to it, not for lack of trying.
Keanu (2016, d. Peter Atencio - TMN) The transition from sketch to feature has been hard for almost all sketch comedy group, Monty Python excepted. The more successful moves to feature-length scripting tend to find a coherent story formed out of what are effectively a series of sketches. Unfortunately, with Keanu, Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele's first foray into the cinemas as a duo, either the sketches were too restricted by the story of the film, or they weren't intended to be sketches at all. Either way, the film doesn't really work. It's attempting to be a buddy action comedy, and it hits those notes, but they're almost all fairly mundane and and familiar notes. Key and Peele aren't offering anything here that surprises or is memorably quotable, unlike so much from their sketch comedy. It's not a terrible movie by any stretch, but it's missing the sparks of brilliance we had come to expect from the duo.
The Nice Guys (2016, d. Shane Black - TMN) This is Shane Black's thing. Two kind of down-and-out professionals of a type, getting on each other's nerves but developing a respect and friendship along the way. These two guys are Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling... not exactly the dynamic duo on the forefront of everyone's mind, but it works so well. Both are quite into it and Black produced a hilarious and charming script about losers with more style and craft than any of his other outings. A great little movie, worthy of rewatching.
The Late Shift (1996, d. Betty Thomas - TMN) Based on the book, a dramatic retelling of the tensions between David Letterman and Jay Leno following the announcement of Johnny Carson's retirement from The Tonight Show. HBO has been investing in these niche stories for a long, long time, and while it looks painfully like a film made in 1996, it's still actually a very engaging watch. There's no reason anyone should really care about what went on behind the scenes of the Tonight Show any longer, and yet, there's something legendary about this fued which makes this sometimes goofy imagining of it captivating. Kathy Bates playing a ball-busting agent is worth the watch alone.
Arrival (2016, d. Denis Villeneuve - blu-ray) Villeneuve announces himself here as the next great director of big screen science fiction. Next he takes on Blade Runner and Dune, showing that he has little humility in the face of his ambitions. But he produces beautiful looking movies, cast with amazing actors who he draws out commanding performances. This is a procedural, of sorts, which finds linguist Amy Adams discovering how to break through and communicate with a very alien sentience that arrives on Earth. It's not an action film, but the intensity is high, and the depth of emotion is perhaps even more suprising than the aliens.
Fire & Ice (1980, d. Ralph Bakshi - Amazon Prime) This type of fantasy, swords, sandals, beards and crystal balls is not my thing. I find these types of stories tedious and dull. But beyond the tedious story is beautiful hand drawn animation which kept me in admiring awe throughout. There's a stiffness and lack of fluidity at times, but that's somehow part of its charm.
The Lost City of Z (2017, d. James Gray - Amazon Prime) Colonialist epics are a thing of yesterday, unless you can present a story that is absolutely aware of its place within modern cultural norms. The Lost City of Z does have its cake and eats it too, by telling a story spanning three time periods, three adventures in the the Amazon, where explorer Percey Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) discovers evidence of an advance tribe from eras past. The British aristocracy finds any intonation that any non-white civilation would have superior capabilities heretical, but Fawcett, more concerned with truth than politics obsessively forges forward to find further proof, with his family left behind to bare the brunt of his herecy. It's a very tranquil and meditative film, with moments of tremendous intensity, and a few moments of maddening truth regarding our forefathers' ignorance. Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, Sienna Miller and Ian McDiarmid co-star.
Jim & Andy (2017, d. Chris Smith - netflix) Jim Carrey played Andy Kaufman in the 1999 film Man on the Moon. It left him a little scarred. This documentary examines Andy Kaufman's life through Jim Carrey's experience trying to completely inhabit another man's skin. It's a fascinating if inessential documentary that provides interesting perspective on Kaufman, but also insight into the craft of acting and how it can be psychologically dangerous to pretend to be someone else for a while. Now all we need is the meta-movie that is the dramatic retelling of this story.
Black Panther (2018 [the dark year], d. Ryan Coogler - in theatre) Turns out I actually wrote a review in 2018 but never published it (all I had to do was attach some pictures). I corrected that and published it now. I've watched the film a couple times since, and it's in my top 10 of all time superhero films.
Creed (2015, d. Ryan Coogler - TMN) I saw at least some of Rocky III and probably all of Rocky IV when I was a kid, but I wasn't that big into boxing movies then, and I'm still not now. I don't really care. I skipped the chance to watch Creed for free on the big screen when it came out (well, actually, arrived late and was locked out of the theatre) but it was my hyped reaction to Black Panther that made it a must-see. I love it. It's a tremendous movie. I've seen it a couple times now and I'll watch it again. Michael B. Jordan is magnetic, his chemistry with Stallone and Tessa Thompson is incredible, and Coogler's direction is amazing (that seamless one-shot of the boxing match is viscerally engrossing). It's a story about legacy, something I love in superhero comic books, and this is really just a comic book superhero of a different type.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018 [the dark year], d. Julius Onah - netflix) - You can look elsewhere on the internet for the backstory on how this project came to be, and how it came to be on netflix. My hot take is that its incredible cast - Chris O'Dowd, Gugu Mbuthu-Raw, David Oyelowo, Elizabeth Debicki, Zhang Ziyi, Daniel Bruhl - is kind of wasted on such an incredibly badly executed story about parallel dimensions. It's a film that couldn't quite figure out what it wanted to be, sci-fi or horror, not doing either all that well with split focus, and then got shoehorned into a film franchise that isn't a film franchise. There's a few inspired entertaining seeds here but it just doesn't come together. Can we get the cast together again for a do-over?
Ghost in the Shell (2017, d. Rupert Sanders - netflix) There's so much content in the world you have to make blanket concessions somewhere. For me it's books and anime. I've never seen the original GitS so everything in this film is new to me. I get the controversy surrounding it, and I do agree with it: ScarJo wasn't the appropriate casting choice. Moving past the whitewashing (if you can, understood if you can't), the film is quite striking visually and I found the story is very engaging. There's only really one scene, in which ScarJo meets her Japanese grandmother, where the whitewashing becomes so brutally flagrant, but otherwise it's not a constant offense throughout the film (unless to you it is, which is valid).
The Disaster Artist (2017, d. James Franco - rental) Is Franco now cancelled or can we still talk about him with some appreciation? I haven't been keeping up on all the cancel culture news. I know The Room mainly from podcast talking about it and a few clips I've watched obsessively online. Tommy Wiseau is a fascinating personality, and the story of his creation of The Room is bountifully as bizarre as he is. Franco takes one step past impersonation here, capturing Wiseau's strange mannerisms and injecting his own sense of his personality, trying to creating a flesh-and-blood living being out of such an enigma. Dave Franco then, playing Wiseau's de facto best friend and naive partner in crime Greg Sestero, has to do much of the emotional heavy lifting, but since it's a film based on Sestero's book of the same name, it's built for such a focus. It's a very entertaining film about a film that's possibly way more entertaining depending on your disposition. But it serves as a great entryway into The Room for the uninitiated and also a fun dramatization for fans of Wiseau (winking or otherwise).
I, Tonya (2017, d. Craig Gillespie - in theatre) If you were a teenager or older in the early 90's then you knew all about Tonya Harding. Or, at least, you thought you did. She was the "bad girl of figure skating", as the media liked to sensationalize her. She came from lower-class rural America, she liked to perform to hard rock and wore outfits that weren't as refined or standardized as other skaters. She was a curvy, muscular girl, with crimped dirty blonde hair that seemed borderline unmanageable. Everything about her flew in the face of the sport's typical pageantry. So she was stigmatized and villainized by the media, especially when compared to her chief competition, Nancy Kerrigan. Kerrigan was a Disney Princess come to life, long and lean, with flowing, shiny brown hair, doing everything by the book. Of course, as the story goes, Harding kept some pretty bad company (her domineering mother most extremely) and it eventually led to the legendary kneecapping incident that got Harding banned for life from the sport. This is a tragi-comedy featuring both the absurdity and the abuse in Tonya's life, with magnificent performances from Margot Robbie, Allison Janney, Sebastian Stan and Paul Walter Hauser.
Annihilation (2018 [the dark year], d. Alex Garland - in theatre) Perhaps the most intense and legitimately frightening film that isn't an outright horror movie. It's a bit of a puzzle that when pieced all together still requires some thought on behalf of the viewer to get to a resolution. It's got serene moments of beauty, and start moments of terror, with many emotional thoughts in between. It's a film that demands rewatching, but may be too intense for some to actually want to. It's wonderful, one of the best genre films of the decade.
The Shape of Water (2017, d. Guillermo del Toro - in theatre) My dirty nerd secret is that I don't really like del Toro's films all that much. The big benchmarks in his career, Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone are probably my least favourite entries in his repertoire. But Oscar darling The Shape of Water is a strange delight. It's as much a tribute to the history of cinema as it is about a deaf lady falling in love with a fish-man, which explains why the Oscar voters keyed into it so much. There's little else Oscar loves more than films about film. There's just too many beautiful, romantic even, moments in this film to not get swept up, even when it gets cartoonishly heavy handed (intentionally so) and it's so precise (as all del Toro films are) in its details that it's such a marvel to behold. Plus, it's basically an Abe Sapien from Hellboy spin-off in everything but name.
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OH NO! Unwritten about TV shows. Blerg.
11.22.63 (Hulu) - A mini-series adaptation of the Stephen King novel about a guy (played by J*cancelled*o) who finds a time vortex in his closet and goes back in time to stop Kennedy's assassination with disastrous consequences. Kind of fun in the moment, pretty forgettable afterward. The Night Manager (Amazon Prime) - A John LeCarre adaptation about a night manager (Tom Hiddleston) at a hotel who gets recruited into being a spy, infiltrating the organization of a previously untouchable global weapons dealer (Hugh Laurie). Olivia Coleman plays Hiddleston's handler. Elizabeth Debicki plays Laurie's girlfriend. It's a great cast and an interesting story, but it plays too rhythmically like a book, so it feels like it gets distracted frequently from the main thrust. It would probably have made a tighter movie.
The Defenders (Netflix) - Blerg. This was what five seasons and 65 episodes of TV was leading to, the uniting of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist. But the most boring part of the Netflix Marvel was the ninja mob The Hand, and that's the main adversary of this series. The show relishes every scene where characters meet characters from a different series but Elektra and the Hand have them dragging their feet through the mud. Sigourney Weaver is also a main adversary in the show, but mostly separated from everything else going on as we get insight into her terminal illness and how it affects her...she doesn't ever feel like she belongs in this story. What a waste of time and effort. GLOW Season 1 (Netflix) I've written about Season 3 already, but going back to the beginning and remembering Ruth and Debbie and the gang as they were at the start, it's been a remarkable journey for them all. It's really a show about camaraderie, about unity, feminine spirit, and it all starts with Ruth sleeping with her best friend's husband, getting found out, and then having to face that person every day in a challenging, close-knit environment, where failure would be the last straw for all of their careers. There's comedy, which is great, and there's drama, which is even better, and there's wrestling, which is terrible, but in a very fun way. It's ridiculously charming, the cast dynamic is perfect, and it doesn't shy away from having difficult conversations. Its mid-80's trappings are painful reminders of a gaudy, ugly era of fashion, but it certainly gives the show a distinct feel as it leans heavily into the neon style. Ghosted (Fox) Craig Robinson and Adam Scott join a secret organization to fight supernatural entities. It was a rough start. I think I lasted four episodes. I'm certain it could have gotten better (and apparently it did) but a rough start more often than not leads to cancellation rather than patience as it finds its footing. The comedy wasn't sharp or original enough and the characters Scott and Robinson were playing felt like exactly that, characters they were playing. Both leads were better than the material.
Runaways season 1 (Hulu/Showcase) I don't even remember at this point if I lasted out the season. The joke about Runaways, now in its third season, is that it took them an entire season to become the titular runaways. The show got way too mired in the dynamics of the parents and kept harping on the squabbles between the adults, and the tense and/or awkward relationships they had with their kids. I loved the first run of the comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, and the show uses almost everything that was there but tries to build out and extend the story to exceptionally tedious results.
Mindhunters S1 (Netflix) I've already written about season 2, so looking back on season 1, I notice that we've completely dropped Holden's love life in the second season, which is great, because it had done all it needed in season 1. Season 2 did drop the ball a bit on Wendy, Anna Torv's character, who was a real highlight of the first season. Season 2 had a more focused story, but season 1's building of an entirely new method of investigation, of criminal profiling, through the gathering of data by interviewing serial killers was gripping television, specifically the interviews with Ed Kemper, a massively imposing man with impeccable manners and a complete emotional detachment from the horror of his crimes. It's not a show for the faint of heart, that's for sure.
Manhunt: Unabomber (Netflix) - a mini-series trying to fall into the American Crime Story vein, a modestly successful stab by the Discovery Channel to enter the premiere scripted television era. It's an engaging story if told a little bit cheaply. It's important to understand that Sam Worthington's character of Jim Fitzgerald is a bit of a lie...he is a real person, but in the show he represents a whole team's worth of activities, so a lot of the actions he takes and conclusions he makes in the show were performed by others in reality. That said, it's certainly bingeable watching and Paul Bettany's Ted Kaczynski is pretty riveting. It makes for a good pairing with Mindhunters, although the latter's production values are so much higher, making this look like a 90's TV show.
American Vandal seasons 1 and 2(Netflix) - I didn't know what this was until I watched it. I had heard raves about it but still thought it was yet another Ryan Murphy or Ryan Murphy-type season-long anthology project. While it is kind of a season-long anthology, it's also one of the funniest shows on TV. Taking inspiration from all facets of true crime documentation and investigation, this show embraces and exploits the tropes to maximum comedic effect while still actually managing to create some genuinely interesting and engaging characters and a reasonable amount of dramatic tension. The first season finds our intrepid duo of high school documentarians investigating the vandal who scratched dicks into the paint of every car in the school's parking lot. One student was suspended for it, but did he really do it? The second season revolves around investigating who put a laxative in the cafeteria lemonade, causing much of the school to poop themselves. These subjects are very silly, and it's the treatment of them with dire seriousness that only heightens their hilarity. It's a shame this only lasted two seasons, but at the same time it's better than none. Worth revisiting.
Black Lightning season 1 (Netflix) you know, I covered season 2 already and that pretty much expresses my feelings about the show overall.
Toast of London seasons 1-3 (Netflix) Have you ever had to ask the question "Can you hear me?" And did someone respond, rather oddly, with "Yes, I can hear you Clem Fandango", leaving you quite puzzled? Watch Toast of London to find out why and laugh yourself silly. Matt Berry is the egocentric Stephen Toast, a thespian of ill-repute struggling to find meaningful work (or any work for that matter) in modern London. This is an exquisitely crafted comedic persona, Berry infusing all sorts of vocal quirks, physical mannerisms, plus curious psychological and emotional boundries into the character creating for truly off beat and bizarre but always hilarious and usually unpredictable scenarios for the character to fall into. He has a chief nemesis in Ray "Bloody" Purchase (the cuckold whose wife Toast frequently sleeps with), an apathetic supporter in his agent Jane, and a confidant in fellow aged thespian/flatmate Ed. It's hard to overstate just how commanding Berry is in this show, which offers the actor/writer/musician the luxury of a new song each episode to punctuate the emotional aspect of a particular scene but also to afford the show some sheer creative lunacy. There's frankly not another sitcom like this. It won't be to everyone's tastes for sure (just seeing Berry's whinnying sex face is enough to put anyone off who doesn't get the hilariousness of it) but it's worth it for the Jon Hamm episode in season 3 and every Clem Fandango appearance.
Jessica Jones season 2 (Netflix) Is there really a reason to continue watching a show where the lead character learns nothing and continues to alienate the people around her. I mean, most shows with a toxic lead tend to have characters surrounding them who either enable that toxicity, dismissive of that toxicity, or absolving of that toxicity. In Jessica Jones, Jess' toxicity does drive the people away from her and even though she could help it, she doesn't, and it's kind of heartbreaking but also extremely annoying. Season 2 dives deeper into Jess' troubled psyche, some of which has to do with her mother, who reappears with superpowers and is a total murderer. This causes Jess some more psychological distress on top of her already potent PTSD. I struggle to understand just what the show is getting at with Jess, what they want us to glean from her... is it that it's okay to still look for the good in someone who acts so awful? Season 2 was a real fucking bummer, with all the performers killing it in their roles, but creating an end product too unpleasant to enjoy too much. Jessica Jones is a great character, and Krysten Ritter excels at playing her, but the showrunners needed to find another note or two for her to play.
Lady Dynamite season 1 (Netflix) With this new golden age of television, so many comedians are being given the opportunity to create a television show with their own unique vision. Too often those visions are too limited by what's come before, and there's a lot of redundancy or familiarity in the outcome. But Maria Bamford's vision is so uniquely her own that it's amazing that Lady Dynamite was even a thing allowed to come into existence. Bamford's comedy is one that explores the diverging topics of mundane life and mental health, and her show is a representation of that kind of schism. It's a quasi-manic time-bounding story that takes place in at least three different time periods, one being the present day with a semi-successful Bamford finding love and cohabitation rather challenging, another time frame being her return to Los Angeles and the cutthroat world of acting and comedy after having a mental breakdown, and the third time period taking place at the tail end of that mental breakdown where she's in and out of the hospital and dealing with her well-meaning-if-not-always-helpful parents (a wonderful duo in Ed Begley Jr. and Mary Kay Place). It's a hilarious but also challenging show to watch, as the time jumping isn't always obvious so it's left to the viewer to sort out what reality we're in, but I think that's a deliberate move on Bamford's part, just a simplified viewport into her brain. It's also got one of the best title credit sequences of the decade. I've been watching this very slowly over the past few years, most of season 2 remaining, but not for lack of enjoyment.
Collateral (Netflix) is a murder mystery mini-series starring Carrie Mulligan as a sleepy London detective inspector trying to navigate a sticky web of intrigue after a pizza delivery driver is murdered. I remember next to nothing about this story. I recall I was somewhat engaged with it at the time, but even then I found the story overly complicated with not enough meat to Mulligan's character to get totally invested in it. If it were any longer than four episodes I probably wouldn't have continued watching past the first episode.
Star Wars Rebels season 4 (Disney XD) - if there are people out there convinced that Disney killed Star Wars, then they haven't watched Star Wars: Rebels. What started out as seemingly a kiddie-fied cartoon set in the pre-A New Hope days evolved into a glorious action adventure drama starring a makeshift-family that grew and grew and grew in scale to something glorious. If there was any burden for the show it was the expectation that it would ultimately dovetail into established Star Wars canon, be it Rogue One's climax or A New Hope's Battle of Yavin. But it found its own path, and its ties to established canon ran much deeper than just, say putting the crew of the Ghost in conflict with the Death Star. The character building reached its apex in Season 4, with each character continuing to evolve, or fulfil their ultimate destiny in exciting or heartbreaking ways. The journey with the cast of Rebels truly is an epic one, as much the equal of any Skywalker or Solo family memeber, and perhaps even more rewarding. This season continues to build upon the understanding of the force, as well as providing insight into the scale of the fight the rebels have against the empire. It comes full circle, bringing together things learned in previous seasons to show that liberal fluidity is more powerful than conservative rigidity. It's a show that further bridges the prequels to the original trilogy, it reinforces the importance of the Clone Wars cartoon in the pantheon, and it gives us some of the franchise's best characters (in a franchise already full of great ones). Thanks to Dave Filoni and the creative crew for this amazing ride.
Star Wars Resistance season 1 (Disney XD) As one series ends, another begins. This time however, it's set in the era of the sequel trilogy, season one ends colliding with the events of The Force Awakens. But unlike Rebels, which seemed to have a mission to further explore the nuances of the galaxy it inhabits, Resistance is a small show with small dreams. It's still spearheaded by Dave Filoni, but Filoni's interest here seems to primarily be channeling George Lucas' love of slapstick and physical comedy. It's central character is Kazuda Xiono, a bumbling Jack Tripper-type who bumbles his way through his espionage mission aboard an outer rim refueling station that the First Order is courting influence with. The selection of Kaz as their spy is the first of hundreds of absurdities that this show asks its audience to believe in. The supporting cast features few likeable figures, and it gets so mired in its sitcom-like setups each episode that it never feels high stakes. The show works best when Poe Dameron shows up, Oscar Isaac's confident performance as an actual competent agent elevating everything about the show, and lending it its only air of authenticity. The First Order is full of threats, with scattered appearances of Captain Phasma, but the only actual menace they actually generate is when the show dovetails into Starkiller Base's destruction of an entire system. The show, it's bad. It's a bad show. The animation is weird, but not unwatchable, which is more than I can say for the rest of the show. I don't like it. Season 1 basically ends where, all things being equal, it really should have began.
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And that's it. The long list of 2017 (and a bit of 2018) in the bag. Some good thoughts, but mostly half-hearted ramblings about things I've mostly forgotten. But that's not all that unusual for this blog now is it.
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