Ah-Ah-Argento #4: Door Into Darkness

 Door Into Darkness (aka La Porta Sul Buio) was a four episode anthology created and produced by Dario Argento for RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana, nee Radio Audizioni Italiane - the national public broadcasting company of Italy) following his third film, Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Originally airing in 1973, part of the intent of the series was to give friends of Argento some directing exposure, including Luigi Cozzi, one of his early assistants, and Roberto Pariante, an early assistant director. The series was modelled somewhat after Alfred Hitchcock Presents... wherein the director himself would introduce each episode, which Argento does here sporting a shaggy mop and stylish '70's clothes.  It turned Argento into an unlikely, but legitimate star in the country where he would become known as a media personality almost as prominently as a director.

The series originally aired in black and white (since RAI could only broadcast in black and white at the time) but Argento and company was asked to shoot it in colour for the eventual re-airings when they would appear in colour. The crew, however still shot the series optimized for presentation in black and white, so it's bizarre to me that the physical media collection this series is featured on ("Dario Argento's Deep Cuts" from Severin Films) does not have the episodes presented both ways (but from all signs, it seemed a difficult task to find even decent copies of these episodes...the transfers are exceptionally noisy and grainy with frequent haziness or film errors, so it almost feels lucky we even get them like this).

The episodes are:
1. "The Neighbor" (aka "Il vicino di casa") - written and directed by Luigi Cozzi
2. "The Tram" (aka "Il tram") - written and directed by Dario Argento (direction credited to a pseudonym)
3. "The Doll" (aka "La bambola") - written by Marcella Elsberger and Mario Foglietti, directed by Foglietti
4. "Eyewitness" (aka "Testimone oculare") - written by Argento and Cozzi, directed by Argento with Cozzi but credited to Roberto Pariante.

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For The Neighbor, prior to the story starting, Argento introduces the series as a concept before introducing the episode. He's a gentle, contemplative speaker, unassuming for someone considered a master of the macabre. This staged setting transitions sharply to Argento slamming the hood of a car on the side of the road on a highway where he continues to introduce the episode. He then flags down a car, and a young couple pick him up. He gets into the back seat and we see the resulting conversation from his POV. It's truly and odd sequence, lasting about 90 seconds or so before Argento asks to be dropped off and the car drives off. 

But the charm of the sequence reveals itself when it turns out we will be following this couple as our protagonists for the story. They've just bought a beach-front apartment that they're moving into. The truck is to arrive with all their stuff the next morning. However, their upstairs neighbour has just murdered his wife. They would have been none the wiser if not for the fact that he forgot to shut the tap off to the bathtub and it starts to leak downstairs. He's gone out to fetch a shovel and the couple allow themselves into his apartment to shut off the water only to find the body.

With their car stuck in the sand and neither their electricity nor phone hooked up they're trapped with nowhere to go. Their only hope is the murderous upstairs neighbour will be unaware that they found out about his crime... if only the didn't leave something inside his apartment.

The Neighbor has suitable tension, but it's only got about 30 minutes of story in an over 50 minute episode, so it feels every moment of its padding. Much of the padding is meant for ratcheting up the tension but it's more frustrating than intensifying.

Aldo Reggiani plays the husband, Luca, and has the lightest work to do, while his wife, Stefania, played by the beautiful Laura Belli is our primary POV character, and the one who has to interact with the titular neighbour (Mimmo Palmara) the most. Palmara sports a big 70's moustache and a high head of aged grey hair, and at first seems tired and unassuming, but when he needs to take an unconscious Luca to the beach, we see what a beast of a man Palmara is, throwing Reggiani over his shoulder with relative ease, and moving around with him with no difficulty. The threat level triples after we see this strength.

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Argento shines with The Tram, a really fun piece of detective/mystery fiction directed with Argento's usual assured hand and only a slightly tamped down version of his traditional flair. Shot on 16mm (as all the episodes were) there are a number of beautiful shots and impeccable use of his environments (the titular tram car as well as the tram depot), neither of which I've seen used anywhere near as well in TV or cinema in the 50+ years since. While Argento (and his cohorts on the other episodes) did not have nearly the time and definitely not the relative budget of his feature films for this production Argento makes a mini-Argento movie that feels as accomplished and as entertaining as anything he's done (Argento cites the lighting being the biggest sacrifice, but he still does well with what he has here).

In The Tram, a body is found under a streetcar seat when the car is being cleaned. The police arrive and investigate, what seems to be an impossible crime. How could someone be murdered AND stowed without anyone seeing it, including both the streetcar driver and ticket taker who were on the vehicles trip from start to finish.

Enzo Cerusico plays the Inspector on the case, Giordani. He has habits and ticks on display as he thinks through his problems, and Cerusico is not only a handsome lead but absolutely charming one as well. Giordani should have spun out into his own series of mysteries, either on TV or film. Having only one adventure with him was definitely not enough.

But part of it is the case, as well. It is a perplexing one, especially if we're to take all the eyewitness testimony (none of which provides any immediate clue to the killer's identity) as fact, then there seems to be only one or two answers that remain. 

The intelligence of the script is that Giordani follows the remaining threads, and it does point to the most obvious answer, through to completion of the accused being convicted but, his please of innocence haunt Giordani. So even though the case is close, justice has been served, Giordani can't shake that he's missed something. So off the books, with his partner Giulia (the beautiful Paola Tedesco), he takes another crack at it, and it leads to an exceptional climax.

The only weakness of this episode is the off-topic, preachy coda that feels like something Argento just wanted to get off his chest (he's not wrong, but it's just such an aside).

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For the third instalment of Door Into Darkness, Argento brought his friend, journalist Mario Foglietti, whom he collaborated with on Four Flies..., for his first directorial effort.

The story begins with an escape from a mental hospital completely shot from a first-person POV perspective. It's an effective sequence (apparently shot by Cozzi, who stepped in as second unit director when Foglietti fell behind).

From there, it's a confounding and yet kind of compelling puzzle. A police inspector meets with the head professor from the mental hospital. They agree to collaborate on finding the missing patient, whomever they may be, noting that they're a schizophrenic and potentially dangerous.

We follow a handsome, but slightly rumpled man (Robert Hoffmann) around a small town as he checks into a rooming house and looks out upon the street, clearly searching for someone. He finds her (the beautiful Erika Blanc), and follows her, but stops tailing her when she meets up with another man. Later in the evening she is killed in her fashion warehouse.

The inspector and the professor have a follow-up conversation, which only serves to obfuscate rather than illuminate what is actually happening. The man starts following another woman (the beautiful Mara Venier) who looks like the same woman he was following earlier, and he starts messing with her. She seems to let him mess with her. The dynamic is incredibly perplexing and uncomfortable. 

The climax is even more discomforting as the inspector leads a dragnet in the town and the man and second woman play out their psychodrama in hiding. It all comes to a head with the reveal of who these people are.

It's a challenging hour of television, and maybe the payoff doesn't reward the effort, but, as I noted I was pretty compelled the entire time trying to figure it out. Cozzi, in his second-unit direction, really seemed to reach for Argento's-style of first-person shooting, which finds some element of visual consistency across the episodes.

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The final episode, Eyewitness, turned out to be a bit of a mess. From what Cozzi said about what happened behind the scenes, Argento was not pleased with the quality of what Foglietti shot after the first few days of shooting (each episode shot for around 8 days) and he and Cozzi stepped in to take over production, reshooting what they could (Argento's take was that cast and crew were unhapping with Foglietti and asked Argento to take over... in both cases Argento seems hesitant to disparage anyone, and wished that Foglietti retain credit). That the episode is as engrossing as it is proves that the talent of the directors and the series crew.

The plot is an interesting gialli. Roberta (the beautiful Marilù Tolo...there's a lot of beautiful women in Italian cinema and more than a few of them in this series) is driving to her rural home after a day and evening in the city. On the familiar road home, she turns a bend and something jumps out in front of her. She screeches to a halt and sees a woman's body laying in the road. Roberta gets out, certain she hadn't hit anything. She checks the body. It is dead with a wound in the back. There's a rustle in the bushes and a man with a gun emerges. Roberta runs, knowing the local tavern is not far. She makes it without incident. The cops arrive. The chief inspector (Glauco Onorato) questions her, then takes her back to the scene where he explains that he believe she believes she saw something, but there was no body found.

There's one mistake Argento made with the rest of the story. Where we should be following Roberta and her husband as they're, maybe, terrorized by the perpetrator of the crime, or maybe it's all just a series of weird coincidences and Roberta really did "just see something" (the way it's shot largely allows for both possiblities) instead a transitional sequence does show us gloved hand disposing of the dead woman's bloody clothes, thereby eliminating the possibility, at least for the audience, that Roberta might have just been making the whole thing up.

But this "mistake" then does lead to the most surprising part of the story, the inspector, after another incident or four in Roberta's life, which could all be chalked up as random events or even fabrications, he believes her. He intuitively trusts his instincts on her character, and believes her. It's a surprising and wonderful scene when one expects tropes out of stories from this era. 

The climax plays out as it should, and it's satisfying (if the final note a bit weird), but this is a story that really could have been filled out nicely into a full-length movie, really the only one of these stories that has that in it.

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I enjoyed all of these entries, with The Neighbor thrilling me the least, and The Tram exciting me the most. In all, as much as these were made for TV, they are all put together with cinematic professionalism. Argento had to cut costs, but I don't think he knows how to cut corners when he directs. Even when he's not successful, he's always intentional and it shows in the work. He was on set for most of the productions, so his guiding hand is there over the whole procession even if he wasn't writer or director on everything.

The Hitchcock/Rod Serling-esque episode introductions are an anthology convention, and Argento serves the role well. Unfortunately the clever way in which Argento's introduction was incorporated into the story set-up of The Neighbor did not happen in the remaining episode. It was an exceptionally interesting way to get an episode started. 

The series ran into trouble with the censors even before the first episode aired, and then ran into more trouble after the first episode aired. All the censorship issues displeased Argento that he abstained from producing another series or even working in television again for years. But what we got is an absolute treat.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Ranking the Coen Bros.

2018, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Netflix
[Reposted from my letterboxd, typos and all, originally written Nov 16, 2018]

Anthologies are always a challenge for me. Movies, books, comics... I'm never left satisfied. There's too many stories, usually of different length, sometimes connected by theme or genre, sometimes only tenuously connected, often not really connected at all. They usually vary in length and tone, often by different creatives, and invariably you have to compare one story against the rest, and even in the best cases there's always a dud, or one that overshadows all the others. It's never a satisfying experience.

I think the only place where the anthology can really work is television. We're talking The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Black Mirror, but also the idea of season-length anthologies like Fargo, True Detective, or American Horror Story. With the former, the episode by episode format of anthology gives separation, but also structure. Not every episode will be equal but the separation between stories (talking about old school weekly viewing, but also the separation provided by opening title and end credits sequences) provides a buffer to immediate juxtaposition. As individual episodes they're standalone, like short films, not treated as a necessary part of a whole package. The season length anthology is just more fulfilling, a mini-series that lives on it's own each year, all the benefits of regular television but with the satisfaction of both an intended story structure and closure.

Which brings us to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology feature from the Coen Brothers (Ethan Coen no stranger to anthology storytelling, having written more than a few collections of short stories). The early rumour was this exploration of the old West was intended as a tv anthology but it's six tales each run at wildly different lengths (from 10 to 40 minutes) which would make tv serialization impossible. [edit: the "series" rumour has been disproven]

The only real way to tackle reviewing an anthology is story by story, but that type of reviewing also exemplifies the fact that an anthology cannot really be viewed as a whole unit, rather only it's pieces.

The film takes its name from the opening story, following Tim Blake Nelson's singing gunslinger through a breif and violently whimsical journey (it makes me want a Shaolin Cowboy movie adaptation from the Wachowskis). I had incorrectly inferred that Buster Scruggs would be the film's Cryptkeeper, the connecting thread between stories, but no such luck. Just the turning of pages transitions us from one to the next.

James Franco robs a bank in the next story, but gets foiled by the teller played by Stephen Root. It's the shortest of the stories but tonally consistent with the previous, if a little less fantastical.

The third story follows a limbless orator as he travels the countryside with Liam Neeson as his caretaker making a meager living entertaining meager (and thrifty) crowds. Is this a friendship? A business partnership? Or an exploitative relationship? Ultimately, it's overlong, cast in such grey, and lacking the wit and charm of the previous entries, destroying the cohesiveness for the rest of the film.

The next story takes full advantage of Bruno Delbonnel's beautiful cinematography as Tom Waits panhandlers for gold. It's luscious color palette is in stark contrast to the four dankness of the previous story. It's just as deliberate a story as the last, really getting the sense of the time to spare on such endeavours people had way back when.

While the first two stories were rather pithy and energetic, these two slow things right down, peeling away the idealism of the old West, leading into the fifth story, a forty minute romantic tragedy on a wagon train to Oregon. Due to it's length it's easy to invest in the characters, and understanding the painstaking hardship of travel seems to be the point. The early romanticism of old West tropes have washed away, here there's bare practicality and excruciating nothingness, coupled with a gut blow of an ending.

The final story finds five heads in a carriage, talking, a spectre of darkness aptly surrounding them, but the Coen's see fit to return levity via the uncomfortable, forced interaction of strangers who would otherwise not associate with one another. It's an engaging dialogue but quite much to take after three tales of a more photographic quality and already nearly 2 hours deep. If anything, it serves as a reminder of how awesome Tyne Daly is, and she should be in more things.

As a whole, it's a Coen Brothers production so it's worth the time spent, but as a Coen Brothers production it's on the bottom end of their spectrum. I also wished the had better Native American representation than just as attacking war parties.

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I'm being lazy with Buster Scruggs i, not writing a brand new review because, well, I don't have a lot more to say about it, just as I didn't have much to say about it then. I did find it generally tedious to watch and frequently checked the timestamp to see how much was remaining. The Coens love a tight movie so whenever one goes over two hours, you feel it.

The Blank Check Podcast pointed out that the connecting thread of these stories is death, but it's tough for me to really think of it a theme of each of these stories. 

My ranking of the Buster Scruggs stories:

1. The Gal Who Got Rattled
2. All Gold Canyon
3. Near Algodones
4. The Mortal Remains
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
6. Meal Ticket

Now that I have rewatched all 18 of the Coens films together, here are my rankings, subject to change.

1. Fargo
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Hail, Caesar!
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. A Serious Man
6. No Country For Old Men
7. The Hudsucker Proxy
8. Blood Simple
9. Burn After Reading
10. Miller's Crossing
11. True Grit
12. Barton Fink
13. The Man Who Wasn't There
14. Intolerable Cruelty
15. Raising Arizona
16. O Brother, Where Art Thou
17. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
18. The Ladykillers

It's a difficult list to make because 60% of these films are flat out masterpieces, and most of the rest are troubled but still generally likeable. I mean, True Grit is an incredible, maybe even perfect film, and I have it out of the top 10, which is absurd.

My top 3 was my top 3 going into this rewatch and they remained relatively untested. LLewyn Davis and A Serious Man were both a lock for the top 5 and jockeyed back and forth, with Llewyn taking the edge because I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. The films in the 6-13 slots could probably be re-arranged any which way and I would still be happy with that ranking.

The only real surprise in making the list is that Raising Arizona jumped 3 spots from the bottom...and maybe that Burn After Reading made it into the top 10. It's probably the only non-masterpiece in the top ten, but it is so much fun. It's very possible that I may be finally warming to Raising Arizona but I just don't have the sentimentality towards it like so many others do. But sentimentality is why Fargo and Lebowski are my 1 and 2.

Of all these films, only the bottom three do I feel hesitant to watch again. In fact, I would probably watch The Ladykillers before O Brother or Buster Scruggs but it's pretty unanimous that The Ladykillers is absolutely their weakest film. For the record, if I were to add in Joel and Ethan's solo works, Honey, Don't would slot in between The Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable Cruelty while Drive Away Dolls would slot in just after Raising Arizona. I don't even know where to put The Tragedie of Macbeth because it's nothing like the rest of their oeuvre. It sits on its own outside of it all...or it's last, I guess even though it's clearly a better film than The Ladykillers at least.

But what an unbelievable delight it is to have all these films in the world, and to revisit them in succession. It was a real effort to watch them week-to-week and not gorge myself on them. But, next time there will be a gorging.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Doors

2021, Saman Kesh, Jeff Desom, Dugan O'Neal - Amazon

This indie scifi movie is broken into four segments, directed by the above, respectively, "Knockers / Interstitials", "Lockdown" and "Lamaj".

The premise is fascinating. Simultaneously, world wide, a series of black obelisks appear. They emanate sounds, whisper to some people to enter through their reverberating surfaces. The world is terrified, confused and curious.

The segments introduce the doors and the world's reactions to them. In "Lockdown", a handful of high school students doing a makeup exam are left alone in a school as the "doors" appear for the first time. It sits in the exit hallway and beckons to one of the kids. It is menacing and untrustworthy in its suggestions. Then comes "Knockers" with a later reaction from the world, as teams of "knockers" (knocking on the doors, get it?) are sent through the doors. They are on timed missions, as going past the allotted period leads to psychosis and death. I guess that means you can exit? Then we have "Lamaj" where Jamal (see the backwards title?) hides his door from the world so he can study it, learning how to communicate with it, learning that we are in turn being studied. And finally, "Interstitials" gives us a video recording of someone being affected by a door, but with no door in sight -- their influence is expanding.

This one sat in my hopper for a while. I recall hearing good things about it when it came out a few years ago, but as is usual with me, I saw on it. Any of my influential sources have been forgotten and all I am left with is my impression, which is no surprised - meh. Its not hard to see the thread of what they were going for, especially since the entire "movie" is a shared creative experience, but the only successful thing they communicated was that the doors were weird and scary. And you get that from trailers. A successful scifi mystery needs to go beyond the premise and execute... something. 

Think Interstellar with its revelation that the mission was partially a sham, and the rest of the movie was emotional recovery from that. Think Arrival where not only is a unique form of language & communication discovered, but we learn the aliens are outside normal time-frames. This movie presented the idea that the "doors" are here mysteriously, and in one segment, that they are sent by someone to study us, but the rest is just weird disturbances for the fun visuals. From the art of film making, you can focus on getting good performances (they are all decent here) and producing compelling visuals (honestly, I am bored with the Twin Peaks shortcut to "weird" being compelling) but it all needs an actual story to tie it together. This movie is an idea, an execution of elevator pitches, and that is pretty much it.

KWIF: Pee-Pee Peeping

 KWIF= Kent's Week in Film. Three "films" that start with "P" completely on accident.

This Week:
Predator: Killer of Killers (2025, d. Dan Trachtenberg - Disney+)
Pee-Wee As Himself (2025, d. Matt Wolf - HBO)
Presence (2025, d. Steven Soderbergh - AmazonPrime)

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The classic Arnold Schwartzenegger-starring Predator from 1987 was quite a successful film, as a group of mercenaries square off against a high-tech alien Predator in the jungle. It's Danny Glover-starring 1990 sequel, taking place in a sweaty, crime-addled futuristic L.A. was less successful but even more popular among the sci-fi nerds for teasing the culture of the Predators. But it was the various Dark Horse Comics mini-series in the 1990s that showed what could really be done with the Predator....

Put him at a disadvantage in a cold-weather climate. Have the Predator hunting during the first World War.  Let the Predators square off against Aliens. Or Batman. Or Tarzan. Or another Predator!

The core idea behind the Predator (their species is the Yautja...first used in the novel Aliens vs. Predator: Prey from 1994) is that they hunt those most deserving of being hunted; other hunters. Earth is so rife with skilled hunters and killers that it's a favourite hunting ground of the Yautja, but not their only one (as witnessed in 2010's Predators). The key to a good Predator story is to not focus on the Yautja much at all, and offer little to no explanation. Shane Black's 2018 travesty The Predator and the awful Aliens vs. Predator movies explained too much, tried to probe the creatures too much. So Dan Trachtenberg's back-to-basics Predator film Prey (pitting a Yautja against a Comanche warrior) came out in 2022, it paved the laneway for what future Predator stories should be... the Predator in other cultures, in other times.

The most obvious go-to would be Predator vs. Vikings, Predator vs. Samurai, Predator vs Kung Fu warrior, Predator vs Zulu warrior, etc.  So it came as a slight disappointment when the trailer Predator:Badlands dropped and it most definitely wasn't the back-to-basics follow-up to Prey I was anticipating from Trachtenberg.  What I didn't know was that the true follow-up to Prey would be Predator:Killer of Killers, stealth dropped on Hulu (in the US, Disney+ globally) last week.

At first blush, it appears to be an animated anthology film consisting of three stories: Predator vs. Vikings, Predator vs a ninja, Predator vs. WWII aerial ace, you know, the type of stories I was actually hoping would each get the full-feature, live-action treatment, not burned off in an animated tie-in. It's a movie that simultaneously offers a little more than what the typical anthology film does, but at the same time offers each conceit less than what it could have.

Set in 841 AD, "The Shield" finds a viking warrior, Ursa, leading her clan - and her son - on an assault against a foe she has been hunting for a long time.  The enemy was responsible for the death of her father a lifetime ago, but it seems revenge has been fuelling her the whole time. As she confronts the man she has hated her whole life, her son makes the killing blow, and makes him the target of the Yautja that has been observing them in action. The Predator here is a hulking beast, literally Hulk-sized, with a unique pulse emanating weapon on his right arm where his hand should be. Ursa, the Viking queen, meanwhile, fights using two shields with razor-sharp edges.  There is some wild violence and some impressive action beats in all this that allowed me to get over my disappointment of there not being more to it than there is. I feel like the emotional resonance that the story wants wasn't allowed enough time to build, both for the big confrontation the Ursa wants, and for the people she loses along the way.  I like that, like Prey, the Predator is still a more technologically advanced creature, but that technology is more primitive, clunkier than what we would see in the 20th century.

"The Sword" is set in Japan in 1609, but starts further back with two brothers, thick as thieves, who learn and train and grow up together, are forced to face each other by their disciplinarian father to see who is strongest and fiercest enough to be his heir. Kenji refuses to fight his brother, while Kiyoshi is reluctant but the disappointment of his father is too much to bear. He attacks Kenji and Kenji flees. Year later, Kiyoshi holds his father's title, and Kenji, now a ninja, sneaks into his city to get his revenge...except Kenji, for as stealthy as he is, cannot elude the Yautja observing him from behind his invisible cloak. This story, largely wordless, was everything I was wanting, except for not being live-action and feature length. It actually manages to hit the emotional resonance that "The Shield" could not, with the silence putting more emphasis of the visuals and direction, and the music providing so much of the emotional cues. As a short, it's absolutely lovely and poetic, but I still can't help want more out of it.

The end of each of "The Shield" and "The Sword" find our protagonists victorious against their alien opponent, and there's the briefest of glimpses of them in the same confined space that looks like the hold of a spacecraft. The film is teasing that there's more to Ursa and Kenji's stories than what we just saw. And then we're introduced to John Torres.

"The Bullet" is set in 1942, and finds Torres as a second-stringer aboard an aircraft carrier during World War II. Torres wants to fly, but hasn't been given the chance. When his squadron leaves to engage the enemy, Torres and his mechanic buddy discover something incredibly foreign, alien even, that's an even greater threat in the skies. He takes off in a junker plane to alert his crew to return to ship, only to have the Pred Baron start picking them off. Clearly we know Torres is successful in defeating this alien ace, but of the three stories, it's the most implausible. Torres is not, like Ursa or Kenji, so skilled, and his equipment is so outclassed it should barely be flying. Voiced by Rick Gonzalez (Arrow) Torres is a motormouth to the point of being too much, especially coming off of the quiet of "The Sword". Torres winds up verbalizing his inner monologue, which makes it feel much more cartoony than the previous for-adult-audiences entries felt.

It all culminates with a fourth act in a Yautja gladiatorial Colosseum, which I was not expecting at all. If anything I was anticipating that our three victors would wind up in the hunting forest planet from Predators. I very much enjoyed that it was something new, and there was no explaining it. We know what a gladiator arena looks like, and we know how they work, just not Predator-style, so it was full of discovery as new elements are introduced. 

All the fighting throughout the film is brutal and bloody and quite impressively choreographed. It's clean and clear what is happening in the action, although sometimes it's moving so quickly (Tractenberg using a lot of follow-from-behind or follow-in-front of the action oners) that taking in all the violent mayhem is sometimes a bit too much to process. I like how the Predator designs were all quite well thought through and how even though our protagonists were technologically outmatched, they still were smart enough to figure out how to use the Predators' technologies against themselves.

I had an absolute blast with this movie. In the end, the three opening acts come together with purpose for a rousing fourth act that, despite some pretty hand-waivy improbabilities, makes it all comes together, not just within but also outside of this film. The victories Dutch, Harrigan, and Naru all had...well, those probably weren't the end of their stories either.  Also, it should be said that at no point did Killer of Killers ever feel like it existed solely as an introduction to the forthcoming Badlands. It will be interesting to see if they do connect in any way, but even still, this feels as stand-alone as every other Predator story, which is amazing.

[Series Minded: Predator edition]

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When I was a young lad, I thought Pee-Wee Herman was real. Like, maybe he didn't always look like that, in that suit, with the hair slicked back, but to me I had no awareness there was anyone underneath. Pee-Wee was a character actor like, say Ernest or Hulk Hogan or Mr. T, who only seemed to star as himself in movies and TV shows about himself as the character.  I didn't know Paul Ruebens from a hole in the ground until he was arrested at a porn theatre in 1991, and suddenly the magic was dispelled.  I mean, I was 15 at the time, and I knew Santa wasn't real, but this was the first true realization that Pee-Wee was a character played by someone not named Pee-Wee Herman.

We lost Paul Ruebens to cancer in the summer of 2023. He was 70 years old. In the year prior to his death, he agreed to participate in a documentary about himself, shedding off the layers upon layers of privacy he'd long, long held and opening himself up to examination and scrutiny in a way that seemed to frighten him previously.

We learn about Ruebens' early days, his family, his dalliances with theatre and art school in his teens, and we learn about his coming out story, which led to his re-closeting story once he started achieving success. He had a true love-at-first-sight relationship post-College, and he had formed a true bond with this man, as they shacked up and got a cat, Ruebens found himself content.  But that contentedness presented a crossroads: either live the life of love, or live the life of ambition. He chose the latter, broke his lover's heart and his own, and set out for L.A. where he joined up with the Groundlings comedy troupe. From there characters, including Pee-Wee were built, but there was something about Pee-Wee that demanded more attention, both from Ruebens and the audience.

Ruebens was committed as a performer. He invested himself in whatever it was he was doing. He knew how to steal scenes with looks and physicality more than words (but as we see in the documentary, he does have a razor-sharp comedy mind to accompany the sly-little-devil twinkle in his eye). As Pee-Wee became a bigger and bigger thing from stage to screen to Saturday morning subversive idol to children and college kids, Ruebens sheltered himself to the point that he barely existed outside of the character he played. His ambitions got the better of him, relationships with friends and colleagues fractured, and then the arrest.

A children's show host being arrested for something indecent coming out of America's puritanical 80's (where sex was evil, but violence and greed were good for all) was the death knell for Pee-Wee and Ruebens spiralled. 

The first half of this two-part documentary (each part 100 minutes long) follows Rueben's life through all these elements, with friends and ex-colleagues all talking about how amazing it was to be part of it all but also speaking truth to who Ruebens was at the time, as Ruebens himself struggles on camera to fully lay it out and cede control of his narrative to his director.

The second half is all about the fall of Pee-Wee Herman, and then his revival, and his third act, and all the messiness in between. The first half is a real rise-to-fame story, but without revealing in the triumph, since there were sacrifices along the way that have manifested as, if not regrets, then at least remorse. The second half is very much a rollercoaster, as Ruebens tries to find his footing as Paul Ruebens and it's full of ebbs and flows that must have been really tumultuous and stressful to live through, particularly the very public reaction and hurtful things said about him. Rueben's relationship with his sexuality is an integral part to the story, and probably a lot of what Ruebens wanted to get off his chest about in the documentary. 

There's a lot of great things about this documentary, first and foremost is Ruebens himself. Even at 68/69 years old, secretly dealing with cancer, he looked fantastic and vital with a precociousness about him that was so alluring to watch. His combative nature with director Matt Wolf is the B-story to the documentary, where clearly Wolf was constantly having to fend off Rueben's stabs at taking control of the project.  Rueben's jabs at the director start out quite playful and take on a bit more menace the closer they get to the more troublesome years. 

The talking heads are all fascinating, most coming from such a place of love, but a few coming from a point of pain, of regret or remorse around their falling out with Reubens (and there were a few). The sheer volume of personal films and tapes that Ruebens had around his life makes this documentary sing with not just the narrative but visual proof of that narrative, and transporting the audience into the past.  

There have been a slew of documentaries about celebrities of the 70's, 80's and 90's of late, most of them produced by the celebrities (or their family/estate) leading to pretty whitewashed looks at their lives, celebrating more their glories than their humanity. This is very much the opposite, really getting in touch with the person who hid behind a character for so long that he had a hard time finding his way out again. It should be a compelling watch if you ever had any affinity for Ruebens at all. 

--- 

I wrote a bit about Steven Soderbergh's prolific output in my Black Bag review (Toasty just published his, we agree!), so I won't rehash it here, except to say that the man put out two films in the first quarter of this year. That's insane. Even more insane is that Black Bag was a critical hit but fared poorly at the box office while Presence was pretty much ignored by everyone, but its low budget meant that it would up being a modest success.

Where Black Bag was a real adult sexy thriller starring big stars, Presence is an experiment in filmmaking with a story.  While the story's unfolding nature of discovery does lead the audience through the proceedings rather well, it's unable to escape the techniques Soderbergh employs that are simultaneously distracting and effective.

The whole film takes place inside a gorgeously refurbished 19th century home which had Lady Kent and I both salivating. It's a dream home, to be sure. The film opens with the Payne family looking at the property, and then moving in. Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is the driving force of the family, clearly successful, but there are hints that her success hasn't always been above board. She is obsessed with the wellbeing of her superstar swimmer son,  Tyler (Eddie Maday) while all but ignoring the well-being of her daughter, Chloe (Callina Lang), much to husband Chris's (Chris Sullivan) constant displeasure. Chloe has recently lost two friends two overdoses, and she's spinning out. Chris does what he can to engage, but it seems like Rebekah and Tyler just ride her and push her too hard. Tyler introduces her to his new friend Ryan, and soon Ryan and Chloe are hooking up. He seems like a good guy, and lets Chloe take the lead in their relationship, but there's also an air of menace about him. He's up to something, and it's not what you think, but the film wants you to think it.

The entire production is told from a sort of floating first-person perspective, which, it's slowly revealed, is the "Presence" of the title. Yes, it is a ghost story. It's not a horror movie, but just a drama in which a ghost is our eyes into the play. At times the spirit, who Chloe believes is her dead friend, seems to be  trying to interfere in what's happening, mostly unsuccessfully, but events that elicit a particularly strong emotion from the spirit allow it to interact with its environment.

It's a bit of a trifle of a film. It exists solely for Soderbergh to play with this first-person perspective storytelling, which doesn't have a lot of true success stories in the film world outside of Nickel Boys which earned an Oscar nomination at this year's Academy Award.  But presence is more in the "just trying something here" vein of Hardcore Henry or Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void and is about as successful as either of them. When the whole story is in service of a stylistic experiment, there's a layer that gets in the way of the audience engaging with the story fully.  

As well, the third act climax felt...very Hollywood. This took a family drama with a hint of supernatural intensity and turned it into a studio movie with a legit villain. I didn't really expect too much from Presence and it doesn't ask much either. It's fine for what it is. 

[Updated] Black Mirror - Kent ranked

28 episodes, 6 seasons and Christmas special and an interactive movie (so far)

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Ranked from 1-10 each for:

T - thoughtfulness (how much it makes you think afterward)

WB - world building (how well the world building works and holds up to scrutiny)

H - horror (how scary is it)

E - enjoyable (it may be smart or scary or conceptually interesting, but is it a fun/good view?)

And finally Ranking 1-20
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s1-e1 National Anthem - the Royal Princess is kidnapped, and the Prime Minister is blackmailed into doing something really gross on live television to get her back. This one's uncomfortable as fuck.  Not the episode to start with (I didn't come back to Black Mirror for 6 months afterward)

T - 9 | WB - 2 | H - 10 | E - 2 or 8 depending on your disposition -- Ranking #31/34

s1-e2 15 Million Merits - in the future the average person's job is literally keeping the lights on.  As they work they watch entertainments and ads, and they gain credits.  When they're not working they live in tiny cubicles where every surface is a screen...gaming, entertainment, porn, and advertising, always..their lives are consumed by it.  The only escape for some: an American Idol-style talent competition.

T - 9 | WB - 7 | H - 2 | E - 7 -- Ranking #9/34

s1-e3 The Entire History Of You - an implant records every moment of your life for you to obsess over and play back.  There's no need to misremember things when literally everything is documented.  How does this access to one's past affect relationships...not well.

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 3 | E - 8 --  Ranking #11/34

s2-e1 Be Right Back - a woman loses her husband after moving to the countryside.  She can't stop grieving.  She catches wind of a service that will place her husband's memories (extrapolated from all social media and other digital records) in a bio-engineered version of him.  It gets a little awkward (stars Agent Carter herself Hayley Atwell)

T - 6 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 9  --  Ranking #3/34

s2-e2 White Bear - a woman wakes up, having been seemingly drugged and kidnapped.  Everyone she encounters refuses to talk to her, only monitoring her with their cel phones.  Then some masked crazies start hunting her.  WTF is going on!?! The world building kind of falls apart at the very, very end but still scary as hell

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E- 9  -- Ranking #8/34

s2-e3 The Waldo Moment - what if a foul-mouthed cartoon character ran for office? It basically predicted Trump.  Easily the weakest episode yet still worth watching.

T - 8 | WB - 7 |  H - 7 | E - 4 -- Ranking #34/34

Christmas Special - White Christmas - John Hamm tells a story to a coworker at a remote outpost, and the stranger tells one back.  There's a mystery here.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 6  -- Ranking #24/34

s3-e1 Nosedive - Bryce Dallas Howard is obsessed with her social media score, an app that allows people to rank each other that the whole world is obsessed with and makes every decision around, but it's not high enough to get into the living community she wants.  Her efforts to be a better person totally backfire.  So casually horrifying.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 8  -- Ranking #14/34

s3-e2 Playtest -  a man subject himself to playtesting an experimental, immersive virtual reality gaming experience, but what's the game and what's real start getting very confusing.

T - 4 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #33/34

s3-e3 Shut Up and Dance - a young man has his life upended when a hacker threatens to release compromising video of him to his entire contact list.  The only way out is to perform 24 hours of errands without fail.  The panic level is high on this one, and the ending is a total gutpunch.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 9 | E - 8  -- Ranking #10/34

s3-e4 San Junipero - people can retire into the virtual reality of their choosing, while the young can only visit.  Two women fall in love but their ability to find one another and stay connected is a challenge.  It's an absolutely beautiful, and hopeful, story.  Won two Emmys.

T - 8 | WB - 10 | H -0 | E - 10  --  Ranking #2/34

s3-e5 Men Against Fire - an alien enemy has taken over, they're seemingly everywhere.  Military tech help identify them, but what happens when one soldier's tech goes on the fritz?  Better taken as an analogy than literal.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #21/34

s3-e6 Hated in the Nation - it's a murder mystery, a police detective show mixed with a bit of X-Files or Fringe.  It's practically movie length, and enjoyable but feels so outside of the usual Black Mirror episode...more like a Law and Order episode, or a pilot for a new detective series.

T - 4  | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 7 -- Ranking #30/34

s4-e1 USS Callister - technology that allows you to live within a virtual fantasy scenario finds its incel creator living a totalitarian fantasy life within a Star Trek knock-off, where his servile crew are stolen mind-maps of people from his real life.

T - 4  | WB - 8 | H - 4 | E - 9 -- Ranking #6/34

s4-e2 Arkangel  - helicopter parenting taken to the next degree.  As a parent I can relate to the impulse to protect your child, but when does protection start leading to control?

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #20/34

s4-e3 Crocodile -  a hit-and-run in a remote coutryside returns to haunt a successful architect when an insurance investigation, using memory-reading technology, threatens to unravel her life.  It asks you to relate but it may be the biggest ask in all of Black Mirror.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 8 | E - 5 -- Ranking #25/34

s4-e4 Hang the DJ - a little hopefulness and romance nodding back to San Junipero.  It's a cute/sad look at on-line/app dating, how people meet and whether algorithms can truly account for chemistry.  The reveal/twist is maybe the most eye-rolling of all though.

T - 7 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 6 -- Ranking #29/34

s4-e5 Metalhead - oops, drone technology got out of hand.  Directed by David Slade in glorious black and white, these metal dog things are freaking terrifying.

T - 3 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E - 9 -- Ranking #5/34

s4-e6 Black Museum - a young British woman (Letita Wright!!) waits for her car to recharge, passing the time at the curious Black Museum.  There we see artifacts from across Black Mirror's episodes and are introduced to a few more curiosities.  Honestly, I forget how this one shakes out.

T - 5 | WB - 10 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #32/34

movie - Bandersnatch - in the 1980's a choose-your-own-adventure novel is adapted by a mentally troubled young man into a video game, but aspect of his past and events of the present threaten to drive him to madness, or murder...you decide.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 5 | E - 9 -- Ranking #4/34

s5-e1 - Striking Vipers - a married man and his estranged best friend from college reunite in a new virtual reality version of the video game they play, which leads to questions about sexual identity, marital fidelity and what constitutes an affair.
T - 8 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 8 -- Ranking #18/34

s5-e2 - Smithereens - a distraught widower takes a hostage in order to talk with the billionaire creator of a social media platform

T - 5 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 8 -- Ranking #19/34

s5-e3 - Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too - Ashley O is one of the world's biggest pop stars, but she's trapped in a life she doesn't believe in.  Rachel is a lonely teen in a new town and she gloms onto her Ashley O fandom as her identity, while her sister Jack is too rebellious for it all.  Rachel gets an "Ashley Too" robotic interface which winds up connecting the sisters with the celebrity in a most unusual way.

T - 2 | WB - 4 | H - 1 | E - 6 -- Ranking #28/34

s6-e1 - Joan is Awful - Joan pops on the in-world Netflix to find a TV show starring Salma Hayak who is styled like her and is reenacting moments of her immediate life. Joan's world is thrown into chaos. It gets pretty meta from there.

T - 6 | WB - 2 | H - 2 | E - 8 - Ranking #16/34

s6-e2 - Lock Henry - A young documentary filmmaking student turn his attention on his depressed Scottish hometown, and the murders that rocked it a decade earlier.

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 7 | E - 7 - Ranking #22/34

s6-e3 - Beyond the Sea - in a different reality of 1969, two astronauts are on a long-term space mission, but are able to send their consciousness between their real selves aboard the ship and the androids on earth that allow them to continue their lives. Things go unexpectedly bad and then get predictably awful.

T - 2 | WB - 3 | H - 5 | E - 5 - Ranking #26/34

s6-e4 - Mazey Day  - In mid 2000s, a reluctant paparazzo chases after a famous starlet who has seemingly disappeared after being fired from a shoot for unknown reasons. What she doesn't know is the starlet was involved in a deadly hit and run and is having a very hard time.

T - 5 | WB - 6 | H - 7 | E - 8 - Ranking #13/34

s6-e5 - Demon 79 - In 1979 England a young shoe sales woman of Indian descent experiences constant racism - overt, veiled, systemic, etc - but when she's accidentally tethered to a demon, she's given the opportunity to let out some of her pent-up frustrations...because she has to kill 3 people or the world will end.
T - 6 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 9 - Ranking #12/34

s7-e1 - Common People - She was dying with a brain tumour but a new technology saves her life by backing up her brain. But is life worth living when there's a subscription cost that, like all subscription services, just gets worse and worse and more expensive over time.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 8  | E - 7 - Ranking #23/34

s7-e2 - Bete Noir - A snack food developer finds her past comes back to haunt her when a nerdy kid from her old high school gets a job working with her. But even if she could get over the past, the fact that reality starts changing around her is bound to drive her mad.

T - 6  | WB - 5  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #17/34

s7-e3 - Hotel Reverie - A brand new type of movie production finds an actress taking the role of leading man in a classic 1940's film, reconstructed as a simulation. When the simulation glitches. the movie stops and time starts racing forward, the actress and her leading lady, who has gained a level of sentience, fall in love.

T - 6  | WB - 6  | H - 1  | E - 7 - Ranking #27/34

s7-e4 - Plaything - A man is brought in for questioning on a cold case murder from the 90's. He tells the story of being a video game reviewer, dropping acid, and helping a species within a videogame evolve, and how that led to the murder.

T - 6 | WB - 7  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #15/34

s7-e5 - Euology - A man is given a high tech package to help eulogize the recent passing of an old love. His journey into photographs help unlock memories long buried, opening old wounds but also finding a closure he never thought he could get.

T - 10 | WB - 7 | H - 2  | E - 9 - Ranking #1/34

s7-e6 - USS Callister - Into Infinity - a true sequel, the cloned crew of the USS Callister struggle to survive within the open world of the online video game Infinity. When they've drawn too much attention to themselves, the outside world starts to intervene.

T - 6  | WB - 9  | H -  6 | E - 9 - Ranking #6/34

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Ranking Black Mirror

1. Eulogy

2. San Junipero (-1)

3. Be Right Back (-1)

4. Bandersnatch (-1)

5. Metalhead (-1)

6. USS Callister - Into Infinity (new)

7. USS Callister (-2)

8. White Bear (-2)

9. 15 Million Merits (-2)

10. Shut Up and Dance (-2)

11. The Entire History of You (-2)

12. Demon 79 (-2)

13. Mazey Day (-2)

14. Nosedive (-2)

15. Plaything (new)

16. Joan is Awful (-3)

17. Bete Noir (new)

18. Striking Vipers (-4)

19. Smithereens (-4)

20. Arkangel (-4)

21. Men Against Fire (-4)

22. Loch Henry (-4) 

23. Common People (new)

24. White Christmas (-5)

25. Crocodile (-5)

26. Beyond the Sea (-5)

27. Hotel Reverie (new)

28. Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (-6)

29. Hang the DJ (-6)

30. Hated in the Nation (-6)

31. National Anthem (-6)

32. Black Museum (-6)

33. Playtest (-6)

34. The Waldo Moment (-6)

T&K's XMas (2024) Advent Calendar - Day 20: Holidazed episodes 2-5

2024, created by Claudia Grazioso - Hallmark/W Network

Episode 2 - The Hill Family: So the most erroneous part on the subtitle is that this is really the story of Josh (Ian Harding) and the rest of his family (Mom and Dad) barely play a part in it.

This episode is the cliche Hallmarkie but in gender reversal. As we'd seen in the premier Josh is the arrogant big-city guy who returns to his Perfect Small Town (which may or may not be Seattle...perhaps a suburb...or maybe Portland area...it's not specific but we'll get to why that's my assumption) without his emotionless, unaffectionate, task-oriented girlfriend (the "Dick GF"?) to clean up things at home before they leave together for the ultimate next step in life and career in Australia. 

But Josh got into a bunch of trouble with his parents car and the local sheriff(?), single mom Nora (Erin Cahill), whom he knew in high school. Yes, all the cliches. He's set up for community service act a local fundraiser but annoys the women there so much that when Nora's son Theo asks if he wants to help him with his ornament for a competition, that then becomes his community service. They start bonding as they try to figure out what "the Life Star" looks like (Theo's idea for an ornament is "the opposite of the Death Star"...not bad actually).

Josh starts to catch Nora's attention and they're having fun day in and day out...until the Dick GF shows up and looks askance at Josh's current choices. An awkward sit-down with Josh's parent reveal Josh and Dick GF had bought them a new unit in a retirement village so Josh could just put them away and forget about them once he's gone to Oz. That goes over well.  In the midst of a big "talking about life and future" conversation with Dick GF and Josh goes a-running over to Nora's house, and says he can't stop thinking about Theo. Weird. Josh has solved the Life Star.  They win the competition to Dick GF's befuddlement. Theo gives Josh a hug, and Josh and Nora look longingly at each other. Dick GF notices, and later, as it's storming outside, give him an all tomato. Then the power goes out. Weird ending.

Ian Harding is an enjoyable actor to watch, and Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez who plays Theo may be the best child actor in any Hallmarkie ever. But this is just too cliche and predictable to be exciting, and the Hallmarkie cliche I hate the most is when the big city person falls in love with being a parental figure to a child, and, then, I guess, finds some sort of romantic connection maybe with the kid's parent. It's icky and weird and not something built to last. And this episode barely tries to even establish Nora and Josh as an item. As I said, weird.

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Episode 3 - The Lin Family: When we last left off Grandma Lin (aka Nai Nai, Lucille Soong) was staying for Christmas, and she believes that Ted's (Osric Chou) fiancee Marcus (Shawn Ahmed) is actually his sister Ella's (Jasmine Chen) fiancee. Nai Nai recently had a heart attack so everyone is crawling all over eggshells not to upset her, including by outing Ted.

Nai Nai wants to plan all of the wedding details which leads to hilarious (not) hijinks as everyone needs to bend over backwards to not reveal their dirty secret. There's lots of family conversations in the closet (the irony is not lost on Marcus. There's photo shoots which wind up in the local paper (which everyone still reads in this PST...weird! And it's not online. Double weird!), there's checking out the venue and dancing (where Theo has to "show" Marcus how to dance after bungling it so badly with Ella) and Ella trying on a wedding dress, even though her whole online influencer persona is anti-traditional gender roles and coupling behaviour... so she's got a rep to protect.

Ted's ready to out himself, but Nai Nai says she's ready to promote him to CEO of the family business. What's the family business? Nobody knows, and Nai Nai seems to have a lot of time on her hands if she's the active CEO, so it can't be exceptionally prosperous. Nai Nai talks about her heart problems as Ted's still trying to come out to her, and so Marcus, feeling guilty now (bullshit) steps in and continues the ruse. Marcus, an out-and-proud therapist up to this point has been a reluctant and dissatisfied participant, so I really could not buy into his stepping in to prevent Ted's confession (you would think he would help facilitate it somehow, right?).

Nai Nai talks throughout the whole episode about how progressive she is and it was her late husband who was the traditionalist. This is all so cliche and painfully predictable, I hated watching it. It was attempting a lighthearted in-the-closet farce, but so damn much of it seemed so antiquated, like it was a script written in 1997. I know in some cultures that coming out can have serious repercussions from other members of the family, and that's never funny. It's a pretty serious thing to explore, and it's clear this episode had zero interest in exploring it. 

This episode made me very unhappy, except for the end when the storm hits, and the lights black out, Ted and Marcus get caught in the rain and start making out, only for Nai Nai to catch them through the window. I wish this happened minute 10, not minute 45.

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Episode 4 - The Woods Family: After two exhaustingly cliche episodes it was nice to spend time with the Woods family that takes pains to set up the cliches only to buck them.  It's still not a great piece of television, but it's a far cry less frustrating and eye-rolling than the two episodes that came before it.

When we left off, we saw Lucy (Lindy Booth) coming home to see her worldly younger sister Sylvie (Rachelle Lefevre) chatting with the handyman, Cole (Steven Allerick), Lucy invited over for a sort of date.  I had expected a cliched sibling rivalry but was plenty surprised when the show completely side-steps any misunderstanding and Sylvie instead wants to help fix all of Lucy's troubles, including getting the guy.

Emergency renos are required at Lucy's gluten-free, organic cafe after a health inspection reveals that a hallway is too narrow to carry a stretcher down. This means more time together as Cole's assistant.  Sylvie, a silent investor in the cafe, starts brainstorming ideas to help raise more money faster as well as starts helping out niece Annie with her boy troubles.  

Sylvie and Annie find Nora's "Joy Box" stashed away, which had Lady Kent and I howling. Turns out Sylvie and Nora's mother's name was Joy. Nora has issues with their deceased mom, but Sylvie starts hauling out all the old Nora favourites, including the special super-sweet Christmas bars she used to make, and giving Annie some of Nora's vintage disco clothes to attract neighbour boy Max's attention.

At first it seems everything Sylvie is doing is helpful... she's getting Nora dolled up for her date with Cole, she's given Annie advice on flirting with boys, and she's making up big batches of the Christmas bars to save the Cafe. But it all blows up in her face. Nora winds up having an allergic reaction to the lip gloss Sylvie gave her. Max freaked out when Annie pecked him on the cheek while taking a selfie. And the bars turn off the Cafe's existing customers (who hate sugar) and fail to attract new ones. And also, Sylvie had given her worldly quasi-boyfriend a "next step" all tomato, and he went off and found himself a hot new Starbucks barista while they were on their break.

And Nora and Sylvie fight over everything, including differences in opinion on their mother, and Sylvie decides to leave, only for Nora to find out about Sylvie's "break-up" after the fact. The storm has hit, the power goes out, and Nora needs to find her sister and bring her home.

I liked the subversion of the expected, but there were still far too many set-ups for the expected to happen... far too many. And the teen drama was pretty cringey.

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Episode 5 - The Lewin Family: Let's just get it out of the way that, to me, it's very, very weird for one's divorced mother and father to both be staying in their kid's home for the holidays. One of them needs to be in a hotel or something. Distance and space are needed. Especially when mom Linda (Loretta Devine) turned up with her new boyfriend Evan (Ser'Darious Blain), who it turns out is even younger than their daughter.

The main focus of the episode is not bittern infighting between exes, or absurd competitiveness between ex-husband and new boyfriend... but that is where it starts. In the opening moments Robert (Dennis Haysbert) is getting up in the morning, working his aching knees, when he hears Linda hooting and howling and giggling down the hall. The insinuation is that Linda and Evan are gettin' it on...but they're just having a pillow fight (the Hallmark stand-in for gettin' it on, lol). Just as Robert goes to head to the bathroom, so to does Evan and they have a most delightfully awkward stare down then non-conversation before Evan retreats.

The two men are assigned with helping grandson Max put together his stand for the complimentary gift wrapping service he does with neighbour Annie. It doesn't go well and the booth collapses. Blame is passed around as the men puff their chests at each other. Later, there's the annual neighbourhood "broomball" competition and Evan joins the Lewins, but Robert's alpha drive takes over and he knocks Evan to the street (even though they're on the same team). Forced to apologize by Linda... Robert and Evan start to learn they have things in common... a lot of things... and they hit it off and become fast buds much to Linda's dismay, and dislike. 

The new friends head out for a nightcap after dinner, and Evan helps encourage Robert to talk to a lady down the bar who is flirting with him. The next morning the two pals have the stand in best-ever shape, and Jennifer (Robinne Fanfair) jokes that her mom found the perfect match... for her dad.  Mike (Jeff Joseph) then quips that, no, she just found a younger version of Robert.

There's more funny little twists to this very unexpected bromance between Robert and Evan, and I was here for most of it, especially the shopping montage where Evan takes Robert out for a style makeover for his first date with the lady from the bar.  

What I was most worried about with this starts to happen, Linda gets jealous and starts interfering with Robert's progress, as well as getting in the way of her own.  She just sees in this revitalized Robert, the man she originally fell in love with. I hope in the big finale it comes to pass that this is pointed out, that it's actually a pattern of behaviour and maybe they both recognize that they can love each other but not be together as being together doesn't make them both happy.  

Meanwhile, there's a whole side plot about how Jennifer's new promotion to partner at the law firm, and Mike's shift to a stay at home dad (Max is like, 13...? I don't get it... though it is a big house to take care of) is echoing the unhappiness that started in Robert and Linda's relationship.  As a side plot, it's not covered deeply enough, but it's still pretty good.

This episode was so unlike usual Hallmarks, not just in being tremendously funny and surprising, but in really getting to the meat of the conceit (even if that conceit is bonkers). 

When the storm hits and the power goes out, Linda and Jennifer are returning from the store, with Linda seemingly resolved to make some advances towards reconciling with Robert, only to find that Robert has invited lady from the bar over.  Please keep surprising me with this story.

1-1-1:Black Mirror Season 6

2023, 5 Episodes - Netflix
Created and written by Charlie Brooker

The new season of Black Mirror is finally here. It's a departure from prior seasons for sure, with Charlie Brooker bringing us five very different stories, three of which are some of the strongest in the series (but also the most radically distant). Three of the five episodes are period pieces (and one more is obsessed with a story from the past), which indicates that maybe Brooker is exhausted with forward thinking, and instead wants to look back and see how the past could have influenced today, or if the past were different what that might look like. 

Between "Beyond the Sea" and "Demon 79", I get the sense that Brooker is itching to do a bigger budget genre movie, whether it be a mid-budget horror, or a bigger-sized sci-fi, but I also get the sense that he's quite comfortable in this TV zone where he has much more control and is hesitant to do something bigger that might be scrutinized more.

But hey, if he wants to keep making Black Mirror, especially in this more diversified form, I'm still all in.

"Joan Is Awful" (d. Ally Pankiw)

The What 100: Joan pops on the in-world Netflix to find a TV show starring Salma Hayak who is styled like her and is reenacting moments of her immediate life. Joan's world is thrown into chaos. It gets pretty meta from there.

1 Great: Brooker's career largely originated in comedy and satire. Until this episode he's more been focused on satire and horror than comedy. But this one's a straight-up comedy. 

1 Good: I don't want to spoil anything, but I loved how meta this episode went. It really doesn't hold up to too much scrutiny, but it doesn't matter, it's a blast. It's the most "star-studded" episode of the season, but it is so with purpose.

1 Bad: The conceit of this episode is that a clickwrap agreement tied to downloading an app that grants an app unfettered access to your life, your story and your likeness (by listening and observing through your phone) is somehow legally sound is complete garbage plotting. A class action lawsuit would utterly bankrupt the company. 

Meta: Diving back into Black Mirror after an absence (it's been 4 years since we last saw a new Black Mirror episode) is always met with trepidation. I mean, the series started with the Prime Minister of England being blackmailed into fucking a pig on live TV... we're always expecting the worst. But this brought us in gently, and it was really, really fun. Perhaps not the best episode of BM but maybe its most fun.

"Loch Henry" (d. Sam Miller)

The What 100: A young documentary filmmaking student turn his attention on his depressed Scottish hometown, and the murders that rocked it a decade earlier.

1 Great: For me, this was a very middle-of-the-road episode that looks at the industry of true crime documentaries without a whole lot to say, but it ends so strongly with its character-focused epilogue 

1 Good: I had no idea that Bergerac was a real TV series. I thought it was an in-world creation... I don't know if it's more awesome or less awesome that it actually exists.

1 Bad: "Loch Henry" never really escapes its ominous tone...it's so even tempered that when it should be raising its stakes into anxious horror territory, it just simmers. I think it's more to do with direction than scripting, and there seemed to be a choice made not to turn it into something scary, but instead something at the terror level of a, well, true crime documentary/ 

Meta: I like how Black Mirror has established connecting threads between the various episodes but it's not all one reality. Here the filmmakers pitch their documentary to Streamberry, the Netflix-like service (right down to the "Dun Dun" and interface) central to "Joan Is Awful". Although, confusingly, one character references Netflix, which makes me think that Streamberry was a late addition and they just kind of goofed on leaving the Netflix mention in. 

"Beyond the Sea" (d. John Crowley)

The What 100: in a different reality of 1969, two astronauts are on a long-term space mission, but are able to send their consciousness between their real selves aboard the ship and the androids on earth that allow them to continue their lives. Things go unexpectedly bad and then get predictably awful.

1 Great: It's not Black Mirror's first movie-length episode, but it felt the most filmic of any BM so far. It's got a really far-fetched sci-fi conceit that forces you to accept it immediately, and just invest in the story that is being presented.  It builds a stripped-down-to-basics alternate reality, focusing on two astronauts and their families, and not caring so much about the details of the androids or the technology or the space mission the men are on.

1 Good: I didn't watch much of Breaking Bad so I'm not an Aaron Paul devotee (he was good on Westworld but he always felt a little out of place, being the latecomer to the cast in the third season), but he delivers a really, really good performance here, having to portray one very reserved, very insular character, then also having to play Josh Hartnett's much more outgoing spaceman. It's pretty seamless.

1 Bad: There's a pivot in the story in the first act (which seems to be the only impetus to set it in 1969) that I didn't see coming, but from there it plays out quite predictably, until a finale that seems to be a twist for twist's sake and not in keeping with the spirit of the episode.

Meta:  I really wish that Brooker had greater ambitions for this episode than just doing a sci-fi nod to Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood . The characters and situations are so baked into the conflict of stoic puritanism and burgeoning sexual liberation of the late 60's that it kind of fails to say anything interesting about them. I can't help but think how engaging it would have been if the scenario had turned into more of a throuple situation, hitting more on the sexual and relationship dynamics explored in last season's "Striking Vipers". It's ultimately a well made but disappointing watch.

"Mazey Day" (d. Uta Briesewitz) [SPOILER WARNING - this episode is best watched with no knowledge of what it's about. Even me giving a spoiler warning may be revealing too much]

The What 100: In mid 2000s, a reluctant paparazzo (Zazie Beetz) chases after a famous starlet who has seemingly disappeared after being fired from a shoot for unknown reasons. What she doesn't know is the starlet was involved in a deadly hit and run and is having a very hard time.

1 Great: I didn't see that coming.

1 Good: I really didn't see that coming.

1 Bad: I wished it had lasted longer. This could have been a wonderful horror movie

Meta: Brooker seemed to be setting up a potent message about celebrity and right to privacy and predatory industries, but then there's a pivot and it's such a delight. I think it's even more fun than "Joan Is Awful" but I wonder how it will hold up on rewatch. The surprise is 90% of everything.

"Demon 79" (co-writer. Bisha K. Ali [Ms. Marvel], d. Toby Haynes) 

The What 100: In 1979 England a young shoe sales woman of Indian descent experiences constant racism - overt, veiled, systemic, etc - but when she's accidentally tethered to a demon, she's given the opportunity to let out some of her pent-up frustrations...because she has to kill 3 people or the world will end.

1 Great: A cracker of an episode, another movie-length one that really doesn't make any false moves in the story its telling and the character journeys it presents.

1 Good: The two leads, Anjana Vasan and Paapa Essiedu are outstanding. They are my top contenders for best duo in all of Black Mirror. Vasan plays the complex emotions of someone questioning whether their having a psychotic break perfectly. Essiedu is just pure charm poured into a white disco suit and furs. Both performers are on shows I've heard are tremendous (We Are Lady Parts and I May Destroy You) and which I really need to give a go.

1 Bad: The opening moments of "Demon 79" -- the establishing shot and title card and late-70's sets and street scenes and the grainy film look that overlays it all -- imply that this episode is going full-blown grindhouse. Alas it doesn't commit to the bit. Brooker can't seem to get away from his own writerly tendencies and just go pure exploitation. 

Meta: I'm torn between really loving this episode as is, and wishing it was the pure grindhouse it teased. The characters would have been much different, where Vasan's rage would have been much less complex in full-blown revenge-a-matic mode, and Esseidu's demon would have been far scarier. The chemistry between them would have been very different, and that's kind of the magic of the episode. Can't we have both?