KWIF: Ash (+5)

 KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Ash (2025, d. Flying Lotus - AmazonPrime)
Kraven the Hunter (2024, d. J.C. Chandor - Crave)
Flow (2024, d. Gints Zilbalodis - Crave)
Dual (2023, d. Riley Stearns-  Tubi)
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (2019, d. Richard Linklater - Hollywood Suite)
Tombstone (1993, d. Panos Cosmatos - Disney+)

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In making Ash, I suspect that Flying Lotus -- the moniker producer/writer/director/actor/composer Steven Ellis has been working under for nearly 20 years -- was attempting to channel David Lynch primarily, but also cribbing from the sci-fi horror films of Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and Paul W.S. Anderson, among others. These influences make a soup with identifiable chunks within but it has the feel of a first-time production from a director with something to prove.  

Flying Lotus has been a top notch music producer, beatmaker and composer for a long time and working within the entertainment industry for much of that, so he knows how to be in charge of a project, and he's familiar with executing a vision. It's likely how he was able to rope in the budget needed for this very not-cheap-looking film. The result with Ash a visually pretty production, grotesqueries and all, with a very even-tempered mood of simmering dread.

The plot finds Riya (Eiza González) regaining consciousness in a habitable station on an alien planet, her memory fuzzy, and members of the crew dead on the floor. The station is in a warning state, red and violet lights illuminating the space, the occasional voice of the station's systems providing updates and alerts. Riya has horrific flashes of people with melting skin, of vibrant halos, and of fleshy tunnels that she cannot make sense of. She's eventually joined on station by Brion (Aaron Paul) who had been in the orbiting satellite when things went down, and Brion's key objective seems to be getting Riya off-planet before the station completely collapsed. Riya, however, fluttering memories returning, cannot let go of needing to find out what happened, as well as search for a missing crew mate.

The progress of the story is the unfolding mystery of what happened via Riya's fractured flashbacks and some recordings of past events. It's not a convention that works well, as the violence has already happened and we've already seen the aftermath, so the tension of the conflicts in the flashbacks are effectively neutered. Though Flying Lotus' direction is strong, it's a film with misguided storytelling, believing that the mystery of what happened is more interesting in staggered hindsight rather that unfolding in a linear fashion.  It's the difference between, I think, doing a straightforward sci-fi horror and reaching for something more clever. 

Flying Lotus reaches, but doesn't fully succeed. While I mentioned the simmering dread, there's no escalating tension, and, honestly, no scares here, as if Flying Lotus did not want to make a horror movie out of this horror script. The score reflects this, with barely any punctuation in its shifting tones. 

The designs of the film are mostly pretty good. The space suits look incredible, the station itself is visually intriguing just enough to deliver the sense of sci-fi without calling too much attention to itself, and the Japanese portable robotic medical kit delivers a bit of cheeky kitsch into an otherwise sombre affair. The grotesque makeups are also pretty fun, but the "creature" designs very wildly between disturbing and incomprehensible cgi mess. The space ship, as well, is kind of uninspired.

At the end of the day, I've seen so many projects like this, so many sci-fi horror films that they all kind of blur together. Here, there was a "we got here first" angle that I wish had intoned a larger, maybe secret war between humanity and this other species, but there's not a lot of hints towards any larger context here, and the endgame of the aliens proves unclear. 

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In the realm of big studio filmmaking there are films made from good ideas, films made from bad ideas (but ones that are still expected to make money from an undiscerning public), and films of desperation, made out of some seeming necessity to keep up with other studios output, to nab their slice of some perceived pie. Kraven the Hunter is a real desperate movie, but then that's nothing new for Sony Pictures.

Sony has held a tight grip on the Spider-Man license for 25 years, and it's been fairly profitable for them, but their attempts at shared-universe building have been absolutely miserable for over 10 years now. With the ludicrous swing of "let's build a shared universe in one movie" in Amazing Spider-Man 2 back in 2014 it was a failure so epic Sony had to relinquish some control of the character back to Marvel Studios to ensure their Spider-Man license had a future. They built up on that joint venture with Marvel by trying desperately to expand beyond just Spider-Man, first with Venom (a big hit at first, with depreciating returns ever since) and then with some of Spider-Man's extended supporting cast, resulting in Morbius, Madame Web and now Kraven the Hunter.

These SPASMs (Sony Pictures' Adjacent to Spider-man Movies) were just brimming with overconfidence. The shared universes had already imploded by the time Morbius hit, and the willingness for the mass audience to tolerate a film for any comic book hero and/or villain had long since waned. Kraven was already deep in the works when Madame Web failed, and the trailer foretold that Sony had yet another bomb on their hands.

There was a whole "It's Morbin-time" attempt at an ironic re-release to appeal to the meme crowd, but Sony quickly learned that memes can't generate box office (tell that to The Minecraft Movie...), at least not by themselves. And yet the absurdity of everything in the heavily retooled and edited Madame Web turned it into a near instant cult classic (though, not enough to make a success at the box office). 

Kraven similarly went back to the editing bay after the abysmal trailer, but whatever ludicrous arch madness went into recutting Madame Web did not make it into Kraven. Stuff happens in Kraven, but we're never given a single impulse as to why we should care. The character has a prolonged flashback story that seemed to make little difference in establishing who this character was. The moment where a mauled Sergei Kravenoff lays wounded on the ground and the shot-up lion that mauled him drips his blood directly into Kravenoff's open wound (one in a billion shot) is about as close to Madame Web's lunacy as it gets. One would think a portly, thickly accented Russel Crowe would bring a heavy load of absurd flavour to the production (not unlike his portly, thickly accented Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder) but there's not a hint of irony in the performance. He wasn't asked to play it up, so he played it straight. The result is, frankly, pretty dull.

It's a dull movie overall. Kraven with his lion-infused blood and a special magical serum given to him by a young Calypso, has super powers...super sight, super agility, super strength, which lets him crawl up walls and trees and shit, as well as leap distances well beyond mortal levels. He finds himself attuned with animals and hunts poachers but also mobsters, and people who get on his list only get scratched off when they're dead. He grows into the world's foremost hunter, and a big meaty slab in the form of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but then he needs a grown-up Calypso's (Ariana DeBose) help to track down some other bad guys? I though he was the world's foremost hunter?

There's bad guys upon bad guys in this film including an assassin called The Foreigner who can, I guess, hypnotize people for up to ten seconds and gives the appearance he's teleported or moving at super speed. It's actually a cool effect but to no real end.  There's also the Rhino, a crime boss who, if he disconnects his backpack full of serum from his liver plug, will grow super hard skin and...really... a rhino horn on the top of his head. It's absurd, but it's not fun absurd because they kind of refuse to have fun with it.

In the end, the worst of the worst guys is Kraven's dad, and so they have it out, but the stakes feel completely absent from the climax. The stakes feel pretty absent from the entire film. What's the point? Why are we even here? What's the story we're trying to tell? Why should anyone care...especially if we're not leading into Kraven hunting Spider-Man which is basically the only think he seems to do in the comics.

Just a waste of everyone's time. Hopefully this is the last nail in the SPASM universe.

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I had not even heard of Flow until it was announced as one of the finalist for the Academy Awards' Best Animated Film this year, and it seemed only after it actually won did I start seeing write-ups on it. It was the dark horse contender against the summertime juggernaut Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot and the latest Wallace and Gromit outing (I suppose the real dark horse contender would be Memoir of a Snail, which I've still not heard about and I just wrote it down right there!!), a Latvian/Belgian/French co-production from Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis.

It is a dialogue-free production where not a single human character is seen in the film. The premise is simple, a lone black cat must survive a devastating flood with the help of a cadre of other survivors.  There is an absence of humans but there are signs of them, including statutes, habitats, and things like bottles, boats, mirrors, and the like. Is it a post-apocalyptic scenario? Are all the humans dead? Or have they just abandoned this space because they were warned of the incoming disaster.

As Cat finds herself with travelling companions (the assembly of these traveling companions is one of many of the major joys of the film) they voyage through the flooded lands to the tall spires and gilded riverside domiciles that infer that this is not Earth as we know it, but some other reality.  I truly was not expecting this.

There is a heavy weight to Flow as it puts our adorably mewing cat into so, so many perilous situations. If you're a cat lover, or even just a cat liker, it is unbearably heartwrenching to see our protagonist in such peril... not helpless completely, but at times situations seem seemingly hopeless, and you want to look away. But if you were to look away, you would miss the magic, be it some twist of fate, or moment of ingenuity from Cat, or the intervention of others. They are gloriously triumphant moments.

The setting of this world is flat-out stunning. It is an incredibly lifelike reality that could pass for an Earth-like alien world in a James Cameron movie. The camera work is incredible as it stays down at cat's eye view (or lower) for the majority of the picture, and frequently dips above and below the surface of the water, just magical animation and directing. If anything in the animation didn't work for me it was the gradient highlights on the animals' fur. Often the animation of Cat and friends looked...incomplete... or at least lacking proper detail. But it's made up for by the incredibly naturalistic movements of the creatures. If you've ever owned a cat, or even just binged cat videos on Instagram, you will recognize all the behaviours.

A slight spoiler, the ending is restorative, full of hope and promise, but with the reminder that often for the benefit of some, others may suffer. I flat out loved this movie even though I cried so many times throughout it.  Sometimes because it was so beautiful and sometimes because it just made me miss my dearly departed black cat Isis.

My second favourite movie of 2024 (behind I Saw the TV Glow), and I think what I'd hoped The Wild Robot would be.

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Dual opens with a prologue in which a man kills another man in a premeditated duel on a high school football field in front of cameras and crowd, and is interviewed afterwards like in a televised sporting competition to assess his feelings of his victory. The other man looked exactly like him. The victor was his duplicate, but now, by rights of the competition, gets to take his name and live his life.

Minutes later we're introduced to Sarah (Karen Gillan). Her long-term boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koel) has been away from work for some time, and their remote conversations seem to indicate their affection towards each other is waning. At first I thought that the film was badly written, and that Gillen's performance was not great, that she was struggling with her American accent again, but quickly realized that this reality is very much an affected one, sort of like in a Wes Anderson film but cranked up a few notches. Everyone in this reality talks in a very frank and dispassionate manner, but even among all of them, Sarah still seems autistic/spectrum-coded. She misses a lot of social cues and her sense of appeasement or cordiality almost always misses the mark.  She is not a satirical character though, even in a heavily neurdivergent world she's still struggling, an outsider.

She wakes up one morning to find blood everywhere on her sheets and pillow. Her doctors tell her she is 100% terminal with a 2% margin of error. She is give no hope but is talked into the duplication process to leave behind a double of herself so that her loved ones won't be sad.  It's a terrible idea (with a hilariously bad sales pitch video online which even Sarah scrubs through). I think if she understood emotions better, this wouldn't have even been an option for her, but since she is who she is, this was presented as "the right thing to do" and so she did it.

Time passes and her double, legally named "Sarah's Double" has become a big part of her and Peter's life, to the point that Peter like this sponge of a person who seems so amenable and upbeat and vital in a way Sarah either can't be, or just hasn't been in a long time. Eventually Sarah learns she's not dying but her double has filed a suit to duel Sarah for her life, and the second half of the film is about Sarah training with Trent, to toughen up and take back what's hers (meanwhile Sarah's Double starts falling into Sarah's bad habits and attitudes).

This is satire, but of what, I can't rightly interpret, at least not yet. It's going to need another watch or two before I'm able to land on what this is really saying about our natures. Once I looked up the director, Riley Stearns, and realized it was the same creator of The Art of Self-Defense, it all really clicked for me. I really dug that film and its very weird vibe. Dual could very well be in that same reality.  Gillan's performance very quickly went from making me flinch into admiration, much the same way Stearns managed to harness Jesse Eisenberg's very specific energy and mold it in his own image for Self-Defense. She's so keyed into this role/these roles, but it's also quite clear the director is specific about what he wants. There's a humour and a pathos to Stearns' films, in that same abstract way Yorgos Lanthamos likes to present them, though with much less discomfort. I really dig Stearns' style overall and was rather elated to be in his unusual hands again.

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I have seen a pretty good sampling of Richard Linklater's repertoire, but I have by no means been avid or fanatical about keeping up. His movies are generally pleasant, and offer something of interest worth watching, but I'd hardly call any of them exciting, at least for me (maybe School of Rock?). I'm never displeased watching a Linklater joint, but I'm also never champing at the bit to watch one, certainly not to rewatch one.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a Linklater film that really fell off the radar, making nary a blip in the public consciousness. It's a light drama about an upper-class family in Seattle, focused primarily on Bernadette, an antisocial, near agoraphobic wunderkind designer/architect who retreated from the field to raise her daughter. Bernadette is the fairly typical Cate Blanchett role of affluent, entitled, difficult personality, but Linklater's whole business here is helping us, the audience, see past these traits and instead see the traumas she's hiding from that have made her this way. She is, absolutely, an eccentric, something, again, Blanchett excels at, but we see "normal" whenever Bernadette is with her daughter, Bee (a terrific performance from young Emma Nelson), and we understand that there is a lovable person who doesn't mean to be the way she is.

Bernadette has a strained relationship with her husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup), a bigwig at Microsoft, and an even more strained relationship with her neighbours, led by queen bee Audrey (Kristen Wiig), and perhaps an even more strained relationship with Seattle itself. Things eventually escalate with both Audrey and Elgie, especially when ... out of the blue, the FBI gets involved. 

The third act takes a wild turn from suburban drama into green screened Antarctic adventure that definitely flexes Bernadette's off-putting entitlement (both for characters on-screen and with the audience) but also leads to an appropriate breakthrough and catharsis for the character.

It's a wild swing that is hard to hate on but also hard to really like a lot. There are good performances, but I have to wonder how long can we stand to watch affluent people live "difficult" lives of their own making. This whole "misunderstood genius" of the rich narrative isn't going to float very far in what's left of the 2020s, and I realize this was made prior, but were Link later reading the room, he might have understood this was all a bit much.

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With Val Kilmer passing recently, I was seeing a lot of "must see" lists of Kilmer's performances. Tombstone was a mainstay on all those lists.  The 1993 western has been on the backburner of my "to see" list for a very long time, with Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earpp being the primary draw. I'm just not much one for westerns. The glorification of a very treacherous, uncivilized, and radically violent "might makes right" time never sits well with me. I need my westerns to be highly stylized and either feel like practically alien worlds, or get right down into the dirt of the human condition of living in such a free-for-all age. (I also realize that the glorification of the old west, particularly by Hollywood, has perhaps crafted an untrue image of the era, but an image that still informs the culture of the country quite prominently, and, methinks, negatively).

I didn't much care for this film. It meanders quite a bit as the character of Wyatt Earpp, having retired from law enforcement, waffles around whether he has any duty or responsibility for his new homestead of Tombstone, Arizona.  There a very large gang called the Cowboys have set up as home base, and for a time, at least, Earpp and his two brothers and their wives just try to roll with the general tenor of the place. But the Cowboys get out of hand, they push the Earpp boys too far, and if for justice, and not revenge, they take up arms against them.

It's not the story itself I object to, one which seems to be utilizing the legit framework of the Earpp brothers (Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton) and family's life, but the wildly uneven tone it progresses through as it sets up so many inevitabilities and foregone conclusions that we just wait to play out.  

The story is also routinely interrupted by a wholly unnecessary subplot where Earpp meets actress Josephine Marcus, a relatively liberated woman of the era who pursues Earpp flagrantly despite him being married, and Earpp seems transfixed by and can't help himself with.  This subplot goes nowhere and seems only included because, in the end Earpp did wind up with such a woman, or so the closing captions said. Each time Delaney is on screen, the momentum of the picture screeches to a halt, and they feel like tacked-in "we need a romantic subplot" decree from the purple suits.

Kilmer played Doc Holliday, a long-time friend of Earpps who joins him in Tombstone to find some last bit of excitement while his life ebbs away from tuberculosis. Kilmer's dewy performance is absolutely fantastic, easily stealing focus every scene he's in. He masticates the shit out of every moment he has on screen, and I see why people were praising it so much.  If only the film were built more around him, or the time we spend with Russell and Delaney were instead spent with Kilmer as the second lead.

If I don't try too hard to remember specifics, Tombstone would be a stand out western, but with the exception of Kilmer and some beautiful, luscious mustachios, it's decidedly mid.

ReWatch: Suicide Squad

2016, David Ayer (Fury) -- Netflix

Apparently I didn't dislike this, as much as I recalled, the first time round. And in this post-Snyderverse world, I actually have very few issues with it. But, this is also the This Guy universe and he is much more forgiving of stuff.

So, yeah, it does work so much better in the post-Snyderverse world. What exactly do I mean by that?  First, let's define The Snyderverse; my definition. It was the incarnation of DC Cinematic Universe that began with Zach Snyder's Man of Steel, completely ignoring what Zach Snyder considers the Snyderverse himself, i.e. only his three movies. So, any of the movies that spun off this Superman movie are included, with some debatable films. So, the Justice League movies are there, for sure, and Wonder Woman but the Shazam! movies are questionable. THIS movie hinges entirely on the Death of Superman and the rise of metahumans becoming an issue in the future, so I would include it. And, as Amanda Waller's prediction pretty much proves true (a Superman goes bad), she is lucky her worries are contained by the rest of the Justice League taking care of a Big Angry Superman.

That said, it kind of bugs me that nobody even peripherally involved in the other movies shows up in this one, when a Big Evil Witch almost destroys an entire city, slaughtering many of its inhabitants. All that is left are the Suicide Squad that Waller sends in? I get that Batman is probably containing his rage to Gotham, but what about Wonder Woman? Or Cyborg? And if there is a long list of second string villains, there must have been at least a few second string heroes hanging around? If not metahuman, at least ultra-skilled humans like Deadshot (Will Smith, I Am Legend) and Boomerang (Jai Courtney, I, Frankenstein) are depicted as? Maybe if it had gone on for a few more days, someone else, someone more heroic would have arrived?

Furthermore, in this post-Snyderverse world, I am less annoyed by the emergence of a villain teamup as I was when I first saw the movie. That dislike is probably what I recall having for the movie as a whole, but that was mostly pre-judging it before actually seeing it. I no longer have any skin in the game as for what they will do nor any displaced hate-on for the chosen Cinematic Universe's tropes.

Re-reading my original post, this elicits a chuckle:

"In fact, that is exactly what I was expecting them to do, to have a fun run with a stand-alone movie with only some tenuous connections to the coming movies. Alas, no."

Of course, we do get the stand-alone movie, removed from the continuity of anything Snyderverse, and as a movie about super-villains sent to their death, it is nigh perfection. You would think that the Gunn movie would make me dislike this movie, in comparison, but no, I still kind of liked it. In fact, I almost wish that we could have received an untampered version, let's call it a Ayerverse copy, and seen how these followup movies would have gone. I think it would have made for a much more interesting DC Cinematic Universe than we eventually got.

Favourite bit? The emergence of a godlike being from Diablo (Jay Hernandez, Magnum PI), giving him more weight than just being a pyrokinetic with rage issues. 

And again, I still like this version of Joker (Jared Leto, Morbin' Time) for all the reasons the purists (Kent included) do not. I don't need the classic be-suited Joker, and if you are going for dark & gritty, a sleazoid, drug dealing, violent psychopath with cartel tattoos works well for me. And I believe this was also the first appearance of Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie, Babylon) in this definitely-not-the-animated-series look & feel? IIRC it was an adaptation of the more sexified version of her in the the Injustice: Gods Among Us video game. Whichever, they work for me.

All in all, still enjoyed it, but still disappointed it was not more.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Black Adam

2022, Jaume Collet-Serra (Run All Night) -- download

I saw the director's name, and assumed this was one of those situations where Hollywood took a rather well known European director and assigned him a blockbuster. But then I looked back at his repertoire and was reminded that most of his stuff as been the B-movie thriller stuff I usually enjoy, nothing high falootin' at all.

That said, I did not enjoy this movie. 

Sure, I went so far as to download a 4K copy and it was spectacular in its colours and visuals, even not on the Big Screen, but I kept wondering what the point of the movie was. Its part of one of the n-th versions of the DC Cinematic Universe, connected in one form or another to the most recent movies, yet divesting itself enough to leave us wondering just why Superman or Wonder Woman haven't shown up to deal with a demi-god level powered being slaughtering folks in.... the Middle East? As to why Amanda Waller sends a black second-grade Batman (Hawk Man; I know he's more than that, but in this movie he seems to be a rich guy with lots of toys, and only one real teammate) to deal with a brown-skinned super man -- there's an ire generating tweet in there somewhere.

Khandaq-not-Wakanda in ancient times has a kid rebelling against a mad king who is stripping the country of its valuable metal eternium-not-vibranium, until the Council of Wizards gives the kid SHAZAM powers and he kills the mad king. Fast forward to now and Khandaq is definitely not Wakanda, having been exploited for its metal (though we never see what they do with it) by many invading forces, this most recent time being Intergang. Adrianna and her brave band of freedom fighters are trying to find the Crown of Sabbac, an eternium forged crown worn by the mad king, supposedly containing demons, so they can... oh, I don't remember. But they fuck up and wake up Teth-Adam. Does "teth" mean black? Who knows, but it might as well. In a rollicking, high body count battle, Adam floats around zapping soldiers to death with lightning, but saves Adrianna so she can escape with the crown. This first fight is spectacular, all not-super Superman style action of invulnerability, flying and glorious mass destruction, if you like your super men slaughtering dozens. It ends when he gets blown up by an eternium missile. Ooo, he has a not-kryptonite weakness? Nevermind, as they pretty much forget that for the rest of the movie.

Teth-Adam wakes up The Justice Society (well, two of them) at the behest of Amanda Waller (?!?!) and two subs: Cyclone and Atom Smasher. None of this made any sense to me, and I even have a passing knowledge of these characters. A supe with Superman level of power has awoken, and I would understand if they were sending in a B-grade team for recon and intel, but nope, Carter Hall / Hawkman decides to try to beat the shit out of this new SuperVillain, bringing along two junior superheroes and Dr. Fate, who keeps on taking off his fucking helmet, so we can see his face. Hall just growls and threatens his way through the entire movie getting his ass regularly kicked, despite him having his own standard-level super strength. The rest quip and smirk: Dr. Fate is old and full of wisdom and magic, Atom Smasher just inherited the suit and the powers, and Cyclone is young, but seems solid enough and has the most glorious not-Starfire purple hair. Despite good efforts, and tons and TONS of collateral damage and (not depicted) deaths of hundreds (with the destruction they cause, it could not be avoided) they barely scratch Adam. Call the Justice League? Not yet.

The thing is, if they had just left him alone, he probably would have floated away. He wasn't interested in being Khandaq's resident superhero, despite his growing affection for Adrianna's enthusiastic son Amon. He seems non-plussed about all the technology despite learning it is 5000 years later and just glowers his way through most scenes, seemingly forgetting doors exist as he slowly, almost gently, continually smashes through Adrianna & Amon's apartment walls. They are not getting their damage deposit back. I did chuckle when the movie finally acknowledges that bit. But still, if Hall had just stopped beating his spinny mace on Adam's head for a moment, things might have ended sooner than they did. But all this battle is McGuffiny for the real stakes are the Crown of Sabbac, which the leader of Intergang wants so he can resurrect/summon/transform into a demon-king of Khandaq. Call the Justice League? Nope. We now have a CGI villain reject from Diablo III game to fight.

So, why didn't this movie work when pretty much all the Marvel movies do. Bias? Somewhat. Familiarity? Eventually. But they all, even the worst of them, have a digestible structure and work with us to build bonds to the characters. This is supposed to be the anti-hero movie, and purposely skips building any bonds to any character other than The Rock. But despite some lame attempts at justification (he was fighting evil), he is just not a likeable character. Even the middling production in Samaritan did a better job connecting us to a villain than this movie does. It all just ends up feeling... so empty.

Hopefully, now that James Gunn has some control over the cinematic aspects of the DC universe, we will see improvement on the screen, for I can unabashedly say that his movie, The Suicide Squad is the best thing in the DC cinematic universe and it does an incredible job of making us like/enjoy anti-heroes. I am not saying the same tone should have applied to this movie, but... there should have been something, anything, to make us actually like Teth-Adam beyond who is playing him?

Kent's post - we agree.

Black Adam

 2022, d. Jaume Collet-Serra - in theatre

Had this movie come out 20 years ago, when the superhero genre in film was still finding its feet, I would have watched it over, and over, and over again, not believing my eyes that we have a film where Black Adam fights Hawkman, Dr. Fate, Atom Smasher and Cyclone. I'm a lifelong DC Comics fan, and I've long been dreaming of the deeper bench of characters making it to the big screen. That wow factor would have went a long way back then.

10 years ago, we got Green Lantern, and by then the bar on what I would consume on repeat was already pretty high, and it certainly didn't make the cut. Five years ago we got a Justice League movie, and I really wish we hadn't. Now we get Black Adam, with the Justice Society in tow, and while marginally more entertaining than Green Lantern or Justice League, we've also had Smallville, Stargirl, Titans and a decade's worth of Arrowverse shows playing with DC's deep bench roster in live action, so the wow factor of just seeing people in costume has pretty much been eaten up.

Of the "DCEU" movies, only Aquaman and James Gunn's The Suicide Squad impress me much. I like Wonder Woman and Shazam, but they don't "wow" me. Black Adam gave me little flutters watching the Justice Society quartet in action...they looked great, the costume design and effects were really nice, and the actors are all pretty solid...but there was no character development, no sense of their organization (why are they answering to Amanda Waller?), no meaningful sense of purpose within the world (maintaining world stability or some such) or to the story.... I get it, they're there to build out the DCEU and to provide some colourful flash and flutter to pit against Black Adam against, but it didn't have to be this clumsy or feel this tacked on.

And that's the stuff I liked about Black Adam.

What I didn't care for was most of what's left. It's not terrible, it's just nothing. It's not saying anything of real value, about the character, about its fictional middle eastern nation, about the world it all inhabits. Khandaq is a derivative of Wakanda with its special rare metal, but it's not a place or a people that is at all culturally defined. They watch Clint Eastwood westerns, listen to Player, read superhero comics and ride skateboards...so they're a bit stuck in the 1980s, except that they're living under a high-tech, non-descript foreign military state that Black Adam rightfully just decimates in an orgy of non-stop PG-13 murder.

As a character, Teth-Adam is here scripted to be an anti-hero with a tragic back story, which the film muddies by wading through 5000 years of muddled fables in the form of a tedious 5 (10 maybe?) minute opening sequence, a flashback or two, before a late-second act revision gives us the real poop on this guy and why he is actually so dangerous. It's all tedious circling that would have been better served straight forward and up front. It's not narrative intrigue, just mess. The Rock --still not middle eastern (despite having played the Scorpion King, twice)-- did grow on me in the role, but the script never keeps him consistent, but also doesn't really let him grow in any meaningful way. 

The human sidekicks served their purpose, and only annoyed me a little, which isn't too bad for that archetype.  I had hoped Sarah Shahi would be a superhero.  The film's villain is 80% maguffin, and 20% whatever.  A big nothing.  By the time Sabaac finally arrives, the film's purpose has been so obfuscated as to never actually feel, or even understand, the threat he poses. At one point he sits on a throne and a laser goes into the sky and apparently zombie skeletons arose from...not sure where exactly (if it had been all the dead Intergang guys Teth-Adam had killed that would have been more interesting) which aren't really much of a threat as the human characters pretty easily beat them down.

The music was, bluntly, overbearing and ever-present. A scene could never breathe, everything was punctuated all the time. More than anything, I found this audio assault to be the film's most challenging aspect to overcome. It's sweeping moments of triumph, especially early on, felt unearned, and often times the music felt incongruous to the scene. The closing credits composition, however, did feel quite epic (but again, unearned).

I wish this film had been properly titled "Black Adam vs. The Justice Society", as then there could have been more investment in the thinly wonderful Justice Society characters of the film. The title would have provided impetus for the film, to build up to their battle, and some time could have been spent building Intergang into some form of viable world threat with all their vibranium...I mean "eternium" mining.  But the film, as is, lacks such ambition.  It's a star-driven vehicle that requires the supporting cast to explain the character, their motivation and their backstory, because the star, as charismatic as he can be, is a bit too busy glowering and brooding and being all "extreme" like were back in the heyday of mid-90's comics.

Will I watch this again? Only if I can send it to myself 20 years in the past.

n Bored Paragraphs: Morbius

2022, Daniel Espinosa (Life) -- download

Kent mentioned the other night, when we were OUTSIDE doing a SOCIAL THING like SEEING A MOVIE, that this blog is akin to us talking to each other about movies, but in text format. I mean, that was the intent of the blog after one particularly fevered conversation after seeing Source Code (ed. note: apparently my brain is retconning the whole thing as Source Code was 4 months after the blog started). But I think, for me at least, it is more like me telling you (random fictional reader) what I told Kent when were chatting about movies (during random fictional social engagement). You see, when I am face to face, even when I am "in practice" (the last few years [decade], even pre-pandemic, social interaction has taken a nose dive) I am not all that verbose; well, maybe more so after a few drinks. But in words, I can blather on and on, even about something I wasn't all that interested in. Sometimes. Sometimes, this comes down to, "saw movie, was good."

Preamble (said blathering) explains proper preamble where I talk about the weirdness going on around the reviewing of this movie, which to me, was more interesting than the movie itself.

So, there was some sort of review bombing going on with the Morbius rating on Rotten Tomatoes. While I don't hold the reviewers of the world as a hallowed group determining the validity of movie making, peeking at IMDB and RT ratings are usually a good place to to see how the world considers a movie. At the time of this post it was 17% Critic, 71% Viewer. So, the audience forgave it more than the critics did? Not at all surprising with superhero based movies, but then you peek at the actual viewer ratings and there is tomfoolery going on there. What the heck are "morbillion dollars" ? Apparently some sort of Internet movement did their own form of review bombing giving the flick more high ratings than it truly deserved. And the "reviews" are truly weird. You cannot take them seriously. But instead of bad actors panning a flick because its "woke", these weirdos are inflating the worth of a truly mediocre flick.

Michael Morbius was one of those Marvel characters I really enjoyed as a kid, atypical from the usual spandex supes, a tortured anti-hero, a "living vampire" whose cure for his disease went terribly wrong when he mixed it with "vampire bat blood". He turned into a pale, stalker of the night in an incredibly tacky disco outfit but still chose to fight bad guys as many of the other Marvel monsters of the time, who included Werewolf (by Night), Frankenstein and actual Dracula. Gawds, I loved those terrible, silly comics!

So, why they choose him for the next non-Marvel Studios character to bring to the screen, after the lackluster Venom movies? I thinks they may be creating some sort of anti-hero squad, based on the coda for this flick. But either way its a weird weird choice, further solidified by casting Jared Leto in the lead. To be honest, I wasn't as bent out of shape as many were, for his casting. I am not a fan but neither am I bothered by him, and his off-screen antics. Whatever; he's Old Hollywood and a bit of a weirdo creep. But he definitely does dive into this role, with just the right amount of levity to bring some character to the movie. Alas, the rest is just... astoundingly bland.

I often fall asleep during a movie, if I have a glass of wine or a beer, but usually only if the movie is something I have seen before or something not worth paying attention to. I nodded off, for a few seconds at a time, at least three times during this watching. There wasn't enough terrible for it to become a mocking, drinking-movie, as we originally intended, but... I am fading again, just thinking about it. There was just .... nothing remarkable about it; it was just such a deficit of a plot that I couldn't keep my attention focused.

So, as in comics, Morbius (it's a Greek name?) is a guy with a disease that will soon (apparently, still takes decades) end his life, so he fucks with his own DNA by adding in vampire bat DNA. Why? Oh, I don't fucking remember. It wasn't even a workable attempt at pseudo science, just a Z-grade monster movie use of coloured water in test tubes and a lab full of blinking lights, as representations of science. Of course, it goes wrong, turning him into a blood sucking, black & purple smoke spewing (what was up with that? was it just ... visually atmospheric or was he ... shedding?) flat nosed monster (why the growling obviously aggressive monster? bats are just bats, even vampire bats are just animals without evil) that apparently can fly (although, he doesn't get skin wings). He inadvertently gives the same "cure" to his best friend Milo (Matt Smith, Doctor Who), who shares the same disease, but has no qualms drinking humans dry to stay alive. They fight, one dies, some tragedy, Michael lives.

Yeah, some tragedy. The real tragedy was the Adria Arjona character. Usually female leads are meant to provide some sexiness to a movie (still sad unto itself), something for the male gaze, and she serves that up well enough, but even so, what was her role? Officially she was supposed to be his assistant, but I don't recall a single thing she did, nor said, other than (SPOILER!) die and become infected. What? Infected? How does that happen? Did I fall asleep when they explained his blood was now infectious?

In the end, this "origin story" is nothing more than a prelude to some sort of Multiverse influenced, Sony studios based anti-hero setup that will include Venom, Vulture (Adrian Toomes) and maybe a few others yet to come? Thinking about that stuff is entirely more interesting than ALL this movie.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

2021, Andy Serkis (Breathe) -- download

I petulantly dislike the first Venom movie. I tried to like it, I even wanted to at least be amused by it, but my annoyance at it wins out over any enjoyment I get out of it. That dislike makes me grumpy.

I think the sequel might accomplish the act of making me even more annoyed.

Go read the Ken't (his Kryptonian name) review of the first one, as I can so easily just lift lines he wrote then and apply them to THIS one.

In fact, I will. Lazy writing powers ON !

Venom: Let There Be Carnage, "... as a film, is pretty nonsensical." Brock is still a complete loser, but still somehow makes money enough to live in a decent apartment in San Francisco. In an apartment that Venom wrecks (there are holes in the ceiling but no angry landlord) and raises chickens. Well, only the two that are left: Sony & Cher. Venom now lives by eating chickens and chocolate to get that brain chemical he needs to survive, because Eddie has finally decided that eating people is bad. Even bad people.

"Venom has its own personality and the two have conversations which are marginally amusing but don't really make a lick of sense.  Eddie's motivations and Venom's motivations seem like two separate and distinct things and not all that complimentary."

And yet, that is supposed to be part of the appeal of how the characters interact. At least in this one, Eddie seems kind of fed up, like two lovers having a continuous spat. And again, Venom seems more petulant teenager than AN ALIEN FROM ANOTHER PLANET. The abusive relationship metaphor is thinly veiled, and yet we are supposed to want them to stay together. Weird mixed messages.

"The story structure and pacing of Venom feels completely off, such that the progression of relationships doesn't flow properly, and the intent of characters from one moment to the next never seems certain.  Why is anyone really doing what they're doing?  The movie doesn't seem to care, why should we?"

Yup. Brock is trying again to resurrect some assemblance of a career, having never recovered from the screwups in the last movie. So, when he gets a chance to interview Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson, The Hunger Games), he jumps at the chance. Meanwhile, we have been given some abusive background story to Kasady, including his mutant (is she related to Banshee?) girlfriend Frances, and the prison/asylum/orphanage they grew up in. The final bit of that scene is weird, as it implies he is locked away, but we know that, as an adult, he becomes a serial killer, which is why Brock goes to see him. Brock seems even more the idiot, not catching any hints or allusions Kasady throws his way, so much so that Venom has to turn his head and make him LOOK at Kasady's cell and all the scratch-scratch work there. Of course, ALL the details as to where Kasady has hidden the bodies (like all good serial killers do) is there on the wall, and NOBODY has seen it or noticed the significance, not until an alien attached to an INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER deciphers it all.

Eddie reveals the truth behind things, gains acclaim again, and it sentences Kasady to death. That is NOT what Kasady hoped for from the interaction, but to be honest, for a while I thought it was. There just didn't seem to be any reason for it all, but when Brock returns for more (hopefully Venom noticed) scoops, he just gets more Kasady ranting. And Venom just wants to eat him. But before it can escalate, Kasady bites Eddie's finger and gets a bit of Venomized blood. That sounds dangerous; I hope Eddie diposes with his other bodily fluids very carefully.

"The action in the film ranges from utterly generic to unappealingly ugly."

Eventually Kasady, now calling him/itself Carnage (where do the symbiotes come up with these stupid fratboyish names?) wants to kill Eddie, and rescue his GF, who he learns was not dead all these years, just trapped away in another asylum/prison/hospital.

Stomp stomp stomp, kill kill kill, petulant arguing, I nodded off.

Eddie and Venom break up and the latter runs around tearing up buildings and interrupting party goers on Halloween. You would think the city would have one of their own metahumans dealing with the thing lowering property values all over town. Also, Venom kills numerous randos as he tries to find an alternate host.

I nodded off.

Big fight scene in a ... Church? It does not bode well that I could not keep focus on the climax of a movie. But then again, despite having seen the first one about 2 and three quarters, I don't recall the big boss battle at all. But I remember it was on a rocket, so someone has now decided that all Venom boss battles have to take place vertically. I guess the next one will have Venom on the Empire State Building waving big claws at circling biplanes?

I did like the end, where whatever happened in the fight scene happened, and Eddie and Venom retire to a beach side apartment, and have a conversation about the things the symbiotes have seen all across the multiverse. Apparently the number one rule about multiverse club is don't talk about multiverse club, because a bit of flickering later, Eddie is now in ... the MCU ? We can only assume. Given we know MCU Spidey will meet Sam Raimi Spidey, he might even end up knowing about symbiotes. Should be (more) interesting.

3+1 Short Paragraphs: Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

2020, Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs) -- download

This is the first of probably a long series of posts about Watching During the Pause. This is a new world, a scary world, a world where studios cannot release new movies to the cinemas, so they are releasing first (or releasing early) to Online. And thus, if it's online, it can be pirated. But a lot more movies will get out there, a lot more movies will hit the services people are already signed up for, or were considering. Like I said in days past, seeing movies Online will become a thing when they make it easier to just pay & watch than figuring out a way to pirate safely.

Harley Quinn was born not of the Batman comics, but of the Batman: the Animated Series. She's The Joker's girlfriend and partner in psychotic crime, who began her career as his therapist. In the movies, she got her introduction via Suicide Squad which gathered together a bunch of Batman villains to fight and even Badder Guy. Birds of Prey started as a comic with Black Canary and Barbara Gordon / Oracle, but later expanded to include The Huntress, and even later versions included Gordon as Batgirl. I am not sure there is was ever a version that included Harley or Cassandra Cain or Renee Montoya, but the latter got her start in The Animated Series as well, so at least there is a tenuous connection. AND Cain actually is one of the Batgirls of later, so again tenuous connection. What I am getting at is that the label this movie grabbed makes no sense and I am not sure why the producers, Margot Robbie included, wanted to tie them together.

So, this is Harley (Margot Robbie, I, Tonya) post Suicide Squad and the Joker broke up with her. She's despondent, drowning her sorrows in the seedy clubs of Gotham's underground, and lacking friends. But she does have a new pet hyena named Bruce. She doesn't mean to, but ends up dragged into a plot involving Bad Guy Roman Sionis (Ewan McGrego, The Impossible), his club singer Dinah Lance (sans Ollie Queen; Jurnee Smollett-Bell, True Blood ), revenge fueled Crossbow Killer Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Sky High) and older than your usual cop detective Montoya (Rosie Perez, Fearless). Oh, and there is a kid pickpocket who bears the name Cassandra Cain. After much rather humdrum misadventure, Harley convinces them all to team up with her to fight back against Sionis.

I went in with no malice intended against this movie. I didn't really know what to expect, beyond a bunch of psychedelic, over the top sequences focused on Margot Robbie. I wasn't sure how they were connecting her to the comic, but didn't really care. I also didn't care that this was part of the flop DC Universe. A nice stand-alone movie would be nice. Alas... sigh. It was just so very very tired and second rate. The acting was wooden, oh so painfully so for Winstead. The action scenes were ... lazy? I almost felt like I was watching cable TV. There we some fun scenes, like Harley invading the police station, and the car chase on roller skates, but beyond that I was just ... bored. Maybe its out current state of mind, maybe its the current state of the world, where maybe I need to be much further pulled out of reality to enjoy myself, but to me, this movie was even more unsatisfying than the Justice League movies that were at least pretty.

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2019 Edition: Pt A

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

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. But let's try with what's on right now, and stepping backwards in time until I get entirely lost. The bad smell should help me find my way back.

Let's start with not-yet-completed Carnival Row, likely by the time I get around to finishing this, I will have completed the 8 episode Amazon series of Faeries in a pseudo-Victorian England but let's lead the paragraphs with initial impressions and see where they end up.

And this is NOT the "new Game of the Thrones", more "the new Penny Dreadful".

Let's just say this up front -- I've been looking forward to this one for a good while now. The trailers really caught me; I actually put something on my horizon that I knew I would love. The trailers were tight and emotive, highlighting the world and the leads and and all the wyrd darkness the show would have. Fairyland is real, and has been beset with war. Refugees end up in The Burgue, an analog for London (edit: whoah, NYC actually), to be mixed up in a Victorian-style murder-mystery where star-crossed lovers reunite amidst chaos and xenophobia.

Aaaand done. After only eight episodes, a very very VERY big world is barely scratched. This is one of those times where the New Order of TV got mixed in with the Old Worlde. By that I mean, that this new streaming service style of high budget, great looking, challenging but short-seasoned TV got stymied by a writing style that was meant for 13-21 episode season style.

Carnival Row introduces a world where the Land of Fairy, or Tirnanoc, is real. Its across the ocean from The Republic of the Burgue. A pair of other humanocentric countries (the Pact) invade Tirnanoc to conquer and loot. The Burgue sends soldiers under the auspices to protect the Fae, but its more about keeping them out of the hands of the Pact. The war is a failure and ends with Burguish soldiers abandoning the land, but not before soldier Rycroft Philostrate or "Philo" (Orlando Bloom; Lord of the Rings) and Faerie Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delavingne; Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) meet & fall in love. When The Burgue abandons northern Anoun to the Pact, Philo has to abandon Vignette, for her own good.

Years later finds them both in The Burgue, the capital city. Philo is a cop who works Carnival Row, the bad side of town full of Fae, and Vignette is a refugee who naturally falls in with this wrong side of the city. Not that they can help it. Despite Burgue's intervention in the war, its not like anyone there likes Fae (or Pix, or Puck, or Critch; choose your slur). And I mean nobody. Oh, some tolerate and work along side, or hire Fae as servants, but there doesn't seem to be a single person who actually is not racist, besides Philo, which doesn't ingratiate him with his peers. And when a series of horrific murders put Philo on a dangerous path with personal connections to his past, his situation only gets worse.

There's a lot going on in this show. But its wrapped up in a classic TV formula, with a broad cast of characters and unexciting tropes. Not being based on anything prior, its all TV. Given a full traditional season, I think we could have said so much more about the world and its people. But while I really enjoyed watching this show, I didn't come away seeing anything astounding, besides the incredible design. Everything from the sets to the flying faerie effects to the look & feel of the city had me enraptured.

Meanwhile, the OTHER big Amazon show re-imagines a world of superheroes being utter shite and who has to deal with them.

The Boys was also a short season, but utter binge worthy, based on comics by Garth Ennis (The Preacher), starring Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, a brutish British man who takes "wee" Hughie under his wing after the love of his life is killed before his eyes. Not just killed, but horrifically destroyed by a coked up speedster superhero who runs right through her. Right. Through. Her. Hughie is left holding only her hands.

Billy's proposal is that the supes have to be spanked (punished). Someone has to hold them accountable. They are untouchable celebrities in this world, backed and protected not only by their powers, but by the most powerful corporation on the planet, that covers up their indiscretions and worse. On the outside, The Seven in that  world's Justice League of America. Behind the scenes they are debaucherous, hedonistic and amoral, at best. Psychopathic at worst. How does Billy intend on doing this? Via some backing from the government, who is afraid the supes will be sanctioned for war actions, and lots of illegal activities to gather info hoping to reveal to the public some of the things they get onto.

Entering into this point in the game is a right proper superhero, utterly sweet and innocent Starlight. She is not aware of the true nature of The Seven, but learns quickly. But she still wants to do Good, so she stays, hoping to weather the storm and find a place. She and Hughie connect in ways that can only be about sharing their mutual disillusionment, and cannot end well. Which is exactly how the bitter, manipulative Billy would have it.

This show is diabolical, to quote Billy. It doesn't really hold back and powers through the plot at a break-neck pace. It takes the comic telling format, and tweaks it enough to generate TV format, but keeps enough of the source material to make this actually fresh viewing. That is what was lacking from Carnival Row in that nothing felt fresh, while this show kept on surprising and often just plain SHOCKING. I don't expect every show to be as daisy fresh as Legion but I like the attempt at least. The Boys more than succeed.

I Saw This!! Post-Deletion Phase

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Graig or David attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. And despite hiatuses, where some movies might just get washed away in the apathy, it still makes us feel crotchety to NOT write something them.

Venom, 2018, Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) -- download/Crave

This was one of the pair of movies that were meant to resurrect previous renditions of popular characters/franchises, taking them in new directions. Oh, they did that, but in the most boring and divisive directions.

I originally saw both of the movies soon after they hit the *cough* digital downloads sites. But I didn't write. But due to finally seeing the evolution of our Internet-based, cable-cut movie & TV watching era come to a stage where it makes sense to actually PAY for them, I did. Ala carte offerings, served through the Internet, and viewed on your favourite devices (smart TV, game system, Android box, etc.) are the new (current new?) cable TV or satellite service. I said that I would start paying for services again when they better served me -- someone who didn't want a boatload of channels I didn't care for. Things are still fleshing out, for example the Crave app sucks terribly and Amazon Prime Video (in Canada) cannot get its shit together (only their own shows are worth the dollar, and fewer still are actually in the claimed 4K), but at least it's there.

So, when I was stuck in a hotel, in a city that shut down at 6pm, where I could only drink so many craft beers (yes, I know, me! Faith & Begorra!) I plugged an HDMI cable from my laptop to the hotel TV (which had terrrrrible cable reception BTW), joined the free WiFi (better speed than I expected) and began "channel surfing". Most nights I was tired from long work-trip days, so ReWatches were in order.

The thing is, I couldn't actually finish the Venom rewatch. The first time round, the movie just .... bored me. The second time round, the movie just ... OK, what the fuck? How can Tom Hardy in a comic book movie bore me? Even at his most mundane, I enjoy Hardy, but for some reason I just could not get interested in what Hardy was doing with his asshole v-blogger being depicted as a legit journalist. But OK, I can live with that, what about Venom, the alien symbiote that started his "creation" as a Spider-Man suit? While not a fan of the anti-"hero" villain monster that people seem to love, I can at least understand the appeal. But instead of a nasty, juicy creature of the dark, I get a petulant teenager alien thing that ... oh, whatever. The whole movie just annoyed me.

I know this is one of those times when you talk to your coworker who just doesn't know how to watch movies with more than a passing glance, where they just don't seem to have a formed opinion as to why "dat movie just sucked dude". That guy is me right now, as I think it dumbed out any properly built opinion I had. I just could not warm to this movie, even in a hotel forced second viewing.

Kent has pretty much the same opinion, but a much better formed one...

Meanwhile...

The Predator, 2018, Shane Black (Iron Man 3) -- download/Crave

Why do I have such a fond opinion of Shane Black? Sure Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys are brilliant and fun movies, but that's .... about it ? I subsequently love Iron Man 3 but that is probably all based around the kid in the small town aspects, as the rest is just lifted from Iron Man comics of one degree or another. So, again, why do I love Shane Black so much?

Just cuz. Cuz true Good Stuff comes along rarely while OK Stuff is everywhere and Utter Crap is mostly avoided, but still surrounds us. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is just incredibly, astoundingly Good Stuff, that I want his subsequent things to be as well done and as enjoyable. Alas, often the Good Directors get assigned to things just because. And that is not a good reason.

In pitch, this is a good re-launch of the franchise. Introduce the Predator creature to Americans long past the last Earth-bound story from 90s tale, and bring back the hunter-predator aliens for a current story. Add in some post-war vets, traumatized and damaged from what America has done to them and give them a reason to be Good Soldiers again. Alas, we get stuck with All Snark and Little Else. Its like a Writing Room just got printed on paper, to become a proper script, without any editing.

Sure there are good lines, and good performances and an interesting idea. But jeebus, it just never lifts off  the ground. I cannot say if it was Producer Meddling or the shadow of that horrendous scandal where a seemingly oblivious Black allowed a real-life human predator into his crew, but this movie just could not come together. It just could not captivate, nor hold together anything that was Shane Black. But I can say, at least, that it was a decent rewatch as a Hotel Movie.

I won't even bother attending to the plot.

Aquaman, 2018, James Wan (Saw) -- download

OK, despite the desires stated for the previous two movies, wherein I feel compelled to rewatch a movie in order to state intelligently about it, but this one? Nope. Why? I dunno, because I remember enjoying it. But like much of the DC Universe, once is enough. Well, if the DC Universe movies are terrible, I am at least compelled to watch again to see if I gave it a fair chance. What's up with that brain?

First up, I found Jason Momoa annoying as Aquaman in the Justice League movie. Let me rephrase that; I liked Jason Momoa, I can never NOT like him, but fuck what is with the WHA-HOO yelling? I guess they wanted a more irreverent, less grim character than the comic book renditions. If anything, give us more of the small fishing village fuck-superheroes version, but no we get X-Games Aquaman.

But damn, this movie is just pretty. Its just so colourful and brightly lit, I could not help but enjoy. But beyond that, I was not enthralled by this Avengers-Lite version of a superhero movie. The plot was a weak aspect of a Marvel style rebel-against-kingliness Thor but, well, better done. And I kept on expecting his mother to be Michelle Pfeiffer, mixing it up with the Antman reveal. Still, beyond Looking Good and Charismatic Momoa, I didn't see any reason to label it anything other than a Good On First Run movie.

P.S. What a terrible poster.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, 2019, Mike Mitchell (Sky High) -- download

I never said a thing about The Lego Movie, during another rendition of I Saw This!! other than I couldn't stay awake. That's a terrible thing happening to me these days, as I turn into My Dad who always fell asleep watching TV post-supper. But some dramatic structures just don't hold me, including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse which I, at first thought, it was just me, but a Crave-bound rewatch (today!!) confirmed, the third act puts me to sleep. I wish I could tell you what it was, but.... well, I had just briefly closed my eyes and then Miles was fighting the King Pin. Wait wait wait, THIS is a post about The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part not Spider-Verse, which deserves its own non-sleepy post, because everything I was awake for IS FUCKING BRILLIANT.

Anywayz, I did not enjoy the first movie all that much, as the rewatch referenced above, which generated the tangent, proved. And despite a lack of sleep, the second one didn't do all that much for me either. Oh, I was head over heels for their post-apocalyptic nod at the beginning, but to be all honest, it just lost me after that. The whole Duplo invasion is cute, but... what as the plot about again? The parallels between the Real World and the Lego World are cute, but... I dunno, have I lost my whimsy? Is that it? Am I no longer able to be charmed by play? This bears further therapy investigating.

31 Days of Halloween 2018: Apostle

2018, Gareth Evans (The Raid) -- Netflix

Full disclosure. After a discombobulation of That Month and complete abandoning of the blog (not hiatus; i just ran away) I am going to try and find my way again by finishing off these posts. And then we will see where I go from there.

Remember, I am not one of the novitiates of Evans' greatness that is The Raid. It was a fine movie, but didn't draw out any great praise from me. Solid it was, as was this, but that is about it. But I am a great fan of post-Downton Dan Stevens, and it was October, so here we were.

This movie is a period piece where a drug addict goes to an island controlled by a cult in order to free his beloved sister, the only person who cares for him. Michael Sheen leads this religious group, which we find out pretty quickly, are a bunch of thugs escaping prosecution, and surviving by seeking hostage payments from the parents of illustrious members. But there is something else going on, something about who the cult worships alongside their pseudo-Christianity god.

I kept on seeing hints of the movie I wanted to see here. It looked great, as the cult had been active long enough to have a town filled with a good number of familiar supporting British cast. And the whole dichotomy of Old Testament Religion meets Elder Gods was curious and grand. Tension is high, with Stevens doing his best bent-out-of-shape addict who may get caught by the islanders at any moment. And once we head into the explanations, it becomes visually stunning but full of "huh? what is that about?" moments.

This reveals why I may not really like this guy as a director. He gives me wonderful pieces, that if you see them as clips, or as right now, as snippets of memory, they seem quite wonderful on their own. But as a whole, as a contiguous entity, they don't pull together. His fight scenes in The Raid looked incredible, but after a while became rote. The monster at the core of the island is spectacular in its depiction, but is not fully thought through and not fulfilling by the time the credits roll.

Cleaning the Slate: TV (Fortitude)

Making a decision. As I watch too much TV, I have too much to comment on, some great, some good, and mostly only meh. As I always have a massive backlog of movies and TV, and even some video games, I am going to pare that down. Only four five remaindered TV shows will get posts, and after that, only things that leave a great impression will end up here. Well, maybe if I actually clean house on the Movies, I will do the occasional What I Am Watching post.

Fortitude, 2015-2017, Sky -- download

Svalbard, an island off the coast of Norway in the Arctic Circle. Mining and research are the primary things going on there. Technically its not part of Norway, but they run the show. Now, add the fictional town of Fortitude, populated by an international group of hundreds but only four cops, and introduce a murder. And something more than just murder.

One of my fondest regrets was a logical choice I made in my youth, when I was offered a 6 month position in Alert, Nunavut. I was working for the Dept of Defense then, and they are always looking for short term computer nerds; nobody is allowed to be there for more than 6 months. The money would have been incredible, but I was at the beginning of my relationship and I don't deal well with unknowns and loneliness. Imagine the isolation, being trapped with the same people day in, day out. And the fucking cold. I sort of fantasized bringing a giant box of BFFs (big fat fantasies) with me, and teaching all the military types how to play D&D. But I chickened out. I still think about it to this day.

That memory attracted me to the show.

The show begins with a bear mauling and an accidental shooting, that is quickly covered up by the Sheriff Dan Anderssen (Richard Dormer; Beric Dondarrion on Games of Thrones). Not long after, a local scientist (Christopher Eccleston) is horrifically murdered, slashed and stabbed. As the investigation continues, an American detective based out of London flies in, Stanley Tucci. Friction between competing investigations is escalated by the presence of a mysterious ailment, one that drives people mad and is connected to the original murder. On top of this, the Governor of the community is doing her best to keep alive her dream of setting up an ice hotel, to prop up the failing mining interests. Murders and primeval diseases don't make good PR.

The mixture of standard British procedural with plague story is enhanced by the myriad of different cultures interacting with each other. Brits, Irish, Americans, Russians, Norwegians and even local Sami folk are all tossed together in close quarters in cold weather and the ever present fear that a polar bear may wander in and eat people. Flawed characters are the norm, as no one comes to Fortitude because their lives were going well elsewhere. It makes for grand drama.

The most chilling part (pun intended) is the virus. And not just virus but the transmission method, a parasite that inhabits wasp larva that have been frozen in a mammoth graveyard under a glacier, for millions of years. Hundreds of thousands? The virus/parasite forces the infected to attack someone else, and expel more maggots/parasites into the other person. Aspects of The Thing creep in, and we don't know who is infected and who might turn at any moment.

Season One ends with a climax but very little in the way of answers. The infection has been identified, the infected caught before they can do more harm and a a woman has been eaten alive, from the inside, by wasp larva. Horror has supplanted procedural. But Fortitude has survived, as it is a town of survivors.

Season Two picks up weeks, months later. The WHO has come in, cleansed the infection vector and isolated the surviving infected. Dan Anderssen has disappeared and his second is barely hanging on. While the season begins with a murder, there is no procedural here at all. This is all thriller tension and mystery. The plot of the infection has altered much the way the infection does itself, and there are scifi aspects of the infection leaving some of its hosts with miraculous powers of regeneration. There is political intrigue, betrayal and again, aspects of horror.

Dan was and still is my focus of attention. Is he a good sheriff or a bad sheriff, is a line that describes his whole character in the show. He's a good cop, skilled and even toned, supportive of his staff and protective of Fortitude. But he's also obsessed with Elena who works at the hotel, in a rather scary, stalker manner. And we find out he's a murderer. When Season Two comes along, Dan has lost his mind, survived his own infection and we are even more unsure of whether he is Good or Bad. But damn, is he compelling. He does this tilt of his head, not a cute dog "baroo" at all, with a Cheshire smile that could eat your whole head. The infection has merged with folklore, and Dan becomes the Demon that threatens the whole town. And yes, he is still here to save it, as more of its inhabitants are taken by the chaos.

Another aspect that I loved about it, may just be inherent in its Iceland shooting locations, but so reflective of the character of a town on top of glacier, is the architecture. There are the expected corrugated metal shacks, built quickly and reflective of a place that wants cheap and quick. And there are old structures, that must have been built by the original inhabitants, the Norwegians. And then there are these crazy, ultra modern structures with massive glass windows and cold concrete walls, that I could only conceive reflect advances in environmental technology. How else could they stay so warm in the -50 C weather outside at all times?

Again when this season ends, we sum up very little and leave a lot of open wounds for the viewers. Beloved characters have died, the plague is expanding its impact and Dan Anderssen is once again Sheriff. I cannot wait to see what happens next.

Kong: Skull Island

2017, Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer) -- cinema

Now that is how you do empty spectacle !!

King Kong has always been one of my favourite monsters. I remember the terror, titillation and marvel I approached the 1976 one with -- I was 9 when in cinema, so it must have been VHS tapes a few years later. From the Burt Reynolds wannabe (Charles Grodin with a moustache; years later, I realized it wasn't Reynolds) to me sharing the curiosity with the ape as to what was under all those beads to how they would get him off the island. And that poster, with feet a-straddle both of the World Trade Centres as he crushes a jet fighter. All my adolescent fascination with kaiju grew from that movie, as all I knew of the 30s flick was his fight with a t-rex. I own the Peter Jackson flick.

It's easy to say that this movie was meant to be Apocalypse Now with Giant Monkeys, but you cannot deny that Vogt-Roberts drew upon some 70s stylistic choices to depict his Vietnam era helicopter attack squad. Insert three Vietnam era war movies here. Sam Jackson plays their cannot-stop-fighting Colonel on the last day of the war, and when offered the chance to escort some scientist types to The Last Uncharted Island, he jumps at the chance. He knows something is up; you don't bring that many soldiers to a peaceful tropical paradise. You may wonder why they are setting a current King Kong movie in the 70s, but like John Goodman's Bill Randa dropping bombs to map geology, there are methods to the madness.

Once they fly the helicopters past the pink storm (seriously, can lightning even be pink?) we are given briefly over to a Marvel at the Majesty of Untouched Nature chopper flight before Kong tosses a tree through the lead helicopter. I get being distracted by all the pretty, but how do you miss an ape who is able to snatch helicopters out of the air? Where could he hide? That first battle, in which Jackson loses most of his soldier mooks and all his helicopters, is incredible, terrifying and filled with WTF. Dudes, stop flying within reach of those arms!! But it leaves our heroes separated and stranded on the island, Goodman feeling vindicated and Jackson happy he has another enemy to obsess over.

This movie is all, really well done setup. Not a lot makes sense, but this is not the movie of great import. The next few will be. Once we do the wink wink nod nod connection to Godzilla we get why they and we are here. Oh, you didn't know that by now? Puh-leeze; it only took three clips for that the be confirmed, and loudly. Randa was there on that first ship that Godzilla shredded; he was the last survivor. And he is a member of Monarch, that company from the first movie, but in the 70s they are failing, having no confirmed sightings since the military A-bombed Gojira in the 40s. This trip is his, his to confirm his life long obsession. The setting of the movie gives time for young Kong to grow, grow big enough to take on Godzilla. Right now he is Hold a Girl in the Palm of His Hand size, but in the future...

So, obviously, this is not the Capture Kong movies of previous plot fame. This is Get the Hell Out of Dodge movie, as the scientists and soldiers are no longer mapping the island, they are just trying to reach the exfil point before they are stranded. And between here and that point are monsters monsters monsters. And a bit of wonder. This island is chock full of nutzoid creatures, from the giant spider with bamboo legs to the titular Skull Crawlers. We never get to see the ants that sing like birds; maybe in the extended Blu-ray.

And Kong, lovingly CGIed (and mo-cap-ed by Toby Kebbell, who also plays a helicopter mook who doesn't last long) and very quickly our sympathetic beast. He is King after all, and you don't get to be King without subjects. The humans on the island, as explained by wacky Soldier Left Over from WWII John C Reilly, see Kong as their protector from all the other nasties. So yeah, Sam Jackson has to be stopped.

The thing is that for all the spectacular depictions of the island and Kong, the humans are rather a side note to the entire movie. When they are not monkey or monster snacks, they have very little personality and contribute almost nothing to the movie. And don't get me started on the inserted Chinese actor. I get it, China contributes a lot to the funding of movies these days, but for gawds sake Hollywood, work with them. At least the nameless jumpsuit scientists get to be stepped on or taken by flying Sawsharks, but she does nothing in the movie but emote badly and stick around till the very end.

All in all, I can actually say I liked it. But remember, I am the guy who loves disaster flicks.

3 Short Paragraphs: The Accountant

2016, Gavin O'Connor (Jane Got a Gun) -- download

There, that is what I was talking about. Let's do a crime thriller and not try to drop it into the Bourne paradigm. O'Connor, who has been working steadily, if under the radar, since the 90s brings us a methodical action thriller about an Autistic accountant cum killer. The movie is written by Bill Dubuque, someone who will be worthy watching as this was his baby, all by himself, both story and screenplay. That the movie is about a man with an extreme sense of focus is nice, considering we got a movie from one person, not a committee.

I digress; I am never so focused. Ben Affleck is Christian Wolff, an account working of ZZZ Accounting in a strip mall. He is also a higher functioning autistic of extreme intelligence. JK Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Amanda Waller, Arrow) are the Treasury agents looking into the actions of a mysterious man, an accountant for drug cartels and foreign terrorists, who comes in as forensic consultant and helps launder their money. To get some heat off him, Wolff's assistance suggests a legit job, doing some forensic work at a robotics company, after a minor accountant in the firm noticed some irregularities. Of course, that change in behaviour puts an immense amount of chaos in front of Christian.

This movie was thoughtful, and that is all too often left behind in movies these days. We get just the right amount of background to all the main characters; just the right amount. There isn't a lot of extraneous details given over to style or a romance sub-plot (though it's there) or exposition or even emotional outbursts. Like Christian himself is all about and only about the details, so is the movie. The movie likes to follow all the details and put them together, such as our understanding of Christian's relationship with his father and his brother. Or his desire to be more than his closed off self, but still be completely unable to. We get a real anti-hero in Christian, not the current American ideal of one who "does what he has to", but a challenged man who does horrific things but we cannot help but identify with, and admire.