KWIF: Hope (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Hope (2026, d. Na Hong-jin - in theatre)
Is God Is (2026, d. Aleshea Harris  - amazonprime)
The Christophers (2025, d. Stephen Soderbergh - amazonprime)

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I knew three things going into Hope:

1) it was the biggest budget Korean-produced film ever
2) the opening hour is an epic, action tour-de-force
3) the poor CGI for the film's creatures many say spoiled the film for them.

The first item is just a fact, the other two are subjective statements. What I had heard about the opening sequence, which again, is about a full hour in length, is absolutely true. It is an incredibly paced, beautifully shot, exceptionally well-structured sequence that spends the majority of its time using deft camera positioning and brilliant practical and digital effect to hide or obscure the creature at the centre of the chaos in this small Korea border town of Hope Harbor.

The set-up is phenomenal. Local police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, providing a believably harried performance) arrives in the very rural farmland scene where hunters point out the very large, dead bovine in the middle of the road. It's been mauled severely, but not eaten. The hunters and the chief puzzle over both its placement (far enough from any grazing land) and the claw marks, which are not bear nor, as suggested, tiger. 

The parties split up with help called for, but unable to arrive due to regional fires being fought. Bum-seok enters the main street of the eerily vacant town and screeches to a halt when he spies a massive, destructive hole straight through the center of a shop, its proprietor dead under the rubble within. And then off in the distance, smoke, then gunfire, and it all pops off. 

Bum-seok races through town on foot, shotgun in hand, witnessing carnage as flung items crush people, people are tossed dozens of meters down the road, roving pickups loaded with ammo and men and women chase, then flee from whatever it is they're attacking. Bum-seok meets people and then separates from them, loses some of them, and generally is overwhelmed and questioning his own bravery.

It's an exhilarating hour of cinema, and, then the creature is revealed, and, even being forewarned and prepared, it's still a let down. In the preceding hour, minute-by-minute, the mind races at the possibilities of what the creature could be. Even knowing beforehand that it would be a disappointment, I still had (ahem) hope that the creature would at least be interesting. 

And you know what...it kind of is. It's definitely not what I was expecting (and I'll save said description for spoilers below), and it did kinda take me aback, both in its composition and in what's best described as excellent-for-2002 CGI effects.

It's clear that Hope Harbor is close-ish to the border with North Korea. There's signage about reporting spies and talk of heavily mined fields to the North. I suspected that there might be some form of North Korean-invasion or panic angle to this film, in metaphor if not literal, but no. It's just backdrop. I guess it explains why everyone has so many guns (or is it just an aping of American action cinema and going intentionally overboard?) 

The creature is taken down, and the second hour of the film cuts back and forth between the fallout of this epic rampage in the town, and what the hunters are discovering out in the woods. Bum-seok and his deputy Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) independently find out more about what others have discovered in the woods, as Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and his posse of hunters encounter some pretty fascinating and gnarly scenes in the trees.  

This process of discovery, which also includes a very gooey impromptu autopsy on the creature, is really, really good. It's the appropriate cool-off from the pulse-racing opener, and really gets you invested in the story a very fun, 1980's creature-feature kind of way (and Hope borrows more than a shots from such films throughout). There's not much CGI to speak of in this so the small let-down of the creature starts to fade (especially as it's a big, rubbery, practical piece for the autopsy).

Everything converges in the woods in the third act, and, well, this is where the film loses me. It's not the CGI. We've been dealing with unreal-looking computer generated images for over 30 years in movies and television, I can accept a lot if the story earns my trust...so long as the effects aren't unbelievably awful (which they aren't here, they just don't have Hollywood money to put into them to refine them over and over). No, what loses me in the third act is the tedium of it.

The second act give us enough of we need to know, the creatures motivations seem somewhat clear, providing a path to resolution. But the third act seems to disregard that we have this knowledge, and instead is another hour of shooting guns and chases and ugly cgi monsters crashing through trees and that hoary trope of going into slow motion as something near-misses biting or grabbing as it passes mid-air (we only see this about a dozen times in the film, mostly in this third act, ugh). It culminates in what should be a breathless chase sequence on the highway, Sung-ki on a horse and the rest of the gang in a police car fleeing the creature, but it feels just so staged and pointless and it goes on so long. Where in the first hour, each minute that ticked by seemed to open up new possibilities in your mind, really stimulating the imagination, every minute of the last half hour had me wondering if it was over yet.

The third act introduces that the creatures can talk, but in a language that isn't Korean (or English). But late, late in the third act, we start cutting to the creatures, independent of what else is happening to our main characters, and we start seeing subtitled conversations with them.... WTF!?! You can't just all of a sudden thrust on the audience that these are fully sentient creatures who we now need to invest time into understanding the meaning of what they're saying this late in the film (the creatures are voiced -and maybe motion capture performed?- by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Cameron Brittan and Taylor Russell). 

And the film just ends on a conversation between these creatures, unresolved. After nearly 160 minutes, and a dire and truly pointless third act, there isn't a resolution, but instead the cliffhanger (but not really a tried and true cliffhanger) for the sequel.

I do not recall the last time I bought into a film so hard and then was so off board by the end. I can forgive overly-ambitious-for-its-budget digital effects, but I really can't forgive poor story planning and even poorer execution.

The cinematography by Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite) is outstanding from frame one, some absolutely gorgeous vistas of this Korean terrain, and just making the immaculately decorated/destroyed streets and buildings of this town look incredible (I can't help but think of the devastation in Godzilla Minus One and think that, even if it is on a smaller scale, they one upped it here...this town got wrecked, or at least we truly are give the feeling that it's just been demolished). Even the highway chase, as overworked a sequence as it is, still looks incredible.  The score from frequent Jordan Peele collaborator Michael Abels will get your blood pumping. 

There's so much to like about Hope that is could have...it should have been incredible. This could have been next-level Attack The Block even with its middling-looking creatures, but it's clear Director Na has lore and mythology for the creatures that he wants to get into, just in another film next film. I would be fine with that, but finish. this. one. first.

Spoilers at the end of this post.

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Is God Is, directed by first-timer Aleshea Harris, is an adaptation of her own multiple-award-winning off-Broadway play. When you hear that a film is an adaptation of a play, you think more of a chamber-piece, more of a two-hander, or something rather...upscale... meaningful... contemplative... important.  You don't generally think of plays as being revenge thrillers with an elevated grindhouse aesthetic (now that we've finally laid the term "elevated horror" to rest, I'm trying to pomp up a new term to annoy people).

We meet twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaya (Mallori Johnson), whose first trait we notice is their scars. Anaya, the quiet one, has extensive burn scars on her face, while Racine's right arm is horribly disfigured, carries a fire in her just waiting to erupt. The twins live together and work together and have a sort of synchronized routine to their day, including icing down each other's burns with extreme tenderness. It seems like it's the highlight of their day, despite all it may connote.  They also have a way of communicating non-verbally that is presented in distinctive subtitling on screen.

Their lives, obviously, have not been easy. Racine's rage as much, if not more of an impediment than whatever prejudices their appearance may elicit. One day they receive a letter from their mother, who they've long thought dead (having spent their childhood in a series of abusive foster homes), but turns out is now dying. She summons them and they hit the road heeding her call. Also horribly scarred (far, far more) and tended to by what seem like cherubs-in-disguise, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) tells the children of their horrendous origin story at the hands of their even more horrendous father (Sterling K. Brown, just seeping sociopathic nefariousness). She then tasks them with but one goal: "make your daddy dead".

And so they're back on the road, trying to track down their father, along the way discovering the impact this despicable human being has had on the lives and minds of the people who have had the misfortune of being around him, including a few half siblings along the way.

The film side-steps any racial violence against Racine and Anaya (in fact, I think there's not a single speaking role not played by a Black actor here) because there's more than enough threats that Racine and Anaya have to face in trying to hunt down their father.  Along the way, Racine's fury, her lust for violence starts to conflict with Anaya's demure sensibilities, and suddely they're not in sync anymore. There is, one more than one occasion, a reason to question nurture versus nature, but also examine the context in which Racine and Anaya were raised. It becomes a complex idea to fully grasp, what's fueling the fire in Racine at any given time.

Is God Is may not have been a commercial hit, but it's a very successful movie. It isn't the naval-gazing, highbrow art that one might thing going into a stage-to-screen adaptation. It's a sprawling, intense, violent, pulpy romp that also has a sense of theatricality and thoughtfulness to it that distinguishes it and, yes, elevates it from typical B-movie fare.  But you can meet it at either, or both levels and be satisfied. Or maybe exploring this kind of darkness, even with the lighter elements and stylistic flourishes, might just be too off putting.

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A friend attended the world debut of The Christophers at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and raved about what a great movie it was. They had never seen Michaela Coel before and were blown away. 

I assumed, given how critically well-received it was coming out of TIFF, and also it being a Stephen Soderbergh production that it was going to be released in the fall of 2025 for awards contention.  I eagerly awaited its release. And waited. And waited. 

When it finally was released early this Spring, it was not released very wide, and screenings around Toronto, a very movie-friendly city, were not as regular as your average release, nor did it remain in theatres long enough for Lady Kent and I to catch it on the big screen. 

Next think I know it's on Amazon Prime, which I don't regularly subscribe to and which continues to have a pretty user-unfriendly interface (it's designed to sell you stuff, as well as gather data on you, not give you movies to watch). Point being, it took a lot longer to get to seeing The Christophers than I wanted. 

And, holy cow... this is one of Soderbergh's best films in a very lengthy filmography of good-to-great films... it's also one of Ian McKellan's best performances in a very long career of good-to-great acting, and, well, Michaela Coel whom I already liked a lot (while unfortunately admitting I've not followed her career closely enough) is just one of the most captivating performers in film and television today.

McKellan plays famous artist Julian Sklar, a notable painter of the modern age, but who hasn't released much work in decades, and has become more of a media personality in recent years. His most famous works are the two series of paintings of his lover from the 1990s, labelled The Christophers. Rumours have long held there is an unfinished third series that, despite how his reputation may have fallen off, audiences are still anxious to see finished... including Sklar's own son and daughter.

Barnaby (James Corde) and Sally (Jessica Gunning) see the third series of The Christophers as their inheritance. They look to Lori Butler (Coel), an art restorer and former classmate, to become Julian's assistant, and, more specifically, they want her to covertly finish the paintings. 

That's the set-up, but the execution is a complete two-hander between McKellan and Coel as Julian waxes poetic to the sound of his own voice, barely letting Lori get an word in edgewise. He dismisses her and is disinterested in her, until he does a web search and reads her critical think-pieces on him which take on his ego and take him down more than a peg or two. And he is intrigued, and also more than aware of the ploy his shiftless offspring are trying to parlay.

With the jig up, Lori doesn't need to hold back as her already tenuous employment is now obviously severed, and she proves herself to be, at the very least, his intellectual equal, if not artistic one.

With two fascinating characters played by two incredible actors, the script serves them both, Julian with a sharp, self-satisfied, erudite wit, while Lori is reserved but tactical in her words. McKellan gets bold with his body, embodying Julian half-robed, as much for his own comfort as for the discomfort of others. Coel, meanwhile, delivers some of the slyest glances in the film, at times telling more with her facial expressions than with her words.

For Soderbergh's part, it's all about capturing a space, being Julian's London double townhouse, which is the home of a disorganized artist. There's no reason for Julian, who hasn't worked with any proficiency since the '90's ended, to have a home in such disarray, but it's clear he hasn't managed his money well, and that how he lives is of no bother (his sectional corner sofa looks like it's from the 70's and hasn't been used in years, but was very well used at one time). Soderbergh captures and sometimes focuses on the surroundings as his characters negotiate them, making the space a major component of every scene.

I was expecting an almost psychological drama out of The Christophers for some reason, not a surprisingly fun and immensely enjoyable while still emotionally resonant picture. What a true delight with just the most satisfying ending.

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***SPOILERS FOR HOPE***

As I said, you're just not at all prepared for these creatures when you see them, and yes there are multiple creatures, and no they are not the same. The first creature, the one wrecking havoc on the town, is teased so exceptionally well. It is a mystery to us, and we're given clues, like the goopy, goopy blood, the fishy smell, the cut in on fish here and there throughout the chase, the description that it looks like a pile of beans? But also, it's clear that the way this creature is fighting, and the speed at which it's moving around, it's not running on instinct, it does have some kind of thought. It's using tools to kill people, and it seems like its on a distinct mission to kill every human in town. It's like the cow was a mistake, and it learned who its enemy was, and it was going to destroy every one of them. And when it's revealed, it's large (as expected) but shockingly humanoid. It's got green skin, looks a little slimy, a human-ish face, long scraggly hair, human-ish limbs and hands, but triple-jointed legs like an animal. I was thinking that it was maybe a sea hag, hence the fishy smell, and that its skin would be so tough and dense because it has to be able to withstand the crushing depths of the Pacific. But no, it also turns out that it's an alien. We see at least four more alien creatures, and each one is different than the others, still humanoid but their bodies are differently composed. One of them can transform into something that looks like the dog-alien from Alien 3 while another has two massive racks of horns growing out of their shoulder blades that makes you wonder about the logistics of living with those. We also see their space craft, which is a gigantic orb, and it looks fantastic, both outside and in. The interior is clearly cribbing from the Geiger school of ship design, but it has its own distinct feel from the Alien/Prometheus tekno-organic look. Again the discovery process exploring all this in the second act I genuinely enjoyed as much as the hyper first act. It just falls all apart in the third act.  The second act finds sympathy for these creatures, so when the third act just starts shooting them all up again over and over and over again, you keep wondering where the sympathy plays into this. There's clearly been a misunderstanding between species, but nobody is keen to resolve it, certainly not the director, not in this film. Sigh. The only possible route for the second film is to redo much of the first film but from the creatures' perspectives. But that would take beaucoup bucks (or a heavy reliance upon AI-generated effects, which double gross), so I don't think it's going to happen (and I'm not sure I would even see it if it did).

***END SPOILERS FOR HOPE***

KWIF: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I also saw The Odyssey in true IMAX. It's a big movie on the biggest screen. I don't know that the viewing experience was all that much different than the first, other than I could see a lot more sand and sky.

This Week:
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, d. Jane Schoenbrun - in theatre)
Illustrious Corpses (or Cadaveri Eccellenti - 1976, d. Fracesco Rosi - bluray)
Pavements (2024, d. Alex Ross Perry - bluray)
Synecdoche, New York (2008, d. Charlie Kaufman - dvd)

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Jane Schoenbrun's latest academic-cum-schlocky meta head trip opens with heavy breathing, and camera work implying we're watching from someone's specific point of view. It's every masked serial killer since... Jason? Michael Meyers? Leatherface? The intensity is ingrained when we watch from this perspective and hear the sounds of someone's breath reverberating inside a contained space. And then into view is tents and cameras and sound gear and crew, and someone steps very closely into frame and seems to be adjusting whomever it is that is behind the camera.  This should be our first indication that this isn't going to play out how we expect.

The opening credits - set to Okay Kaya's cover of R.E.M.'s Nightswimming - takes us through all the pop culture hoopla and paraphernalia of the (fictional) "Camp Miasma" horror franchise and it's vent-headed killer "Little Death". News articles, posters, video games, toys, websites, all detailing the rise and fall of the Miasma series, much like the 80's heavyweights like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street.  It's a series that had its day, and then it's corporate overlords kept trying to make it a thing, outstaying its welcome. 

This credits sequence is so information dense and so evocative it's easy to get lost in. As a pop culture and paraphernalia junkie, I just wanted to watch this opening on a loop five times over just to take it all in (my favourite bit is that "Little Death" released a much derided rap album). This density serves as an intentional disconnecting break from the film's initial imagery (and sounds). It's there, in part, to make us forget what we initially saw, so that when we meet Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) we don't suspect what the film will eventually be telling us.  

Kris stops in at a gas station convenience store, loads up on candy (so much candy, too much candy) and finds a random copy of "Camp Miasma VI" on DVD. When she checks in and asks the hotel clerk (Kevin McDonald) if there's a DVD player she could use, he lets her know he had a small part in the locally-shot film. We learn that Kris has been hired to be the director of the Camp Miasma reboot. The series has a problematic past in that its killer is problematically trans-coded and the studio execs want a queer director to reboot it for, well, optics.

Kris is in the Pacific Northwest to meet up with the original Miasma "final girl", played by Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, adopting a thick Tennessee drawl... which I mean to say is she's doing Dolly Parton's accent...and laugh... RIP Dolly). Presley's been a recluse since declining to return for the sequels, and is basically a non-commodity, but Kris is infatuated with her, in particular the sex scene in the first Miasma film which was both a sexual awakening as well as kink origin story for her.

Billy, who now owns and lives on the camp grounds the original Miasma was shot, is introduced walking in on an obviously titillated Kris watching this scene. Billy is presented stepping out of the shadows, hair a vibrant golden yellow, lipstick a stark blood red, and an obscenely big hat, all making her look like a femme fatale straight out of a noir film.

This is all still very early in teenage Sex and Death at Vamp Miasma, and it's hard to fully describe what the actual experience of watching it is like. There is obscene, face forward product placement that, if it takes you out of the movie, it's acting as intended. If Anderson's just-shy-of-over-the-top drawl is almost too much, it's as intended. If you are, like I was, made to feel in awe of Anderson, to be reminded of how hot and iconic Dana Scully was in the X-Files then that too is intentional. It's all intentional and it's all part of the layers of artifice that this film puts on.

Kris is not at Billy's home just to recruit her for her reboot of the series, she's there for a more personal and intimate reason. She saw in a still frame of Billy's eye in that original film a look - at the crossroads of pleasure and pain - little death and Little Death. She's been fixated on this imagery and this idea and cannot get past it. Billy gets it. Kris has a kink that she's too ashamed to admit to, and she's a willing participant in unlocking that for her.  I don't think Anderson really cared for Scully being a sex symbol, but she certainly seems on board with making Billy Presley one. That there's a 30 year age gap between Billy and Kris hardly matters. There's no power imbalance, and nobody is taking advantage of the other. Consent is explicit.

The second act of the film finds Kris and Billy watching the original Miasma film, which Schoenbrun's spot-on riff on 80's slasher films (including making near-40-year-old Zach Cherry playin a teen sleepaway camp counsellor) is both entertainment and foreplay for them. The film-within-the-film (-within-the-film) explains the origins of Little Death, which dives into its own variation of the all-too-common transphobic origins of horror's cinematic murderers.

Schoenbrun examines the warping of young minds that comes with horror film's obsession with titillation and brutality, but from a feminine lens, not the masculine one in which most horror (particularly those of the 80's) were presented in. Schoenbrun doesn't cast judgement. That "Little Death" rises again and chases Kris (who intentionally doffs her clothes down to her underwear) all the way to Billy's rose-petal coated bed and skewers the both of them as they fornicate is all just part of the role play. It's not horror, it's leering and alluring. It's wrong, and yet, ok?

There's not a lot of direct horror in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but there is a lot of flesh and fluids, as Billy says. It is a satirical examination of horror as a genre... both a loving and biting one. It's almost a sex comedy, but also... not really.  

I am not well versed in 80's horror, nor do I have any first-hand familiarity with women's sexual awakenings (that I know of!), and though I've done some reading of trans media analysis, I too am not an expert in that to comment extensively in the context of this film (critic Willow Maclay's review is exceptional from that context), so ...Camp Miasma is, in some respects, not in any way meant for me, a straight, cisgender, horror-averse man. But at the same time, it's also not throwing a hand up to explicitly excluding me either. 

Beyond the aforementioned themes of film and sex and transphobic media, it's also asking the audience, whomever you may be, to think about voyeurism, about what it can mean to be the watcher, or to be watched. How do these different perspectives impact us? What does it mean to look...is it leering? Is it desire? Is it judgement? And what does it mean to be looked at? Is it affirming? Is it off-putting? Is it exciting or upsetting? And where does context fit into all of that?

It's only once Kris reports back to the studio big wigs her progress on the film, kicking off the third act, that we start to understand the context which the film has actually been presented to us all along. Kris insists it's not "meta" but it very much is. The artifice is also the substance. I don't think a film has thrown me for a loop this befuddling and inspiring since Synecdoche, New York. 

It's a fascinating picture, deep in thought, with multiple themes playing in concert together (including Schoenbrun taking some jabs at the Hollywood intellectual property machine), each that could be picked apart and analysed from an academic perspective, but at the same time being playful and having fun with it all, not taking itself too seriously.  

...also, fyi...miasma: a heavy vaporous emanation...
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I have been dipping my toe into giallo movies the past little while, a very tentative dip that likes the temperature but still won't commit to jumping in with full gusto. The Italian murder/mystery subgenre of film is pretty vast with many names of directors and stars swimming in the pool (if you'll allow me to extend this metaphor), it almost feels too crowded to just dive in. Amid all the splashy titles, and the plentiful boutique physical media labels just trying to sell their wares, it's hard to know what's truly worthwhile, it's like I need a coach at the end of my lane to tell me where to turn (ok, I've lost a grip this metaphor).

Illustrious Corpses was a recommendation on the relatively new-to-me (but not new overall) podcast The Big Picture from regular Chris Ryan... a recommendation that would test whether he was a trustworthy source or not. Turns out this film isn't a giallo at all, but the recommendation was still a good one... nay, a great one.

The film opens in the real Capuchin Catacombs, looking at real desiccated corpses. It's a stark visual but not one meant to scare or frighten. The character, an older man with a real lived-in face, looks deeply into the mummified faces, intrigued and ponderous. He leaves and is promptly assassinated. It turns out he was a prominent judge. Assigned to his murder case is Inspector Amerigo Rogas (Lino Ventura, another very lived in face, but with a little more mileage left to go).  He monitors the big, stately funeral, and suspects, maybe, mafia connections were to blam. In the streets, youthful protesters decry the dead man as being connected to the mob.

As Rogas investigates, there's another murder, another judge. And then a third. Rogas starts piecing together that the three judges were connected by more than profession, there is perhaps a vengeful aspect to this string of killings. But as he digs into these men, he starts uncovering information that might not be directly relevant to the case, but certain powerful people want to keep buried.

Soon Rogas' hunt finds the tables flipped. There's potentially a conspiracy afoot, and not only isn't it something he cannot solve, he may not be able to get out from under.  

I may have mentioned in my review of Dario Argento's The Five Days  that my knowledge of Italian history is verrry slim, so the backdrop of Illustrious Corpses, the political tensions involving student protests, labour shutdowns, neo-fascism and a burgeoning communist undercurrent are all pretty new concepts to me, but director Rosi certainly captures the mood. The vociferous chants of protests are a common soundtrack to the picture tell of a country ready to explode, and more than once we catch wind of a government doing everything it can to keep such an explosion from happening, even if it means scuttling a murder investigation or three (and committing a few more of their own).

What starts out as a high profile murder investigation soon bursts into full-blown '70's conspiracy thriller, and it is pretty incredible. Ventura's Rogas starts out so cool and assured, so observant and above it all, and we slowly watch that confidence, that comfort, that sense of being untouchable erode away and, eventually, collapse into the sea.

Director Rosi and his cinematographer Pasqualino Del Santis frame everything in beautiful, massive, old spaces, as if Italy itself is constantly threatening to consume our primary characters. We often see Rome and Venice in film, but Rosi takes us to many different locals, each with their own charm, some decadent, some rugged. The camera's gaze, often, is snapshot worthy, even if the innate colour tone is almost always some shade of brown (with maybe a hint of blood red).

This was a total surprise, as I had settled in for a delightful picture about a crazed murderer and instead felt the wave of historical anxiety and tension Rosi so ably builds overtake.  It's up there with the best of the subgenre, a real damn surprise.

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Pavement was never my band. I enjoyed the few songs I heard of theirs back in the heyday(s) of my indie-rock years (about 1993-2011), but never actively pursued them, never owned an album. I was always just happy to hear a new tune every few years, but always felt listening to too much of them would perhaps sour what I did enjoy.

I have to say, watching director Alex Ross Perry's 128 minute avant garde "documentary" on the band was the most time I've committed to the band since first hearing "Cut Your Hair" back in the mid-'90s.

In Pavements we have:
- A behind-the-scenes document of the 2022 reunion tour;
- An archival footage retrospective;
- A making of the cliche-laden Hollywood biopic;
- A behind-the-scenes telling of Alex Ross Perry's attempt to launch an off-Broadway jukebox musical adaptation of the band's music; and
- The opening of a celebratory museum gallery tribute to the band and their history.

It's a lot to string together into anything approximating a cohesive narrative, but editor Robert Greene gets pretty close, and in the end, for all the fake productions attempting to mirror reality (the Hollywood biopic is completely fake, the musical is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek cheeky production, and the museum is not entirely fake but constructed for the purposes of the film), it winds up somewhere honest and tributory without being overly sentimental or fawningly admiring.

At once pretentious and silly, there perhaps too much facade to Pavements and not enough introspection/retrospective to function as a satisfying introduction for anyone not familiar with the band, or, for someone like me who only ever flirted with them, never committing. 

It's pretty clear though, frontman Stephen Malkmus was never going to approve of anything remotely standard, nor was he going to sit for anything approximating a conventional interview, and had little interest in assessing his band's, history or his own.

As is, I think this one is for the fans.

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In referencing Synecdoche, New York in the above Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review I was reminded how long it's been since I last watched the film, a time which predates this blog.

The impact of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut never left me, although the majority of the details had long since faded. Was the comparison even apt between these two films? Am I just a fake critic who really doesn't know what he's talking about? A. Yes and yes. 

Much like Miasma, Synecdoche... is a very personal journey through the working thoughts of a director's brain. I don't think if Kris in ...Miasma or Caden Cotard in Synecdoche... are fully meant to be stand-ins for the directors of their pictures, but both are certainly speaking for the director.

While the themes are somewhat different, I still see synergy in how they approach their stories, layers of surrealism to inform the viewer that what they're about to see, that the world the characters in the film inhabit is a skewed depiction of reality.  Schoenbrun is more obvious about it in ...Miasma than Kaufman is (at first) but when Kaufman wants it to be known, he hits you with a literal house on fire.

The story of Synecdoche finds Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a successful theatre director, inhabiting a life that's falling apart, but he's kind of oblivious to it, a passive player in a way. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is an artist who leaves him to exhibit in Germany, taking their daughter with them. She had been pretty disconnected from any engagement with him (though as we learn more about Caden, the disconnect seems to have started on his end). Caden also has had a string of maladies plaguing him that seem to reiterate his view that death is waiting specifically for him.  He flirts with Hazel (Samantha Morton) at the box office but he can't seem to take action even when Hazel couldn't be more direct about how she feels about him. His young actress from the play, Claire (Michelle Williams) is utterly infatuated with him, and at first he knows it's a line he cannot cross, but he crosses it when Hazel moves on from him. 

Caden gets a sizable grant to produce the play of his dreams, a very personal work, a play about death coming for us all, but the only story he knows to tell is his own, and so the world around Caden is largely shaped by his own reality, a mirror within a mirror within a mirror, without any real sense of identity or direction. Soon the world within starts to bleed with the world without and the become intractable. The one area of his life he proactively controls, he loses control of, and he needs someone else to step in and take over as him... and it seems the most comfort he has ever had in his life is when someone else tells him exactly what to do.

Time, in Synecdoche, New York, is the main thematic element. Kaufman lets us know without any exposition that time is passing in Caden's life and he's missing all of it, stuck in routine, stuck in ruts, stuck in his own mind, stuck in his own obsessions. The opening scene takes place over the span of the month, but plays as if it were one continuous scene. It's not obvious, but it's there. When Adele leaves, Caden thinks she's been gone a week or two, but Hazel tells him it's been a year, and she's not coming back, and the fashion magazine moments later tells us it's been two years.  Time in the film keeps moving like this, and Caden keeps losing track of it because he's so insular, so fixated on his own fixations.  The film spans Caden's life as he begins middle age to his very old age², and it seems to go by so fast.

In creating a lasting work of art, Caden misses out on actually living his life. His work misses the larger patches of what's going on in the world (things are bad outside of the confines of the warehouse he's operating out of, as implied by the increased military presence on the street, with no context given because Caden can't be bothered to pay attention to it). I'm not certain if this is Kaufman's specific point, but there's a reading that only drawing on one's own life for the sake of art can lead to one's art consuming one's life (as well as an obsession with not dying might result in losing out on actually living).

This is both a deep and purposefully obtuse movie. Kaufman is a very intelligent writer who obsesses about his own mindset and his career and the immediate world around him, and perhaps this is a self-criticism, but also with the awareness that he can't see another path for himself. Death is the inevitable. The end is prescribed at the beginning. 

I didn't really understand Synecdoche, New York when I first saw it. I understand it only a little better now, but I love the puzzle of it. A marvelous film.

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3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Landscape with Invisible Hand

2023, Cory Finley (Bad Education) -- Amazon 

Amazon has this weird pattern, where they will add movies to their roster, then after an undetermined amount of time, shunt it off to one of their subscription-services, or more accurately, remove access from Prime Video subscribers in favour of the consumer paying more for the additional subscription. Eventually they come back. I get the model with blockbusters -- convince people to join with "free" access to the recently released movie, such as Project Hail Mary, and then drop it for the other licensors to take over. But I don't understand how it works with long-released movies but I am sure there is an algorithm at play, a terribly designed, badly implemented algorithm. This one came and went, came and went, came again and I watched it.

Speaking of Project Hail Mary I cannot help but compare the aliens in that movie to the aliens in this movie. In Landscape with Invisible Hand the Vuvv have come to Earth from another galaxy and while the pretense is that the governments welcomed them due to the technological and economical advancements they offered. And yet its definitely an occupation ... or, maybe more accurately, a Colonization. In the Ryan Gosling movie, the aliens are not really any more advanced than Earthlings, but are entirely alien -- they would not do well in Earth cultures. When the Vuvv come to Earth, they don't give a hoot about the impact they have on the planet and its cultures; they just implement their changes, reap whatever benefits they can and ignore the negative effects. They do not have any empathy for the "lesser species". My comparison between Rocky's species and the Vuvv is more about descriptors (small weirdly shaped, live in dark rocky abodes), as we well know Rocky was very empathetic with his friend Grace but I cannot help but wonder whether a species with more technological advancements might lose that empathy... you know, like we do.

Our humans are Adam (Asante Blackk, This Is Us), a highschooler with a talent for outsider art, and his crush, Chloe (Kylie Rogers, Home Before Dark), whose family has just moved to town. Moved is too strong a term as they, being herself, her brother and her dad, are living out of the family car: homeless, jobless. Adam's own mother, a lawyer, is also without work and seeking a job, any job, but they still have the family home... for now. Adam tries to win favour with Chloe by offering her family the family basement, which does not go over well.

This opening has quickly established that while the Vuvv have offered Earth some offscreen benefits, the average person is not benefiting... at all. Unemployment and homelessness are the norm now. Vuvv efficiency comes with the cost of having to do things their way. But the Vuvv are partial to human melodrama and as Chloe and Adam begin to get close, she suggests they broadcast their "courting ritual". The Vuvv have provided a technology that allows a human mind to connect to a network, visually experience what is transmitted to them, but also return the transmission. Yes, Vuvv TV is just watching humans do human stuff and they really like "love".

At first it goes well. Adam is falling in love and the two are getting to know each other. They make money, a LOT of money, enough to keep the house payments going and eat real food, as opposed to the cheaply extruded blocks of essential proteins that the Vuvv provide to all humans. Except Chloe begins "producing" their relationship, and it begins feeling less real to Adam. And, it becomes pretty obvious to the Vuvv viewers. The two are dragged before a Vuvv executive and sued for faking their relationship. By then, it mostly was. Pay back all the money, or lose everything.

Shit gets weirder. Adam's mom Beth (Tiffany Haddish, Boosters LA), uses her lawyer powers to propose an alternative arrangement to the Vuvv executive. While they are asexual beings that bud instead of give birth, they still have an attachment to their .. offspring. Beth proposes a marriage between her and the offspring, who ends up taking the name Father. They get to experience the human family structure instead of just viewing it. Of course, they are oblivious to the hypocrisy about being upset at humans faking it while having no issue pretending this is all real; it just confirms their lack of understanding of everything human. But, why should they care? They are at the top of the food chain, societally speaking.

Adam doesn't do well with this, angry with his mother, with Chloe, with the state of the world. Chloe's dad, utterly emasculated by his homelessness and joblessness, still tortured by his own toxic masculinity, offers to become the "housewife" to Father's family unit, allowing Beth to keep the job she got at a local fast food joint. Adam and Chloe aren't on speaking terms, when the school is closed down. Everyone will now just "learn" (Vuvv indoctrination) via the mind-view technology. Adam is at wit's end and paints a massive mural of life since the Vuvv came to Earth, on the side of the school.

Our final act has Adam recognized by a Vuvv art critic as a power voice in outsider art, and is offered a residency and a galactic tour worth millions. Except, they need him to alter the art so as to depict the Vuvv as benevolent overseers, come to Earth to make everything better. Whereas everyone else has been making hard choices either to just get by, or to have a better life, Adam just says No. He abandons the money, the recognition, and in turn, the Vuvv just rip the side off the school and take it away.

The End.

This isn't a movie of grand changes, world altering realizations, or anything else so grand, usually found in alien movies. Adam doesn't "save the Earth", he doesn't even do much to help his family. There isn't a resistance against the alien dominators, just people who are impotently angry. This movie is a vignette into lives of some people under Vuvv rule. Exploration of the Human Condition is a phrase bandied about with broad gestures, but like Adam's art which is often primitive and would challenge many people on the idea of what "real art" is, or is not, this movie does have the things it needs to say, but also, in many ways, its just a weird alien movie.

KWIF: The Bride! (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I feel like I've fallen off a cliff with my movie watching this month. I'm a little aimless. Blank Check is covering Peter Weir and I'm not all that psyched about following along. My delve into the "Tales for all" series feels like I've hit a wall a bit (although this week's feature may have somewhat re-invigorated my enthusiasm) and the theatres are in just a slight lull (but this week's back with two films I'm very excited about seeing). Maybe it's just the winter blahs and spring tease that's toying with me (the one hour time change also fucked me up for a week, we need to knock this daylight savings b.s. right off), or maybe it's the horror show going on outside cinema that's proving escape mighty hard. Anyway, I forced the issue and thus is the result....

This Week:
The Bride! (2026, d. Maggie Gyllenhaal - in theatre)
2:22 (2018, d. Paul Currie - Tubi)
Vincent and Me (aka "Vincent et moi" - "Tales for all #11" - 1990, d. Michael Rubbo - Crave)

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A little over three months ago we got a luscious and epic (and multiple Academy Award-winning) Frankenstein movie from Guillermo Del Toro, but this was film that was rooted in adaptation, reverence and Gothic tragedy. It's a film that took Mary Shelley's novel, Bernie Wrightson's illustrations, and a romanticized view of Gothic style and architecture and created a delicious salmon ball of a movie that might not be to everyone's tastes, but it's not meant to be...it's 100% catering to its director's sensibilities and anyone familiar with Del Toro's past work can tell it is most definitely the film he wanted to make, and he'd been thinking about making it for a long, long time.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride is not really an adaptation. The titular "bride" in The Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's 1935 follow-up to his previous movie, is not much of a character to speak of in that film, appearing only in the climax of said film. Anyone using the Bride of the Monster in the 90 years since doubtlessly owes something to Whale's film, but any story where the Bride is a character must then be largely a construct of its writer.

Though perhaps not adapting anything particular, Gyllenhaal, writing and directing here, clearly shows her reverence for Whale's pictures, Shelley's novel, and the popular genres of the 1930's cinema... the gangster pieces and the song-and-dance films. If anything, The Bride! owes its biggest debt to Bonnie and Clyde, which I've never seen, and even I know it's the framework for everything here.

The film opens with a black screen, and a voice. In stark black and white we see the face of Mary Shelley, as played by Jessie Buckley who informs us that she's been trapped, in a void for some time, and she may have found her way out... a way out through story. Buckley speaks in a rapid fire, rambling nature as Shelley, delivering a monologue that's chaotic and somewhat nonsensical, but the gist comes through. We transition to a mid-30's Chicago restaurant where Ida (Buckley) is cavorting with a couple of mob goons, along with some other girls. She's clearly not in a good space, but then she eats an oyster and starts convulsing. Shelley starts taking control. There's a dual-brained nature to the performance, with Shelley's chaos and Ida's confusion, and it leads to her flapping her gums about the big boss-man Lupino's (Zlatko Burić) vile business. She gets pulled outside and it's...unclear if she is pushed down the stairs or if it's Shelley's influence that makes her fall.

We transition to Frank, the child of Frankenstein, a hundred year old monster in appearance only, but the manners of a gentleman and the enthusiasm of an Amish kid on Rumspringa. He loves song and dance romances, and is terribly lonely. He has made it to Chicago to meet Dr. Euphronius (Annette Benning), a mad scientist type who has picked up Frankenstein's legacy in investigating life after death. Frank fascinates her endlessly, but he wants only one thing from her, to build him a companion. And so they dig up the freshest body they can find - Ida, of course - and resurrect her (Frank resists initially..."too pretty" he says, but Dr. Euphronius is too keen to see if she can do it).

She emerges with no solid memories, but a sense of self, and, also the guiding voice of Shelley in her head (and sometimes outside of it as well). This new bride for Frank is everything he's not...gregarious and outgoing, unabashed and liberated (can't help but think that Poor Things had a bit of influence on this portrayal), but Shelley's voice and mind still wrests control from time to time, and her diatribes become even more chaotic and nonsensical.

It's a choice.

In Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein, he opens his film with a metatextual scene where Mary Shelley decides to regail her husband Percy and their friend and host Lord Byron with the "what happens next" after the end of Frankenstein (though it should be noted that Shelley here is recounting what happens after the end of the previous movie and not her novel, as The Bride of Frankenstein is predominantly built out of parts of the novel unused in the earlier movie). The actress playing Mary Shelly also plays the Bride of the Monster in the film, and it seems like the metatext of that movie as well as the dual role of Shelly and the Bride sparked Gyllenhaal's imagination and informed much of her approach to the character(s) Buckley plays here.

Gyllenhaal goes for broke stylistically here, with more than a couple of dance numbers that blur the line between what's actually happening and fantasy. There's violence, with Ida facing the groping hands of assailants no less than three times, and all the assailants get their comeuppance in very quick order. The violence begets lust and romance between her and Frank, as they flee the police (including Detectives Wiles and Malloy played by Peter Sarsgaard and Penélope Cruz respectively) across the Northeast. The unfortunate element of all this is that Frank gaslights her the entire way (starting with naming her "Penelope... Pretty Penny"). Yes, gentlemanly and a protector, but also a liar with his own incel agenda to have a woman love him and keep her loving him forever.

It turns out that Wiles has a history with Ida, and it comes back to an investigation on Lupino who is under suspicion of having murdered dozens of missing women, and who the crooked law has been paid to overlook. 

The Bride! has character-based threads, story-based threads, and style-based threads to it which all weave together, but only loosely. It's not able to hold much weight. The performances are all pretty incredible. Buckley shows why she's a worthy Oscar-winner (she's been a powerful force in everything I've seen her in), and Bale turns in a surprisingly likeable but also frustrating performance as the Monster. Benning is in peak supporting actor form, and together Sarsgaard and Cruz make an unlikely but winning pair. And Jake Gyllenhaal's scenes are largely separate from the rest of the cast as he plays an early talkies singing-and-dancing big screen idol and you could almost swear it's straight from the era.

The stylistic choices Maggie Gyllenhall makes are bold. I mean, the mid-30's setting lends itself to a particular style, and the deviations from that style in set design, makeup and wardrobe are largely phenomenal. But it's more the choices, where music is anachronistic more often than not, and Gyllenhall doesn't shy away from huge winks to the audience (there's a big song and dance number to a thumping rendition of "Puttin' on the Ritz", and the film ends with... "The Monster Mash" playing over the credits. Seriously). Ida, at one point, incites a Pussy Riot-esque meme like trend for girls and women to rebel, adopting her chaotic hairstyle, her ink-stained face and lips, and the black tongue. Women run wild on the streets, gangs of them, tired of all the shit they have to face. It's surreal, unreal, and a surprisingly delightful bit of fantasy to imagine that the patriarchy (of that era, or any era for that matter) wouldn't (or couldn't) just smack that shit down with brutal force. 

But the film, if it's trying to be inspirational and feminist, falters quite a bit, especially in the fact that it wants to have its cake and sit on it too. Gyllenhaal wants her husband playing Detective Wiles and her friend playing Frank to be seen, ultimately, as good guys.  So Wiles has his redemption, and Frank, even after Ida's found out he's been gaslighting her all this time, still gets a "but I love him" signal from his non-Bride which seemed antithetical to the whole purpose of the film. And the gangster sub-plot, the origin story of The Bride in this film, it gets resolved in a mid-credits scene.

The Bride! is not perfect, and its inconsistencies make it less than satisfying, but at the same time it is far from boring and it really has some special elements to it. I think the whole Shelley-possessing-Ida angle is what needs the most consideration upon rewatch, but I just haven't decided yet if it'll be worth rewatching.

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The idea of "burden of choice" is not new, especially when it comes to movies. In the thirty year glory period of movie rentals pre-Netflix, I could often be found roaming around a video store for upwards of an hour trying to decide upon a movie or two (or three) to take home for the night. These days, if I don't have an agenda when I sit down to relax for the evening (or on a lazy weekend morning) then I can be found spending that same almost-hour just jumping around from streaming service to streaming service looking at "cover" images and reading descriptions and maybe taking in 15-second previews. The experience of browsing can be as entertaining as actually watching something.  

Tubi really is the closest approximation to the video store experience. There are quality, big-name, titles, box office hits (and near misses), but there's also piles upon piles upon piles of low-budget, never-heard-of-it goodness that stretches back into the 1970s and maybe even before. It's a bevvy of delights for the trash aficionado.  

Low budget movies aren't the same as they used to be though. There are entire studios and/or distribution houses that fund and assemble the glut as packages to sell to streaming services or cable services internationally. If there's money to be made it's not going to the filmmakers, and a lot of them know it, producing movies where perhaps there's effort but not any care or pride. The majority of low-budget filmmaking from the past 25 years feels...soulless.

So when scroll across something like 2:22 , where it has the usual glossy highly photoshopped poster that looks like every other poster and the requisite "hey that guy (or gal)" star, regardless of the film's enticing high-concept-that-it-cannot-possibly-deliver-on-description I usually just have to turn away. But something in me decided to give this one the rare 5-minute shot... the coveted 300 seconds to impress me or I'm getting out, never to return.

Inside, I found a familiar lead (Michiel Huisman, Orphan Black, The Flight Attendant, The Haunting of Hill House) and a surprisingly creative bit of editing as well as a deft use of effects budgeting.  Huisman plays Dylan, an air traffic controller, with a gift for spotting patterns. As he makes his way to and from his apartment to Grand Central Station every day on his bicycle (it's funny how typing it out, "bicycle" seems so juvenile, but if I were to write "bike" you would probably assume motorcycle) via his train to and from the airport, he starts to see patterns, especially at the station. The movie telegraphs where this is all going with an opening flash...back? forward? sideways? to a guns-drawn standoff in the station.

Then one day at work Dylan begins having a weird...seizure maybe that causes him to sort of blip out of focus for a few seconds, and in that few seconds there's a near-collision on the runway that he manages to save the day on... but he still gets suspended. He's at a "sky-ballet" event where he finds himself transfixed by Sarah (Teresa Palmer, definitely not Kristen Stewart), an art gallery curator, and as they meet they become aware that she was on one of the flights that almost crashed. And they share the same birthday. There's kismet between them that neither can deny. They're both floating on air after just one evening of talking to each other.

But as the days go on, and the patterns become stronger, Dylan starts to become a bit more unglued. Reality is not this precise in its repetitive behaviour, and it's all a bit too intense for him. At the gallery opening Sarah's been working on for her ex-boyfriend, digital mixed-media artist Jonas, (Sam Reid, definitely not Michael C. Hall) one of the centrepieces is a digital recreation of Grand Central, and of the repeating patterns Dylan has been seeing. A fight ensues and things sour with Sarah.

Dylan tries to keep his composure but he goes slightly bonkers with what the world's telling him, only to find other clues in his apartment that lead him to understand what's going on.

It really is a pretty slickly produced movie that has the sensibilities of a 90's mid-budget thriller that would have starred, I dunno, Andy Garcia and Julia Roberts, or Bruce Willis and Andie MacDowell. It has that big-star sheen and polish to it, just without the big stars. That doesn't mean it's good, though, much like most thrillers of the mid-90's.

It's not that there's a logic flaw to the supernatural element to this movie, it all comes together, it's just that the mystery, once it really starts to get solved, is pretty pedestrian. I guess the genre nerd in me wanted more of a sci-fi explanation than a fantasy one.

It also would have helped had the film not been telegraphing its finale so prevalent throughout the film. The idea is that history is repeating itself and once we understand that there's so little drama when we understand what the finale has to be (and some of us may get there faster than others, but most of us will be ahead of the movie on this one).

There are three editors on this film (William Hoy, Sean Lahiff, Gary Woodyard) and it's easy to see why it took three people to pull this together. Not only are the sort of time-flashes pretty intensely cut, there are also the montages of repeating patterns (this was sooo close to being a time loop movie, but it isn't at all) that looked like they took a lot of work to assemble, and then there's the fact that they shot this movie in Sydney but it's set in New York and Grand Central Station is at the very core of every aspect of this film. Shooting, editing, and blending with effects the scenery and backgrounds must have been an absolute chore, and I was astonished at how well it worked. I mean, I knew it couldn't be New York City, and so I spent a lot of time trying to see where the seams were and I failed over and over (I'm also not *that* familiar with NYC).

This is a film everyone involved can be quite proud of even if it's not as successful as was likely hoped for. It's not quite a hidden gem, but it is a quality production.

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If producer Rock Demers is the literal rock of the "Tales for all" series, the solid foundation upon which this house is built, then Australian writer-director Michael Rubbo is the I-beam across the center that keeps the framework stable. He is the writer-director of The Peanut Butter Solution and Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveler, not just the two most ambitious of the "Tales for all" but also probably the two most memorable (I was going to say "most successful" but I really don't know what is the appropriate measure for success on these movies which are Quebecois treasures and notable for being staple viewing on CBC in the 80's and 90's).

Rubbo returns for a third outing with Demers and did not leave any ambition behind. With Vincent et moi/Vincent and Me, Rubbo was engaging with his love of art in his screenplay via the character of Jo (Nina Petronzio), a young teen who travels from her rural town to attend a Montreal arts school. She is a Van Gogh obsessive, just idolizes his work (there is a back story there). She is an exceptional artist, though all her form is in impersonating her idol, both in how she paints and sketches. 

On the train to school, a young lad, Felix, tries to make friends, but she's standoffish and just wants to read her book on Van Gogh. Arriving at art school she learns he is the director of the school play. Her teacher is excited by her arrival, as she's seen her talent, and gives the class an assignment: design a jungle backdrop for the school play. Jo is immediately taken aback... she only draws and paints real life, she has no imagination (her words). Her teacher doesn't believe her. Felix pays a visit and brings a book of Henri Rousseau's jungle paintings. The next day Jo show's off her new backdrop, which is a near-perfect replica of a Rousseau. Her teacher catches her in a lie saying it was an original work, and Jo flips the fuck out.

It seems clear that this stage setting is all about Jo having to learn and grow as an artist and as a person, to accept the friendship and input of others while also discovering her own imagination as she blossoms into womanhood. I mean, we've seen at least three other similar films like this in the "Tales for all" series so ...

wait...

To calm herself down Jo runs around Montreal on her own trying to sketch people but they keep moving. She manages to sketch one lean, elderly gentleman with a pointy beard... only when she goes to leave he grabs her by the coat and drags her through a parade to a Chinese restaurant where he demands to see the drawing she made of him. He is immediately impressed, not just impressed, but astonished. He buys the drawing off her for a crisp $50 Canadian bill and requests he meet her back there the next day with a painting of her rural farm life.  Felix has been following her, and warns her that the thin man is shifty business.

Fast forward to the end of the school year and the performance of Felix's play (really, genuinely beautiful sets...awful play with a blunt "save the rainforests" message) when Jo's teacher shows her a magazine article where her drawings have been passed off as newly discovered drawings of a 13-year-old Van Gogh. Jo tries to hide her displeasure, but when pressed, she tells what happened, and she's accused of being a liar again. She flips out and starts flipping chairs. The rage issues in this young lady.

Of course, now she has to learn lessons in humility and to accept things which are beyond her cont... nope her and Felix and a reporter are off to Amsterdam to reclaim her drawings.  There they meet Joris (Paul Klerk), a boy of their age who lives on a wee boat and knows Amsterdam inside out. He's on the hunt for the thieves who recently stole a Van Gogh painting. Jo is smitten and Joris acts like he has foreign girls swooning over him all the time. Felix is jealous.

The kids become detectives investigating some leads and they not only find the stolen painting but uncover a forgery scheme as well. It's only by narrow fortune that they manage to escape the wrath of the thin man. Unfortunately for them, the reward and glory for their discovery goes to the reporter who manages to figure out from context clues the kids mistakenly give him. Not only is Joris not getting his hard fought reward, but Jo isn't getting her drawings back.

Well, I guess this act of international intrigue can only go one place, which is teaching Jo and other kids that sometimes life is unfair and disap....

Or, Jo just literally astral projects back into 1880's Arles France where she meets her hero, Van Gogh (Tchéky Karyo, Goldeneye). He's pretty standoffish with this young intruder as he's trying to work, but they wind up having a real conversation where she tells him of his legacy (which he doesn't believe in the slightest until he starts picking up from context clues that she's truly not from this time). He gives her a lesson in his painting style (something clearly Rubbo is versed in, as he did many of the fake paintings in this film himself) and sends her back to her real time with one of his paintings.

And when she wakes up, yep, there's a Van Gogh sitting right there. She could be a millionaire, but all she wants is her sketches back. So, in voice over montage she tells of trading the painting for her drawing to the Japanese businessman that bought them, and then wraps up any other loose ends in the montage. 

Oh, lest we forget, the film opens with Jeanne Clement, the record holder for being the oldest living person ever validated, having passed away in 1997 at 122 years old. She was 115 when she appeared in this film, retelling her experience of having met Van Gogh in Arles when she was 13 or so. She said he was rude to her and probably drunk. 

I suspect the story from Clement came out probably around the time they were shooting this film in Amsterdam, or perhaps before and maybe inspired Rubbo in writing the tale? Either way, they managed to finagle an interview with Clement, which starts with her recounting her Van Gogh encounter, and ends with young Nina Petronzio talking with Clement in-character as Jo, telling Clement that she encountered Van Gogh and he was very nice. Poor Jeanne Clement seemed so damned confused by this conversation and the encounter and ...I dunno, it felt a little mean spirited, like some sort of Borat shit. I don't think she understood what was happening.

Vincent et Moi is a largely English language film (occasional French or Dutch with subtitles), and the young  cast's performances are a little choppy from the outset. The film feels weighted in its first act, likely because all the budget was spent or earmarked for shooting in Amsterdam, so the early scenes feel rushed and a bit sloppy. Amsterdam, though, is a blast. Not just for the scenery (despite this not being an very well shot film) but the performances and just the tone of the film changes to another gear. It's not until the shorter third act where Jo meets Van Gogh that the truly bonkers nature of the film and its structure are fully revealed. Karyo has been an impeccable European character actor for decades and this early appearance he's so handsome and charming, if maybe not so close to the usual portrayal of the painter. The scenery here shows Rubbo's love and care for art as he recreates through scenery or sets some of Van Gogh's works and, while not the most high-end of cameras and film printing, they're still gorgeous images.

The only disappointment I truly have with Vincent et moi is that Jo isn't more autism spectrum encoded. Here rage issues, her hyperfocusing, her lack of understanding social norms or her ability to read the emotions of others. It's all there, but it's clear it's not intentionally a "coded" performance. 

This is a delightfully bananas film. I never thought anything could dethrone The Peanut Butter Solution as my favourite "Tales for all", given my deep nostalgia for that film, but this one's making a play for it.  It's a weird, wild gem.

KWIF: The Brutalist (+2)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. I've got the week off, so I've been doing more of what I like to do... consume! I am but a product of our capitalistic society.

This Week:
The Brutalist - 2024, d. Brady Corbet - in theatre
My Old Ass - 2024, d. Megan Park - amazonprime
Longlegs  - 2024, d. Osgood Perkins - amazonprime

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The Brutalist had, without a doubt, the most striking trailer of 2024. It's striking imagery, bold score and alluring typeface had a visceral impact on me as an audience member. Oh it was absolutely unclear to me, at all, what this movie was about, I just new it was something I must see. Leaving nothing about Gladiator II made even close to the impression that The Brutalist trailer did before it. 

Learning of its 3 hour and 35 minute runtime did not deter me (much...but any reservations I had abated once I noticed at the theatre earlier in the week that there was a sign posting about an intermission...bless the intermission!), and having no other agenda I set aside the better part of an afternoon to the film. 

There's something exciting about this process of discovery. Information is so readily at hand, our age of social media, podcasts, and other online discourse, it can be so simple to find out everything about an experience without ever having the experience, just as it can also be hard to avoid information at time. I knew The Brutalist was making top 10 lists (but not universally), but I still managed to avoid descriptions and even knowing what the film was about. I didn't even watch the trailer again, because I just wanted to experience it...thinking it would be an experience. At 215 minutes, one expects to be taken on a journey.

So, even knowing nothing about the film's story, I had expectations of what the film would be, and I have to say, dear reader, those expectations were not met. The Brutalist is an accomplished film, of which there's no doubt, and those key elements from the trailer (Daniel Blumberg's incredible score, the utterly unique credits, the myriad of gorgeous tracking shots) were indeed present in the film, and kept me present in the film.  Alongside stylistic details such as old film reel inserts (whether it's inforeels on Pennsylvania where the film is primarily set, or even the curiosity of vintage celluloid pornography) Lol Crawley's cinematography contributes to the exceptional style of the film that engaged me at times when the story seemed to lull.

I don't mean to say that the story is, in any way, badly executed or performed. I don't recall the last time I've seen Adrien Brody (Golden Globe winner for this role, for whatever that's worth) so invested in a role. He plays László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect displaced by World War II, separated from his wife as they were filtered to different concentration camps, whom he's not even sure is alive when we first meet him upon his arrival in New York in 1947. It is a Jewish immigrant story, and broad strokes of assimilating in the polite hostility and microagressions of American culture, and the overwhelm of a society already in the thrall of capitalism are definitely felt. But László's story seems highly individualistic, that of someone who is already accomplished in his field given the opportunity to return to his chosen profession by an appreciative benefactor and struggling to complete his vision without compromise.

The first hundred minutes are very effective in establishing László's character, who he is as a person. He feels deep love and connection to his family, coming to America to work with his cousin at his Philadelphia-base furniture shop, but he doesn't feel the same need or desire to assimilate that his cousin does. László's experiences have only solidified his identity in a world cruelly intolerant towards it. He had an incident where his face was bashed in and to deal with the pain, he was given heroin on the transport overseas. He's now addicted. And he is recognized as a womanizer, at least by his cousin, and the way Corbet frames every meaningful female character on screen from László's point of view (from his cousin's American wife to his benefactor's 20-year-old daughter), center screen, gives the impression of attraction and danger. 

The film makes plain these weaknesses, alongside his pride and ego, and decades of similar stories have them feeling like a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. We're so familiar with the dramatic conflict between womanizing artist and their spouses, we've seen the story of the creator who loses everything to drugs, we've seen the story of the visionary whose ego inhibits their success. Every moment one of László's weaknesses presents itself, I would groan, just a little. I was predicting how it would contribute to László's inevitable failure.  As someone who is constantly getting in his own way, I have little patience for stories of people whose character flaws impede their success. Ironic, I know.

So it is much to Corbet's credit that his story never does explode these bombs that are set. I'm much more impressed with it in hindsight than I was in the moment.  I can't say, without a rewatch, whether these act as effective character colour, or if it's just Corbet subverting tropes (I go back to his framing of women in the first act as objects of desire, to the impression that it's definitely the latter).  But the setup of the pride/drugs/womanizing take up such space when Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, Rogue One) and his niece join him in the second half of the film (following the intermission) and she is forgiving of his past infidelity, and turns the moment of her forgiveness into a surprisingly sensual and intimate scene.

Erzsébet is a charming, cultured character who surprises everyone, including the audience. She is a gentle force to be reckoned with, to be sure. She's a devoted wife who adores her husband (as he adores her) but she's also got her own life, ambitions, and issues outside of László's concerns. She is rich enough to support her own story.

The thrust of the film, what most of it is centered around, is the build that László is leading for the Van Burens. His benefactor, Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pierce, Lockout) takes a deep liking to László despite their first contentious encounter, and the community center he wants László to build is in part a memorial to his mother but also a means of (quite literally) cementing his presence in this rural Pennsylvanian community.  It constantly seems a folly. László is at odds with seemingly everyone except Harrison about the build. The barrage of microagressions he receives from the foreman Harrison hires, Harrison's son who is managing the project's finances, the local townsfolk wary of this non-Christian foreigner all threaten his work. It is clear, from both László and Erzsébet's perspective of the project that there will be no compromise of his vision, even if it means he doesn't get paid.

For me, the film's most impactful moment was Harrison and László's trip to the marble quarry in Carrara, Italy. László had a pre-war relationship with one of the miners whom they meet up with and he takes them up the mountainside to show them the marbles. I have never seen a marble quarry before, and, looking at it from a macro scale, I was at once one is taken aback by the marrying of the terrain, but what is exposed underneath and the erratic design of the carving is visually fascinating.  Up in the mines themselves, there are corridors of marble, that László's friend explains, they miners used to resist (and literally crush) Mussolini's forces. There's the blood of resistance and freedom on those stones (it marries with László's artistic vision for his project nicely). 

An incident between Harrison and László on that trip to Italy wrecks László, and the sequences following the trip are the most difficult to process, as they end the story of our main characters with unexpected uncertainty, and the epilogue then jumps two decades into the future. The epilogue is a complete shift in tone stylistically that doesn't fit at all with what came before. It feels much like the end of a long-running TV show that jumps to the future to give you a sense of where things end up, only here, it doesn't feel like we've gotten a resolution to the story at hand. The epilogue serves up the specific intent and meaning of the build, which László never specifically mentions at any time to any one during the build process. In hindsight it does make events of the earlier film more resonant, but it's a really, truly weird mechanism to convey it.

It's this epilogue that I think left me so cold to the film. It doesn't fit.  And as much as I loved the design of the closing credits (although it is to read the stylized font as it scrolls horizontally upwards across the screen in multiple columns), Blumberg's accompanying electro-pop closing track, "Epilogue (Venice)" is just so anachronistic (despite otherwise being right up my alley) that it doesn't close out the film on a note that feels representative of the film.  The whole epilogue is just bizarre.

Going back to the trailer, it features such experimental boldness, but feels so assured, I was expecting a similar film that would stimulate, maybe even overstimulate with style. But it's not that. The Brutalist is much more subdued, maintaining a consistent mood throughout that makes it easy enough to lean back into, but didn't give me the capital e "Experience" I was thinking it would be.  It's good, not great.

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I've been meaning to catch up on Aubrey Plaza's filmography. There are a half-dozen or so well regarded smaller-budget films (eg. Emily the Criminal, Ingrid Goes West) that Plaza stars in that live on Netflix and Amazon that I keep popping up but I never actually watch. My Old Ass is just the latest of these.

The conceit of My Old Ass is that a young woman, Elliott (Maisy Stella), living on a cranberry farm in the Muskokas of Ontario is getting ready to leave for university, when she encounters her future self during a shroom trip. Even following the encounter, they, through magical realism, continue to maintain long distance contact, as Elliott spends her last summer at home.

The "time travel" conceit threatens to overwhelms story of this film, which is a lightly dramatic but breezy and comforting coming-of-age story of this turning point in Elliott's life, but it can only overwhelm conceptually. It is not the focus of the film.

Future Elliott warns herself to stay away from anyone named Chad (not sure if this was meant as a meta joke, or not, given the place "Chad" takes alongside "Karen" in our current lexicon), but when she inevitably meets Chad, he is sweet, funny, and they seem to click with disarming ease. She knows she should stay away from him, but she cannot help but be drawn to him.  This flies in the face of her identity as she's known it, a proud and out lesbian. This reexamining of her sense of self, and sexual fluidity seems like such modern, and necessary, exploration in cinema.

On top of romantic encounters, future Elliott provokes her with the initiative to connect more with her family during the summer, to get to know her younger brothers in a way she's failed to do so as she's explored her independence in her teenage years. She is changing, just as everything is changing around her.

It's an exceptionally sweet, charming, and lightly emotional film. It's wonderfully scripted by Park, and Stella, who cut her teeth on the TV series Nashville, carries this film ably and sublimely, like a Canadian Florence Pugh. She's a talent to watch. Plaza is only featured physically in the early and late stages of the film, but her very specific and well-known on-screen persona acts as a useful shorthand for us to understand Elliott (both now and in the future). She is a welcome presence and despite literally phoning in her role for much of the movie, invests a tremendous amount into the character that we only really see in the emotional closing minutes of the film.

I adored this movie.

[As I was writing this, I learned that Plaza's husband had died by suicide this week. Jeff Baena was a director, three of his films I had seen -- Joshy, The Little Hours and Horse Girl -- and he was still and emerging talent with a large support network, at least creatively. I am saddened by this loss. To my Toronto friends, if you or anyone you know is in need of mental health support, call 211.  Other Canadian resources can be found here. ]

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There is definitely a divide in the reaction to Longlegs, at least from what I've seen. Critics have been praising it and planning it, audiences have been reacting much the same, with a plethora of 5* reviews, but even more 1* reviews. One thing for sure is the division has been profitable for the film's distributor, Neon, to the tune of over $125 million at the box office.

I avoided Longlegs when it was in theatres because it was already a zeitgeisty thing, and I tend to recoil when things get too popular. If it's already become a meme, I'm less willing to engage with it. Plus, I knew Longlegs came from The Blackcoat's Daughter director Osgood Perkins, and I hated that film. A friend petitioned me to watch Longlegs as he was curious my reaction to it, and a recent podcast episode of Comedy Bang Bang where Taran Killam played "Longlegs" in a sort of Emo Phillips-esque affectation spurred on my curiosity.

I hated this film.

As I watched it, I wondered if how I was reacting was just my preconceived dislike for Perkins, because visually, this is a striking movie. Perkins' stylizing of flashbacks as, like, super8 film, or his title cards, or throughout his framing in sequences are all so striking, I should be drawn to it. But his stylizing doesn't make up for the faults in his storytelling.

Like The Blackcoat's Daughter, Perkins' story works its way backwards and forwards to a semi-twist ending, but so much of his storytelling is the obvious and frustrating omission of information as to leave the twist to the finale.  These both are stories told where it's not so much the protagonist - in this case FBI rookie Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, in a performance which I'm not thrilled with, but is clearly what the director was asking for) - unfurling a mystery, but the story being a mystery to be unfurled for the audience through the storytelling of cinema(!). Oh, there are discoveries for Harker to make in the process, but we as the audience are intentionally having key things withheld from us that Harker already knows (as opposed to the common tension-raising device where we as the audience learn things ahead of the story's protagonist). It doesn't work for me, at all.

On top of that, the film presents Harker has having some low level telepathic or extrasensory ability, and just drops that nugget following a visually appealing but contextually confounding testing sequence, and then doesn't follow up on nor explore it. We're just supposed to accept it. Perkins wants this to be a reality where the paranormal exists, but also wants it to be real-world grounded, and he doesn't marry the two effectively. This feels like it is trying to be Silence of the Lambs married with some early Hollywood Cronenberg psychodrama vibes, but it doesn't come close. It doesn't help that its astoundingly clear Perkins has zero concept of how the FBI (or any investigative agency, for that matter) actually function. The investigation is a bigger fantasy than any of the metaphysical aspects of the film. 

Nic Cage plays Longlegs, the serial killer of the film, and does so in heavy falseface makeup that makes him look like Teddy Perkins in that great Atlanta episode. Cage is allowed to do his Cage thing and it is what it is. A lot of the divisiveness in audiences seems to stem from whether this performance is good or terrible. It's neither, it is just Cage and it didn't excite me one way or the other.

The film's ultimate reveal, for me, was simply unsatisfying. I had two or three other scenarios playing in my head as the film was withholding so much, all of which I would have found superior to what resulted, and yet would not have changed my opinion of the film.  I just didn't buy into anything this film was selling at any point. 

To Oz Perkins: you're an incredible stylist, please let someone else write for you. Until then, you're on my shit list.

But Is It Horror? Maybe to some, but I found it more frustrating than scary. I don't think Perkins ever really settled on whether it was suspense or horror, and that indecision is tangible.

[Toastypost - we disagree, vehemently]