3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Train Dreams

2025, Clint Bentley (Jockey) -- Netflix

Stubbing this out, even though I have not yet finished the movie, as the voice of it has sent me down a rabbit hole for the adapted novella's author, one Denis Johnson. I read mostly pulp fiction: scifi and fantasy and horror and crime. Rarely do these works have a "voice" but I just absorbed Johnson's "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" and its nothing but voice, as strong and clear as Will Patton's narration of the Bentley film. I imagine the film director felt it was necessary to capture the author's voice, as while I imagine the soul & plot has been captured in the movie, all too often the author themself is absent from the medium.

This was a sad movie, but not in a bad way. To misquote Kent, the movie is "contemplative & meditative." It chronicles the life of an average man, not a simple man, but also one not complicated by intricacies. He was a loner, often lonely, but not an unfriendly man, dismissive of company. He was a logger, but much of the life portrayed he is apart from that. His life has poignant tragedies, but what life doesn't. Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton, It Comes At Night) was just a man who lived through better part of the 20th century, observing civilization grow up around to him, connected by train tracks and technology, but despite his contributions, never really became a part of it.

I am going to have to let the movie settle into my brain pan for a while, before I complete this. Later. Unfortunately, doing that let all the storied thoughts in my brain seep out. I have to say, it had a great impact on my while watching, and in the days not long after, but... now, its mostly gone. I won't let that judge my fondness for the movie. I suspect that in watching the movie, and in reading a bit of Johnson afterwards, I found another place in my mind, one I don't often travel to anymore. And I left the memory of that movie there, when I returned to the anxiety & stress of my real world.

I came at this movie thinking it was going to be about trains and about trees, and about a great tragedy. But while it is about these, they are not its core. The train trips are linkages, the trees are ever present, as Robert only leaves the forest once, late in life. The tragedy is great, very great, perhaps the greatest impact on his life, but its not the only impact the movie portrays. In fact it begins with an injustice, a short scene where European railway workers murder a Chinese worker, and Robert does not stop it; the scene leaving us to wonder, was he about to help the killers? This act haunts him, literally, forever. 

Its hard to relate this movie by its plot, by its story, because that is not what it is about. Already adapted from condensed source material, the novella, it is not seeking narrative arcs. More, its giving us a mood through translation of words to screen, sometimes helped along by Will Patton's voice-overs, an actor already know for reading Johnson's voice. In some ways, I drawn to this by it being akin to the vignettes I write, small condensed images in hand-written word, nary a plot to be found. Being formed around Johnson's beautiful prose, Bentley creates his own beautiful imagery in sunlight, in shadows among trees, in steam & smoke, in people's faces. 

One of the strongest things from the movie that stayed with me, are the images of Robert's musings. He is often lost in thought, staring out at the world, not really part of it. He is re-playing times, voices, images from his past constantly. Robert is a man of many thoughts, but few words. I think that is where the train dreams come from, because like myself, when he is forced to a time period when all he can do is think, sitting in his seat, watching the world pass by outside the window, he slips into a dream like state, of ponderances. 

Next time I watch a movie like this, I will set myself aside, stare out a window and keep this laptop handy...

KWIF: The Sheep Detectives (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I originally had a snarky comment closing out last week's review of Mortal Kombat II where I was lamenting having seen the video game adaptation instead of seeing the one about investigative ewes. I deleted the comment because I had already heard that The Sheep Detectives was actually, surprisingly, a pretty decent film, and that neuters the joke a little bit. Plus, I was going to see The Sheep Detectives anyway, so there never really was an either/or decision in the first place.

This Week:
The Sheep Detectives (2026, d. Kyle Balda - in theatre)
Mile End Kicks (2025, d. Chandler Levack - in theatre)
Dark City (1998, d. Alexander Proyas - DVD)

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I must have seen the trailer for The Sheep Detectives about a dozen times, most of them in the form of a preview before the screening of one film or another. Every time the trailer would start, I would balk at the very concept of a live-action movie about cgi sheep attempting to solve the murder of their shepherd. And yet, by the end of the trailer, every time, I was completely sold. Well, I guess not completely since the very same cycle would start anew the next time I would see the trailer.

It is, without a doubt, an absurd concept, but absurdity doesn't innately make for a film bad, and often the very absurd nature of a story's conceit is what makes it stand out, what makes it good, different and exciting.

I've been hearing a lot of comparisons to Paddington bandied about, but The Sheep Detectives really takes a greater nod from Babe, in that it's set in the real world, but when the humans aren't around the animals are speaking to each other. Yes, there are plenty of jokes where we watch the sheep talk in English and then cut to a human POV just to see them bleating at each other...and it's never. not. funny! (Director Balda is kind of restrained in his use of this gag to be honest, maximizing it's efficacy.)

Based on a 2005 German novel, this is "cozy mystery" at its coziest... I mean, we're talking wool coats for days, right? But the real surprise is that the mystery is not the most captivating part of the film. The reason The Sheep Detectives works so well is it establishes characters and it establishes a community (mainly with the sheep, but also with the humans) and it establishes a tangible world for them to inhabit. In this world, sheep are intelligent creatures. They sit and listen to farmer George (Hugh Jackman, X-Men: Origins: Wolverine) read mystery novels in the evening, and Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jack the Bear), George's favourite sheep, always solves the mystery before the end. George has a reputation about town of being a prickly bastard, but he's a kind and gentle loner who adores his sheep above all. He opens our story by narrating the letter he's writing to, it turns out, his daughter whom he gave up for adoption three decades ago (Molly Gordon, The Bear).

The sheep, we quickly learn, have the ability to force themselves to forget, which they do as a collective. Only Mopple (Chris O'Dowd, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) can remember the past. The sheep believe that they don't die but turn into clouds. Mopple knows the truth, but lets them have their comforts. Otherwise their understanding of death is restricted only to the stories George tells them, so when George turns up dead, the sheep community is rocked.

So too is the human community of the English town of Denbrook. The kind of hapless town constable Officer Derry (Nicholas Braun, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) is completely incapable of handling any sort of death, nevermind a murder. A wayward aspiring reporter (Nicholas Galitzine, Handsome Devil) seems intent on helping him break the case for his own reasons. The suspects are all in George's will, including the town butcher, a rival shepherd, the lovelorn innkeeper, and George's estranged daughter who just happened into town the day of his death.

In a conventional story, there would be much mileage about the sheep working through each of the suspects and eliminating them as the possible murderer. Instead, The Sheep Detectives is far more interested in the sheep community, and expanding their horizons. There is the whole concept in this community of a "winter sheep". Most sheep, they say, are born in the spring, but the occasional sheep is born in the winter, and they are shunned by the herd. And so a tiny, unnamed lamb George loves dearly, but is rejected by all. Part of the story is the herd confronting their prejudices, but in a roundabout way.  Even upon learning that their greatest ram, Sebastian (Bryan Cranston, Kung Fu Panda 3), is a winter sheep, it takes a lot before the herd truly understands the harm of their prejudice.

But that's just one facet of what these sheep need to learn. They have to leave the familiar safety of their farm and venture out into the world, where they are exposed to the realities they've otherwise chosen to forget. It's a potent moment when Lily realizes that Mopple has had to live with everything they've forgotten, but Mopple presents it as something beautiful, not horrible.

I'm not doing the best job of selling The Sheep Detectives but, to be blunt, I absolutely adored it. Funny, charming, sweet, sincere with a, yes, cozy mystery at its core to keep things moving, but just a delightful cast of characters and some of the most rewarding emotional stringpulls in some time... I cried at least three times and it earned every one of those tears. I never resented the film for them.

There is no reason The Sheep Detectives should be as good as it is, but we're so lucky that it is. A large contingent of my early-evening Wednesday screening applauded at the end of the film. I joined in. There was no one there to receive the applause, but it felt like the right way of mutually socially acknowledging that we all had a genuine emotional reaction to this film, and that we appreciated it. I do not recall the last time that happened.

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Love the pseudo-American Apparel-
style poster for this film. Perfection

Mile End Kicks first shot is inside Toronto's legendary Horseshoe tavern. The band Islands is playing a gig. I am transported back in time.

Despite the caption "2011", I am transported to 2005, to seeing Islands in their earliest incarnation, possibly at the Horseshoe, but maybe at the Rivoli or Lee's Palace or some other joint and perhaps during the North By Northeast festival. Anyway, I'm there. I'm in. It has me. It took the film all of 9 seconds to completely reel me in.

By 2011 I was out of regular "gigging", going to shows around town, and certainly out of the pretense that my photographing and reviewing of such shows (sometimes for online media outlets, most often just for personal blogging) was a career path. Grace (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria) is 22 years old and already has a foothold in journalism.  She has four hundred articles in the local newspaper she's been writing for, including investigative journalism, interviews, and writing a sex column, as well as music reviews. She ponders the idea of writing a "33 1/3" volume on Alanis Morissette's album "Jagged Little Pill". Her boss at the paper (Jay Baruchel) thinks it's a great idea, and hooks her up with the "33 1/3" publisher who likes her take and gives her a small advance to write the book, but it needs to be done quickly.

The next we see of Grace, she's on a bus to Montreal for the summer, giving the middle finger to T.dot on her way out. Her mom doesn't understand why she has this sudden impulse to move elsewhere, and her dad...well, just seems depressed. Grace has a top 5 list of what she wants her summer in Montreal to be: write her book on Alanis, have real sex, climb Mount Royal, learn French and fall in love, probably not in that order.

She's renting a room in Montreal's Mile End from Madeline (Juliette Gariépy, Red Rooms) a hot DJ whose boyfriend Hugo (Robert Naylor) plays in a rock band called Bone Patrol. Madeline is super friendly and wants to be pals, while Grace is a bit reserved and really wants to focus on her writing. But Madeline insists she come to a loft party where she is DJing and Bone Patrol is playing. At the party, unfamiliar with the Montreal scene, Grace retreats to an outdoor space where she meets Archie (Devon Bostick, Diary of a Wimpy Kid) the bassist for Bone Patrol, and they form an immediate kinship... but when the band finally plays, Grace has a rather visceral reaction to Chevy (Stanley Simons, The Iron Claw), Bone Patrol's frontman. She chats him up and he's the most up-his-own-ass pretentious, faux-ambivalent, self-involved shitheel, but Grace can't see past his stage mystique.

Mile End Kicks is about Grace's epic summer in Montreal, becoming part of it's 2010's hipster scene and getting waaay too invested in a guy who can only ever think about himself (and even then not that deeply). There's an obvious love triangle happening between Grace, Archie and Chevy, but the will-they/won't-they isn't really the thrust of the movie. It's more of a "what the fuck, Grace?" as her logic just cannot find a way to overrule her libido when it comes to Chevy, and Archie pre-emptively takes himself out of the equation.

Mile End Kicks is about Grace building up her life, but also feeling completely helpless as it starts to crash down around her. A lesser film would have spent more time and energy on making more direct connections between Grace's life and the songs of "Jagged Little Pill", but the film doesn't need to link them firmly at all. Grace's fall from grace happens for many, many reasons, (almost all her own) and her only way out of the pit she's fallen into is to find self respect and confidence, to engage the world on her own terms rather than feel like she has to be deferential to the men she finds in the circles she's in.

There's an excellent, fundamental moment early in the movie where some of the men of the paper she's working at are having a debate over a couple of bands. It's clear she's not invited to this conversation and when she interjects her own input, she is dismissed immediately and, to put a finer point on it, laughed at. Late it the film (when she's back on her upswing) she reads an insightful and incisive text at a poetry slam about not just this explicit experience but all the general outside-the-circle-of-men experiences women have everywhere. It's a terrific 1-2-3 execution (especially when Grace returns to the bullpen late in the film).  I have witnessed these types of situations so many time (even well into adulthood) and have probably been a party to them more often than I've been cognizant of or care to admit. It's institutionalized sexism that often we (meaning men) are not even aware of. I mean I was aware of it before this film, but praise it for actually making it a part of the conversation.

The film contains three (or perhaps even four) of the most awkward make-out scenes I think I've ever seen on film. Given that Grace is our POV character, she's mostly not the one being awkward so our cringe isn't a sympathetic one but more of an "oh gods, what the eff" type of cringe. It's almost all Chevy and that boy, wow, is a fucking mess.  Either Levack dated a guy just like this or knew someone who had. The hyper-specificity here is too crazy to be made up.

The film effectively uses its setting as a real "Montreal is a main character" film, and it definitely captures what the Canadian hipster "scene" was like at the time (Toronto, a few years earlier, wasn't that much different, nor likely was Vancouver a few years before that, or Halifax a few years before that...the "it" scene sort of cycles through the major Canadian centers in five-ish-year spans). It effectively seeds in the tension in Montreal's art scene that's so distinct to it (the outsiders that come in and the French-English divide between them, as well as the Toronto resentment)

Mile End Kicks is a film about being in your 20's and fucking up, but also about learning from your mistakes and growing as a person, and understanding that you'll continue to make mistakes (just hopefully new ones, and not repeating them). It's also about empowerment, and while not being so aggressively Alanis about it, it's still a pretty bold awakening.

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I had not watched Dark City for a very, very long time, though I had carried the DVD of it with me to at least a dozen different residences over the years. It would have been one of the first DVDs I bought, but I have no recollection if I ever actually put it in a DVD player and watched the film it contained.

A friend recently brought up the film, noting that clips of it had been popping up in one of his feeds ... somewhere. I recall that I liked the film way back when, and it has maintained a decent if not stellar reputation in the meantime... but would it hold up? Would I still even like it? Does the disc even work or has it succumbed to disc rot?

Turns out, mostly, mostly and yes, the disc still works wonderfully.

The most unfortunate thing about Dark City is that it opens with a narration from Kiefer Sutherland's Dr. Daniel Schreiber. Schreiber exposits about an advanced alien civilization late in its decline looking for some hope of salvation, and that hope is human. Schreiber is helping them in their experiments on humanity, and this film, then, in theory, unpacks just what that experiment is.

The second most unfortunate thing about Dark City is the affectation that Sutherland imbues Schreiber with. He gives the character an out-of-breath speech pattern, speaking in short bursts (not unlike Malcolm's asthmatic friend Stevie on Malcolm in the Middle). It's really a hat-on-a-hat as Schreiber also has a scarred lazy eye and a severe limp as well. Sutherland was making choices.

A few minutes in the proper film starts as Rufus Sewell's John Murdock awakens in the bathtub of a grimy hotel, completely unaware of where or who he is. He receives a phone call from Schreiber warning him some men will be after him, and he needs to leave immediately...it's then that he notices the dead sex worker on the ground with spirals and other sigils carved into her skin.  He moves with haste, just as a quartet of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers show up and check out his freshly abandoned place.

The streets of Dark City are just that, dark, dimly lit. Every light seems like a spotlight only illuminating in a cone shape exactly what it's pointing at. Also at midnight, the society of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers use their psionic abilities (called "tuning") to cause the entire city to grind to a halt, and it's denizens to go inert and unconscious. They also reconfigure the entire city, buildings twist up out of the ground forcing other buildings to shrink or retreat without causing any true damage to speak of. Reality bends to their whims...almost.  But these creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers need Dr. Schreiber to concoct new memories for the citizens of this dark city which most citizens have had done a few times over.

But it's John Murdock who has somehow repelled the new personality application and also developed the same tuning powers as the creepy overlords. He poses a genuine threat to the order of things.

As we learn all this, there's also a mystery... is John a murderer. His estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) can't conceive of it, and even John himself has to test whether indeed the impulses are there or if he's truly capable of being a psychopathic killer. The detective on the case, Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) can't see any other options, because to do so would be to admit that reality is not all that it seems.  While Sewell's efforts as Murdock are genuinely quite good, there's a case to be made that this works better if Bumstead is it's main figure trying to solve a murder and unraveling the case of John Murdock, which then leads to the revelation of where they actually are and who is actually in charge and why.

Dark City is a really decent sci-fi neo-noir that doesn't always tease its mystery in an efficient or effective manner (especially since the opening voice over gives up so much of the surprise), but the exceptional special effects (for the most part) and shadow-laden atmosphere of the picture do so much of the heavy lifting to keep things engaging when the story may falter. Even 28 years later, on one of the oldest DVD pressings in my collection, the film still looks really good, the copious practical effects, sets and miniatures and the well-masked digital effects standing up very very well.

The third most unfortunate thing about Dark City then is the climax is such utter nonsense. Murdock goes tete-a-tete with "tuning" powers against the...leader? (of a hive mind?) I guess of the creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers... and there's nothing more boring that two characters trapped in a mental battle just leering at each other while crazy cgi bullshit swirls all around them.  It's such a let down given some of the film's strengths prior to that point.

The fourth most unfortunate thing is how sleepy Jennifer Connelly is in the role of Emma Murdoch. I can hazard a guess that she's been told to play the character as if she's just had a lifetime of memories slammed into her brain only the night before, so she's effectively a new, but confused person...but for some reason that gets relayed as sedate, with most every line delivered in an unaffected monotone. She's a much better actress than this performance.

But a few unfortunates aside, Dark City holds up as a solid watch. Perhaps it's not the monumental sci-fi story of it's generation (hard to be when The Matrix comes along 13 months later) but it's got very little to be embarassed about, and despite not hiding what could have been some great surprises, still has a surprise or two under its belt.

KWIF: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It was a real toss up: final two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again's second season, or the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. It was no toss up. Daredevil has been, to put it bluntly, repetitive and boring, while TDWP2 is an event! It wasn't even a competition.

This Week:
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026, d.  David Frankel - in theatre)
Mortal Kombat II (2026, d. Simon McQuoid - in theatre)
Keyhole (2011, d. Guy Maddin - tubi)
Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002, d. Takashi Miike - tubi)
Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988, d. Akio Jissoji - tubi)

I am not a journalist. Despite having been a writer and for many online resources for over 30 years, nothing I've done is what I would call journalism. The closest I came was a 3 year stint on editorial at my student newspaper in University (I thought this was an extraordinary and fundamental time in my life but in hindsight, turns out it was a somewhat juvenile and retroactively embarrassing era for both myself and the paper, full of (my own) sloppy work, ill-informed editorials, and errors in judgement. My desire to be more like the Harvard Lampoon or Mad Magazine than anything with journalistic integrity (which is not to diminish the work of my collaborators, but I was really not up to the task...but I digress). 

I got a degree in business, not journalism, and I cared about each equally (which is to say, minimally). It's probably for the best I never went into journalism professionally (though I tried on a few occasions). I don't have the stones for it. Much like being an artist, being a journalist requires sacrifice, and the rewards are not monetary, and you have to love it (which I don't...I respect it, don't love it so much). Plus, in the past 15 years or so, there's been a decided attack on journalism as an institution. Truth telling is now all a matter of perspective (or so the 1% overlords would have us believe). It's been a rough dozen-plus years for the media. Most of my favourite writers are now doing their own Substack or Substack-adjacent writing, and supplementing any written work with podcasting. The world is a lesser place for social media having supplanted traditional media as people's primary source of news (or, rather, "news"). There's no security to working in the world of journalism.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a sequel that doesn't need to exist. Nothing about the end of The Devil Wears Prada demands we know more. But now that it does exist, that it sets itself on top of the backdrop of the failing state of traditional media and the billionaire bros who snap up media outlets so they can control the narrative with their detached-from-the-layman world view...well, at least there's something for it say, something to explore in this moment, even if it doesn't quite have the firmest grasp on its message.

We find, when this film starts, Andy Sach (Anne Hathaway) has just won a journalism award but also, at almost the same moment, via text, finds out that she and her entire staff at the newspaper she was writing for have been laid off. Meanwhile Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) has just had an expose written about how Runway Magazine has promoted and supported a brand who runs a manufacturing sweatshop. This is a scandal, one which Miranda of 20 years ago would never have found herself in (it's telling in many ways that she has).  The owner of Runway's media parent, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) needs damage control, and thus returns Andy to Runway, the place where she interned 20 years ago, now as the new features editor.

She reunites with Nigel (Stanley Tucci) and Miranda (who doesn't remember her, or so she says), and is instantly swept into a meeting with their key advertiser, Dior, where Emily (Emily Blunt) now works as retail manager.

Andy finds Miranda in a subdued position relative to where she once was. Still a titan of the industry, print media is all but dead, and the online sphere for Runway has trouble competing with other scroll-and-like spaces. Andy's role is, at first, damage control, but also about trying to raise Runway's profile up.  It needs to be more than just about the pictures, people need to read it for the articles too.  Without saying it, it's attempting to "Teen Vogue" it (where in the mid-2010s Teen Vogue shifted its focus from fashion and entertainment and rapidly gained attention for it's provocative and insightful political articles.... Teen Vogue was collapsed into the parent Vogue in 2025 by its publishing overlords, according to many to stifle its anti-right wing messaging).

Andy's efforts to raise the status of the magazine is noticed in the media, but not represented in the site traffic. She needs a big gambit both to secure her place and to gain at least a modicum of respect from Miranda. She needs to land the white whale interview: Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu). The ex-wife of one of the world's richest men (a chuckling tech bro doofus played brilliantly under gobs of makeup by Justin Theroux) is now the world's richest woman, but Sasha hasn't given an interview in the three years since the divorce. Andy lands the interview (conducted by Miranda but the article written by Andy) and not only gets in Miranda's good graces once again but becomes a bit of a legend.  

The crux of the film, however, is that no matter what one good story brings for a day, a week, or a month, it's not enough. The cycles move on so fast that there's no time to rest, and media and journalism are still a dying form, unable to demand enough attention in the attention economy when there's injured baby foxes being fed milk from a bottle or video game live streams that run for two days straight to compete with. Runway is on the table to be sold...or on the chopping block to be axed.

While the first act is all about Andy getting reacquainted with a world she left behind 20 years earlier and noting both the similarities and shocking differences, the second act is about settling in, about establishing a new life in a roller-coaster world of uncertainty and insecurity. Miranda is the only one who seems like teflon-coated steel, nothing penetrates and nothing sticks...but even she is showing signs that that it's all actually getting to her too. The world is changing and she can only do so much to change with it.

The third act then becomes about Andy's perception of the situation, that the threat to Runway, one of the last bastions of traditional media, is the warning siren and that saving it means much more than just saving a magazine but providing hope for the entire industry of journalism.  It's idealist and optimistic, and it takes the audience on that ride of hope and scrappy-can-do attitude.

And then Miranda slaps her in the face with reality. It's only a matter of time. There's a boa wrapped tightly around every industry, squeezing tighter and tighter trying to milk them for everything they're worth, until they're worth nothing, at least monetarily. The solution to the troubles in this picture all rely on the good graces of an ultra-rich benefactor to whom minimal, or no returns (or even negative returns) are worth the investment for the art and integrity. You can't monetize artistry and integrity.

This, mercifully, isn't a naive film, although at times Andy is far too naive as a character, and Miranda is far too withholding to fully invest in the driving story forces at play. It does oversimplify its narrative so that it can have a satisfying ending while still being cognizant that there remains a dark cloud overhead and the struggle will continue after the last pan of the New York skyline.

The Devil Wears Prada was a really good movie that has become sort of legendary. The sequel doesn't tarnish the legend, though it fails to find its own legendary status in the process. It's a pretty picture, with tons of fabulous outfits, sets, and settings (and boy does Anne Hathaway look more amazing than she ever has), all of which are a must, and it mercifully doesn't wallow in the past. It does unfortunately seems obliged to put Andy kind of in the same place she was in during the first movie, even though she has two decades of prestigious experience, world travelling and her own life under her belt. It's natural for someone to find themselves repeating patterns of behaviour when with certain people, but I just felt like she should be much more assured than she is here. Similarly, Miranda shows next to no sign of growth, yet she feels muted compared to the ruthless ferocity which she had in the prior film. But she's also almost 70 now, and there does come something of a softening with age which we should find believable.

Already a massive box office success, the best we can say about The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that it does fine as a sequel. It doesn't at all diminish what came before, nor does it immediately discount its own existence. I find myself wishing that it were more interested in its setting, exploring the erosion of media and journalism, especially given the eyes it has on it, but that's not the audience its serving (this isn't The Paper 2 or Broadcast News 2). It serves its audience well...or well enough.

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I didn't see the 2021 iteration of Mortal Kombat (but Toasty did) and, to be honest, I didn't care to. From all reports it was attempting to be a character-driven narrative exploring the characters of Sub-Zero and Scorpion, and that there was not, in fact, any Mortal Kombat to be had. I mean, what's the point then?

I am by no means invested in Mortal Kombat as a property. The last version of the game I played was its original incarnation. But that said, I've long had a soft spot for the '95 cinematic treatment from Paul WS Anderson, a film that has aged surprisingly well in that it was always kind of hokey and wasn't taking the whole thing too seriously. The last thing we need to do is take Mortal Kombat too seriously.

It seemed like (at least from Toasty's report) MK2021 was taking things too seriously. Mortal Kombat II wants you to think it's not taking things too seriously... but it still is. What story there is within the film is wildly unfocussed and largely predictable, with absolutely no tension built along the way (for a number of reasons). The movie starts by introducing the concept of "Mortal Kombat", where two realms, instead of waging war, compete in a tournament of 10 fights. The first to win five of these fights is victor and the losing side's realm is theirs. Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) watches her father get brutally defeated by Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) and her mother and people immediately subjugated under him. He takes her as his daughter (I can't say for certain the scriptwriter was just aping Gamora's story from Guardians of the Galaxy/Infinity War but it's basically the same) which I'm sure will work out fine for everyone as a big happy new family.

Meanwhile Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) is a washed up Stephen Segal-type 90's action star who nobody cares about anymore. He's sad about his life but Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) recruit him for Mortal Kombat, Raiden promising him a greater, more fulfilling destiny. He declines, but, it turns out, he doesn't have a choice.

And so Kitana fights for her father, reluctantly, while Johnny Cage fights for Earth, reluctantly, only it turns out Kitana is a spy for Raiden and Johnny Cage has a warrior within, so the dramatic narrative arcs these characters can take are, well, straight lines rather than curves. Their stories go from A-to-C without even thinking about venturing towards B along the way.

So if there's no real character arcs in this film, surely it will have fun with team dynamics, right? Inner conflict and romances and whatnot? Notsomuch. Or at all. The "team" here, Raiden, Sonya, Johnny, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Jax (Mechad Brooks), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) spend their time together largely spitting exposition. There's no real sense of camaraderie or any sense of these characters becoming friends or connected to each other in any way (we're told that Sonya and Jax are old friends, but do we feel it? Notsomuch). 

The film spends a lot of time trying to circle back on characters from the prior movie, even though they are not central figures here. As such, unless you are really invested in MK2021 then these beats have little to no weight on their own (like, Hiroyuki Sanada returns as Scorpion, but in the underworld, where he resumes his fight against the revived Sub-Zero to no real effect of the story at hand). 

So, if it fails at developing anything meaningful with its characters, MKII must be all about the tournament and the fighting, right? Yes and no. It does feature heavily its match-ups, the one-on-one fights, but none of them carry with them the weight of what the stakes of the tournament, and the fate of the "Earth realm". The film brutally fails at finding any tension within the tournament itself. With one or two exceptions, nobody witnesses the fights, so there's no crowd reactions, no cut to team-mates or friends as they watch their friends succeed or fail brutally. There's just nothing exciting outside of maybe a few cool manoeuvres or a particularly gory fatality, and there's not enough of those to justify a feature length movie this uninteresting.

It wouldn't be so bad if the film at least had style, but it's so evident that it was filmed on the Volume or similar on-set digital backdrop technology, and that the crew were either inexperienced with it or didn't have the time to refine their shots. The actors are lit so horrendously that they have a soft glow outline around them much of the time, while the backdrops too often don't feel tangible at all (I will concede that it's entirely possible that watching this on an IMAX screen made this so much more evident than a standard movie screen, or any home viewing implement). The few sets actually constructed feel cheap, much cheaper than an $80million budget would presume.  That, visually, this film feels inferior to the 1995 adaptation of Mortal Kombat is very telling.  That film used mostly practical sets that were well lit and well shot. This film seemed hampered by its constraints and is pretty ugly as a result.  At the very least the 1995 film had a still-iconic techno soundtrack, and this film's score doesn't even seem to be trying. 

There is one sequence not shot on a set, where Johnny, Liu Kang, Sonya and Jax venture into the home terrain of the excessively-toothed character Barada. It's an exterior desert set that has scale and doesn't feel contained by walls or barriers. Since it's outdoors there's a lot of natural light, and it does everyone a world of favours that the rest of the film does not. The fight between Johnny and Barada is fun and silly and feels like the only real payoff for Johnny (or any character for that matter) in the film.

Fans of the franchise will probably get more out of this than I will, but a films at this budget really should be trying for something more than fan service.

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I'm a bad Canadian cinephile. I don't spend enough time exploring the films or filmmakers of my home country. This is in large part due to the fact that Canadian cinema, by and large, doesn't have the resources that the films of other countries do. And with the exception of Quebec, which has an industry all its own, most of our best talents get co-opted by our neighbours to the South, obfuscating a film's Canadian-ness, if anything remains at all.

There are a few notable filmmakers who have made a name on an international scale that still largely work within the Canadian system and tell stories set within the country.  Guy Maddin is definitely such an auteur, one who likes to combine his fascination with the earliest era of filmmaking with a love of his homeland. Or so I've been told. I've seen maybe one or two of his films in the distant past, and have long been meaning to catch up.

Keyhole, his 2011 effort, was maybe not the first place to start. A psychological noir set in a haunted house, the film follows Ulysses Pick (Jason Patrick) and his gang of thugs as they barricade themselves in Ulysses' home. 

Our key signal that things are askew finds Ulysses' second-in-command telling the dead to face the wall and the living to face forward. The dead, then, march out the back door to face a proper disposal.

Ulysses emerges from the rain with Denny (Brooke Pallson) slung over his shoulder. They're both drenched. Eventually Ulysses will get dry, Denny will always seem perpetually wet, despite a change of clothes.

Ulysses warns the gang the house is haunted and to beware of touching ghosts. Meanwhile he searches the house with Denny in tow, her ability to read into his thoughts aid him in his quest to find his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) within the twisted maze of hallways and stairs and doors. 

He is vexed by the ghost of Hyacinth's father (a very nude Louis Negin), who manipulates environments throughout the house, though does not seem to have any real control.

The journey is an abstract one, lacking decisive logic, living between metaphors. As a film, it is an exploration of Ulysses' life, his failures as a husband and father, and it questions whether these failures mean anything to him.

It's a puzzling film which it both its greatest and most detrimental asset. Bending your brain to understand what it is Maddin is trying to convey has its rewards when you can reach an understanding in what you see, but the dream logic that prevails often has no meaning, serving primarily to keep the audience off balance.

Maddin's first digitally-shot film, it's a black-and-white production but doesn't have the olde-timey feel (the heavy make-up of the silent or gangster film eras, for example) and it doesn't look particularly good. The sets, lighting and costume seem constructed on a shoestring budget (which they probably were) and lack the usual hand-crafted flair of the films of Maddin's I'm (not-so-)familiar with.

What probably lets the film down the most, however, is the character of Ulysses, who just isn't very compelling. Whether it's Patrick's performance or what he was given to work with, I was never certain why we should care about Ulysses or his journey.

Once I get into the swing of watching Maddin's pictures, acquainting myself anew with his sensibilities, I might soften on Keyhole, but as stands I found it a pretty rough watch.

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If I were to attempt to catch up on the works of Takasi Miike, it would have to be the only movies I watched in a year. The director has made around 120 films since his debut in the early 1990s and dozens upon dozens of television episodes. That prolific level of output seems unprecedented, and one has to wonder what gets sacrificed in the process of producing as such speed.

Like Guy Maddin above, I'm not particularly well-versed in Miike's repertoire, certainly not enough to speak to any overall style or sensibilities (a quick search of this blog finds no entries of Miike films...which surprises, me. I thought for sure Toasty would have one or two Miikes written up). 

Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (aka "Noboru Ando's True Outlaw Tales: Raging Fire") opens with a primal scream over a heavy metal track. The camera tracks a young man running full tilt through the streets of Tokyo (intercut with flashes of...other things, a perplexing montage of images at this stage of a film to be sure). Finally the young man, guns drawn, leaps over a small barricading wall of an outdoor stairwell and begins firing on the group of men below (clearly mobsters, based on the way the one man is dressed compared to the other men around him). The gunman dispatches everyone, having hit the boss at least once at this point. The boss does not fall, he keeps lumbering forward, taking more and more bullets, until he has his hands around his assailant's throat. The only escape the gunman has is to cut the man's hand's off. Thankfully his partner has come by for clean-up.  The next shot of the young assassin, we see him naked on a couch, the severed hands still attached to his throat.

Yeah, this is kind of what I think of when I think of a Miike film. Extremes.

The story of the film finds Arata Kunisada (Riki Takeuchi ) freed from prison. The mob boss that was just assassinated was a father figure to him, and he is distraught and vengeful. 

But this isn't a one-man-assassin squad/John Wickian tale, at least not yet. The film cuts between different mob factions and Kunisada's journey, which for much of the film's run time finds him hiding out, rather than pursuing his revenge.  But eventually Kunisada gets back on track and, well, finds a missile launcher to help him on his quest.

Having just watched the excellent Italian mob-revenge actioner Big Guns, this very much feels like another take on the same story, right down to the police sort of standing by, or perhaps even aiding the protagonist in their mission of revenge. The difference is Big Guns felt quite calculated and detailed in its execution. Rekka on the other hand feels quite rushed and unrefined. That shagginess has a bit of an appeal, for sure, but it makes for some confusing story beats, or even whole acts. (There's a detour that Kunisada takes with a possible love interest that seems completely inconsequential to the overall story, and, for the amount of screentime it takes, contributes little to our understanding of this rather one note character).

The film dabbles with character drama and mafia intrigue but isn't particularly committed to either, and by the time the big rocket-launcher climax happens, it becomes a big old cartoon that betrays whatever it was trying to do emotionally before. 

The film closes with the ghost of a dead mob boss popping his head into frame, shouting "rock and roll!" It's not a vibes movie, per se, but perhaps Miike is a vibes director, and you're either on his wavelength or you're not. I dunno...Rekka wasn't boring, except when it was.

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One thing I'm always searching for is films from the 1980s with great special effects, including miniatures and big sets and puppets and stop-motion animation. I've exhausted most of the North American releases some time ago (though there is still the rare surprise) and have to look internationally for such pleasures. The main problem is I have no idea where to look, or what I'm looking for, and sacrificing a few hours hoping for something inspired to look at can be such a gamble.

The opening moments of Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (aka "Teito Monogatari") deliver instantly. A glorious barrage of manufactured clouds, impeccably lit with purple and red hues leads way to a massive set where a group of mages start mumbling incantations, causing the set to rumble and fracture and animated lighting to strike. There are rods sticking up from the ground that receive the lightning and are rotoscoped with a glowing red tinge. This is all glorious even if the dialogue of the scene is moving so fast that I had to rewind at least three times over to catch all the exposition.

The gist of The Last Megalopolis is that, centuries ago, Taira no Masakado led an uprising against the lords of Tokyo and failed. His spirit, though dormant, haunts the city. Should anyone dare to desecrate the site where he lay, he will awaken and destroy the city. And so, the demon Yasunori Kato (garbed in an Imperial Officer uniform, he is no doubt the inspiration for M. Bison in the Street Fighter video games) seeks to do just that, but in order to awaken the Masakado, he needs the blood of his descendant to do so. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

What follows is a convoluted but enthralling tale that takes place over three time periods from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. It's heavy on incantations, sorcery and witchcraft (of a type), and a bevvy of effects to go along with it. The best special effects in the film find paper being dispatched by both the good guys and bad, sailing on the wind before crumpling itself up and then transmogrifying into a bird or a wee little rat-like beastie. It's really, really cool.

The Last Magalopolis is based off the novel "Teito Monogatari" (adapted into Manga prior to the film's release and into an anime series in the early 1990s), and combines elements of real Tokyo history with epic fantasy and spirituality. A lot of the characters in this story are actual historical figures, and I guess the production team thought that it was enough of a shorthand to not really explore these characters at all.  It is completely a story-driven film, and figures wind their way in and out of the story in such a manner that if you're not used to Japanese names it can get confusing as to who is being referred to in a given situation and why. Also, this film is not waiting for you to catch up.

It's a propulsive narrative, even at two hour and fourteen minutes, and by the end while it has a resolution, barely feels resolved... because it isn't. This is effectively the first half of the story, condensed. A follow-up film, Tokyo: The Last War would be released the subsequent year. 

Part fantasy, part horror, part historical fanfic it's a wild and dense production that perplexes and delights in equal measure.

KWIF: The Martian (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new this week, just some scienced fiction and a modern classic.

This Week:
The Martian (2015, d. Ridley Scott - disney+)
Solar Crisis (aka "Crisis 2050" - 1990, d. Allan Smithee - tubi)
Ocean's Eleven (2002, d. Steven Soderbergh - hollywood suite)

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I love the idea of this poster, but 
why not red sand?

After watching Project Hail Mary (twice) I felt the urge to watch The Martian again. It was a movie I liked well enough the first time but it didn't really stick with me, beyond the "going to science the shit out of it" quote that lives rent free in my brain.

Both Project Hail Mary and The Martian are adaptations of Andy Weir novels, with screenplays by Drew Goddard, and as such there's a definite consistency in tone between the two of them. While both feature space men finding themselves alone and effectively stranded, these are not harrowing films of survival that Hollywood normally likes to present. 

Instead these are stories about men of science, men of competency, men of versatility, capable of adapting and, yes, science-ing the shit out of a problem. That makes them compelling figures to watch (there's a reason MacGyver was a big enough hit to run for 7 seasons in the '80's and a remake ran for 5 seasons in the 2010s) and with Drew Goddard, schooled in the Buffy/Angel writers den, he's got a knack for writing intelligent characters both pithiness and humility, which makes them enjoyable and somewhat down-to-Earth despite clearly advanced intellect and skills.

The key difference between Project Hail Mary and The Martian has nothing to do with story, and everything to do with the directors involved. Phil Lord and Chris Miller are not Ridley Scott and Ridley Scott is not  Lord and Miller.  Lord and Miller are particularly gifted at comedy as well as exploring ideas in a big, conceptual way that subverts expectations, Scott has in current stage of his career (starting with Prometheus), leaned almost exclusively into the grandiose. It's not spectacle he's after but big moments, big ideas, big pressures on the characters.  Where with PHM Lord & Miller no doubt heightened the wit of Goddard's script with their own instincts and timing, Scott at times steps on the levity, not to quash it but so as not to diminish the emotional reality of the film.

As much as these two films have a consistency between them, I can't picture Ridley Scott's Project Hail Mary being nearly as entertaining, while I could picture a Lord & Miller The Martian being the "Best Musical or Comedy" of 2015 that the Golden Globes proclaimed it to be, but it wouldn't feel as prestigious as it does. 

I'm not going to review the story here in any great depth (Toasty did a good job of that already), because it's a very successful, 10-year-old (!) film with a very simple premise... a man gets stranded on Mars and has to rely on his wits, intellect and science to survive long enough to be rescued. 

Toasty is probably right that Mark Watney would have been left to die on Mars because the billions it would cost to rescue him would not have been approved, and most likely when they discovered Watney was alive, that info would have been classified and probably subject to conspiracy theories, but as we see with Weir's Project Hail Mary he prefers to find optimism in his crises situations.  Here not only does NASA and the US government do everything can to keep Watney alive and to rescue him, but they even wind up collaborating with foreign agencies who stretch out their hands (and money and technology) in a sign of goodwill and harmony.

I had forgotten how stacked the cast of The Martian is. Of course Matt Damon is the face of the picture, the central figure and titular martian, but the crew that leaves him behind has the likes of Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara and Sebastian Stan, while among the ground crew there's Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Sean Bean, Donald Glover, Benedict Wong and Mackenzie Davis. At the time many of these actors were known primarily or only as comedic performers so it was a bit odd how reigned in their performances were (as if the script called for broader comedy and it was cast in such a way but Scott reined it in).

It's a captivating film through and through, even at almost two hours and twenty minutes. It looks great, with amazing sets, effects, and wardrobes, and the sound design (I really need to see it in the theatre some time) is incredible (it lost the Academy Award in both sound categories to Mad Max:Fury Road, which hard to argue with). It grossed over six hundred million at the box office internationally, and was nominated for many, many, many awards (winning a few), and has since become a big-time "dad movie", which maybe has diminished its prestige a little. The massive success of Project Hail Mary has put this other Weir adaptation back into the spotlight and, no doubt, has fast tracked adaptations of Weir's other novel and short stories, and I'm sure execs are champing at the bit to acquire the rights to whatever he's working on next.

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I have been, for pretty much most of my life, pretty piped into what mainstream science fiction movies were out there. One of my favourite childhood books was one about science fiction movies, most of them grown-up films that I wouldn't get to see until a decade (or two) later. I was pretty aware of any new scifi movies that were released in theatre pretty much since adolescence.  So for there to be a sizable-budgeted science fiction movie from 1990 that I know nothing about is shocking to me.

Based off the novel "Crisis: Year 2050" ("Kuraishisu niju-goju nen" written by Takeshi Kawata), Solar Crisis was not a trifle of a film. With a budget of at least 30 million dollars (in 1990 money), with recognizable (if no longer A-list) stars like Tim Matheson, Charlton Heston, Peter Boyle and Jack Palance, there was some ambition behind this production. The investors were so hot on the idea a theme park was planned to accompany it.

Financed by a consortium of Japanese investors, Solar Crisis was an attempt to make a very American-style blockbuster sci-fi disaster epic. Instead its a very American-style epic disaster of a sci-fi blockbuster.

Japanese actor Tetsuya Bessho is the only real Japanese presence in the film in a tertiary role, and the film seems pointedly made in such a way as to not elicit anything...unAmerican, although it also seems somewhat filtered through a an outside lens despite being made at a Los Angeles (the way a lot of Euro-investor, made-in-Baltic-states-style sci-fi/fantasy productions would feel in the 2000s) .  What little details there are on the making of this film (I only learned what Grokipedia was after I had read it's surprisingly detailed AI generated article on the film, and I feel slimy all over now), word has it that the film was extensively re-edited with some re-shoots to make it more appealing to an American distributor, and one has to wonder what "unAmerican" elements had to be left on the cutting room floor. (And by all accounts, the film had a middling performance at the Japanese box office, so it's not like there's a secret masterpiece that was lost in this process.)

Solar Crisis would prove to be director Richard C. Sarafian (Vanishing Point). The intervention in editing and reshooting his film caused him to remove his name from the domestic release and, I guess, quit directing after that. He had a fairly prolific (if not quite esteemed) career directing in both film and television prior to that, and following Solar Crisis he seemed to focus instead on his acting career.

The film is somewhat a throwback to the "what if" scifi movies of the 1950's (for example The Day The Earth Caught Fire) where a specific threat or event loomed and it was up to a team of astronauts and military men and scientists to try and stop/fix it. In this case, it's a solar flare that could eradicate Earth entirely. The plan then is to sent off the largest, most powerful warhead ever produced to trigger the flare while the Earth is on the other side of the sun.

In charge of this mission is Commander Steve Kelso (Matheson). He's a military nepo-baby, as his father, Admiral "Skeet" Kelso (Heston) seems to be pulling strings a bit.  Steve has an enlisted kid, Mike Kelso (Corin Nemic), whom he declined to have strings pulled to bring him to the orbital base where Steve's mission is taking off from. Mike, however, decided to go AWOL and find his way there on his own...only things didn't go as planned and now he's stranded in the desert.

New to Steve's crew is the test-tube grown, genetically reprogrammed scientist Alex Noffe (Annabel Schofeld). She's an outcast among all the military on the satellite, but she's meant to be made to feel welcome by a lot of disrespecting of her boundaries. She finds herself drawn to Steve (like some unseen force, the script perhaps, demanded it) and Steve likewise finds Alex alluring.

What nobody knows is that the evil billionaire (is there any other kind) Arnold Teague (Boyle), head of the IXL Corporation, is a solar flare denier. He doesn't believe it exists and if it does it's not a threat, and even if it is it's not a threat to business, and if anything money can be made if it does destroy half the Earth. It's better for him if it does, actually. The one thing this film gets right, billionaires are psychopaths disconnected from their own humanity. It's a weirdly timely story, how billionaires are trying to control the narrative of a climate crisis for their own gain and everyone else's expense.

Teague is hedging his bets highly, but he's also not taking chances. Through espionage, Alex is kidnapped and reprogrammed to sabotage the mission. Young Mike, meanwhile, finds help in the desert in the form of the cracked ex-general Travis (Palance, just making a meal out of every scene), who agrees to help the kid find his way to the satellite transport site. Along the way the run afoul of Teague's men and learn of his sabotage plans with Admiral Skeet, searching for his grandson, always two steps behind them.

This isn't a unique story. There is a whole history of sci-fi save-the-Earth tales that predate this film, and many that follow (Armageddon, Sunshine, Project Hail Mary, to name just three). What makes this one pretty bland and generic is the military angle. Though not lacking in ideas, there is a lack of science, and a lack of psychological intrigue. The political and social intrigue, of world building, is hinted but needs more presence, and one has to wonder if some of it's on the cutting room floor. Boyle's evil corporate overlord is so bog standard for the time, seen in so many sci-fi and action films of the 80's and 90's. It doesn't help that it seems like Boyle's barely awake when delivering his lines.

Similarly Matheson seems utterly bored in the role as commander Steve, and lacks commanding presence. As stated, Palance seems to be having a blast in his role, and Heston is not lacking in gusto, as if this were his big break for a return to prominence. Young Nemic, meanwhile, is definitely trying to find his footing and do something good with a bad role, but he can't keep up with Palanace. Schofeld as Alex... well, you hate to say it, but sometimes you're watching a film and you see an actress in a prominent role that you've never seen before and you just know the main reason she's there is because she agreed to take her top off. She's not a terrible actress, but she's not up to the standards of the other main cast here, and Alex is perhaps the most prominent character in the story with the most emotional arc. Schofeld isn't up to the task.

The effects, mostly, are pretty good from former Star Wars visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund. There are some wonky scenes (the very first shot of a shuttle in space was hot garbage) but they're few and far between, and I'm wondering if they were reshoots. The style of the film - the ships, wardrobe, hair and makeup - can best be described as uninspired.

I didn't hate Solar Crisis but it's not a great watch by any stretch. While it had aspirations of being a big screen blockbuster, it winds up being a levelled-up version of a Full Moon Video production.

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I dunno about this poster...
I only count 5

Speaking of "dad movies", Ocean's Eleven is another modern classic of the "dad movie" oeuvre. It's so weird to me that anything by Steven Soderbergh could fit so explicitly in that classification.  Sure, the director's repertoire is so vast and varied that of course it should present the opportunity for a "dad movie" to find its way into his filmography, but generally Soderbergh's sensibilities skew outside the general tastes of the "dad movie" consumer. I mean just look at Haywire, which should seem like a total braindead "dad movie" actioner, but Soderbergh just can't help himself and bring something outre to it that just doesn't quite blend.

And yet, the glossy remake of the old Rat Pack non-classic is just sooo slick that Soderbergh subverted his own impulses and made a movie for pretty much everyone (aside from some cussing) that's devoid of sex, drugs, or any real violence. 

If anything, Ocean's Eleven was an exercise in shooting for the edit for Soderbergh. This film lives and dies by its hyperactive editing, and it really lives large. Soderbergh edits a lot of his own films, but for this (and for others) he called in Stephen Mirrione (who would later become a favourite of George Clooney's as well as Joseph Kosinski). All the pieces that need to be woven into this narrative means that scenes have to be tight as hell. There's no room to take more than a breath or two. 

The whole production is helped along by the bounciest film score in the history of film from David Holmes. That upright bass player's fingers must've been bleeding. I used to listen to the score just for fun, and I'd forgotten just how damn propulsive it was, but also just how damn essential it was to the film. There's a concert happening in Ocean's Eleven and Holmes provides the music while Mirrione choreographs the dance. It feels like if Mirrione edited any film like this and you laid Holmes' soundtrack over it, it would work, regardless of content. 

This is the heist film that reinvigorated heist films in modern cinema, but also kind of ruined heist films for modern cinema. It set the temperature for just how complex and convoluted a heist has to be to appease the audience, and anything less seems boring by comparison. Not even the subsequent Ocean's films (which I need to revisit) come close to being half as successful as this one (the next closest standout is Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, but that came out the year before...).

Of course, what takes the Mirrione-edits and Holmes-score to "dad movie" level is the star-studded, audience-baiting cast of Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle (but that accent tho...woof), Bernie Mac, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, and Andy Garcia. That's just wall-to-wall talent carpet right there. As good as everyone is (barring Cheadle's bad cockney accent), I found Reiner delivered the standout performance of the film with Mac really popping as well. Clooney and Roberts need to ground the film in something a little more than just a heist (and it's truly a little more), which brings Garcia in, as the villain getting in between them. Garcia's performance is wonderfully understated and controlled, to the point that he seems both non-threatening and utterly dangerous.

It's been a couple decades since I last watched this, and, despite the Rick and Morty take down of all the heist cliches that Ocean's Eleven set-up, it still works almost completely.  

3 Short Paragraphs (Probably Not): Project Hail Mary

2026, Lord & Miller (21 Jump Street) -- cinema

Yeah, ok wow -- actually in the cinema. It was worth the inevitable fidgeting I ended up doing.

So many thoughts about the movie, but unformed, chaotic thoughts. Such as, are all Andy Weir adapted movies going to be Feel Good epics where a really smart (mostly) solo astronaut has to "science the shit" out of things to accomplish his goals, and uses video recordings as a method of exposition? Or perhaps, how is Gosling able to so effectively depict a socially awkward loner who is so charming and handsome? Also, I wonder why I am so attracted to the Lone Astronaut trope. Also, why was Pacific islander music so effective in a movie set In Space? And like I said to Kent, as he was kind enough to re-watch the movie with me, I am not at all surprised at how charming the puppetry-based anthropomorphism of Rocky could so easily be accepted, considering it was our generations that fell for Muppets.

Project Hail Mary is the Lord & Miller adaptation of Andy Weir's third (published) novel of the same name. They are about an astronaut who wakes up on a spaceship that has been sent out to deal with the phenomena that is literally eating suns. The spaceship, Hail Mary, has been sent 11 light years away to a sun that ISN'T dimming despite the presence of the lifeform eating our sun. His crew has died enroute, in their sleep, and he is alone, until an alien spacecraft appears, and Ryland Grace meets Rocky the alien. The two become fast friends, working together to solve the problem. 

I often opine the state of film, in that most of what I (chose to) watch is, "Just OK." And as I am forgiving of much, I imagine a lot of what I am OK with is actually, objectively, terrible -- not including the, subjectively, terrible stuff I watch. And while I repeatedly hold admiration for hard working film makers, even those who may not be making "art", I often tire of just OK. This movie was not OK; it was great. It is what Hollywood subjectively was about. It is blockbuster, it is grand, it is funny, it is tear-inducingly touching, its is so clearly well-structured, and it benefits from a large budget handled by very skilled story tellers & makers. And yet, the story is so very thin -- man wakes up on spaceship, man meets alien, together they save the world, while the plot keeps us watching. And it stars, not including significant flashbacks, a single human, and a puppet alien.

Project Hail Mary is about saving the world, something we are not doing IRL. Where The Martian is about how the world came together to Save One Man, this is a tad more realistic, in that the world comes together to save itself; kind of. But it slides right past the world coming together as, once again, its about One Man. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling, The Fall Guy) doesn't want to be a hero, even at the expense of the world. He doesn't want to join a suicide mission to another star system. But he does, just not in the way you think. 

Why is the world coming together to save itself, more realistic? I guess incrementally more realistic than it wasting millions of dollars to save one man. My dark thought on that is that he would have just been abandoned, not even mentioned, swept under the rug and just become a Top Secret Confidential note that would come up in people's therapy sessions for the rest of their lives.

The flashbacks allow you to see not only the fun, revealing science he leads, but also the weight of it all. If they do not see this through, then the sun will dim incrementally, over time, and the planet will cool, crops will die, life will become unsustainable. Its like what we are currently doing, but much more clearly defined -- and with a clear villain. Its a dark future for humanity that requires sacrifice.

There is one scene that has stuck with me -- the logistics leader of this whole endeavour is the cold, almost emotionless Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall), and she stands apart from the teams she is sending to die in space. Until she sees Grace is lost in the mission, unable to connect with others, get out of his own head. Despair is the mind killer. So, at a karaoke party, she does the unexpected -- she sings the Harry Styles song "Sign of the Times" in a startingly clear and loud voice, with all the anguish and emotion all these people must be feeling. Then she walks away.  Its not like we see Grace suddenly change because of this one event, but it feels pivotal. Good story telling lets us become one with all the messy, confusing emotions, to feel part of it, in this instance all due to a powerful song and voice.

And I don't even like the song, but its been emerging in my earworms non-stop since....

And then there is Rocky (James Ortiz, primarily a puppet designer; World's End). The alien who is shaped like rocks, not the movie. And yes, that's a comical line from the movie. When Grace recovers from the amnesia induced by the long sleep that kept him alive during the journey, there is no tenable way for him to complete his mission -- his crew is dead, and he was the secondary choice; all the other better trained scientists died in an accident before they left Earth. But Rocky is a brilliant engineer. The movie covers it in a toss away line, but the book had Grace marvel at exactly how utterly brilliant Rocky is. So, for every scientific theory that Grace can come up with to study the sun eating astrophage, Rocky can build what they need. Grace is no pushover, a brilliant man himself, but without Rocky, none of it would happen.

This First Contact is only briefly scary, and then it all becomes two people who are the only survivors of their crews, both trying to save their worlds. I love how this story abandons 75 years of first alien encounter mythology for comedy, heartfelt connection and mutual support. Basically, fuck the differences, and whoah are there differences, let's do this! The movie depicts it all so well, so light heartedly but with such conviction. And we all fall in love with that lumpy, rocky puppet. Ortiz, the voice of Rocky, is also one of the puppeteers. Actually he's the lead puppeteer, and it sounds like their plan all along was to have the lead also voice the character, which is a brilliant decision, as instead of choosing a famous voice actor, they go with ... an average guy? The choice is even played up in the movie.

Lord & Miller have done something special with this movie. I think back to how marvellous Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was, and especially, how it handled its visuals. Sure, its animated, so you can be impressive with anything depicted, but most don't. While this movie doesn't spend all its time in the grand majesty of Outer Space, when it does, its beautiful. Juxtaposing grand scenes with buddy comedy; brilliant. 

We Agree.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): This Is Not a Test

2025, Adam MacDonald (Pyewacket) -- download

This is a Canadian teen zombie movie, set in the 90s, based on a novel of the same name. It uses the zombie apocalypse as a platform to explore familial abuse, depression, desperation and suicide, i.e. familiar dark teen shit, which I state with no desire to diminish their impact on young lives.

Sloane (Olivia Holt, Cloak & Dagger) is about to commit suicide, reading back her own note where she states she cannot do it all on her own, when her father yells for her to get down there for breakfast. The interruption is what she needs but she comes down to immediate verbal abuse. That is interrupted by a screaming woman banging on their door, begging for help. Dad investigates, and immediately yells at Sloane that they have to leave, NOW. A confused Sloane looks out the door to see the suburban neighborhood in zombie chaos, bloody figures chasing down others. One comes through their front window, her father fights it off but is bitten. Chase flees into the street running and running.

Sloane crosses paths with some classmates, and the mother of two, and they all try hiding in a house but eventually agree they have to find a more secure place to go -- their school. The escape, through backyards & streets filled with idling zombies (when they have no one to attack, they just amble about) but eventually make it to the school, but not before losing Mrs. Chase (Krista Bridges, 19-2). Barricading all the doors, the students rally in the gym: Sloane, Cary the jock (Corteon Moore, From), Trace (Carson MacCormac, Locke & Key) & Grace Casper (Chloe Avakian, Locke & Key), and Rhys (Froy Gutierrez, Cruel Summer). 

At its core, this is a Bottle Episode, in that the primary parts of the story are all told within the school with the limited cast. Part of my hindsight brain is saying, "It could have been better, the interpersonal conflicts between the characters never really rose above middling," but as I was watching, I was thinking, this is teen drama. And no, not from a disparaging stand on "teen dramas" but more the idea that these are just kids. They are scared, they don't know what to do, and emotions rule everything at that age. And nobody trusts anyone. They respond as irrationally and chaotically as I would expect them to. 

Also at its core, there is the exploration of Sloane's desperation. If she wanted to die, why is she trying so hard to survive? Its a simplistic question but its what the story wants to explore. We can easily see, "she really didn't want to die, she just wanted out" but it takes this horrible situation for Sloane to figure it out. She saw her anchor as her sister, and without her, she was lost. In the end, all she has is herself, and she decides, it is more than enough to warrant life.

From a film making point of view, this goes into the "hard working creator" bucket. As the core mythology of film making wanes and evolves into something (even) less pedestal worthy, you can admire people who just want to tell stories, just want to use the structure in their own ways. It seems condescending to say that I admire them for working so hard on the movie, instead of the movie they made (which is, as I am wont to say, OK) but I have so so many examples of "not OK" in this blog, where millions of dollars and A-celebrities were tossed at the machine and only dross was spit out. This was a solid exploration of a genre I enjoy (that deserves its own exploration) and actually worth my time.

Now I wonder whether the same young folk who, for a number of years, left disparaging comments on this blog for me slagging on "Tomorrow, When the War Began" will emerge for this post, as I imagine the source material has its ardent followers.

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.