KWIF: Coyote vs Acme (+5)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Oldies, and some not-so-goodies. Let's try and be quick about this...ha!

This Week: 
Coyote vs. Acme (2026*, d. Dave Green - in theatre)
Love Wedding Repeat (2020, d. Dean Craig - netflix)
9 to 5 (1980, d. Colin Higgins - hollywood suite)
ABBA: The Movie (1977, d. Lasse Hallström - hollywood suite)
The Gumball Rally (1976, d. Charles Bail - hollywood suite)
Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (1974, d. Toshiya Fujita - tubi)

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At a holiday Monday matinee in a local neighbourhood repertory theatre, I expected a film like Coyote vs. Acme to have at least a few children loading up on sugary drinks and popcorn and running around the theatre. While there were probably over 100 attendees at this screening, I don't think I clocked a single person under the age of 10, and the vast majority were at least 30 or older.

The early millennials were probably the last to experience Looney Tunes as part of the general pop culture diet. Anyone younger, like my GenZ kids, would have probably experienced them on some sort of physical media presented to them by their parents, if at all. While these ridiculous cartoons were a very large part of peoples childhoods for over 60 years, the changing nature of entertainment has rendered these characters and their antics somewhat...obsolete.  There are other characters in other animations on other media that are doing the Looney Tunes thing, but in a modern context, servicing a modern audience.

This is all to say that Coyote vs. Acme is, maybe, the best thing featuring the Looney Tunes characters that I've seen in many decades.  It's not saying much. The efforts to bring these characters to a modern audience have largely been failures (whether artistically or commercially) outside of the original Space Jam and Tiny Toons back in the 1990s. I don't know how often I have though about the Looney Tunes gang since I started "adulting" half my life ago, but I can tell you, it's not very much, not really much at all.  And I think about this kind of stuff all the time.

Coyote vs. Acme was set to release in 2023, and the buzz at the time was that it was a real winner of a film. An honest-to-gosh funny, entertaining, and meaningful film revitalizing these somewhat antiquated characters. Anticipation was already starting to percolate when the film was unceremoniously shelved by Warner Bros. in 2023 for tax writeoff purposes (alongside a nearly completed Batgirl movie and a Scooby-Doo project already in production).  The belief was that we were never going to see this film.

Ketchup Entertainment stepped in and I guess offered Warner Brothers the correct sum of money to release distribution right to them.  I can't imagine that Ketchup did this for any other reason than a strong desire to see the film, because the Looney Tunes box office track record over the past 30 years speaks for itself. 

But it's here, and it's, frankly, magnificent, whether people are seeing it in droves or not, this is both a deliriously funny and entertaining movie and a real love letter to the Road Runner cartoons and cartoon violence in general.

The plot is pretty basic: after decades of faulty equipment and zero successful attempts at capturing and eating the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote decides he wants to sue Acme, the provider of all his bird-chasing gear. Kevin Avery (Will Forte) makes a living out of filing frivolous settlement claims with Acme for token sums to the point that it's a very routine and uneventful process. But Wile E. isn't interested in settling and communicating by using only paper cutouts, a limited supply of placard signs and wild gesticulations, he gets Kevin to commit to taking on Acme on a much, much larger scale.

Accompanied by his neice, Paige (Lana Condor), Kevin and the Coyote start investigating Acme only to start hearing scuttlebutt about secret projects and experiments, with their own carrot-chewing Deep Throat informant guiding them on.

This is an Erin Brocovich meets Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-type mash-up that somehow gets to the noble heart of the little guy persevering in taking on the big guy even though they know they will lose. It's a story about continuing to try even though failure is the most probable outcome, of making movements out of adversity.  There's a "thank you" to all the people who hold up signs and stand up and make noise in the credits, and it spells out perfectly what's at the heart of what should be just a silly live action/animation mash-up.

We've been living with real people in animated worlds on screen for decades upon decades now, but most of that is cgi (not that this isn't) and not the melding of toon worlds with the real world. There are more than a few examples dating back to classic Disney (the best of the more recents being the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers from 2022) but the gold standard has always been Who Framed Roger Rabbit, being a film that merges these realities into an odd yet cohesive place of existence. Coyote vs. Acme finds if not exactly that same balance then very, very close.  You believe these human characters are occupying the same space as these cartoon beings, and vice versa.

The way director Dave Green and his crew subtly (well, as subtle as a cartoon can be) inject animated things into the everyday world (like the screen on someone's cell phone being a cartoon screen instead of a real one) further serves this meshing. There's a super fun action sequence in the third act which finds a human character employing animated devices to wreak animation-style havoc on the real world (like grabbing the pavement on the road, pulling a section up like it were a carpet, and then jerking it causing ripples to wave their way down the road, tossing cars up into the air...really fun special effects).

The comedy comes from all angles, including physical and animated, wordplay and situational comedy, but Coyote vs. Acme, with its script from Samy Burch (with story by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Burch - based on a satirical New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier) finds its greatest comedy in the repurposing of tried and true Looney Tunes jokes and gags in different contexts throughout the film. This will be the litmus test for any viewer and their enjoyment...how familiar are you with the Tunes of yore? I imagine it's still a funny movie without getting these jokes, but it's probably significantly less funny if you don't.

And therein lies the challenge for this film. It can only be a hit if word of mouth is so resoundingly positive that it makes it an unavoidable feature, a real foundational pop culture piece. But if a large part of the audience is too young and unfamiliar, or similarly a large number of the critical/social media attention market don't have the familiarity, the enthusiasm will probably be much less than, say, someone like myself who just smiled the biggest, dumbest smile throughout the entire film, except when I was laughing, which was often. The whole family went to see it with 40 years between youngest and oldest and we all had a blast with it...we'll be shaking the dust off for weeks.

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You can't use a title that riffs on the tagline/second title of one of the all-timers in the time loop genre and not be a time loop movie. Whomever named Love Wedding Repeat should go to movie jail for a decade and think about what they've done (or didn't do).

No, Love Wedding Repeat is not a romcom spin on Edge of Tomorrow's alt Live, Die, Repeat (but could you imagine if this were a wedding romcom taking place at the same time as Edge of Tomorrow? Oh to dream!). Instead it's intoning the film's actual gimmick which, in all honesty, is not bad conceptually but terribly executed. But we'll get to that shortly.

The film opens in Rome where Englishman Jack (Sam Claflin, who is not Nicholas Hoult) was visiting his sister Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson, who is not Sophie Turner) but instead has found himself out on a non-date with his sister's American roommate Dina (Olivia Munn, who is Olivia Munn), and the two are just clicking. As they breach the distance for a kiss, they get interrupted by an old college pal of Jack's and the traditional awkward British pleasantness finds Jack swept away back to London instead of staying to spend more time with Dina.

Fast forward 5 years and Hayley is getting married to an Italian man in an Italian villa. Dina is on the guest list and Jack has one objective in reconnecting with her. He will, however, have to hurdle his spiteful ex-girlfriend Amanda (Frida Pinto) and her boyfriend-with-an-inferiority-complex Chaz (Allan Mustafa) and run interference when Marc (Jack Farthing), a coked-up classmate Hayley had a fling with not too long ago, shows up to disrupt the wedding.  Hayley asks Jack to effectively roofie Marc with a powerful sleeping aide she's been using and, due to divine intervention (or some impish children attending the weddings who rearrange the name placards for the seating at the table), the glass with the sleep aide becomes a game of Russian roulette. Who will get dosed? Is it Marc as intended? Or Jack? Or Dina or Amanda or Chaz? Or dull friend Sidney (a perfectly utilized Tim Key), or sarcastic friend Rebecca (an underutilized Aisling Bea), or Marc's best friend (and Hayley's Maid of Honor) Bryan (Joel Fry)? 

It's Bryan. And so having to handle a sleepy Bryan also falls on Jack's plate as he tries to reconnect with Dina. It's pretty much a catastrophe, and an hour later the groom winds up dead. 

But rewind...what if someone else drinks from the tainted glass instead?

Rather than play through a few of these scenarios, in the way that a time loop would, instead we get an extremely rapid -- to the point of being unintelligible -- montage sequence of other scenarios and blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpses of what the fallout of those situations might look like. And then the second scenario plays out where it's Jack, instead, who gets dosed.

Love Wedding Repeat is a frustrating movie. For a romcom it spends most of its time keeping the romantic couple apart, and offering mostly situational comedy with ringers Key, Bea, and Fry offering a little extra sauce (Fry's sleepy physical comedy is pretty good, Key's attempts to charm Munn are deliciously weird, and Bea's hilarious quips are too infrequent). The situational comedy, however, comes with a lot of questions, and, moreover, the sense that the only reason people are acting the way they are is for the sake of the story.  I mean, obviously... but their actions aren't logical or feel grounded in either reality or even this somewhat heightened reality.

A traditional comedy would put our protagonist(s) in a tight spot for comedic purposes and eventually they would find their way out of it again. The whole point is to build up the characters, to put challenges in their way, to observe their character flaws, and to show them overcoming them. Here, it meticulously goes through the wedding day and builds up all these catastrophes, and then, just, resets, presenting them with a whole other set of challenges to overcome, this time triumphantly.

But unlike a time loop where a character succeeds at leaving the time loop, and then life continues for everyone everywhere as if nothing happened, here, we're effectively dealing with alt realities, and in one alternative timeline Hayley accidentally kills her husband. I mean, where's the satisfaction in knowing that?

There's a kernel here in the story that really could have worked, but the fantastical premise sinks it. The cast is pretty charming, but it's not even close to being enough to save a fundamentally flawed production.

Rome looks nice.

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9 to 5 opens with that iconic low-register piano key (with bass accompaniment, a tapping of the hi-hat, and Dolly herself click-clackking her fingernails emulating a typewriter) and that's all this film needs to suck the audience in. The first couple stanzas of the song further draw you in as Dolly sings about getting up in the morning, forging your way to work and then toiling throughout the day, all while we see imagery of mobile women on the streets of New York on their morning routine. It's all a celebration of women in the workplace, to which the film that follows never lets down except in the last possible moment.

Recent divorcee Judy Burnly (Jane Fonda) enters the workforce for the first time, hired in the secretarial pool at Consolidated Companies under VP Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.  Judy is put under the wing of Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) the senior supervisor of secretarial, who should be in Hart's position but was passed over for not being part of the boy's club... and has once again been passed over for promotion by Hart, the role given to a far junior man (and also Hart recognizes that Violet's supreme competence elevates him, especially when he takes credit for her work).

Hart keeps his secretarial pool under a tight, regimented regime, observed by his subservient personal assistant Roz (Elizabeth Wilson), with Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) being his personal secretary less for her skills than because she is pretty and buxom.  Hart denigrates his female staff regularly, has no compassion for their personal lives, intentionally underpays them and sexually harasses Doralee multiple times a day, while spreading rumours that he and Doralee are actually sleeping together (ostracizing her from her coworkers).

Eventually Doralee snaps at Hart's advances one Friday night and hogties him with a telephone cord. Violet - whose tether was already ready to snap - and Judy, with lingering trauma from her divorce, decide to take matters into their own hands, kidnapping Hart and holding him hostage at his own house while they make incredible improvements to the working lives of the women on their floor - job sharing, flex hours, in-building day care, equal pay for equal work, and talks of unionizing.

There's a ticking clock to their hostage situation, with Hart's wife on vacation and Roz sent away for a multi-week French immersive learning course. Likewise Hart has them on many criminal charges (including attempted murder), but they have a smoking gun that Hart has been embezzling from the company, but a records request will take time to process.

The kidnapping, which is part of the promotion of the film in trailers and the poster, doesn't happen until past the halfway point. Prior to this, the film spins its wheels in two frustrating side-quests. The first finds Doralee, Judy and Violet bonding while getting high and fantasizing about revenge on Hart. The bonding is good-not-great, but the three fantasy sequences are each overlong and kinda corny (although the role reversal fantasy with Doralee being the boss sexually harassing Hart was amusing, to a point...even as I recognize any sexual harassment of any kind is not really funny).  The second finds Violet accidentally poisoning Hart's coffee and getting taken to the hospital after receiving a concussion (unrelated), and there's some stealing a dead body shenanigans that feel like they're from another film entirely.

The characters here work. They are well drawn with interior lives and there are both spoken and unspoken motivations that fuel them. The glimpses as each of their lives outside of work are great and could have been explored even further rather than, say, the whole body-thieving subplot.  The juice of the movie is all in Hart's kidnapping and the changes they implement in his absence, and the lurking people at the office and outside Hart's home that may spoil it all adds layers of intensity.  You want these women to succeed, you want this horrible boss to be exposed, but you know the real risk is that should Hart have any small liberty he will gain the upper hand because of status and gender.

The conclusion of the film finds Hart failing upwards, the trio's changes deemed a corporate success, and that old cliche of still-frame postscript text providing a little glimpse into our main characters' futures. And as successful as the movie is at being quite progressive and feminist forward, it lets our characters down with a lack of imagination and thematic resonance in these postscripts by turning Doralee into Dolly Parton as a successful country and western singer, while Judy gets married to the Xerox guy (and, it sort of implies) isn't working anymore. Only Violet has true success relevant to her character, gaining the vice-president position she's long deserved.  It's also disappointing that Hart's postscript says he gets kidnapped in Brazil and is never seen again, as opposed to, you know, being exposed as a no-talent fraud and philanderer whose wife divorces him, taking everything and he winds up working at McDonalds or something.

Tomlin was always a fiery comedic performer with a very strong presence and no-bullshit personality which served her very well for a time, but the usual Purple Suits seemed to have less and less use for her as she got older (not a new story for women in Hollywood). She's perfect here. Coleman plays a slimeball like no other, where he's imposing but not really threatening, and elicits disgust at almost every turn. Likewise perfect. Fonda's role as Judy is sort of the gateway into this world, and is meant to act as the audience's shepherd through the film, but Judy's journey is a bit thin and could have been beefed up more. She's not much of a presence in the film.  

And then there's Dolly, the petite gal with big hair and big personality bolstered by a big Tennessee accent. She is very pretty, but it's always been Dolly's personality that was her greatest allure over 60 years in the entertainment business. She is so positive and kind and charitable, and that resonates from her no matter what she's doing. Here, as Doralee, that positivity, kindness and charity is taken advantage of, and abused, and watching Dolly flip into a tough-talking, no-nonsense, southern broad is remarkable while still feeling authentic. Dolly was not a pushover. Her successes were her own because of how driven she was and clearly how she could demand respect and would not accept anything else. This was her first film role, and beyond variety shows, her first big acting role, and she destroyed it. Doralee isn't Dolly, but Doralee isn't the same if it's not Dolly in the role. What a magnificent performance and performer. Rest in peace.

Following 9 to 5 there were a handful of other working women movies in the 1980s and they sort of disappeared after that, particularly once the Julia Roberts effect took hold in the 90's, and films about women were either romcoms or sappy melodramas, and there's not been a lot of mainstream movies reckoning with how American workplaces still, by and large, fail women. Even most revenge-on-your-boss movies have been male led.  In that respect 9 to 5, rather than being an archive of a certain time and place, still has an unfortunate vitality to it, especially as angry, old white men in America are attempting to claw back the inches of progress made in the 45 years since this film debuted.

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ABBA was one of my mom's favourites growing up, such that many, many ABBA songs feel baked into my very being. I wouldn't say I was ever a fan, but I really can't imagine an existence without their music.  

When I saw that ABBA: The Movie was on cable (...cable...?) I was hoping for either a so-bad-its good Spice World-style wacky musical adventure around the globe, or else a concert film that would give me the feeling of being at one of their shows in their heyday of the late 1970's when they were the number one musical artists in the world.

It's really unfortunate that ABBA: The Movie is neither of these things. Instead it's a film that follows an Australian radio DJ (Robert Hughes) tasked by his boss to go out an nab an interview with ABBA while they're on their Australian tour. 

Thus much of the movie, rather than being concert footage is instead footage of this personality-deprived non-character trying in vain to worm his way into backrooms and concerts, and, sometimes, interviewing the public about how they feel about ABBA (that most people love ABBA because they're so joyous, wholesome, nice and "clean" winds up feeling like some kind of propaganda after a while).

The concert footage we do see gets us some of that big sound with those big voices, but, I'll be frank, the stage show leaves something to be desired.  Maybe it's the fact that we never get into a groove with the live performances... I don't think there's a single live song that isn't interrupted by cutting to what the DJ is doing in the meantime. 

We get a bit of interview footage (but not ABBA with this DJ) instead fielding questions from the media circus around them, including such hard hitting questions as Agnetha Fältskog being asked about having a "sexiest bottom award" (*eyeroll*), which is then brought up again late in the film (*double eyeroll*).

There are a few of ABBA's bangers presented here, as well as a couple not-so-bangers, and a weird music video at the mid-point that finds the DJ having a dream sequence I guess. It's all nonsense.

ABBA: The Movie is not very entertaining and a terrible waste of potential. For hardcore fans only.

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There was a spate of movies in the 70's that featured characters on long drives, chases or races across the United States, things like Vanishing Point, Death Race 2000, Cannonball!, Convoy, Duel and more. Americans were obsessed with their highways and it seems like they couldn't get enough of watching them be traversed.

It turns out it wasn't just in movies, but in real life as well. The Gumball Rally was inspired by the same unofficial New York-to-LA race that Cannonball Run was (officially?) based on: "The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash". For five years in the early-to-mid 1970's teams of drivers competed in a non-stop race from one coast to the other for little else but the glory of being the winner.  These events were covered by Car and Driver magazine as fun and whimsical adventures featuring some real personalities, and Hollywood was quick to capitalize upon the stories' popularity, pumping out both Cannoball (starring David Carradine, from the director of Death Race 2000) and The Gumball Rally.

The Gumball Rally features a dozen or so vehicles participating in the event, which begins merely with the mention of the word "Gumball" relayed across the land. The participants show up to New York, parking their flashy vehicles in a secret garage and meeting in a private room at a restaurant to discuss how the race will proceed. Lieutenant Roscoe of the LAPD has, for years, been trying to catch the participants of The Gumball Rally, the intonation that their race is a public safety issue (and, given some of the destruction we see in the film, he's right). The organizers of this affair are Roscoe's target: Michael Bannon (Michael Sarrazin) and Steve Smith (Tim McIntire), each hitting the highways in their own sporty coupe. 

The film spends a half hour establishing who the players are, with a little hint as to where they come from and their personalities, and then gives them an extended sequence where they're all putting the finishing touches on their vehicles in the garage, establishing a smidge of repartee between many of them. It's a half hour of movie time before the race begins, and I won't say it was a wasted half hour, but they could have compressed a little more to get to the part we're just waiting to see.

The racers leave the garage 10 seconds apart at 6am on a sleepy, sunny morning in New York. The vehicles race through the near-empty streets where only the construction workers, cops and newsstand agents are mobile. New York is so lovingly shot, we could have spent an hour just moving through those naked streets with rays of sun reflecting off glass, and I would have been happy. As such it's about a 10 minute sequence of the cars attempting to get out of town. It's kind of awesome.

Once out on the highways, the vistas are there, but they are less enticing than New York. The vehicles, particularly the sporty ones, are shot with a near-lustful lens... a real ogling of the AC Cobra, Ferrari Daytona, Chevy Camaro 7-28, Chevy Corvette, Porche 911, and Rolls Royce Silver Shadow among others.

Ostensibly a comedy, The Gumball Rally isn't terribly funny. While there are a few situational chuckles here and there, it's Raul Julia as Smith's ringer, an F-1 driver imported from the Ferrari team in Italy (along with some of his pit crew stationed across the country) that is the biggest personality. He is horny-to-the-point-of-distraction and there's more than a few good gags made from his skirt chasing.  The other big personality in the film is Gary Busey (paired with a suffering John Durren in the Camero) who is fully embodying ADHD in his performance, needing constant, escalating stimulation.

Having never heard of The Gumball Rally before, I was shocked with how expensive and visually appealing a film it is, excellent cinematography, some great (and once-unique) camera placements on the cars, and the sheer number of helicopter shots. There's some requisite smashing-through-shit sequences that are kind of the weakest parts of the film, yet still sort of impressive in the level of destruction (nowhere close to The Blues Brothers level of chaos, but then nothing is).  The best thing about The Gumball Rally, though, is how it doesn't try very hard at all to have character development or story arcs (really, it's only Roscoe that has an arc in this film).  It does what it needs to do, and I very much enjoyed it even if the stakes were very, very low.

I feel another project coming on... Cannonball, Cannonball Run, Death Race 2000, Speed Zone and the others of this ilk, I'm going to have to do comparison watches.

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The titular character of Lady Snowblood, aka Yuki Kashima, was born as a tool of revenge, raised to be a demon whose sole purpose was to avenge the family she never met, punishing the many responsible for their deaths. In the first film, Lady Snowblood accomplished her goal, and had become legend in the process, but by the end was grievously wounded.

While maybe not in top shape when this film begins, Yuki is definitely healthier than when we last saw her, and she's actively trying to evade the law, but eventually must give in. Before her sentence can be carried out, she's rescued by Secret Police and sent on a mission to spy on a revolutionary.  She become the housemaid of  Ransui Tokunaga (Juzo Itami), but it's not long before Ransui reveals he knows who she is. She fills him in on his important dissident work and implores her assistance in toppling some corrupt government officials.  Except they get the jump on them, Ransui is taken, Yuki escapes to find his brother and bring him some damning documents that could explode the country into chaos.

She flees to the slums where Shusuke Tokunaga lives and finds a man who loathes his own brother, and will not cooperate in taking down the government. Instead he plans to blackmail the men in power for the benefit of the slums, requesting much needed money and food. Instead, the slums are burned to the ground and it's up to Yuki to take revenge.

Unlike the first film, where Yuki is the quiet, driving center of the film, the plot moving with her wherever she may lead it, here she's frequently on the sidelines and one has to ask, in this story of class, segregation, veterans affairs, police brutality, corrupt politicians, and socialst revolution, where exactly is she supposed to fit? The story is not bad, but it's not well matched to the character, and it fees more like Yuki is swept up the the films events rather than steering them.  

A story set in two halves, neither dominates over the other, but then neither does either elevate itself. Given how brilliant the first film was, this one is quite the let down without really being bad. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

2024, George Miller (The Witches of Eastwick) -- download

Weird, my headcanon says George only directed The Road Warrior (and Fury Road) but whatever, my headcanon is sometimes stupid.

I am not. Also, WTF dude, download?

I am already on my second viewing of this one, as I have to admit, I started nodding off after Hour One (pt 3). It was all my own fault: a long day of work, a carb take-away, and an overly full tiki drink. So, second viewing already only days later and I am enjoying it.... even more? There are so many, many, and while I won't use the title of the video essays ("Every Frame a Painting"), scenes that stand as beautiful pieces of work on their own.

So, so many scenes a painting? Quit rolling your eyes.

But what kept on going through my head during the watching, and is retained during this one is that this reminds me so much more of Babe: Pig in the City than any other of Miller's works. Its almost fairy tale like in its depiction, as he danced the thin line between recreating the visual cues and imageries that made Fury Road so distinct, and doing something ... new.

Of note, I made this mistake of listening to a less that favourable review podcast (Maximum Film!) and it has left me thinking. Was what they said warranted? Is it diminishing what I felt about the movie, especially now that I have finished second watching? errr... watching 1.5 ?

I liked the movie, maybe even a tempered love. And I also know that deep down in my heart, I will love it more with repeated viewings. The thing I can say is that it did not want to be Fury Road and in that it succeeded. Where the previous movie was fraught with silences, this one was overwhelmed by the constant monologuing of Dementus. If this is but one of the Mad Max movies of the "new era" then it may be less than lauded, as Beyond Thunderdome was, but it still stands up as such a spectacle.

So, prequel. The story of how Furiosa came to be.

She's a wee thing (Alyla Browne, Sting) in the Place of Abundance: food, water, horses, even electricity -- you can see solar panels on the roof of buildings in the background. Her horse is taken down by raiders from the Wasteland and before she can finish disabling their bikes, she is taken. But not before she can alert her home, her mother.

Don't forget to mention that the other girl with Furiosa is Valkyrie, who ends up being one of the Mothers. Is she the final inspiration for Furiosa to betray Immortan Joe?

The first chase, as these movies are naught but chases scenes strung together by plot and need. Two women, one is Furiosa's mother. She traces them back to the camp of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, Snow White and the Huntsman). This is where we slide back easily into the world building Miller has given us as the raiders yell at each other, "My lips. Dementus's ear. My lips. Dementus!" They may have found a Place of Abundance, but what's more important is carrying this information to their leader, being the first to mention it, to rise in the ranks.

Gawds, Dementus, what's with the Jesus look?

The second chase. Mary Jobassa (or Joe Bassa? Jabassa? Furiosa's mom; Charlee Fraser, Anyone But You) succeeds in rescuing Furiosa but not without injury and loss of the fuel they need to get back to the Greenlands. They are caught, and rather than run to safety as instructed, Furiosa comes back, only to be confronted by the death of her mother, and the first instructional of life in the Wasteland, by Dementus.

Second Act. Months later? A year? Little D is Dementus's pet, along side The History Man (George Shevtsov, Mystery Road: Origin) wearing his and tattooed with (mostly useless?) facts from the old world. By chance Dementus's horde comes across a warboy (one must wonder why this is the first time; the world of Mad Max doesn't actually seem all that big) who leads  them to The Citadel ("the whata-del?"), home of Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, Offspring) and his genetic reject sons, to semi-quote Dementus. This is the first hint of how inflated the ego of Dementus is, as his horde is decimated and unsuccessfully threatening Joe and crew.

Instead, Dementus, who is not entirely stupid, finds his way into Gastown and takes it for himself. He offers the previous deal they had with Joe, in return for Little D and The Organic Mechanic (Angus Sampson, The Lincoln Lawyer). Well, technically Joe takes them as part of the deal. Dementus doesn't have as much leverage as he hopes. That is the repeated truth of Dementus, in that while he feels he is underestimated, he constantly overestimates the effect he has on people. Little D escapes from Joe's clutches almost immediately, hiding among his people as a boy.

Third Act. Years later. Another chase. Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy, Morgan) has become a Dogman, the grunt mechanics of The Citadel. But she has a plan and works through it with precision, helping build the legendary (but first) War Rig, something that is already "shiny & chrome", even so far to be adorned with a bas relief of Immortan Joe and his legacy. It is driven by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke, CB Strike), a survivor of more runs (between the triad of Gastown, the Citadel and Bullet Town) than any other. Based on the actions of these two movies, that could mean surviving more than two runs, but hey, he's legendary, his truck is legendary. Furiosa (secretly) rides with him, and survives an attack by Dementus's crew... actually no, its a breakaway crew belonging to the Octoboss (Goran D Kleut, Wyrmwood Apocalypse), someone who has already seen how Dementus treats those who are loyal to him. Just another example of the slow degradation of Dementus's reign. She is the lone survivor, and Jack offers her a place in his crew, and a promise to help her escape, once a new crew is trained up.

Fourth Act. Some time later, again. New crew, same War Rig. Furiosa is now a Praetorian. A run to the Bullet Farm where another plan is in place. Jack and Furiosa will change things up, her lagging behind in a vehicle packed with two bikes and lots of supplies. While the crew is concerned with filling up the tanks with bullets, they will escape into the wasteland (small W) together, making for the Greenlands. 

Exceeeept, it doesn't as planned. Dementus has already taken the Bullet Farm and wants the War Rig, probably for another Trojan Horse attempt. They do succeed in surviving the attack, so, another chase. They are captured, Jack is killed and Furiosa only survives by gnawing off her own arm... well, not literally but she might as well have. So long Jack, you are gone far too soon. Furiosa returns to The Citadel, minus one arm, but with great resolve. 

Fifth Act. A reckoning. She builds an arm. She instructs the angry, petty, awash with toxic masculinity fools to not pursue Dementus to Gas Town, which is on fire, but to prepare for his attack. We get the "40 Day War", where we see whatever crew Dementus has left cut down, piles of bodies, almost all vehicles destroyed or in need of repair. And Dementus escapes.

There ya go Dementus, ya get yer Jesus thing.

The last chase. Despite an attempt at deception, he is caught and the words just keep on coming out of him, never stopping. He is not regretful, and he has his "freakishly high pain tolerance" but he asks one thing of her, that she "make it Epic." 

She does.

So, there we have it. Mega post for Mega movie. Something I didn't bless the first movie with after only a single cinema viewing. But what did I think? I still strongly believe I loved it, but I still have some issues. The production of Fury Road was said to have been a nightmare, but from the fires of the forge we got perfection. This seems.... rushed? It is tightly paced, but maybe covers too much? He shaved off the bright, saturated colours of Fury Road for crisp, clean scenes but supplemented by CGI far too often, and far too obviously. 

What I really need to do is see it a third time, in cinema. 

Kent's post. We agree, but a tempered agree.

What?!?!? Not even a single reference to Chris Hemsworth and the nose/teeth? Seriously? 

KWIF: Furiosa (+4)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week Kent has a spotlight movie in which he writes a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else he watched that week, he just does a "quick" (ha! ahahaha! ha!) little summary of his thoughts. 

This week:
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024, d. George Miller - in theatre)
Point Blank (1967, d. John Boorman - Criterion Channel)
Purple Noon (or Plein Soleil, 1960, d. René Clément - Criterion Channel)
The American Friend (or Der amerikanische Freund, 1977, d. Wim Wenders - Criterion Channel)
Paprika (2006, d. Satoshi Kon - the shelf)

and, go!

---

Following Mad Max: Fury Road, about as beautifully artistic and mentally and viscerally stimulating a post-apocalyptic action movie as we're ever to get, I was keen to say that Warner Bros. should just cut George Miller a blank check and make another one, whatever way he wants.  I believe it was during the press junket for Fury Road that Miller intoned he had written a full backstory script for Furiosa, the character played by Charlize Theron in the film.  I was more than ready for that.

As time passed, the realization dawned on me that Furiosa's back story would have to be a pretty bleak one, given how in Fury Road she was headed to The Green Place from which she was abducted as a child. Was that something we really wanted to see? The abuses set upon a young girl in a very toxic and masculine society?  We're aware of Immortan Joe and his harem of "wives" (barely more than breeding livestock as far as he's concerned) so it could get real, real dark. Did we want that?

What we really wanted was more Fury Road.

And you know what? That's almost exactly what Miller delivers with his new entry in the "Mad Max Saga".

In this nearly two-and-a-half hour extravaganza, told in five parts, we first meet Furiosa (Alyla Browne) in the fabled Green Place, a beautiful crevasse in the dead center of Australia (for the first time in the "Saga" were given an actual birds eye view, confirming, yes, this is Australia). A couple of marauders from the wastelands have found the place, and Furiosa, along with a younger sibling or friend raises the alarm. She attempts to sabotage the marauder while help comes but finds that, more than anything else in this lush refuge, she is the most valuable prize.  Our first chase begins as Furiosa's fierce mother (Charlee Fraser) pursues the kidnappers through the desert, and yeah, it's relatively bare bones, but also completely intense. Furiosa is no hapless victim and finds her own ways of sabotaging the marauders.  

Furiosa's story is one of tragedy, so things don't go so well against the vast forces of Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, Ghostbusters: Answer the Call). Furiosa is charged with protecting the location of the Green Place, while she is lobbed between Dementus and Immortan Joe.  Realizing what fate has in store for her in Immortan Joe and his creepy family's care, Furiosa (now Anya Taylor Joy, The New Mutants) hides herself, disguised as a mute boy and a mechanic, she listens and learns. She observes the creation of Immortan Joe's first war rig, and sees the glory of its driver, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke, The Lazarus Project [@Toasty...where's that review?]).  Through a series of events, Jack becomes her new mentor. He's a hard, but kind man who wants nothing more than to help Furiosa be fully capable of surviving their horrid reality.  As the two plot their long-term plan for escape from Immortan Joe, the two get swept into an increasingly urgent and brutal war between Immortan Joe and Dementus, which leads to more and more loss for Furiosa, but gaining an all-consuming thirst for vengeance.

If we look at the prior films in the overall Mad Max "saga" they are all structured differently. The original film is pretty much a series of vignettes, while the second film attempts a more conventional three-act structure (that I can recall). Beyond Thunderdome is more two distinct stories, and Fury Road is basically one long act. I like how Miller keeps you guessing with this series and the only thing you can really expect is to have an epic time with some crazy stunts.

While there was some themes to Thunderdome and Fury Road, Furiosa is pretty much a straightforward action movie. It maybe juxtaposes how different people deal with tragedy differently, but it's certainly not the driving force of the movie. Each of its five acts captures a day or so in Furiosa's life that shows her resolve and willpower in the face of intense combat and overwhelming odds against.

The acting is all exactly what it needs to be. Browne playing young Furiosa for the first hour of the film was unexpected but she was incredible. By the time we meet Joy's Furiosa she's been keeping herself hidden for years so her toughness is very quiet and reserved, until it shows itself in a very raw, emotional form. Praetorian Jack teaches her to control her rage and enhances her skill set, with Burke making Jack a very welcome reprieve from all the letcherous, vainglorious, egocentric and ugly men of the various worlds she's forced to inhabit. 

Furiosa has about as much dialogue in this as Max did in Fury Road, which isn't much at all, so both Bowne and Joy's performance of the character is all in the physicality and the eyes. Conversely, Hemsworth is all words. While Dementus is a dangerous man, he's also a charismatic fool. He leads his people to ruin, but he has the distinct capability to always sucker in more people under him. Hemsworth's charm factor is so high, even when playing this despicable man. He has more dialogue than I think every other character combined, including a riveting monologue in the final act that is the flailing desperation of a thoroughly defeated egomaniac.

I liked how Miller and co-writer Nico Lathouris side-stepped a lot of the world building. Rather than shift its lens off Furiosa, it held tight with her throughout the film. It didn't spend more time with the society of the war boys, and didn't provide an origin story for "Witness Me" or even recycle any of the catchphrases from the prior film. Certainly they are a part of the story, but there is no character there to explore their culture through like Nux from the last film. Been there, done that. We really don't spend time with Dementus' crew as well because, as we learn, Dementus' crew is mercurial.

I found Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to be a highly invigorating experience. I wanted to throw my arms up and cheers so many times, and I clapped with glee to see the war rig manufacturing process. It's a worthy prequel to Fury Road even if it is not quite its equal. I doubt anything can be.

---

One of my ongoing viewing projects is to watch all the various adaptations of Donald E. Westlake's Parker novels (written under the "Richard Stark" pseudonym). Though I've never read any of the novels, I became a rather immediate fan upon reading Darwyn Cooke's loving graphic novel adaptations.  To date I've only managed to catch the awful Jason Statham-starring Parker and the director's cut of 1999's Payback, starring Mel Gibson.  Of the eight adaptations of various Parker stories, arguably the most famous is the 1967 crime thriller, Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin.

Based off the first Parker novel The Hunter, it finds Marvin's "Walker" (as Westlake notoriously refused anyone using the name without committing to multiple pictures) trying to come to grips with how he wound up in a prison cell with two bullet holes in his abdomen. The answer: betrayal. He got pulled into a job by Reese, a man in desperate need of money to pay off his debts, but the job wasn't a big enough score to pay Walker the split he was promised. Reese, having seduced Walker's wife, Lynn, sets him up for the fall. His only mistake was in making sure Walker was dead. Walker pulls through his injuries and sets out to not so much get revenge as collect what he is owed by any means necessary.

"The Hunter" is the same story Payback was based off of, and the rhythms of the story are almost exactly the same. Some of the characters shift in their personality and story, but inconsequentially. The real difference is in style. Payback is a very 1990's production, Cooke's comic adaptation is very firmly in the 1950's, while here it's so very 1960's Los Angeles, and it's glorious. I have to think everything Quentin Tarantino was trying to achieve visually in Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood stems from this film. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but the aesthetic of this film, from the streets of Hollywood, to every hotel room, office and mansion homestead are so exquisitely of the era, and it all just sings beautifully.

If I had to place the aesthetic it's that in the 1960's technology was just starting it's advancement into commercial sales, hi-fi stereos and phone intercoms, and doors that open and close with the press of a button. The ostentatiousness of the 1960's resulted in such heavy investment in electronics and mechanized devices that there wasn't the same sense of investment in making everything gold or highly ornate. Environments were very much wood framed with the brushed chrome of technology as an accent. Colours were pastel bases, muted, yet still vibrant.  The buttoned down suits of the 1950s gave way to more mod suits in the 60's and the women adopted patterns and colours galore.  There are times when I watch the film and wish I could tour around the setting more. This is a film where I wish I could just dive right in and live there.  

I was about to say Lee Marvin as Walker was maybe a decade too old to play the character, but I just looked it up and he was 43! Five years younger than I am now. And he looks like he's cresting 60 in the film.  Man that era of sunbathing, heavy drinking and smoking was hard on one's looks.  That said, he's almost perfect for the vision of Walker, a big, broad man who can stop you dead in your tracks with just a look.  There's a weird flashback where Lynn talks about when she met Walker, and it shows Marvin being playful and smiling with her, and oh, it threatens to undermine the entire image of the character. It's early enough on in the picture that Marvin has time to rebuild his image, but it takes a bit.  The most immediate thing about Marvin's Walker that seems to deviate from Parker is his code of ethics. It seems at first like Walker is really trying to get revenge, it's not for a while where he really starts hammering it in that he's actually just after his money.

Angie Dickinson (Police Woman) is in the film as Lynn's sister, Chris, and she is everything to this film. She is a love interest for Walker, but definitely not the conventional "love interest" role. She is versed in working hard and doing what must be done, and as much as she wants to resent Walker for asking her to do so, she can't help but see a guy who very much does the same...only he's kind of an emotionless automaton. He frustrates her so much (as witnessed by the incredible scene where Dickinson goes full ham on Marvin until she's utterly exhausted and collapse to the floor) and yet it's clear she's got an incurable thing for him in spite of herself. She plays it so well. Her roles seems beefed up from other versions of this story, but maybe it's just that Dickinson does more with it. She has presence, and her character feels lived in, in a way maybe no other character does.

Boorman and his editor (Henry Berman) do weird collages throughout the film, mostly as flashbacks, which are not unwelcome but seem so ...primitive as a storytelling vehicle. Sometimes they work very well, acting as Walker's inner conscience or a dreamscape, but sometimes they feel like too much.  There's a magnificent scene of Walker walking down a hallway, his ADRed footsteps "clop-clopping" away, setting the rhythm for Johnny Mandel's score to kick in, paired with some of that collage editing and it's just an masterful senses-grabbing scene that has been cribbed so much since, but probably never bettered.

---

Another kick I've been on is watching any adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series. I just did an obscenely long look at the 1999 version of The Talented Mr. Ripley in comparison with the new Netflix series, and this drew me to re-subscribing to the Criterion Channel so that I could catch up on two earlier adaptations of Ripley stories.

1960's Purple Noon (not Purple Moon as I keep wanting to say) is a very French adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring notoriously handsome actor Alain Delon (Le Samourai) in the title role of Thomas Ripley. I could go into a very detailed list of "differences" between this and the other adaptations of the novel, but I'll spare that in favour of just the broadest strokes.

The first big shift is how the film begins in media res, with Tom and Philippe Greenleaf (changed from Dickie) already best buds and hanging out in Rome. Philippe  is already aware that Tom was sent by his father and Tom seemingly doesn't hide the fact from Philippe his criminal ways. The two are very boys' boys as they horse and pal around and fuck with other people for their fun. They pick up a woman and both make out with her (well it's more Philippe making out and Tom trying to get in on the action). Did I mention this film is so French. Marge likes Tom just fine but her relationship with Philippe seems strained by his cladding about with Tom. Tom covets everything about Philippe, his wardrobe, his carefree lifestyle, and his women.

Obviously this is the second big change. Tom's intoned homosexuality is completely absent from Delon's performance (and the script). When he kills Philippe, takes over his life, kills Freddie and returns to being Tom, he heads back to Marge and they start a relationship, and Tom seems genuinely happy. He has Dickie's life and he doesn't have to pretend to be him.

But as much as the story and performance are absent of any gay undertones, the lens in which we view the film is very queer indeed. The camera isn't in love with Delon, it is obsessed with him. Where in other productions the camera provides us largely Tom's point of view of events, lets us understand the story through his very warped eyes, here the camera is very disengaged from Tom's point of view and instead just ogles him. Though Tom is clearly covetous of Philippe's life, through the lens we see Tom as the ideal. He's much more attractive than anyone else on screen (and Maurice Ronet is not a bad looking guy, but pales compared to Delon) and we can never forget it.

Remember that old Late Night with Conan O'Brien bit "If they mated" where they would take two celebrities and show us what an adult offspring would look like if they shared their DNA? In Delon's case, he would be the "If They Mated" of Zach Efron and Jared Leto in their primes. Just the most piercing blue eyes and carefree floppy hair and fit-but-not-buff body. Just total ah-ooh-gah.  I don't know what makes the lens gay male gaze as opposed to female gaze, but it's definitely feels like one and not the other.

The final big distinction of the various versions is the ending, in which Tom doesn't get away with it. And it's kind of clever and unexpected how they did it. Innocuous, sudden, and yet logical. I understand why in such an era they needed crime to be punished on films, but it does lessen the story, but so does the removal of the homosexual undertones.  It's a very good production overall, but of course it is. As I stated before, the source material is one of the greatest, sure to be adapted over and over.  Yet, it's the lesser of the three productions for not even daring to challenge the norms of the time.

---

I like the story behind The American Friend (not My American Friend, as I keep wanting to say) - the late 70's German-French production from noted auteur director Wim Wenders - almost as much as I like the film. As Wenders tells it, after his first few films were road stories largely improvised from loose scripts, he was looking for a fully scripted story for his next film. He became obsessed with Patricia Highsmith's novels and attempted to option every one of them, only to find they were all unavailable. This caught Highsmith's attention and she met with Wenders and clearly, as he says it, he "passed the test", and she offered him her new manuscript for her third Ripley novel before she had even sent it to the publishers. This was Ripley's Game.

A coup for Wenders, in a way, but also a consolation prize of sorts. Wenders had approached actor-director John Cassavetes for playing the role of Tom Ripley, but he was busy. Cassavetes suggested Dennis Hopper (Super Mario Bros.) to Wenders, and Wenders came to like the idea. But when the time came to shoot the picture Hopper was still sidelined shooting Apocalypse Now. Hopper came off the set of that feature a practical zombie, drinked and drugged out of his mind, barely able to engage with the material and his co-stars.  Bruno Ganz (The Boys From Brazil) was a popular stage actor who had only one screen credit, but Wenders convinced him to take the role. Ganz prepped endlessly and was very invested in the part. A few days into working with Hopper, who was very laissez-faire and freewheeled his lines, the men came to blows. Wenders let them fight it out, which led to an evening of drinking and a mutual understanding with Ganz softening his over-prepared stance and Hopper committing to starting each day prepping with the director.  

It's a wonderful story in a way, I just wish it paid off on screen. Hopper's Ripley, wearing a stetson and cowboy boots most of the time, is certainly not the mind's eye view of Thomas Ripley, not akin to any other interpretation we've seen on screen. But aesthetics aren't everything.  My chief complaint is that Hopper's performance just feels like he's in a completely different movie every time he's on screen. 

Thankfully (I guess) in the first hour of the film, Ripley only has two or three short scenes which seem quite outside the main plot. Ganz plays Jonathan Zimmerman, a framemaker whose wife works at an auction house where Ripley peddles his illicit art wares. When the two are introduces Jon slights Ripley which causes him to spread a rumour that Zimmerman's rare blood disorder is terminal and that he's having money problems. 

This catches the attention of some criminal types who are in a feud with other criminal types. They start to gaslight Jon into believing his disorder is terminal, and convincing him that he should be doing what he can to ensure the stability of his wife and son after his passing.  All he needs to do is kill someone.  It's very Highsmith in a Strangers on a Train but in a fun house mirror sort of way.

The job is done, and it's an intense set pieces that is wonderfully shot (no pun intended). There's a dangling thread of Jon having been caught fleeing the scene on camera but it's never picked up (and I'm not sure why). Ripley later encounters Jon at his frame shop, perhaps to taunt him, but Jon apologizes for his behaviour in their initial meeting and is very friendly. Ripley feels guilty. When he finds out the goons are trying to force Jon into another hit, Ripley tries to stop it before it starts, but ultimately can only intervene and help out. It's a very clumsy, blackly comedic, and similarly intense sequence on a high speed train.

Jon's secrecy with his wife and the weight of his deeds starts fracturing his marriage, but Jon thinks it's all too late. Ripley notes that the bad guys will try to clean up any loose ends, and they're going to have to go on the offensive. The film's final big piece once again plays out unexpectedly, with some irreverent turns that carry just as many nerves.

If not for Hopper, this is otherwise an really great film.  It's not a terrific Ripley story, as the character is largely absent from the first half, but at the same time, given what we see of Ripley in the various adaptations of the first of Highsmith's novels, the character profile of an art dealer with criminal connections seems absolutely fitting. I just wish almost anyone else was playing him, but I think a 15-years-later Delon would have been perfect, as the film ventured between Hamburg and Paris.

---

Paprika is the final film made by Satoshi Kon, and what many regard to be his masterpiece. Having just seen all four in the past month, it's hard to not say they are all his masterpieces.  He was such a thoughtful, incredibly curious and inventive storyteller, and as very much a latecomer to his career, it's still resonates as a huge tragedy that he died still quite evidently in his storytelling prime.

That all said, at least in first watch, Paprika is my least favourite of the quartet. It is so primarily because of my typical reaction to typical anime, which is a flinching revulsion.  Where Kon's prior films seemed to defiantly break from typical anime styles and forms, Paprika seemed to be a sudden dive right into them, as if Kon just caught up on the prior ten years of anime that he had missed.

It's probably an unfair assessment.

And yet I kept wincing as I watched this. It started very simply with the character Paprika's haircut. Something about it screamed so loudly in my face, the way the curl of the hair covers over the cheekbones to both accentuate the jaw and highlight the eyes...almost more helmet than hair. It was the visual equivalent of chewing tinfoil or fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Just set me on edge.

A lot of anime (not a genre, I know, but...) has this thing where its action scenes or often entire stories operate in a stream-of-consciousness manner, because you can do anything in animation. But should you? The stream-of-consciousness side of this entertainment shouldn't bother me (I like Twin Peaks after all) but it's often just nonsense.  Of course, I have limited exposure and so limited experience, but that is my experience and it does not appeal to me.

So when Kon's movie opens with a very intentional stream of consciousness-style dream sequence I was getting itchy, despite being obviously wowed by the director's continued masterful control over transitions, here rapidly transitioning between different dream realms.  I basically bought into the film by the end of the incredible opening credit sequence, but my seatbelt wasn't securely fastened the entire journey.

Paprika doesn't really hold your hand. It may grab you by the shirt sleeve and give you a little tug from time to time, but it's not laying it all out for you, and it never establishes any sort of rules to what you are seeing. It's all very mercurial, dream logic.

Yet the story is nearly quite straightforward. In a near-future world, a company has invented a technology that can record people's dreams, but there's an exploit where people can actually enter those dreams using the technology.  Paprika is Dr. Atsuko Chiba's alias when she enters the dreamscape, her very superheroic alter ego. Except someone else has stolen the technology, entered the dreamscape and is doing some real harm.

As Atsuko and the other heads of the project work with a police detective to try to suss out who is poisoning people's dreams, people start losing their minds in the real worlds and killing themselves.  The news is bad, and the chairman wants to shut the project down, which would leave anyone using the dream recorder exposed to the psychopath.

This is a generalized summary and definitely not 100% accurate...as I said, it's a film that doesn't hold your hand.  I found it difficult to embrace this world without understanding it first. The film talks about the newly developed "DC Mini" but doesn't really set us up for understanding the world as changed by the dream therapy technology that seems more widespread. Maybe they're both the same thing but it doesn't make sense that they are. I dunno, I probably need to watch it again.

The film toys with dreamscape logic, which means that often characters seem to wake up but are still in a dream, and then wake up from that dream to still be in a dream etc. It is a trick dream-based movies have been using for decades before and since. It's as effective as it is annoying.

There's this whole angle to Paprika that's about filmmaking and storytelling and camera perspective and collaboration and regret that seems very personal and personally appealing to Kon, but also is verrrry inside baseball for animators and cinematic storytellers. It's a side trip that ultimately has some leanings into one of the character's back stories but it also feels like an unnecessary tangent that stalls the mid-point of the film.

The character designs in this film in general feel more animated archetypes than in Kon's previous films (as Griffin Newman pointed out, it seems like three of the main doctors were visually designed after Professor X, Toad and the Blob from X-Men, something I picked up on as well, but was likely in mind after a binge of over 100 issues of X-Men comics and the 13 episodes of X-Men '97).  I don't feel like I understood our main protagonist, Atsuko and her altar ego Paprika all that well. I don't really understand why Atsuko was doing call girl-style illicit meetings with patients where Paprika invaded their dreams. It somehow made more sense when the dream world was invading the real world and Paprika became an independent being from Atsuko, but I'm not sure why that made sense.

This wasn't a mind-twist, so much as a mind hurt. Again, maybe upon rewatch it will reveal itself more, and repulse less. I mean, there's an abundance of fat jokes and denigrating of an obese character in this so, cultural biases, along with my own anime biases, all got in the way.

3-2-1: Fast X

2023, d. Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) - IMAX theatre

The Plot 100:
142 minutes of sensory overload. Aquaman, who really was in Fast 5 the whole time, really, does revenge. But he doesn't want to just destroy the "Family", he wants Riddick to suffer...by destroying the "Family". Snake Plisskin is MIA from the "Agency", Jack Reacher has taken over, placing the “Family” on the "Agency's" most wanted list, but Captain Marvel is there to undermine him. Baby Boy,Ludacris, Missandei and Han are doing their thing. Girlfight gets captured, makes frenemies with Atomic Blonde. XXX’s off on his own doing his thing. Peacemaker, plays funcle. It ends with cliffhangers, I guess? 

3-2-1:
3 Good:

(1) Big. Loud. Dumb. Sometimes, you just want to escape whatever is going on in your life. Sometimes you really need an excuse to tune out the voices and drown out the noise. Fast X is loud enough to drown out any noise, and it's so dumb that you absolutely *must* shut your brain off.  And it's big enough, meaning they sunk a hundreds of millions of dollars into wanton chaos and destruction for a nearly 2 1/2 hour movie that never really lets up on it, because none of the story in this film or film series is ever going to sustain the audience's attention for more than 30 seconds at a time without some engine revving or explosion happening. It's a big, loud, dumbass movie, and it's really not trying to be anything other than that, and that's why it's good. Your mileage may vary.
(2) The End. Oh my god, the ending is so stupid. The inspiration for this two-part finale to the Fast Saga was obviously Avengers: Infinity War as they try to cram as many existing characters as well as a whole bunch of new ones into the framework of an otherwise bare bones story idea. The ending is supposed to be a downer/suspenseful ending (did they just die? Did they just come back from the dead? How are they possibly going to get out of this one?) but it's some real weak tea, '66 Batman "see you next week" kind of plotting that took some real cojones to spend 140+ minutes leading into. It's seriously one of the most ambitiously stupid or stupidly ambitious moves a film has made in a long time. I'm think it's all terrible and I loved it.  Especially if you stop and think about what happens if another one doesn't get made. The hubris is hilarious. Do I genuinely enjoy this movie or is it just ironic enjoyment, and is there a difference?
(3) The players. With a franchise cast of regular players already a couple dozen deep they just keep adding more. Alan Ritchson, Brie Larson, Daniela Melchior, Pete Davidson, Rita Moreno, and everyone has a family tie to somebody else. It's always all about family, and it makes me giddy how they manage to shoehorn the theme in over and over and over again. They keep bringing people back too, like Scott Eastwood and Helen Mirren and Cardi B who you would be forgiven for forgetting that they were even part of this franchise. And of course there's some surprises saved for the very end.  It's like those over-stuffed star-fueled disaster movies of the 1970's, but with espionage and cars and razor-thin character work. It's Roger Corman movies if they had 200 million dollar budgets. It's really hard to be angry with these earnestly dumb movies.

2 Great:

(1) Jason Momoa. I sometime think Jason Momoa isn't, well, a great actor. Since he popped out of the Khal Drogo role, he's basically been a gigantic, handsome slab of meat with incredible tresses and a lot of charm. I've seen a lot of roles I've liked him in but at the same time I'm still wondering "Is he a good actor?" Aquaman, still DC's biggest success(?!?) kind of succeeded in spite of him being in the lead. He was surrounded by better actors there. It's kind of the opposite here. When he's sharing the screen with Vin Diesel or Ludacris or a checked-out Michelle Rodriguez, he's really got a leg up. Being the new guy, and the villain, he just unzips and goes balls out (metaphorically, we don't actually see his balls...I think).

As I watched Momoa traipse (oh, he traipses, honey) around on screen, taking wardrobe change after wardrobe change, providing dainty flourishes to his peppery language, and just being a total slice of spiced ham, I couldn't help but wonder...what is this performance? It's definitely in the gender-fluid, sexually-ambiguous realm, played with giddy menace, winding with a sort of a maniacal Dean Pelton vibe. And then it hit me... it's the Joker. 

Ah, but which Joker, you ask? Jack Nicholson? Cesar Romero? Heath Ledger? It's ALL OF THEM. Every Joker ever is employed in Momoa's gleeful performance. Hints of Mark Hamill's cartoon joker, touches of Joaquin Phoenix, even some of the dead-eyed lunacy of Jared Leto. It's super fun and basically the draw of the movie.

(2) John Cena, the fun uncle. In the last movie, F9, John Cena debuted as racially ambiguous (but confirmed definitely part-Latinx in this film, with Rita Moreno playing his Abuelita) Domenic Toretto's very, very white brother, Jakob. It was never mentioned before that Dom had a brother (besides his brother from another mother, Paul Walker's Brian) so the shoehorning of him in was pretty hoary, and positioning him as a petty, jealous, angry villain who is just desperate for Dom's attention and easily redeemable was pretty dorky all things considered. You kind of forget he even exists in the Fast Franchise until he just pops up.  Cena's such a ridiculous looking guy to begin with...like he's as wide as he is tall, with a face full of soft edges that makes him much easier to accept in a comedic role than a serious one. Cena has done some really crappy films in his career, but also some great work, and I feel like having spent much of the past four years with James Gunn on Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, he's really grown as a performer, with a shamelessness and gusto that translates well on screen. His appearance here, he gets to be physical at first, but most of the work he does with Little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry) is just charming as fuck, and Cena, once again checks his ego at the door. There are a lot of little pairings of actors in this film where the chemistry really works (Rodriguez and Theron, Diesel and Mirren, Bridges and Gibson) but I think this pairing worked the best, and I could see a Lone Wolf and Cub/Mandalorian-style comedy-action series with Cena and a child really working well.

"Family"

1 Bad: 
I'm not big into the "Fast Franchise" lore. I've seen most of the films once (Fast Five two or three times, as it's easily the best) and they're all stupid and enjoyable but keeping track of any of the continuity is just. not. worth it. You can tell these are scripts written with zero forethought and barely any immediate thought. They're not really thought through, they're just an action RPG brought to life with dice rolls deciding whether any of the action sequences work, not physics or science or the laws of nature.  Anyway, yeah, haven't the "Family" been working for the "Agency" since, like, Fast 5, or, like, a decade or so? They're contractors, sure, but isn't the "Agency" the good guys?

So, when Alan Ritchson's Almes takes over (because Kurt Russel's Mr. Nobody has apparently done one of his "famous" disappearing acts) and labels the "Family" as wanted fugitives, why then is it just perfectly acceptable to just start shooting "Agency" goons in the head, stabbing them in the neck, slicing open femoral arteries, exploding them, running them over with cars, knocking buildings down on them? I know the "Family" didn't start out on the right side of the law, regardless, they could have been friends with any of these faceless goons, but no, without asking any questions or looking under the masks at the humans beneath, they just start bodyslamming them through floors and spear diving them through walls.

I basically shut my brain off for the film and just went along for the ride, but, this one aspect really bothered me.

META:

not yet family

So, days before release, he-whose-head-looks-like-a-thumb announced, somewhere, that the epic 2-part finale to the Fast Franchise was now going to be a trilogy.

As much as I proclaim to love the dumbness of this series, turning whatever story this is into a trilogy seems both terrible and unsustainable. The plot of this film was threadbare as is, with literally no characters arcs happening (maybe Cypher learns something?). Momoa's rampage of revenge has basically led to the "Family" being on its last legs, but of course there's an easy out for everything, and nobody ever dies in this series, and every bad guy seems to become part of the "Family" eventually anyway, so what are we even doing here?

Hopefully FF11 wraps in a lot of the Hobbes and Shaw cast (would love Vanessa Kirby to return...for...reasons) and we can maybe welcome Hobbes' now probably-adult daughter into the fold. Plus Shaw's brother, Luke Evans, still hasn't been seen since 6, so he needs to come back, and those goofs from Tokyo Drift (Lil Bow Wow and Lucas Black) need to reappear again too.  Of course either Mr. Nobody is coming to the rescue, or it was he who was kidnapped setting a lot of the dumb plot of this film in motion. But I don't really even see 2 more hours coming out of Fast X (it seems like a half hour resolution is needed at best), nevermind another 4 or 5.  But then, this is a series about excess, and pushing limits, and everyone coming back from the dead...so why not the bad guys, like Idris Elba, or Djimon Hounsu,  or Dom's baby mama Elsa Pataki, or even Vince.  Remember Vince? No? Me neither. What about if Dom's dead dad was the bad guy this whole time and they try to tie this all together, Spectre style? That would phenawfulmenel.

Behind the scenes there's been a lot of talk over the years about how Diesel's ego has taken over the series, and for all the talk of "family" he sees himself as the sole creative driving force. Justin Lin, whose filmmaking sensibilities are largely responsible for the franchise having become the juggernaut it is, and was planned to be the director of the two-part finale, was driven out of the director's chair early in the shooting of this production, presumably over creative differences with Diesel. It's a lot less public than the fued between Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, but both are telling on what it's like working with him. It's also telling how much of the film Diesel spends apart from the main cast (which, besides the opening scenes, is all of it). Diesel is the driving force of the series but he's also the burden which the series must carry. He's the star, but biggest presence, but also the weakest performer. Dom seemingly has like a dozen lines of dialogue the whole film, despite dom-inating the screentime, which is probably for the best, since Diesel's emotionless performance leads to such a back-of-the-throat, low growl as to be borderline inaudible at this point. 

This was the first F&F movie I've seen in theatres since Fast 5, and I do have to say that the experience in theatre is so much better than watching from home. Big, loud, dumb, expensive movies are built for it. I can't say if the quality of the film is improved or if it just winds up being a better time when you've committed yourself to this one thing.

Black Moon Rising

1986, d. Harley Cokeliss - AmazonPrime

A common trope of boredom through to the turn of the century was channel-flipping.  Just thumbing the remote one channel at a time, pausing for moments to catch mere glimpses - a few lines of dialogue, a mid-sales pitch on a shopping network, a cheesy action sequence - before moving onto the next thing that probably doesn't interest you.  The equivalent these days is thumbing our way through our streaming services to add things to our lists, but taking a good long time before pressing "play" on something.  The difference here is we don't tend to catch those mere glimpses of the show or movie, just a picture and a brief 1-2 line synopsis (some, but not all, Netflix apps now have a preview feature if you pause on a selected title for a moment).  AmazonPrime has, for some productions, a prominently featured "Play Trailer" beside their "Play Movie" button.  And that trailer for Black Moon Rising is what suckered me into watching this decidedly middling, obviously forgettable mid-80's Fast and Furious franchise precursor.  I immediately paraphrased Troy from Community, "That looks terrible...I want to watch it twice."



There's definitely a 5-minutes-into-the-future vibe to that trailer, with the Lalo Schifrin synth score and the titular "future car", the Black Moon, and of course name checking John Carpenter as co-screenwriter, but it's all a bit of a smokescreen.  This is such a vintage 80's also-ran action movie, it's almost painful.  Yet it is still quite watchable, mostly thanks to the charisma of Tommy Lee Jones, here a very lithe 39-years-old, complete with a topless scene that'll make you say "damn, Tommy Lee Jones was cut!"  I know I had never, ever, even momentarily, contemplated Jones' sex appeal before.  That changed.

The film's plot is very convoluted.  There are three competing stories.  The first finds Jones' master thief, Quint, being blackmailed by the FBI (Police Academy's Bubba Smith) into obtaining evidence for a case they're pursuing (pretty sure that would get thrown out in a court of law, so why bother?).  He gets caught, but escapes and is on the run from some bad people. 

The poster screams Blade Runner.
It's no Blade Runner...  I actually stayed
awake watching this one.

The second plot has to do with an experimental supercar, the Black Moon, developed by a former NASA engineer and piloted by an expert driver, and maintained by a mute Larry from Newhart (no brother Darryl or other brother Darryl though).  It runs  on water and can go faster than any other car in history, and has a light composite frame never before seen.  They're courting auto manufacturers who are dubious about the whole thing.  Plot A dovetails into Plot B when Quint, stalled out at a gas station, stashes the data tape on the Black Moon, planning to retrieve it later in Los Angeles.

The third plot has to do with Linda Hamilton's Nina, master car thief and the right hand woman in Robert Vaughn's car theft/development scheme that makes no sense (he's stealing cars to display in office buildings for criminals?  Is that what's happening?).  Of course, she steals the Black Moon before Quint can recover the tape and then the story gets going...kind of .

There's car chases, fist fights, gunplay, uzis, big hair, and sex...so, typical 80's action movie.  Everything is so sub par, however.  The car chases are more tedious than exciting, 80's gunplay was mostly about people jumping out of the way of submachine gun bullets or cars getting shot up, and the sex scene so perfunctory.  That said, Tommy Lee Jones has charisma to spare, here.  It's easy to think of him only as the old cranky guy from almost every movie he was in post 1990, but seeing him as a bit of a younger buck, making sweet time with a lady and it's a revelation just how charming he is.  He's got a real knack for delivering dry wit and sarcasm. 

The film's weaving of the three plots is rather forced, and Cokeliss' execution of the film is so mechanical.  There's little actual excitement.  Some of that might be in comparison to today's standards of blockbuster, but I think if this were any good for its time, I would have heard about it before two weeks ago.  The opening credits had some nice composition and framing, but after that it routinely feels like an episode of The Rockford Files.  It's TV quality. 

There is a scene, however, of a car jumping from one tower to another, which should be spectacular but is exactly as cheesy looking as you'd expect from a modestly budgeted 80's action movie.  Not a forgotten masterpiece, not even a forgotten curiosity, just kind of forgotten for a reason. 

3 Short Paragraphs: Baby Driver

2017, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) -- download

This is the movie Edgar Wright got to make when he walked away from Ant Man. And damn, good on him! This is the kind of movie where the director / writer got to do what he wanted to do, exactly what he wanted to do. And again, DAMN. In case you haven't guessed, I loved this movie. It is in no way perfect, a bit lop-sided and unfocused, but so what, every disconnected bit was just wonderful on its own, adding up to a fun experience that I may just go see again in the theatre, just because, owing to the world we live in, where a proper download exists even before the movie disappears from the theatres. And because, of all the movies from this summer, this one is just sticking around, which means its making constant money. Good on Wright!

Baby is a driver (duh!), a driver for thuggish bank robbers, bank rolled (pun intended) by mastermind Kevin Spacey. Spacey hires a different gang every time, but keeps Baby on the payroll to drive, and to pay off his own debt to Spacey. Baby has a condition, rather benign (tinnitus) but because he keeps earbuds in his ears all the time, and is constantly being drawn along by the music, people think he is .... odd. He is, but not in a bad way. Baby distracts himself with music, not just from the ring, but from the harsh reality of it all. The world seems to play along, building musical montages that seem made for him and the song on his iPod. Either that, or he choreographs every element of his life to the songs playing, like he does his driving plans. This movie loves music as much as Baby does.

Like all caper and/or driver movies, Baby wants to redeem and all because of a girl. But Spacey needs him to continue working, despite having paid off his debt in the first job starring Jon Bernthal, John Hamm and Eiza González. But his obsession with the girl, and getting out, ruins the Next Job which you could say begins ruined by having psychopath Batts along, and re-using Hamm and González. But damn, are we glad they are back. Jamie Fox may be annoying as the kill happy Batts, but Hamm and González (From Dusk Til Dawn [TV]) are just so grand to watch on screen, we knew they HAD to be back; too bad about the jinx it causes.