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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Disclosure Day

2026 Steven Spielberg (War of the Worlds) -- download

Spielberg's career was not built on aliens -- he actually has an incredibly varied catalog -- but a number of his movies do focus on aliens coming to Earth, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, of which this one may be seen as a spiritual successor.

Google has a 'Disclosure Day' search result animation - a cardinal. Huh.

Not sure I am going to do a play by play recap of this movie. We know its about "disclosing" the existence of what has to be alien life, even if the trailers don't say it out loud. I mean, I spoiled that in the first sentence. But what is the movie really about ??

"You can't HANDLE the truth!!!" yells Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson).

We can't handle the truth. In February of this year, President Donald "Cheeto Benito" Trump signed an executive order to release all the files they had on UFO phenomena, or as they are calling them now - UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena).

Do doo de doo doo.

We handled the truth. There was nothing to be "handled". Even if the fucking US Dept of War official website looks like part of an AR game, this news came and went without even a whisper. The "truth" was just as ambiguous as it always had been. But what if something tangible had been revealed? What if the documents had shown incontrovertible proof that there were alien bodies stored in Area 51 and they had, at the very least, parts of downed alien craft? How would the world have reacted?

In the movie, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, Young Sherlock) of Wardex (Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction) vehemently states that if said incontrovertible truth about alien existence, in the form of terabytes of footage & files, was released to the world, they would panic, utterly lose their shit. For the movie's world, which is already teetering on the brink of war, it would mean the End of Things. The movie even postulates that religion would collapse, when we learn we are not alone in the universe.

Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor, The Crown), a genius level data scientist in Wardex, believes, and was influenced into believing by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo, The Electric State), an ex-Wardex employee, that the world deserves to know. Needs to know. He believes vehemently that we can handle it, that it is exactly what the world needs now, as it is about to wipe itself out. He has escaped with a backpack full of said data. And Wardex is after him.

Meanwhile, unconnected to Daniel's whistleblower activities, weather person Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, The Fall Guy) is having a really weird day. After a Disney Princess encounter with a bright red cardinal, things have been... odd. She's guessing what her boyfriend (Wyatt Russell, Overlord) is going to say, before he opens his mouth, and speaking Russian. In the studio she is unphased by her new ability to understand Korean, but collapses after speaking an alien language on-air, for everyone to hear. Something is very wrong.

But Daniel understands what she is saying, when no one else does. So, the two are connected, and are being influenced by Something Bigger Than Them. So much of the movie hinges on the idea that Something Bigger is Happening. Its the driving factor of the movie. Its what propels us towards a climax of the actual release of the files and videos to the entire world, via the news broadcasting framework.

So much of this movie displays as the product of a Very Good Filmmaker. The production budget allows for so much, so many things and Spielberg is able to masterfully engage us. The train scene, for one, is an exciting spin on a classic -- a classic he really subscribes to, as you can easily see this whole thing happening in an Indiana Jones movie. But its also just the lighting and the way he frames a shot. You can easily envision the mock-buster of this movie; I wouldn't be surprised if the idea "an alien conspiracy whistleblower running from a shadowy government agency" is already the plot of one, or many, Straight To movies in the VHS days. I rather enjoyed watching skilled people do their thing.

But in the end, I was, surprisingly to myself, not satisfied with the actual "disclosure". So, they release all this footage to the news, masterfully convincing a bunch of news TV shows to all connect together and show the footage. So what? Most people will think its fake, even if they accept the idea of world covering "breaking news" doesn't happen for AI Deepfakes. And once the governments, including the US Govt which was unaware of what Wardex was doing, get their shit together, it will just quietly become yesterday's news. 

And, what was the alien agenda here? We are meant to believe they a benevolent alien species that lives by empathy instead of tyranny. But what have they been doing for 50 years? Abducting children and subjecting them to terrifying experimentation we know. And I understand that if human interaction like Wardex showed them to be fearful of humans, I get the hiding, but they are still massively technologically advanced compared to us. Do they have to hide? And now, once revealed, what's next? The movie would rather just have us postulate this on our own, as it literally is only about the "disclosure", but since I did not buy into the almost-religious-experience level of awe this was supposed to inspire, I am again left with "so what?" I need to know the answer of that question. 

Kent.

KWIF: Disclosure Day (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. A mid-week KWIF as this weekend brings us Supergirl and maybe other distractions.

This Week:
Disclosure Day (2026, d. Steven Spielberg - in theatre)
Toy Story 5 (2026, d. Andrew Stanton - in theatre)
Hoppers (2026, d. Daniel Chong - Disney+)

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I've always considered Steven Spielberg an "aliens" guy (as I think most people do?), even though it'd been a minute since Spielberg last did aliens. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was 2008 and only featured the aliens reveal in the end. He remade War of the Worlds in 2005 and it was over 20 years before that when he did E.T. The Extra-terrestrial. Prior to that it was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  In a career with 35 movies 1/7th of his output was aliens related. That track record alone wouldn't make him an "aliens" guy, but it's still hard not to think of him that way because, in his presentation of aliens on film, particularly in Close Encounters, E.T. and now Disclosure Day, they seem not the works of a fantasist, but of a believer.

Disclosure Day isn't a preachy movie, and yet it's really trying to sell the audience on the idea that aliens exist and that we should be okay with it (I mean, I get where Spielberg's coming from, as we are a species that is notoriously xenophobic, that destroys what it doesn't understand, and generally rebuffs the unfamiliar in favour of the samey same).  It's a chase movie that posits that a shadowy organization, Wardex, in collusion with the U.S. Department of Defense, has been covering up alien encounters, commoditizing alien technology, communicating with alien beings, and torturing alien prisoners.  At a certain point the "need to know" on all this became tighter and tighter to the point that even the POTUS was eventually denied access (given who sits there now, probably for the best).

As the film starts, Wardex employees have turned up missing, as have Wardex assets retrieved from alien encounters. They're on the hunt for Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor, The Crown), a mathematics and programming prodigy who has escaped with thumb drives of their entire video archives as well as a particular piece of space magic technology. Daniel is on the run with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson, The Knick), who he learns, in the process of hiding out, used to be a nun. As he discloses to her why he is on the run, that "disclosure day" is coming and all this material will be made public, Jane's faith (and lack of faith in humanity) has her bristling against this course of action.

Meanwhile local Kansas City news station weather person, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, The English) has aspirations for becoming a news anchor. She has an encounter with a cardinal (the bird, not the Catholic) immediately after which she begins having weird episodes of speaking foreign dialects, and empathically reading peoples minds and finding the perfect path to delivering them comfort, sometimes with words and other times with telepathic images. After trying to give a weather report, only to wind up speaking in an alien language of clicks, she passes out. An MRI shows no anomalies, but the Wardex goons are waiting for her outside her hospital room. With the concerned help of her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) they get out. Margaret knows something is happening to her, but she also knows it's not a bad thing. 

She gets a phone call from ex-Wardex employee Hugo Wakefield (Coleman Domingo, The Four Seasons), the man orchestrating the whole "disclosure day" event, and he advises her to find Daniel, using her instincts to guide her. 

Daniel gets captured, Jane's on the run, Margaret ditches Jackson, Margaret rescues Daniel and they keep running afoul of the Wardex goons, as their leader, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, The Staircase) uses alien technology to invade peoples minds and take over their bodies.

This is all happening as U.S.-Russian tensions escalate and the threat of nuclear war and/or World War III looms large. Jane and Scanlon both worry that any disclosure of the existence of extraterrestrial beings will plunge an already volatile world even further asunder.

This is very much Spielberg (with frequent collaborator, screenwriter David Koepp, and, oh yes, John Williams' latest [maybe last] film score) in Spielberg mode. When you think of a Spielbergian adventure, this slots right into that. Spielberg has long been an incredible populist filmmaker, he wants his films to be (for the most part) enjoyable to the broadest demographics. But that Spielbergian populism, at its peakiest peak, was always very American-centric. For as avid an enthusiast of World War II and aliens as he is, he seems incapable of really expanding his mindset out of the ol' U.S. of A.

So despite having three Brits as the leads of this film, only Firth plays in his natural accent (because the British accent can still accentuate the "villain" motif). Blunt is working in an American dialect I can't quite place, but there's a hint of a twang, while O'Connor's American accent comes off as somewhat flat. 

In dealing with its backdrop of international tensions, we don't get a sense that there's any extension of Wardex outside of America. There's no conceit that they have satellites all over the globe where other alien encounters *must* have happened. Not even a mention. It's like the John Smith idea that America is special and that a resurrected Jesus went there to deliver a whole second set of commandments, just for Americans, because they're special. This is a movie that doesn't tout American Exceptionalism, but it's most definitely the product of creators educated in that sort of groupthink.

Disclosure Day, in its sensibilities feels very of the 1980s, and I can't help but feel had it been a period piece (Spielberg loves a period piece) set in the '80's that it might have played better for me. I get the sense that Spielberg wanted to explore his anxiety around our lack of empathy, our fractioning, our tribalism, and all the unease in the world, and that, in his mind there's one unifying answer, that we're not alone and we should be thinking of something more than ourselves.  It's not hard to extract that message, but it all teeters on the edge of cloying.

The man is a masterful, thoughtful storyteller, but he has a mode he finds himself in regularly, and, while it's been a while, this is that mode. One where his sense of hope and optimism means that conflict is pretty neutered and there's a sever disconnect with reality (how many times should Margaret have been shot dead and wasn't? How terribly sloppy is Wardex as an organization?).  

This is a movie that does not lack for interest, intrigue or excitement, nor does it lack for some really good performances, and intriguing ideas, but for the most part Disclosure Day didn't hold together for me. It did feel like the "aliens guy" was trying too hard to convince me of something rather than let me get there on my own.

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No, I don't know what "HDR"
or "Barco" are...

As an adult person really interested in the collecting of toys (I'm an APRICOT, a term I just made up and is definitely not going to get adopted voluntarily by the collecting community) the idea has been percolating for some time about the potential for a Toy Story feature that takes place in the world of adult collectibles. I love going to toy shows and the idea of putting Woody and pals in the feeding frenzy of toy conventions, with nerdy adults haggling over pricing and condition of figures, or squatting and rifling through a dig bin, well it gives me tingles and has me smiling. But the basics of the idea of Woody confronting "collectibles" was already covered in Toy Story 2, and I'm not sure such an idea offers much more thematically than that (except to say we don't have to grow up and stop playing with toys, and I don't know that it would cover much different ground than The Lego Movie did). Watching Toy Story 5 served to remind me that it is a series about the importance of play for children, and that the toys in these movies have a singular desire to make children happy. Not the inner children of adults but, like, legit kids.

The prior Toy Story movies have centered around primarily Woody or Buzz, with characters like Jesse or Lotso Huggins driving home a particular emotional thread, but Toy Story 5 puts Jesse (Joan Cusack) front and center, pushing Buzz and Woody to the periphery, as Jesse, for as tough a cowgirl as she is, still has a particular traumatic trigger around being abandoned.  She has been basking in the glow of being Bonnie's #1 toy for a couple years now, but Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) needs more than just toys as friends, and as much as Jesse wants to help Bonnie connect with other kids, they're just not interested in much other than screens.

Enter Lilypad (Greta Lee), a web-enabled tablet device for kids that immediately takes the dominant spot in Bonnie's room and pushes all other concerns aside. Lily takes it upon herself to connect Bonnie to other kids from dance class, and for a moment, it seems like Lily is doing what Jesse couldn't. But in order to fit in Bonnie has to be her inauthentic self, and it's kind of a disaster for her. A late night chat with Woody (Tom Hanks) via walky-talky with a shaky connection brings Woody back to Bonnie's room, only to find when Lily returns  Jesse and Bullseye have gone missing, and a lovelorn Buzz (Tim Allen) desperate to find her. 

The human kids in the Toy Story franchise have largely been like deities, gods worshipped by these toys, and thus a bit more abstract. We are typically invested in the world of the toys, less so the world the kids inhabit. But this film places Bonnie as just as central a figure as Jesse, yes inhabiting two different worlds, but symbiotically. One needs the other whether they know it or not.  We get so invested in Bonnie's well being that it's soul crushing when she's rejected by others.  Yes, the toys love her more than existence itself, but Bonnie doesn't know this, they're not the real world to her, just a part of her very vivid imagination.

Picking up the threads of Jesse's trauma from Toy Story 2, she has her own anxiety spirals that as often elicit rage as desperation. She lashes out at Lily, at technology in general, and it's up to a trio of long dormant devices she finds in another home (led by Smarty Pants, a toilet training device voiced by Conan O'Brien) to teach her that technology has its place in a child's development as well, and can just be as important to them as old fashioned role-playing toys.

The undercurrent of the film is casting a critical - but not damning - eye at technology. It's a film that acknowledges the draw of technology and how it can entertain and how it can help a child develop in certain ways, but it is also keen to point out its limitations and even its drawbacks. Writer-director Andrew Stanton sharply observes that while technology may satisfy most kids attention, it won't satisfy all, and some kids (and adults) will prefer playtime to pixels, and wouldn't it be great if technology could connect them.

There is a secondary thread which finds a crate of next gen Buzz Lightyear toys washed ashore on a deserted island, and it slowly starts to arc its way in front of the path of the main story. Rather than being a distraction it's entertaining, exciting and curious, both in the actions on screen and the question of how it could possibly fit in the overall narrative of the story, which it does so pretty nicely.

Did we need another Toy Story movie? While it's doubtful anything will ever hit the resonant high and tumultuous events of Toy Story 3, each entry in the series has validated its existence with a narrative purpose that expands on the themes of the series, builds up its characters even more, and has a remarkable amount of fun in doing so. Five films in 30 years is hardly a flooded market. I'm not sure I want the series to continue if it outlives its cast, but if everyone's game in 2031, I'll be just as happy to see where it goes next.

---

In prep for Toy Story 5, I decided to dive into Hoppers, the previous entry in Pixar's dynasty of (mostly) quality product.... I mean, it has been a while since Pixar felt like "Pixar!" where every release was an event worth taking note and going to the theatre, even if you didn't have kids and time to kill.  The breaking point seemed to be in 2015, when The Good Dinosaur not only failed to delight critics, but kids as well. It was Pixar's first real disappointment and the sequel-heavy future looked a bit bleak from there. Not that people weren't excited for Finding Dory or a new Incredibles or Toy Story 4 but with so little new in the tank it felt like Pixar wasn't the place of innovation it once was (I mean, Into the Spider-Verse came out the same year as Incredibles 2 and, as good Brad Bird's sequel was, the Spider-Man movie made it look somewhat antequated.)

While Soul, Luca and Turning Red are all quite good films that sparkle with some of the latent Pixar magic, films like Onward, Lightyear, Elemental and Elio have all felt underbaked or formulae-gone-wrong, just gas-less films that failed to excite critics or audiences (to the point that these four, plus the Cars sequels, are the only Pixar films I haven't seen).

Hoppers' wasn't a return to form for Pixar, but it wasn't a critical or commercial failure either. In one week Toy Story 5 has already outperformed Hoppers' entire theatrical run. But then, Toy Story 5 has history, name recognition, and the might of Disney behind it. Hoppers got a trailer that didn't really tell the audience what it was about and a title which is kind of perplexing. It looked more like a Disney knock-off movie than the next great Pixar film.  

It is definitely better than a Disney knock-off, but it has some hills to climb and it doesn't fully accomplish reaching the apex. 

The title, Hoppers when paired with its protagonist images on the poster and in the trailer, is a head scratcher. Beavers aren't exactly known for their hopping ability.

"Hopping" in the movie, however, is the term for putting one's consciousness into the body of a robot animal... something the trailer sort of forgets to talk about. In the film, Mabel Tanaka is a ADHD-coded child with too much energy to burn, and a lot of festering rage. Her grandmother takes her to the glade and teaches her the tranquility of being at one with nature, of listening to its rhythms and just enjoying the peace of the Earth. A dozen years later, grandma has passed and Beaverton's Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) wants to build a beltway through the glade to make circumnavigating the city a possibility. Mabel (Piper Curda) will do anything to stop him but feels helpless, unable to get anyone else to care about nature.

She discovers her college professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) has invented robot animals that can traverse nature undetected and undisturbed, not only that but the operator is technically inside the robot, acting as the animal. Mabel hijacks the beaver robot and enters the wilderness where she discovers where all the animals that abandoned the glade are now in a concentrated space that's incapable of keeping them all. She tries to rally to animals to fight back for their land, and once again finds apathy...at first. And then...violence.

The thrust of the story is that Mabel is connected to nature and loves it wholeheartedly, and she will do anything to protect it. But her energy is off-putting and tends to deter people from her cause rather than to embrace it or see what she sees. It's a film about how utterly defeating it can be to care, how soul-crushing it seems when it feels like you're the only one who cares about a problem, and how sometimes one's efforts can not only fail, but backfire.

The problem is, as a story it doesn't offer good alternatives. It's a film that acknowledges that we need fighters in the world, and we perhaps need to have more empathy for the fighters than we do, but it doesn't tell the fighters, or the wanna-be fighters how to fight. In fact, it kind of low key shames them, puts them down, and pushes the fighters towards working with the systems that don't really work rather than trying to remake the systems so they do.  The film digs a hole for itself that it's not really equipped to get out of once it jumps in.

The standard Pixar formulae finds its stories taking place in a world that we're unfamiliar with, one which posits that it's existed the whole time only we're just being exposed to it now (the ocean life in Finding Nemo/Dory, the world of toys in Toy Story, the world of bugs in A Bugs Life, the monster dimension in Monsters Inc., the world of emotions in Inside Out etc). In presenting such a world, everything to the last detail needs to be thought through and considered. If a joke is made, the logic of the joke still needs to fit this world or world-within-a-world. In Hoppers it's the animal kingdom, or at least a regional representation. And it's kind of where Hoppers falls short in its Pixarness.  My buy-in into this world fell apart almost immediately as Mabel witnesses the mammal King George (Bobby Moynihan) leading the wilds in a rousing routine of jazzercise.

There's a clear divide that there's civilization in a city, and the place where wild animals live outside of it. But where the human dwellers may feel divorced from the bushes outside its streets, the animal kingdom considers humanity to be a part of it. There are royalty in these realms - mammal, lizards, amphibians, fish, birds and insects each have a king or queen (and yet no human king, until beaver-Mabel presents Mayor Jerry as "king" to the humans). There's just an internal lack of consistency to how this whole civilization works and while it's not fatal to the film, it does raise too many questions whilst watching to just fully relax into the story.

Similarly, I could buy into the idea of the hoppers, and even the idea that once your consciousness is placed in the animal robot you can understand other animals (but not humans) but then to have earpieces and communication with humans that cross the divide is a step too far. It's basically an invention that lets humans and animals communicate, which is a much bigger deal than the hoppers technology, quite frankly.

Toy Story 5 has a couple of animals in it and their renderings feel lightyears (pun intended) beyond the animals we see in Hoppers. The animation of Hoppers is fine but doesn't escape the conventional soft-edged trappings that CGI animated movies has largely been stuck in for over 20 years (but thanks to Spider-Verse and K-Pop Demon Hunters we seem to be finding a pathway out of) so in a way, despite being generally entertaining and with a welcome ecological message, it has a generic feel. 

[Toasty's take - we agree, I think]

I Saw This!! What I have been watching - 2025 edition (Part B)

(Part A here)

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

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me (usually Toast, but Kent this time) spending too much time in front of the TV and not writing about it. Bad Kent! Bad! But it's in part because Kent is tired and busy can't review everything.

---

Slow Horses Season 5 - 6/6 episodes
created by Will Smith (no, not *that* one)
Season 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

I've written a fair bit about Slow Horses over the past few years, and although I have not went back and reread what I wrote, I imagine my statements about the show are pretty repetitive at this point. It's probably my favourite show on TV right now and each season is just as gorge-inducing as the last.

Of course Gary Oldman's performance as head of these MI-5 rejects at Slough House was, is and will remain the biggest draw of the show, in no small part to how Oldman balances being absolutely rude and disgusting with being exceptionally hyper-competent. You want to hate him but can't help but be impressed and entertained by him. You never want to be stuck in a room with that guy though.

This latest season to a very big step forward in balancing the time and attention the main cast of characters is given. For much of the first for seasons River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) has been central focus with Lamb and Kristen Scott Thomas' MI-5 head Diana Taverner being the backbone of the whole thing, but this season steps back from the three and spotlights the Diana's incompetent boss Claude Whelan (James Callas), a political appointee, as well as Slough House's resident intolerable egotist incel Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) and agent-with-an-addiction Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards).

The House is still reeling from the previous season's very personal attack which claimed the life of Shirley's partner Marcus, and Shirley's either going to fall off the wagon or kill someone, and she seems exceptionally paranoid. But Lamb knows they're in the paranoia business and when it looks like an Agent might have been attacked (such as when Ho was almost run over if not for Shirley's intervention) there's maybe more going on than it appears. That it happens just after a courtyard massacre also seems more than coincidental.

Ho, who improbably finds himself with an incredibly attractive girlfriend, winds up in deep, deep trouble when his blind desperation for female affection maybe compromises the entirety of MI-5. And Whelan faces pressure from a ultra-right wing mayoral candidate who has blackmailing dirt on him. 

These all seem like kind of disparate threads, but the way they are woven together pull tighter and tighter over its six episodes and it's deliciously intense and quite satisfying by the end of it as the Slow Horses board seems to get completely reset.

While the bad guys of the season are virtually paper thin, with only the hint of a meaningful journey presented around them, this winds up being one of the most rollicking and propulsive of the series. And as always I got to the end and just wanted more.

A series rewatch might be called for 2026 (or maybe time to dive into Mick Herron's novels?).

---

Man on the Inside Season 2 - 8/8 episodes
created by Michael Schur
season 1

It seems a few months and a few cases have passed with Charles (Ted Danson) working for Julie's (Lilah Rich creek) detective agency. The notoriously stand-offish private investigator seems to have warmed a little bit to Charles' accompaniment, and though it's never ever uttered in the show, it just may be he's kind of the annoying father figure she never had.

But Charles has been kind of bored by the usual cases that pass through a P.I.'s office, so when the opportunity comes for Charles to go back undercover, he excitedly leaps for it. This time he needs to go inside a local, beloved community college as a guest professor (his former vocation) to help the administration suss out who is threatening them as they look to close a spurious deal with a billionaire graduate.

Almost immediately upon entering the campus, Charles meets-cute with Mona, a former pop-rock chanteuse who's now the music teacher at the College. Mona is flighty but also extremely forward and she takes as much of a shine to Charles as he does to her. Mary Steenburgen, to who Danson is married to in real life, plays Mona, and their chemistry is undeniable. It's super charming and even a quite hot, as far as septuagenarian romance goes. 

Where last season had the focus of Charles still coping with the loss of his wife and his retirement from teaching by meeting people of a similar age in a retirement home, and learning how to live and be vital again, this season circles around Charles' troubles with entering and navigating a new relationship, a new personality in his life. It's a little less meaty, but a lot more cute.

Meanwhile Julie's mom, Vanessa (Constance Marie) enters the picture, and we both learn more about why Julie is the no-nonsense woman she is, but also about the very challenging mother-daughter relationship they have. Also Jason Mantzoukas plays Vanessa's lover with that typical manic Mantzoukas energy to hilarious effect.

The cast at the college isn't quite as robust as the seniors home in season 1, although David Strathairn, Sam Huntington, Jill Talley, and Michaela Conlin all are good in their roles, it's super sweet to see that Charles has maintained contact with everyone at the retirement home and so Stephanie Beatrix, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sally Struthers and John Getz all make welcome returns. So too does Charles amusing family of dunderheaded grandsons and Mary Elizabeth Ellis as his daughter Emily and Eugene Cordero as her supportive husband Joel.

It's a comedy with a bit of a P.I./mystery twist, that ultimately becomes about family and found family. Like other Schur projects, it abounds with heart as much as humour and reminds us that constantly reminds us that even when we differ it's still possible to get along.

It's such a lovely and gentle show, teeming with big laughs and great performances. I hope we get more for years to come.

---

Down Cemetery Road Season 1 - 8/8 episodes
created by Morwenna Banks

There have been a lot of good series that have come and gone starring actors I like quite a bit that I haven't watched a second of, so it would be disingenuous of me to tell you that I was immediately drawn to Down Cemetary Road based on the pairing of Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson. I mean, it did seem an alluring idea, but the fact that it was based on a Mick Herron novels, so it may carry some of that Slow Horses juice was all the kick I needed to make it a must watch.

The plot finds Wilson's character, art restorer Sarah Tucker, getting in over her head when she starts investigating an explosion that happened in her friend's neighborhood. A man and woman were killed and a young girl, a friend of her friend's child, was hospitalized. Sarah, for reasons she can hardly explain, is utterly invested in the well being of this suddenly orphaned girl, and she hires a private investigator to look into it. Joe Silverman (Adam Godley) looks into it, and for his efforts he is killed, but made to look like a suicide. His short-tempered, vintage punk-styled wife Zoe (Thompson) can't help how astute she is and she knows somethings up.

Each begins their own investigation that crosses each other's paths more than once, that leads them to instant danger and a government cover-up led by Hamza, a highly incompetent individual (Adeel Akhtar). We spend a fair bit of time inside the government operations, what Hamza is up to, what his superiors are up to and the episodes start to unfurl a bleak tale of weapons testing and the attempts to cover it up.

The show is at its best when Wilson and Thompson are together, which they aren't much for much of the season. The second half, once the background is all pretty much revealed, moves at a pretty cracking pace as the characters start to narrow down their objective to rescuing the little girl, and nothing else matters.

It's a show that stretches credulity at times but never fully breaks it, as these two women take on powerful agencies and face ruthless killers. But the journey is a satisfying one, and the connection between Sarah and Zoe, while not solid as steel, feels weirdly open ended. A quick peek and it seems Zoe Boehm is the center of Herron's novel series but it does look like Sarah is a part of her journey going forward.

Yes, more of Wilson and Thompson together, please.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): They Cloned Tyrone

2023, Juel Taylor (screenplay Creed II) -- Netflix

Welcome back to another episode of "White Men Review Black Movies". 

I kind of cringe when I write "black movie" as a thing because, in all honesty, I am just an observer of someone else's experience, in pretty much all movies. I feel a need to label things to better understand things, to shape them into my experience. Even if my experience of it is entirely based on pop culture (and your demographic, dude). So, let's drop that from now on. I mean, its already been said, but enough is enough.

Kent writes about the movie here.

Dystopian scifi is usually set in the Near Dark Future. But we have been saying, something pithfully, for the last ten years or so, that we might be living in a dystopian future, now. Its the mind playing the same trick that it does for conspiracy theorists, in that things cannot be this horrible without being... fictional... right? Someone is out there manipulating the world, in ways more than it was always manipulated, influencing this greater enshitification (to semi-quote Doctorow) of the world that we cannot seem to claw back from.

This movie envisions a window on one particularly enshitified existence, wherein your life is dominated by run down housing projects, falling apart homes, drug dealers, pimps & hoes, drive-bys, lottery scratchers that never win, and a plentitude of alcohol & drugs. Fontaine (John Boyega, Pacific Rim: Uprising) is a low level drug dealer, morose and sardonic, who personally demands his money from Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx, Project Power), a throwback braggadocio of a pimp. But earlier that evening Fontaine broke the leg of a competitors corner boy, and as he leaves Slick's motel room, he is murdered by the competitor. Thinking-of-retiring ho Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris, The Marvels) witnesses it.

The next morning, Fontaine wakes in his bead to begin his usual routine: talk to mamma through her door, buy a scratcher & lose, buy a 40 of malt liquor, give the bum some, etc etc etc. His routine and life is empty, but not ended. But Slick and Yo-Yo notice; how could they not. Their state of befuddlement allows them to notice the black SUV that snatched up a man and connect it to whatever is going on. Following it, they are led to a typical rundown house which happens to have an elevator in the closet, which leads down to a secret mad scientist laboratory. And thus it really begins.

So, hidden lairs, evil scientists, massive (and I mean MASSIVE) conspiracy, and satirical commentary. At the same time the Shadowy Bad Guys are keeping the cliche thug lifestyles alive they are also breeding a whiter black man, someone who can "pass" (except the hair, the hair is sticky). Yes, this community, and others, are "the control group" because gentrification is the end-goal, a homogenization of all of American, a more united United States. Cringe.

The movie has a lot of fun making its commentary while playing on so many cliches and negative stereotypes. One of the deepest cuts happens as background noise in a hair salon as a teacher complains about having to spend her own money on school supplies, only to have it all fade away as soon as her hair straightener is applied. I cannot comment on how effective the social satire is, but it was all well constructed. 

Wait. "Black-Comedy" ? That tag is its own deep cut.

Go-Go-Godzilla #33: Godzilla vs Kong

Director: Adam Wingard
Year: 2021
Length: 113 minutes

The Gist:
I guess because of the understanding of how the Titans communicate and sense each others' presences, Monarch is protecting Kong on Skull Island within a gigantic dome from alpha Titan Godzilla. Kong isn't stupid though, and he knows his fortress is actually a prison. Dr. Ilene Andrews is Monarch's chief Kong-ologist, and her deaf adopted daughter, Jia, seems to have a special bond with Kong. She's taught him some sign language, but they keep that between them.

Walter Simmons is the megalomaniac head of Apex Cybernetics, a very powerful tech organization. He recruits ex-Monarch researcher and Hollow Earth theorist Dr. Nathan Lind after telling him he's created a  vehicle for safe entry into the centre of the planet but what they need is a Titan to lead them to the gateway.

Using his connections they manage to get to Skull Island and convince Ilene that this mission is a good idea. On the way to the gateway, Godzilla attacks a drugged, dazed, and seemingly depressed Kong. Kong fights valiantly, enough to ward Godzilla off, but it's no victory. To continue on the path they've chose would risk another attack. But tracking Godzilla, they discover a gateway, and airlift Kong there.

They make passage into middle earth where they discover Kong's home territory, seemingly abandoned, but just laced with stones full of a new form of energy.  Unknown to Doctors Andrews and Lind, this is what Walter Simmons was really after. Apex Cybernetics created a giant remote controlled Mecha-Godzilla that uses a hybrid cybernetic mind link between a human host and one of Ghidora's skulls from the previous film to control it, but it needs the raw power of the Hollow Earth to power it.

Godzilla knows that Kong has found a hotbed of power and, from Hong Kong big G revs up his atomic blast and opens up a hole right to Kong's homestead (that's 6000+ KM for reference). Armed with a super-charged axe, Kong makes his way to the surface to battle Godzilla (basically hopping up the tunnel Godzilla just bore into the Earth...all 6000+ KM), and once again finds he's just not a match. Godzilla nearly kills him.

Meanwhile, Simmons is out to prove man is the Apex Predator once more and sets MechaGodzilla out into the wild. It's a brawl, and Godzilla's about to lose, but Nathan uses the HEAV as a defibrillator and revives Kong. Jia explains to resurrected Kong that Godzilla doesn't have to be his enemy, and that he needs help. Kong steps in, and the two decimate Mecha-G in a pretty nice tag-team (Godzilla charging Kong's axe with his atomic breath was just aces). They reach an uneasy truce, an understanding of cohabitation, and go their separate ways.

Oh yeah, Mark and Madison Russell from the last film are in this as well. Madison is obsessed with a Titan-focussed conspiracy podcast run by Bernie Hayes, who works for Apex Cybernetics. Along with Madison's friend Josh, they manage to meet up with Bernie and go on a fruitless and meaningless adventure which culminates in them dumping a flask of whiskey on a computer to give Mecha-Godzilla a moment's pause, which is just enough to make a difference it the big finale.

Godzilla, Friend or Foe:
He's the same Godzilla as previous, a massive force of nature, but we get the sense that he's not *just* a force of nature. That he can think a bit too, and even socialize with others.

The Samesies:
Just like the previous Godzilla eras, the continuity here ain't so tight between the films, especially when you add Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to the mix, it's not easy to fit all the pieces together of what humanity knows about the habits and behaviours of the Titans and Hollow Earth, and when they knew about it.  I'm sure it's all fudge-able, in the same way one has to fudge Star Wars continuity to make it make sense, but it's not all there on the screen.

Like many Godzilla films past, the technology available to mankind has gotten really advanced. There's some heavy investment into "super science" and research infrastructure, even way beyond the previous film. King of the Monsters toes the sci-fi waters, where GvK just jumps right in. It's pretty unapologetic about it, too, which I like a lot.  

Mechagodzilla having a connection to Ghidorah is right out of the Heisei era Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II, as is the idea of Ghidorah taking over the robot from its human controllers.

Like King Kong vs Godzilla, there's lore introduced here that suggests the two beasts have an ancient rivalry. This film goes into it a lot more than the 60's film did, though. 

The Differences:

The Hollow Earth was teased in the previous film and even visited via an underwater portal (which I guess explains why there wasn't all the topsy-turvey-ness others have reported. The reason they don't go back to that gateway is, well, because they blew it up with a nuke.  Anyway, the visit to the Hollow Earth here is very adventuresome and exploratory. It's vibrantly realized and I really dug this sequence.

The HEAV (Hollow Earth Aerial Vehicle?) is not too far off from the Super-X hovering tanks of Toho films past, although these are strictly transportation meant to accommodate the flippidy-doo journey into Hollow Earth. I like the Tron-like light trails it leaves behind in its wake.

I haven't been re-watching Kong films, but doesn't Kong usually have something of a connection with young women? I think this is the first time he's really had a relationship with a child, and maybe the first time he's shown an aptitude for communicating with sign language.

This is the first Godzilla movie to feature a podcaster, and dive into conspiracy theories as they apply to the Monsterverse. Of course, this is the annoying thing where we know more than Bernie does.

Anyone worth caring about?
Oh, so much more to care about than in the previous film. Rebecca Hall as Ilene and Alexander Skarsgard as Nathan are both immediately and infinitely more appealing and likeable than Vera Farmiga and Kyle Chandler. Chandler is still in this film but really tossed into the background, where he should be. Hall, Skarsgard, and Kaylee Hottle (Jia), as well as the Apex and Monarch crews, are all basically team Kong, while Millie Bobbie Brown (returning as Madison), Brian Tyree Henry as Bernie, and Julian Denison as Josh are the largely useless and purposeless team Godzilla but quite likeable. I'm happy to see some of this crew are back in one of two "Empire" movies this March of 2024 in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (see also Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire).

But, really, the best character in the film is Kong. He's so expressive. He's a big, homesick, lonely boy, with such soulful eyes, and every moment he has with Jia made me just a little, teensy bit weepy.

The Message:
Uh, it's possible to make peace with even your longest-standing enemy? *ahem*

Rating (out of 5 Zs): ZZZ
This isn't a super-smart movie, and it's sense of scale goes all out-of-whack, but boy does it know how to have fun. If there's a big difference between this and King of the Monsters it is exactly that point. The characters in this film are going on a big old ride and despite the peril they may be in, the performers seem to be having fun. It's contagious. 

The Kong v Godzilla fights are very well orchestrated with a LOT of fun little nuances you could never accomplish in suitmation. That's not a dig on the fun of suitmation, but just part of the comparison. CGI frees the filmmakers up to create more expressive creatures, and have more nuanced fights. Not sure the physics always work out in its favour but who cares!? Big dumb fun is supposed to be exactly that.

I just wish Skarsgaard was playing Tarzan in this.

Sleepytime Factor:
I did have a brief little headbob of a nod during the Ghidorah-head discovery or one of the team Godzilla scenes, but I never went right out.

The Pentaverate

 2022, d. Tim Kirkby (Look Around You) - Netflix
created by Mike Meyers

Even by the third Austin Powers movie, Mike Meyers' sense of comedy had waned, or, if not waned, not kept up. His last invested work of comedy was the ill-advised and much derided pseudo-brownface comedy The Love Guru, and excepting a few small parts, the odd Shrek cash-in and a weird spate of recent Dr. Evil talk show appearances, Meyers' public output has been next to nil.

So The Pentaverate is a big deal, but if we were already a bit tired of his Klumps-ian penchant for playing multiple roles in the same production, what to think of a vehicle where he plays, based on the title and initial peeks, at least 5 key roles (in reality it's at least 7)?

I went into The Pentaverate very, very, very, very...very (that's 5) hesitant, bracing myself for the worst. The worst, typically, being an ageing comedic performer having lost touch with both what's funny in general, and what made them funny in the first place. (I've just reminded myself that a new Kids in the Hall sketch series is set to break very soon, and I'm similarly very, very, very, very....very [5] nervous). Thankfully, this is not the worst worst-case scenario.

The setup is the Pentaverate is a secret organization that attempts to guide the world for good, and when it cannot, it at least attempts to rectify the bad. We're introduced to them via Keegan Michael Key playing a physicist working on cold fusion. He's kidnapped by the Pentaverate, indoctrinated into their history, and ask by the four (all Meyers as a Russian oligarch, an Australian Murdoch-ish news media baron, a British Attenburg-ian thespian, and a former rock music manager) to join as their fifth member (the previous fifth [Meyers] having been recently murdered, as the investigating Maester played by Jennifer Saunders later declares). Oh also his death has been faked and if he turns them down he has to die.

Meanwhile, in low-fi Canada, local Toronto network reporter Ken Scarborough (Meyers, playing just a sooper nice guy, eh?) is fired from his longtime gig for being, basically, too nice and too boring. He has one last shot at making a compelling story, so he hits CanConCon (Canadian Conspracy Convention) and gets embroiled in the mystery of The Pentaverate, guided by a fanatical conspiracy nut from Long Island (Meyers again) whose beliefs about the Pentaverate cannot be disproven, even with evidence, which Scarborough gathers as he infiltrates the security force of the organization.

I was immediately taken with this show's style, it's weird medieval elements denoting the organization's age, the sprawling New York skyscraper whose interiors are both brutalist and retro futuristic, taking inspiration from 70's scifi things like Logan's Run and the Black Hole. It's not a cheap looking show, and in certain respects it could very well have been a mid-budget motion picture reedited and carved into 6 unevenly-sized episodes (with title sequence intros from Jeremy Irons breaking kayfabe frequently).

The music struck me instantly, and the first title sequence I recognized Orbital's classic electronica track "The Box" which seemed perfect. The duo did the soundtrack for the whole series, and it's rather incredible. Meyers, for his part, is excellent at inhabiting character and playing off himself. Perhaps he's such a perfectionist that this is really the only way he can ensure he gets things just perfect to his sensibilities. As he shows up in different prosthetics again, and again and again, I had to ask if it was the right move...wouldn't it be better if someone else played a few of those roles. By the end, I don't think so. He relishes each of these intense make-up jobs equally, and I don't know that another performer would treat any of these roles with the same care and zeal. I really respect his performances here. They're pretty great.

I didn't talk about Debi Mazar in this
post, but she's kind of incredible

Which all makes it very hard to say this isn't terribly funny. It's got some good bits, a few great bits, a few decent bits that should have been better or maybe were better until they got overplayed. An over-reliance on poop and dick jokes, and cheeky humour of the old Austin Powers sort, plus Meyer's penchant for fourth wall busting which is a 50/50 gamble whether the joke is worth breaking the reality of the film. What Powers had, at least, was a very specific type of film to parody. Here his influences are varied and not cohesive (outside of a lot of 70's genre media like The Six Million Dollar Man and The Prisoner), so he's reliant upon his own setup to build jokes off of. It isn't a terrible setup but it's also not fully congealed... there's more than a few plotholes and question marks around the Pentaverate's operation.

I admire that Meyers went into this with a message, a critical eye looking at conspiracy theorists and the question of who benefits from propagating them. There are more than a few exchanges that aren't denigrating the followers so much as asking them to quit avoiding the truth, to stop living in the fog of deception. He also has a wistful wish to return to trustworthy news, and even a plea for kindness and civility, and an end note that diversity matters (hopefully that was practiced behind the scenes). I really appreciated that the messaging doesn't get lost amidst all this silliness, nor really swing like a bludgeon. There's not really any punching down here, there is a lot of punching up... but you know what could have used a bit more punch up....?

I like this, not love, but like. I'm always a sucker for Canadiana and Meyers seems especially wistful about it lately. If there's any overt agenda here it's convincing the audience that Canadians are pretty great, (even if we talk a little funny) and maybe if we had a little more Canadianness in the world it would be a bit better.

3+1 Short Paragraphs: Beckett

2021, Ferdinando Cito Filomarino (Antonia.) -- Netflix

I am a man who likes to watch the familiar draped in the clothes of the unfamiliar. I have started re-watching Shetland, a typical British procedural but set in the remote communities of the Shetland Islands. The islands are so foreign yet familiar looking, bleak yet beautiful, the procedural crime stories sad but a comfortable wool blanket. So, Beckett feeling to me like a typical man-on-the-run American thriller set in a foreign land also sounded like thriller comfort food. But Kent's write-up told me it was more, more than typical, less about the capable American foiling his foes while running from a political conspiracy (men on the run, are always on the run from a conspiracy) and more about the Every Man, the far less capable man who decides not to give in. And it all takes place in Greece, a country we see so little of, besides sea side shots from yachts and vacation villas.

Beckett (John David Washington, Tenet) and April (Alicia Vikander, Jason Bourne) are vacationing in Greece. She seems to know what she is doing, and he is just tagging along, following her lead. They decide to avoid the turmoil of political and explore more remote areas in the hills, but this has them heading late to the B&B they had booked, Beckett driving the small car down the narrow not-lit-at-all roads, until he falls asleep at the wheel. He awakens, finding April dead within the ruins of a small house, but not before a brief flash of a red headed boy being sheltered by a woman. When he comes fully awake, neither are to be found, and it is only Beckett, April and his immense regret and grief. A few days later, after a short recovery in hospital amid the awkward calls to April's family and language barriers, Beckett returns to the scene, distraught, needing to make it real, needing to ... end it all? And then someone starts shooting at him, including one of the policemen who took his statement.

From there Beckett is on the run, a run through rough, unfamiliar terrain. He does not speak Greek, he does not have any money, he does not know where he is going, he does not know who to go to. At first he is just ... running, but after a few missteps which get others hurt, he finally sees an image of the boy from the ruined house, and now he needs to find out why, why people are shooting at him, why this is happening to him. 

Much of the interplay between plot and Beckett is through his average person eyes. The conspiracy is muddled, even after some hints and exposition; Beckett, and us via him, are not meant to understand it all. Its all happening around him, to him and he is just running on adrenaline, reacting, with one goal -- find that boy, or at least what happened to him. It is always rough, full of pain and exhaustion. We don't question when John Wick pushes past the bullet wounds and thousand punches, but when Beckett does it, we feel the weight, the effort required. And when it ends, not with a grand action sequence nor masterful reveal, just a blunt, foolish fall from a great height, we feel the relief and accomplishment along with Beckett. I was glad for this less than slick journey through Greece, with a hint at what they have been going through, even though I am not expected to understand it all.

Beckett

 2021, d. Ferdinando Cito Filomarino - netflix

There's a scene in this film where the titular Beckett (John David Washington) attempts to grab a woman's moped as he flees for his life from the people trying to kill him. In a typical action movie he would successfully speed off and a high speed chase through the streets of Athens would commence. In this movie Beckett is easily beaten off by the woman and she speeds off, leaving him to find another avenue of escape from his pursuers.

This is not, in any way, a conventional action/suspense/thriller. It adopts the man-out-of-place espionage trope but never makes Beckett anything more than a man. He's not an action hero, he's not a super spy, he's not the "impossible white male", and he's not about to become any of those things. He's caught up in something bigger than himself, and he's perpetually out of his depth. He gets beaten, shot, stabbed, on top of physical injuries sustained after a car crash early in the film kills his girlfriend (Alicia Vickander...doing someone a favour). But he's not immortal, he's not invulnerable.  Washington carries the burden of every injury in his physical performance, and the exhaustion, panic and desperation is never lost on his face.

Moreover, the death of his girlfriend finds Beckett distracted from his grief and guilt for much of the film, as he fights for survival, but you can't always hide these things as the emotions flood out of him, out of control. This vulnerability is not something we ever really see in these types of movies, certainly not from the "hero" character, and it's disarming watching a grown man weep.

Add to the mix the frightening aspect of being a foreigner in an unfamiliar country with a language barrier getting in the way, and being embroiled in a kidnapping conspiracy that's intentionally obfuscated to both Beckett and the audience, it's quite easy to sympathize with just how stacked the odds are against him.  There's two possible scenarios presented for what Beckett is caught up in, and neither really matter.  What Beckett is all too keenly aware of is what he's seen, and he later learns that even what he knows is a threat that can derail the plans various people have. 

This film is not faring well with audiences and critics are being only a little more generous. I think its subversion of the expected action thriller playbook and the dismissing of the conventions of the hero archetype throw people for a loop.  In these situations we want so see bravery, boldness, fortitude, and rising to the occasion, not cowering in fear, fleeing for one's life, and next to no fighting acumen out of the lead.  But that is this film's whole purpose to subvert these expectations and kind of plunk an average man into a larger caper and still have him be an average man.  Beckett worries about involving others, enlisting their help, both because he fears they may call the police (who are not to be trusted) and also because it means putting them in danger as well.  His own actions have consequences for himself and others, and the way Washington plays it, he's very aware of this.  He's not an action hero, but he is a good person.

(minor spoilers)

Beckett, following his girlfriend's death in the car crash and a few days recovery, is about to overdose on vicoden, at which point he is attacked for the first time.  Despite wanting to die because of his grief, he doesn't want to be killed.  His adrenaline kicks in and it's fight or flight (mostly flight).  We see these moments where his adrenaline kicks in, where, still upsettingly wounded, he's able to push on, to keep running, to fight back (and the fighting is always very fraught and messy).  But the moment the adrenaline drops, his sense of guilt and grief get the better of him.

The final stages of the film, Beckett makes an ill advised jump from the third story of a parking garage onto the roof of a car.  At this stage he's been through the absolute ringer both physically and mentally and he's just trying to do something good, to have something good come out of all of this madness.  This is where you have to remember that Beckett was ready to kill himself earlier in the film, an that now if he's going to die it will at least serve a purpose.

(/end spoilers)

I'm quite enamored with this film and with Washington's performance.  The "everyman" is so rarely ever an everyman.  Look at North By Northwest, similar plot but it's Cary fucking Grant in the most charming Cary Grant mode of his career.  In that Hitchcock thriller it's not an everyman caught up in a big espionage plot, it's Cary Grant, and that's the difference.  John David Washington has a very small portfolio at this stage, and while he's definitely a compelling lead, there's no "John David Washington" persona to ascribe to him or his performances, he's still able to disappear into the role he's playing.  Beckett is not the same as "Protagonist" in Tenet and he's not the same as Ron Stallworth in BlacKkKlansman.  The only thing he can't escape is being notably Denzel's kid, but he's also very much a different performer than his father....it's the biggest burden he bears, as for some he may never be seen outside of his father's shadow. For me (and for a lot of directors) he's already a compelling leading man in his own right.

Director Filamarino here captures the Grecian countryside and cityscapes beautifully, but never loses track of the fact that Beckett is our point of view character.  We see the majestic landscapes or the city rooftops from the freeway from Beckett's perspective.  In one scene Beckett is at a cliff's edge looking upon a gorgeously expansive terrain. There's no civilization in view, but Beckett's only path forward is down.  As much as he comprehends the beauty, the awe is more in how unaccommodating it is for Beckett's plight.  Same with the city, having finally made it to Athens, he still needs to navigate this unfamiliar metropolis safely to get to the safety of the US Consulate, and it's pretty, but daunting.

Does it compare to the more visceral thrills of a Marvel or Fast and Furious film? Of course not, but it's not supposed to.  It's asking us to connect with a character and a situation, to really live in the tension and danger and emotions the character is bathed in, to make one's self feel so vulnerable and helpless and just looking for a way out, for someone to fix it.  It's full of depressing reality, which isn't the escapism most people are looking for.

3 Short Paragraphs: Angel Has Fallen

2019, Ric Roman Waugh (Snitch) -- download

Mike Banning has been trying to quit his job since the beginning of this franchise. It started in Olympus Has Fallen, where he persevered to save the POTUS after a horrible attack on the White House. He stuck around for London Has Fallen, when a number of world leaders are killed and POTUS has kidnapped. When we return, he's still protecting the POTUS, but the presidency has moved on to Trumbull (Morgan Freeman). Mike is not as old as his boss, but he's more broken down, suffering from the effects of so many years of extremely dangerous service. So, of course, we toss him immediately into the fray, as an assassination attempt on President Trumbull plays out. And then, to add insult to literal injury, Mike is implicated.

The first two were about attacks on the US from outside, this is about an attack from within. In the Movie Universe, progressive presidents have been moving the US away from its aggressive stance, towards a more moderate one, a more just one, the one that much of the American people still believe they represent. When America plays in fewer wars, they buy less guns, and the Military Industrial Complex loses money. An old buddy of Banning is a profiteer in said Complex, and is seeing his own American Dream die because of the POTUS and his plans. So, die he must. He doesn't.

Gone are the reasons to watch this movie, no connection to the first beyond characters, no style choices beyond Generic Actioner, not even a closed room movie. I watched it because I had to round out the commitment I already made, sort of like I finish off so many books, "just because". But as mentioned in the last movie, they are often Easy Clicks, when dancing around the HDD full of Movies I Should Watch Instead. And yes, it satisfies something base inside of me. I like Gerard Butler, for pretty much the role he plays here (aging, full of ouch) and I like Danny Huston, who has done a lot of Generic Actioners, despite my brain type-casting him as a thoughtful supporting member, via Silver City and 21 Grams.