31 Days of Halloween: Night Patrol

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3 Short paragraphs (Or Not): The Rip

2026, Joe Carnahan (Copshop) -- Netflix

The Rip is a cops & crime movie starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon as two aging, tired and possibly corrupt cops dealing with finding Too Much Money in a cartel stash house. Ben and Joe worked together twenty years ago on his movie Smokin' Aces but Matt and Joe have never worked together before. But seeing the two friends together in a movie, under Joe, says a lot about the collaboration between the three. 

When the credits rolled was the first time I was reminded this was a Carnahan movie.

The movie begins with the murder of police captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco, S.W.A.T.). She's walking in a parking lot when two masked individuals attacked, ending her life with a shotgun, but not before she enters a txt into a phone and tosses it away.

Next up, the intros. As the Tactical Narcotics Taskforce (TNT) squad reels from the death of their captain, Internal Affairs and "the Feds" (FBI) are also there, as this Miami-Dade station is already under the microscope after the disbanding of a fully corrupt major case squad, which has made things tough for the TNT. This little opener, constantly switching between Detective JD Byrne (Ben Affleck, Mallrats) and the others in the bullpen, especially him squaring off with his own brother FBI Agent Del Byrne (Scott Adkins, Avengement), to the point of fisticuffs. Meanwhile, Lt Dane Dumar (Matt Damon, The Wall), squad leader, is chatting with Major Vallejo (Nestor Carbonell, The Morning Show) about how difficult this all is, and whether he really even wants to be a cop anymore. Between the damage to their reputation by way of the other corrupt cops and the death of their friend and comrade, he's dispirited.

This opening is dialogue forward; in fact, much of the movie is. Writers Carnahan and Michael McGrale (The Following) really lean into the cop shop talk, a mixture of cop jargon and street lingo. They build personalities and build expectations for the viewer, of what we will think of these guys. Are they Good Guys? Are they just another bunch of corrupt cops. And also, Vallejo has pointed out the Feds are here because they believe another cop was responsible for Velez's killing, so pretty much everyone is a suspect.

Just need to post at least one line of dialogue, so you get the idea; from Byrne, as he talks to his brother about the aforementioned corrupt cops:

"Not a lot of straight-A students. But superb fucking murder police. And you guys fucking torched the place. Which further hamstrings Jackie’s investigation because now all the VCAT guys, not just the bent ones, are buried fucking alive."

Then Dane gets a tip on his phone, a text message from a burner phone about a money house belonging to the cartels. As they are all leaving the station, he tells them what's what and they are all coming along, no OT, it just has to be done. If you are quick, you might catch that he tells one person one dollar value, another person a different amount. Hmm...

From there, its somewhat typical Miami cop fare. They go to a run down subdivision where apparently the only occupied house is the one they are going to. The cartels buy up homes to hide their monies in plain sight. Inside is Desi Lopez Molina (Sasha Calle, Sugar), living in her late grandmother's house. "Nope, no money here!" she says, of course, but they bulldoze their way in with typical veiled cop threats. We are not exactly supposed to like these guys, definitely not trust them. In today's context, that's not hard to impress upon the viewer. Then they find a completely empty attic. In an old lady house, just this side shy of hoarding (the garage has 30 years worth of phone books...), an entirely empty room is more than a little suspicious. And Desi has no idea, nope, no way. When they kick in a wall, they find industrial tubs jam packed with neatly sorted, packaged and labelled cash. Not $150k as Dane suggested to some, but much more... way way WAY more. Millions. Tens of millions.

And with my typical overly long opener, the movie is presented. Stupid Money. Enough money for all these cops to just disappear, even if they weren't corrupt. Even the best of them would be tempted. And Desi just sitting, handcuffed, on the sidelines, being all nervous, cuz she knows exactly who owns the money.

And it begins. The movie instantly begins playing them off each other. Dane vs Byrne, the two biggest personalities in the room. Some come together, just counting the money and postulating what they could do with it, like everyone does when they see a big lottery number on the TV. Others are acting very suspicious, pulling out burner phones, even though Dane specifically asked everyone to give up their phones, as this is the kind of money that ruins everything. But do we even trust Dane? Byrne definitely doesn't. But who do we trust? The movie plays on our expectations, manipulates everything we know about these kinds of movies and has a lot of fun with the constant, never ending stream of dialogue and chat, back and forth between the squad. 

There are a few twists. A phone call from the cartel saying "go ahead, take the money, we don't care, we will accept the loss, and no we didn't kill Jackie, but we don't need the heat from killing a house full of cops." And who is Detective Ro (Steven Yeun, Nope) talking to on his burner phone? And what about the house at the far end of the roundabout that is blinking "PIGS" on their porch lamp in morse code? What about when the power is cut and masked, armoured thugs unload automatic weapons into all their vehicles, essentially trapping them all there. Its not a scene-ender, it doesn't kill anyone, so... why? What the ever living fuck is going on here?

I thought the movie was pretty effective in leading your around by the nose but not directly to the conclusion. You might get an idea of where you will end up, but I doubt most will. I am not saying there is a Big Reveal, but there are some satisfying revelations. The pair of leads are now aging action stars, so the movie does lean on them being tired. grizzled veterans, but with still the power & motivation to be effective. And I loved the fact that the movie wanted you to put down your phone, sit up on the sofa and just listen.  I also enjoyed that it was pretty much a "bottle episode", primarily taking place inside the stash house. We get to become comfortable with the characters, watch their faces, make our own decisions on what happens next.

Oh, and we do find out why Jackie was killed, her connection to the stash house and who was corrupt, and who wasn't.

KsMIRT: all groaned up

 KsMIRT=Kent's month in reviewing television. I haven't reviewed television in a while. Truth be told, I find reviewing television frustrating, as I don't have the capacity to review episode by episode, nor do I have the capacity to really, really dive into a full season. So why bother with these half-assed reviews? I mean, how can I not? Can I not? 

This Month:
The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins Season 1 (2026, NBC - 10/10 episodes)
Deadloch Season 2 (2026, AmazonPrime - 6/6 episodes)
Last One Laughing UK Season 2 (2026, AmazonPrime - 6/6 episodes)
Star Wars: Maul: Shadow Lord (2026, Disney+ - 10/10 episodes)

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One of the things I hate the most about my brain is how deplorably poor it is at remembering clever one-liners or turns of phrases from the media I watch. I'm so direly envious of those who can, like, the next day after watching a new show or movie, perfectly use a quote or reference in correct situational context. I mean, I would rather be funny on my own, but part of being funny is remembering one's own bits and I have a real hard time remembering to commit to a bit. (Toasty has a running gag on this blog of citing an obscure or absurd reference point when bringing up an actor in his entries, and when I try to do it, I can commit about 12% to the bit, often forgetting mid-post about the bit.... We could really do with an editor ... if we were striving for any sense of professionalism... which I gave up on long ago).

I say this because shows from the Tina Fey and Robert Carlock school of situational comedianity (30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girls 5Eva) are so, so amazing at one liners and ridiculous turns of phrase that I want desperately to remember so, so many of them, but it's a futile want...my brain just ain't wired that way.  The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins is another Carlock production, co-created with Sam Means (who wrote on all three of the aforementioned Fey/Carlock specials) and serves as a spotlight piece for Tracey Morgan (Cop Out).

Morgan plays the titular Reggie Dinkins, an ex-NFL pro who was the hottest draft pick one year and an instant icon, until a gambling scandal drove him out of the sport and into a reclusive lifestyle for two decades. Daniel Radcliffe (Swiss Army Man) plays Arthur Tobin, a certain-award-winning documentary filmmaker who has convinced Reggie to let him film him as he prepares to mount a comeback into the public spotlight. Tobin himself is trying to mount a comeback after an epic (and viral) meltdown on the set of a Marvel movie he was hired for, and then fired from. 

Reggie's ex-wife Monica (Erica Alexander, Wu-Tang: An American Saga) is still his manager and they have a very friendly and familiar relationship, but whatever was between them romantically is long since dead. Monica is likewise venturing out into new terrain as she explores taking on other clients, but is constantly interfered with by a rival organization run by Barry Hu (Ronnie Chang, The Devil Wears Prada 2).

Reggie and Monica's son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall, Space Jam: A New Legacy) is kid of privilege but seems to really love and admire his dad, but harbours secrets that he fears would shame his father...really, geeky secrets. Reggie's much younger fiancee, Brina (Precious Way), is much more than a gold digger, for her social media influencer empire is on the rise and she's making her own serious money. She actually loves Reggie, and somehow the show makes it work.  And then there's Reggie's best friend and former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynahan,Hoppers), who lives in the basement but is utterly committed and loyal to Reggie.

The gags are, as should be expected, a rapid fire, just an incredible barrage of ridiculous things often said ridiculous ways. There's some fantastic physical comedy (the peak, for me, was Rusty chasing a hard boiled egg he left in a pocket of his laundry and dives into the top-loader washing machine only to get stuck in the machine, vertically upright...and then it starts agitating) and a strong roster of recurring characters such as Reggie's sports rival (Craig Robinson) and Arthur Tobin's hook-up with a postal worker played by Megan Thee Stallion (just seeing the two of them in the same frame is wild...and kinda hot, the size difference and sexual tension is palpable).

Of course the show lives only at the whims of Tracey Morgan who is quite in the pocket on this one. While it may be hard to imagine Morgan as a genuine physical threat on the football field, his physicality is one of the greatest gifts to comedy especially when they "age down" Morgan for flashback sequences that barely try at all. But Morgan also delivers his one-liners with his trademark inflection and gusto, and the writers sharply swivel back and forth between making Reggie surprisingly astute, educated and pop-culture savvy and ridiculously lacking self-awareness and being a goof. The treat is how these two sides of the character don't really contradict one another.

Even among all the riches of gags there's still a heart to this show, a desire to see these down-but-not-out characters actually succeed (although there's a definite Lucy Van Pelt to the whole thing where just as success seems to come, the football is pulled away). Excited to hear Season 2 is coming.

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I quite loved Deadloch's first season, so I was super bummed when Season 2 came out and I no longer had a subscription to AmazonPrime to watch it, and there were no viewing alternatives.  Eventually I would have to feed the Bezos machine my daily quarters to get access, but I wasn't going to like it. Would it sour my experience of watching things on the Amazon platform? Turns out, no, not so much.

Season 1 ended with a nice pat ending for the mystery/ies at hand but did as so many series do and attaches a coda to the end that teases where a second season might be heading. In this case it was having detectives Eddie Radcliffe (Madeline Sami) and her/their partner Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) investigate the death of Eddie's former partner, Bushy, with Dulcie's exhuberant wife Cath in tow.

It's kind of amusing then that within minutes of the first episode of season 2 we find Eddie's quest for justice being pretty decisively slammed down by the copious evidence that all but confirms Bushy's death was a suicide...a dated suicide note in his handwriting perhaps the most damning piece in a trove of them.

So if Bushy's death isn't going to be the thrust of this season, what is? Well, Eddie's gone completely mental about the verdict on Bushy's case that she's/they're reluctant to go along with Dulcie on the new case in which a dead crocodile near Barra Creek on the north shore of the continent was found with a severed arm in its mouth. Whose arm is it? Does it connect with the mystery of two missing Swedish backpackers? And what's with all the dead and missing crocs? 

It turns out Barra Creek is Eddie's hometown, and most of the people there know her/them, and with few positive associations. Eddie's father was recently released from prison and it turns out Eddie was the one that put him there, convicted of killing crocs, which are a protected species.

But there's so many other mysteries afoot that it's hard to connect them all, or to see if they're even all connected. Eddie is too close to the situation to see anything clearly and is even more unhinged than she/they were last season, while Dulcie is getting lost in process and procedure, being swallowed by the job, which starts interfering in her relationships with Eddie and Cath.

This season of Deadloch builds an insane community around Barra Creek that is only a pile of mysteries heavier than an Australian riff on Letterkenny. There's the animosity towards city folk, and all the cultural conflict between the indigenous population and the redneck hicks in town, as well as the competing croc tourism business which finds the small-potatoes Darrell family (whose patriarch may or may not be the owner of the dismembered arm) competing with the aggressively bro-polished attractions of Jason Wade's (Luke Hemsworth) croc park. It's a rich, and very specific world that's a bit of a romp to visit but, woof, would be so much rougher to experience for reals.

This season is densely packed with both mysteries to unravel (concurrently) and hilarious line readings, many of which I would never have caught without the subtitles on. So often characters are talking/yelling over each other or muttering under their breath that it's pretty astounding how absolutely razor sharp the dialogue and the portrayals are here.

Dulce and Eddie get a new assistant in Leo (Jean Tong), a low-level journalist who is so low-key people barely register that they're even in the room with them. Of course when perky, ultra-polite forensics expert Abby (Nina Oyama) happens on the scene - ecstatic to be reunited with her work moms - she's uncontrollably jealous of Leo, and acts out in hilariously rude (for her, yet still quite tame) ways.

As with last season, I found it amusing how much the showrunners/creators (Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan...no Kate McHarrison or Kate McStarr?) love to reveal that so many of the female characters in this show are lesbians (or queer-coded) and the jokes about lesbians (by lesbians for lesbians) as well as feminism (by feminists for feminists) are a salve for an entertainment reality that's starved for this kind of representation.

That Deadloch had two less episodes this season was a sure sign that the first season was strong enough for Amazon to give the series a second shot but that they didn't have much confidence in it growing its numbers the second time around. McCartney and McClennan close out the series in its final episode, and we find both Dulce and Eddie in quite different places by the end of this season from where they started, and the ending is a happy one, though sad if this is the last we'll ever see of these genuinely fantastic characters.

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If I write about a reality TV show or a competition show or a panel show, I will usually do one season but not usually any more than that. I feel they're the type of show that if I'm not talking about the format then I really only have what happens to discuss, and usually there's too much to remember and write through (or too much of nothing, so nothing much to write about). Plus, quality can warble dramatically, and it can all be too much.

 That said, I feel particularly inspired to write about the second series of Last One Laughing UK, the show that got me to subscribe to AmazonPrime again (dammit).  

I discussed LOL Canada and LOL Australia back when LOL first cropped up and Amazon proliferated the format across the globe. It's interesting that the only (English language) one to have a second season is LOL UK, and I think that has to do with the fact that the UK is sooooo panel show/game/reality show intensive in a way I don't think any other country is. There's something fundamentally British about comedians faffing about in a loosely structured format that hasn't really transferred to other countries in quite the same way. The UK is a densely populated island, but it's also pretty small, which results in the comedy scene being relatively close knit in a way we don't see in Canada (due to its vastness) or in the US (due to its size and capitalistic competitiveness).  

The format of the show hasn't really changed... 10 comedians get in a room and they can't laugh or even smile broadly... if they do they get a yellow card, and if they do it again they get a red card. Monitoring them are Jimmy Carr and Roisin Conaty, which Jimmy acting as the sort of ringleader/emcee/Jigsaw of the piece. Though the pretense is that Carr and Conaty are eagle-eyed watching and then triggering the alarm if there's a laugh or a smile, the facade is less strict this season and there's an awareness the producers are feeding them the possibilities.  I wish there was even more transparency actually.  We are only seeing about 3 hours of what is probably an 8-10 hour shoot (the clock is set at 6 hours for them to be in the room, but I suspect with stopping and starting and various set-ups that it last a lot longer) and even then it's only what we're seeing of the edit (and it's clear there's at least one camera for every couple of performers tracking their movements and face). At times we the audience are seeing things that it seems Jimmy and Roisin are not... but it's always hard to know in what order things actually happened as opposed to the edit.

This second series of contestants is a great bunch and the reason I wanted to write up this series is because I had thoughts on their performance and the way the show may or may not have favoured them:

[SPOILERS WITHIN]

The majority of the contestants this season I know from watching Taskmaster, with a few exceptions. It just goes to show how great a show Taskmaster is at exposing the world to the UK comedy talents. Each contestant had to prepare a "joker", or a one-person performance of approximately 5 minutes in length.

• Romesh Ranganathan - an exceptionally prominent competitor, like, probably the most involved in everything throughout the show. His standup persona is very snarly, so he seemed like he would be a tough act, but he was always on the verge of breaking. Ramesh's joker was hammering on his lazy eye and then having prepared bits for the crowd to read which, honestly, needed to be more discomforting in most cases...but he did get one person to break.
• Diane Morgan - I haven't spent much time with Morgan's Philomina Cunk character, but Morgan seemed like an early frontronner because she should be used to being funny with a straight face as she often does this with the public as Cunk. Her joker was reading Dylan Thomas with fart breaks. Incredible. While not the most vicious player, she was definitely in the mix in the room.
• Gbemisola Ikumelo - a 2 time BAFTA award winning comedy actor/writer/showrunner, but never been on Taskmaster, so I have no idea who she is. She will go down in infamy on this show for her attempt to not react to Morgan's farts. Ikumelo was holding in the laughs to the point of pain and tears, until finally letting out a gutteral wail of a sob laugh at the end of Morgan's performance. Once eliminated she didn't hang around the green room long, having fallen ill. If I had to guess, a migraine, because surely that would happen to me too.  She was a great presence but didn't go on the offensive much. We didn't get to see her joker.
• Maisie Adam - a delight on Taskmaster season 20 doesn't seem to get much room to stretch here, at least until she goes face to face with Ramesh and the two of them start to basically roast one another. We don't get to see Maisie's joker, which is a shame. She's pretty involved in the room, but not heavy on offense.
• Amy Gledhill - a contestant on the current season of Taskmaster, where she's a very lively, vibrant presence. She was pretty recessed in the room. I have to suspect being a younger comic in the mix and the other contestants not being as familiar with her, that she wasn't as comfortable inserting herself into the more seasoned group engagements and perhaps wasn't as included or targeted in them. I think she was taken out on a cheap call though (maybe as likely because she wasn't as active a participant)
• Bob Mortimer - a legend, apparently, in the UK comedy scene, and the winner of season 1 of LOL (meh, I think Richard Ayoade gave him the win out of some sort of reverential deference), as well as a former Taskmaster contestant. I don't find his schtick very funny, I don't vibe with it, but clearly a whole generation of comedians find his shit uncontrollably hysterical. I was ready to riot if he were to be crowned winner again. His songs are dumb and his jokes seem to amuse himself more than anyone (though for some reason they are very amused). He was very involved in the whole thing and seemed comfortable in the environment being the reigning champ. His joker was abysmal, but again, the crowd seemed to love it. I dunno.
• Alan Carr - another comedy legend whom I've maybe heard of... but don't remember. He was all over the place in this one, and generally pretty funny throughout, although his joker was a bit... vintage... being a somewhat hastily constructed game show. He was giggling throughout the introduction so I thought he was an easy goner, but he stuck through well into the second half of the show.
• Mel Giedroyc - the host of the Great British Bake Off and a former Taskmaster contestant. She seemed to be an easy get, a real laugher before the show started, but she figured out her "game face" early on (sticking her lower jaw out any time she was about to laugh) and she went deeeep in this one. She was probably the most aggressive player and the one who was looking for opportunity. Her joker was a really bold physical performance which... was... very... interesting (according to David Mitchell).
• David Mitchell - a big time sketch and comedy series performer and actor who I'm quite familiar with. He was as in the mix as Mel, Ramesh, Alan, and Bob, and was seemingly perplexed the whole time.  Did he want to be there, or was that the persona he was playing, of someone who didn't want to be there, to distract him from laughing? He seemed to be acting the whole time. His joker was a terrific really bad first-time stand-up comic routine which was very droll. The only problem is the show clearly shows him smiling a number of times (at least two) and doesn't call him on it.
• Sam Campbell - the odds on favourite for the win because Sam is unflappable. Whenever someone seems to have a comedic edge on him he can completely undercut their bit in surprising and hilarious ways that seem like absolutely no big deal to him ("that's a serious issue" he says to Mitchell during a particularly funny "edgy" run in his bad-stand-up bit). Sam's joker was patentedly absurd, but he let the comedic glory be not himself, but the Tim and Eric-quality community theatre performers he had tag along in his ridiculous set piece. Sam didn't attack enough, though whenever he did chime in it was usually quite sharp. I vibe with Sam Campbell in a way I don't Bob Mortimer.

The winner of the Series was David Mitchell, and almost well earned, except for the fact of the show letting him off the hook for his various smiles. Neither he nor Sam got a yellow card, and so the final tiebreaker came down to who made the most other people laugh, and David won 2-to-one.  I think one of those smiles/yellow cards would have been the tiebreaker otherwise.  

It was a fun series, but the one thing I noticed was how weak the attacking was. On other series we would see competitors smell blood, seeing a comedian on the verge and they would just hammer on them until they broke, and nobody did that here. Mel was the closest, as was Diane Morgan at times. I also noticed that, unlike other LOL series the prize here was just a trophy, and no big charitable donation or prize money.  Also, this series didn't have much in the way of guest interjections. A notable British TV interviewer stepped in with a pretty funny series of interviews with the contestants, and Natasha Demetriou (of What We Do In The Shadows) and Ellie White came out of a cubby as "intimacy coordinators" and made everyone hilariously uncomfortable. Put them both in the next series.

Fun show. 

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In the wake of The Mandalorian and Grogu's middling box office and middling critical reception, there's a lot of angsty blogging, youtubing, tiktokking and podcasting around the state of Star Wars today (present company not excluded), and what the future might bring under Dave Filoni's guiding hand as co-president of Lucasfilm. 

Filoni was brought aboard the Star Wars train by George Lucas himself, to assist Lucas in overseeing The Clone Wars, animation being Filoni's forte. The Clone Wars got off to a rocky start, with a middling theatrical release of the first four episodes as a film (that The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like four episodes of The Mandalorian is not lost on me), but by the second season of the series the kinks had sort of been ironed out, and the series wound up being the glue that holds the Prequel Trilogy together, rather than vice versa.

Filoni went on to create the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, definitely in my top 5 Star Wars projects ever, but that too was a series that took time to build, being enjoyable enough the first season but making itself epic and its characters involving in its second season, increasing in scope for its subsequent two seasons. 

Filoni's works since then have been more in the live action space but not ignoring animation. A revival seventh season of The Clone Wars was an epic capper to the series as well as dovetailing into Revenge of the Sith, while The Bad Batch explored the fallout of the Clone Wars through a new cast of characters and featured the trademark Filoni touch of being a bit rough around the edges the first season, but gelling quite firmly and endearingly the second. What Filoni brought to these projects were incredible character-building, expansive galaxy-building, and a commitment to not forgetting what came before.

While The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and particularly Asoka had Filoni-esque highlights, there's a large contingent of the Star Wars fan base that want live action to be treated differently than the animation, as more accessible, less addled by Star Wars lore.  They're probably right. And the worry is that under his hand the future of Star Wars is going to be an ouroboros.

So when you get a nothingburger like The Mandalorian and Grogu, that worry is justified, but then you also get Maul: Shadow Lord, which expels the issues with previous Filoni-created series and manages to get up and running in a matter of a couple short episodes, rather than an entire season. 

Sure, Maul is a legacy character who has been seemingly killed on screen at least twice already, and it may be a little confusing for any casual fan to understand in what time the series takes place, but it's a show that doesn't get bogged down with the past, and it's also not overly concerned (at least with this first season) with extensively tying itself to everything else Star Wars.

Maul, here (played once again impeccably by Sam Witwer), is our anti-hero, a man who has been wronged by his former master, Darth Sidious, now the Emperor Palpatine, and also full of loathing towards the Jedi, who have gotten in his way more than once. He had, previously, attempted to create a criminal empire to take on his former dark lord, and was not just squashed like a bug, but his brother was killed in the process. He is a traumatized figure whose powers and abilities are both fueled and crippled by that trauma.

His goal, then, is to re-establish a criminal empire, as well as find himself an apprentice to help him take on his former master. The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive goals, but also focusing on both detracts from focus on the other.

On a remote planet, Janix, Maul operates in the shadows, but not deeply enough. His criminal doings have raised the attention of Brander Lawson, an inspector of the local police force played brilliantly by Wagner Maura. Lawson begins investigating Maul's operation and eventually confronts the villain, but is given a proposition, one which a good cop like him cannot accept.

Also entering the picture are Jedi master Eeko-Dio Daki (voiced by Dennis Haysbert) and his padewan Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon). They too are living in the shadows of Janix, scrounging for whatever they can get on the streets, when they confront the former Sith. 

But soon, enemies must be allies on all fronts, as the Empire becomes alerted to Maul's presence and a pair of Inquisitors begin hunting the Jedi and Sith down. As well there's a Star Destroyer full of Imperial troops and bureaucrats locking the planet down, and while it's not quite as invested in highlighting the grip of totalitarianism as Andor was, it's still unsettling and effective in showing how these types of agencies operate in tearing down existing structures of order and imposing their own.

Maul: Shadow Lord surprises at building a cast of characters worth caring about, investing us as equally in Lawson, his son, and his robot partner Two-Boots (Richard Ayoade) as we are with Master Daki and Devon as we are with Maul and his coterie.  We just know that at some point Maul has to turn on Daki and get Devon on his side. That could be a horribly clunky moment if done wrong, and at a certain point we wonder if it's going to happen at all, the show lulling us into a false sense of allyship between the parties. It's honestly surprisingly brilliant in how its story unfolds.

And then there's an epic clash that we thought would be reserved for a second season, but this show is wasting no time. It's not Filoni-pfaffing-about in its first season. It's kinetic and propulsive and easily consumable...too consumable. It is the Pringles of Star Wars, just salt, starch and grease making you crave more, and once it's over, the craving doesn't go away, only becoming stronger in its absence.

If the future isn't so bright for Star Wars live action, at least we know animation is going to be more than okay.

KWIF: a double dose of 1985 (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Well, the world sunk deeper into the shitpile this week. Everything is rank, and I feel like I've gotten numb to the horrific smell of it all, but I know deep inside I'm in full-on existential crisis. So I'm watching a lot of media that is outside of political talking points and instead is focusing on what is being done and said by whom, and why...exposing agendas and providing points where people can fight back (it all starts with awareness and education). And when I'm not doing that, I will watch a movie to escape. 

This Week:
To Live and Die in LA (1985, d. William Friedkin - Tubi)
After Hours (1985, d. Martin Scorsese - Netflix)
The Case of the Witch that Wasn't (aka "Pas de répit pour Mélanie" - "Tales for all #10", 1990, d. Jean Beaudry - Crave)

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Longtime friend and reader (and radio host extraordinaire), GAK, directed me a couple weeks back towards To Live and Die in LA, a mid-'80's underappreciated seemingly coke-fuelled gem in the self-aware ACAB subgenre, with director William Friedkin seemingly resurrecting the tone of his 1971 hit The French Connection but with 1980s Los Angeles vibes.

And, I'm glad I took that recommendation (frankly, GAK rarely, if ever steers me wrong), because...wow. What a wild movie that, somehow, 40 years later, still had more than a few great surprises in store.

In 2022, Girls5Eva coined the acronym "B.P.E.", standing for "Big P*ssy Energy", not realizing that it already had a meaning from way back in 1985: "Big Petersen Energy" (and not just because we can see the outline of William's petersen clear enough in those tight, tight jeans to tell if he's circumcised or not (he's not).

I don't know what to call Petersen's performance here. The most common attribution I see on Letterboxed is "coked-out" but that doesn't feel quite right. It is a "much" performance, and yet it's not too much. He's hopped up on something, but it's not cocaine. It's high, aggro energy, and the dial on the asshole vibes just keeps getting turned up on his Secret Service agent investigating a counterfeitter that killed his partner. But Petersen's Agent Richard Chance is not out of control, he's searching for something and it's not quite vengeance, and it's definitely not justice.

Adrenaline. Chance is a adrenaline junkie, which leads him to push himself and his partner harder and deeper into the case than his superiors have signed off on, and ultimately leads Chance into not just skirting the law but creating outright chaos on the streets and freeways of L.A. All to get what he wants. He thinks he's doing his job, but really he's chasing a high.

Peterson runs (and runs and runs), he rolls and action hero poses with his gun, he casually hooks up with his informant, Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel) and just strutting with B.P.E. in every damn scene. His Secret Service agent seems, in the opening scene, to be a decent guy, trying to do the right thing, then he does a base jump off a bridge and chases that sensation over all else and it consumes him. 

After his partner dies, he gets a new partner, Agent Vukovich (John Pankow) who winds up being completely under Chance's sway, much like Ruth. In each, it seems like they probably started a relationship in earnest, but as Chance becomes more and more fixated on the thrill of the chase, of taking down Willem Dafoe's Rick Masters, the more callous he becomes towards everyone else. He basically negs Vukovich into helping him operate outside the law and with Ruth he start to wield his "throw her back into jail" leverage in more and more unseemly ways.

The most amazing thing about Petersen's performance is how unlike him this performance seems. A typical Peterson performance is pretty subdued, I frankly never would have thought he had something like this in him. It's disgusting and fabulous at the same time.

The Dafoe of 40 years ago does not feel all that dissimilar to the Dafoe of 20 years ago, 10 years ago or today. That man had his thing figured out early and he's so astute a performer that, while perfectly capable of making Rick Masters a larger-than-life character, it's apparent that he and the Williams figured out that Petersen's performance should be the scene stealer.  It's the magic trick of the film that by the end you basically feel like Secret Service Agents Chance and Vukovich are worse guys than Masters. At least Masters seems to have respect for women.

I would just love to scream out the biggest surprise of the film, but it's still an amazing thing to discover, and still such an atypical move for any film to make, I don't want to spoil. I loved it, I cheered out loud, it gave me a mini-adrenaline rush that would make Chance envious.

All of this accompanied by Friedkin's oversaturated lens that makes L.A. feel like an alien world (which fits with Petersen's practically inhuman vibe). There's a grit and dirt to this L.A. that, unlike, say the grimy shadows in New York of The French Connection, here the sun is baking down and exposing that grunge everywhere you look. This skeevy feeling story is only bolstered by a fully of-the-era Wang Chung soundtrack that is somehow  atrocious and really, really rocks. 

The Miami Vice influence is so goddamn strong that you can see why this may have gone under the radar as a knock-off or try-hard. But it doesn't just try, it succeeds, and you could make an argument that maybe it does it better (you would probably lose that argument but you could still make it). Radical.

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From the West Coast of 1985 to the East Coast, Martin Scorsese takes us on a trip into the wild nightlife of Manhattan's artsy SoHo district.

Me and Mr. Scorsese's films don't really get along. Whatever wavelength that man is operating on, I just don't have a receiver for.  He may be one of the maestros of modern American cinema, but I remind myself that I am not an American, and that may have something to do with it. (Toasty and me, we row the same boat.)

But maybe there's something else to it, and After Hours may be the key.

After Hours was sold to me as a comedy, an grandiose one-crazy-night spectacle of chaos I would most assuredly delight in. I was not amused.

I think in most any other director's hands, After Hours would be a farce, but between Scorsese's fingers he can't help but try to squeeze for blood in this stone to prove it's human. What I mean to say is Scorsese doesn't seem capable of comedy, he can't see past the humanity in a scene or sequence, and so what should be a broadly comedic set piece winds up feeling far more dramatic than what the script intended.

The few Scorsese pictures I've seen are relatively humourless affairs (The Wolf of Wall Street seems the closest he can get to comedy, and that's appears more a satire than a straight-up chucklefest...but I haven't seen it). After Hours was clearly drafted as a comedy and even casted as one. You don't have people Teri Garr, Catherine O'Hara, and Cheech and Chong in a film like this unless you're aiming for funny... and yet, Scorsese's aim is so far off it's like he didn't even know where the target was. The few chuckles I did get in this thing seem almost accidental.

The situation finds a somewhat hapless, lonely, professional word processor Paul (Griffin Dunne) meeting a flirtatious young woman, Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a restaurant one lonely evening. They talk about the book "Tropic of Cancer" and she tells him about a friend of hers she's staying with selling plaster bagel paperweights, and to call her if he wants one. So when he gets home, he calls, and is invited over. Along the way he loses what little cash he has on him when it blows out of the cab window. At the apartment, Marcy is missing and her friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) is shirtless making a papier mache sculpture which she then enlists his help in. Things get a bit flirtatious there, I guess, and Paul makes move on her but she passes out from exhaustion. Then Marcy shows up, and ultimately she turns out to be more on the manic end of the manic pixie dream girl spectrum than the dream girl end, and he runs out fleeing in the rain.  Things just escalate from there, until he ultimately winds up running from an unruly mob looking for blood and into the den of a woman who seems like a spider who just trapped a fly.

All of this should be played as heightened and crazy as possible, but Scorsese keeps subduing his actors, having them find the humanity in the character, in the scene, and it constantly deflates the comedic tension. Instead the feeling is more...anxiety, and a bit of pathos, which aren't very funny emotions.

All the women in this film that Paul meets are on some spectrum of insane, and it reflects rather poorly on Scorsese that this is the case. (I don't know of a Scorsese story that is female led, now that I'm thinking of it. A quick look at his filmography, the only possible contenders: Boxcar Bertha, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and The Age of Innocence... I haven't seen any of them.) I can't make any sweeping statements about what Scorsese's viewpoint on women are, and I wouldn't fully judge him based solely on this film alone, but the women here are sketches and had they been allowed to be dialled into a broad comedy, they would be (mostly) pretty funny, but here we are. 

Paul, as a character, is at first driven by his libido. He's looking to hook up with Marcy...or Kiki...or whomever, but eventually that drive is overruled by his desire to just go home, but he can't seem to leave SoHo. Is he in some form of purgatory because he had lusty thoughts? Despite thinking too deeply about how Paul would be feeling in any given moment, it doesn't seem to be thinking that deeply about what got him there in the first place. It seems like Scorsese's wants to play into comedy tropes that he knows from watching so many movies, but he just can't let himself...he can't fight his instincts. I mean Marcy winds up dying from a drug overdose, and then Paul can't help but pull the sheets off her naked body (whether it's to ogle or look for burns, I don't really know, but either way, it's just too much for the moment). Paul does call it in, but he does also leave the scene, and leaves up "Dead Body" with arrows signs up in the loft, which is almost funny.

After Hours seems like one of Scorsese's biggest struggles. He's attempting a genre that is not a natural fit for him. He has this script that is, really, really quite tight, so much so it seems impossible to fail. But it does fail, and it all comes down to the director. It seems every actor is giving Scorsese exactly what he wants, but he doesn't know how to establish a tone outside of gritty realism at this stage. For Scorsese, heightened realism is maybe a half notch higher than what he normally does, at least at this stage in his career and that's still way too earthy for this material.

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The Case of the Witch Who Wasn't, or, rather, "No rest for Mélanie" mercifully finds the tenth entry in the "Tales for all" series back in Quebec with a legit French audio track rather than the weird dubbed melange of languages dubbed fully into one French or English without any real sense of syncing.

While the English title might hint at something supernatural in play, the French title is certainly more appropriate, as the story finds Mélanie's pen pal Florence, visiting her on her farm for the summer and the two wind up trying to "tame" the grumpy old witch lady, Madame Labbe.

Their method of "taming" her are acts of kindness, bringing her flowers or a hanging plant, knitting her a scarf, putting a bow on the collar of her pet pig Rose. Eventually they befriend Madame Labbe, just in time to find her hog tied on her bed after being robbed and Rose being stolen. The girls, along with Mélanie's brother and some other area kids, start investigating the break in and tracking down the thieves. Meanwhile, Mme. Labbe has become despondent and is not eating or caring for herself, and when she catches ill, the doctor says she'll likely have to be put in a home. 

Mélanie basically treats Mme. Labbe as she would treat her pet llama, or their dog or any other farm animal. She knows Mme. Labbe is human, but she reacts to her and how others react to her as if she were a possession. It's truly bizarre, but then I expect nothing less out a "Tales for all" at this point. It's like watching an alternate dimension where people in these films don't act or react like people do on our earth.

The most bizarre, and the most challenging aspect of the film is not the "taming" of Mme. Labbe, nor is it the intense moment of discovering her tied up after a robbery, or the amateur sleuthing of young children, it's the handling of Florence's arrival to town.

Florence is black, which the film doesn't treat as a capital "I" Issue, merely a lower-case "i" issue. At first, Mélanie's response to Florence's appearance is one of shock, only because we learn that Florence had sent Mélanie a picture of her white friend and has basically been writing to her details about her white friend's life...catfishing her to some degree (it also turns out Mélanie had left many details out about her life and family as well, so it's a two way street...of lies!).  And then the microagressions come out. On the face of it they seem like the good intentions of a nieve production company, but from a very modern standpoint it's absolutely cringe-inducing some of the questions poor Florence has to field. (Oh, and not to mention the scene where Mélanie accidentally takes something from the antiques shop they were investigating and when the cops roll up behind them Mélanie hands the stolen item to Florence to hide in her dress. Mélanie is not an ally.)

There's obviously a far more interesting story to be told from Florence's POV here, but that just wasn't something that the late 1980's were capable of, and so instead Florence's visit to rural Quebec winds up being a rather tertiary aspect of this trying-to-be-sweet movie.

But it's not a sweet movie. It objectifies people in a very weird way and it features a lead character whose sketchy behaviour ultimately has her rewarded with everything she desires in the end. If it didn't make me so uncomfortable, I'd be kind of impressed by it.

 

KsMIRT: vintage retro throwbacks

KsMIRT=Kent's Month In Reviewing Television, where each month (or whenever) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching recently-ish as relayed in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format, you know, for kids! 

This Month:

Police Squad! (1982, dvd - 6/6 episodes)
G.I. Joe: Operation: Dragonfire (1989, youtube - 5/5 episodes)/G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Season 1 (1990, 18/19 episodes)
Duster Season 1 (2025, HBO - 4/10 episodes)

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The What 100: If a crime has been committed in Los Angeles, Detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) is on the case. His captain, Ed Hocken (Alan North), is already on the scene. Drebin will need to track down clues, interrogate suspects, receive forensics, check out the word on the street, and, invariably, get into a gun fight before solving the case. Freeze frame. 

(1 Great)  "Turns out it was one of those 24 hour wicker joints...". Never a more random and absurd statement then punctuated by the visualization of said all-night wicker spot that will just live in my memory palace to be recalled whenever I need a lift or a chuckle.

(1 Good) Police Squad! found its footing and formula from the first episode. The opening credits - full of gunfire - always featured a "special guest" that was then killed in the opening credits. At the end of the credits, the title of the episode is shown on screen, but the title the announcer presents is completely different. After the precipitating incident was shown, Drebin would always be in his car, en route, providing voice over with some hilarious, irrelevant backstory about where he'd been. It also sets up the gag of Drebin always crashing his car into something when he parks that would carry on into The Naked Gun series. Each episode has a sequence where Drebin consults with his forensics expert Ted Olson (Ed Williams) who is always teaching some kid science when Frank walks in. Drebin also every episode consults with the shoeshine guy Johnny the Snitch (William Duell) who gives him some special dirt, which is always then followed up with some professional asking Johnny for help, like a surgeon asking how to approach a triple bypass. Each episode always ends with Frank and Ed wrapping up, with Drebin recounting all the previous episodes bad guys whom the latest bad guy is getting locked up in, and then freeze framing. Except it's just everyone standing still, with, maybe, one person perplexed by the freeze frame. The formulaic elements are of the sort that they build upon each other and get funnier the more they are used, especially as by episode six they already seemed to be itching to subvert their own formula.

(1 Bad) Out of 6 episodes, only one is a dud, with the comedy just not hitting. The production was obviously having an off week that week. As well, it's annoying that the DVD presents the episodes in the order in which they aired (or didn't air, as the case may be) but you can tell by the wrap-up at the end of each episode that episodes 3 and 4 have been switched 

META: The Zucker-Abrams-Zucker mode of comedy had just been forged with Airplane! and it was with Police Squad! that they started to hone the edge of that sword. While not always as rapid-fire as their work would later become, Police Squad! was still loaded with jokes and gags that ranged from sharp wordplay, stupid characters, visual gags, upending genre conventions and so much more. It's so remarkably successful at achieving what it set out to be (funny!) that it is shocking the series only lasted 6 episodes, of which only four actually aired. Old school television is fascinating  Nielsen opined that the TV viewing audience of the time didn't have the attention span the show needed, and their kind of rapid fire, visual comedy needed the devoted attention of a theatrical audience. It's such a modern argument, that the home-viewing audience isn't actually paying attention to what's on their television, it's remarkable to hear it be said decades ago.

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The What 100: G.I. Joe, America's top secret mobile strike force team. The mission: to defend freedom. The threat: Cobra, an evil organization bent on world conquest. The battle cry: YO JOE! GOT TO GET TOUGH!

(1 Great) Let's be real here, when Canadian animation company DIC took over animation duties from Sunbow, the G.I. Joe series took a nosedive in quality, in terms of storytelling, voice acting and visual animation. Where the Sunbow series was ridiculous, it was a knowing sort of ludicrousness that emphasized the fun the writers were having with the series, while still being pretty focussed on character building. In this DIC series, the episodes are quite juvenile and lacking in anything that could be called character development. But, amidst the poorly drafted characters are some idiotic stories that are stupidly entertaining, such as "Granny Dearest", where Cobra's resident mad bomber/idiot Metal-Head's grandmother pays him a visit on Cobra's latest debacle. Or the two-part |Victory at Volcania" where General Hawk (in his radical 90's-styled Jim Lee-esque superhero costume) is age-shamed repeatedly and bumbles around like an old man when he's, what? 50? Or the Christy Marx-written two-parter "The Mind Mangler/BIOK" where fears of AI (how prescient) are muted when Cobra's artificial intelligence BIOK runs rogue from its world conquering duties and instead hyperfixates on its petty grudge towards Skydive.

(1 Good) The point of the G.I. Joe cartoon was not really entertainment, but to sell toys, and much, much more than the Sunbow series, the DIC series really got them toys in the cartoon, constantly adding new characters and vehicles and playsets to the show. When I was a kid watching cartoons, that's what I wanted, to see more of the toys on screen and in action. The story didn't concern me as much. I still love to see the toys up on screen, but, moof, good stories are needed.

(X Bad) DIC's first stab at Joe was a direct follow-up to 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie with the middling 5-part Operation: Dragonfire. I had heard legend about how bad the DIC animation was, but Operation: Dragonfire, by and large, looks pretty good (kind of up to DIC's Inspector Gadget standards, if a little more rushed) but the story centered around Sargeant Slaughter -- a ridiculous "real life" character from professional wrestling, and a terrible voice actor -- as he squares off against Serpentor who is also dealing with an internal conflict with a revived Cobra Commander. It's passably watchable but the step down in storytelling quality from Sunbow is evident from the start.

DIC's first full season, however finds the animation quality continually degrading. By the time the series reaches its season finale, the lack of movement and continuity in the animation moves beyond the point of being kitschy and funny and into "embarrassed for your" territory (even though the animation is at its worst, "The Mind Mangler/BIOK" is about as close to the Sunbow series as the storytelling gets with Marx's script fitting much more in the classic mould of the series). 

Though the Sunbow series did have an expansive cast of characters, they were also a largely stable, rotating cast, both on the hero and villains side. DIC pretty much abandons all the characters from Sunbow in favour of the 1989/1990/1991 wave of figures (for obvious reasons) but, again, Sunbow's show runners really defined their characters and personalities, while the roster on the DIC series were basically reduced to, at best, a single personality quirk. Only Cobra Commander is still voiced by his original actor Christopher Collins, and is one of few carry-over characters from Sunbow. The Cobra team shrank to a standard roster of Cobra Commander, Destro, Metal-Head and Gnawgahyde with a host of nameless vipers filling in the background (and even Gnawgahyde disappeared mid-season).

The worst offense of the DIC G.I. Joe series was the demotion of its female characters. On the Joe team, only Lady Jaye was still around and frequently one hair away from "damsel in distress" territory. Gone was her status as, basically, third-in command (in one episode, she's the object of fixation for a resurrected pharaoh who kidnaps her with intent to marry her...sigh). In Operation: Dragonfire Baroness and Zarana are effectively arm candy for Serpentor and Cobra Commander, without much initiative of their own. They stay out of the fight for the most part. In the first season, you can bet that pretty much any new female character is Zarana or Baroness in disguise. The Sunbow series put its female characters just as much in the center of the action as their male counterparts (even if they were vastly outnumbered) so it's awful to see almost no representation in the DIC series.

META: Lady Kent has long been the G.I. Joe fan in the Kent household, but when the G.I. Joe Classified Series of action figures released in 2020, I started really getting into G.I. Joe, more and more so with each year passing. We did the watch/rewatch of the Sunbow series last year and the DIC series started to feel more and more like a gap in my Joe awareness. It was only recently that Tubi had the DIC series also available to stream (unless I've just missed it all this time). Every time I put this series on, it would elicit groans from Lady Kent, it's a real tarnish on the Joe series that she loves. But every time that new, oh so 80's rawk "Got To Get Tough, Yo Joe!" theme crops up I start ironically bopping by head to it, and getting in the spirit of its full-blown jankiness. It is a terrible cartoon, full stop, but even worse when put in comparison to what came before. But I really do think it has its genuinely fun moments that are actually intentional and not accidental, though they are far fewer and further between that its predecessor series. I'm keen to jump into Season 2.

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The What 100: In the Southwest in 1972, new FBI transfer Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson) requests to be assigned the most impossible case, taking down crime boss Ezra Saxton (Keith David). Where others have failed, and dramatically so, Nina will persist. It's not just about proving herself, it's also personal. But finding the cracks in the organization proves difficult, until she lands on Saxton's ace wheel-man Jim Ellis (Josh Holloway). He's utterly loyal until Nina finds reason for him to doubt his boss... she can prove Saxton killed Jim's brother. So he begins working as an undercover operative while Nina faces obstacle after obstacle both in the field and inside her own agency.

(1 Great) I will love Josh Holloway forever, but he isn't the bright spot of this series. That goes to Keith David who is charming, menacing, funny, caring and brutal whenever he needs to be. David plays it all so well, even if the show finds itself backed against the wall trying to rationalize his character. Eventually it's clear that everything is a game to Saxton and he controls all the pieces...he's good at keeping secrets and manipulation, but he has flaws and that's both his trust and his family.

(1 Good) The opening credits features a rollicking 70's-styled horn-heavy adventure theme by JJ Abrams, with animations by Meat Dept. which is basically a high speed chase through city and desert but the cars are basically Hot Wheels-style and everything is in miniature. It's a delightful, fun, entertaining intro to a show that just doesn't match its energy or vivaciousness.

(1 Bad)  The stunt driving isn't exciting. It's not shot nor edited in a manner that wowed me ever. For a show whose center premise is about a bad-ass driver, it doesn't present the badass driver with enough badass driving opportunity. I was hoping for a TV-ified Baby Driver but the needle drops feel like afterthoughts, and the action doesn't match. 

META: I want Duster to be so much better than it is. I was hoping it would sink into the 1970's style of production and storytelling, instead it's trying to be very modern, with heaps of backstory and character complications and multifaceted dynamics. The themes around family and doing right by them are at the show's core, but it doesn't know how to tie them all together, and it doesn't know the tone it's trying to set. Nina and her associate agent Awan Bitsui (Asivak Koostachin) are the only non-white people in this Agency office and the show gets weighed down by that, even as they both prove themselves over and over to eyes unwilling to see. I expected a peppier, poppier show, one that lives up to its credits sequence and it is just too dramatic to be fun, and the fun it does try to have seems out of place in its own narrative.

Despite my delight at having Josh Holloway back on TV, this show really didn't work for me, and this character really didn't work for Holloway. Worst of all,Coming from co-creator JJ Abrams (with LaToya Morgan), I was expecting something bolder, and perhaps bigger from the show.

KWIF: Rebel Ridge + The Hudsucker Proxy

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. This week, one of the better Netflix originals (as happens when it's a more auteurish director at the helm) and yet another film from the Coens (we're only 1/3 of the way through folks). I also rewatched Thunderbolts* but nothing new to contribute since my original review... except to say that the measly 2 deleted scenes on the blu-ray adding maybe 20 new seconds of material to the film was utter bullshit. There has to be more that was cut, but Marvel always seems resistant to expose what has been excised from their films.

This Week:
Rebel Ridge (2024, d. Jeremy Saulnier - netflix)
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994, d. Joel (and Ethan) Coen - dvd)

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The films of Jeremy Saulnier have a common thread, which is protagonists out of their element. In Hold the Dark, Jeffrey Wright is a wolf-hunter brought to Alaska. In Green Room [I've seen it but no review... but Toasty's is spot on], it's a desperate punk rock band playing a remote neo-nazi bar. In Blue Ruin, it's a nebbish vagrant trying to enact a revenge plot. In all cases, the conceit itself contains an innate sense of tension, and Saulnier is masterful at ratcheting it up, often with a dramatic pivot (or two).

In Rebel Ridge, we meet Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) who is biking to a small town in Louisiana to bail out his cousin from jail. On the road into town a cop car starts trailing him, no lights, no siren, and then aggressively manoeuvers and bumps his rear tire sending Terry flying. The cop, weapon drawn, starts barking commands, and soon is joined by another cop, again, no sirens or lights. Terry's large hiker's backpack is searched, and in it is discovered a bag with over $30,000 in cash. As Terry calmly and clearly  explains it's to bail out his cousin in town, and then they're going to buy a pickup truck to long-haul boats across country. The cops twist everything he says into being a cover for drugs and drug running (his cousin is in prison for possession afterall). Terry is eventually let go, but his money is seized under "civil forfeiture", a law that effectively lets the police seize assets they think have been or will be involved in crime. 

The dynamic established in this opening sequence is prime Saulnier...just every muscle tense pretty much from the first moment. The violence and aggression of a car bumping a bike, if you've ever had it happen, makes your stomach churn. The vulnerability of a cyclist against a 1 ton car is like Bambi vs Godzilla. And from there, it's hard not to see a black man being railroaded the way that Terry is as purely racist in intent. When places in the United States, under the thumb of Tangerine Palpatine, now feel emboldened to declare their towns "whites only", you can't help but think that Shelby Springs is one of these places.

Terry's mission to free his cousin is a desperate one. His cousin had previously turned against gang members and if he goes to state prison, where he will be sent since Shelby Springs' jail is under construction, he will surely be murdered. Terry has mere days to either get new money or recover the cash from the cops. He finds an ally in a Summer (Anna Sophia Robb), a courthouse clerk with a troubled past, but with an acute awareness of the laws and how the laws are being bent by the local police department.

It comes clear that Terry's assault wasn't an act of racism...or, rather, not *just* an act of racism, but a scheme the local chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson) and his officers have cooked up with much complicitness at different levels of local law and bureaucracy.

Terry is an ex-Marine, but never served overseas, which carries some weight with the PD. It's only when they discover he was the trainer close quarters combat, disciplined in many martial arts ("Uh oh...I think he's on the Wikipedia page") that they realize that they're going to have a real problem.

The expectation when have from films of this ilk is that Terry is going to use his "special set of skills" to absolutely destroy this police department full of fuckheads. Instead Saulnier is careful to point out that Terry's skills are specialized, and that he is outmanned, outgunned and is fighting not just against the law but legalized corruption. So when the Sheriff gives him an out, Terry takes it, ending act one.

Act two finds Terry drawn back into Shelby Springs, where things have turned pear-shaped, and what was already a bad situation gets much worse. But Terry is awakened in this moment and he's driven into action where once he retreated.  In a normal film, this is where the action would kick into higher gear, instead the film goes into detective mode, as Terry and Summer start digging into the Sheriff's dirt and seeing what they can find. There's certainly something that's off-board and a state case of corruption could be made against the police department.

Again, the expectation set by the genre is that once our hero and protagonist establishes a plan of action it's going to be a success. Saulnier would never have such simple pleasures. By the time we think a film of this sort should be winding down, Rebel Ridge is just ramping up to its third act where the catharsis we've been looking for all along is waiting.

Except every time we think that Terry has got the upper hand, Saulnier's reality comes shaking down. It's still one man versus a so many and Saulier grounds it pretty tangibly so that the reality of the One-Man-Army is still just a fairy tale. There's only so much one man can do even a man as skilled and determined as Terry.

Rebel Ridge is gripping from moment one. It has its quiet moments, but even those never let go of the tension underneath. Saulier's script is built around injustice and the abuses and corruption within law enforcement, but there's a whole layer that is casting an eye at race without anyone ever explicitly calling it out. It's all micro aggressions and subtlety, like the fact that Terry looks to Officer Jessica Simms (Zsané Jhé ) - who Burnne clearly indicates was a diversity hire - for solidarity.  The script is sharp, insightful, and has more than a few wonderful moments, both on the action/standoff front and in dialogue.

Aaron Pierre, very shortly after Rebel Ridge's debut on Netflix was quickly cast in the HBO Max Green Lantern TV series as its lead character, John Stewart, which having now seen him in action, is completely on point. Pierre has presence, charm, wit and grit.  Don Johnson should look out, because playing a villain this well could have repercussions of people thinking he's actually this slimy, with scales about to poke out through his skin. It's an excellent performance, and the scenes between Johnson and Pierre crackle with electricity.

As immediately ramped up as I was upon watching Rebel Ridge, spending time thinking about it started posing questions which undermined the story, if only a little, and it starts with the opening moments based on a reveal towards the end. Also, as a cyclist, it's absolutely crazy Terry wasn't wearing a bike helmet, and listening to music while cycling, come on, man?.... And I don't think stomping SD cards into the dirt is going to have the effect on them you think it is, dude....

Hands down the best "Rebel" Netflix movie by a very wide margin.

[toastypost...we agree!]

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The Coen Brothers blasted onto the scene with the radical neo-neon-noir Blood Simple, announced themselves to a receptive public with the live action cartoon antics of Raising Arizona, impressed critics with the very different mob drama of Miller's Crossing and won the Palm d'Or at Cannes with Barton Fink. Even if none of these was overwhelming blockbusters, they were all strikingly unique and bold storytelling successes made relatively cheaply. Producer Joel Silver wanted in on the Coen Brothers business and gave them over $25 million to play with for their next movie, at least two and a half times their previous most expensive production. That movie was The Hudsucker Proxy, and its domestic box office barely reached $3 million. It flopped. It bombed. And like all Coen Bros. movies, it eventually got itself a cult following.

The Hudsucker Proxy is a weird, weird film for 1994, hearkening back to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s mixed with the heightened reality of a Frank Capra production, it's a full-tilt period piece that is homage to the cinematic entertainments of yesteryear while being bathed in the glorious, incomparable cinematography of Roger Deakins. As retro looking as it was, it also wasn't looking too far askance from modern filmmaking, with elements owing to Terry Gilliam's Brazil and the works of Tim Burton up to that point, almost like those director's bold aesthetic choices showed the Coens how visually fastidious they could be given an appropriate budget.

At once a fantasy and a nightmare about capitalism, The Hudsucker Proxy is like It's A Wonderful Life filtered through The Producers, as the board of the monolithic Hudsucker Industries enacts a scheme to tank the share prices of the company. You see, the founder and majority shareholder of the corporation has swan dived out a window, and with no heirs, as per the corporate rules, his shares go public in a month's time on January 1. In order to tank the stock, they need a rube, an idiot, a patsy to put in charge and purposefully ruin them.

Enter Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) who just arrived in the big city from Muncie, Indiana with a college degree, big idea and all the gumption, but no experience. He finds a job in the mailroom at Hudsucker, but a chance awkward encounter with shark-like Sidney J Mussberger (Paul Newman) finds him moving on up to the big time in a jiffy.

The media is aflutter with news of this new, ever-so-random President of Hudsucker, and tough-talking, Pulitzer Prize-winning ace reporter Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is on the beat. She pulls a ploy on Norville, and (hud)suckers him into thinking she's a helpless fellow Muncie-ian who just fell off the turnip truck, so he gives her a job being his secretary. She writes a scathing story on him, and the inverted Lois Lane/Superman dynamics at play are pretty delicious as he starts to question this pseudonymous reporter's character to her face.

But the best laid plans of mice and men go awry when Norville's big idea  of the hula-hoop becomes the national fad and  the stock prices soar. His rise to the top of the business world was swift, but his rise to the top of public notoriety and fame is even swifter. It goes to his head, and Norville becomes too big for his britches. Amy wants to be the one to knock him down a few pegs, especially upon developing feelings for him and seeing him for not quite the hayseed she initially though he was (he's definitely a hayseed, just smarter and more capable than the stereotype suggests). But it's the board, using the court of public opinion and planting false stories, that finds Norville's good fortune dry up just as fast as they came. 

The film opens with a sweeping cityscape that is a gorgeously constructed miniature set that tricks the eye and the brain constantly. It's at such a huge scale that it's hard to believe that anyone outside of a Godzilla flick would have taken the care to build such a dense network of art deco mini-buildings, primarily for an establishing shot. These days it would be a bland CGI recreation of somewhere or other, and not wow nearly as much. The city could is intended to be New York but it could be Chicago, Metropolis or Gotham, or another unnamed surreal fantasy location (the cityscape was reconfigured and reused in many other films including Batman Forever and 1998's Godzilla, among others).

The sets, costuming, wardrobe, hair and makeup are all exceptional. Though it's set in the late 1950's, it feels like a mashup of the 1920s, '30s and 40's, but with the encroaching beatnik crowd (complete with Steve Buscemi cameo) bursting the bubble otherwise.  Carter Burwell delivers yet another incredible score. Blood Simple has some great themes, and Miller's Crossing was a stylistic triumph of mixing traditional Irish sounds with noir-stylings...here it's completely orchestral sweeping, lush and epic, with hints of playfulness without directly acknowledging the levity to the crowd. Each Burwell piece for the Coens so far is distinct from the last. The only thing that sticks out as a unifying component at this point is exceptionally high quality and thoughtfulness.

Paul Newman's cruel, capitalistic villain is a timeless one. A power/money monger that seems to be just as  prevalent today as it did in 1994 as it did in the 1958 and the 1930s and in Dicken's A Christmas Carol. (We learn nothing as a society from these tales, as we expect these villains to change on their own or be destroyed by goodness, only in reality they just keep succeeding with the backing of government and others of their kind). Jennifer Jason Leigh's reporter character is so fantastic, even if at times I don't agree with the Coens handling of the character, undermining her confidence with Norville's talk of her not being womanly enough (but it does fit the time period, so it's a nominal complait...). At this stage I have to wonder if I've seen a JJL performance that has not impressed me, that has not been fantastic? Doubtful. I find Tim Robbins to be the weakest link in the production. He's playing at least 10 years his junior at the time of filming, so he just seems too old to be so...fresh. His peformance delivers the appropriate nativity, hopefulness, ambition and eventual callousness, but the apparentness of his age undermines the fact that he is supposed to be a newly graduated youngster. If the parable of Hudsucker were spanning years instead of weeks, the casting would seem more appropriate, but it's like Norville ages from a 23-year-old to a 34-year old in 3 weeks as a result of his success. Maybe that's intentional on the directors' part.

I sound like a broken record, but many a Coens film requires multiple viewings before the vibe kicks in. I definitely didn't "get" The Hudsucker Proxy upon first viewing years ago, but this delighted me greatly now. I know I didn't really have any foundation in the classic cinema the Coens were calling upon, but even just a few dribbles into that pond since were enough to give me the language I needed to engross myself here. The Coens are so much more film literate than most of the filmgoing audience that when they smash up styles and genres in the way they do, and then defy storytelling conventions on top of that, they can be pretty perplexing upon first visit if your unable to catch on and hang on for the ride..

Also this is the first Coens film, and one of few, not to be centered around a crime...unless the kind of stock-tanking is a white collar crime, at which point nevermind (but even if it is a crime it seems like one of those "legal crimes" not unlike the one at the center of Rebel Ridge).

The Hudsucker Proxy may have bombed at the box office, but it's is an unequivocal success. For a 30-year old film that is recalling tropes and styles of 70, 80, 90 years ago, it still feels really, really fresh, exciting and unique. I've seen the film before and yet it was still utterly surprising.

The film's title is terrible if you're trying to convey something to an unknowing audience. They don't know what a "Hudscuker" is and "proxy" is such a rarely used word, it's sometimes hard to contextualize. But The Hudsucker Proxy walked so The Phoenician Scheme (and most of Wes Anderson's output) could run.

Series Minded: The Nakeds Gun

[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop. This one kind of snuck up on me. I wasn't expecting to re-watch the original Naked Gun trilogy for the new film's debut, but I enjoyed rewatching the first so much I had to watch them all].

The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad! (1998, d. David Zucker - netflix)
The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear (1991, d. David Zucker - netflix)  
The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994, d. Peter Segal - netflix)
The Naked Gun (2025, d. Akiva Schaffer - in theatre)

Parody films used to be so bankable, both as financial successes at the box office and as tremendous sources of big time laffs, chuckles and guffaws (not to mention titters and chortles). But the parody film has become something rather derided in the past decade or two, in no small part thanks to the prolific output of the "Not Another X Movie" series which treated mere reference as comedy and relied on being gross, crass, or punching down on others as their default mode. But even when parodies were in the hands of parody maestros, like Buck Henry, Mel Brooks and the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker trio, The Naked Gun stood apart.

Leslie Nielsen would go on to star in a slew of parody films following The Naked Gun but to greatly diminished returns. They replied upon Nielsen's comedic persona almost entirely, what they lacked was a central character like Detective Frank Drebin that was a defined suit of comedy armour for Nielsen to wear. Of course, Nielsen had debuted the character in the short lived TV series Police Squad! six years earlier, so the character had already been built and tested. 

I had forgotten how central to The Naked Gun comedy engine Frank Drebin is. He's not a buffoon, yet he can be. He's not oblivious, but he often is. He's awful at his job, but also very successful. He's a mix of the hardboiled detective from film noir and the jaded shoot-first, ask-questions-later cop of the Dirty Harry movies. He's a walking talking cliche that constantly defies the cliche. By the nature of the cliche, Drebin is poker-face serious at all times (except when he needs to react to something, at which point Nielsen's comic mugging is rivalled only by the likes of Jim Carrey) and delivers every line like he's chewed on the words for a millennium even though it's clear he hasn't really thought them through at all. 

Drebin is the primary joke delivery vehicle for The Naked Gun series and why it works so well is because the cliche is so well-worn and time tested and reused ad nauseum, that even a thorough lampooning of the character and story tropes do not diminish the effectiveness of the tropes.  With Austin Powers lampooning the Bond cliches so thoroughly, Bond and spy movies had to evolve from the cliches. Detective and police stories didn't budge an inch after The Naked Gun.

The Naked Gun and its first sequel weren't just keen on parody though. They are joke machines, set-up and punchline followed by wordplay followed by background visual gag followed by slapstick followed by callback followed by character-centric joke followed by topical joke followed by surprise cameo followed by fourth wall break followed by political gag followed by pop culture poke followed by innuendo followed by overt sexual joke followed by non-sequitur, inanity, and silliness... all swirling down the same drain intermixing and popping up again.

The big surprise of the series' first cinematic entry, The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, was not only how damn funny it still remains (even outside of nostalgia and intense familiarity) but how little (if at all) it uses punching down in its comedy.  Likewise it was surprising to me, given that David Zucker fell down a right wing rabbit hole in the 2000s, how snarky and satirically scathing they were of the police, Republicans, and jingoism. At one point in the first film, Drebin is asked to hand in his badge and gun and states "Just think, next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested." 

Plot is kind of besides the point in these films, and yet, at their core the first two films still have a meaningful (if irreverent) caper for Drebin to foil in and an emotional arc for him, centered around his love affair with Jane (Prescilla Presley, who the first film convinced a 12-year-old Kent was the most beautiful woman in the world).

The first Naked Gun has O.J. Simpson's (I know!) Nordberg getting shot up during a drug stakeout at the L.A. docks. This coincides with the impending visit from Queen Elizabeth II. In investigating the shooting Police Squad links the events at the docs with prosperous businessman Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán) who happens to be the main host and sponsor of the Queen's visit.  Paying a visit to Ludwig's office, Frank and Jane spark an immediate attraction, and Ludwing sends Jane after Frank to find out what he knows. One safe-sex-joke-that-I-totally-didn't-get-when-I-was-12 and a delightfully silly montage later, they're a steadfast couple. But not so fast... of course Frank quickly suspects that she was using him for Ludwig's benefit so they have a romantic complication to overcome as, during the third act, Frank needs to save the Queen from being assassinated at a baseball game. Though perhaps a big detour from the detective/cop genre the film is lampooning, the baseball sequence finds an insane amount of gags from Frank's impersonation of an opera singer for the national anthem (of which he doesn't fully know the words, but then who really does if we're being honest?), to him impersonating an umpire and getting too into the audience adulation for his positive calls for the home team, to him trying to pat down the players throughout the game to check for guns. All that plus getting to watch O.J. as Nordberg get accidentally abused and tortured over and over and over again is its own kind of schadenfreude.

The second (and a half) film finds the comedy less omnipresent than its predecessor, largely because it's a bit more stuck in its time, yet it still has much the same snap as the first. Frank and Police Squad are in Washington D.C. for a Presidential commendation, which finds Frank interacting with George and Barbara Bush, replete with Frank accidentally delivering all manner of assaults and insults upon poor Barbara over and over again. (The George Bush impersonator is caked in thick make-up to a distracting degree, which, really, you couldn't just nab Dana Carvey?). President Bush announces he's deferring his entire energy policy to one man, Dr. Meinheimer (Richard Griffiths), who it turns out that Jane now works for. Frank and Jane split up before their wedding and Frank is heartbroken. Jane is now with oil baron Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet), who is secretly running a cabal of energy industry leaders, and they're plotting to fix Bush's energy policy by replacing Meinheimer with a double.  Of course Frank gets in the way, in no small part thanks to Jane's connections to it all. One awkward encounter after another, the pair reunite and they have wild night at the pottery turner (if you don't know the Ghost reference it just becomes a delicious bit of absurdity). After a disastrous incident with a tank, Police Squad is no more, but Frank, Ed, Nordberg and the real Dr. Hapsburg infiltrate the state dinner (as a mariachi band no less) where the fake Hapsburg is to present his fake energy policy and stop a nuclear bomb. Hapsburg nearly manages to escape but is interrupted by a beautifully orchestrated callback. 

The (thirty-three and a) third movie moves itself squarely into the 90's. By this point the spoof movie had taken off with National Lampoon and Mel Brooks back in the game quite heavily, so it seems there was a pivot.  Whether it was studio demands or the absence of Jim Abrahms and Jerry Zucker, this third entry in the series leaned in hard on spoofing then-recent (and not-so-recent) cinema, including opening with a parody of the stairs sequence from The Untouchables, riffing on Thelma and Louise, and, strangely, Staying Alive ( but only in the most rudimentary ways).  Not satisfied with in-story (or in-dreams, or in-tangent) parodies, the film's final act takes place at the Academy Awards (the curious roster of celebrity cameos - like "Wierd" Al and Vanna White is very charming) where they have more opportunity to do out-of-story spoofs like "Geriatric Park". Divesting itself of classic detective and cop tropes and going into 90's crime thrillers and prison dramas along with xenophobic, gay panic, rape jokes and transphobia (in the guise of a Crying Game riff) is the series at its absolute lowest, but sequences that play like hack observational comedy (such as Frank's visit to the grocery store or Frank trying to talk to a cabbie) lay the foundation for this weakest entry in the series.

33 1/3 leaves behind the noirish tendencies, savvy wordplay and even the regular running gags to fit into the "movie riffing on other movies" trend that wouldn't subside for another couple decades. It's really disappointing. On top of that, the story doesn't have any character resonance. It opens with with Jane having become a busy lawyer with her biological clock ticking. Frank has retired and is bored. They want a baby but Jane's too busy and Frank's feeling neglected. The "domesticated man" comedy is dated, but Nielsen sells it pretty good. Ed and Nordberg need his help in a case, and he goes undercover at a sperm bank. After Jane discovers Frank is a cop again, she leaves him, so Frank dives headfirst into more undercover work, going into high security prison to befriend freelance bomber Rocco Dillon (Fred Ward). He helps him escape and Jane reenters the picture just as Rocco's girl Tanya (Anna Nicole Smith, who the film convinced 18-year-old Kent was the most beautiful woman in the world) inexplicably makes fresh with him (it must have been something in Nielsen's contract, as she does it again and again in the film). Rocco's plan is to bomb the Academy Awards, and through various shenanigans (some of them actually amusing) Frank stops them.

It's Frank and Jane's relationship in the first two movies that works so well at its core. The smartest thing the second film did was open with them broken up just so it had an excuse to put Jane with yet another foil for Frank and then bring them together again. Here, the break-up feels contrived and doesn't seem to carry a lot of weight on Frank for the remainder of the film. Jane's return to the fold at the end of the second act is handle well enough to bring her back into the picture, but it's just so she can be the damsel in distress again (though pointedly so, if not quite pointedly enough).  There was an opportunity here to establish a formulae for the series itself, with Frank and Jane starting each film broken up again already, and to continue to abuse Nordberg (which this third entry mostly neglects)... but the series would not continue anyway due to diminishing returns... that is until 2025.

This new iteration of The Naked Gun was resurrected by writer/director Akiva Schaffer (of The Lonely Island), co-writers Dan Gregor & Doug Mand, and producers Seth McFarlane and Erica Huggins, and it falls squarely into the "legasequel" terrain. Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr. while Paul Walter Houser plays the Junior version of George Kennedy's Captain Ed Hocken. Where the Senior Ed was the man in charge of Police Squad in the original series, here both Frank and Ed report into their Chief, played by CCH Pounder.

It's been 30 years since the last Naked Gun film so there's a LOT of cops and detective fiction and non-fiction in the intervening years, and the awareness of police abuses and corruption is much more in the consciousness, so a modern day spoof on the genre has plenty to play with. The film opens with a Christopher Nolan-styled bank robbery sequence that featured prominently in the trailers. Neeson, like Nielsen, is shameless in his comedy guise and had no compunction about doing an action sequences wearing a schoolgirl uniform. Like the original series, this downplays the violence, despite noting how frequently Frank likes to shoot perps (offscreen gun violence is something he shares with his father apparently).

The robbery was a smokescreen for the theft of the P.L.O.T. device, which is handed off to billionaire tech mogul Richard Cane (Danny Huston). His plan is a big modern supervillain grand scheme...to send a signal that will drive the world into a primordial rage, while all the rich shits go live in a secret volcano bunker with "Weird" Al and wait out humanity's self destruction.

As a result of his egregious abuse of his police powers, Frank is booted off the robbery case, and onto investigating an auto wreck. The victim's sister, Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson, which this film reminded me that 14-year-old Kent was convinced she was the most beautiful woman in the world) advises Frank her brother worked for Cane and so the storylines dovetail. Unlike Frank Sr. and Jane, their flirtation is filled with more disdain than attraction, which softens slightly with each subsequent encounter. Beth is much more a woman of action...as a true crime author (based on stories she's made up) she figures she can follow the cliched path of investigating her brother's death and exact her revenge. Only Frank Jr. stands in her way. Unlike its predecessor, and in modern action movie fashion, Frank fails to stop the evil plan, and then has to deal with the fallout. I never could have predicted where it would go, not in a mil...not in a doz... not in, say, seven guesses.

The film is loaded with sight gags, non-sequiturs, wordplay, etc... all the hallmarks of a Naked Gun movie, and its approach to parody is more in line with the first film of the original trilogy, rather than the third. Shaffer opts for stylistic parody rather than direct scene-for-scene or lampooning. He adopts the tone of Tony Scott or a David Fincher when the need serves him, but adopting such sensibilities does bump up against the comedic sensibilities at times. 

There's some of The Lonely Island's trademark pop-culture riffing, with an 80-styled montage of Frank Jr. and Beth, whisking away to a log cabin and having sexy times, but quickly turning weird when they build a snowman, practice witchcraft and bring the snowman to life...and it just gets weirder from there. It's mashing so many references and genres together, it made my brain spin, and yes, I loved it. 

On a joke density level, it's pretty high, especially for a modern comedy released in cinemas (ha... what's that?) but its still not to the level of the original Naked Gun... but I say this with only one viewing. Part of what makes the original so fantastic is familiarity, having watched it dozens of times so as to have seen every joke it has to offer. I have to wonder/hope this version has more in store than upon first watch.

As said, Neeson is game. He's not been shy about dispelling his on-screen image, from A Million Days to Die in the West to The Lego Batman Movie to a cameo in Donald Glover's Atlanta, it's clear the man has a sense of humour and is more than aware of his on-screen persona to subvert it.  After seeing Paul Walter Houser steal his main scene in Fantastic Four: First Steps, I was hoping he would have a bigger spotlight here, but as Ed Jr. he gets about as much screen time as George Kennedy would, but his presence is still enjoyably welcome. Pamela Anderson's comeback career trucks on, after The Last Showgirl showed everyone (who watch it...it's on my list) that she has real-deal acting chops, here she's able to spotlight her comedic sensibilities once again, and all you need is "Sassafras Chicken in D" to tell you she's got the goods. It's hard to think who the modern Ricardo Montalbon or Robert Goulet, because Hollywood doesn't really produce these kind of personalities anymore... and Danny Huston is far too good and capable an actor to be considered in their league, but he does a really good job, culminating in that amazing final showdown with Neeson in the end.

The biggest letdown of this new film is it didn't feature the patented Naked Gun opening title sequence with James Ira Newborn's rollicking, swinging, horn wail of an theme playing over scenes of a police siren wailing while it intones a cop car driving through ludicrous situations (it does play the theme during the end credits and reedits the opening sequences from the original trilogy, which seems a poor concession). That said, the title card of the film does have a good gag, and there are jokes scattered throughout the end credits.

Will The Naked Gun revive comedies on the big screen, or, will it just revive more parody movies (in which case, God help us all)?

One final note, I took my kids (16 and 23) to see the film, and it played well for my eldest who is kind of obsessed with procedurals and detective stories, but my teen hasn't really ever engaged with the genre and found only a few scenes really amusing. This generation of kids who experience most of culture through youtube videos and tiktoks of other people talking about culture makes this kind of spoofing and satirizing difficult, because the kids don't have the cinematic language for it. Or maybe that's just my kid.