Series Minded: Trons

[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]

Tron (1982, d. Steven Lisberger - Disney+)
Tron: Legacy (2010, d. Josef Kosinski - Disney+/Blu-ray [my internet crapped out about halfway through so I had to switch formats, and let me say physical was so much better])
Tron: Ares (2025, d. Joachim Rønning - in theatre, IMAX 3-D)

Tron debuted in 1982, 43 years ago, as an extremely modest success, at least financially, making its budget back and a little extra for the Disney coffers. But it was not the nu-Star Wars smash that its corporate overlords had hoped. Toys went on discount, and the merchandising blitz and tie ins came and went. It’s only resounding wins were the piles of quarters dumped into its fairly radical (and still alluring) arcade cabinets.

Steven Lisberger’s idea for Tron would basically become the template of so many Pixar and Pixar-esque films: a what if x-inanimate objects or concepts had feelings and lives and culture and civilization. In Tron’s case, it’s a “what if programs were real?” The reality they exist in is called The Grid, and it was all conceived in a nascent computer age where 64 kilobytes (practically the size of this text document) was considered a lot of processing power. The general populace didn’t really understand computers on a technical level and were barely familiar with them on an operational level. It’s also like the screenwriters of Tron weren’t all that knowledgeable themselves. Either that or they liberated themselves from the restraints of that knowledge in order to make their techno-fantasy world, and frankly it’s a better film for it.

Tron, at its core, is about world building, with a story about a user getting trapped in the digital world as he seeks evidence of a corporate executive having stole his ideas for himself. The bad guy is Encom VP Ed Dillinger (David Warner, The Omen) whose master control program (MCP) started life as a chess game and evolved into a bloatware tyrant absorbing all useful programs and trashing the rest as it rampages its way through corporate and governmental systems. Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, Starman) created a half dozen very lucrative video games that Dillinger stole, passed off as his own, made the company some serious cash and got promoted and while Flynn fired. But Flynn has friends on the inside of Encom who help him get access to find the evidence he needs, only the MCP uses an experimental digitizing laser to zap Flynn into the digital world.

The titular Tron is, effectively, a security watchdog program, and Flynn needs Tron’s help if he’s going to both escape and bring down Dillinger as well as his tyrannical MCP.

Tron opens on the Grid with Flynn’s Clu avatar (also Jeff Bridges) driving a tank through the vector-graphics inspired world, communicating back and forth with Flynn as it seeks the evidence Flynn’s looking for but is overpowered by the MCP’s response team. Clu’s failure immediately takes us to the real world, where we see Dillinger interact with the MCP, concerned over yet another incursion, as well as introduce us to Flynn’s friends Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner, Scarecrow and Mrs. King) and Dr. Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan, Caddyshack). Alan is the creator of Tron, while Lori is the designer of the digitizing laser. There is a half-hearted love triangle (Lora is Flynn’s ex, and is currently dating Alan) that extends to the Grid when Flynn meets their avatars Tron and Yori.

The in-Grid world had three primary designers. Legendary French comics illustrator Jean “Moebius” Giraud worked sets and costumes, primarily, with neo-futurist designer Syd Mead creating the film’s vehicles, and digital commercial artist Peter Lloyd creating the landscapes. As much as the film is known for its extensive use of then cutting edge computer effects, much of it is trick-of-the-eye as painted backdrops and clever use of light and shadow as well as rotoscoping and a lot of manual processing was necessary to build the world. It was a strenuous and laborious process to create the look and feel of the Grid, shot in black and white, with up to ten layers of processing as well as merging with digital effects… it’s the only film of its kind like this and it never fails to impress. It’s so damn unique.

The film’s other trick-of-the-eye is in its use of sound to flesh out its world. There’s nothing else that sounds like Tron, effects wise. As the Skywalker Sound library has gotten pillaged over the years and the sound effects of Star Wars have bled into other films and television, the sounds of Tron remain uniquely its own. Rather than using the primitive 8-bit audio sounds from video games of the era, sound designer Frank Serafine built everything specifically for the film. 

Wendy Carlos, composer known for her pioneering digital compositions, most notably for her scores to A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, creates her own digital audio soundscape here. Like those Toto or Tangerine Dream scores of the fantasy and sci-fi films of the early 80’s, Carlos’s score feels so very coded to its time. Electronic music was still exceptionally primitive at this time, but even at this era, it was being blended into rock and pop to greater effect than as its own enjoyable compositions. But the mix of score with visuals as well as technical adventurousness now cements the film to its time and it feels so pointedly a snapshot of an era, a piece of history [something not lost on the makers of the new Tron: Ares, but also sadly not replicated].

Tron is simultaneously not a great movie and also a mindblowing one. It’s so awkward in its conception of programs as living beings, and the society of The Grid makes no sense, and their worship of users as deities seems especially cruel, but at the end of the day, when Jeff Bridges is your guide into an adventurous world of kick ass games like disc wars and lightcycles, it’s too enjoyable to really care that deeply about where it goes wrong.

The first resurrection of the Tron property came with "Tron 2.0" in 2003, a first-person-shooter videogame that was a sort of testbed for the appetite for new Tron content. It was modestly well received and modestly successful. Modesty would be an enduring theme for Tron.

2010, though, had designs on blowing the modesty right off of the perception of Tron. Josef Kosinski’s directorial debut would cost at least 170 million dollars to produce, and every damn penny of it is up on the screen. Kosinski, an architect by training, really wanted to reintroduce The Grid for a modern era. To do so he would design the living hell out of it. Though indebted to the first film, and holding true to the light-piping effect, and the bold colours, Kosinski and his team really leaned into the shadows and contrasts with this film, to make the colours pop even more, and boy do they pop.

The light cycles, the Recognizers and the tanks, the buildings, the costumes, the landscapes, they’re all taking those original designs and reimagining them with absolute love and care. The vision of Tron: Legacy is an utterly stunning one, and just may be the most eye-popping movie ever made. Not even joking.

The story of Legacy is a sweeping one, following Kevin Flynn’s kid, Sam (Garrett Hedlund, Pan) as he gets sucked into the grid on what he thinks is an accident, but turns out to be the work of a new Clu, designed by Flynn years earlier to create the perfect system. Unfortunately Clu became a tyrant, chasing the impossibility of perfection, with nothing to guide him. Kevin Flynn has been trapped in the grid for about 20 years, he missed Sam grow up, and he watched his other baby, the Grid, fall victim to authoritarian rule. The world inside the Grid is just as bad as the outside.

On top of the drama of Sam reuniting with his father, and Clu’s own “father issues” , the film seeds the story of the ISOs, a unique breed of program that sprang up organically, not programmed. New life. Flynn was on the cusp of introducing them to the world when Clu’s regime took over, and his jealousy and distrust of ISOs led to mass extermination. The only survivor is Quorra (Olivia Wide, House M.D.).

Flynn and Quorra must get Sam out of the Grid and into the real world before Clu does, as he’s breeding an army to head in to the real world  and make it the “perfect system” too.

Tron: Legacy, while certainly not the first of the “legasequels” definitely was at the forefront of the trend that ran wild in the 2010s and still has not abated. It’s also one of the best, if only because it’s “franchise restarting” designs didn’t yield a film that feels unresolved by the end of it. Sure, there were seeds for where a follow-up might go, and yes Cilian Murphy was cast in a small role as Ed Dillnger’s kid as foundation for a larger role later on, but the story of Tron: Legacy is self-contained much in the same way Tron was. It builds the world, tells its specific story and it ends with a basically happy ending.

Rewatching Tron: Legacy [which I seem to do often] is always transportive. It is a world I get sucked into and a world I am absolutely transfixed by. It’s not just visually attractive, it’s sexy, without ever intoning sex. It’s just pure dopamine fuel, eye candy so sweet you’ll have ocular diabetes afterwards. The sound design, once again, is on point, but unlike the first movie where even the footfalls announce themselves, here the sound design is so clearly second in line to the Daft Punk soundtrack.  The soundtrack is part of the otherworldliness of the Grid, it’s so well integrated into the film that it feels like it’s impossible to separate the sounds from the visuals… and yet, the soundtrack is such incredible listening on its own. But the reverse likely isn’t true…as pretty as the film is, it loses much without the score.

Bridges hit his academy award-winning elder statesman phase at this exact time, with his Crazy Heart Oscar win the year before and True Grit reteaming him with the Coen Brothers the same year, it’s a reminder of just how much he brings to any film he’s in. Nearly every line delivery (only exception: “Nice!”) is pure gold, carrying either the full weight of Bridges seniority, or his post Lebowski Dude-ness, sometimes both at once. The first Tron movie would be primarily a curious relic without his affable persona as its demi-heroic lead.  Garrett Hedlund got a bad rap at the time of being another of the “bland” young leads that Hollywood was trying to force out into the theatre. I don’t think Hedlund particularly pops, but he’s definitely got character, and his performance is full of subtlety.  He’s not the brash, big-talking, jokey hero… he plays a thrill-seeking rich kid with daddy issues as a very down-to-earth, likeable, believable guy..with daddy issues.  Olivia Wilde’s Quorra is maybe the only “born sexy yesterday” character that should be given a pass. The camera is definitely in love with her, but it’s never objectifying her. The camera looks at her like the way she looks at Sam, intrigued, captivated, curious and admiring. She is a skilled fighter, and she’s full of curiosity. She’s not dumb, but she’s only experienced life inside the Grid, and so her wanting to know more of the outside world where her mentor comes from is naturally her focal point with Sam. It’s too bad the character doesn’t have more of the weight of being the last of the ISO’s, the trauma of having watched her entire race get eradicated, sitting on her shoulders, but, to paraphrase a Bridges line, that would be, like, a total bummer man.

There are few movies I love watching more than Tron:Legacy, and there are few theatrical experiences that legitimately blew my mind like Tron:Legacy. For a long time I held out hope that Kosinski would return to Tron and deliver another all out audio-visual assault, but I knew once Top Gun: Maverick became the biggest movie of 2022 [not a legasequel, btw, as often erroneously ascribed] that we would not be getting Kosinski back on Tron unless he had an absolute passion to do so. He does not.

So Tron:Ares being announced not long after Top Gun: Maverick was a definite surprise, and one that I welcomed… with trepidation.

The first trailer whetted the appetite, as it presented light cycles and Recognizers moving through the real world (Vancouver) and seemed to maintain the same bold contrasts of Tron: Legacy. Those jet black blacks and those vibrant popping trails (mostly red in Ares’ case). The soundtrack, at first, was the tag on the end of the trailer. Nine Inch Nails. Yes, it’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the duo responsible for many of the best soundtracks of the past dozen years, but they’re doing it as fucking Nine Inch Nails! Getting the band back together! It would go on to be the major point of the film’s marketing, boldly proclaiming the NIN soundtrack early and often in commercials. So we know the producers at least did  one thing right.

But the flipside was the film stars Jared Leto.

Leto (House of Gucci) is a frustrating performer and as a human being, real suspect. Reports of his “method” antics on set, and reports of his real-world activities leaves nothing but a bad taste in one’s mouth. On screen, he can deliver performances that range from incredible to damn annoying. It’s a backhanded compliment from Fight Club – “I felt like destroying something beautiful” (referring to the scene where Ed Norton bashes Leto’s face in during a fight) – that’s hard to erase from one’s memory every time you see him.

So this film had a lot of goodwill thanks to Tron: Legacy and NIN, but also had an uphill battle.

The end result is kind of a draw.

Directed by Joachim Rønning, the less-than visionary director of the last of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (for now) and the Maleficent sequel from a script from David DiGilio (The Terminal List), the creative impetus is not anything other than “make content to see if the property is still viable”.

With Tron: Legacy, the film was accompanied by a blitz of toys, comics, video games, an animated prequel series, merchandizing tie-ins. It didn’t gross the near-billions that I think Disney was hoping for, but it was a modest success at 400 million globally, and it’s had staying power, in no small part thanks to the Light Cycle rides at Disney parks.  Tron is never going to be the cash cow that Disney wants all its properties to be, but if the property is treated with reverence and care, then the fanbase will keep coming along.

There’s no multimedia merchandizing blitz for Tron:Ares, and even less love and care shown for the property in the movie itself. The film plays out nothing like the adventurous world building of the prior two films, and instead opts for a 2000s-era action film centered around the good guys and bad guys chasing a maguffin. It’s not exactly paint-by-numbers, because the Tron elements force at least a few intriguing deviations, but where those deviations SHOULD have been the story of the film, it can’t seem to get back to its nonsense plot fast enough.

Tron: Ares opens much like Tron:Legacy does, with a voiceover from Bridges explaining the Grid, and then news highlights filling the audience in on what’s happened in the world of Encom in the years since. The point here being to close the door on any further adventures of Sam Flynn and Quorra while tepidly introducing both our human protagonist, Eve Kim (Greta Lee, Past Lives) co-CEO of Encom, and Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters, X-Men: Apocalypse), the newest head of Dillinger Corp.  Both companies are in a race to bring the digital world to reality, and they’ve developed the 3-D printing technology to do it, to create living things and functional products, except the technology only lasts for 29 minutes before cohesiveness fatally breaks down. Eve wants to use the technology for the benefit of society and Dillinger wants to use it to make weapons.

Eve has discovered “the permanence code” from Flynn’s records and Dillinger wants it and will do anything to get it, including sending his Master Control Program, Ares (Leto), off Grid and into the real world to find Eve and take the code from her by force. The mission is successful, except Ares is discovering emotions and humanity in himself, and wants the permanence code for himself. The result is against programming, protecting Eve at all costs. So Dillinger sends the ruthless Athena (Jodi Turner-Smith, Bad Monkey) after them and she takes control of Dillinger Corp, prints out her own army, and is willing to decimate The City (Vancouver) to do so.

The plot seems like your standard direct-to-streaming sci-fi action movie premise, and lacks most of the Tron flavour. Our main “Grid” protagonist, Ares, is a nothingburger of a character, much like many a lead from said 2000’s-style action spectacles. Ares is just a curious program who has such a strong desire not to be a program anymore that he defies orders. He’s a weapon with a heart. He’s the Terminator in Terminator 2, with Athena being the T-1000. It’s largely been done before, and mostly better.

Leto is fine in the role, inoffensive, but there’s no real charm either. The character should be discovering himself, but there’s nothing behind the performance that says that’s what he’s doing, he just seems like a wide-eyed know-it-all who knows he doesn’t know it all (it’s really hard to power wash the smarm off of him). We’ve seen the little digital boy wants to be a real boy story so many times by now, it’s beyond cliche and nothing new is added to that cliche here. There is a scene where Ares encounters a legacy program of Flynn and we get even older than The Old Man Bridges, still full of more charm and life and unique energy than Leto 30 years his junior. 

Greta Lee does so much of the heavy lifting in this film. She has an innate sense of self-awareness that at once displays strength, smarts, confidence and vulnerability. She’s so alive, blood-pumping, playing against a character with barely a spark of life in him, whose veins bleed cold code. Jodi Turner-Smith needs to remain cold-cold-cold to the point of evil, which is always a flaw in these stories. They even state in the endgame that she was just fulfilling her programming, but at times it comes off as vengeful, emotional, and it’s too much for the character. I’m sure it’s what Turner was asked to do, and she does it well, I think it deserved more restraint. Peters as Dillnger is, again, an underbaked character. He’s so singularly focused on his objective that there’s no sense of calculation, just an idiot with a one-track mind. Gillian Anderson (American Gods) plays his mother, his advisor, the CEO he succeeded, and she’s trying to be the voice of reason and conscience and he ignores her. The conflicts between mother and son should be fascinating, but they’re like bargain basement Succession riffs and Peters falls short of being anything but a comic book villain.

The best moments in the film are two “Grid” sequences: the first in which Ares and Eve must escape Dillinger’s grid, and the second is Ares’ journey into the 1980’s Grid.  Both should have been full-act adventures on their own, instead they are mere sequences within the film that don’t amount to a whole hell of a lot. The ‘80’s Grid is largely a nostalgia tug that, sadly, has no reason to execute an action sequence (wouldn’t it have been more fun if Athena had infected the Grid and resurrected legacy protective programs and Ares had to find Tron to help him escape.... Or something?).  The journey into Dillinger’s Grid comes at the right time, right at the time where I was about to check out of the film for not really having the same vibe as the other films in the series. It just doesn’t last long enough and doesn’t explore what life in DIllinger’s militaristic Grid is really like.

The climax of the film, with Athena bringing a Recognizer into the real world (I don’t think that hangar bay was big enough to print that out completely…some assembly required?) is really the only “Tron-in-the-real-world” aspect that fully delivers on awe. The light cycles riding around Vancouver never quite feel tangibly part of their environment, and people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets, well, often feel like people in Tron costumes walking around real-world sets. The Recognizer sequence seems to get, late in the film, how Tron-stuff works in the real world, but it’s still a sequence that feels like an action sequence and lacks real narrative thrust.

I watched the film in IMAX 3-D, and I have to say that 3-D technology, in IMAX at the very least, has advanced leaps and bounds since the last time I watched a 3-D movie. The depth of field seemed well orchestrated (especially where the light trails were involved) and the 3-D-ness of it all rarely called attention to itself. At the same time, I did have to wonder if some of the difficulty I was having with appreciating the action sequences was because of the 3-Dness, or if it was how Rønning shot the film. I didn’t have full clarity on the action sequences at all times. The fight choreography was also seriously underwhelming.

The Nine Inch Nails soundtrack is huge. It delivers, mostly. Because it’s playing with aspect from Legacy and the original, there are obvious nods to the Carlos and Daft Punk scores (and Carolos and Daft Punk sounds outside of their Tron work) as well NIN seem to crib notable sounds from Radiohead, Bjork and Massive Attack which left me puzzled as to the intent of the nod (I wonder how many would actually notice). It’s a kick ass soundtrack that, unfortunately, isn’t in complete lock-step with the film, and at times overpowers the imagery on screen.

Tron: Ares is satisfactory (but not satisfying). Like the prior two films it has an ending, but offers a braindead post-script (two actually) that tease where it could go in the future, and we're never going to get there.  Outside of it’s soundtrack, is not daring in any way. It does not live up to the legacy its predecessors established, and never fully feels connected to its past despite all the references and desperate efforts to tangentially connect it (really, the “permanence code” should have been related to the ISOs, to Quorra, but I suspect Disney was hoping to cater to a new new audience more than servicing an existing fanbase…and fair enough). It’s true crime is just being generic in its storytelling and action sensibilities in having the real world and the digital one collide. There should be more meat on those bones.

Tron:Ares will, unfortunately, put the lid back on the box for at least another 15 years before Disney decides to dust it off again. We'll see then what kind of effort they're willing to put into this modest property.

[Poster talk... quickly, as I've been at this for long enough. The main Tron poster, of Tron and Yuri and the ascending data disc in the (original) laser-in-the-sky is one of the series' most iconic images, so it was obviously replicated for both Legacy and Ares. Legacy tries to sexify it up a bit with Quorra's hand on Sam Flynn (which doesn't happen in the film), while Ares spoils the whole meeting of Ares with Flynn in the 80's Grid. Not sure how I feel about that. I really don't like the Ares' poster representing this, though).

Other posters for OG Tron are pretty clunky.  For Legacy, there's a plethora of posters highlighting all the gorgeous visual elements of the film, the costuming and vehicles with a big focus on the light cycles. Ares likewise focuses on the light cycles heavily in its posters.  I like the poster that highlights that Legacy introduces a new vehicle (though Legacy did not have a plane or glider poster which is too bad). Ares only introduced one new vehicle, a sort of monster truck/snowplow hybrid, and it didn't make the posters.

I didn't talk about Legacy's "digital de-aging" here, but it's curious that there are many posters spotlighting Clu and his weird cgi-reconstruction of Bridges young face.

Ares' poster series delivers the usual spate of character posters...so boring. It also leans heavily into the red accent of the film, but ignores the Triangle motif that the film tries to establish early on, only to abandon by the end of the first act. There are some Leto posters and just as many Turner-Smith posters, so, to quote Flynn... Nice. There's also a heavy focus for Ares on Tron-in-the-real-world including a series of posters with a light cycle driving through or past famous international landmarks. Meh.]

 

1-1-1: Black Mirror Season 7

created by Charlie Brooker

It's been almost two years since the last season of Black Mirror, which, truthfully, isn't so long ago but also feels like an eternity (Brooker really needs to write an episode about how our perception of time changes as we get older...but, you know, with technology). We got spoiled in those early Netflix years where Brooker cranked out three seasons of six episodes (and a special) over four years. It's probably for the best he hasn't maintained that pace. Black Mirror can be an intense show, and we probably need a longer refractory period before we thrust back into the technological trauma of Charlie Brooker's demented mind.

Except Black Mirror isn't just about exploring technology's ugly downsides or worst-case-scenarios, not anymore. Starting with "San Junipero" in season 3, an oasis of loveliness in an otherwise sea of dread at that point, Booker usurped expectations as to what the show could be. He continues to do so, and it's not just once per season. He's really adapted over the past three seasons into big tone shifts, from playful to comedic to suspense to creature feature to existential horror to romance and on. Every episode is not an absolute nightmare, and every episode is not about the twisting of the knife. 

One still has to brace themselves for each episode of Black Mirror to present to them something discomforting or even upsetting, but the show hasn't so much as lost its edge in today's nightmare world as its ceded being edgy for the sake of sustainability. I think if the bleak worldview of the first two seasons persisted, the show wouldn't have sustained its mass appeal. Brooker has ventured much deeper into science fiction territory over the years, stepping back from horror and terror. From the beginning he's balanced high concept world-building storytelling with character-based storytelling very effectively, but his character-based episodes have evolved to let the characters set the tone of an episode rather than the technology or the "twist", such as they were.

Season 7 is the next evolution of Black Mirror, with Brooker connecting new stories with past stories, sharing technology between stories but in different contexts, and even dropping a direct sequel to a past episode. unconstrained by time commitments (there are two feature-length episodes here), this season is varying in quality from episode to episode, but I think none are particuarly bad, some just are subjectively better than others.

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SPOILERS BELOW

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Common People
d. Ally Pankiw

The What 100: Mike and Amanda are a couple very much in love, and completely devoted to one another. They have a very comfortable life together, until Amanda falls ill with a previously undiagnosed brain tumour. Enter Rivermind, a company that says it will be able to fix Amanda, and for free, with a daring new technology that replaces the damaged sectors of the brain. But this new lease on life comes at a cost of a monthly subscription that Mike and Amanda can barely afford, not to mention other limitations like "service areas". The enshittification of human brains begins to wear on their once happy life.

(1 Great) The chemistry between Chris O'Dowd and Rashida Jones playing Mike and Amanda is everything for this episode. It's pretty heavy handed in its messaging so it all rests upon these actors to sell the emotional component of the story.  In the background is a couple who have built a very loving life together, remaining strong after a series of miscarriages, and, even in its current trials with Rivermind, you can sense the frustration but the love is not lost. When the idea of this brain-segment replacement is proposed, I immediately knew what the progression of the story would be, but it's the characters' journeys navigating this life-saving, but also life-crippling technology that matter.  O'Dowd and Jones are pretty effective dramatic actors, but they know comedy too, so the tone capably switches in and out like in the situations when Amanda is forced to say "contextually relevant" ads out loud that are both hilarious and terrifying.

(1 Good) Frankly, I found the marriage of tackling the burden of for-profit medical systems, the non-stop upgrade cycle of cellular service, and the progression of every service becoming a subscription to actually cohere pretty well in this story. It's not subtle in the slightest, and it need not be. Subscriptions services suck as do for-profit medical systems. The lack of humanity involved in capitalizing on other people's ill fortune seems to only be getting worse in our ever-dreadful capitalistic society.

(1 Bad) There's a tertiary aspect to this story about how, when societies start to crumble, the first thing to go is our sense of empathy. We start to feel better about our own situations by observing the misfortunes of others, whether it be putting them into a gladiatorial pit or watching them denigrate themselves for money. This story has a side-hustle on-line "only fans"-inspired website called DumDummies where people go on to humiliate and/or abuse themselves for the meagre spend of others. It's a very Black Mirror concept, but it's also a bigger concept than is given time to be explored here. The DumDummies side plot tonally interferes with the pathos of the episode once it starts becoming a more relevant part of the story. It's also conceptually unpleasant, not quite "The National Anthem" level but still, clearly, Brooker hasn't completely grown out of that gross-out sensibility.

META: The end of Season 4 had an episode called "Black Museum" which intoned that there was some connective tissue between episodes in the series, and ever since Brooker has been adding more connective tissue between different episodes. It's clear that not all the realities are the same realities but a lot of them are, or at least adjacent (we'll cover this more with the next episode's "meta"). This episode, tonally, felt akin to "Be Right Back", but the brain technology used in this episode we haven't seen any logical antecedent to (at least not yet). However, Amanada is a school teacher who has been teaching her kids about the mechanical drone bees that were introduced in "Hated In The Nation", so they're possibly in the same reality.

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Bete Noir
d. Toby Haynes

The What 100: Maria is a successful food scientist for a snack food company who has her world turned upside down by Verity, whom she went to high school with, who joins the company. Verity was not a popular kid in high school, and her sudden emergence in Maria's life makes her uncomfortable. Within short order, Maria gets the sense that Verity is there to sabotage her career, and not only that, either she is going mad or somehow Verity is changing reality.

(1 Great) This exploration of the effects of confabulation is an amazing starting point for a Black Mirror episode. What if suddenly things aren't quite as you remember them? Little things like the wording of an email, or the name of an old fast food chain... especially if it keeps happening. Bound to drive you mad, but what if it all correlates with the sudden re-entrance into your life of someone whom you bullied in high school? Would you think they were fucking with you? But they can't just rewrite reality, can they...?

(1 Good) ...In effect, yes they can. This story introduces to the realm of Black Mirror the idea of parallel realities, and the character of Verity has developed a quantum computer that has allowed her to shift reality around her on the press of a button an a whim. The power one can exude with such a device is enormous, and the episode touches upon that, but also the dissatisfaction of having a "cheat code" to life, and one's inability to escape one's trauma. Instead of therapy, Verity built a device where she could jump realities.

(1 Bad) I quite enjoyed the episode, but if I were to quibble, I would have liked it to sit even more with the terror of Maria feeling like her reality was crumbling around her. The thing is, it seemed like Booker's script was sort of on-board with Maria getting some sense of comeuppance. Was Brooker bullied as a kid?  I did guess that Maria, despite being our protagonist, was the villain of the piece, and while that didn't fully come true, she's not the innocent victim either. Had she had any outward sense of complicity or remorse (you could tell in Siena Kelly's performance there was some internal struggles and repression of her past misdeeds) then I think we would have been far more sympathetic towards her, and her terror would have hit harder, but this wasn't what Booker was after.

META: Spinning on the idea of Everything Everywhere All At Once and tapping into alternate realities, Brooker has opened up the concept that Black Mirror is a multiverse (Oh no! Multiverses are so 2023). As I mentioned above, he likes to loosely thread these pretty much stand-alone tales together in their own ways, but the only way to truly connect them would be as a multiverse, since some of the stories or technologies clash with known elements of other stories and technologies. I don't sense any grand architectural scheme out of this, I don't expect any sort of "Black Mirror Avengers Endgame" upcoming where worlds start colliding and crossing over. I think Brooker may be just playing with the concepts quantum dimentions or the theoretical powers of quantum computing (the series Devs used it to, in its own way, "time travel" through digital prognostication).  

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Hotel Reverie
d. Haolu Wang

The What 100: The 1940's black-and-white classic "Hotel Reverie" is going to be remade, so to speak, but through the proprietary technology from ReDream where they've rebuilt the entire world and environment of the 1940s original, as well as its cast so that they can insert superstar Brandy Friday as the romantic protagonist of the piece. During the "filming" Brandy will enter into the digital simulated reality of the film, performing against legendary actress Dorothy Chambers, or an AI simulacrum thereof. Brandy must complete the film's prescribed journey or face potentially being trapped in the world forever, but, when an accident disrupts the system, and Dorothy obtains self-awareness, Brandy isn't sure she ever will want to leave anyway.

(1 Great) Emma Corrin as Dorothy Chambers delivers a very believable, era-specific performance that asks her to be a character in a 1940's film but also gain an awareness of that fact, and also understand that she was also a real person, not just a character in a film. Dorothy learns who that person was (mainly through digital news archives) and gains a sort of sentience as result, and Corrin plays that awakening so well. Corrin also is able to show how the character's real-life struggles influenced the performance in the film-within-the-film but also connect it to the story at hand. It's a really skilled juggling exercise which she handles impressively well.

(1 Good) The romance between Brandy (Issa Rae) and Dorothy was the heart of "Hotel Reverie" and it is a lovely heart at that. I liked the idea that Issa Rae as Brandy Friday could step into a 1940's reality where nobody would care that she was a black woman who winds up falling in love with another woman...nobody would care beyond the context of the story itself where there's a jealous husband involved, that is. For all the aspects of Rae's performance in the film-within-the-film that didn't work for me, the connection between Brandy and Dorothy really did.

(1 Bad) The conceit of this story does not work for me at all. "Remaking" a classic black and white movie, beat-for-beat, scene-for-scene just with a modern actor in one of the roles will not be a success. A curiousity, yes, but not something that would a sustainable vision for film releases going forward. Especially from what we see in this episode, the results of sticking a modern actor in a classic movie are not at all pretty, especially when you can't have multiple takes and your star is stunned or surprised by so much of what's going on around them.

META: The gang over at The Weekly Planet podcast suggested that the story here is not bad, but the reason for the story is, and I wholeheartedly agree. This could be a technology where *anyone* (with enough money) could get inserted into a movie and live out their dream of being part of the picture (could you imagine getting to play, say, Han Solo in a technological dreamscape where the Star Wars galaxy feels real and not a set? It's a real fantasy to be sure). Have the episode be it's expensive and some regular person has scrimped and saved only for the the experience to go a bit haywire, and this romantic thing happens as a result... it seems even more Black Mirror that way if it's a technology that the masses can access, even if it's somewhat out of reach.  I felt like this conceit could have tightened the narrative and slimmed the episode down, making for a more sweeping romantic tale.

I also thought, at one point, is this going to wind up being the origin story for the San Junipero technology ("Juniper" is mentioned both in this episode and in "Common People" and "USS Callister: Into Infinity" as well), but no, not really(?)

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Plaything
d. David Slade

The What 100: A dishevelled man walks into a convenience store, tries to steal a bottle of liquor but is stopped by anti-theft automations at the store. When the police arrive they find out the man is also a DNA match for a cold case murder from the 90s. Taken in for questioning he tells his history of being an awkward, nervous, social outcast and gaming nerd. He worked for a video game magazine and was assigned to preview the latest offering from legendary programmer Colin Ritman, Thronglets...an anti-game about raising and nurturing a digital civilization of creatures that start to grow beyond their parameters. The unfolding of the story bridges past and present, and holds the key to the future in a very Black Mirror fashion.

(1 Great) Peter Capaldi holds the reigns of this episode from his first moments on screen and just carries it through. A lot of it is the knowledge his character Cameron has that nobody else (including the audience) does, but Capaldi is so charming and effective as a nervous tick of a man who has only somewhat outgrown his nerves with some very specific confidence. I never really did watch Capaldi as Doctor Who, but I don't think there's a performance of his that I've seen that I have not enjoyed.

(1 Good) Most Black Mirror episodes are very well directed but David Slade's episodes (previously "Metalhead" and "Bandersnatch") are standouts. The X-Files, Hannibal and Breaking Bad director has a history of making visually striking episodes of television, something which hasn't necessarily translated into a bold cinematic career, but damn does he make TV look good. This episode is set in the same world as "Bandersnatch" (the Black Mirror "interactive film" where the user can choose the direction of the story as it progresses) so much of the visual style was established with that production, but here Slade carries that style forward and has to juggle a second time period. It's all within an aspect ratio that doesn't seem to be standard widescreen, nor classic 4:3. And that interrogation room, the angles are just insane and captured perfectly. And, of course, Slade has real fun with Cameron's acid trips.

(1 Bad) I was anticipating a Bandersnatch sequel, and this isn't that, which is probably for the best.

META: Of all the Black Mirror episodes, Bandersnatch is the one I've returned to the most...for obvious reasons. It's a wild pick-a-path style story that is super fun to puzzle over all the alternate realities that it presents, and the way it lets you reset to "save points" (just noting that "save points" are mentioned in "Hotel Reverie") and back up to pick a different option to the abrupt story's end. As far as I know, there is no "true path", and so doing a direct sequel to Bandersnatch would entail ascribing one to that story, which would ruin it, so it's best they didn't.  

Brooker used to work as a video game reviewer for PC Zone magazine, so it's tempting to say there's a bit of himself in this one, but there's probably not much beyond having the same job as Cameron in the 90's.

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Eulogy
d. Christopher Barrett, Luke Taylor

The What 100: Phillip is called up by a service called Eulogy to see if he would provide his recollections of a woman whom he once dated and has recently passed away. The service entails him interacting with a virtual assistant who steps him into the photographs he has of the era and helps him draw out his memories which would then be shared with those in attendance at the funeral. It's an emotional journey about the fluidity of love and memory.

(1 Great) 90% of the time Black Mirror is about the terror of technology, how invasive it is or how it can spin out of its intended use into something nefarious, but sometimes Brooker crafts an idea that finds technology providing something so beautiful as helping someone to remember the past. The start of this journey takes a distant trauma and reawakens it for Phillip (Paul Giamatti in all his masterful, jowelly power), as he hesitates to fully recall this woman from his past, and slowly transitions into needing, more than anything, to seeing her face again, only he has no photo reference of her.  The episode powerfully builds up the sensations of recollecting beauty and pain and longing and regret, amongst other emotions on a truely beautiful roller coaster ride.

(1 Good) The visual effect of the AI assistant bringing Phillip into the pictures he's looking at was absolutely terrific and I would 100% love to be able to explore photos like that. I loved how it could visualize only what was seen in the picture and any details it had to assume were kind vectored in, looking surreal and unnatural. I could watch any number of stories with this device in any number of genres.

(1 Bad) We find out about halfway through that the AI interface is a representation of the deceased's daughter. I struggle with whether this is a good choice or if it would have been more resonant if the digital assistant were actually connected to the deceased's daughter, to provide a new emotional connection between people, even if a short term one. Otherwise, no notes. A new Black Mirror favourite.

META: The temple device is back! I cannot remember all the places where the temple device is used (it's used again in "USS Callister: Into Infinity"), but it's one of the regulars of the world of Black Mirror. It's the device that connects one's brain direct to technology (although unlike in "Common People", it's easily removable) and it's one of the show's mainstays. The question to ask is every use of this technology in the same world, or is each use of it a deviation and thus a parallel reality?

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USS Callister-Into Infinity
d. Toby Haynes

The What 100: Black Mirror's first true sequel picks up a few months after "USS Callister" left off. Their abuser Robert Daly is dead both in the real world and in the game, "Infinity", and having escaped his pocket dimention and into the full scope of the open world of the game, the digital clones aboard the USS Callister find they've left one sadistic abuser behind only to find tens of millions of others who will kill them in a digital heartbeat. Needing the in-game currency to survive, they're forced to ransack players for their credits, only their activities have set off alarm bells in the real world that something may be wrong. Where clone Nanette has become a confident leader, Nan in the real world is riddled with anxiety, particularly having been present in Daly's apartment the night he died. She takes on the role of finding the in-game clones, but corporate head honcho James Walton just needs them out of the game as fast as possible, and death will do just fine. Except Walton is hiding a very big secret about the heart of the game which the crew discover is their only way to escape their grim fate.

(1 Great) The longest episode of Black Mirror yet (by 1 minute over "Hated in the Nation"), "Into Infinity" is the episode of Black Mirror that most feels like a proper movie, epic in both scale and adventure with a big, big denouement and some very exciting, effective and weighty action sequences throughout. It's full of consequences and big moments which never feels like its being careful. Let's put it this way, I watched the first 3 episodes of Andor Season 2 the same night, something I had been buzzing in anticipation for a couple years now, and frankly I enjoyed myself more with "Into Infinity" (though still feeling a lot of love for Andor). 

(1 Good) It's been almost 7 1/2 years since "USS Callister" led Black Mirror's fourth season, and in that time, wow has the (American) cast kind of exploded. We've seen a lot more of Cristin Milioti, Jesse Plemons, Jimmi Simpson, and Billy Magnussen in the years since (sadly Michaela Coel did not return for the sequel) and so their increased profile lends much more to the sense of scale of the production, and they're all great playing duel roles in the "real world" and cloned versions of themselves.

(1 Bad) Did "Into Infinity" introduce anything new on top of the story of its predecessor, thematically at least? I mean, the visualization of "Fortnite"-style gaming into a "real life" setting was pretty great, but there was only a nominal commentary on the enshittification of MMORPGs. It hits the "corporate greed" and the toxic evil of the rich button much more than the first, but doubles down on toxic masculinity and white male entitlement (if you find yourself saying you're a "nice guy", ask yourself, do you actually respect women or are you just afraid of them. The answer will determine whether you're really a "nice guy"). 

META: I've had Galaxy Quest on the brain since the Blank Check podcast released a Special Features commentary on it this past weekend, and this episode felt not far off from Galaxy Quest. They're both satires of Star Trek with a meta story involving characters who are forced into a reality they did not ask for and step up to the roles they're asked to play. Honestly, I feel like this episode could have been a Galaxy Quest reboot/legasequel as much as a Black Mirror episode.

I also think Brooker did a pretty great job of sequelizing "USS Callister" without necessitating a re-watch. Most of the background to this episode is delivered in episode. And it's fun! 

KWIF: Wes Anderson x Roald Dahl (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (ha!) I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This week:
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar | The Rat Catcher | The Swan | Poison (2023, d. Wes Anderson - Netflix)
World on a Wire (aka Welt am Draht) (1973, d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Criterion) 
The Grand Tour (1991, d. David Twohy - Bluray)
Maggie Moore(s) (2023, d. John Slattery - Netflix)

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Wes Anderson is not the most prolific of creators. Looking at his filmography, he trends at about three years between films.  We just received Asteroid City earlier this year, so this quartet of short films from Anderson was entirely unexpected, and a delightful surprise.  His films are quite obviously painstakingly crafted... not that other films aren't, but Anderson's fastidiousness in art and visual design requires exacting confluence in not just art design and technical production, but also choreography.  It's not just that the positioning of sets, props, camera, lighting, performer, etc. need to be in the exact right position, it's that they need to all move with the precision of Cirque du Soliel to achieve the effect Anderson wants.  I have speculated in the past about what drives character performance Anderson's films -- the forthright and honest, dispassionate and unfiltered way of speaking -- is either the director finds human emotion an alien concept, or else understands it so well he turns a clinical eye towards it.  I'm now wondering if it's because his films are often so clockwork in their timing, that there's no room for modulation in performance.

With these four productions, Anderson has stripped down even further the performance side of things, and upped the ante on precise, controlled movement.  These four tales to be told are each a Roald Dahl short story that Anderson is not so much adapting into a play or production, but a moving storybook.

He's ostensibly created a new genre.

Think books-on-tape, but visualized.  We see the narrator, a big-name celebrity, in costume, on a set, relaying the prose story, with visual cues of all kinds - performers interacting, props being handed or taken away by costumed stagehands, set pieces (or pieces of sets) moving to reveal new set pieces, camera movements around a set, soft transitions to stop motion animation, in-camera visual trickery, pantomime -- all in service of the verbalized narrative.  

Who is narrating can shift throughout each production, the duties lobbed around like a volleyball, but there's always a logic to the shift. Anderson has these narratives relayed at a lightning clip, to the point of being somewhat dizzying. If you get distracted, even for a second, you can lose the plot.  And with all the wonderfully captivating and clever visuals, it's hard not to be distracted.  The breakneck pacing is doubly part of the whole stage-production vibe that gives each story the air of a single take, but also necessary to keep the story contained to its sub-20-minute length.  The narrators -- Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade, Ralph Fiennes and Rupert Friend -- all deliver the story rapidly and precisely, super enunciated, and whether it's rote memorization or reading off cue cards it's quite impressive (methinks it's the former, as eye movement and demands of performance would make cue card reading even more of a challenge.)

The four stories are:

1) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Here the narrator switches because of a nesting doll-like tale that finds a story within a story within a story. It's ultimately the tale of a man aiming for the greatest riches he can imagine by learning the very specific discipline of seeing without seeing. It takes years for him to master it but when he does, he finds that he sees something more can be done than benefit himself, that the greatest reward in life is helping others. It's the most moralistic storybook tale of the quartet, and also the most involved production, with the most performers and elaborate set changes required. It's the greatest marvel of the four. I envy the weird kids who stumble on this absolutely curious product at a young age and watch it over and over. It is both transfixing and mind expanding.

2) The Swan. A sensitive young boy is bullied by two exceptionally nasty brutes who force him into more and more extreme situations. It is a harsh tale that exemplifies the cruelty of man towards other men and towards nature, and one's ability to, if not rise above it, then endure in spite of it. It's a melancholy tale reflecting the worst of human nature. If I take anything from this it's that we've hit a stage in children's stories in the past two or three decades where parents increasingly want to shield their children from such tales, to promise the kids a world of harmony, not harshness, and this is Anderson reminding us that it's okay... that maybe such stories teach us empathy as well as extoll the virtues of endurance and perseverance.  Anderson still loads the storytelling up with innate whimsy as a result of the production values and the preformative acts of the stagehands, but it's not even the proverbial spoonful of sugar. It's a dark tale with a small speck of glitter.

3) The Rat Catcher. A darkly comedic tale of a nasty rat-like exterminator hired to catch rats. He engages with the narrator and a garage hand, providing his insight into his profession, but also his own disturbed self. Richard Ayoade is the narrator here and, frankly, I'm surprised it took Anderson this long to collaborate with him. They seem to be a natural fit. Ralph Fiennes plays the ratcatcher here, and it is a magnificent comedic performance.  This story exemplifies best Anderson's control over the power of suggestion, using the combination narrative and pantomime to get through the most unpleasant aspects of the story.

4) Poison. An Englishman in (presumably) occupied India awakens to finds himself in a predicament with a poisonous snake asleep on his belly. His associate summons the doctor, and both endeavour to aide the man in his situation. While each of these tales is told in a rapid clip, this one utilizes its storytelling pace like a ticking time bomb, ratcheting up the tension as Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley try to diffuse the situation, while a more and more uncomfortable-looking Benedict Cumberbatch lay motionless in bed. It's easily the most exciting of the quartet's stories, but it's climax is the most sobering and potent. We think this is a whimsical story about a most tense situation, but the poison in question is the racism already in the Englishman's blood. it's toxic and spat venomously, with no easy antedote. 

I can see these not being to everyone's delight, because the form here is so radically different than what we expect from a Wes Anderson film, or from film in general. It's a new form of storytelling that I would love to see others try their hand at, having actors narrate a short story but providing staged visual accompaniment, maybe under a structured anthology.  I don't imagine it becoming a dominant form of entertainment, but it's such a bold new way to tell stories. At the very least, I would love more of this pairing of Anderson and Dahl.  It's clear the influence the author and his storytelling, has had on the director.

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Beyond his name and his profession, until a few days ago, I knew nothing about director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  A cursory glance around the internet, he is a complicated figure at best, or the epitome of the toxic, abusive, self-destructive auteur at worst. Were he alive today, he would be cancelled.  He was a queer filmmaker but had some of his works levied as being homophobic, as well as misogynistic and sexist. Mercifully, I don't see any of that in World on a Wire.

This is my first exposure to Fassbinder, as part of Criterion's October selection of Techno Thrillers. I only just learned that the production was a two-part made-for-TVmini-series based on the Daniel F. Galouye novel "Simulacron-3", which suddenly makes much more sense to me.  I had wondered how someone like Fassbinder who was incredibly prolific (looking at his IMDB page, he had completed over 40 productions in about a 15 year career before his death) could come up with such an immaculately well-realized cyberpunk story in the early 1970s.  Of course there was a novel behind it, there had to be. And, as a production, it feels very much structured like a novel, less like TV or a movie.

Running 205 minutes, on a German TV budget, early on it seemingly feels the strain of its limitations.  The sets and wardrobe and lighting seem a bit cheap, the performers somewhat stiff, and there's just some oddness, like lack of extras or strange behaviour on screen. But moving past the 1970's German TV of it, and it starts to unveil itself... and the methodology of a craftsman comes through. There aren't special effects in this production, but through use of mirrors and windows and camera positioning or movement, Fassbinder delivers clues and cues to what's really going on. Glass is a motif throughout the production in both obvious and subtle forms. It's clear that the director is thinking both about telling the story as well as presenting it.

I had no idea cyberpunk existed as a genre prior to, like, William Gibson, but this is quite definitively a cyberpunk prototype. Our protagonist, Fred Stiller, is one of the architects of a simulated reality, where thousands of unique near-humans exist, primarily for the purpose of advancing market research for the government. Stiller's colleague mysteriously dies in an unlikely accident, after seemingly going mad, Stiller begins to question the project. When another colleague, the head of security, disappears before his very eyes, and then seems to be the only one who remembers the man, Stiller begins to question his sanity. 

It's not really a spoiler to say that Stiller learns his reality is, in fact, a simulation. It's the obvious revelation that I worried the story would spend 3 hours building towards. Instead, the clues are laid out for the audience to piece together, and for Stiller to resist the truth until he can no longer ignore it. By the mid-way point (the break between the two episodes) Stiller is aware that he is not a real person, and then it becomes about what he does with that information.

I'm blow away with this early 70's sci-fi psychological thriller and how adeptly and thoroughly it negotiates its ideas of reality, which, to me didn't seem to become part of the sci-fi conversation at large until the 90's when VR became a buzzword.  I was captivated by not just the story but the choices made in the production of the story that smartly expand on the world, and the worlds within worlds.  I was going to say I'm surprised this hasn't been remade, but Galouye's novel was also the basis for The Thirteenth Floor (1999) which I recall being a trite, subpar production. This is an utterly surprising, quality piece from a filmmaker I probably shouldn't like very much, but I'll separate the art from the artist for the time being.

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I like David Twohy's films. I think his Riddick trilogy with Vin Diesel is an over-ambitious, bonkers, action/sci-fi near-masterpiece, which is a pretty hot take, I know. I really, really like The Arrival, despite the miscasting of Charlie Sheen as a tech nerd.  He wrote Waterworld (a film I mistakenly avoided for decades), The Fugitive, and Critters 2 which is an insane resume. I'm pretty sure I have seen all the films he has written or directed except G.I. Jane and this one, The Grand Tour.

Re-released this year by Unearthed Films, I picked up the blu-ray of The Grand Tour on a recent physical media hunt because it was "A David Twohy film" I had never heard of before. It stars Jeff Daniels, but the figure on the painted box art it looked at first glance like Jeff Bridges to me, further confusing me. It also intoned time travel ("He came back from the future to save his only child from the past") so that's all I needed.

Once I unwrapped the box, and saw that the case had a reversible liner with a different image, I immediately recognized it... Timescape. This film was released in theatres as Timescape. Or, at the very least, it was advertised in comic books with that second image as Timescape. But that was still the limit of my familiarity. I had no idea what I was in for.

The Grand Tour finds widowed, alcoholic, single father Jeff Daniels still grieving his lost wife while renovating their house outside of town into a bed and breakfast.  A coach bus pulls up to his door and group of tall, attractive, odd-behavioured tourists from "California" emerge, with one demanding they stay at his establishment. A fat wad of cash ensures the transaction. These strangers are a mystery, and the way they behave raises questions that only Jeff Daniels seems curious about. Since we know the premise of the film, from the box art, involves time travel, the presumption is that they're time travelers, or aliens, or both. But why are they here?

The film delicately balances its sci-fi aspects with a very human story of a flawed and hurting man looking to keep it all together in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Daniels does a pretty amazing job at keeping the character consistent between investigating what his guests are up to, fighting his attraction to one of them, trying to be a good dad, holding his father-in-law at bay, and struggling through guilt and depression. Though we didn't talk about depression much in the early 90's, it's clearly a film that is working through it, showing that there's no easy fix but sometimes you just need to prioritize others over yourself.

I liked this quite a bit. It's a surprisingly deep story within a thrifty production that has those layers that Twohy always brings to his scripts, elevating it above the usual direct-to-video or B-movie genre pictures.  Twohy is a pretty good visual storyteller, though not exactly a stylist, and I think he trusts his writing more than his visual storytelling which may be what has held him back from being a more prominent director. This is a bit of a gem.

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I really, really like Jon Hamm as a performer. If we were in the old Hollywood system of the 40's and 50's Hamm would be cranking out four or five starring vehicles a year, one of which would be a hit while the others forgotten. As Patrick Willems mentioned recently, we don't really have that superstar leading man concept anymore, where an actor drives people to the theatres.  Post Mad Men though, Hamm (or Hamm's agents) had been pushing for that superstar leading man career resulting in a number of forgettably bland pictures ill-suited for him and his charm.  Hamm has since abandoned those aspirations, either stepping into great supporting roles where there's no pressure upon him, or leading smaller productions that are more tailored to take advantage of his persona.  Confess, Fletch is the most recent, and most winning example no doubt. 

Maggie Moore(s) is the second directorial feature of Hamm's Mad Men co-star and friend John Slattery. It is a dark comedy/crime drama about a troubled sandwich shop franchisee, Jay Moore (Micah Stock), whose life spirals out of control resulting in a hitman murdering his wife, Maggie, as well as woman of the same name. Hamm plays the widower Police Chief who is trying to make sense of the chaos.

The film co-stars Tina Fey as a neighbour to the Moores who Hamm's Chief takes a romantic interest in. Fey and Hamm have had a long history of working together (notably 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt), and there's such a natural sense of comfort between them. There may not be heavy fireworks between them, but there is a sweetness to their pairing that plays well on camera.  If I'm honest, I found the relationship drama between Fey and Hamm to be far more stimulating than the shitstorm Jay Moore gets himself into and the knots Hamm and his deputy (Ted Lasso's Nick Mohammad) try to untie. They're almost two separate films tonally, the relationship dramedy and the crime comedy, and they do seem at odds with one another.  The third act culminates in gunplay and violence that is even more tonally at odds with the rest of the production.

Positioned as a comedy by Netflix, I find it difficult to laugh when child pornography and spousal abuse are kind of instigators of the films high-jinks, and there are only a few outright chuckles found within. To its credit, the film never lost my interest, because I found Hamm held this up on his beefy shoulders pretty well, but I've seen more than a few of the muddy small-town crime-comedies over the years, and the key distinguisher of them as a subgenre is that they're all pretty forgettable. They all want to be Fargo but the only memorable one is Fargo.  The difference with Fargo is how conscious it is of its tragedy. It's a satire of human nature, how our egos tend to just dig us deeper into holes we've already dug. Maggie Moore(s)' story is trying to find humour in its horrors, and just can't escape the nature of the horrors it presents.  I think maybe if they shifted tones, did more of a Hell and High Water vibe, taking it all more seriously, it would play better...heavier, but better.

  

[We Disagree] Alita: Battle Angel

2018, d. Robert Rodriguez - Crave

Remember the first trailer for Alita: Battle Angel?  The one where Alita's eyes are so huge they're legitimately upsetting...the kind of unnatural visual that gets the villagers rallying with their torches and storming the castle ready to kill the beasts.  In case you forgot:




Looking into those huge CGEyes, the trailer is a horrifying and unsettling journey beyond the uncanny valley.  But once you actually start watching the you can possibly look past the eyes and instead be tangibly upset with the tangibly unreality of Alita's entire computer animated face that is on screen throughout over 80% of the film.  You'll never ease into it's not-human nature...the way the mouth moves primarily, especially when it contorts into a pinched, fangy smile.  *Shudder*

In the year-ish since Alita's debut and unsuccessful domestic box office venture (though it did make considerable bank globally), the film has garnered a rather cult-like collection of supporters (*cough*Toast*cough*).  I won't ever deny anyone something they enjoy, but dear god this is a terrible, terrible movie.

I don't know the source material since I'm not an anime fan.  There's something structurally about most anime that I find grating, so I just avoid most of it (which isn't to say I dislike all Japanese animation, like Studio Ghibli and non-genre anime tend to be ok, but I just can't summon the energy to wade through it all to find the ones I could tolerate).  What bothers me about this westernized "live action" re-envisioning of the anime isn't the aspects that feel anime.  No, it's the godawful dialogue, character dynamics, story progression and, grrr, futuresport.  I hate futuresports.


The relationships between the characters only exist in cliche.  There's not a single dynamic here that feels unique, and every  one of those relationships progress in the film in completely predictable fashion.  Like memory-less Alita, the waif-ish ingenue, immediately falls in love with Hugo, and accepts Dr. Dyson as her father figure, and makes "the big speech" to try to rally the antagonistic hunter-warriors to her aide against the bad guys.

As a result, the dialogue in this film is clunky as hell.  The characters only ever speak like they're reading lines in preparation for a series of very bad plays.  I can't think of a single moment where it felt like two characters shared anything real between them.  All dialogue here seems to have intent, whether it's overt exposition or pensive pondering or brutal, Hallmark-ian romantic exchanges. 

The film's visuals are very unique, and the world is rather distinct (it's a far future society that has all but collapsed, where there exists only one remaining city, "Iron City", surrounded by trash, and above it a hovering golden city Zalem, the dream of every lowly person to achieve status to go up there.  But rather than this acting as any sort of tangible class metaphor, the story ignores it for a cliched adventure about a cyborg girl and her missing memories and a lot of stupid futuresport.

The source material was originally serialized manga, and even the original anime was multi-part.  The film reflects this with it's many, many, too many plot threads, like the murder mystery plot, or Hugo's dreams of being a Motorball star and going to Zalem, or Alita's missing memories, or Dr. Dyson's tension with his estranged ex wife over the use of their dead daughter's body (and name) for this amnesiac cyborg... the "hunter warriors" league, the influence of Nova from high up above, the curious case of the missing limbs, etc etc.  This film has so much going on, and almost all of it is exhaustingly cliche.
 The reality of Alita revolves around its futuresport, called "Motorball".  The biggest champion of Motorball has the potential to elevate to Zalem, so everyone is obsessed with it.  People body mod with cybernetics to give them an advantage in Motorball, and it's an "anything goes" sport.  It's people wearing rollerblades with rockets on them racing after a ball in a circular track, trying to slam the ball into a repository.  It's just cyborg Rollerball.  God I hate futuresports.  Films can get too mired in explaining futuresports rules, or they can forget to really explain the futuresport and just let it happen, and in either case it's annoying...does anyone *really* care about the result of any futuresports game ever?  It's never playing out in real-time so the drama of a sports match can never capture the feeling of watch a real sport, so what's the point?  (Yes, Quiddich is a futuresport and I hate the amount of space it takes up in those books and movies too).

Most of Robert Rodriguez's films are enjoyable, even if they're not great films .  There's a consistent style shared among most of his films from the Desperado trilogy through to the various grindhouse-inspired work and his kids movies.  The outsiders are Sin City and Predators, where the director is working on an established property that isn't his own and seems to create a tighter, more careful production.  This is definitely in that outsider territory, to the point that I didn't remember he was the director until the end credits.

Likewise I forgot that James Cameron was involved with this.  It was seeing Cameron's script credit (with Laeta Kalogridis) that it all made sense.  Cameron trades almost exclusively in big showy productions filled with boring stock characters who never remotely feel or act like real people.  I can accept those types of characters in a cheap, intentionally stupid Hallmark movie, but in a film costing over a hundred million dollars, I want characters that believe their reality.   

I hated this movie.

The Hiatus Post: Blade Runner 2049

I am taking a break from the web. Not being on the web, but contributing. I have been posting something to something blog related since 1999. I have had unintended extended breaks, but I always felt the pressure to do something. This time, I am under far too many other pressures and I just need one fewer thing that I feel compelled to do. The photoblog is paused, this blog will be paused. On my side, at least; Kent will do as Kent's life allows him to do.

2017, Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) -- cinema

Disclosure. I haven't felt compelled to watch Blade Runner in quite sometime. Disclosure. I actually enjoy the original version, with it's noir over-dub. Disclosure. I never really liked the idea of Deckard possibly being a replicant himself. Disclosure. While I never avoided spoilers, apparently I did because I never caught the first one, till the opening footage.

So, thirty years since the last movie took place, 35 years since the last movie came out. And Villeneuve still wonders why this movie didn't do better. To me its obvious; the original's fanbase was not only late in coming (the original didn't do well either) but they are now old & jaded. Sure, the younger fanbase of all things scifi and retro is there, but again... jaded. As for the rest of the world, the world that makes up the population that determines a movie being a success or not? Despite "hey girl" Ryan Gosling being the lead, its slow paced, atmospheric scifi. And it cost a fortune to make. So, really, not so much of a mystery Denis.

But still dude, I loved it. Fucking loved it. But get it, this is not big grins and rush-right-out-to-see-it-again loving it. This is knowing my expectations and having them met, if not exceeded. It is a lush, colourful (no, really it is) homage to the original while being a powerful, standalone movie. I just wish the plot had been tighter, as in the end, after all the exposition about the powerful central theme I still couldn't really tell you anyone's motivations beyond Joe's. Why exactly did the Bad Guy need Deckard? The replicant underground? Hell, other than the option of tossing the old pigskin back n forth, why did Joe need Deckard? But meh, who cares, I just watched the fuck out of this movie.

The visuals, the aging anachronistic world (remember, now was The Future of the original) where the decay of mother earth is apparent. Is that snow? Ash? Ashen snow? Isn't this LA ? No plants, no real animals no nothing but industrial decay and bodies everywhere. One can assume that the humans left on earth exist for no other reason than to fuel the off-world colonies exodus, through labour and spending. At some point that spending will be done, and ... abandonment.

Speaking of the visuals, I must admit, I am in the camp of being disappointed about the female centric sex machine of the movie. C'mon, I get it, you think the girls get Gosling so we get Joi, the Not Real Girl. But, what about the background? Wouldn't the Joi advertising try and appeal to all ? Unless they didn't want to interfer with the whole Joe-Joi unreal couple thing. The how about the pleasure droid brothel? There wasn't a single sexual exploitative male image, and that just seems ... unrealistic.

In the end, after two-plus hours, I was left satisfied. And more than eager for another part of the story, even moreso than after the dozen plus times I have seen the original. I want to see where the offworld colonies go, what is left with Earth, and now that Replicants know they can procreate, what is next for them?