10 for 10: what be on teevee?

[I said I wasn't going to do these anymore...like 2 years ago...but it's back!
10 for 10... that's 10 movies (or TV shows) which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie (or TV show) we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? ]

In This Edition:

1. Shoresy - Season 5 (2025, Crave, 6/6 episodes watched)
2. Agatha Christie's Seven Dials - Season 1 (2026, Netflix, 3/3 episodes watched)
3. Wonder Man - Season 1? (2026, Disney+, 8/8 episodes watched)
4. The Muppet Show - pilot (2026, Disney+, 1/1 episodes watched)
5. How To Get To Heaven From Belfast - Season 1 (2026, Netflix, 8/8 episodes watched)
6. Hijack - Season 2 (2026, AppleTV, 8/8 episodes watched)
7. Laid - Season 1 (2024, W Network/Peacock, 8/8 episodes watched)
8. The Burbs - Season 1? (2026, W Network/Peacock, 7/8 episodes watched)
9. Look Around You - Seasons 1-2 (2002-2005, Tubi, most episodes watched)
10. Smack the Pony - Seasons 1-3 (1999-2003, Tubi, a handful of random episodes watched)

...and...go!

---
Season  2 | 4

All the talk in 2026 about hockey-based TV shows has been about Heated Rivalry, which comes from former Shoresy writer/director Jacob Tierney. The second most talked about hockey-based TV show of the year has been, well, the Olympics, I guess, where the Americans squeaked out wins against the Canadians on both the men's and women's ice (it wouldn't be so upsetting if America was in a better space right now). Shoresy has had four good years of being the pre-eminent hockey-based TV show, so they've had a good run. This season is, like the other seasons, full of laughs and slow-motion shots of women in thongs walking away from the camera. As ever the dichotomy of a Jared Keeso project of both being progressive and salacious is present.

Shoresy is Keeso's love letter to hockey, a sport he clearly, dearly loves (the man played Don Cherry in a TV biopic mini-series and obviously relished it), and so the writer-star uses it as his platform to examine his concerns or frustrations or hopes and dreams for the sport, by way of a "whale-shit hockey league" in Sudbury, Ontario.

This season, Keeso turns his, and Shoresy's focus to the criticisms facing North American hockey players being too soft, that the Europeans, once known for being real delicate, finesse players, are now the biggest and toughest on the ice. The local league having folded, and the Blueberry Bulldogs no longer having a home, Shoresy, with inspiration from none other than Wayne Gretzky (making a cameo...or is it a literal Cameo), decides to stage an exhibition game of tough North American SOBs against the reigning Euro team.

I'm not sure I agree with the violence-as-sport aspect of the game (the one thing about the Olympics is how tamped down the fighting gets) so this idealizing of it kind of shifts me uneasy, but then, that's the point Keeso is trying to make, that we've gotten soft on the ice, I guess. Elbows up?

[11:27]

---

Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent comes from affluence, but that affluence has waned since her father's untimely death. Her mother has to rent out the manor for parties and events in order to keep up the lifestyle. But in the morning, following the latest soiree, Bundle's beau turns up dead in his bedroom, and things are more than suspicious. Like, what's with all the clocks?

Anyway, turns out Bundle is a tenacious young lady, and also quite astute, and she starts poking around the shadowy world of the elites, which leads her to a secret meeting place upstairs from a private club where a secret society gathers and plots and machinates.  Bundle suspects that the secret society is responsible for the foul play that's stricken her life, but the clues start leading her elsewhere.

I enjoyed Mia McKenna-Bruce's performance as Bundle,  her petite and doe-eyed appearance mask a fiercely independent streak and formidable intelligence. Shockingly, her mother, played by Helena Bonham Carter, appears quite the opposite... she hides in her home, tending to her plants and seems to have little interest in expanding her knowledge of the world outside her ground. The men bundle finds herself surrounded with are largely boys of priviledge, and somewhat daft, inept, pompous or oblivious, except maybe Martin Freeman's detective who definitely sees her capabilities but also sees her only as a vulnerable young woman.

At three sub-hour length episodes, not sure why this wasn't just a movie, but it ends with the promise of something more, something much bigger and more adventurous for Bundle, and if we're going to do "cozy adventure" or "cozy espionage" instead of "cozy mystery", I might be there for it.

[23:51]

---

In the long stretch of Marvel projects since, oh, let's say X-Men appeared in the year 2000, my enthusiasm for a Wonder Man project was at the very least in the lower quarter of said projects. I mean, certainly quite above things like the non-MCU-related TV shows or the Fox Network shows of the early 2000s, but I just have no experience with or opinions on the character. Its star, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, on the other hand, I think is tremendous, even though the majority of his work I've seen has been in other comic book projects (Aquaman, Watchmen).

In a series created by Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton and writer Andrew Guest (Community, Suburgatory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), it keeps Simon Williams as a Hollywood-based actor, but it seems that the majority of the show is cut from new cloth...but then I don't really know.

Here Simon is an aspiring actor who invest too deeply in any role he is given, much to his detriment. He's often fired from gigs because he wants to do too much to make his role meaningful to him and to the production. His family doesn't fully believe in him, but there's also worry, because Simon has super powers which have always seemed beyond his control.

Simon meets Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley, Iron Man III, Shang-Chi), the actor who played the terrorist The Mandarin, at a movie theatre and they wind up at an audition for the new "Wonder Man" movie (a remake of a 80's cheesy sci-fi classic) and become fast friends. Trevor takes Simon under his very experienced wing and teaches him a new approach to acting to compliment his talent, rather than get in his way. 

It's really not a superhero show, despite being set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is a show about performing, and friendship, with a bit of loving criticism thrown towards the filmmaking process.  The heart of the show is the bond between Simon and Trevor, and both Abdul Mateen II and Kingsley crush the shit out of it. These are two phenomenal actors playing struggling actors who become unlikely friends, and it sells... even as we find out that Trevor is actually a plant who is being pressured by a government agency to expose Simon as an unregistered super-powered individual (even that angle is a critique on how policing agencies wind up having quotas merely for optics, not necessarily for the good of the public).  It's clear that Trevor doesn't feel good about what he's doing and, while the conclusion of the series is a given, it's still a pretty enjoyable ride getting there.

It's a sweet and lovely series, way outside the usual MCU parameters. It's a surprise, and I liked it a lot, but I still fall into the camp of wanting more superheroics in my superhero show.

[42:29 - of course I spend double the time talking about a superhero show]

---

Disney finally, FINALLY, did it. They bought the Muppets off of the Henson company two decades ago and outside of two rather terrific films (The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted) they have really, really struggled with what to do with them. Their attempts to contemporize the Muppets as TV shows haven't ever fully worked.  What the die hard fans have been shouting on message boards for ages is for Disney to just do The Muppet Show again. Disney has resisted for so long.

With Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg among the Executive Producers of the series, there was a slew of creatives involved with a strong desire to recreate The Muppet Show as exact to the vintage series as possible.  Disney conceded but without commitment. They got one episode.  One episode to get it right, to recapture all the feelings of a series that ended 40 years ago, and also make it feel like more than just a nostalgia trip. Pop superstar Sabrina Carpenter, also an executive producer, gleefully offered herself up to be the celebrity guest for the return.

The sets look astounding, as if they were always there and just needed dusting off. The Muppets look great, only the voices -- to this old fan -- seem off, because of course they are. There are different people puppeting the central characters these days. The skits... well they're classic Muppets bits, vaudevillian in nature, song-and-dance numbers, joke-centric comedy that's intentionally corny, and just the lunacy of the Muppets...but the show is as much, if not more, about what's happening back stage as on stage and the way the two bleed into each other has always been the delight of the series.

By all rights, this pilot seems to have been very, very well received with high viewership over an extended period of time, which has fingers tightly crossed that Disney is finally ready to commit to the format, and just let The Muppet Show live again. 

As soon as it was over, I was ready to watch the next one... I need a next one.

[56:29]

---

I probably wouldn't have given How To Get To Heaven From Belfast a second look if not for the auto-play trailer on Netflix highlighting that it's the new series from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee. I liked Derry Girls just fine, but Lady Kent loved it, having watched it through at least twice before I waded in.

Derry Girls was a half-hour comedy about Northern Irish Catholics teenage school girls in the mid-90's during the waning days of The Troubles, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is definitely not that.

The show is a comedy, but more like a comedy-thriller maybe as three old friends learn about the death of an estranged member of their high-school crew of outsiders. Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher) is now a detective show creator/writer, Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) is a mother of three and going mad, while Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) is still a died in the wool Catholic lesbian who takes care of her mom as an excuse not to live life. When they get together and venture to the small town outside of Belfast to pay their respects to their old friend, things are...weird. The family is really weird, almost cult-like. And Saoirse thinks she discovers that the body in the casket is not, in fact, her dead friend.

It's a twisty, spinny mystery, especially as the show very clearly and very early tells us that the dead friend (and a wife and mother) Greta (Natasha O'Keeffe) is in fact alive and being held by a woman who seems very much like a contract killer (Bronagh Gallagher).

Everything, though, ties back to a secret from the women's past, a murdered man that they buried and tried to forget about, but now seems to be at the center of everything.

It's an exceptionally weird and twisty show that constantly upends what the actual threat is to these women. The dynamics between the characters is a comedic one so there are tremendous laughs throughout, but the situation is a wild puzzle that only the showrunner knows the answer to. She provide the audience just enough information to keep them guessing at the wrong answers.

It's also a show that subverts expectations over and over again. It sets up many characters as being villainous, but usurps that expectation time and again in terrifically interesting (although just as often, sloppy) ways. 

It's quite a mess overall, but the mess seems almost intentional, as part of the fun (at one point, the show winds up in Derry, where, for promotion of season 3 of Derry Girls, they painted a huge portrait of that cast on the side of a building... that portrait not only pops up in this series, but also has Derry Girls star Saoirse-Monica Jackson standing in front of it eating an ice cream, which is mind-breaking meta).

[whoops, the timer got messed up...let's just say 1:08:30]

---

The next train is arriving...handsome

In the last season of Hijack Idris Elba's Sam Nelson, a high powered corporate negotiator, was on a flight that got hijacked, and he took it upon himself to try to keep the people on the plane safe while helping the boots on the ground and the hijackers communicate and follow-through on demands. The big deal of Hijack was that the hijackers, for the most part, were unwilling participants, and that there were other plants on the plane.

Season 2 kicks off with the methodical business of a subway train in Berlin, which Sam is on, getting hijacked. It seems Sam is keenly aware that something is starting to happen and attempts to intervene...but no, to spoil the surprise at the end of the episode, Sam is the hijacker this time.

Much like last season, Sam is an unwitting participant, as are others involved. Sam must convince the metro control room that he is the lone hijacker, he must take the credit/blame/fall for this action. His only demand is that the Berlin police find Bailey-Brown, the terrorist that was at the heart of last season. Sam's been convinced that Bailey-Brown murdered his son (between seasons) and that his ex-wife Marsha (Christine Adams) is going to be killed if he doesn't follow through.

And so, over the eight episodes of season two, Sam tries to keep the train passengers in line, tries to keep the police actions at bay, tries to deduce who the plant(s) are on the train, tries to keep Marsha safe, all while trying his best to somehow find a way through all of this that keeps everyone alive. Nobody needs to get hurt, but people do get hurt.

I dunno, I've been following a lot of transit nerds on youtube over the past couple years and so I think a lot about subways and public transit systems, so seeing the Berlin network, trains and stations was really quite awesome. The first half of the season is full of upending expectations (not unlike How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, only having less fun with it) and the second half feels at times like it's stretching to fill the runtime. This would have made for a fabulous 2-hour movie, and would have still been really solid at 4 or 6 episodes, but 8 was too long, and it took too much time to get to what was actually happening (the ties to the previous season's adversaries implied that people who watched the previous season cared that much about the bad guys of that season to see them return). 

But watching Elba is always a pleasure. That's a handsome man right there. And of the large cast involved, they all do solid work, but there's not enough time with most of them to really invest in anyone but Sam and so what the other characters are doing seems...unimportant. A movie would have been more tightly focussed.

[1:20:19]

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Based on an Australian series of the same name and adapted by Nanatchka Khan (Don't Trust the B... in Apartment 23) and Sally Bradford McKenna, Laid is a comedy about sex and death, as so much media is. In this case event planner Ruby (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once) learns that seemingly all the men and women that she has had sex with are dying, and not from an STD or anything directly relational to her, other than they're dying in the order in which she slept with them.

Ruby's best friend AJ (Zosia Mamet, Madame Web) is a true crime obsessive (worshipping at the feet of Amanda Knox) and immediately wants to get down to business solving this thing, creating a whiteboard for Ruby's sex timeline.  

The gist of the show is that Ruby is a bit callous with her sexual encounters, using men (and women) in disregard for their feelings. She's in therapy but resists any action that would see self improvement.  She finds herself attracted to her client Isaac (Tommy Martinez) in spite of herself, and he in turn is into her, despite himself. But she knows she can't be with anyone else because all of her sexual partners are dying in very weird ways.  Unfortunately, that also means AJ's boyfriend, Zack (Andre Hyland), who Ruby slept with when they both were drunk at a mutual friend's wedding during the brief time in which he and AJ were broken up. The fuse is lit and it's only a matter of time before that bomb goes off.

Ruby is... selfish, self-centered and inconsiderate. She's defintely not the most horrendous person in the world but she's just on the other side of the line from being a "good person".  In trying to figure out why this is happening to her, why her exes are dying, she also needs to examine herself and the impact she has on others... and it's tough for her to escape her seemingly inescapable tendencies.

Laid, as a comedy, is a failure. Each episode has a few chuckles and sometimes a really good laugh or two, but for the most part the comedy is more conceptual, and when you're playing in dark comedy territory, you have to have a really good handle on tone, and this show never quite gets there.  Many times Ruby (and sometimes other characters) actually witness the violent deaths of one of her exes and there's maybe shock or surprise but no sense of trauma or lasting effects on them, and it's the weakest decision the show makes. That people are dying and Ruby is so centered on her romance with Isaac or AJ is just fixated on the mystery does the characters a disservice.

It's only trivian night host Richie (Michael Angarano), from the middle of Ruby's sex timeline, who doesn't die, and gets dubbed her sex loophole. Surprisingly Richie seems to become Ruby's grounding point, despite their sort of disdain for one another. 

While I didn't necessarily love every aspect of the show -- tone was definitely the most challenging part -- I was very invested in how this possibly could be happening. By the end of episode 6, we have an answer as Ruby's world falls apart, and episode 7 gets to the meat of it while Ruby's tries to pick up the pieces. Episode 8 goes for redemption, but Ruby's still Ruby...stripes don't change that fast. But it seems we have a finale, a resolution, except that there's obviously an unresolved Richie plotline and then Ruby's dad shows up the whole thing seems to have started again. Bam, cliffhanger...and the show is cancelled, and the American version didn't really follow the Australian version's plot, so ...no resolution.

The only part of this show Lady Kent seemed to enjoy was the theme, which was just James' "Laid" (of course). Stuck in my head for weeks.

[1:40:32] 

---

Decent remake of the Hanks poster

I don't really remember The 'Burbs, Joe Dante's 1988 dark comedy starring Tom Hanks about a man moving into the suburbs with his wife only to get paranoid about suspicious things in his neighbourhood.  I definitely wasn't itching to see it remade into a TV series.

But much like watching Hijack because Idris Elba, it's almost irresistable to have Kiki Palmer (Nope, One of Them Days), one of the most magnetic performers in Hollywood, in a starring role and not watch it.

Palmer takes on the Hanks role here as Samira.  She got knocked by with Jack Whitheall's Rob after a short courtship, and they got married, had the baby and now are moving into Rob's parents place, which they offered up as they're on a "permanent cruise".  The home is in a large cul-de-sac where all the neighbours seem to be up in each other's business, and stuck at home with the baby, Samira understands why, there's some weird shit going down here...especially across the street in the abandoned manor that was just sold.

Turns out the house used to belong to the family of Rob's friend in his high school years. She disappeared under mysterious circumstances and the family moved away a while later leaving the place to rot. This disappearance gets into Samira's head, as new weird things start happening in the neighbourhood, and she's not the only one who thinks so. She makes friends with a wine-drinking porch crew and they kind of fuel each other's paranoia, as they each harbour their own secrets. 

The show starts as all mystery, everyone is a bit of a blank slate and kind of suspicious, including Rob. Samira's pent-up house-bound energies need to go somewhere, so she puts it into nosing around, and trouble follows.

Palmer is, as ever, a damn delight. The show does touch upon her being a black woman in the suburbs (and the requisite racism that surrounds it) in the first episode but sort of lets the anxiety of it ebb as she becomes part of the community quickly. Julia Duffy (Newhart) reminds us why she was nominated for Emmys six years in a row, and bringing Mark Proksch's weird energy vampire energy from What We Do In The Shadows into the cul-de-sac is a real gift. Whenever Paula Pell and Palmer share the screen, the most unlikely of comedy-duos emerges and I want nothing more than a big vehicle for the two of them to lead up and drive around.  If anything, the weakness of the show largely falls on Whitehall's shoulders.  He's not bad, but there's nothing in his performance that tells me why someone like Samira would be with him, and he doesn't bring anything unique to the role that makes him stand out from the other very talented performers (like RJ Cyler who plays Samira's brother, they needed more of him in the show).

I haven't watched the finale, but already, most of the mysteries are resolved around the main cast, and the central mystery which started it has morphed into another one that's just a little less sticky. It's a fun, if light watch.

[1:56:49]

---

Created by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, Look Around You started its life as a series of edutainment shorts that was all about editing, images and voice over, no real roles or characters. On Tubi the nine 8-to-10-minute shorts are compiled into two 35 minute episodes.  They seem to be spoofing something very specific from British culture of the 1980s, but such things are not alien to any child of the 1980's who had access to PBS or TV Ontario. These sorts of informational videos were filler on TV throughout my youth, the only difference here is these videos aren't teaching you anything useful...everything they're talking about is made up and/or patently absurd.

It's pretty frivolous, but at the same time tugs on both nostalgia and comedy strings in a delightful way. There won't be a lot of big belly laughs, but if you appreciate conceptual comedy, this will definitely scratch an itch.

The second season of Look Around You is an entirely different show. It's once again in the edutainment sphere, only this time as a hosted show, likely aimed at kids but for all audiences. The four hosts (including Serafinowicz and Olivia Coleman) all speak in a very gentle fashion as they explain their topic or engage with their guest or chat about the video we've just seen. It's all still styled so very early '80's and it's really silly business being played very, very straight. In one episode, Jack Morgan (Popper) is going to have plastic surgery performed by a miracle robot (operated by Benedict Wong), and in another the cast meet a horse that can predict the winner of horse races, while in yet another they discuss a super-serum that will give an athlete super-speed only for it to cause them to shrink in the process.

My favourite bit of the show is Serafinowicz's penchant for portmanteaus. He slips at least one in per episode.

Silly business. Good fun.

[2:08:10]

---

I like British comedy, but I'm by no means obsessive about it...mainly because a lot of it can be very localized, and/or too broad for my tastes. Well, hows this for too broad... a sketch comedy show starring...3 women? I kid.

I'd heard of Smack The Pony long ago, but really had no idea what it was. An Only Fools and Horses spin-off? I don't know. I never investigated because I had other things to consume.

The show stars Fiona Allen, Doon Mackichan and Sally Phillips, and yeah, it's just sketch comedy, the hardest programming to review. I wasn't keen on starting from episode one, because those early ones can be the roughest of a sketch series as the cast and writers find their feet. It's sometimes better to start in the middle so you can see the peak work and get familiar with the players involved so that you're a bit more forgiving of the roughness of the early shows.

I'm not keen to binge the show, just putting an episode on when I have 20 minutes or so to kill, it kind of fills a hole, being amusing enough, and completely non-taxing. The show has little structure, and from what I've seen so far, no real recurring characters, although there are repeating bits, like dating profiles (where different characters record their absurd dating profiles). 

The show will have long-form sketches where ideas are given room to play out and grow, and there are a lot of sub-1-minute gag-based sketches which are uncultivated nuggets that feel, unfortunately, too slight to be satisfying (my favourite sketch I've seen so far involves characters meeting at an art show, kissing each other on the cheek and smearing lipstick, only for the smeared lipstick to be seen everywhere all over the place in incremental ways, really quite amusing).

More than a few British character actors-to-be pop up here, including Darren Boyd and Sarah Alexander... I'll no doubt come across more as I continue my relaxed pace of consumption. 

Enjoyable, if not earth shattering, my only real problem is the quality of the sound on Tubi. The mix of the audio has the laugh track too loud to sometimes hear what's being said in a sketch. 

[2:22:19]

[I don't know why I fool myself into thinking I could ever get these written in 10 minutes or less.]

---FIN---

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)

---

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.

---

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.

 

KWIF: Better Man (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. "Week" with a ten-day break in between watching films. There were no films watched in the 10 days in the UK. There were British panel shows and game shows to delight in or be puzzled by in the later evenings. 

This Week:

Better Man (2024, d. Michael Gracey - on plane)
Relay (2025, d. David Mackenzie - amazonprime with ads)
Mother (2009, d. Bong Joon Ho - on plane)
Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller ("Tales for All #7" - 1988, d. Michael Rubbo - crave)

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I haven't really given two thoughts to Robbie Williams in the past 30 years. Even when his bigger hits were exploding on the charts in the UK and here in Canada ("Millennium", "Angels") it was not.at.all the kind of music I was remotely close to being interested in listening to.

The idea of a film about the story of Robbie Williams' rise to fame as part of manufactured boy band Take That, and then his own solo career was of little interest, because I just had nothing invested in the man or his career or his music.

But why was he being played by a cgi ape-man?
That's... a choice.
It's a choice that had me at least mildly intrigued, but not enough to actually watch it.

And then film essayist Patrick Willems wouldn't shut up about Better Man for much of his 2025 output, most centrally in his essay on "Are biopics good now?" It was that latter essay that sold me on seeing the film. And now I get what he was talking about..

If Better Man were fiction, it would be an A+ achievement.It really is only the fact that Williams himself is directly involved in the telling of his own story that tarnishes the film's lustre, if only a little. Surprisingly, Williams, a man of much braggadocio, is also one of incredible self-awareness and the crooner's candour about his life, his demons, his mental health struggles, his substance abuses, his abrasive personality and his daddy issues all make for a remarkable story of success and self-destruction.

It's not a unique story, particularly in the musician biopic game, but as Ursula K. Leguin said,  the story is not in the plot but in the telling, and Better Man is remarkably told.

Williams narrates and provides singing vocals for the character of himself (otherwise performed by Jonno Davies in mocap), who, yes is an anthropomorphised chimpanzee. The reason for this is because of his own self loathing, his perception of himself as something of a wild animal, as something other. His physical appearance is not something any other character in the film comments upon, but from moment one it sets the stage for metaphor being very important to this film. He's not literally an ape, and he doesn't literally think himself an ape, but from his pov he's not properly human.

From a very young age, Williams tells us, he's had a knack for showmanship, and becoming *someone* in the world of entertainment was his only dream, until that dream came true, and then it wasn't enough. He needed the spotlight, he needed the credit, he needed to express himself, but didn't think he had the support.

His dad, Peter (Steve Pemberton), left him and his family when he was a child to become a stand-up comedian, a performer, changing his name from Williams to Conway, who really knows for what reason, but he didn't see his son again for many, many years.

Williams finds himself in the next big thing, the boy band Take That, and it's, again, part of the metaphor. He becomes a singing and dancing monkey. And it's here the self-loathing really takes hold, and doesn't let go. He sees reflections of himself in the audience, taunting him, lambasting him, and he turns to drugs and alcohol to shake them, but these crutches seem to only make the demons stronger.

His father returns to his life, but only because he's successful, and after being booted from Take That for his "bad boy behaviour" he finds solace in a chance meeting with girl group singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) of All Saints.  The film is exceptionally careful not to make too much out of the other members of Take That or Nicole (or even, really, Willams' rivalry with Noel Gallagher), leaving the spotlight on himself, yes as the center of the film, but also as the person at fault in how things went sour in all those relationships.

The film's musical set-pieces are exceptional, and, as Patrick Willems pointed out in the aforementioned essay, they aren't just music for music's sake, not just getting Robbie Williams hits in the film, they actually have purpose and intention, and as far as I understand each track was re-recorded to emphasize the dramatic intent of the narrative. "Rock DJ" is arguably a song with terrible lyrics, but it's got banger energy and the resulting song-and-dance number is epic in scale meant to emphasize Take That's meteoric rise in the UK pop charts, and a bit of Robbie's stumbling along the way. It's full of humour and some crazy moments that make for a stunner of a sequence (that I'm sure would have played much better on the big screen than on an airplane seatback monitor). "She's The One" really hits home how important Nicole Appleton's arrival into Robbie's life was, but not enough to overcome his demons, as he hid them from her. "Something Beautiful" is structured as Williams heartache over Appleton being forced into an abortion by her manager if she wanted to stay in her band, something it seems Williams has never recovered from. And "Angels" is the powerful ballad about the loss of Williams' beloved Nan, and his regrets that his career, ego and substance abuses kept him apart from his family when they should have been his grounding rod.

The story is a rich (if only a snippet) of William's life, but manages to delve into his psyche effectively. I was not expecting to be anything but superficially entertained by Better Man but was astonished at how rich its text truly is. The culminating scene, as Williams belts out "Let Me Entertain You" finds him battling the record-setting crowd at Knebworth Stadium who have all turned into the doppelgangers of himself, all who have nothing nice to say to him. It's a ruthless battle that Williams has to win if he wants to live (and that is a question itself he wrestles with). It's an incredible scene and potent metaphor for what Williams was struggling with despite being rich and famous and talented.

Better Man was a film that got the better of me. I found myself weeping on the plane more than once (three times in fact) wiping my tears on my sleep hoping nobody was looking.  It was a seriously affecting journey that is a magic trick, because I still don't really care about Williams as a performer, nor do I particularly like his music, and his personality is as abrasive as yoga pants made of steel wool, but I really did love this movie. When it was over I immediately wanted to watch it again.

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Relay is an intense thriller that starts our at a seven on the anxiety level an just sits in that simmering tension right until its finale. It's percolating drone of a soundtrack by Tony Doogan feels like getting needles pricked into your skin while tweezing hairs out...it's not exactly intolerable, but the discomfort level and sensory overstimulation is high.

The plot of the film finds Riz Ahmed's Ash helping Lily James' Sarah negotiate the return of some highly sensitive, highly classified documents that could cost a massive agri-corp's a tremendous amount of money as well as be exposed as responsible for deaths and illenesses globally. Sarah's conscience was initially to expose them for their callous capitalism, but the threats and intimidation got the better of her and she's reached out for services to help her return the documents for a cash payout.

This is Ash's business, the negotiation between both parties. As he says, both sides are his clients and he's looking to resolve the situation amicably. But in the meantime he's using every bit of leverage he can to squeeze the corporation into cooperating, when it's evident they've sent the dogs after Sarah, a very savvy and sophisticated mercenary team let by Dawson (Sam Worthington). 

The trick or it all is Ash never meets anyone in person, never talks to anyone directly. He uses the government-run teletype relay service for the deaf to communicate, a service which provides a person to interface between the disabled and non disabled parties. It doesn't retain any data on its callers and everything is strictly confidential. (My favourite parts of the film are the reactions of the different TTY agents as they work through the tense negotiations they are relaying, some acting cool, casual and professional, others looking decidedly uncomfortable or freaked out).

Dawson and company try to flush out Ash, while Ash tries to resist being enamoured with Sarah, who starts being a little flirtatious with her protector. For much of the film's runtime Relay feels like a classic 80's or 90's thriller that used to dominate the box office and it's a real cracker of one (although, given Relay's almost non-existent presence at the box office, it's not likely to revive the trend).

So it's just such a shame that the film, which accomplishes everything first-time screenplay writer Justin Piasecki and director David Mackenzie (of the excellent Hell or High Water) set out to do falls apart when one considers the details of the film after it's over.

I won't spoil that here, but read Toasty's post on Relay if you want those details and the comments section there for my feelings on them.

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Mother's opening shot is of an expansive field of dry, tall grasses. Into the frame walks Kim Hye-Ja in her matronly garb, where she stops, stares down the camera lens for a beat or two, and then starts dancing. It's a tentative, reserved dance that also feels liberated somehow. It's mysterious, confusing, and delightful. It's hard not to think of it as a Lynchian moment, especially for how disconnected this "prologue" (or, maybe, overture?) feels from the film that starts immediately thereafter. What it does tell you is you're in a Bong Joon Ho film, that is for sure.

The next scene we see is Kim's "Mother" (she doesn't otherwise have a name) working in her herbal remedy shop chopping up some long stalks. Out the front door and across the street is her adult son Do-joon (Won Bin) who is holding up a dog on its hind legs and waving its front paws at his mother. A car whips down the street, striking Do-joon and Mother, distracted, slices her finger. Ignoring her own injury she races out to her son, who seems physically fine, but she's panicked over his bleeding (which is just her own blood on him). Do-joon's friend, Jin-tae (Jin Goo), grabs Do-joon and they run in pursuit of the Mercedes that ran him over. They go to the golf club to find the assailant responsible. In the process we learn that Do-joon is intellectually disabled and that Jin-tae is rough around the edges. Their mischief winds up in a brawl with golfing lawyers, and they all get arrested.

Mother dotes and coddles Do-joon (one scene finds Do-joon urinating against a wall and mother walking over and feeding him a broth while he urinates), and Do-joon has trouble remembering things, and is easily manipulated (it would appear that Jin-tae uses Do-joon to get himself out of trouble on a regular basis). 

A 15-year-old girl winds up dead, and Do-joon is implicated in the murder. The police railroad a confession out of him, which isn't all that hard, given his diminished capacity. The case is quickly closed and Mother is convinced of his innocence. He wouldn't hurt a fly, that is, unless you call him the "R" word, which will send him ballistic.

The film then is a dark comedy masking as a neo-noir (or a neo-noir masking as a dark comedy) as Mother attempts to conduct her own investigation. Mother clearly has traditional medicinal knowledge and social skills but otherwise does not seem well educated or savvy, and so her investigations are mostly blunders. But after she falsely accuses Jin-tae, she winds up enlisting his help to strong-arm information out of people, and he starts to fancy himself an ace detective.

The revelations around the case, as well as Mother's history with Do-joon, can get pretty shocking, as Do-joon's meditations and injuries in jail start to trigger memories, not just of the night the girl was murdered but also of memories from his childhood. It's all very dark, and sometimes very funny.

I used the term Lynchian before, and there's definitely some of that in Mother, as well as a sprinkle of Hitchcock as well, without a doubt, but overall this is inescapably a Bong Joon Ho production, his sense of humour and that slightly warped way of storytelling that is uniquely his own are prominently on display. There are ways stories are supposed to go, and then there are the ways a Bong Joon Ho story goes, and you can't often predict that. Class issues aren't at the core of the story, but the topic seems inescapable in Director Bong's work, and status does affect Mother's ability to investigate (and is also responsible for people underestimating her).

With the exception of his first feature, Barking Dogs Never Bite, I have now seen all of Director Bong's filmography and I adore him as a filmmaker. Everything he's made is a distinct pleasure, but I think Mother may be my favourite of his many exceptional works. I guess I'm just going to have to do a whole filmography rewatch to decide.

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In my hazy recollection of the the CBC airings of the "Tales for all" series of films in the late 1980's and early 1990s, it was the English language productions that ran the most often and Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller seemed to be on all the time. Truth be told, I don't know that I ever watched the movie in full, but the idea of being able to magically put one's self onto a stamp and be able to travel to a new destination on that stamp, being returned to human upon arrival at the letter's intended destination...well, that's pure 1980's kid fantasy fuel right there.

So it's a cardinal sin for the film to take 45 minutes of it's 100 minute runtime to even bring up the idea of stamp-travelling, never mind putting it into action.

But that's not the only flaw of this film. The titular Tommy Tricker, for the first act of the film, is our protagonist. We watch as pre-teen Tommy hustles his fellow students into buying stamps he claims will be so valuable in the future, and as such should pay a premium for it today. He finds a more dedicated mark in Ralph James, an anxious, stuttering, toe-headed boy who shares the passion for stamp collecting with his father. Tommy pays his house a visit and tempts him with a rare set of stamps, but Ralph doesn't have much to offer him in return. In looking through Ralph's father's collection, they find a loose "Bluenose" stamp that Tommy manages to swindle Ralph out of. It was a bait and switch, Tommy showed him one set of stamps then gave Ralph another. Ralph's dad is going to be so pissed.

We see Tommy go to the stamp shop where he manages to cash out his newly acquired Bluenose for 300$ which he spends of groceries to feed his mother's vast brood of children. She asks where the money came from to which he replies "ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies".  

Tommy seems like a desperate young lad who makes opportunities where otherwise none would be. He's a troublemaker, a trickster, a hustler, a swindler, but it's evident why...it's survival for him. I'm not sure what lessons he needs to learn here, when you're dealing with class struggles, sometimes an upper-class kid like Ralph needs to be swindled by a lower-class kid like Tommy because some have too much and some have too few. It's not "right" but the systems are built for the rich to get rich off the backs of the poor, so sometimes the poor need to take back by any means necessary. 

But this isn't a class struggle film, this isn't a film that truly cares about understanding Tommy Tricker, because after all this early drudgery about stamps and stamp collecting (this is a reality where stamp collecting is seemingly everyone's biggest passion, the world over) the focus shifts suddenly to Ralph, and the absolute shitstorm he's in when his father finds out he got hustled. Through a truly convoluted and nonsensical series of events, Ralph's sister Nancy winds up with a seemingly worthless book of stamps from a deceased collector. Ralph, in a rage, tears the book apart, and they discover a secret message that, eventually leads them to discover the secrets of stamp travelling and puts them on a quest to recover a book of precious stamps.

Eventually Tommy returns to the story but only in the peripherals, and solely as an interloper in Ralph's adventure. Or rather, misadventure, as Ralph wind up in China as a result of Tommy's intervention where he needs the help of Nancy's penpal to get sent onward to Australia where he can hopefully track down the secret location of the stamp treasure. 

The second half of the film, filled with magic and stamp travelling and adventure is pretty inspired if not exceptionally well executed. The first half of the film is exhausting in its pacing and the ineptitude in which it reveals its characters and its scenarios. Everything that happens in the first 45 minutes could have, and should have been conveyed in under 20 minutes.

It also doesn't help that all of the kid actors, every single one of them, delivers every line stiltedly. It's frequently painful to watch as these young wanna-be thespians attempt to put inflection and meaning behind the words they're saying. They're taking the direction, surely, given the gestures they make and the physical interactions they have, but they aren't able to perform any of it convincingly, and often takes seem like they had to do, because the production's limited budget meant they had to move on.

At it's core, there's a tremendously fun story and adventure to be had, and I'm sure a modern remake in live action or animation would certainly improve on the many faults of this original.

KWIF: No Other Choice (+3)

KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. January's here. It's real movie time. 

This Week: 
No Other Choice (2025, d. Park Chan-wook - in theatre)
Train Dreams (2025, d. Clint Bentley  - netflix)
F1 (aka F1: The Movie - 2025, d. Joseph Kosinski - appletv)
The Young Magician ("Tales for All #4") (1987, d.  - crave)

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With No Other Choice, director Park Chan-wook is in full control of his craft as he presents a viewing experience that is so emotionally twisting that for pretty much the entire runtime (just shy of 140 minutes) the audience is proactively and continuously meant to ponder their allegiance to and affinity for the film's protagonist. 

Adapting Donald Westlake's 1997 novel "The Ax" with co-writers Don McKellar (with whom Park worked with on HBO's *The Sympathizer*), Jahye Lee (with whom Park worked on Netflix's *Uprising*) and Lee Kyung-mi, No Other Choice is a tale of corporate downsizing and the satirically desperate extremes people will push themselves to in order to perpetuate their status in the toxic and uncaring reality of capitalism.

Lee Byung-hun stars as Man-su, who, as the film opens, manages a specialty paper factory. The factory has just come under new American ownership and he's been told that staff needs to be cut by twenty percent. He's preparing to rally and fight for the men he's been working with for years, only to find that he is among the twenty percent. He has invested a tremendous deal into his role, sacrificing time with his wife (who also give up her career), his stepson and his daughter to educate himself to be a leader in his field. But finding work in the field of paper, when demand is down, automation is up, mergers shrink the number of available employers, and competition from similarly out of work people is fierce, it all means Man-su is lost and, from his vantage point, out of options. 

His beautiful house, his upscale cars, his dance lessons, his Netflix...even his dogs are all on the list of potential cuts if he can't find work before his severance package runs dry. His loving wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) is ready to make sacrifices but Man-su is not. After 18 months of desperate hunting, Man-su lands on the idea of killing the man in really the only position he is suitable for, but stops himself... and not because he cannot bring himself to murder another man, but because he can't guarantee that there aren't more qualified men who would get the available position before he does.

Thus ensues a pitch-black comedy of errors that runs concurrently with a grim, distressing existential journey where Man-su's whole sense of self and where he fits in his own life falls out of step with his ambition and self-determined necessity. It's a masterful exercise in defying expectations and audience manipulation. The Man-su we meet at the start of this journey is a very different man than the one we see at the end, as is Miri who is about as devoted a wife as we ever see in secular, modern stories without ever undercutting her agency or intelligence.

But for spoilers, this is a film I would really like to deep dive into writing about, because it is rich and complicated in theme and subtext, a lot of which is masked by its wicked sense of humour and the nastier, distasteful side of humanity it takes us through. It's a long movie, but we're always allied with Man-su on his journey even when we've stopped sympathizing with him (it's a film that warps the audience greatly in that "he really shouldn't get away with this, but we want him to get away with this" fashion).

Director Park's visual acumen is incontestable, with his cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, this is as good as any of his films have looked, and they pretty much all look fantastic. Here, he stays on the warm side of the spectrum, even as our affinity for Man-su cools. The director wants us to know that no matter what twisted extremes Man-su has gone to, the film is still showing him in a favourable light (if not always positive). The film never wants us to fully disengage from Man-su. The refrain of "no other choice" goes from a laughable excuse for corporate greed to the aching plight of a desperate man to the words of a selfish and myopic person. The title of the film itself has its own journey.

I honestly cannot tell you if I liked this film, or if I enjoyed it. I am impressed by it. I was fully engaged with it, and in unpacking it, even just this little bit, I see much more of its depth that I was too emotionally distracted to fully take in during my first viewing. I have a feeling it will play much better upon rewatch.

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Without specifically spoiling the end of No Other Choice, it's final images are sights inside a fully automated paper factory, which juxtapose sharply against the busy, populated factory we see at the start of the film. In the last images we see, we are taken to a forest where we observe as a logging crane (excuse my lack of knowledge of the technical term) as it picks up a felled tree and relieves it of its branches in seconds. The scale of the machinery, its power and efficiency, and its dominance over nature was a surprisingly visceral visual, one I was surprised to have such an uncomfortable reaction to. Much like the factory scene that precedes it, there is not another person in sight and the message of consumerism and capitalism and its increasing disconnect from humanity is a potent one.

Train Dreams is the life story of a logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) working on clearing the way for railways in the summer months. At the film's start, logging is a fully manual profession, one man on either side of a massive hand saw cranking back and forth through a tree, their sweat moistening the ground beneath them. On a felled tree, men take their axes and hack away at the branches in just as demanding a physical effort. And then they need to section the tree. It's a labor intensive process that pays four dollars a day (minus expenses). It's extremely physical and dangerous work, but the need to expand the rails, and then the demand for paper during the second world war was great, so the job was dependable and the work steady. Robert would toil summer months, missing his beloved wife and later his young daughter and their remote cabin by a creek, but the money was good enough to keep them stable through the winter. Options, otherwise, were limited, as Robert would find out.

The film, through narration by Will Patton, is largely gentle and meditative, but personal and investing. It takes us through Robert's life, from his earliest memories as an orphan shipped out on a train, to his final year, without being at all pedantic about it. The narration helps step us back and forth through his life, with brief capsules of interest, some relevant to the moment on screen, some not. Robert's journey could have just been centered around tragedy - his earliest days on the logging crew he was confronted with the horrors of anti-Asian racism, as a Shanghai-born crewman is grabbed suddenly by a trio of men who drag him kicking and screaming before tossing him off a train bridge. Robert's brief motion to intervene is fruitless and he can do little but stand by, and then return to work with a seemingly disaffected crew. Robert is haunted by the man for the remains of his days... not perpetually, but the spectre never leaves him. The ghosts, in a manner of speaking, begin to pile up. 

Tragedy would befall Robert, and he would not return to logging for some time. His grief and misery would take a long time for him to come to terms with. When he returns to the work he did for so long, he's met with the future. A steam-driven truck roams the terrain, and the crew is stocked with chainsaws which Robert finds foreign and difficult to manage. The young crew treat him like a relic, but he wonders if he was the same in his younger years. Time marches on.

We spend most of Train Dreams in nature in various forms. There's not a lot of what you might call civilization in Robert's story because it seems like he avoided it. In Edgerton's portrayal, he's not the stoic, silent type, and he's not the cordial over-sharer, he's unremarkably average and he's so aware of the fact that nothing that happens in his life makes him any more special than anyone else. He's not a deep thinker, but he does contemplate existence, and meaning. His elder colleague in his early years (a remarkable William H. Macy) imparts on him the idea of nature and humanity's connection to nature and how our interference in nature has unknown consequences, ripple effects. Our understanding of the connectivity is still so very primitive, we evolved bipeds with our big brains think nature something to dominate, to control, to use and abuse without giving back. Robert fears nature also takes, and it's taken from him.

The end of Robert's journey takes him to civilization, and when we encounter a big city it's a shock to the system. It's the 1950s already (otherwise we have few guideposts as to the actual time periods within the film), there are cars and televisions and everything seems electric. Robert is a man out of time who just stepped into the future, but he's curious rather than frightened by it all. 

Reflecting upon capitalism and its effect on our conceptualization of standard of living is the centerpiece of No Other Choice, in Train Dreams it's more the byproduct of the story being told, but there's a curious sympatico between the two films. Robert does not want to be logging, but there are no other real choices for him. Similarly, the ending of No Other Choice informs the theme of Train Dreams unexpectedly. Where No Other Choice's ending visualization of logging specifically points to the lack of people involved in the largely mechanized process, Train Dreams makes us consider whether we should be logging at all, at least on the industrial scale we do.  No Other Choice bemoans the loss of jobs, while Train Dreams contemplates the impact of a whole many other kinds of losses.
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Earlier this year Toasty reviewed Joseph Kosinski's 2017 wildfire fighters biopic Only the Brave, with some commentary around whether he was going to be a Kosinski completist or not.  Spoiler, despite being somewhat affected by the film, he's opted out.

Kosinski's Tron: Legacy and Oblivion were visually captivating projects that boldly announced an exciting new director, one who is very design-centric and has an aptitude with kinetic movement and special effects. But, after Oblivion's less than stellar performance, Kosinski seemed to either abandon sci-fi, or he never wanted to be working in that genre in the first place. From Toasty's description it doesn't sound like there was much opportunity for design or kinetic action in Only the Brave, and his pandemic film, Spiderhead, didn't offer anything near to the scale of Tron or Oblivion.

He worked with Tom Cruise in Oblivion, and if Cruise likes you and works with you well enough on his terms, you become one of his guys. So he was tapped for Top Gun:Maverick, which, despite being held back by Cruise for two years until the pandemic lockdown was lifted, was a massive success, one of the highest earning films of the year. Largely because of Kosinski's camerawork on the flying scenes, he was widely praised as a key part of the film's success.  The status that Tron and Oblivion should have given him was now bestowed upon him. He's a premiere filmmaker. But before he's handed the reins to anything completely, he had to prove himself, thus F1, to show that it wasn't just the name brand of Top Gun and the starpower of Tom Cruise, that he brought something to the table as well. 

For the record, I love Tron:Legacy. It is one of my comfort films. There are a lot of elements to it that I love, but Kosinski's visual adeptness is a key part. I really disliked Top Gun: Maverick, but didn't blame Kosinski for its script, which was all about inflating Tom Cruise's ego, and appealing to boomer dads and grandads by having an old guy strut into a room, ignore everyone else's opinions and abilities, and let the praise heap upon him as the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled person alive.  It was a wish fulfillment power trip for an aging generation and it suuuucked. I guess the flying sequences were good, but they didn't do enough to pull me out of the ego boost/pander porn that was the film's story.

From the trailers for F1, it looked to be pretty much the exact same plot. Brad Pitt plays an aging driver who is brought in to help a struggling F1 team, only to steamroll everyone without consequence because he's the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled driver alive. Same plot, but race cars not planes, and race courses not military strikes. Why would I watch this? I really do not care for racing as a sport, and those Maverick vibes are very off putting.

When I loaded AppleTV, well, call it a moment of weakness. I saw it's 2h35 min runtime and nearly spat out my kombucha. I said I would give it 20 minutes and dip out. Then I watched the whole thing sitting on the edge of the couch, never bored, never intentionally doing a time check to see how long until it was over.

There are a few differences here between Maverick and F1, the first being Brad Pitt is not Tom Cruise. Without getting into Pitt's abusive alcoholic private life, the man has remained a pretty terrific actor, capable of letting go of ego and disappearing into a role. Tom Cruise, for the past decade (or more), just seems to be playing Tom Cruise, and the ego is inescapable. Pitt does not need his characters to be humanity's apex, so when he steps into a role like Sonny Hayes, an aging phenom who the script needs to walk into a room and take charge despite being the "new guy", well, Pitt doesn't play him with bully and bluster, but rather a sort of glib zen-ness. 

Sonny hasn't driven F1 in 30 years. In the meantime he's been a driver-for-hire across various motorsports. This movie postulates that anyone can just step into an F1 car and race and drive it without extensive time behind the wheel and qualifying trials, but we let it go, because the gist is Sonny is just that good at feeling things out. All the sensors and cameras and algorithms just can't tell you what gut instinct can.

But in Pitt's hands Sonny isn't perfect, he isn't flawless, he isn't so good his skills can defy all logic...just most logic. He makes mistakes that hurt others and hurt himself. Yet, it is a script that does pop in and out of making him magical sexagenarian but it's only eye rolling juuuust a little bit.

The film's plot is colour by numbers, there's pretty much no surprises in what happens here, and yet, Kosinski is not precious with it. He built a story that services the action in a way that builds tension for the characters, their relationships, the team and the race their in all at once. The stakes are presented, they're evident, and they just help lubricate the whole thing to move it forward without any resistance.  Hans Zimmer's score is symbiotically propulsive and, not unexpectedly, bombastic in Zimmer fashion, but he never gets cloying in his score around the drama, which I think may save the film.

It's all about the racing, and Kosinski levels up not just what he accomplished with the flying sequences in Maverick but also takes car racing cinematography to another level. It's maybe not quite as zany as Speed Racer, but there's a visceral and tangible nature to it that is undeniable. It made me a bit sad I didn't see this in theatres. As I said, I don't care about cars or racing, and the racing sequences in this are thrilling. Turns out, car races are fun when they edit down 60+ laps of a race to a 10-minute action sequence.

In some respects, both Top Gun:Maverick and F1 are like extensions of Tron:Legacy and Oblivion. Legacy had various racing and flying (and competition) sequences, while Oblivion had some great flying sequences. The former two and the latter two are otherwise quite unalike styilistically, but the DNA of propulsive filmmaking is there.  I half expect Kosinski's next project to be a Waterworld legasequel just to bring it all back around.

I think Kosinski is an exceptional technical director, another guy who can produce big screen-worthy, widely appealing productions. The aesthetic flavour that initially drew me to him is not a constant in his work, but it's clear he is very skilled at providing wow-inducing action sequences. I think the disappointment both Toast and I are feeling is we thought Kosinski would be one of us, a guy who liked nerdy shit and would be capable of getting big budgets and big names to make them. Instead he's like the nerdy teenager who started hitting the gym during the summer and now hangs around more with the meatheads and tries to hide his geekier tendencies.

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The fourth entry in Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" is the highly bizarre Poland-Canada co-production of The Young Magician ("Cudowne dziecko" in Polish).  I mean, so far all of the "Tales for all" have had some aspect of "highly bizarre" to them (and The Peanut Butter Solution is straight up bonkers), but they all have an internal logic to them, no matter how weird they get.

Writer-director Waldermar Dziki was clearly inspired by American kids adventure cinema of the mid-1980s as this feels like a funhouse mirror reflection of its glossier across-the-sea counterparts. 13-year-old Peter (Rusty Jedwab) is having a challenging time...he's quit the hockey team because the captain won't play him, the girl he likes seems to like the hockey captain better than him, and, well, his parents take him to a magic show where he's pulled up on stage to help out with a trick (he "helps" by doing nothing).

After the magic show Peter becomes convinced that he should have telekinetic powers, so he keeps practicing until, eventually, he develops telekinetic powers. Only thing is, his telekinesis tends to make things go haywire. Being a teenager, he of course uses his newly developed superpower to show off, and then it gets him in trouble and then the military comes and takes him away for testing. They can't figure out at all how his powers manifested, so they want to drill into his head. Peter escapes and meets Alexander (Edward Garson), a young orphan cello prodigy who shows Peter the way to harness his power: practice.

Peter gets absolutely no practice in before they're off on another adventure, and then contacted by the police to help deal with a deadly canister of highly volatile material. Yup, let's get the kid with uncontrollable telekinesis who makes things explode all the time try to move the canister of highly explosive stuff. Genius. Turns out, it was genius. Peter removes it safe and suddenly the military doesn't want him anymore and he's a town hero. He helps Alexander get a philharmonic gig, the end.

What?

Yeah. This movie feels like it was made by taking a pile of note cards with plot points and character markers on them, shuffling them, cutting the deck in half and then tossing the deck in the air so that they land in a random order. Nothing about this story makes logical sense, beyond Peter being a teenager and using his power to do petty things. 

This is a dumb movie that introduces its secondary lead (Alexander) at the end of the second act. It probably had three times the budget of any of the previous "Tales for all" productions. I mean, there are so many helicopers in this film, and not always the same helicoper, and not stock footage.

It's clear this was made in Poland (even before seeing the credits, where most of the participants outside of the Canadian leads have Polish last names) but pretends to be Canada despite not looking Canadian at all.  There's no Polish audio track and I spent the first 20 minutes switching between the English and French dubs trying to see if either would synch up, and at times the English would mimic the movements of a character's mouth, but I suspect that there's not a version of this film with the original on-set dialogue.