3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Spiderhead

2022, Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion) -- Netflix

OK, weird; I think I just side-stepped (my head canon for moving between alternate realities in the multiverse) from a reality where The Gorge was done by Kosinski, which was going to lead to a paragraph about directors working with actors they like. Miles Teller was in Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick (and his wildfire fighting movie Only the Brave -- ohhh, that's why its in My List)and is in this. Buuut, that's not this reality, so Spiderhead is actually his latest flick. That said, three flicks together does warrant that paragraph buuuut I kind of derailed it.

Anywayz.

The original short story called "Escape From Spiderhead" provides the key focus of this movie -- incarcerated criminals participating in drug trials voluntarily, drugs that elicit great emotional responses, and how the doctor administering the trials is manipulating the people so that the outcomes are favourable to his end goals, no matter the damage it causes to the inmates. Kosinski builds a movie around that premise.

Kosinski likes his architectural imagery. Even with Oblivion being a scifi movie set on an post-apocalyptic Earth, the look and feel of the watch posts that Jack and Vic live in, is spectacular, all curved widescreen smooth plastic and glossy white materials. This is not the post where I indulge in the design aesthetics, but Spiderhead establishes that in the initial fly-over of the facility, its incongruity against the isolated rural landscape. Once we are inside, it continues, all wide range concrete and wood but with pristine white observation rooms. Like Kent, I too enjoy this a lot.

Side-note: I have been doing a lot of rewatching of late as my brain gravitates to consuming known-factors. Enough, in fact, that I feel they warrant a "Rewatch Snippets" post.

Via flashbacks, we get that inmate Jeff (Miles Teller, The Gorge) drove drunk and killed his close friend, the younger brother of his girlfriend. It tortures him, but other than that, he is a stable guy. Abnesti (Chris Hemsworth, Extraction) leads the testing with his complicit assistant Mark (Mark Paguio, Lonesome). They appear to be the only two running the experiments, other than a handful of security/orderlies. Its odd, as it is very clear that there are a good number of violent, sociopathic criminals in there. Abnesti is friendly, confident and more than a little detached from the idea he is doing this to people, despite his affability. Alongside Jeff, we meet Lizzie (Jurnee Smollett, Lovecraft Country), who works the kitchens of the facility as well as being an inmate. Jeff and Lizzie connect.

Abnesti's testing is focused on marketable drugs, drugs the company can sell as legal recreationals. But you can tell by the way that he pushes Jeff that there is a darker motive at play. He also constantly plays a rather sinister card that it is not he that is demanding Jeff do the less than pleasant aspects of the testing, but the nameless faceless council running the facility. But Abnesti is not above manipulating everyone, including Mark, to get the results he wants.

Harkening back to the "Stanford prison experiment", where fake guards were asked to psychologically punish/torture fake prisoners, much of the movie focuses on complicity: Abnesti getting Jeff to perform the tests himself, Abnesti guilting Mark into helping him even when his conscience weighs on him. Through coercion and deception, Jeff does some things he is not proud of. Only when he starts to unravel Abnesti's lies does he start to question what is really going on.

The movie could have been darker, but it didn't want to be a horror / torture-porn movie. Its more a play of personalities, with obviously likeable Abnesti being setup to be truly heinous, while Jeff, initially meek and agreeable is understood to have performed a truly dark deed, but... not one we cannot  have sympathy for. I cannot fault the movie for the performances, but... it was all a bit vanilla? For a movie that was mostly about what Abnesti could convince Jeff to do, it never felt as if anything but the expected would happen.

KWIF: Hundreds Of Beavers (+4)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film, which in this case is actually Kent's Week in Film two weeks ago and then again this past weekend. Assuming I finish this post this weekend.

This "Week":
Hundreds of Beavers (2022, d. Mike Cheslik - Tubi)
Cast a Deadly Spell (1991, d. Martin Campbell - HBO)
Absentia (2014, d. Mike Flanagan - AmazonPrime)
Hush (2016, d. Mike Flanagan - Tubi)
Emilia Pérez (2024, d. Jacques Audiard - Netflix)

---

A lot of movies have tried to emulate zany cartoon energy in live action. It so rarely works. Whether they're taking inspiration from Tex Avery or Chuck Jones or they're trying to put live actors into a Hanna Barbera or Jay Ward property, the results have mostly been of the "not great" sort. Outside of films that blend human actors with animated characters (again, more misses than hits), the only flat out successful humans-as-cartoons production I can think of is Stephen Chow's masterpiece, Kung-Fu Hustle.

Hundreds of Beavers (surprise! It's not porn!) isn't quite that level, but as an independent production it is quite ambitious and remarkably clever in its aping of animated forms. The film's creators, director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, credit the slapstick of the 20's and 30's silent and black and white era of cinema as inspiration, but it's hard to not see the Loony Tunes influence painted all over the first act, especially as characters pop in and out of rabbit holes that join different points of the terrain.

The film opens with a merry melody that spells out the disaster that befell our applejack-selling protagonist, a drunkard name Jean Kayak. Left with nothing in the dire 1800's winter wilderness, Jean is forced to learn how to hunt and trap in order to survive, and square off against the ingenuity of the wild animals he cohabitates with.

He finds the trading post where he can exchange his hides or fish for goods that will level up his trapping ability. The trading post also houses a fair belle who can skin a carcass in record time, and their flirtatious connection in the lonely wilderness is much to the chagrin of her father. 

The "animals" of the film -- beavers, wolves, racoons, rabbits, even a horse -- are just people in cheap mascot suits, but in washed-out black-and-white contrast, the cheapness has kind of the perfect effect.  Especially early on, it's the suits as much as anything else that establish the surreal world of the film.  

The environments are snowy and vibrantly white, which gives director/editor/effects creator Cheslik all he needs to disguise his deceptively rudimentary effects. As much as the film takes inspiration from slapstick and cartoons, it's also feeding off of video game structures at their most primal level. Feeling much more "Commodore 64" than "X-Box One", Hundreds of Beavers finds over it's hero levelling up and level restarting constantly over its 108 minutes, until its final act which goes full-blown Super Mario as Jean Kayak must navigate his way through the massive and intricate fortress the beavers have constructed. There's a Temple Run chase, a Frogger-like crossing, there's map discovery and puzzle solving of the try and try again variety. 

The film's title card doesn't really emerge until the 30-minute mark, complete with another song and credits, but it feels like it should be at the point where a cartoon with this kind of energy would normally end. Yet it keeps going for [time check] another 75 minutes. From what we've seen to this point, it doesn't feel like there's enough juice to sustain another 75 minutes, but it's a clever switching of gears, changing the pace and rooting down into the silly character drama, establishing relationships and rivalries and running gags that, quite astonishingly, actually sustains the enjoyability and fun of the production.

I should also note the film is completely silent, or at least, there's no spoken dialogue (what dialogue there is we see on olde-style screen cards). The score, from Chris Ryan is absolutely essential to the success of the film, and it's flawless. It's doing so much heavy lifting in a film where every element is pulling more weight than it should bear.  To me it felt like Terry Gilliam drawing Looney Tunes but directed by Guy Maddin. It's irreverent, pushing boundaries, but also reverent towards old cinema styles. It's a film that shouldn't work at all, and that it not only works, but works resoundingly well and manages to sustain it's total running time is an absolute feat (even if I think shaving off 20 minutes would have done it some good).

Dam fun and dam enjoyable.

---

Cast A Deady Spell is a fantasy-noir set in an alternate 1940s where everyone seems to have some capability to use magic. It's a film that stars Frank Grillo precursor Fred Ward (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins) as former cop, now hardboiled P.I. Harry Philip Lovecraft, a good detective who refuses to do magic.  A case comes his way to recover a stolen book, the Necronomicon, which leads H.P. to a swanky club owned by his former partner, an ex-dirty cop also named Harry (Borden, as played by Clancey Brown, Highlander). Singing at the club is Borden's girlfriend, H.P.'s ex, Connie Stone (as played with full femme fatale sultriness by Julianne Moore, Boogie Nights).

There's undead henchmen, gargoyle spies, deadly magic, and clever tricks, not to mention the looming threat of a Lovecraftian elder god. It's a film full of special effects, extensive prosthetics and make-up, not to mention being a period piece, so it's all quite stylized.  Martin Campbell, not yet the man behind Goldeneye, or The Legend of Zorro, or Casino Royale, but he's been in the game for 20 years at this point and shows off all the skills that would put him at the helm of some truly great action and genre pieces [and, to be fair, some not so great ones *cough*Green Lantern*cough*). While not the most lush visual production, everything work quite well in unison. There are no flat beats, no wrong notes, it builds its world adeptly, leaning both into its fantasy and noir influences (it's far heavier on the noir, and it abandons any real attempt at the horror side of Lovecraft).  

So I have to ask... why have I never heard of this before? I know all manners of sci-fi, horror and fantasy films from the era, including a broad range of low budget, direct-to-video garbage (now on Tubi!) but I've never heard of this film from a known director of some renown, with a handful of quality (and, in Moore's case, A-list) actors, with really good special effects, and a thoroughly enjoyable production. 

The answer comes back to the same problem we're facing with streaming: movies that don't go to theatres get lost. They get no promotion, and so there's no awareness of them. They don't get a second life on video, so there's no secondary "new release" push. They just live on in the archives to be randomly discovered. Oh, here's a Jennifer Lopez sci-fi movie I've never heard of, or a hanful of Chris Pine action movies that nobody knows existed, or movies starring Chris Evans we've watched and all forgotten about. Without being released to theatres where it would reveive even a modicum of marketing push, there's no sustaining a movie in the consciousness. They just disappear, a faint whisper of a memory when playing a movie trivia game.

Even now, at the end of this write-up, I've already forgotten the name of this film and had to scroll back up to read it.

[Side note: there is a gay and a trans character in this film who are a couple, and I'm not certain how I feel about their representation. H.P. drops casual slurs and gets physically rough, which I feel is to the detriment of H.P.'s characterization. At the same time, I feel like the couple are treated sweetly and sympathetic by the filmmaker and script, and their fate is tragic which may fall into the "kill your gays" trope, but also so many people die in this thing...so Idunno. Is it inclusive or exploitative?]

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As noted on my previous post, I'm all aboard the Flanagan train, and I'm wading knee deep in the Mike Flanagan waters, but I'm starting to worry it may be too much too soon.  After watching Midnight Mass, I started trolling Toasty's Flanagan reviews past, and I decided to hit up a personal favourite of his, Absentia. Both Midnight Mass and Doctor Sleep impressed me so much I really needed to go back and see Flanagan's beginnings.

Watching Absentia reminded me of watching the films of Benson and Moorehead, The Endless and Resolution... just supremely well executed small-budget indies that intone much grander conceits and ideas without needing any real budget for it.

Here, a woman is in the final stages of having her husband declared dead in absence of a body after 7 years. She's pregnant, having become close to an officer on the case, and she's looking for a new start on life. Her sister, fresh out of rehab from heroin addiction is there for the mutual support feedback loop. 

A couple weird things happen to the sister, and then the husband returns. Questions are asked, emotions are heightened, and the whole world seems to go pear-shaped. The sister's maybe relapse-fuelled investigation yields dozens of disappearances in the neighborhood in all recorded record. There's something going on here. It only gets worse from there.

It's an early example of what Flanagan seems to do exceptionally well, which is set up a supernatural scenario, maybe even a horrifying one, and then let his characters live in that world, getting really intriguing reactions from them as they try to psychologically rationalize what is happening to them, or get a little off kilter from the realization that their understanding of the world is completely upended. Flanagan also likes to toy with religious themes as well as ideas of perception, and with the sister's substance abuse history, her view of what is actually happening is perhaps distorted.

I liked the film a lot, but it's let down by many of its performances. I've noted that Flanagan enjoys giving his characters a monologue (we've watched The Haunting of Hill House since I watched Absentia and that show is absolutely rife with them). It's a stylistic choice of his, as he must know it's utterly unnatural for people to monologue like that in the presences of others. What has made it tolerable in most of his productions is skill of the actors in delivering their speech, but here, these indie, probably novice actors, can't quite get there, and they come off pretty clunky.  Also, the only "name" actor in this is Doug Jones, and I would have loved to have so much more of him.

I tried to watch Hush immediately after watching Absentia but it's a film starring a deaf character (unfortunately not an actual deaf performer, instead co-writer and Flanagan's wife Kate Siegel) and I was multitasking so I couldn't track the subtitles and had to stop early on. What I didn't know was that within 15 minutes there's no more sign language and most of the film is pretty wordless.

The gist is Siegel plays a deaf writer who is terrorized by a serial killer. The killer has murdered her neighbour and now is outside her home holding her hostage, toying with her rather than going straight for the kill.  It becomes a tense cat-and-mouse game as the killer waits to see what his victim will do, only she starts incrementally getting the better of him, though not without taking a few hits herself.

I don't like home invasion thrillers/horrors. It's a definite thing that causes me anxiety, so movies like this, even when they're not particularly very good, are still pretty effective in raising my blood pressure, and that's really all Siegel and Flanagan are banking on here.

It feels like a small, contained indie production, like Absentia, but with much better cameras and lighting. It looks good. And if you don't think, like, at. all. about it, it's pretty intense. But the more you start looking at it, the more the flaws become apparent. 

The mask the killer wore had a texture of melted flesh, with a slight smirk on it, which gave the killer a cockiness that made sense when he decides to toy with her. But he very quickly reveals his face and the threat level drops sooo many notches once he does.  Something about that mask really brought out the angry, misogynistic alt-right white kid vibes that dissipate once we see John Gallagher Jr.s face.

There's also not much, if at all, in this home invasion/hostage thriller that utterly necessitates the lead character being deaf, except for the gruesome opening murder scene in which Siegel's bloodied neighbour is banging on the patio glass with Siegel completely oblivious. It's not an essential element to the story, or really, the character.

Siegel does a very good job at alternating between afraid, in pain, and steeling herself to do something probably stupid or brave or daring. She's the defacto final girl by nature of being pretty much the only girl in the cabin in the woods.

Overall, I was entertained but it felt like it was maybe a 30-40 minute short film stretched out into a feature length, and it's easily the weakest and least Flanagan-esque of his works I've seen so far.

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It's been a stressful few weeks at work with time being eaten up by demands in the off hours, so while I was working on a volunteer project I did so with Hallmarkies as a backdrop. I got three of them in before I finished by project and once complete I needed something ... not so trashy and mindless to watch.  I had clocked that Emilia Pérez was available on Netfilx and it was one of those titles I had stored in the back of my brain, even though only had a vague memory of what it was.  What I knew was it was boldly a musical about a drug kingpin who is a trans woman and wants to transition. It also won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

What I also learned, less than a minute into the film, is it's set in Mexico, almost completely in Spanish and stars Zoe Saldana (as well as Selina Gomez, of the familiar names), all from a white, cisgender French director.

Saldana is, Rita, an exceptionally competent lawyer overlooked by her superiors because of racism. She's approached by drug kingpin Manitas in secret with the promise of untold riches if she can help source out his transformation. Manitas tells her his whole life is a condition of his circumstances and as wealthy and powerful as he is, he cannot live this life anymore. He would commit suicide, if not for the desire to first live life as she truly would like to live it, to experience the world as her true self.

Manita's wife (Gomez) and children are escorted to Switzerland by Rita, while Manitas undergoes her surgeries, and Manita's death is faked and reported on television. Satisfied with the job, Rita is set free, with her riches, to live her life. 

Except, four years later, Rita, now living big shot lawyer life in London, meets Emilia Pérez, and Rita soon fears that this is a spectre from her past coming to kill her. Instead Emilia once again wants her help to bring her family back to Mexico, under the guise of being Manitas' beloved aunt.

While settling in, Emilia and Rita meet a woman searching for her son, who has been missing for 10 years. Emilia knows through old connections she can find out where the body is buried, and does. Emilia soon finds a path for her wealth and atonement for past sins, in trying to uncover the whereabouts of the hundreds of thousands of missing persons, all likely a victim of the drug cartels of which, in a past life, she was a part.

It is indeed a bold film, weaving between its criminal elements and its trans elements, it's attempts to be both an ally to trans women and innocent victims of the drug trade in Central America, all while jutting in and out of song and dance numbers that, more often than not, never fully flourish, or feel complete. The lyrics dip in and out of singing and dialogue in a way that's largely unsatisfying. Some tunes that have catchy hooks never play out in full song. I never thought about pulling up the tracks on Spotify because they never felt like whole songs.  

The nature of this hesitant musical is intriguing in its own right, and I found myself drawn to its rhythms, its beautiful costuming, its lush colours...even its dingy settings were captured so perfectly. But all the while  I was feeling uneasy in my gut with how it was portraying its transness, its victim advocacy and its conceptualization of the drug trade.  It all felt... at least to some small degree... exploitative.

I never truly got a sense of the characters in the film, what they actually were feeling. In a musical, emotions are supposed to come out in song, but the emotions presented seemed beside the plot of the film. I didn't connect with these characters like I wanted to, and every turn that sent the plot in a new direction seemed to put more distance between me and them.  I think the performances throughout were fabulous, but the material let them down.

I came out of the film feeling like I watched something very unique, but I didn't feel enriched by it. I didn't feel like the film ever really dealt properly with the material it was presenting. I was entranced, but not enlightened.

In watching the film, I was reminded of Annette, another askew musical by a French director that couldn't be more different, story-wise, and yet tonally felt so much the same.  Probably a very fucked up double bill to explore one night.

[I'll come back to all those Hallmarkies mentioned at the top of this review another day]

 

KWIF: Next Goal Wins (+4)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week Kent has a spotlight movie in which he writes a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else he watched that week, he just does a quick little summary of his thoughts instead of calling his mother. He must have been an evil bebe. 

This week:
Next Goal Wins (2023, d. Taika Waititi - Disney+)
Delicatessen (1992, d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet et Marc Caro - AmazonPrime/the binder)
Nemesis (1992, d. Albert Pyun - Tubi)
Requiem for a Dream (2000, d. Darren Aronofski - the binder)
Tokyo Godfathers (2003, d. Satoshi Kon - the shelf)

---

There is a consistent rhythm to the dialogue of Taika Waititi's residents of American Samoa which is not to dissimilar to the rhythm of the Maori denizens of most of his New Zealand films... full of charm, good nature, and prepetual sense of positive optimism. That type of dialogue, and general nature, is something that Michael Fassbender's reluctant, angry, drunken, heartbroken, belligerant coach just is incapable of joining in on. In part because that is what the role calls for, and partly because this type of comedy is definitely not Fassbender's baileywick.

It results in the character of Thomas Rongen, a real life man who was basically left no other options than to coach the worst national team in international soccer/fütböl, taking a very expected white man's journey of learning and growing by embracing a culture other than his own. It's a true-ish story but that doesn't make it any more played out as a story. 

The thing is, knowing exactly what the journey would be deflated almost all expectations of true drama, and so the film  left with promoting the charms of the various actors playing the denizens of American Samoa, and every single one of them seems like someone you would just delight in being in their presence. It speaks to the dark place Coach Rongen had to be in to take so long to embrace it.

Waititi's film isn't a triumphant return to form by any stretch. It's a pretty wobbly narrative, a skeleton of story upon which hangs mere ribbons of characters, most of whom are teased with inner lives, but really none of which are not explored to any satisfaction. Yet it's not the nearly unwatchable mess of Thor:Love and Thunder, which was about as big a narrative and tonal misfire as we've gotten in the past 5 years.

I laughed a lot, and even cried a couple times. When a character explains to Coach the third gender of the island -- fa’afafine -- as a flower that makes our lives more beautiful, that got me real good. It takes Coach a little longer to come around, and given the increasingly crass and dangerously incendiary attacks by political and religious leaders on the trans community as a mode of riling up and distracting their followers from real issues affecting them, it makes for the film's most direly uncomfortable moments. The film takes place in 2011, which in the course of trans awareness was an eon ago, so Rongen at first is dismissive or insensitive or even aggressive about it, before befriending and mentoring Jaiyah (played by the stunning and charming Kaimana in what should have been a breakout role) as team captain, embracing her as its clear her community does.

I can see the editing lines of the film, the truncated drama, the expurgated character arcs, and half-remaining narrative framework in the remnants of Next Goal Wins. What is left is a mostly breezy picture about a group of people aiming for a low-stakes victory and probably being quite fine whether accomplishing it or not. I'm not sure I want to see the no doubt 30-minutes-longer version whose island breeze levity gets dragged down by too much emotional weight.

It's fine! Really!

---

Delicatessen is a film I've been meaning to watch for 30 years, and, in fact, have had a DVD of it in the binder for 20 (but, sadly, in another region format).

In an amber-drenched, wet and smoggy post-apocalyptic France, we find amidst the ruin an isolated square where, beneath a tenement house, a butcher shop sells human meat. The meat is sourced primarily by drawing in unsuspecting victims with an ad that promises room and board in exchange for building upkeep labour. The meat's consumers, primarily, are the building's odd motley of tenents.

Enter Dominique Pinon's Luison, an out-of-work clown who starts charming many of the locals (though others don't sway from their meat cravings and keep their distance). Luison makes a connection with the butcher's mousy daughter who wants to save him from his fate. She enlists the rebel Troglodites who live in the sewer to kidnap Luison, and all hell breaks loose in the building.

Until the third act, the film is largely comprised of a series of vignettes that form a picture of the people of the building and a sense of this should-be-horrible world they exist in. Yet Jeunet and Caro inject this bleak landscape with a sense of whimsy and playfulness (accompanied by a winkingly jovial Parisienne score) that undercuts any and all darkness.

It does feel like the film is biding time though to get to its rollicking third act which takes its multi-level set piece and absolutely wrecks it in gloriously practical fashion. It's wondrous to behold and elevates this film from pleasant curiousity to sheer joy.

Jeunet and Caro cast, dress and style their band of actors like human cartoons. You would think given their various exaggerated features they were shot with a fish-eye lens to further accentuate their unique traits, mais non, they are just that fascinating to look at...or at least feel that way given the directors' lovingly curious way of capturing them on film.

This would program well as a triple feature with Kung Fu Hustle and The Shape of Water.

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I was listening to a podcast in which a trio of cult cinema fans (and professional screenwriters all) were nerding out over their love of Albert Pyun movies. Pyun has nearly 50 film directing credits (and a few uncredited efforts), of which the vast majority were released direct-to-video. The most "famous" of his features would be the Jean-Claude Van Damme feature Cyborg, and the not-even-laughably bad Captain America from 1990.

The funny thing was, as big a fan as these commentators were, they still could acknowledge that the majority of Pyun's work was, bluntly, pretty bad, but that the director has a penchant for getting putting a little more into some of his films, and getting a little more out of them, that his DTV contemporaries.

Nemesis was touted as the spotlight film for Pyun's filmmaking zeal, and, to be blunt, it's a pretty bad story about a largely nonsense war between humanity and cyborgs that is definitely riffing on both Terminator and Blade Runner, but having a fraction-of-a-fraction of the not just budget of either, but attention to detail in world building.

For starters, they get the definition of cyborg completely wrong. They call what are essentially sentient robots, "cyborgs" when the lead character, Alex Rain (the charmless Olivier Gruner), a "cyborg" hunter is himself a true cyborg, comprised largely of cybernetic parts. It's a maddening that a DTV genre movie that relies upon exploiting nerds for profit could get this one concept so wrong.

I won't go into the specifics of the story because the filmmakers didn't really seem to care, so why should I?  But within the first 30 minutes, Alex has been nearly killed and rebuilt twice, retired from his job and pulled back into it, and sent on a mission to do assassinate a "cyborg" rebel leader only to switch sides when he learns the truth. It's storytelling whiplash that would be infuriating if there was any sense of a character in Alex Rain at all.  Gruner seems to wrestle with any dialogue (it's clear English is not his first language) and cannot conjure up any sense of emotion. He does look good with his shirt off though, and it's off a lot.  

It's also insane how the film keeps pairing Alex up with characters and then killing the sidekick or companion off. It robs the film of any meaningful relationships for Alex, and pretty quickly you stop even trying to care about anyone that may pop up on screen, even plucky Max... Max Impact.

For as inane as the story is, and as checked out as I was, by the third act I was finding myself charmed by the film's action gusto. As noted, Pyun gets a lot out of his minuscule budget, and manages a pretty relentless stream of action sequences. They are not exceptionally well shot, but there are some clever flourishes amidst them, including one atop a collapsed building, one while two characters slide down a very long and wavy industrial (and very muddy) slide while shooting at each other, and a sequence in which Alex repeatedly shoots the floor out from under himself to descend four stories and escape a trap.

Then there's the big finale which results in Alex fighting a stop-motion robot skeleton which is not something you see anymore and for as silly as it looked, it was twice as charming.

Beyond Gruner, the acting is bad, but due to the script being so awful and the majority of the movie's dialogue being captured in post.  But we get small appearances from Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, the ever reliable Tim Thomerson, a blink-and-you-miss-it Jackie Earle Haley appearance (I didn't even notice), and even a very nude, very young Thomas Jane.

I see the appeal of Pyun's work, but if this is the best of it (as per the podcasters' claims) I don't know that I could stomach anything much further down the quality scale.

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(filed under: horror,not horror)

I was 24 when Requiem for a Dream came out, and it was one of the scariest, most intense, viscerally upsetting films I had ever seen.

I felt scarred, yet I listened to the soundtrack (Clint Mansell with the Kronos Quartet) I don't know how many times. I couldn't brave watching it again however.

So why now? Same thing that triggers most of my movie watching these days: a podcast. The Blank Check crew were stating that Satashi Kon's Perfect Blue had an noted influence on director Aronofski, specifying that Requiem was a benefactor of Aronofski's fandom. I wanted to see if I could pick up on that now, having just watched Perfect Blue a few weeks ago.

But I don't really see it at all. Perhaps I just havn't studied either film enough to really plot the parallels.

Aronofski does have a playful lens and a feathery touch with the editing throughout the film but the playfulness lessens and the editing becomes more intense as the severity of the story escalates. I liked the splitscreening, and doubtlessly the quick cut montage of the heroin process is going to be Aronofski's most lasting contribution to pop culture.

I was sucked in by the showiness early on, thinking that it would allow me to sail unscathed through to the finale but damn that third act, as cartoony as it gets, remains scarring enough to want to wait another 24 years for another rewatch.

Ellen Burstyn is still incredible, Jared Leto is just this side of trying too hard, Marlon Wayans is great but the character gets short shrifted in the story department, and Connelly's performance breaks me. 

Oh, and how had I completely forgotten about Christopher McDonald's TV pitchman? The DVD menu screen only comes up after being forced to watch a minute of McDonald's infomercial, and then it lands on the active "order now" screen where the menu is slyly buried. One of the all-time great DVD menu screens for sure.

But is it horror? Not traditionally, but yes.

---

I can't exactly recall when it was that Toast and Marmy screened Tokyo Godfathers for me, but I would hazard a guess that it was circa November 2005, where I needed to crash on their futon for a week.

I imagine I made it clear that anime wasn't my thing, and they must have made it clear that Tokyo Godfathers wasn't your typical anime.

My recollection of the events and characters of the film was naught, but the impression it had lasted these past two decades. I tried to coax my anime-loving kid to go see the film in the theatre this past holiday season, and they passed. Mainly because I didn't sell it very well. But I was disappointed we didn't go.

I had forgotten that the godfathers were not, in fact, three older, unhoused men but only one middle-aged unhoused man, a slightly younger trans woman, and a sixteen-year-old runaway. I had also forgotten it was, in fact, a Christmas movie, with elements of Buddhism and Shintoism that occur during the same week.

In the film, this rag-tag trio discover a baby abandoned amidst the trash (there is so much trash in this film). Hana, who had just been wishing to have a baby for Christmas, is overjoyed by the miracle. Both Gin and Miyuki think they should take the baby to the police, but Hana, herself having grown up a foster child, implores them to care for the baby, at least for Christmas so as not to forever ruin the holiday for the child. Hana names her Kiyoko.

Left with a bag full of clues, the film follows the trio for a week as they do their own search for Kiyoko's family. Throughout the search, there are numerous incidences of coincidence and happenstance that would feel far-fetched if not for the fact that the film is treading heavily in "the magic of Christmas".  I think many of the coincidences would usually annoy me, but director Kon is so adept at finding themes and meaning that most of the coincidences have deeper meaning for the story or a character, or both.

It is a remarkably compassionate and considerate movie. It humanizes its unhoused characters with great empathy without hiding any of their flaws or blemishes. Gin is a drunk, Hana is an impulsive loudmouth, and Miyuki may have some undiagnosed mental health issues. These traits, along with stubborn pride, seems to be keeping these characters on the streets. Gin, for all his flaws, is riddled with regret over his lost daughter, and definitely sees Miyuki and even Kiyoko (and perhaps even Hana) with that lens. Hana is full of love and affection, and shovels it out to all three of her found family in heavy doses in her own unique way. Miyuki is a scared, lost child, and needs her surrogate parents more than she cares to admit.

On Hana, Kon sort of conflates trans and drag as being the same thing, which obviously they are not. And while Hana is called a drag queen and has a community of drag performers she is a part of, she is very, very clearly a trans woman whom Kon has a tremendous affection for. Hana confidently and unwaveringly identifies as a woman, and her drag home seems to be more a safe place of acceptance.

The "one-crazy-night"-like scenarios they find themselves in are indeed maybe a little wild and crazy, yet still feel grounded. The impulse would be to ask why this is animated, as opposed to live action?  Animation allows the audience just enough distance reality that it demands one accepts and invests more into the characters. Animation makes it easier to live in the discarded world that the Godfathers find themselves in. In live action, we would be too confronted with the unpleasantness of all we throw away, that we discard and don't want to think about anymore. 

The colour tones Kon and his team of animators use for the characters is not vibrant, a lot of autumn tones, but the lights of the city are dazzling, so there's both a dinginess and a shimmer that play off each other. It is a beautiful movie visually and in its soul. I love it, and it's long overdue as part of my holiday viewing regimen.

I have loved each of director Kon's movies so far, but this is the clear frontrunner for me, definitely the sentimental choice. Paprika is going to have to do something pretty exceptional to unseed it (and while I hear Paprika is a mind-blowing exceptional movie, I wonder if the hype is maybe too much...we'll see next weekend).

 [hey, Toasty has a review! Of course we agree!]

1-1-1-KsMIRT: whatever times five

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (ha!) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  These are shows I finished (or was finished with) in the past four-ish weeks.

This Month:
Doom Patrol Season 4 pt 2 - CTV SciFi/Max
The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin Season 1 - AppleTV+
Girls5eva Season 3 - Netflix
The Gentlemen DNF - Nflix
Hijack - AppleTV+

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Doom Patrol Season 4, part 2 [6 of 6 episodes watched]

The What 100: The Doom Patrol are fractured, again. They've lost their immunity from aging and they're not dealing well. Rita's starlet egocentricity can't handle the rapid aging. Cliff's Parkinson's is only getting worse. Larry is so petrified not of aging, or dying, but being alone that he pushes everyone away, including Keeg. Jane has lost touch with all her other personalities in the underground. Rouge fears she can never redeem herself. Victor wonders who he is, and what he can contribute, if he's not Cyborg. And, of course, weird shit and lots of swearing.

(1 Bad): It feels like so, so long ago that we watched Doom Patrol Season 4 Part 1, because it was. We put off watching it for months after it aired, wondering if we even cared anymore. With the DP it's not even superhero fatigue, because it's not really even a superhero show. It's just a show about weirdos facing even weirder threats that grounds itself in deep rooted issues of mental health.  No, it was just that sense of everything falling apart, which, with the Doom Patrol, has been from episode one. This is a dysfunctional family. And after a while, especially when everyone is keeping to themselves and not interacting except with hostility, it's not fun to watch.  So it was hesitation that put off watching this last batch of 6 episodes. I think the worst of it was stepping back in, because Episode 7, the first episode back, picks up directly from Episode 6 and, like I said, it had been a minute, and to be honest, I felt that same sense of fatigue.

(1 Good): While overall Season 4 pt. 2 was a mixed bag, more than a bit of a rollercoaster for each character (and the viewer), it had two incredible highlights, the first of which was Episode 9 "Immortimas Patrol". As has been the thing for genre shows to do since, oh, the late 90's and "Once More With Feeling", "Immortimas Patrol" is a musical episode, and in Doom Patrol's weirdest of weird ways, their Christmas Episode (with nary a hint of Christmas).  It was watching the Oscars back in 2022 when performing in the ensemble for Encanto's best song nomination when I saw that Diane Guerrero was not only a cast member of that film but could sing, and yeah, she gets to show that off here. Also, Oscar winner Brendan Frasier sing-talks his way through a song about trying to masturbate without interruption.  And there's the chorus of Sex Ghosts that keep popping up.  The songs here are written by Aliza and Talia Berger with music by Clint Mansell and Kevin Kiner (just an incredible duo handling scoring chores this entire series), and they are all really, really fun while also being story and character-centric.

(1 Great): The thing about the Doom Patrol is they were doomed from the beginning. The original team Larry, Rita and Cliff, were on borrowed time to begin with. So that they each meet an end is only fitting. But holy shit, do we ever get some closure. Rita passed away, and it's so sad, until her ghost emerges to orchestrate her own funeral. Larry and Keeg find beauty in endings. Jane finds a new path forward as a whole person, and with Casey, who isn't even really a person.  Victor continues to make his mark, his way. And Rouge decides to embrace her dark side, but possibly used for good? And Cliff spends his final days with his family leading to one of the most beautiful, tearjerking, and abrupt endings of any TV show ever. I still get weepy thinking about it.  For a static robot face, the Robotman head has been so incredibly expressive for 46 episodes and the hold on it for the final frame as the light in his eyes goes out is just a little bit of magic given the moments preceding it.  This show, while not always great, was always something special. 

META: Yes, I cried multiple times during the finale. Shut up. Stupid show.

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The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin [6 of 6 episodes watched]

(The Plot 100): Dick Turpin wants nothing more than to be a glamorous highwayman. He's not been much else in his life. He certainly does not want to be a butcher like his father.  So he sets out on finding a gang, and then gets to robbing stage coaches. But as a gentleman.  He leads with compassion and robs with kindness. Things don't always go well for him, but he can always hold his head up for being his authentic self. This attitude gets people's attention, and a scribe starts writing brochures of his adventures making him a celebrity.

(1 Great): Where each of the first four episodes was pretty much a stand-alone adventure, with a little continuity of world and character building, the latter two episodes are a two-parter, in which an even more decadent, charming, congenial, fancy highwayman, Tommy Silversides, turns up and out-Turpins Dic Turpin in every way possible. While almost every character in Dick Turpin is really fun, Connor Swindells who plays Silversides gives a next level performance. He's clearly dastardly, and up to something, but he is also incredibly charming and irresistible. It's not just the show telling us these things, but Swindells showing us them.  And then, in the second episode, there's the turn, and it's hilarious, giving Swindells yet another layer to his performance.

(1 Good): This feels like a sister show to Our Flag Means Death, as both are period-set comedies about relatively hapless, but good-natured men who want to participate in what are commonly seen as ruthless and violent criminal activities. Steed Bonnet from Our Flag... and Dick Turpin here are both in over their heads in their quests for excitement and adventure, while also retaining a positive outlook on life, and enforcing their own moral codes of gender and sexual identity positivity and inclusivity. They just want everyone to be their best selves.  It's hard not to be charmed by these shows ... unless you're one of these "anti-woke" toolboxes who can't see anything beyond their own limited perspective.

(1 Bad): I found Dick Turpin to be great fun. Solid cast, whimsical production, fantastic earworm of a theme, but it's a little...tame.  It's not trying to be edgy, and I get that, but it is rather... fluffy.  Where Our Flag... had some heft to it that grounded it in something tangible and emotional, Turpin is just a silly light comedy. I like the characters, but I don't feel terribly invested in them. 

META: I know Our Flag... has been canceled, and that it was on HBO/Max and Turpin is on AppleTV+, but I really, really, really would love a crossover between these two shows. They're so complimentary, it only makes sense. It won't happen, but I wants it.

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Girls5eva Season 3 [6 of 6 episodes watched]

The Plot 100: A pregnant Dawn, a starved-for-attention Wickie, a newly empowered Summer and a very horny Gloria have forged out on their own, with all new material, really trying to will a resurgence into existence. But they find a tiny modicum of success in Fort Worth (singing a song about Fort Worth) and are nervous to leave even that glimmer of stardom behind. A bold move, Wickie takes all their money and books Radio City Music Hall as their big tour finale...a finale for a tour that hasn't even been planned.

(1 Great): Renee Elise Goldsberry as Wickie is a freaking force to be reckoned with. While all the cast are enjoyable, Goldsberry is next level, all the time. She's best know for being a key player in Hamilton but she's got incredible comedic chops that she shows off non-stop. The energy on screen doubles every time she's in a scene.  Wickie is reliably self-involved -- a generous archetype for comedy -- but Goldsberry plays Wickie's ego as a mask, and she's aces every moment she comes out from behind it (and nails even hard the mad dash recovery to get back behind it).  The spotlight episode of Wickie returning to her supportive, upper class family home is the season highlight.

(1 Good): Like the Tina Fey/Robert Carlock-produced 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt before it, Girls5eva is a joke machine. Just densely packed joke-after-joke-after-joke in such a manner that it's hard to take them all in. I find myself still processing one joke when two others have flown past me.  My favourite joke is the Mariotte Divorced Dad Suitelets as a setting and all the delicious comedy nuggets within (like the last minute, pre-wrapped birthday present vending machine and the "#1 Weekend Dad" coffee mugs). It is a show that begs rewatching for all the comedy nuggets.

 (1 Bad): I'm not going to complain about Netflix resurrecting Girls5eva after it seemed like two seasons, 8 episodes each, was going to be it. But I will complain about only giving it a 6-episode order, and what looks to be an extremely tight budget.  It's not necessarily the stripped-down sets or even the sparse extras casting (no crowd ever feels like a crowd), as a sharp director and production staff could definitely make it work. It's clear that the budget limitations extended to the shooting time, and there wasn't enough to do more elaborate camera setups to hide the flaws, or to do more takes and edit the scenes tighter.  This season, frankly, doesn't look very good. It looks like...Hallmark...just with dirty jokes.

META: I don't know enough about the production of this Netflix season, but it just doesn't hit as hard as the prior seasons. One of the key things is the songs just aren't quite up to the same bar as the previous two seasons. Where I would actually listen to the soundtracks to Seasons 1 and 2 on Spotify (oh, I'd do the Splingee) I haven't even been tempted by Season 3. But maybe upon rewatch I'll start getting "Inside My Sweater" stuck in my brain.

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The Gentlemen Season 1(?) [4 of 8 episodes watched]

The Plot 100: UN Peacekeeping officer Eddie Horniman is called home after the death of his father. He inherits his father's title of Duke of Halstead, much to the chagrin of his complete fucktwit of an older brother. Eddie learns that his father had leased out the property to criminal organization, and now he's also in bed with them. Eddie endeavours to get them off his land and out of his life, but seems to just get more entrenched the more he does to try and get them out.

(1 Great): Kaya Scodelario as Susie Glass. She's the "handler", the "fixer", and the woman-in-control (but not in charge) of the weed operations. She's ultra-competent, calm/cool/collected at all times, and perfectly styled without being showy about it. It's a ridiculously charming and enjoyable performance, which makes it all the more sad that I didn't enjoy the show enough to stick it out for more of her.

(1 Good): The show looks good. Like, real good. It's got the same feel as any of Guy Ritchie's films about cheeky British criminals, which have, since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, all had a visual pinache. Ritchie directs the first two episodes, and you can tell. Surprisingly, when Nima Nourizadeh steps in to direct the next two episodes, you can't really tell it's not Ritchie behind the camera. So cudos to the production team for maintaining a consistent sensibility. 

(1 Bad): Honestly, there was nothing outright "bad" about The Gentlemen, but it just wasn't clicking with me. Okay, maybe when they introduced Peter Serafinowicz (nailed it on the first try) as a very distinctive character only to promptly [spoiler for the first episode], I was quite deflated by that. That was bad.  Part of my lack of enthusiasm is Eddie is a bit of a nothing character. He has one goal, which is doing whatever it takes to get these criminals off his land, so there's not a lot else to that character. Everyone else seems to have something going on but Eddie's just this stoic, handsome, rich, military twat who isn't particularly skilled at anything. He's not exceptionally intelligent, or a great fighter, or quick on his feet, and that should make him a compelling lead, but Theo James plays him with a sense of authority that the show seemingly backs up, rather than it being the misplaced authority of a man in over his head. I also wanted more flirting between him and Scodelario, but it all stayed weirdly businesslike in the first half.

META: I loved Ritchie's first two films, then stepped away from his Swept Away vanity project and never really came back to him full time. Sure I saw the Sherlock Holmes movies and enjoyed them enough, and I did see Aladdin (a real "why bother" film), and I do really love Man From U.N.C.L.E.  but the thing that drew me to him in the first place, his stylish British crime flicks I've avoided completely. Rocknrolla, Revolver, Wrath of Man, Operation Fortune, and event the show's disconnected namesake The Gentlemen I haven't seen... but Toasty has... and it seems like he enjoys them.  I dunno...maybe I'll do a Director's Set on Ritchie and go through it all. 

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Hijack [7 of 7 episodes watched]

The Plot 100: Idris Elba plays Sam Nelson, a guy on a flight from Dubai to London that gets highjacked by British nationals for unknown reasons. Elba's background is as a high level mergers and acquisitions closer, so he's used to high pressure situations and talking to/manipulating people. On the ground, meanwhile, is a series of people, including Elba's family and various officials, trying to discern if there is actually a problem.

(1 Great): This show is seven episodes of intensity. It's the first show in months that we just flat out binged out of a need to know more, tossing aside other, better shows, just to get through this compelling story.  It takes place in nearly real time, but never, ever calls attention to that fact. It very capably negotiates at least three, maybe even four dozen characters both on the plane and on the ground - passengers, flight crew, ground control, Sam's family, police, and government officials.  It's probably in no way accurate to real life, but it's an immensely engaging journey.

(1 Good): The show has one mystery, which is the "why". Why are these people hijacking the plane? It's a good mystery they tease out over the first four hours before the list of demands are revealed and then we spend the next half of the series being very aware of the additional threats posed beyond the airplane. As if things weren't intense enough. 

(Good 1.5: I liked that Sam is a guy with "a particular set of skills" but in this case it's not the answer to this problem. Sam is a negotiator, a talker, and he uses that skill a LOT to insert himself into the situation, sometimes unbelievably. But I like that Sam's negotiating skill is just as often not the solution as it is, and that he's not "the guy in control" of the situation, really, ever, and the real fact is no one is. It's just kind of chaos.)

(1 Bad): Peril fatigue. That thing when the main character is put into too many life-threatening situations and the audience starts to check out of the idea that he will actually be harmed. The final act goes maybe two unnecessary steps too far with Sam and the flight, and then there's additional perils happening on the ground. It's all a bit too much, and unnecessary. I think an epilogue as opposed to the additional bits of danger would have been better, even if it kind of broke the "real time" structure.

META: Famous handsome man Idris Elba is not just known for being famous and handsome, but also being incredibly charming and a pretty good guy. He's likeable, and I like seeing him in things. I don't see everything he's in but I am certainly drawn to things because he's in them.  This came out mid-2023 and didn't really move the needle on anything, but it went on my lengthy "to watch" list. I put it on to be background while working on the 2000th Post Spectacular, and got sucked in and distracted quickly.  

It's not a completely successful show, but it moves briskly and is very, very engrossing.

WFH: Sicario: Day of the Soldado

 2018, Stefano Sollima (Without Remorse) -- Amazon

One opportunity afforded by the endless Work From Home is that ritualistic allotted hour where I step away from the desk and sit on the sofa, to nourish myself. After about 20 minutes or so of putting together a lunch, I find something to watch. For most of 2020, I rewatched TV or film drivel, but I decided of late to use the time to watch some of the "meaning to get around to" list. Basically things I downloaded or added to My List but never actually watched. And as Marmy is usually asleep, the intention is to keep the volume relatively low and turn on the CC. Also, the choices have to lend themselves to being watched in spurts, as I will never get the 1.25 standard hours of movie time to sit and watch before returning to the desk.

Violent drug cartels vs America fits that and I rather liked Sicario, the sombre not-quite-action flick from Villeneuve. I was always hesitant to watch a sequel that he had nothing to do with, but having recently seen Without Remorse and at least respected its action/combat scenes, I thought I could stand to see more from Sollima.

Emily Blunt's character is not here, as Sollima focuses on Matt Graver (Josh Brolin, Oldboy), the morally ambivalent CIA agent and his blunt weapon Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro, Inherent Vice). The US has had another terrorist attack on American soil and this time, illegals crossing the border were blamed. But this is not a movie about The Wall, or Trump's policy, but more about how the cartels are making bigger money transporting bodies across the border than trafficking drugs. So, if the war on drugs is taking a back seat these days, here is a better reason to take them down. The solution is simple -- have them take each other out, and Graver is chosen to start the war. Their mission objective involves kidnapping the daughter of one of the cartel leaders, who happens to be the man who had Alejandro's family put to death. She will be a pawn to pit the cartels against each other.

This was a grim, violent movie as was to be expected. But I did find myself noting it never really went in the expected directions. The end game was never truly apparent, given the murky nature of the motivations provided to our mains. And of course, once something goes wrong, ties are cut and loyalties betrayed. Graver is clearly not happy having to leave his valuable asset behind enemy lines, but Alejandro seems to know what he is mixed up in. The oddest bit about it all, is that everyone is just presented as a working man. Sure, they may be government agents mixed up in international events, or brutal cartel soldiers who know their days are numbered, but it all just seems like ... a job to them. Just a job. I think that is more dangerous than any belief system, for its easy to forgive much when you just see that as the way of the world. Something you just do day to day, because... what else is there?

Double Dose...of Dornan

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...pretty simple.  Today: two films co-starring Jamie Dornan)

Synchronic - 2019, d. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead - Netflix
Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar - 2021, d. Josh Greenbaum - Crave

Let's talk, very briefly, about Jamie Dornan.  Up until I put on Synchronic I didn't quite know who Jamie Dornan was.  Honestly, I thought he was an actor from Game of Thrones but I couldn't place which character he was.  My wife, the GoT expert had to set me straight that he was not in the show...and wasn't he the 50 Shades of Gray guy? 

Yeah, that's him.

Like an older Robert Pattinson, Dornan's big break was as the lead male love interest in the most egregious of housefrau book-to-film adaptations, the type of film that actively rebuffs any sort of hetero male or critical viewing.  The type of film we look down upon the stars of for nothing else but association with the property what deigns to have a rabid fanbase of female followers.  The type of film that said stars have to crawl out from under the weight of.  It took Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson years to get out from under the Twilight shadow.  Dornan's 50 Shades co-star Dakota Johnson has had a bit of an easier time escaping the series, but the perception of Dornan seemed to relegate him to second-string man-candy, and the generic black-haired handsomeness that likely gets him confused for Sebastian Stan, Kit Harrington or Richard Madden by the populace at large.

Synchronic was never going to be the breakout movie for him.  He, alongside Anthony Mackie, lend the film some low-wattage star-power that gives its two directors, indie genre darlings (and Toast&Kent favourites) Benson and Moorehead, a bit brighter of a spotlight.  

Mackie is the focal figure here, a New Orleans paramedic with a brain tumor who becomes very intent on figuring out the strange deaths he's encountering throughout town.  Dornan is his paramedic partner, his best friend.  Where Mackie is terminally single, Dornan feels bogged down in his marriage and being father to a once-suicidal teenage daughter.  He's envious of Mackie's freedoms, but doesn't see the loneliness that Mackie bravely smiles through, weary of the one night stands.  They both look at each other with the view that the grass is greener on the other side.

The strange deaths seemed to be linked to the drug "synchronic", but it doesn't explain the weird, anachronisms that surround the bodies, like sword wounds and venomous snake bites.  Mackie tracks down the source of the drug and buys out the supply, and has a weird encounter with its creator who explains how it allows the user to time travel for a short period of time, but only younger users whose pineal glands are less calcified than a normal adult (as a result of his tumor, so is Mackie's).

When Dornan's daughter goes missing after taking the drug, Mackie starts experimenting with Synchronic, to learn how it works, and how he can possibly return her home.

Like Toasty , I think a lot of Benson and Moorehead, and their thoughtful, creative and playful endeavors into sci-fi via left-field approaches. Their prior features The Endless and Resolution are part of the same reality and play with time in complimentary ways while remaining independent films.  They have greater plans to explore that universe, and I had hoped, knowing that time travel was part of Synchronic that this film would further expand that world. 

Such is not the case, which is not to say that's what disappoints me about the film.  To be clear, I liked it, I enjoyed viewing it, I was happy I watched it, but I was disappointed, mainly in how the story broke down.

With the mystery of the weird deaths as a result of the drug, I was expecting an atypical detective procedural where Mackie, and maybe Dornan along with him, would start piecing together the mystery and discover the bigger scale time travel reveal.  But when Dornan's daughter goes missing towards the end of the second act, the film fractures, and Mackie is on his own in his experiments, while Dornan (and Katie Astleton [Legion, The League] playing his wife) sees his marriage disintegrating before his eyes.  

The story doesn't know exactly what it wants to do with these disparate elements.  Benson and Moorehead really like the grounding of characters and placing their woes and relationships at the forefront while the weirdness of their reality creeps further and further in until it can't be ignored.  It's a good formula, but in severing Mackie and Dornan it creates multiple streams, one kind of awe-inspiring, the other uncomfortably mundane, that don't compliment each other well.  It's to the point that you almost don't need Dornan in the film at all, that Mackie, facing death anyway, could have gone on a solo detective adventure through the whole film, then help rescue just a random girl who disappeared.

It's a film that keeps Mackie in the spotlight and tries to give Dornan something beefy for his character, but Dornan still seems shunted to the background, and he doesn't pop much at all beyond a supporting player.

It would take something very bold, very bizarre to make this handsome, raven-haired Irishman to really pop off the screen (besides his handsomeness and Marvel-esque physique).

I didn't even know he was in Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar when I put the film on.  Honestly, I didn't even know what Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar was when I put it on, except the latest Kristen Wiig-starring vehicle which she co-wrote with co-star Annie Mumolo (her real life BFF and co-writer on Bridesmaids).  In the wake of The Pause, a LOT of films were shunted on to Video-On-Demand or streaming services with little advertising or fanfare.  Barb and Star was one of those.

The most I knew of Barb and Star... was the promotional poster images, the bright Floridian inspired pastels that seem...I dunno, like Postcards from the Edge: Redux.  It wasn't inspiring me to watch, or even seek out more information.  It just said "comedy...for your parents."

The thing I forget is, I'm now a parent, and the comedy that's made for me is, well, often made for me.  But all too often comedy features are just bland, for-the-masses-but-for-noone comedy (like 75% of Melissa McCarthy's or Jason Bateman's individual outputs [and 100% of their together-output]).  I was lumping Barb and Star... into that tired "for the masses" group.  Even loving Bridesmaids and knowing that Wiig's sensibilities of comedy aren't really that mainstream, I couldn't even bother to watch a trailer.

It was a podcast recommendation that got me to put the film on... and all the person said was that they were watching Barb and Star... again and their cohosts seconded how great an idea it was.  I still knew nothing about the film, except that one group of reviewers seemed to think that this was a film worth watching repeatedly.

Well, I've watched it twice now in the span of a week, and I may watch it again very soon.  Wiig is great, playing dual roles (we'll get to that), Mumolo who I don't know if I've ever seen (or at least noticed her) on screen is fabulous, and, oh, Jamie Dornan steals the whole goddamn thing out from under them.  Yes, that Jamie Dornan.  He's the goddamn highlight of the movie and the most central part of what will bring me back to the film.

But what is this film?

Let me explain the opening sequence.  A young Asian-American boy rides his bicycle delivering newspapers, headphones on, singing emphatically along to the Barbara Streisand/Barry Gibb duet Guilty.  The production of this opening sequence is phenomenal, with Greenbaum creating a grandiose sense of scope providing overhead shots of the bike riding down the center of the street, and the boy's very casual distribution of the newspapers until he stops dead in front of one house, his last paper to deliver, the music cutting out, and an ominous moment of score subbing in.  From the POV of the house the newspaper hits the porch with a thud.  We cut back to the boy, who gives a menacing look, and without changing expression, busts back into "Guilty" and the music kicks back in over him and his emphatic expressions return.  

It's a brilliantly crafted opening that upends every expectation I had going into this film (and I honestly had no expectations).  But what was that all about?  Why the sinister moment?  What the actual eff....?

Moments later the boy is biking out of civilization, stops in front of a tree, is scanned by a robotic owl perched on a branch, and the tree opens to reveal an elevator.  It descends into the secret lair of Sharon Fisherman, a strikingly pale albino woman, with a severe jet black wig and a gap in her front teeth. Is that... Tilda Swinton?  Nope, it's Kristen Wiig basically made up to look Swinton-esque.  She's basically a Bond villain who is crafting a plan of revenge involving killer mosquitos.  The boy, Yoyo (Reyn Doi), is adopted/abducted child/protege while the doe-eyed, doting handsome Edgar (Dornan) is her loyal lackey whom she has wrapped around her finger.  She is sending him to Vista Del Mar to enact a revenge plot against the town that abused her as a teen.

Yeah, this is where the movie starts.

It's a good 10 minutes before we meet the titular Barb and Star, sitting on the couch having an old fashioned mid-western gab session, speaking a mile a minute, occasionally pausing to enjoy the rhythms of Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" and drink their tea.  We catch a glimpse into their lives, their history, their personalities in this introduction, it's everything we need to know. These women are best friends, with shared losses (one is widowed, the other divorced).  They work and live together, and are basically inseparable.  They're so of the same mind that they continue each others run-on sentences.  But that means that when their lives are uprooted suddenly that they dare to do something wild, like go visit the middle-age paradise of Vista Del Mar ("View of the mar"/"View of the swordfish" they say in tandem).

Arriving in Florida and their hotel, they are greeted by a grandiose musical song-and-dance number.  It's that kind of movie.  They are like kids in a candy store, just awed by everything without any sense of where to start.  They want to do it all.  In the evening at the bar (with arch piano accompaniment from famed comedic lounge act Richard Cheese) they meet a lovelorn Edgar and they hit it off, and the night.gets.weird.

The next day, Edgar makes his walk of shame only to discover he's accidentally botched his mission, while the two once-inseparable women start talking deceit so they can go see Edgar independently.  From there Star learns that she can be loved even as a divorcee, Barb learns to embrace her independence, and Edgar learns that relationships don't need to be toxic.  Even Sharon Fisherman learns that, if she lets go of her bitterness, she can find acceptance.  But it's a radically goofy ride along the way.

Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar is just utter bananas.  Every scene is completely unexpected and the laughs are so unique, most of which is derived from this veritable swarm of delightful characters crafted in this film.  Barb and Star are indeed so alike and yet Wiig and Mumalo still manage to give them distinguishing characteristics and personalities.  

Dornan's boy-in-puppy-love routine is endlessly hilarious, even if it hits its goofiest heights in his adorably literal rock-ballad musical-number "Edgar's Prayer" early in the film.  It's the shot in the face that the dull but handsome rich man of 50 Shades... needed.  It takes that image and twists and twists and twists until its unrecognizeable, and Dornan is so earnestly game, but also completely capable comedically. 

This is a big, friendly cartoon of a movie.  There's nothing threatening here (except the hilarious Vanessa Bayer as the sole perpetrator of the famous midwestern passive-aggresive pleasantness in the role of grand diva of Talking Club), and it doesn't punch down on anyone which is why it works so well.  It could easily be taking a chunk out of midwestern women, or Floridians, or that guy who is always walking around in his yellow speedo, but it embraces them all for their own quirky weirdness.  It's a film that accepts everyone.  Everyone except Gail, who arrived just after 6:00 and is therefore not welcome to Talking Club - nor a bowl of hot dog soup - this day.

10 for 10: too busy to review

[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, some things I actually watched fairly recently but don't have a whole lot to say about:
Widows - 2018, d. Steve McQueen - netflix
Hustlers - 2019, d. Lorene Scafaria - amazonprime
Sicario - 2013, d. Denis Villeneuve - netflix
The Most Dangerous Game - 1932, d. Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel - amazonprime
The Bee Gees: How Do You Mend A Broken Heart - 2020, d. Frank Marshall - hbomax
The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two - 2020, d. Chris Columbus - netflix
Juliet, Naked - 2019, d. Jesse Peretz  - netflix
Hotel Artemis - 2018, d. Drew Pierce - netflix
The To Do List - 201, d. Maggie Carey - netflix
Flight - 2012, d. Robert Zemeckis - netflix

....allons-y....

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 My intention was to do a big one-two punch of Widows + Hustlers, the former a movie I was very keen to see when it was originally released but never got out to see, the latter I was only mildly interested as a result of good buzz.  After watching them, and enjoying them both, I just couldn't connect the threads, other than being mildly crime related and being two films with a largely female ensemble cast.

Widows I wanted to love, based on its cast.  Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Elizabeth Debicki each heavyweight performers in their own right in my mind, and always make what their in better for their presence.  Yet, something about this film just didn't connect.  It's not a mess, it's not poorly told, directed, or shot, it just doesn't accelerate.  Is it as simple as the film brings Carrie Coon into the picture, another heavyweight who makes anything she's in better, and legitimately wastes her?  No, it's not, but it's kind of endemic of the film that seems to not know what to do with what it has.

I think this is the first Steve McQueen film I've seen, and he's a director with a solid reputation preceding him, but I'm not very impressed.  Davis is obviously the lead of the picture and she commands the screen but her character is left in sort of a confused limbo for much of the film as she tries to wrangle the other widows of her husband's gang into performing their last job.  She doesn't have a lot of options left to her, having become accustomed to a certain lifestyle.  Debicki has the biggest journey in the film, taking her character from abused spouse to sex worker to empowered force of nature and she walks away with the picture in the process.  Rodriguez plays demure, very against type for her, and it's rare to see such a softer side of her.  She's been playing tough girl since her debut.

I think this would have worked better as a pulpier, flashier movie, rather than attempting gritty realism which I hear is what McQueen favors.  The whole side angle of Colin Ferrell and Brian Tyree Henry's political aspirations gives a particular insight into tainted Chicago politics, but it's largely out of step with the rest of the film.  I just think it should have been more exciting, rather than striving for thought provoking...which it is, but only just.

[14:17]

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Hustlers though was more surprising than I expected.  It's a sort of friendship love story, about a woman with no options left it seems but to turn to stripping, and the star performer who takes her under her wing.  Constance Wu (Crazy Rich Asians) is the former, with Jennifer Lopez as the latter.  When Wu joins up at a high-end strip club in the late 2000's she feels like an outsider and doesn't know how to work the business.  Lopez is introduced via a pole dance sequence which somehow is shot avoiding the gross salaciousness of a strip club, and instead seems to admire and be in awe of her physical prowess.  Every time men in the audience creep into frame, to lob money at the dancer, it threatens to bring the performance down, but Lopez, in character, seems to be in a zone of her own.  It's something I think that takes a female director to pull off and it's what Scafaria brings, is such warmth, love and respect for these women and what they do.  There's no real judgement here.  It's a celebration of them. The backroom sequences early on, which bring together sort of a clan of women, including popular performers of the day Lizzo and Cardi B, are just so alive, and it's a pointed contrast to the future jump later on when the back room is populated by foreigners, possibly illegal immigrant, indentured sex workers (just watched season 2 of The Wire before watching this so it was prominent in my mind this possibility)

As Wu's character takes off under Lopez's guidance the two become fast friends and intimately connected.  They start a side hustle of getting their patrons, rich wall street assholes, too drunk and overcharge their credit cards.  Getting rich and moving up in the world.  But then the financial crisis of 2009 hits and the well dries up so their gamble turns more aggressive and serious, which winds up catching the attention of the police and a sting operation takes it down.

Based on a true story, but obviously loosely adapted, it's a powerful statement about the nature of wealth, and how it's obtained, as well as the different class and gender economies in the world.  It pokes around a lot of themes but doesn't extrapolate tremedously upon any of them.  It's a pretty good story though, and I think it hits in a more thought-provoking manner than Widows and is more fun too.  Lopez is great and talks of her being robbed for at the very least an Oscar nomination were bang on.

[30:54 - already 10 minutes behind]

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Sicario is one of those movies I had heard about when it came out, that it had one of the most intense sequences put to film, and that it had more than a few surprises under its belt.  I knew it was a movie about the cross border drug trade, but not much else... like, I didn't know until this past year that it was a Denis Villeneuve  film, nor that it had Roger Deakins as its cinematographer.  Those are two very key pieces of info that should have placed this much higher on my to-watch list years ago.

It's a film that had a modest amount of hype.  Not too overblown, but enough that kept the title resonant 6 years later, and obviously spawning a sequel that maybe didn't hit the same level of accolades but seemed to manage fine.  It was a film whose hype was modest enough that it could have easily lived up to it.  And yet, I felt kind of empty after watching it.  Like I wasn't quite sure what I should feel about it.

It's the story about a task force that doesn't so much as operate in the grey area as it operates rather illegally, dismantling drug cartels, but also working its own angle to keep supplies running -- the idea being that the drugs are going to flow anyway, might as well make it flow in the most efficient way with the least disruptive impact on society.  Emily blunt plays a New Mexico area FBI agent who gets recruited into this special task force (one blessed from on high), and she's never quite certain the role she's playing or why she's actually there...until she finally discovers what that is, and it's not good.

This is a hard film.  I mean it's really watchable and yes, there are some pretty intense moments, but it's a raw nerve, exposing the darker reality of our world in dramatically entertaining fashion, but no less makes for uncomfortable viewing.  The film's "good guys" aren't really that good, and the work they're doing makes sense, but it's without any ideals or scruples.  It's not even gray area, they're in the black, and the only thing that makes them the "good guys" and not the bad guys is that they're not really in it for the money.

I didn't feel the itch to watch the sequel after watching this and I'm not sure if I will.  

 

I probably will.  Although it won't have the Deakins-isms I so tremendously enjoyed in this.

[42:47]

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Another plan foiled from lack of time was the idea of doing a week long series of "to hunt man" reviews, spurred on by watching The Hunt .  The first film I watched after The Hunt I decided should be The Most Dangerous Game, the original hunting-man-as-sport movie (based on the original hunting-man-as-sport novel [novella?]).  

Well, you can't really even call The Most Dangerous Game a movie.  At about 62 minutes, I've seen TV episodes longer.  It falls in that weird runtime blank space where it's not a short film, but it's also not a feature.

What it most assuredly is is a truly goofy movie. 

A famed big game hunter is aboard a ship that crashes when the signal light that's supposed to guide them ashore is deliberately misplaced.  The lone survivor, he finds his way to a manor house where he's greeted by a cartoonish Cossack with extremely broad makeup and hair applied, like he's in a Universal monster movie.  A most ridiculously accented, highly theatrical Russian Count strolls down the stairs and introduces himself as well as his guests, a drunkard and a dame.  The drunkard is played by Robert Armstrong beautifully.  He's not at all "natural" drunk like in the recently reviewed Another Round but he doesn't quite play it like a cartoonish drunk either.  It's so far beyond that, that I could only applaud and be amazed by the choices he made.  Fay Wray (of King Kong fame) plays the drunkard's sister, and obviously the defacto love interest for our new hero (who, as a big game hunter, is, in modern eyes, a despicable piece of shit).  She tries to warn the new blood of the Count's intentions, but the Count makes them known on his own.  You see, the Count sees in him a kindred spirit, a man who understands the hunt, the thrill, but how the edge wears off after time, and you need a more dangerous game, one who can fight back with the same level of calculation... it's time to hunt man... are you with me, co-hunters, or against me , and be hunted.

Well, obviously it's no fun if they just hunt down people together so they square off in a tepid tete-a-tete that takes them through the jungles of the King Kong set.  Literally.  If you're at all familiar with King Kong you're going to recognize much of the terrain they traverse in this film's short run time.

Oh, this is a stupid, stupid story, and yet, it's kind of delightful to watch... like when the Count sics his dogs on the hunter and it's so very clear that the dogs are just playing and the man is holding treats for them to jump up on him.  And Fay Wray does what she's famous for doing, which is screaming, all the bloody time.  It's pretty grating, in a dumb fun way, both her screaming and the movie.

[58:25]

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How Do You Mend A Broken Heart is the subtitle of this HBO biopic of the Bee Gees, a sibling-led group whose legacy I don't think I've ever given too much consideration to.  The subtitle, one of the Bee Gees more popular songs, seems to indicate a sort of thesis for the film, but it's one that never comes to fruition.  Barry Gibb is the sole survivor of the trio, Robin and Maurice having passed away a few years apart in the past decade.  You would think this would be Barry, pontificating on what the loss of his brothers means as he reflects upon their 50 years in music, but no.  It's mostly a manufactured, talking heads retrospective that rapidly accelerates through their 60's and 70's discographies with a bit of dabbling in the 80's and beyond.  Because they were so prolific, having written thousands of songs, with dozens of hits (both to their name as a group and as songwriters for theirs), there's really no justice served here to any of it.  

If you don't know anything about the Bee Gees, and really I didn't, it does serve as a really good primer to their career, with a modest amount of insight into the influence they wielded, and the emotional highs and lows they experienced.  It attempts to get to the heart of the group, but it always seems a bit cold and distant whenever they try.  There's a lot more drama that could have been teased out, but with 50 years to cover there was no time.  It's like "hey we had drug habits...and then we didn't" and "we were married, and then divorced, and married again" with no real emotional connection to these events in their lives.  

A lot of the talking heads comes from interviews with the brothers from older interviews, and it keeps them at a distance, knowing that they've already passed and yet the film is trying to recontextualize their insight into this new narrative.  

My biggest takeaway was that I the Bee Gees had a very long career, but in that very long carreer, they produced only a small window of music (at pique disco) that I actually liked.  I kind of wish they just set the whole doc in that era and dove deeper into the making of their biggest hits.

[1:09:44]

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The first Christmas Chronicles movie debuted on netflix during our "dark year" here at T&KSD.  I know I watched the film, as I distinctly recall viewing it my phone during a stupidly long bus ride across town as we tried to deal with my daughter's lice problem at a professional facility.  You don't really forget something like that.  The film was quite fun, with a sort of Adventures In Babysitting (but with christmas and fantasy) kind of vibe, but far from perfect.  Kurt Russell definitely sold the damn thing with his gusto.  I was hoping for something bigger, more adventurous, and actually more action heavy...I wanted Russell to be "action Santa".  

So with the promise of a sequel, I was hoping that the 80's influence would spin it into something more James Cameron-y (as much as I dislike how the man directs, I like his idea of sequels going bigger)...alas Part Two is too much of a sequel, bringing back the character Kate from the first film, now an awkward pre-teen, and her new, soon-to-be stepbrother with her. 

By tying the film so closely to the first it does lend it a sense of connection that I think worked in favor of the overall film, but also set it on a path that I didn't personally want to see it go on.  It gets very magic-centric, which isn't ostensibly a bad thing, but director Chris Columbus brings to it everything you would expect him to, given his track record.  It's a family movie, and it's okay, but it doesn't stand out or apart in any way beyond Kurt (and the stunt casting of Goldie Hawn as Mrs. Clause...but it's not stunt casting if she's great in the role, right?).  I hope they keep making these so that maybe they'll eventually get a really good one.  Kurt and Goldie are awesome, and their wardrobes as Mr and Mrs C are my favourite Santas ever, so I can't not want more, even if what we've gotten so far has been mediocre at best.

[1:21:43]

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I was a big fan of Nick Hornby in my late teens/early 20s.  High Fidelity was my obvious gateway.  Being a music fan, but moreover just an obsessive nerd, I felt seen and understood by his novel, and the film made from it.  Fever Pitch was deep in the weeds about very specific British football obsession, and yet I could relate to that too, and About A Boy perfectly encapsulated white male ennui which I've been know to indulge in.  I followed Hornby on his subsequent two (maybe three?) but they stopped speaking to me.  He was eminently readable, he's got a very fluid style, but I didn't connect with what he was saying anymore.  It's like what he wanted to explore wasn't personal, so much as intellectual to him, and that created distance.

I didn't really want to see movies based on his books, I felt I had moved past him, his work, and derivatives thereof.  But, with Juliet, Naked, I mean...Chris O'Dowd.  I love Chris O'Dowd.  His Isrish accent and way of elocuting is one of the most soothing and enjoyable things on Earth.  Even though this film seemed to come and go without any fanfare at all, I was excited when it popped up on nextflix and it jumped to the top of my list. I just had to convice my wife that the O'Dowd factor would overrule her dislike of Ethan Hawke. (She left the film early, not because it wasn't interesting she said, but she had a book she was more into reading)

Well, damn if this wasn't just a complete joy for me to watch, and if it's true at all to the book, it returns Hornby back to the type of personal, nerdy storytelling I originally liked about him.  In this case O'Dowd plays a man obsessed with a musician of nominal cultural impact, played by Hawke.  Along with a few hundred others online, O'Dowd is constantly deep in the weeds, talking bootleg concerts and the intricacies of songs with strangers for hours. Rose Byrne plays his long suffering girlfriend, whom he constantly tries to engage in his passion, and over the years his distraction has turned her off of him completely. 

But in the mail comes a cd with raw studio recordings of his "perfect album", Juliet.  Byrne discovers it and listens and is, frankly, non-plussed.  She inadvertently strikes up an email friendship with Hawke, and then suddenly we're introduced to Hawke's character and his life today.  He's now a loving and devoted father to a 10-year-old son, but there's other kids, from one night stands in the reaches that he's not connected with, including a young woman who is visiting him for the first time.  

Oh boy, I could talk at length about this film.  It stuck with me, and the beats are perfect.  There's not really heightened drama, it's too aware of itself to do that.  The characters are in a place where they want to have something real and nice, and with that in mind, they just try for nice, even though it might not always work out.  This isn't riveting cinema, but it's subtle, pleasant, and seems made for me.

I'll watch it again. And maybe read the book, get back on that Hornby train.

[1:38:56]

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I should be done...

---

I don't know how Hotel Artemis came and went from theatres without making a single blip on my radar.  When it popped up on nextfilx, I had to search the inner reaches of my brain long and hard to figure out if I'd ever heard of this film before.  I mean, the cast is outstanding, with Jodie Foster, Sterling K Brown, Brian Tyree Henry, Jeff Goldblum, Dave Bautista, Jenny Slate, Charlie Day, Zachary Quinto, and Sophia Boutella.  I mean, that's a cast of characters you want to see no matter what the setting.

In this case it's a near-future dystopia where water supplies are managed by corporations and they're starving (dehydrating) out the citizens of LA, as they protest these entities which now can decide who lives or dies by who has water.  But this is literally just background.  In the fore is the titular hotel, where bank robbers Brown and Henry wind up when Henry gets himself shot up.  The Hotel is acually a hospital, with four beds, that services the criminal, the rich, and the criminally rich.  It has a definitive rules of operation/code of conduct, that the nurse (Foster) holds as gospel.  But with the events going on outside, her faith in those rules is doubly called into question, first when the Hotel's patron needs to check in (with no beds available) and the second when an childhood acquaintance of Foster's son (Slate) winds up on her doorstep severely injured.

It's a film that works only because it believes in its internal consistency and the world in which it operates.  The style is shadows and neon, such that it feels like it's an outside part of the John Wick universe... and even though it never directly connects to Wick, it at the very least owes it a debt of gratitude as inspiration.

It's fun, engaging, and full of neat, clunky, near-future tech that's equally possible and improbable.  I see Toasty is sitting on a review of this.  Can't wait for his thoughts.  I bet we agree.

[1:50:36]

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Is The To Do List an earnest homage to horny teen movies of the 80's and 90's or is it a satire of them? 

I mean, why can't it be both?

I think it would have made for, well, maybe not a better movie, but maybe a more impactful movie had it picked a lane. It's spends more time in the homage lane than the satire but this could have been Wet Hot American Summer level great had they flipped it into satire, especially with this cast.  I mean, the bulk of this cast playing teenagers is in their late 20's or even early 30's, so they don't look the part.  Why not play into that?

The crux of the film, though, is that it's a female-led, sex-positive, "horny teen" comedy so if it spent too much time satirizing the genre, then maybe that point of giving a teen woman's POV sex comedy wouldn't come across as hard. 

I liked the resolution of the film, which has nothing to do about landing one guy or another but rather reinforcing the point of one freely and openly exploring one's sexuality without guilt or shame. I can't help but think that making it set in the early 90's just makes the whole endeavour seem strange though (mercifully the 90's jokes aren't so dominant or overpowering).  It's really just....why? There's nothing about this story that really needed the setting to be the '90's.

I enjoyed it, but I didn't love it.  It should have been far funnier than it was, but not for lack of trying.

[1:56:34]

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Oh, Robert Zemeckis.  Why, why do I even bother?

Because they were covering it on the Blank Check podcast and I thought, surely with Denzel, it can't be *that* bad right (for the record, the Blankies weren't really panning this film, they were actually fairly positive about it all things considered).  I basically watched the film on 1.5 speed, and was intercutting watching the film with listening to the podcast, so I may have tainted my viewing experience a little... but being semi distracted is pretty much the only way to watch a Zemeckis film that's not BTTF or WFRR?

Denzel drops his usual rocksolid, watchable performance, (although I have to compare his drunken acting against both Another Round and The Most Danger Game and Denzel's drunken acting doesn't feel real or natural like Another Round, but it's not funny like TMDG, nor) but this is the typical manipulative and laborious tripe from Zemeckis which reminds me why I stopped watching his movies. I laughed, inappropriately, often.

The idea of a very flawed man doing something incredibly heroic is compelling but the story doesn't negotiate it in a satisfactory manner. If anything it's played too subtly and via relationships that don't really seem to matter to the character or the viewer.

Like so many Zemeckis films it tries so hard to play for realism but then has moments (or sometimes just production decisions) so broad or ridiculous that it's like the director is self-satirizing his own story.  It's not good.  The Blankies pointed out the frequent on-the-nose musical cues and yeah, I just had to roll my eyes.  Feelin' Alright, indeed.

And even without looking it up, I just know that rolling a commercial passenger plane is just impossible.

[2:00:54]