KWIF The Secret Agent (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It's Olympics week, full of figure skating controversies, ski jumping controversies, and yes, even curling controversies. All it really left time for was a Saturday double feature at the movies.

This Week:
The Secret Agent (aka "O Agente Secreto" - 2025, d. Kleber Mendonça Filho - in theatre)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026, d. Gore Verbinski - in theatre)
Summer of the Colt ("Tales for all #8", 1989, d. André Melançon - Crave)

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The Secret Agent is the latest of unlikely critical darlings to transcend the festival circuit into both audience attention and awards acclaim. The Brazilian film debuted at Cannes where it won best actor for Wagner Moura and best director for Filho and has now achieved the rare double nomination at the Oscars for Best Foreign Feature and Best Feature, along with other nods its way. 

I've been keen on seeing the film since it's Cannes triumph, intrigued by the title and its 1977 setting because I'm sort of an espionage guy. I knew little else going in, other than many critics casually described it as "weird", and "not really a spy movie". I hadn't even seen a trailer.

And, indeed, it is a weird film, but not weird for weirdness sake. It makes highly unusual storytelling decisions which are, in its own way, disarming without being shocking.. You cannot anticipate the moves this film makes, not without prior awareness, and even then, it would be really hard to see how the pieces fit without experiencing how they actually play out in concert with each other.

The Academy Awards have really embraced the atypical in recent years, starting with The Shape of Water, and continuing with Everything, Everywhere All At Once and Poor Things among others in recent years. Given how outre the storytelling is here, I would say this is maybe its most unusual best picture nomination thus far. And yet, all that uncommon narrative is in service of something. I'll come back to that.

When we meet Wagner Moura's Marcelo, he's pulled into a gas station in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Before he's even stopped the car he spies a dead body in the adjacent dusty field, covered by a sheet of cardboard. His gut instinct is to keep going, even as the portly station attendant comes out. It's a bad scene but it's evident there's more on Marcelo's mind than just the dead body. The title of the film crafts in the viewer's mind all sorts of paranoid thoughts on behalf of Marcelo. There's an incredible tension to the scene that the charismatic station attendant slowly disarms, finally easing when the attendant shoos a pack of wild dogs away from the body as if he's had to do it dozens of times by now. But then a police car shows up and the tension's right back up again as they're not there for the body, but to pay attention to the yellow VW they had passed (once again, the tension is only disarmed by comedy, as a family-filled car is about to pull into the station, only to spy the body and rethink their decision, the young children catch sight and scream). 

It's an incredible sequence, waves of tension and levity, masterfully crafted and beautifully composed. At the same time it's an aside but also sets the tables for the film. Carnival is happening and apparently crime and deaths are rampant while it goes on. Marcelo is anxious about something, police especially, but it will be some time before we find out what it is he's so nervous about. There's corruption aplenty, and Marcelo's is  tense but also a nimble thinker.

The first scene is prefaced by a series of pictures, pictures that look like legit photos of the era and not manufactured for the film. It's easy enough to intone that director Filho is setting the scene for the time, place and attitude of the film (as is the caption, "Brazil 1977, a time of great mischief" which seems to be an understatement). I do not have any context for Brazil of this time period, it's political turmoil of the time is not something I've ever delved into. The fact that there is political upheaval is not lost on the viewer, but what is actually happening is not explained. This is not a film interested in educating an exterior audience, and I'm sure Brazilians are very in tune with the the imagery, captions, billboards, and intonations made in the film that would float past or at least not fully register with an outside audience.

It is then credit to the film's writer/director that this film so readily resonates outside its home country. At first it may be his stylistic choices, but any examination of what the stylistic choices are about all lead back to the themes of the film, which are about corruption, class structures, money, power and justice, as well as the unusual bonds of families. There's also too much to unpack after only one viewing.

Marcelo finds himself in Recife - a northeastern coastal city in Brazil - hosted in a, for lack of better term, refugee hostel with others who we learn are fleeing persecution of some sort or another. Also in Recife is Marcelo's son and his in-laws. Marcelo's has to remind his son that the boy's mother died of cancer, but it seems unspoken that she was perhaps assassinated. Marcelo's intent is to get his son and flee the country, but obstacles are in the way. In the meantime, he's been posted at a documents bureau, where he searches for some form of identification of his mother, a seeming lifelong quest he's had to just prove her existence (the story, explained late in the film, is a troubling one, and seems to have specific cultural resonance to the country that I don't fully understand).

Meanwhile, a shark is found with a human leg inside it. The police chief and his two thug sons seem very intent on handling this discovery themselves. In the wake of Jaws' success, the film's reputation living large in the minds of kids too young to see it, the story of the leg takes on a life of its own in the newspapers. Urban legends are built up around the leg, the phantom limb starts taking on a life of its own. 

Marcelo is also being hunted by two hitmen, a father/stepson team. The repeating pattern of fathers and sons and parents and children seems very deliberate, yet I struggle to understand fully the significance. Again, this is a film that will need repeat viewings and probably some extracurricular reading for full dissection. And these seemingly disparate threads - Marcelo, the police chief and the hitmen - all become rather woven into the same thatch. 

Outside all of this is a piece of the film set in the relative modern day, where a young woman is listening and digitizing audiocassettes featuring the voices of some of the players in the film. The abrupt jumps to the modern day are just that, abrupt, and yet, there's a sort of comfort in the fact that this character is discovering the events along with us. She seems to know more than we do, but with less exacting detail. The bigger surprise of these segments is they progress without ever using them as opportunity for exposition, which could have easily been the case. The purpose of these scenes, though they interrupt only a few times in the film, is only made clear in the final sequence of the movie, and it's kind of the lynchpin to the whole thing.

The Secret Agent is not at all what I expected given the title, and it's a far more unique film than I could ever have anticipated. It's not far afield from the works of a Bong Joon Ho or Yorgos Lanthamos, and yet director Filho is also not aping other directors work either. If ever he was in the past, in this his fourth feature, he's operating with his own voice (I'll need to dig up his three prior productions).  Moura, who has been quietly proficient in supporting (and even lead) roles in North American productions, shines here as both a charming and adept protagonist. Expect Moura to get a few big chances to shine in the next few years. 

I predict The Secret Agent won't win any Academy Awards in its nominated categories except perhaps Best Foreign, but given how it penetrated this year's ballot, I expect Filho will be a prominent awards contender and higher profile filmmaker in the coming years. The film, however, will live on beyond this year. It's just too deep and too unique to get lost in the sea of generic movies.

[Poster talk... many of the Secret Agent posters adopt the aesthetic of 70's spy or paranoia thriller posters, whether it's using a painted style of the era, or establishing the feel of a hand-cropped photograph. I love so many of the posters for this film. The most common theme across the posters is the image of Moura holding a telephone, looking anxious...such a 70's vibe recalling the image of Gene Hackman with the headphones on in The Conversation or Robert Redford at the telephone in 3 Days of the Condor.]

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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is a time loop movie that doesn't show you start and end of the time loop, it takes place completely within the span of one loop. Loop number 118, if we're to believe Sam Rockwell's unnamed man from the future. 

The film opens with a rapid sequence of up close shots of aspects of a Los Angeles diner setting. Focusing more on the patrons than objects, but giving us little hints as to character or dynamics without showing us their faces. We get a sense that there's life here. And then there's a rattle, a barely noticeable skip in the image and a tell-tale "fwump" sound effect that tells us savvy audience members that something metaphysical, even temporal, has happened.

Into a busy diner walks Rockwell, sporting massive scraggly reddish-gray beard, a wild look in his eye, a manic trash-bin wardrobe, and complete disregard for any sort of social formalities. He interrupt the scene, starts spouting some end-of-the-world gibberish, touches upon his time-travel shenanigans and starts looking for recruits to help save the world. He's convinced the right combination of people in this diner will save humanity from a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence, but he just keeps finding disaster. Nobody is interested, which, he seems prepared for. 

But this time, he gets a volunteer from Susan (Juno Temple) who we learn in flashback, lost her son in a school shooting. No worries about that though, as she finds out her son can be cloned and because he died in a school shooting, the government will pay for most of it, and what they don't cover can be paid for by her son-clone having a sponsored ads setting.

The man from the future conscripts the rest of his crew, including troubled couple Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), teachers who we learn accidentally awakened the teenage social media hive mind and are now on the run.

The final team member was hesitantly accepted by the man from the future. At first Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), in her princess party dress and smudged makeup, was deemed too weird, but a trick of a fateful bottle of hot sauce convinces the man to bring her along.  We learn that Ingrid was born with an allergy to phones and wifi. The signals give her headaches and trigger nose bleeds. She kind of hates the technological world, as it's a bit of a hellscape for her to navigate.

The film jumps between the perilous journey the rag tag group needs to make from the diner to a 9-year-old's house where the child is busy inventing the AI that will disrupt the world and the flashbacks that fill in the blanks on the most prominent members of the group. (Asim Choudhry's Scott doesn't get such treatment, alas). 

The story in general, but flashbacks especially, feel like truncated, lighthearted episodes of Black Mirror, just technology accepted into society but making everything slightly worse when promising to make things better. It's hard not to call this "Black Mirror Lite" but it kinda is.

The third act makes some big moves and in doing so undercuts its own reality. The logic of the film seems to get tossed aside unless I'm missing a clear explanation/revelation somewhere.  It doesn't stop being entertaining, but it doesn't hold together conceptually.

The performances are fun, by and large, and there's a good sense of humour around the idea of technology destroying our lives but also being impossible to live without. It's really in how it's applied, awareness of the impact it has, and how we react to it that the film is concerned with, but...not that concerned. It's a satire, but it's also just silly. It's making statements but it's not committing to them. Things that would normally get a GenZ eyeroll would likely slip past them because it's not really old-man-yelling-at-clouds.  

Director Verbinski is known for being a visual stylist on The Ring and Pirates of the Carribean movies, and there's no doubt this is a film that looks a lot better than its twenty million dollar budget. But whatever style Verbinski brings is top loaded in a way, with some exceptionally interesting and well composed shots calling attention to themselves in the film's opening sequence and then seemingly falling away for the rest of the film (perhaps intricate compositions take time which costs money?).

I like both the main story and the flashbacks and they do all connect, but they almost feel like they should be separate pieces. There's probably a whole 90-minute "one crazy night" story in just the team getting from point A to point B, but the flashbacks interrupt that flow (and the lack of Rockwell in them is to their greatest detriment). Each of these microstories could have possibly supported their own feature, or maybe this could have been a multi-part anthology rather than a movie. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is solidly entertaining, but I imagine I'll have largely forgotten about it in a few months.

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As I prepared to do my Saturday double-feature this week, the intent was to finally knock The Secret Agent off my list (success) but the second feature was more up in the air. A few intriguing-but-still-February releases had just come out, but there were also a few Oscar contenders I could pick off. The biggest of them is Sentimental Value, a family drama centered around filmmaking (oh, the Oscars love films about films and filmmaking). I realized/remembered, in this decision-making moment, that I am never excited to see a dramatic movie. Nothing about watching characters deal (or not deal) with their emotions or confronting the challenges or difficulties they face in their lives has any appeal to me...that is unless there's some sort of genre twist to it. It doesn't sound like there's a genre twist to Sentimental Value, and I suspect I will never see that film in my lifetime, unless I wind up doing some stupid boy project where it slots into (I can't even fathom what that one would be).

So imagine my surprise when I get to the next "Tales for all"* film on the list, Summer of the Colt, which turns out to be a horse-centric family drama. I think what appeals to me even less than a dramatic film is a dramatic film centered around horses. Black Beauty or The Black Stallion, no thank you.

(*"Tales for all" being the series of family films made by Quebec producer Rock Demers, the earliest of its installments which were mainstays on Canadian weekend afternoon television through much of the 1980's and 1990's)

So it's no surprise to me that I found the first half of this film to be nearly interminable. The set-up finds Laura, Daniel and Felipe visiting their Grandfather's horse ranch in Argentina. They're met by their young friend Martin, whose family lives and works on the ranch.  But Laura is a young woman now, and not as interested in playing as the boys. There's horse riding aplenty and kids being kids and it's all so tranquil and kind of pointless for what seems like forever. 

It should also be mentioned that this is an Argentinian co-production with Demers, and it was most likely filmed in Spanish as both the English and French dubs do not sync with the performers' mouths. It's an obstacle. Also an obstacle, as we find with most of the "Tales for all" is the child actors are not the most seasoned performers and a lot of their performances can be very stilted and/or conveying incorrect emotion. The English dub voice performers are pretty solid though, but all this is barriers to enjoyment. It's important to establish all this film had going against it, because, in the end, I actually quite liked it overall.

What builds slowly in the film is Laura's sensing hostility from her Grandfather. He loved her just last year and now he's suddenly standoffish, cold, and even mean towards her. She sees it as sexism, that now that she's blossoming into womanhood, she's not such a tomboy, and he can't relate to her. But he's also not trying. So she takes drastic measures to try and fit in with the boys, by cutting off her long locks into a choppy bob. Her Grandfather can only retort snidely "Well, I hope you're proud".  The film sometimes presents Laura from Grandfather's point of view, and he sometimes catches sight of her and he sees an entirely different person. We can infer, based on comments made, that he's seeing in her the children's grandmother, who left for Paris and never came back, and it's too much for him to bear. It would seem  one tainted experience with a woman nearly 50 years ago just turned him into an old misogynist and a control freak.

Meanwhile summer pals Daniel and Martin are having a great time chumming around, doing horse sports and such, but when Martin points out a golden colt to Daniel, Daniel falls in love with the horse and asks his Grandfather if he can have it. His Grandfather agrees, but only if he can break the horse in... neither Daniel or Grandfather realizing that Martin has already bonded with the horse and has been slowly breaking the horse in for weeks already. 

It's a juvenile love triangle, but instead of a girl, it's a horse. Daniel becomes obsessed with the horse... some choice Daniel quotes:

D. "I've never seen a horse like that.... He's the one I want... Yeah, I want him for myself. He's beautiful!"
D. "Be quiet, Martin, he belongs to me!"
D. "you and me will do a lot together you'll see. You and me will go everywhere together...you're mine now."
D. "you had no right to let anyone else mount you! You're mine!"

Don't read these as gentle cooing, no read them as a steely-eyed psychopath, because that's how they come across (at least in the dub).

When Daniel catches Martin riding "his" horse, their friendship becomes a bitter rivalry. That is, until the horse bucks Daniel off and nearly kills him (for a second there, I thought it did, which I wouldn't put past one of these "Tales for all" to do), and then it's all bros before ho(rs)es. Well, not really, but the boys do talk it out.

The second half of the film spurts to life in full blown telenovela style. Just meaty melodrama with intense looks and leers, and heightened emotions which could lead anywhere. At one point Daniel pulls back his bed covers to find his grandfather has left him a silver-sheathed knife... a real Chekhovian play where we have to legitimately worry if this obsessed, nearly-psychopathic kid is going to stab another kid over a horse.

Laura's journey into young adulthood starts off as a real non-entity in the film, as Laura spends much of her time either alone or with her Great Aunt. But her delight in becoming a woman starts to sour because her relationship with her Grandfather calls into question how these changes in her body affect how others see her, it's a real mind fuck, and she doesn't understand it. She tries to get clarity and only gets pushed away. So the only way for her to process is through drastic measures and even those don't work. As coming of age stories go, it's pretty powerful at times. 

Likewise Grandfather is not just this nasty figure, he's actually pretty kind, but also myopic and out of touch with his own emotional core. His relationship with his grandchildren is based on a foundation of control, and suddenly with Laura and Daniel he's finding his control challenged. They are children, not horses, as Laura reminds him, they should not have to be broken in.

The film's second half shows the character developing emotional intelligence, realizing that the feelings they have inside don't need to stay there. Talking about things is the only way to make a situation better, even if it's uncomfortable.

Visually, Summer of the Colt is perfunctory, it does the job it needs to do. It captures the horses nicely and gets those emotive looks from the performers right center of the frame in full melodramatic fashion. There's little fancy here, but it all works. 

Next to Bach and Broccoli it's the most cohesive and resonant of the "Tales for all" but without a real genre hook, it's not quite as fun.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Running Man

2025, Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs the World) -- download

If ever you were going to do a cliche remake of a 1987 movie based on a Richard Bachman (Stephen King) novel written in the 70s, then doing it in the year the novel was actually set (2025) is very on point. Also, adhering almost canonically to the actual story is pretty bad-ass, especially when compared to the rife-with-production-issues comedy action movie starring Arnie.

In a Near Dark Future, the divide against Have's and Have-Not's has become gargantuan. You are either poor and suffering or rich and thriving. In between everyone is The Network, a mega-corp that controls the government and feeds the hungry masses with violent and/or humiliating games shows, and reality TV. Ben Richards (Glen Powell, Chad Powers), a skilled labourer in Co-op City, has a history of standing up against management for the betterment of his fellow worker, and losing his temper. It has left him black listed and unable to find work. His daughter is sick, they cannot afford medicine, so he goes down for Network game show try-outs, and while assuring his wife he won't participate in The Running Man, he ends up being perfectly suited for it.

The Running Man is a rigged game show where three participants must stay on the run for 30 days while five Hunters, and their masked leader, chase after them. The general populace can make money by turning a Runner in. For each day a runner survives, they make money, and if they survive the month, they make One Billion Dollars. No one has ever won the game, of course. Beyond that, there are very few rules, one being that they have to send in a video of themselves in every day.

This is an Edgar Wright movie, so in the tone set all the way back in Shaun of the Dead, its darkly funny and uses a lot of stylized motifs that fit perfectly into the game show environment. It has budget and a decent cast, and as said, follows the book pretty closely. And it is keenly aware it is a retro-style remake of a laughable blockbuster movie from another era. 

The problem is that I couldn't tell if Wright was trying to go for ironic-remake or sincere adaptation of a popular King book with a metric ton of political overtones that very much reflect our own issues now, even if you ignore the date. But the movie is not over-the-top enough or biting enough to be a fun, corny romp. Neither is it dark & grim enough to reflect the Dark Urban Future it wants to rail against. So, all I am left with is that Wright was intentionally doing a 90s style remake, generally meant to go Straight To Video, a kind of movie that has little meaning these days considering almost everything is rushed to Streaming.

Objectively, its not a terrible movie but its also not enough of anything to make it memorable.

3-2-1: Alien: Earth

2025, 8 episodes - Disney+/FX
created by Noah Hawley

The What 100: A deep-space research vessel owned by Weyland-Yutani crash lands in the Prodigy Corporation-controlled territory of New Siam. Prodigy founder Boy Kavalier sends his precious hybrids (completely synthetic bodies housing the minds of sick children who volunteered to have their consciousnesses transferred) to recover whatever is most precious that it may house. And those, of course, are a variety of alien specimens. But one surviving crew member, a Weyland-Yutani loyalist, is not going to just let Prodigy keep what they find. What's the most dangerous thing on Earth: invasive species, a new breed of being, desperate men, or greedy corporations?

3 Great: (1) World building. For the longest time I've never wanted to see "Aliens, but on Earth" because it seemed like the easiest and most obvious answer would be a plague that runs rampant, out of control too fast and too deadly for anyone to stop it. I had no interest in that story, whether in the end it was stopped or not stopped, either way it just seemed ... banal. Creator Noah Hawley's idea, which is to expand the reality of what is actually happening on Earth (it's run by essentially 5 corporations, rather than any sort of governmental structure now), and then carving out its own little pocket of this reality to operate in is the masterstroke of inspiration. In setting up the previously unheard of Prodigy Corporation, as well as establishing not just the Hybrids (as described above) but also Cyborgs (cybernetically enhanced humans) on top of the Weyland-Yutani-created Synths (who we've seen plenty of in the Alien franchise...Ash, Bishop, Michael), it's just opens up the world. For me the most stimulating parts of this reality are the glimpses into the corporate structures and rivalries (but they're not front and center to the show).

(2) The Hybrids, Boy K, and the Peter Pan connection. Centering a show or movie around kids can be a dicey affair, primarily because kid actors tend to always be a mixed bag. Even if they're really good, they're also going to age and that can make for complex storytelling. But Hybrids put the mind of children in adult bodies, and the show has a host of exceptionally capable actors playing the Hybrids who very effectively convey their youthfulness and naivety, both when interacting with adults and with each other. Where the show could have wallowed in boring "exploring their new bodies" stories like many a superhero show of the 2000s, instead it decides to wrestle with the ideas of whether these beings are even human anymore, and also delving into the trauma of severing your identity with your body.  Boy K (Samuel Blenkin, Black Mirror), an early 20-something genius in technology and business, sees himself as the "Peter Pan" of his new crew of post-human beings, and so he names all of them after the Lost Boys, except for Wendy (Sydney Chandler, Sugar), the first of his creations, who is his favourite. Having just watched a whole bunch of Pan movies recently, I loved how it toyed with its metaphorical connections, and, in the season 1 endgame, how it all was revealed to be bullshit, not connecting to the material at all. Boy K doesn't see himself as a parent to the Hybrids, but their cool rebel leader who they should inherently love. Instead the role of parents go to Arthur (David Rysdahl, Fargo Season 5) and Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) who are the technological and psychiatric experts on the whole Hybrid endeavour (as much as anyone can be an expert on a purely experimental process). Their different approaches to parenting create a pivotal inflection point in the series, and it's so interesting to see how people in this reality deal with their multi-trillionaire overlords who think themselves beyond human. 

(3) The new Aliens. Introduced on the vessel Maginot at the start of episode 1, the research ship has been fruitful in finding new species out in its 60 years travelling the galaxy, and it's ready to bring them home. But they're unprepared for the intelligence of the creatures they have brought with them, and things start to really go sideways. Once on Earth and in the hands of the Prodigy Corporation, things really aren't much better. The hubris of humanity is to think that all creatures are unintelligent, incapable of observing or learning, and that whatever systems we put in place to contain them are beyond their capacity to figure a way out of. Of course we're wrong, and the show is at its most upsetting when it's proving how wrong we are...including thinking that the Hybrids have found a way to escape death Among the creatures is a very large kind of fly-trap like animal (as opposed to vegetable), and there are creatures called "flies" that themselves eat non-organic material. Of course, there's also the Xenomorphs in all their various stages (and because this is a TV show, it has time to explore those various stages in much more depth than ever before...including what a facehugger is implanting within its hosts. But the greatest addition, the greatest creation of the series, even more than Prodigy or the Hybrids or the Cyborgs or any individual character among a host of great characters, is a Trypanohyncha Ocellus, a multi-tenticled eyeball creature whose iris can segment into many irises around its ocular body. It is looking for an ideal host, and when it finds one it brutally and aggressively burrows into its eye socket and replaces the being's eye with itself, and presumably its tentacles are penetrating the brain of the creature in a manner that allows it to control the being. Nicknamed Iris by some in the fan community, it is a very clever, intelligent creature, that much is shown, but we don't know how smart it actually is, or if it's able to communicate with language. It's unknown when it takes a hose whether it's in full control or if there's some form of symbiosis. There so much to explore with Iris, I love it tremendously and it creeps me the fuck out.

2 Bad: (1) The Xenomorphs. Everything around the xenomorphs, from the egg pods to the facehuggers to the infancy stages that are puppets or whatnot are all great and I loved every aspect of them in the show and on screen. The full grown Xenomorphs is where I felt the show didn't work. I appreciate the fact that the Xenomorphs were pretty much always practical, man-in-suit, but I really, really, really disliked the physicality of the creatures on screen. I know the stunt performers spent a lot of time studying the history of Xenomorphs on screen and they tried to adhere as faithfully as they could to history, but something in the way these particular ones were constructed, they didn't ever look right, and the movements were too exposed. The Xenomorphs are seen broad daylight, rarely in the shadows, and it exposes them too much. You need the shadows against the darkness of the body and the details to all be somewhat hidden, to really be more difficult to see, otherwise it...well, looks like a guy in a suit.  It's weird for me to feel that this show that is built on the Alien franchise, a franchise that centers around that classic Geiger design, only truly fails at the one thing that has been done so right so often, and yet succeed at pretty much every single other thing....

(2) ...except the finale. The show was PERFECTLY set up for a Grand Guignal of a finale, to really have the aliens (all of them) run ham on the entire Prodigy compound and just be a bevvy of carnage and chaos for our protagonists (some of them) to survive. Part of what I loved about the world building I described above was how the series so obviously constructed a corner for itself to play in such that when it all came crashing down it wouldn't affect anything else in the franchise. The expectation was there would be an implosion at the hands of the creatures, and there was not. I do not fully dislike the finale, but it fundamentally fails to deliver what any Alien film or story needs to close out with, just an orgy of alien violence.  Instead it pitches focus back to its central characters, and largely has the Hybrids level up. They're the ones that run ham on the Prodigy compound. Wendy/Marcy has learned to communicate and effectively command an adult Xenomorph (one which was borne out of her brother's lung, almost as if it's weirdly family) which neuters a bit of the chaotic element, but adds its own interesting wrinkles.  Where the show ends up, with the Hybrids in control, but Weyland-Yutani descending on the compound and all the adult players who have irked the Hybrids under their thumb could still have been the end result with a big scratch-fest (though sacrifices should have been made).  It's absolutely clear (and confirmed by Hawley on the excellent companion podcast) that the decision was made to not close these out in any real fashion because they're making a  TV series, and didn't want there to be any type of closure that might give Disney/FX the opportunity to say "nah, that's alright, we don't really need more".  It's tactical rather than satisfying.

1 Good: So much good (Timothy Olyphant as a Synth!? Come on! Incredible) but episode 5, which flashes back to the full story of what happened in those final hours on the Maginot is an incredible mini-movie in the midst of the series that also acts as a massive recontextualzation of cyborg Morrow (the magnificent Babou Ceesay, Free Fire) who in the previous episodes was nothing but reprehensible and vile, and he comes out of this flashback being, almost an anti-hero.  But the episode replicates in a way the Nostramo from Ridley Scott's classic original (the idea being that many of these big barges would have been made at the same time, on a sort of assembly line basis, so they're very similar if not exactly the same), allows us to spend more time on one of these ships with a different crew, and for things to go tits up in a very different way for very different reasons. It's an absolute blast.

META: As I mentioned above, I went into Alien: Earth with expectations that it would play to the easiest possible story, and not only was I pleasantly surprised by what it actually about, I really began to love every character and their role to play in the story by episode two (the only character I don't love is Nibs, because she's too much of a wild card...venturing into psychopath territory... I think there will be interesting things around her lack of stability in the next season, but boy is her style of cuckoo-bananas hard to empathize with).

The series had me eating out of its hand pretty much from moment one. It looks incredible (man-in-suit Xenomorph excepting) and it's stories and characters are so laden with complexities, there's a tremendous amount to explore.  This isn't a mystery box show in the slightest. It's not asking questions and depriving the audience of answers, it's just got so much depth to its characters, sci-fi scenarios and psychological ideas that it's got multiple seasons worth of mining to do. But at the same time, it's part of the Alien franchise so it *must* retain the surprise and horror of its most alien aspects. Hawley and company rightly understand that the Xenomorph has been used to death and really isn't surprising anymore (it's still pretty scary), so the introduction of new species with so much to learn about them still, leaves the show with many more scares and gross-outs in its pocket.

It's going to be years before we get a season 2. Again, I wish the finale had performed better as a denouement, just to be more satisfying while we wait, but I'm definitely going to rewatch, probably multiple times, in the meantime. 

KWIF: six films for sick days

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Laid up on the couch with a fever and a stuffed-up head for a few days meant I had plenty of time to start picking away at the list of saved movies on my cable box and some other things of interest, including saying goodbye to a legend.

This Week:
After the Thin Man (1936, d. W.S.Van Dyke - dvd)
Southland Tales (2006, d. Richard Kelly - hollywoodsuite)
American Graffiti (1975, d. George Lucas - hollywoodsuite)
Get On Up (2014, d. Tate Taylor - hollywoodsuite) 
Rainbow (1996, d. Bob Hoskins - tubi)
Three Days of the Condor (1973, d. Sydney Pollack - rental)

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I have a collector's brain. It wants complete sets, whether it's a full line of action figures, the entire run of a comic, the complete discography of an artist, or seeing every film in a series, my brain demands satisfaction, and if I don't satisfy it, a little worm wiggles around in the back of my brain until I do. I've got a lot of worms in my brain. I've learned to tune out the noise they make as they multiply.

After watching The Thin Man last week, a new worm found its way in, and started wriggling frantically. Knowing there was more of Nick and Nora out there to consume perhaps created the fever that bred in me this week. Perhaps I thought acquiring the DVDs of all five sequels and watching the first of them would be enough to relieve the fever, but apparently not.

Picking up where The Thin Man left off, Nick (William Powell) and Nora (Myrna Loy) return to San Francisco, where Nora is immediately beseeched by her cousin, Selma to come over to a dinner party, and to bring Nick, she is in need of help. Nick is reluctant, because Selma lives with Nora's battle axe of an aunt who really dislikes him and is not shy about sharing.  It turns out Selma's dirtbag husband Robert has run off, again, and there's no telling where. Selma in the meantime takes solace in the companionship of her ex-boyfriend David (Jimmy Stewart). 

It takes Nick virtually no time at all to stumbled across Robert at a Chinese nightclub, where he and Nora are very quickly thrust into the mix of intertwining lives and conflicts. The club's chanteuse is having an affair with David while she's also in an entanglement with the club owner. The owner has just beat up and kicked out her brother who was trying to extort money out of her. They learned that David offered Robert twenty thousand dollars to leave Selma and San Francisco and never come back. Robert, much to David's chagrin, pays one last visit to Selma, mainly to steal her jewels. As Robert takes off into the night many players are in witness although Selma is the only one seen with a gun in her hand when Robert is shot and killed.

In acquiring the full set of Thin Man movies I had my worries about the series not maintaining its roots as a screwball comedy merged with noir thriller. The opening moments of After the Thin Man did little to assuage that concern as the formerly rat-a-tat dialogue became more stilted, less easy, less flowing. There's still a lot of comedic punch to what is there but it doesn't sing musically like the first film.  

At a certain early point, with Nick and Nora's return to their home, I thought we may be instead heading into, like, sitcom territory. There's an absolutely bonkers moment where their dog, Asta, spies his kennel where lives Mrs. Asta and their little Wire Fox Terrier puppies...except out of the house toddles a little black Scottie puppy and Asta is perplexed, until an adult black Scottie crawls through a hole under the fence only for an outraged Asta to charge at him. For some reason this little domestic quarrel rears its head again one more time in the film.

But the mystery comes into play (outlined by Nick and Nora's creator Dashiell Hammett) and I was delighted by how intricately woven it was. Though Nick reluctantly takes up the case, he's also partnered up with the easily frustrated Lt. Abrams (Sam Levene). Abrams in Levene's hands is a great character who isn't a hapless detective, nor is he the usual police bully of noir films, but somewhere in between. He's trying to conduct a legit investigation but he's also easily flustered, where Nick is always too soused to let anything truly rile him.

Nora is more intricately involved in the plot of this one, and I absolutely delight in watching Myrna Loy get wide-eyed and enthralled by something. She is captivating. Nick does sideline her (again) at one point and it's so unfortunate how the chauvinism of the era dulls the edge of an otherwise sharp pairing. Splitting Nick and Nora up in these films is a mistake when everything is much more vibrant and lively with Nora on screen.

The film ends with Nora pregnant and the cover of the DVD for Another Thin Man shows Nick and Nora with a baby... which bodes ill if the history of sitcoms has any bearing here.

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Richard Kelly's debut feature, Donnie Darko, was not an enormous success when it premiered in theatres, but by the time it made its way to home video, it had already reached cult classic status. It became a dvd and cable classic in short order, and cemented Kelly as an talent to watch.

A half decade later, Kelly returned with Southland Tales, a multimedia sci-fi dystopian epic dealing with the post-9-11 trauma, and a prescient, bitter awareness of Republican tactics for swaying a nation to give up their liberties in favour of security and fascism. If you oppose the Republicans in any way, you're a terrorist.

It is an ambitious movie, the kind of blank check swing directors don't really get anymore after having a solid indie hit. Now they just get subsumed into the "franchise" circuit, whether it's Marvel, Sony, Jurassic Park...whatever. But maybe it's because of Southland Tales and its miserable (less than one million dollars) box office take that these young directors need to prove themselves with more than just one film.

In perhaps its only nod to Star Wars, Kelly opens his film as "Chapter 4", implying that more came before, and more is to come (there were three graphic novel prequel chapters, and this film is comprised of three chapters). 

Through intense channel surfing of info-dense TV screens as well as info-dumping voice over from Justin Timberlake's character, we learn that the world has escalated into a seemingly never-ending war over oil in the middle east. As a result of their instigation of these wars, the U.S. has been cut off from outside oil and their reserves are depleting. But a billionaire industrialist (Wallace Shawn) has developed a new technology based on ocean currents that will generate limitless energy transmitted as a signal across the globe.  

Unfortunately this new technology has unforseen consequences which is what drives the film, at least in the background until deep into its third(/sixth) chapter.

It tries to center itself around the story of famous actor, Boxer Santaros, (Dwayne Johnson) and husband to a Texas Republican Senator's daughter (Mandy Moore). Boxer, however, went missing and his disappearance has caused a huge stir. He turns up in L.A. in the grips of the Neo-Marxists, a terrorist organization opposed to the US-IDENT technology that will control people's access to the internet and, well, everything. Boxer has amnesia and has found a new romance with porn star/aspiring mogul Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar).

The Neo-Marxists also have in their possession Officer Roland Taverner and his twin brother. They have conscripted the brother into impersonating Roland, bringing Boxer for a ride-along where "Roland" will act very racist and then unprovoked shoot and kill a mixed-race couple having a domestic dispute (all staged for Boxer's camera). The idea, I think, is to use the footage to incite people against the police and to damage Boxer's reputation and by proxy his Republican family.

I dunno. At a certain point the machinations of the various characters and factions and split personalities and dual identities all get too convoluted to track. This is a busy, busy movie, and I suspect, even at 144 minutes was heavily edited down from the full length Kelly wanted to make. The third act/sixth chapter seems like it takes a jump from where the fifth chapter left off, and barrels into heavy exposition mode trying to tie all the nonsense together.

Southland Tales is a wildly bizarre movie, one that has aspirations of being a weighty and important metaphor, while also considering itself a form of satire or comedy. Stacking the cast with Saturday Night Live alumnae, and having the film's big bad be Wallace Shawn certainly tips its hat that it's trying for something...I don't think Moby, who made the score, got the message though, and his drowning electronic soundtrack makes everything feel ominous at all times...except when it pauses for a musical number. 

It seems like Kelly's going for Vonnegut vibes, Breakfast of Champions or Slaughterhouse Five but with the dreamlike surrealism of Lynch (Kelly does get Rebekah Del Rio to perform a soulful, part-Spanish rendition of the US National Anthem, much in the vein of her rendition of "Cryin'" seen in Mulholland Drive). The only problem is Kelly has neither the wit or sharpness or storytelling acumen of either Vonnegut or Lynch, so it comes off as an amateur imitation of both.

I can talk shit about this movie and how much it doesn't work, and how much it feels like a poseur, but in the end I was fascinated by it. I haven't seen Megalopolis yet, but I feel like they're sibling disasters of directorial hubris, films of men with something to say but no clarity on how to say it.

I'm probably going to watch this again at some point. There is so much going on that it would definitely reward rewatching (and tracking down those graphic novels), even if it never finds the competency it needs.  Kelly would make one more feature, The Box a few years later, and has not been able to get another production off the ground in more than a decade. The spectre of this ambitious failure I think still haunts him.

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George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, founder of Lucasfilm, Lucasarts, Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound, has meant a lot to the world of film, and to me personally for the past 50 years.  He's a visionary, and an admirable businessman (especially in an age where that's very much not the case) if not necessarily the most revered of directors. 

Lucas' problem as a director, as made most evident by the "Prequel Trilogy" of Star Wars films, is that he's more interested in technology and visuals than performance, very much to a fault. At a certain point he decided that everything could be fixed in the edit, somehow forgetting that performance is in the moment and cannot be adjusted (much) after the fact.

Of his films I'd obviously watched all of Star Wars, and I've dipped into THX-1138 a few times, a real classic "vibes movie". I've avoided, for some time, American Graffiti due mainly to lack of interest in the car culture or teen culture of the 50's and 60's. And surely what could possibly be enticing about a George Lucas film without special effects and sci-fi themes?

As much as I get no Star Wars out of American Graffiti, I do get dozens upon dozens of other things. The teen sex comedy/dramedy seems borne out of this, and the archetypes of the older rebel who can't let go of the glory of his high school days or the nerdy wimpy kid who goes on a big adventure all seem to spill out of here. The opening credits over the imagery of Mel's Diner and "Rock Around the Clock" playing spill into so much TV content of the 1970's...Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Alice... it's surprising Lucas isn't a producer on all those shows for all they owe to this film.  

But at the same time it's clear that, much like he did with Star Wars, Lucas is leaning on reference, the most obvious being James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and The Last Picture Show. 

It's a "one crazy night" kind of movie, though more dramatic than funny. It follows two high school graduates, Curt (Richard Dreyfus) and Steve (Ron Howard) on their last night in town before flying off to college on the east coast, 3000 miles away. Curt is having cold feet on the whole endeavour while Steve's looking forward to a whole new, liberated college life. Steve gives his nerdy pal Toad (Charles Martin Smith) his car to look after in his absence, and they look to their studly drag racing pal Milner (Paul Le Mat) more as a warning sign than an aspiration, as he's still cruising for high school chicks despite being in his 20s.

The film splits everyone up into their own adventures. Steve's is the most tedious, as he asks his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams) to open up their relationship while he's gone, and so their whole evening is fraught with their conflict as well as their obvious connection (or co-dependency?). 

Curt's journey is more meandering, as he winds up in multiple places, including facing off against the local street gang, but ending up in their good graces. It's the story that I had the most difficulty with because the script never tells you who Curt is or what he wants, but it's kind of the point because Curt doesn't know who he is or what he wants. His journey has him exploring a lot of different angles, some great, some not so much.

Toad/Terry's story is the cliche or the hapless nerd with the black cloud hanging over his head, hoping just once to bask in the ray of sunshine. Being gifted Steve's car, Toad immediately takes to cruising, and actually manages to get a girl off the street into his car, mostly by being sweet, even if his horny teenage mind is thinking anything but. Adventure finds him and Debbie (Candy Clarke) as they seek out booze, make out, get the car stolen, try to steal the car back all while Terry tries to pretend to be someone he's clearly not, and Debbie seeing through it all to who he really is and kinda being into it. It's cliche, but it kinda works when Terry gets that ray of sunshine at the end.

The best subplot of the film find John Milner, the fastest cat in town, saddled with a 14-year-old riding shotgun. The dynamic between Milner and Carol (Mackenzie Phillips) is antagonistic, and all Milner wants to do is dump this girl on the side of the street and go cruising, whether for girls or for a race (especially when he hears there a new challenger in town, played by Harrison Ford). But, surprisingly, for all his greaser hair and tough guy exterior, Milner has a big compassionate heart and he takes a shining to this spritely kid. Mercifully it never turns into anything untoward between either of them, it's just fun and playful in a big brother/little sister kind of way and you can imagine these two just being best of platonic friends if not for the era (or the film's bummer of a coda.)

As a dad who has (and has had) teenage kids, I see the Gulf of difference in the activities of kids these days versus my years as a teen, and I can see the huge difference between my teenage and those in the 50's. And those differences feel not just unfamiliar, but almost alien. The gender roles and expectations are the biggest hurdle to surmount, but also just the car and cruising culture, the dance and music, the hangout culture, it's all so foreign.  So in a way, this film is a bit of an archive, a slice. It's not universal, and yeah, it's full of cliche, but it certainly captures something that really doesn't exist anymore... and that's Lucas' capacity to get good performances out of actors (zing!).

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This past week on the Nebula service, film essayist Patrick Willems dropped his latest video about a new age of musical biopic, mostly based around his love of the 2024 Robbie Williams biopic Better Man but also a few other recent examples. He contrasts these against the routine biopics of the 2000s and 2010s, and cites Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story lampooning the formulae as being responsible for killing it. But Walk Hard's failure at the box office resulted in the Christ-like resurrection of the music biopic formulae, the result of which was multiple Oscars for the abominable Bohemian Rhapsody. (If you want to watch Patrick's essay now, ad free, you can sign up for Nebula or wait a few weeks and watch it on Patrick's youtube channel).

It was with this in mind that I pressed play on the James Brown biopic Get On Up. It is everything you expect a music biopic to be, and delivers on all the cliches you would expect. But even clocking in at whopping 139 minutes, it's still hardly long enough to do justice to James Brown's entire life, a life full of highlights and lowlights at every age.

It is your typical vignette-heavy biopic that director Tate Taylor (The Help) and editor Michael McCusker try to spice up by telling in a non-linear fashion. It helps distract from the formulaicness, but only a little, and only for so long. And in its jumping around between time periods, the editing only serves to highlight just how unfocussed the story is they have to tell.

The saving grace for the picture is clearly Chadwick Boseman (RIP King). Boseman was a goddamn supernova, he burned so brightly and then he was gone. But man, when he burned could you feel the heat. He developed a James Brown affectation that he settles into comfortably in the film, he adopts the physicality, the ego, the strengths and weaknesses of the man, all while still shimmering loudly as Chadwick Boseman. I don't know if I ever got over the fact that he's a good half-foot taller than James Brown in heels, and so the amount of people who have to look up to Boseman as J.B. always feels wrong somehow, but it never diminishes the impact of his performance.

The third act finds a purpose beyond just history lesson or highlight reel, it settles into the idea of James Brown as a man alone, a man who puts up walls and barriers between himself and others, and man who put himself so high up on a pedestal he couldn't find his way down to retain friendships or partnerships or relationships.  The through line should have been there throughout the whole movie, centered around his partnership with Bobby Byrd who was his right-hand-man on stage and best friend off stage for decades, until, one day, he wasn't.  The final sequence of the film finds J.B. singing acoustically directly to Bobby in the audience, telling him that he loves him and needs him and misses him through song, because he's only able to express emotions from the pedestal. It's pretty powerful, but it would have been even more powerful if the film had solely focused on that partnership, or told James Brown's story though the eyes of Bobby Byrd from the outside. But this is a production that couldn't truly thing outside of the genre's storytelling conventions.

At times it tries something different, like the half dozen (or less) time Boseman-as-J.B. addresses the audience directly, right down the barrel of the camera. There was something there as well, an alternate path, a glimmer of inspiration of what could have been had we had Boseman breaking the fourth wall throughout the picture, on the regular, giving us insight into the man's mind (which, it seems pretty clear, the scriptwriter and director barely have a handle on, and only Boseman in performing him even gets in proximity of what was really driving James Brown).

It's not a bad movie, but not a great one either, but there's a wonderful one just lurking in the shadows.

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For some reason renowned character actor (and sometimes leading man) Bob Hoskins found himself behind the camera in Montreal in 1995 shooting a children's film that has the distinction of being the first ever production to be fully shot digitally.

If you have any experience with Canadian television of the 1980's and 90's, then you will recognize the aesthetic of this production... unpolished, to put it kindly. For some reason Canadian television always looked very distinct from American TV, far less glossy and polished, the lighting, sets, wardrobe, hair and makeup, and even actors were all less pretty, glamorous, sophisticated. Canadian television did not have the same budgets, and so the same technical gear was not employed, and the craftspersons were used to focusing on fast and cheap over quality. So it's no surprise that an inexperienced director like Hoskins coming to shoot in Canada would rely on his Canadian crew to see him through the execution of this project, especially when it's pretty clear he had no real vision for it himself.

The story is set in New Jersey, where Mikey, along with his two school chums and his older brother Steve (Jacob Tierney, Letterkenny), finds the end of a rainbow, and is transported to the cornfields of rural Kansas. They discover the local farmhouse and are taken to the local Sherriff (Dan Ackroyd in full ham) who wants to put them on a plane home. For some reason the kids don't want to go home and so there's weird airport hijinks as they try to elude their police escort.  The one kid's mom works for the news and they catch wind of the kid's story and there's a crazy media blitz upon their return home, except everyone thinks they stowed away on a plane. Only their science teacher (Saul Rubinek) doubts the official story when he sees the photos the kids took inside the rainbow.

Unbeknownst to anyone but Steve, Steve took golden orbs from the rainbow, so that he could sell them for cash to buy a motorcycle to impress the tough girl he has a crush on. What he doesn't know is that stealing from the rainbow has broken the colour pallette on Earth and ushered in a doomsday scenario. People are going mad as the world desaturated of colour, and violence raises to calamitous proportions. Everyone's mean to each other. Steve tells his mom after being grounded "No wonder Dad left you" and she slaps him. Real greasy stuff.

It's up to the plucky band of kids and adults to figure out the solution to saving the world, and Mikey to take the ultimate trip on the rainbow in order to restore things to normal.

It's a really poorly executed movie overall, lacking any real sense of adventure. Its a film with only a few simplistic ideas to fuel it and it's completely hamstrung by talent and budget despite some actual talent involved. Its swearing and dark-turn third act keep it out of TVOntario rotation where it should otherwise have a home, but if The Asylum had a kid's sub-label, it would fit right in there.

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Robert Redford has never been my guy, because, well, I grew up being a sci-fi/superhero kid and my trigger for being a semi-cinephile were the works of new talents in the 1990s. Redford didn't fit much into this band of viewing. And yet, even having only ever seen five of his acting roles and one of his directorial efforts, I've always liked the man, even though I couldn't tell you exactly why. Since he passed away this past week, there have been plenty of tributes out there that explain why...he cared a lot about film, about the environment, about people and politics, which showed in his work, as did his seemingly effortless charm. While he remained an attractive man even in his golden years, he was devastatingly handsome in his prime.

If ever I was going to start somewhere with Redford's filmography, the first stop of course would be Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but the second stop would be Three Days of the Condor...because next to superheroes and sci-fi, I like the spy stuff.

In Three Days... (based off the novel Six Days of the Condor by James Grady) Redford plays Joe Turner, a reader for the CIA, a devout bookworm whose job it is to look for secret codes and messages in print. When we meet him he's riding an underpowered scooter through New York, holding up traffic (using the coding from American Graffiti, Toad rides a scooter, therefore scooters are for nerds). He's late to work, but when he arrives he walks in like he owns the place and knows everything about everything. He's very handsome and he's very smart and he flaunts both, but instinctively, not intentionally. 

When Joe heads out to collect lunch for the team, a group of trained killers raid the office, murdering everyone. It's clear they have a specific objective, which is to clean house, as they ask no questions. Joe returns and discovers the scene, his coworkers (including his lover) are all dead. Moving past his grief, his logic kicks in and he knows he needs to be careful. He leaves, finds a pay phone and calls it in. He's given a rendez-vous and the CIA find a friend he can trust to meet him, but his distrust of the whole situation leads to caution, and he very quickly learns it's all a set-up. He has no familiar place to go where they can't find him, so his only choice is to find a safe haven with a stranger.

At random, one of the most handsome men in New York winds up picking one of the most beautiful women in New York, photographer Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway) to hold up at gunpoint and hitch a ride out to her Brooklyn Heights basement apartment (we don't see basement apartments in film very often). Joe is desperate and not incredibly sympathetic towards the situation he's put Kathy in. In his mind he's being utterly logical and his actions are justified. He tells Kathy the situation, but in a manner more to work through it for himself rather than to get her on his side. He doesn't really think much of her at all.

Kathy, for her part, was just out buying stuff for a ski-retreat with her boyfriend. When she doesn't show up, the boyfriend calls and the conversation is tense, not just because Joe is holding her at gunpoint to keep it casual, but because Kathy has a pattern of behaviour with him, signifying she's just not that into the relationship.  We never, truly understand Kathy's motivation for suddenly being on Joe's side. He's upended her life, held her up at gunpoint, tied her up, stolen her truck...but at a certain point she's just in it. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps. Or she's just so frustrated with her life that she's kind of happy someone's come along to usurp it. Or maybe it's just the Joe is played by 39-year-old Robert Redford and is just delicious. Or there's the moment where Joe is looking at her photographs, and in the way he looks at them he sees her like no one has before.  There's a bevvy of explanations, none of which are obvious on screen, but I guess she sees a desperate, intelligent, sensitive, hurting man who she wants to help, so they have one of the worst sex scenes committed to screen and then she helps him get a leg up on the men who are after him.

Beyond the perplexing romantic entanglement, Three Days of the Condor is a taut and propulsive thriller that, once set into gear, doesn't really stop til its final freeze frame. The most intriguing espionage thrillers are the ones where the story's protagonist (and therefore the audience) doesn't ever fully understand the game they are playing, and this is one of the best examples of that. Even when Joe thinks he's got it all figured out, it's clear there's still more going on than he knows. It's the source of the film's excellent tension, and the film's ambiguous ending provides little actual relief for our title character, leaving it to the audience to wonder what kind of life Joe will lead from this point forward, and for how long.

Not a perfect movie, but a classic nonetheless. Redford carries the picture on his shoulders with ease, and conveys Joe's hyperintelligence so nimbly it makes you think that Redford is just as smart. This does make me want to watch more Redford, so what should be top of the list?

[Updated] Black Mirror - Kent ranked

28 episodes, 6 seasons and Christmas special and an interactive movie (so far)

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Ranked from 1-10 each for:

T - thoughtfulness (how much it makes you think afterward)

WB - world building (how well the world building works and holds up to scrutiny)

H - horror (how scary is it)

E - enjoyable (it may be smart or scary or conceptually interesting, but is it a fun/good view?)

And finally Ranking 1-20
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s1-e1 National Anthem - the Royal Princess is kidnapped, and the Prime Minister is blackmailed into doing something really gross on live television to get her back. This one's uncomfortable as fuck.  Not the episode to start with (I didn't come back to Black Mirror for 6 months afterward)

T - 9 | WB - 2 | H - 10 | E - 2 or 8 depending on your disposition -- Ranking #31/34

s1-e2 15 Million Merits - in the future the average person's job is literally keeping the lights on.  As they work they watch entertainments and ads, and they gain credits.  When they're not working they live in tiny cubicles where every surface is a screen...gaming, entertainment, porn, and advertising, always..their lives are consumed by it.  The only escape for some: an American Idol-style talent competition.

T - 9 | WB - 7 | H - 2 | E - 7 -- Ranking #9/34

s1-e3 The Entire History Of You - an implant records every moment of your life for you to obsess over and play back.  There's no need to misremember things when literally everything is documented.  How does this access to one's past affect relationships...not well.

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 3 | E - 8 --  Ranking #11/34

s2-e1 Be Right Back - a woman loses her husband after moving to the countryside.  She can't stop grieving.  She catches wind of a service that will place her husband's memories (extrapolated from all social media and other digital records) in a bio-engineered version of him.  It gets a little awkward (stars Agent Carter herself Hayley Atwell)

T - 6 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 9  --  Ranking #3/34

s2-e2 White Bear - a woman wakes up, having been seemingly drugged and kidnapped.  Everyone she encounters refuses to talk to her, only monitoring her with their cel phones.  Then some masked crazies start hunting her.  WTF is going on!?! The world building kind of falls apart at the very, very end but still scary as hell

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E- 9  -- Ranking #8/34

s2-e3 The Waldo Moment - what if a foul-mouthed cartoon character ran for office? It basically predicted Trump.  Easily the weakest episode yet still worth watching.

T - 8 | WB - 7 |  H - 7 | E - 4 -- Ranking #34/34

Christmas Special - White Christmas - John Hamm tells a story to a coworker at a remote outpost, and the stranger tells one back.  There's a mystery here.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 6  -- Ranking #24/34

s3-e1 Nosedive - Bryce Dallas Howard is obsessed with her social media score, an app that allows people to rank each other that the whole world is obsessed with and makes every decision around, but it's not high enough to get into the living community she wants.  Her efforts to be a better person totally backfire.  So casually horrifying.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 8  -- Ranking #14/34

s3-e2 Playtest -  a man subject himself to playtesting an experimental, immersive virtual reality gaming experience, but what's the game and what's real start getting very confusing.

T - 4 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #33/34

s3-e3 Shut Up and Dance - a young man has his life upended when a hacker threatens to release compromising video of him to his entire contact list.  The only way out is to perform 24 hours of errands without fail.  The panic level is high on this one, and the ending is a total gutpunch.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 9 | E - 8  -- Ranking #10/34

s3-e4 San Junipero - people can retire into the virtual reality of their choosing, while the young can only visit.  Two women fall in love but their ability to find one another and stay connected is a challenge.  It's an absolutely beautiful, and hopeful, story.  Won two Emmys.

T - 8 | WB - 10 | H -0 | E - 10  --  Ranking #2/34

s3-e5 Men Against Fire - an alien enemy has taken over, they're seemingly everywhere.  Military tech help identify them, but what happens when one soldier's tech goes on the fritz?  Better taken as an analogy than literal.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #21/34

s3-e6 Hated in the Nation - it's a murder mystery, a police detective show mixed with a bit of X-Files or Fringe.  It's practically movie length, and enjoyable but feels so outside of the usual Black Mirror episode...more like a Law and Order episode, or a pilot for a new detective series.

T - 4  | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 7 -- Ranking #30/34

s4-e1 USS Callister - technology that allows you to live within a virtual fantasy scenario finds its incel creator living a totalitarian fantasy life within a Star Trek knock-off, where his servile crew are stolen mind-maps of people from his real life.

T - 4  | WB - 8 | H - 4 | E - 9 -- Ranking #6/34

s4-e2 Arkangel  - helicopter parenting taken to the next degree.  As a parent I can relate to the impulse to protect your child, but when does protection start leading to control?

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #20/34

s4-e3 Crocodile -  a hit-and-run in a remote coutryside returns to haunt a successful architect when an insurance investigation, using memory-reading technology, threatens to unravel her life.  It asks you to relate but it may be the biggest ask in all of Black Mirror.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 8 | E - 5 -- Ranking #25/34

s4-e4 Hang the DJ - a little hopefulness and romance nodding back to San Junipero.  It's a cute/sad look at on-line/app dating, how people meet and whether algorithms can truly account for chemistry.  The reveal/twist is maybe the most eye-rolling of all though.

T - 7 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 6 -- Ranking #29/34

s4-e5 Metalhead - oops, drone technology got out of hand.  Directed by David Slade in glorious black and white, these metal dog things are freaking terrifying.

T - 3 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E - 9 -- Ranking #5/34

s4-e6 Black Museum - a young British woman (Letita Wright!!) waits for her car to recharge, passing the time at the curious Black Museum.  There we see artifacts from across Black Mirror's episodes and are introduced to a few more curiosities.  Honestly, I forget how this one shakes out.

T - 5 | WB - 10 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #32/34

movie - Bandersnatch - in the 1980's a choose-your-own-adventure novel is adapted by a mentally troubled young man into a video game, but aspect of his past and events of the present threaten to drive him to madness, or murder...you decide.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 5 | E - 9 -- Ranking #4/34

s5-e1 - Striking Vipers - a married man and his estranged best friend from college reunite in a new virtual reality version of the video game they play, which leads to questions about sexual identity, marital fidelity and what constitutes an affair.
T - 8 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 8 -- Ranking #18/34

s5-e2 - Smithereens - a distraught widower takes a hostage in order to talk with the billionaire creator of a social media platform

T - 5 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 8 -- Ranking #19/34

s5-e3 - Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too - Ashley O is one of the world's biggest pop stars, but she's trapped in a life she doesn't believe in.  Rachel is a lonely teen in a new town and she gloms onto her Ashley O fandom as her identity, while her sister Jack is too rebellious for it all.  Rachel gets an "Ashley Too" robotic interface which winds up connecting the sisters with the celebrity in a most unusual way.

T - 2 | WB - 4 | H - 1 | E - 6 -- Ranking #28/34

s6-e1 - Joan is Awful - Joan pops on the in-world Netflix to find a TV show starring Salma Hayak who is styled like her and is reenacting moments of her immediate life. Joan's world is thrown into chaos. It gets pretty meta from there.

T - 6 | WB - 2 | H - 2 | E - 8 - Ranking #16/34

s6-e2 - Lock Henry - A young documentary filmmaking student turn his attention on his depressed Scottish hometown, and the murders that rocked it a decade earlier.

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 7 | E - 7 - Ranking #22/34

s6-e3 - Beyond the Sea - in a different reality of 1969, two astronauts are on a long-term space mission, but are able to send their consciousness between their real selves aboard the ship and the androids on earth that allow them to continue their lives. Things go unexpectedly bad and then get predictably awful.

T - 2 | WB - 3 | H - 5 | E - 5 - Ranking #26/34

s6-e4 - Mazey Day  - In mid 2000s, a reluctant paparazzo chases after a famous starlet who has seemingly disappeared after being fired from a shoot for unknown reasons. What she doesn't know is the starlet was involved in a deadly hit and run and is having a very hard time.

T - 5 | WB - 6 | H - 7 | E - 8 - Ranking #13/34

s6-e5 - Demon 79 - In 1979 England a young shoe sales woman of Indian descent experiences constant racism - overt, veiled, systemic, etc - but when she's accidentally tethered to a demon, she's given the opportunity to let out some of her pent-up frustrations...because she has to kill 3 people or the world will end.
T - 6 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 9 - Ranking #12/34

s7-e1 - Common People - She was dying with a brain tumour but a new technology saves her life by backing up her brain. But is life worth living when there's a subscription cost that, like all subscription services, just gets worse and worse and more expensive over time.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 8  | E - 7 - Ranking #23/34

s7-e2 - Bete Noir - A snack food developer finds her past comes back to haunt her when a nerdy kid from her old high school gets a job working with her. But even if she could get over the past, the fact that reality starts changing around her is bound to drive her mad.

T - 6  | WB - 5  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #17/34

s7-e3 - Hotel Reverie - A brand new type of movie production finds an actress taking the role of leading man in a classic 1940's film, reconstructed as a simulation. When the simulation glitches. the movie stops and time starts racing forward, the actress and her leading lady, who has gained a level of sentience, fall in love.

T - 6  | WB - 6  | H - 1  | E - 7 - Ranking #27/34

s7-e4 - Plaything - A man is brought in for questioning on a cold case murder from the 90's. He tells the story of being a video game reviewer, dropping acid, and helping a species within a videogame evolve, and how that led to the murder.

T - 6 | WB - 7  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #15/34

s7-e5 - Euology - A man is given a high tech package to help eulogize the recent passing of an old love. His journey into photographs help unlock memories long buried, opening old wounds but also finding a closure he never thought he could get.

T - 10 | WB - 7 | H - 2  | E - 9 - Ranking #1/34

s7-e6 - USS Callister - Into Infinity - a true sequel, the cloned crew of the USS Callister struggle to survive within the open world of the online video game Infinity. When they've drawn too much attention to themselves, the outside world starts to intervene.

T - 6  | WB - 9  | H -  6 | E - 9 - Ranking #6/34

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Ranking Black Mirror

1. Eulogy

2. San Junipero (-1)

3. Be Right Back (-1)

4. Bandersnatch (-1)

5. Metalhead (-1)

6. USS Callister - Into Infinity (new)

7. USS Callister (-2)

8. White Bear (-2)

9. 15 Million Merits (-2)

10. Shut Up and Dance (-2)

11. The Entire History of You (-2)

12. Demon 79 (-2)

13. Mazey Day (-2)

14. Nosedive (-2)

15. Plaything (new)

16. Joan is Awful (-3)

17. Bete Noir (new)

18. Striking Vipers (-4)

19. Smithereens (-4)

20. Arkangel (-4)

21. Men Against Fire (-4)

22. Loch Henry (-4) 

23. Common People (new)

24. White Christmas (-5)

25. Crocodile (-5)

26. Beyond the Sea (-5)

27. Hotel Reverie (new)

28. Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (-6)

29. Hang the DJ (-6)

30. Hated in the Nation (-6)

31. National Anthem (-6)

32. Black Museum (-6)

33. Playtest (-6)

34. The Waldo Moment (-6)