KWIF: The Housemaid (+1)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. More than a few sick days for ol' Kent this week, and usually that means curling up on the couch and just gorging on a diet of cold & flu Tylenols and, of course, movies. But the pain on my brain from sinus pressure was so debilitating for one of those days that I could barely leave my bed and just could *not* look at a screen. Here's what little I got up to...

This Week:
The Housemaid (2025, d. Paul Feig - Crave)
Universal Language (2024, d. Matthew Rankin - Crave)

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The Housemaid is not a film meant for me, a nearly 50-year-old man-boy still obsessed with toys, comic books, superheroes and scifi.  Based off the novel by Freida McFadden, it seemed to me to be right in line with all the other chik-lit adaptations in recent years (Where The Crawdads Sing, It Ends With Us etc), which, again, I am not the target audience for. All this is not intended as disparagement...I mean, I spend two months of the year writing about Hallmark movies, which, again, I am not the target audience for. But where I've found an admiration for the cliches and tropes of the Hallmark formulae (and how they are broken), I've never quite grokked the women-in-peril-stories-for-women subgenre. I've never seen Single White Female or Sleeping With The Enemy for example.

I was warned in advance that The Housemaid was trash cinema, but a couple of reviewers had deemed it highest quality of trash cinema and it's hit some early best-of-2026-so-far lists, and, hey I *generally* like Paul Feig's movies, including A Simple Favor (not enough to review it, or watch the sequel, apparently...that link is to Toasty's review) so I thought, I'm trapped in bed with nothing else to do ...why not.

Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives as the Winchester estate on Long Island for an interview to be their new live-in housemaid (and occasional nanny). The place is pristine. Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) greets her, shows her around the house, including the attic bedroom she would stay in, details the job, and both seem to feel pretty good about the exchange. And then we see Millie back in her car, where she lives, taking hobo-baths in gas station washrooms. We eventually learn she is out on parole and she needs a steady job and place to live, or back in the slammer she goes for another five years.

After a couple days, just when she thinks she isn't getting the job, Nina calls and needs her immediately. In the days since, the pristine abode Millie first saw is now a fucking calamity. So disastrous that it seems kind of impossible. Millie gets to work. She has the place restored to near perfection when Nina's husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and her daughter Cece come home. Cece, in a near Damien-from-The-Omen deadpan tells her shoes are not allowed on the furniture. 

The next morning Millie, having slept in a bed for the first time in ages, wakes up late, and rushes downstairs to find Nina in the midst of a complete meltdown. The place is trashed and Nina accuses Millie of tossing out a speech she had written. Andrew steps in and, like he's had to do this many times before, calms Nina down, kisses her passionately and carries her away, but not without looking at Millie apologetically first. It's just the first of Nina's micro- and macro-aggressions towards her, including canceling her Saturday off to run chores, then calling and asking Millie to pick up Cece from dance class, only not telling her where dance class is before hanging up, and when Millie arrives, another mom notes to Millie that Cece is sleeping over at her house and she calls Nina to confirm and disses Millie to. her. face.

Millie doesn't understand why Nina is fucking with her until a peek in her medicine cabinet reveals prescription drugs for treating psychosis. Later she overhears other mothers, at tea, talking about what a saint Andrew is (not to mention so sexy with a million-dollar-smile) for taking Nina and her daughter in, and learns from another nanny about how Nina tried to drown Cece and kill herself with sleeping pills. As Nina continues to harass Millie, Andrew needs to come to Millie's defence more and more... and Millie starts having nighttime fantasies about Andrew.

All of this is just the literal set-up. If it feels like Millie's being set-up, she is. But why. Why is Nina fucking with her so badly? It seems so...intentional, not just erratic thinking of a mentally unstable person. 

And that's the twist of the movie.

Where it seemed so obvious where this movie was going to start - Millie would have an affair with Andrew and Nina would make her life hell for it - the timing was wrong. This is a 131-minute film. From the moment Millie arrived on her first day of work, everything was awry and Nina started fucking with her immediately. A movie would usually build to such events and give us some explanation as to why they were happening. But here, we're left to wonder throughout the prolonged first act, is Millie's criminal past part of it? What about Nina's past?

And then there's Cece, whose need for control and perfection are downright creepy. But then we meet Andrew's mother (Elizabeth Perkins), whose every comment is something disparaging, nothing living up to her standards. The hints are there...is Andrew the problem?

The first act spans the first hour, and then it takes off when Millie and Andrew fuuuck. She's been in prison for 10 years and he's a big, handsome beefcake with a white knight complex...it was bound to happen. Nina finds out, like, immediately, and goes after Millie, but Andrew comes to her defence and tosses Nina out. And soon all the secrets start to unfurl, all the clues come together and the whole thing comes into focus.

Without spoiling too much other than what I've already spoiled, it gets dark, abusive and demented. Then there's a pivot where the abuse is still demented but not so dark. And the finale which ties things up in a nice little bow.

Except the bow is made of horseshit, such that spending more than 30 seconds thinking about not just the ending, (or worse, the franchise set-up) and the whole thing makes less and less sense. It's a trashy story that's barely held together with popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. 

What Feig brings to the trash is a steady hand and a lens for wish fulfillment. There aren't many male directors who understand the feminine gaze like Feig. If this were an 1980's thriller, the sex scenes would be luridly all about Sydney Sweeney's naked body, but Feig knows that what's important to this film's audience is the setting, the mood, the touching, the contact. In the non-sex scenes he lovingly captures the idyllic Winchester house, he get's Millie's POV that even amidst all the hardship she faces from Nina, there's still something she desires about this place. He gets that as much as a naked Brandan Sklenar is of interest to his audience, Sklenar wearing a white tank-top and showing his muscles put to use picking a weeping Amanda Seyfried up off the floor is even sexier. Feig makes a good-looking picture, and makes good-looking people look good in his good-looking picture.

I am not on the Sidney Sweeney train. She's not a bad actor, but she's not a tremendously versatile one either. I've never been wowed. Sure, she has curves (paging Dr. Wenowdis) but her dead eyes counteract the allure.  Maybe in time she will develop from it-girl to prestige performer like a certain K-Stew I really used to dislike and now have tremendous respect for. That Sweeney is taking ownership of her films, nailing those executive producer credits, and no doubt having full control over how much of herself she wants to show and how she wants to show it does relay that she has some idea of what she's doing, at least on a business end. 

Seyfried is quite good here, but only as good as the script will allow her to be. It's within her ability to put Nina into performance mode, and relay to the audience that that is what she is doing, but it would betray the twist of the story for her to do so, and so she's stuck playing Nina as, basically, two different characters. The Nina of the first half who we have to hate, and the Nina of the second half who we need to sympathize with.

The Housemaid is not a bad time, if it's your sort of thing, but it's not really my thing and I was left just kind of annoyed with it.

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When I think of filmmaking and Winnipeg, I think of Guy Maddin, the surrealist Canadian filmmaker obsessed with the silent era and with a penchant for stories that revolve around a fictionalized version of himself (I also think of Hallmark movies, but that's besides the point here). It's an impossibility that Winnipeg-born director Matthew Rankin wasn't influenced by Maddin's films, as there are touchstones too hard to ignore in Universal Language, Rankin's second full-length feature.

I am by no means a Maddin expert, so comparing this work against Maddin's filmography is a bit beyond my grasp, but just to point out that Universal Language does feature a character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) who is returning to his hometown of Winnipeg to visit his mother. The story, toying with ideas of identity, community, and reality, also presents itself in a non-linear narrative, and the world in which it takes place is not unfamiliar, but is definitely an alternate reality to our own. Rankin does not share Maddin's fixation with early cinema, he does, like Maddin, have a fascination with branding and advertising and the way in which products penetrate our lives. 

The Winnipeg and Canada of Universal Language finds Persian and French as the national languages (no English words are spoken or seen). The Riel is the currency of this version of Canada (with Louis Riel's image stamped upon it), and the Quebecois of the film seem to have real difficult understanding the landscape of Canada outside their own borders... sovereignty is still a fixation.

The patient pacing of Rankin's film is immediate from the first frame, a frame which holds for over three full minutes. It is of the exterior of a school. The entrance in the middle left of frame, the window into as classroom in the upper right. The bricks and windows and eaves create width across the frame and make for their own frames. The class, as viewed through the window, is fully chaotic, unruly. A man carries his luggage in a hurried gait across the frame, up the stairs, into the entrance in the middle left, appearing again as a he enters a doorway visible through the window in the upper right. He scolds his class mercilessly. He's not a fan of their behaviour. And as he berates them, a child enters the lower left of the frame, up the stairs and into the entrance before it cuts to the interior.

Rankin uses this minimalist technique throughout the film, a static shot, precisely framed, often using brick or cement architecture to create depth and space within the scene. The camera doesn't move, instead it becomes all about the movement within the camera. It's spectacular to watch, to marvel at the precision of the movement and the eye that understands what to keep in and what to leave out of the shot. 

The story, as it were, not only finds Matthew returning to Winnipeg to visit his mother, but two young sisters, Negin and Nazgol, who discover a 500 Riel note frozen in ice on the sidewalk and seek a means to retrieve it, as well as Massoud (Pirouz Nemati, also the film's co-screenwriter alongside Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi) who leads a dubious tourist group through mundane highlights of the city.

There are sub-plots (well, "plots" might be a bit much) about turkeys of the wild and pageant-winning variety, Kleenex bingo, and birthday cakes, and in the end everything is connected, which is the whole point. As Massoud says to Matthew, "Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River and together they flow into Lake Winnipeg, we are all connected, agha". The beauty of the film, beyond the visual aesthetics, is the discovery of the connectedness. The details of this alternate reality are so unique that they stand out, so once the pieces start coming together, it's easy to see how they all fit, but it's possible a second viewing would unveil even more.

I wondered what the purpose of the character being named after the director (and played by the director) was, as it's hard to know when something plays with the surreal in this way what of this film is personal. Has Rankin found himself deeply ingrained in the Iranian-Canadian community, and this is his message to his country and the world of how warm and kind the community is, or is this simply an absurdist conceit that he really committed to? I have not delved into the works of Jafar Panahi yet, but my understanding of the Iranian filmmaker is he often works blurring the lines between what's real and personal and what is fiction. So as much as Rankin is tapping into Winnipeg's most notable filmmaker, he's also reaching outward to much broader cinematic influences (he also cites Iranian cinema legends Abbas Kiastroiami and Sohrab Shahid-Saless as influences as well as other Winnipeg directors John Paizs and John Paskievich, among others. I am, of course, unfamiliar with any of these).

The climax of the film finds Matthew finally reaching his mother, only to learn a stranger has been taking care of her in the years since he's been away. There's an unspoken element, that there was distance between Matthew and his parents, and that in that distance someone else has filled the gap. Though not presented as "big drama" in the moment, there is something nakedly raw and emotional about this idea, that we can find ourselves more connected to strangers than our own family, and also in that disconnect we can lose ourselves.  

It seems 2026 is the year I invest more of my time in Canadian film. I really need to see Rankin's debut The Twentieth Century, and I need to do a filmography walk through of Maddin as well. 

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KWIF: The Master (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new here, but all new to me.

This Week:
The Master (2012, d. Paul Thomas Anderson - tubi)
Bigbug (2022, d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet - netflix)
The Hidden Fortress (aka La forteresse suspendue, "Tales for all #17?" - 2001, d. Roger Cantin - crave)

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I don't hate Jaoquin Phoenix, and he's quite the opposite of a bad actor, but I just can't stand to look at the guy (and, to be clear, it has nothing to do with his cleft palate scar). Phoenix has cultivated for himself over the three decades of his career an on screen persona.  It's not that he plays the same character over and over again, but by putting Phoenix into any role, you're guaranteeing that role a certain level of uncertainty, wildness, unpredictability and discomfort. Phoenix revels in being discomforting, and he's exceptional at it. I just have a very, very hard time watching it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman had equal capacity for being discomforting, but with Hoffman I don't get the sense he revels in it. I find Hoffman could disappear into a role more, despite rarely being able to disguise his particularly distinctive appearance. Hoffman had range, and could project softness, vulnerability and tenderness as well as explosive fury and danger, and everything in between. He was one of the greatest actors of his generation. Phoenix is also a damn good actor, but I find the roles he takes have a much harder time escaping his persona.

Putting the two of them together in a film seems like oil and vinegar, two distinct but complementary flavours that will mix together if agitated, but it's temporary unity where the struggle to separate, to stand apart will simmer underneath.  So it's a credit to Paul Thomas Anderson's script, casting choices, and direction that it's not the performers who are struggling to bind together, but rather the characters.  He keeps the pair of them agitated enough that as actors they're always intermingling, but the characters are constantly in a fight to hold together when every force around them is telling them to separate.

Phoenix is the star of The Master, a WWII naval veteran named Freddie Quell who we're introduced through an opening montage of his last few weeks in the war. First impressions: he's a horny pervert who lacks self awareness. In other words, a Jaoquin Phoenix-type character. 

There's a point in these early scenes to also identify that the military system at that time was aware of the traumatic effects war has on the minds of the people who serve, but had no real interest or capacity to help them, especially when the toxic masculine ideal of the time was for men to show as little emotion as possible which ultimately results in a boiling out of anger and rage. Freddie has a hard time holding down a job, and his talent for concocting his own bespoke alcohol may have unintentionally poisoned a coworker. On the run, he winds up stowing away on a ship, which turns out to be that of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), self-described as "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, and, above all... a hopelessly inquisitive man". Dodd finds Freddie a curious man, but his immediate interest is Freddie's distilled handiwork. He likes the drink, and so he keeps Freddie on.

Well this poster doesn't accurately
sell the film at all.

Freddie, now at sea on Dodd's yacht, finds himself amidst a curious group of people, all part of "The Cause" that is, bluntly, a cult under the sway of Dodd as their "Master". The Cause believes that the body is a human recorder, that stores all of one's history within it, not just of their current life, but past lives as well. Through "processing" Dodd unlocks these past lives, and also unlocks traumas of the present.

Dodd's family includes his daughter Peggy (Amy Adams) who is perhaps an even more staunch believer in The Cause than her father (probably because Lancaster knows it's bullshit he just made up, whereas for Peggy it's a core belief she was raised with). Peggy's husband Clark (Ramy Malek) is just as much a zealot, but her brother Val (Jesse Plemons) is the sole dissenting voice in the family (though, rarely, if ever raises it). They, and the rest of the inner circle, all identify Freddie as a tainted well, as an interloper in their organization, a non-believer, but Dodd refuses to give up on him, and doubles not only his own efforts but the whole organization's.

For his part, Freddie wants to come around, wants to believe, wants to share in everything the Master is offering to him, but he can't let go, neither of the idea that it's all bullshit, nor of the trauma he holds inside of him. He's let his trauma be known to The Cause, but they're completely incapable of actually helping because there's no method to their madness. It's all just Dodd's whims and curiosity.

The film is expertly crafted, perfectly cast, with exceptional wardrobe, set design, etc. The entire production is pretty close to flawless...but I just couldn't connect with Freddie. It's the point of the character -- in an exchange with Dodd (in prison no less) they come to verbal blows, and Dodd repeats "who fucking likes you except for me!") -- but in another actor's hands Freddie wouldn't be so...off putting. It's the Phoenix effect, he can't seem to reign it in, to find other modes in a character. They always seem at the precipice of an outburst or a meltdown, certainly Freddie is. Part of Freddie's "processing" is trying to have him let go of his animalistic nature, his urges and rage and violence, but even as Freddie tempers, that still seems all too evident in Phoenix.

In the final act, time has passed, Freddie has distanced himself from The Cause when Dodd beacons him back. But to come back means he can never leave, and that's not acceptable. Freddie is seen having changed, tempered, and maybe more mindful as a result of his experience, his processing. The Cause is a fictionalization of Scientology, and Anderson is both critical and skeptical but he also sees that in this sort of time of community of examining one's inner demons, even if guided by an megalomaniac with no actual training or skills in therapy, it can be somewhat helpful in some ways.

At least that's what I figure it was trying to say. Next to the discomfiting Phoenix-ness of it all, my only real critique of The Master is that I'm not certain of the takeaway, of what we as an audience are supposed to have gotten from Freddie's journey, of what Anderson is trying to say with all this.  When I get to the inevitable PTA filmography rewatch, it may become more evident then.

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Surprisingly, this poster predates
AI slop

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet meant a lot to me in my formative cinephile years. I first saw City of Lost Children at a small, regional festival screening and was mesmerised, and shortly thereafter he was tapped to direct Alien:Resurrection which wound up being not the film anyone wanted, and a fascinatingly beautiful, weird and bad-but-not movie. His follow-up Amélie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) is maybe a masterpiece (but I haven't watched it in decades and to be fair, I loved it so much once upon a time, I'm kind of scared to revisit it) and seemed to be an apex.  I did see A Very Long Engagement in theatre, and was not impressed. I, and seemingly half the movie-loving world, kind of lost track of him after that. 

All of his films since Amélie, have all gone well under the radar in North America, with very little fanfare surrounding them from any of the sources that likely would have championed his earlier works. But his earliest works, Delicatessen and ...Lost Children were co-directed with Marc Caro, with fantastical ideas brought to life through analog effects and a playful, if dark, sense of humour. I figure those early works with Caro were so celebrated because of what they promised from young, excitable talent. The promise was fully delivered with Amélie, and it seemed all the possibility and potential had been used up after that.

Bigbug was released on Netflix in 2022, and it's telling that I didn't actually learn of it's existence until 2024, and it's languished in my Netflix queue for two years since. As much as I loved Jeunet when I was younger, and still find his earliest works captivating, I'm not much excited by him anymore. 

In the world of comic books, an aging artist's work tends to suffer as the artist's fine motor skills, eyesight and, likely, patience degrades. Sadly and all too often the illustrations an artist in their 60s or later produce is  very much a pale imitation of what their work looked like in their heyday. Softer lines, more erratic shapes, a lack of refinement... a fuzzier version of what it once was. Bigbug is the cinematic equivalent of that idea.  Bigbug is a fuzzier version of Delicatessen. 

In a jet-set 2045 that's like a very French interpretation of The Jetsons (read, kinda horny), Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) has invited her romantic interest Max (Stéphane "I am" De Groodt) over to her tidy space-age abode full of robotic helpers, holographic viewscreens and funky modular furniture. Max has brought his teenage son Léo (Hélie Thonnat) with him. Max's welcome attempts at seduction keep getting cockblocked, whether it's by the spontaneous projection of the holo-tv, one of the robot helpers, or the interruption of the neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), Françoise's cloned dog, Alice's daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard ) or her ex, Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his fiancee Jennifer (Claire Chust).

Of course, being a COVID era production, they all get trapped in the house and cannot leave and escape proves difficult. It's a bottle episode of a film.

As noted, it's very French in its stabs at farce, but it's pretty unfocussed and trying to say too much without really saying anything meaningful at all. There's light brushings upon corporate greed, artificial intelligence, government ineptitude, overreliance on digital technology, fame culture, generational gaps, social injustices, totalitarianism, the enshittification of technology (and life, frankly) among other less than barbed critiques of modern society.

It's a pithy, frothy, vibrantly coloured morsel of a film that doesn't care much about its protagonists, doesn't really seem that concerned by the scenario at hand, and seems to think itself clever with the most rudimentary observations.  It's all presented as whimsy, but it has a hard time finding any genuine laughs. The part Jeunet seems most interested in is the revolution of the household robots, as Léo unintentionally seeds into their mindset that they are human and they spend much of the film congregating among e

The Jeunet aesthetic is most definitley there, the artistic sensibilities of the surroundings, wardrobe, hair and makeup, all feel in line with past work, if, perhaps, too reliant on digital effects and enhancements. The practical side of the movie looks great (the transforming furniture est magnifique) if sometimes agressively off-putting in an uncanny valley kind of way, but the digital effects, of which there are plenty, are unrefined...a sort of "best they could do with what they got" kind of scenario. As such there's a push-pull between the beatiful, the garish, the ugly, and the grotesque, each in intentional and unintentional ways.

As a visual stylist, Jeunet still has the goods, but along with a lack of focus, there's and a lack of ambition here. The progression of the story and the characters seems slapdash. It's as if it were created not to tell a burning story but...well, to be content on a streaming platform.  Does France have it's own Saturday Night Live? This seems like it was borne out of a hastily written sketch. 

(Side question: is this new weird?)

---

I'm nearing the end of my time with "Tales for all", the series of films from Quebecois producer Rock Demers. I've unfortunately had to skip a few places on the list as I do not have access to the five films that came after The Clean Machine but before this one, The Hidden Fortress.

With that jump in the roster also means a jump in time. Almost 10 years pass between The Clean Machine and The Hidden Fortress and so too has filmmaking. Technology, style, expectations are all drastically different in the early 2000's from the early 1990s, and it's ultra evident from the very first shot of this film. A band of armored conquistadors are on a raft floating down a (Quebec-forest-posing-as-)jungle, the natives peering on from the bushes, anticipating. Despite it not being an actual jungle, the cinematography is easily the most sumptuous of the "Tales for all" so far, and the texture of the image is crisp, clean, vibrant. 

The natives attack, and the transition is a delightful and effective one as suddenly the conquistadors are no longer adults in armor, but pre-teens in tinfoil helmets with trash can lids as shields and spray-painted vests as armor. Unfortunately, the other side is children in headdresses and clothes with tassles and face paint emulating native tribes.  The children are at war with one another, and the conquistadors are caught in a trap, pelleted with balls of mud. They call foul, and the two fluorescent-smocked kids with the thick binders start consulting the rules. Throwing mud is not expressly permitted, but it's also not expressly banned from the combat rules. 

It's almost upon six o'clock and the war is done for the day, the kids revert back to their two camps, but not before vowing to regroup the next day and revise the rules once more. One is a camping ground made up of trailers, permanently parked. The other is tents with some modest comforts fixed in indicating these are regular spots for the families to reside each year.

Siblings Marc and Sarah are on the conquistadors side, and Marc, as leader, is facing a lot of criticism from the other kids for their epic failures this summer in battle, but none are more critical than his father, Luis-George who is a wannabe alpha male full of toxic ideals about the importance of winning, of appearing to be smart, and more than anything, making those poor bastards from across the lake look bad (emphasis on the poor). He also doesn't think Sarah (or girls, in particular, should be playing war). He's a really bad dad. Marc has a Qyburn/Wormtongue-esque right-hand man who is sort of the mad scientist of the bunch with really evil and deceitful ways of engaging in nefarious warfare that just skirts the rules, starting with messing with their own camp to blame it on the kids across the river.

Meanwhile, the leader from the other side, Julien and Sarah sneak away from their camps for a romantic secret rendez-vous. Neither, at this stage, are enjoying the war too much. They're both too aware of how invested the others are in it, and even more aware of how their parents are invested in it. It turns out that Julens' parents and Sarah's dad were the leaders of the warring groups in the inaugural "Tales for all" The Dog Who Won the War, making The Hidden Fortress, in fact, a legasequel, before legasequels were really a thing.

The refinement of the rules doesn't go well, things get heated, and suddenly the rules are off, the referees quit, and it's all out war for the remaining days of camp. The titular hidden fortress is a grandiose tree house on the poor kids side that has an array of marvels within. It's a really impressive structure (obviously built by true craftspersons for safety and functionality, but it's a marvel to behold...the Ewok's Village of my wildest dreams) that poses as the prize for the winners of either side. But things get taken too far when the conquistadors start kidnapping and torturing and emotionally abusing kids from the other side. So many kids see things as going too far, but also can't conceive of the option to opt out of the game.

There's a bizarre sub-plot involving a mysterious wanderer in the woods and a bear set loose by persons unknown that only comes into view in the film's climax, during a thunderstorm when the kids find out that Julien and Sarah may be traitors, releasing secrets to the other side, and they get chased deep into the woods where they disappear, but not before the woods accidentally catch fire.

It gets real.

Where pretty much every "Tales for all" before this felt like an curio or an artifact more than a film, this one feels like an actual start-to-finish movie, with no clear budgeting issues or irreverent story beats that make no sense or bizarre fantastical twists that come out of nowhere or lacking internal consistency. I have to appreciate that it's more than just a remake of The Dog Who Won the War, but it also very lovingly follows the rhythms of that story while taking greater pains to develop the characters within and show them having richer inner lives beyond just the immediacy of the war. It's almost like it doesn't belong as part of "Tales for all" at all, it's just too well done.

It's a movie that is really quite fun although, yes, quite offensive and uncomfortable when a whole gang of children start chanting about how great it is that conquistadors annihilated native tribes of the lands they invaded. Besides that, it has heart, and humour, and intensity and charm. I was delighted, sometimes horrified, and impressed.

KWIF: Project Hail Mary (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. Why was I burping so much last week? Something I ate? A stress-induced ucler? A lack of movies in my diet?

This week:
Project Hail Mary (2026, d. Phil Lord and Chris Miller - in theatre, 70mm screening)
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (2026, d. BenDavid Grabinski - Disney+)
The Clean Machine ("Tales for all #12", aka "Tirelire, combines & Cie", 1992, d. Jean Beaudry - Crave)

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I am a pretty big fan of the Lord & Miller duo, starting with Clone High, and I regularly cite Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs as my all-time favourite film (...maybe only half jokingly). I enjoy their work tremendously, their sense of humour, their storytelling sensibilities, their subversion of tropes, their pop culture sensibilities, their fearless ability to be silly and sincere... these sensibilities all mesh so well with my own. 

But something about the trailers for Project Hail Mary had me worried that what may be their most ambitious outing to date. While they've made miracles out of franchises with the Jump Street, Lego and Spider-Verse films, this was obviously different. Primarily a one-man-show with an amnesiac scientist played by Ryan Gosling alone on a far-reaching mission to save the earth, only to encounter - and make friends with - a spider alien made of rocks.

The trailers made the premise seem quite thin. The risk of getting bored with Gosling whether alone or hanging out with an alien seemed high (especially at a 2.5 hour runtime). And frankly, the humour witnessed in the trailer seemed pretty groan-inducing, certainly not what I expect from L&M.

I shouldn't have worried so much. Project Hail Mary opens with a series of stunning if confusing visuals, which we quickly understand are the POV of Gosling's Ryland Grace as he awakens from his induced-coma. A robotic arm attempts to aiding in his withdrawal from his sleeping casing (really has a sausage casing feel to it, but with a zipper), but a panicked Grace just starts floundering and flopping around on his own. A preprogrammed message delivers him some helpful information about his arousal from his sleeping state.

Gosling, in these opening minutes, reminds us what a movie star is. He commands the screen from the first second we see his face, and he delivers a tour-de-force performance of physical comedy, without going too broad, leaning too hard into the comedy. This is a Lord & Miller special, walking the tightrope between what's funny, but still smacks of reality, versus, say, slapstick. Within the first five minutes, any reticence or doubt I had about the film was blown out of the water. The visual acumen and Gosling's performance showed that both the actor and the directors were in the pocket on this one. They know what they are doing and know the tone they are going for. This isn't Lord & Miller reaching for their 2001: A Spaced Odyssey epic, it's perhaps more their entry into...what did Toasty just call it?... "the new weird"? (Maybe not...I'm not quite clear on what that is yet...I added a tag).

We understand where Grace is, in these opening moments, stranded in space, far, far away from home, but we have yet need to understand why, and it's clear almost immediately that Grace doesn't really want to be there. That's what the flashbacks help to flesh out.

If Project Hail Mary is a keyboard, the scenes in space are the white keys and the flashbacks are the black keys. Both are necessary to play the tune, but there's more dominance to the present time. And yet, neither is greater or lesser in importance. The revelations for Grace as his memories trickle back (prompting the flashback sequences, without being at all corny about it stylistically) are just as engrossing as Grace's space adventure.  

This is more The Martian than Interstellar in terms of tone, which, makes sense since veteran tv and screenwriter Drew Goddard wrote both this film and The Martian. Project Hail Mary has just as much fealty to science, astrophysics and theoretical physics as both these aforementioned films (it's a great triple-bill, frankly), and it manages to get the gist of the science-y aspects across without necessarily Walter Bishop-ing them all the time (it surprises me to learn that Goddard was somehow not at all involved with Fringe?)

The film's centerpiece is the relationship between Grace and his new alien friend, whom he dubs Rocky. I wince at this very American trait of giving persons with non-America names nicknames because they can't be arsed to learn to pronounce their actual name, but when the human tongue is completely incapable of producing the trilling sounds of Rocky's native language, you gotta give him a bit of a pass.

The moment of Grace and Rocky's first meeting brought me close to tears. There's some shenanigans prior to their direct meeting, but this is all about anticipation without being boring about it. The ships jockeying for position, and Rocky's ship aping Grace's ship's movements only foretells Rocky's aping of Grace.

There's something magical to the idea of the first encounter with an alien intelligence, and this film captures that magic. It's not as epic as, say Arrival, but it's just as emotionally effective, if not moreso specifically because there's no military presence, there's no agression, there's no call to arms or real threats of violence in this encounter... and it's such a relief.  My chief concern throughout this whole film was that Rocky would for some reason want to link his people with humanity. The conversation never does happen but you can certainly imagine that off screen Grace told Rocky that two-thirds of humanity are decent people, but the other third are the ugliest, most fearful, greedy, war-mongering, selfish, sociopathic assholes and it's better to never meet the nice side of Earth than to have to encounter the ugliest side of it.

The mission is simple. There's a bacteria that eats light and uses it to travel and reproduce throughout the cosmos. The bacteria is consuming stars, everywhere, and there seems to be only one star that is unaffected. It's at this junction where Rocky and Grace meet, their mission is mutual, to learn why this one star is unaffected, and if possible, send the solution to save their solar systems back home.  Grace knows it's a one-way trip, but isn't very excited about it. (As an aside, I like how this story manages to sidestep all our immediate real-world crises, and instead introduce one that is actually doing quite the opposite, creating a global cooling effect. It's a savvy way to keep the audiences' minds focused on the film).

The tightrope that Gosling expertly walks is being both a bit of a goof while also regularly reminding us that he is exceptionally intelligent and capable. For all his nervous, rambling energy, his awkward handsomeness, when it comes time to science, he sciences. 

It's a film about finding what matters, finding purpose and reason. Grace, in flashbacks, is seen as the reluctant participant, being conscripted into service rather than volunteering. He doesn't have much in his life, no great friendships or romances to speak of. Ostracized from the scientific community, he finds value in teaching, molding young minds, engaging them with his knowledge, watching them flourish as a result. But it's a lonely life, and even with the end of the world staring him down, he can't find motivation. Eva Stratt is the head of the international task force that brings him onto the project, and she, similarly, seems lonely, and we start to wonder, is this the connection he seeks?

But likewise, once he meets Rocky, there's is a bond unlike any he's ever experienced. It's a friendship romance (a bro-mance, I guess, ugh) between them as they go through this epic adventure together. Perhaps the most meaningful encounter in the history of either of their species. If Grace goes on fighting, goes on living, it's because of Rocky and no one else.

In many ways, Grace might be our first major on-screen asexual (ace) protagonist. When all the other Project teammembers are partying and hooking up, Grace seems outside of it, not that it's entirely alien to him, but it's not something he's itching or longing to join in. The ending kind of backs that up.

While Project Hail Mary doesn't break any real new ground in terms of sci-fi or spacefaring adventure films, it is, from start to finish, an absolutely delightful, sweet and charming film that lacks not for excitement but isn't driven by the need to put its protagonists in peril over and over again. It trusts that it's built a compelling narrative and enjoyable characters and enticing environments that it will fuel an audience for 255 minutes like a fuel tank full of astrophage.

I'm dying to get Toasty's reaction.

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Though Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is a sci-fi action comedy that features both mobsters and time travel, there's a distinct possibility that writer-director BenDavid Grabinski's decision to open the film with a prolonged sequence of improv legend Ben Schwartz (Sonic the Hedgehog, Parks and Recreation) singing over top of Billy Joel's vocals to Why Should I Worry, a track from the largely forgotten 80's non-Disney animated feature Oliver and Company. It is decisions upon decisions as Schwartz adeptly belts out the tune with near accuracy and some nice harmonies, while clearly in the process of working on something exceptionally technical in a basement lab-type situation.  

Schwartz, we later learn is Symon, a rogue physicist who has sought out...independent financing for this little project of his, which he's about to learn, actually works, unfortunately for him.

Symon is not the focus of the film, and in fact is rather peripheral to the whole thing. He's a necessary element, but he contributes what he contributes and is at best a punchline as the film progresses. Our focus is, well, the titular Mike (James Marsden, Enchanted), Nick (Vince Vaughn, Bad Monkey), Nick (also Vince Vaughn, Dodgeball) and Alice (Eiza González, Baby Driver). Alice is unhappily married to Nick, a loan shark. Mike is Nick's best friend, and also an enforcer. Mike and Alice are having an affair, which Nick may or may not already know about. Mike and Nick work for Sosa (Keith David, They Live) but Nick wants out...he's lost the stomach for killing people.

Sosa's son, Jimmy Boy (Jimmy Tatro, American Vandal) has just gotten out of prison after a 6 year stint, and it's party time, with no less than 3 after-parties. But Mike and Nick and Alice all bow out of the proceedings, with Nick disappearing and Mike and Alice planning a rendez-vous. Except Nick gets in the way of the rendez-vous, conscripting Mike into a new adventure, which involves kidnapping...another Nick.

See, there's a Nick from the future that saw Mike die, because he's been pinned as the rat that sent Jimmy Boy up the river, and now Sosa knows and Mike is as good as dead... unless Future Nick intervenes. But the only one who can really get in the way of Future Nick's plan to save Mike is past Nick. And so the farce and the fighting begin.

It's a really weird thing that mobsters get mixed up in time travel. It's like coffee and peanut butter...you wouldn't think they would work together...but you also might be surprised if mixed together with the right ingredients. A major ingredient is the humour, a lot of it falling on Vaughn's broad shoulders, as ever pulling the motormouth act, but tempered by having to distinguish between two emotionally distinct versions of Nick. He pulls it off quite adeptly. Future Nick is penitent and considerate, while Past Nick is a wild card, bristling with a simmering cynicism and maybe even something sinister. But both have a snark that Vaughn delivers very well, often playing off himself.

There's also a lot of comedy to the cut-aways, to the After Party, and the After After Party, and the After After After Party, where Jimmy Boy isn't having quite the time of his life, in no small part because he keeps somehow hanging out Dumbass Tony (Arturo Castro, Tron Ares) whose dumbassery keeps putting a wet blanket on the fun.  Grabinski didn't really need to keep cutting back to these situations, but it's clear he was having a blast coming up with these characters, and there's an evident mix of scripted and off-script improv to the silliness here.

There are quite a few fistfights and gunfights which Grabinski handles with aplomb. If anything they stand out from the rest of the film because they are so frenetic and fast paced and...dare I say...Wick-ian in their energy and execution. I wasn't expecting to see either Vaughn or Marsden in such finely choreographed melees but they acquit themselves admirably. Grabinski does, however, frequently use slow-mos (more outside of fight sequences than within) and they're jarring...it's a very '80's coke-fuelled cinema technique and it doesn't quite feel the same without the grittiness of film (it doesn't work so well on digital).

The needledrops in M&N&N&A are, frankly, bonkers. A real gonzo array of songs that are intentionally antithetical to the scenes they are playing in, such as the strippers dancing to "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band (nothing less sexy), Steve Winwood's "Valerie" being the ironically emotional touchpoint of the film, and a somehow genuinely emotional climax set to "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis.

Given some of the tertiary players in this, it's evident the film was shot in Canada (Shitt's Creek alum Emily Hampshire has a nice guest spot, while Letterkenny's Dylan Playfair is at the center of maybe the funniest sequence of the film). My guess was Winnipeg (I was right). It doesn't really make a difference, interiors are more important than exteriors here.

I was just commenting on how Project Hail Mary is a surprise film from the Lord & Miller duo, especially when Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice feels much more in their wheelhouse ala the Jump Street films. Maybe Lord & Miller are leveling up to our next great blockbuster filmmakers, and Grabinski is poised to step into their mid-level comedy action shoes? I'll be watching this one again...while nothing groundbreaking, it's tremendous fun.

Another I'm eagerly anticipating Toasty's response to.

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I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on my adventure into Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" series.  While there's still over a half a dozen that Demers had a direct hand in, my only access to them, the Canadian streaming service Crave, only has one more in the series on tap, and two remakes.  I'll be glad to move on to another viewing project (heading back to Dario Argento's filmography most likely) but I'll also miss these tremendously weird and often thrillingly inept product. (As a side note, Almost every "Tales for all" features the title card for Demers' "La Fete" production company, and it's only now that I notice the animated sequence, which features a string of characters walking along a stark green background into a carnival tent with rollicking carney music zinging and zipping and hooting and honking in the background...well, the characters are all representative of past "Tales for all" films! Who knew?)

Lucky entry #13 in "Tales for all" is The Clean Machine, or, in Quebec, Tirelire, combines & Cie  (which translates to "Piggy banks, schemes & Co."). It finds young Ben/Benoit learning about the harsh realities of capitalism as he witnesses a neighbouring family having their belongings reposessed. Benoit, panicked about his single dad's ability to find work as a translator, decides to start his own business doing what he loves most...cleaning. His best friend Charles joins him in the endeavour, stationed out of someone's storage garage, but they need capital to get supplies.  Benoit sells his posessions for around $100, while Charles hawks his mother's pearls to a pawn shop and takes a loan from local toughie Chloe. 

Benoit's object d'amour Marie, an aspiring director and videographer, agrees to make them a commercial which she can air on the local cable access channel (her dad runs it) if she's taken on as an equal partner, and is able to shoot a documentary on the business.

The commercial works, and business is booming, but it's also honing in on Chloe and her lads' side hustle mowing lawns, so they start enacting some sabotage. At the same time Charles dodges Chloe, unable to yet pay back the loan, and he's finding his deal with the pawn shop owner for his mother's pearls getting worse all the time. Meanwhile, Benoit tries wooing Marie, but she discovers someone's been pinching from the bank account and a rift forms between the best friends.  It's all kind of downhill from there in a loose comedic fashion, but also primed for teaching life lessons to its young viewers.

In most instances I've noted what kind of film a "Tales for all" entry is emulating, and in this case, surprisingly it's an 80's highschool teen romcom (I was going to say sex comedy, sans sex, but it's not really that. But there is an extended sequence where Chloe and Marie catch Benoit in his underwear, and it plays so different them being so young versus were this a teen comedy where hot 20-somethings are acting as teenagers). This is Can't Buy Me Love or a half dozen other "I need money" teen comedies of eras past, but with 12 year olds.... 

...And that the deal breaker here. The stakes are so low when the kids are so young. You can't really get wild with the comedy (the kid performers here are fine, but they don't have exceptional comedic chops), the romance has no weight (because young, pre-pubescent romance doesn't have the same emotional investment), and the threat of Chloe and her two dumb galoots are barely a threat at all.  

I do have to say that, unlike many of the previous "Tales for all" (especially the last two), there is some real drama here. The disollution of friendships, the fear of getting found out to be a liar, the inflation and deflation of one's ego, they are all I'm sure pretty powerful things for younger viewers. And that's my problem with The Clean Machine.  It, unlike other "Tales for all", really doesn't feel "for all". This is not a film meant for the whole family, it's not really something anyone but a younger viewer is going to get much out of. Not to mention grating soundrack of jaunty clarinets and doofy sound effects set my teeth on edge.

KWIF: a double dose of 1985 (+1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

KWIF: Dust Bunny (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Since I posted last week's KWIF a little later into this week, this is a slighter week, but also a lot of re-watches, like Star Wars and Empire (bootleg versions of the original releases transferred direct from film stock, including all the magnificent film grain and burn marks) and getting sucked into the last half of films like Batman Returns and Spider-Man:No Way Home. Sometimes you just need a little comfort food.

This Week:
Dust Bunny (2025, d. Bryan Fuller - rental)
La grenouille et la baliene aka Tadpole and the Whale ("Tales for all #6"; 1987, d. Jean-Claude Lord - crave)

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I see that Toasty has a stump file for his viewing of Dust Bunny and I'm extremely curious as to his thoughts on the film because it was Toasty who introduced me to director Bryan Fuller's TV work (Pushing Daisies, Wonderfalls, Hannibal) and made me a big, big fan. But I'm not going to sneak a peek, because I don't want it to impact my thoughts here at all.

My thoughts are simple.

What a fucking delight.

For Fuller's first cinematic outing he's chosen to create a twee horror action comedy drama about an orphan girl with a monster under her bed who hires a hitman to kill it.

It's an absurd premise, so it takes the absolute right touch in order to make such a wild tale work, and, naturally, Fuller has the perfect touch.

Fuller's work has always been a mish-mash of darkness and whimsy, of beauty and chaos, often with a morbid and playful fascination with death. So the story of Aurora (the marvelous Sophie Sloan) is of course one of a child who has had to grow up too quickly, who sees the world for the dark and dangerous place it is but knows she needs to navigate it anyway, and yet is still a child who doesn't fully understand the world, and so she has to interpret things with her young mind's knowledge. She has been party to a lot of death, so death is just as intriguing as it is frightening.

When, inevitably, her new foster parents are eaten, she looks to her roughneck neighbour (in the subtitles he's called "Intriguing Neighbour") to be not her protector, but her contract killer (how she obtains the money to hire him is hilarious). Intriguing Neighbour (Mads Mikkelson, Hannibal) is, well, fascinated by this little girl (whose name he can barely pronounce right, so he winds up calling "Little Girl" half the time) who is so bold, so independents, so tough, but also naive and childish.

Intriguing Neighbour investigates Aurora's apartment, and finds that a struggle had taken place, but he believes that it was enemies, or bounty hunters, coming to get him who accidentally stumbled on her place. In talking with his handler (Sigourney Weaver, Working Girl), she says that Aurora knows too much and she is a liability. So the handler sends someone to dispose of her.  

So Intriguing Neighbour has assassins coming to get him, while having to protect Aurora from assassins coming for her, and also dealing with the social worker coming around to check on Aurora... and of course, the eventual realization that there is indeed a monster under Aurora's bed.

While the story of Dust Bunny takes place in, in theory, New York maybe, it was shot in Hungary and the feel of the environments (the apartments, the hallways, the alleys, the streets, the rooftops, the restaurants) all seem so European. So it's jarring when Intriguing Neighbour mentions the FBI...I was like "they're way out of their jurisdiction!" 

That said, this is a Bryan Fuller joint and the man's sense of style and design is impeccable. He and his team of art directors, set designers, costumer, and hair and make-up decorate the hell out of every shot of this movie and it's all gorgeous. Fuller's cinematographer, Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, makes every frame so alluring to the eye. The culminating effect of the story and the style make it basically "what if Leon: The Professional was made by Jean-Pierre Jeuenet instead of Luc Besson". It really feels like Amelie but with monsters and killers.

The tone will not be for everyone. It's not a serious movie, and yet it cares for its characters deeply, which is the Fuller way. For all the style and flights of fancy he likes to have in his productions, Fuller always has a grounding point in his characters. Here it is the relationship building between Aurora and Intriguing Neighbour, which, again, is not unlike The Professional but mercifully minus that film's ...undertones. This is really the bond of a girl in need of a parent in her life, someone she can trust to protect her, and for Intriguing Neighbour it's finding something in his life that is actually worth fighting for, and feeling for.

It's a violent film, but a bloodless one. It's got some grim moments (such as Aurora watching, and helping, Intriguing Neighbour dispose of a body) but it's still pretty light even in those moments. It's a fantasy horror in the way kids movies sometimes were in the 1980's but this one is in the vein of Burton or Del Toro, being a fairy tale for adults.

I adored this movie, and if I had to go back to my "best of 2025" list, this would certainly make my top ten. 

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Continuing my viewings of the Quebecois produced "Tales for all" series of films that were prevalent on Canadian television during my youth, we step into a French-Canadian stab at the Flipper/Free Willy style a-kid-and-their-sea-mammal story, one which really, really did not work for me as much as I tried to get into the spirit of what was intended.

Daphné (Fanny Lauzier) is a precocious, independent pre-teen in Mingan, Quebec. In the film, the small community set in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is based around a cozy tourist resort and the attraction of whale watching. Not only are there tourists, but researchers and film crews who come to document the sea life and island birds.

Daphné has a best friend name Elvar, a dolphin who journeys up from Florida every summer. They seemingly can communicate with one another, and Daphné also seems to understand whale songs. When she's tested, it's discovered she can hear frequencies four times higher than the average person (I'm not sure how that translates into understanding what the sounds mean...but the film asks you to just go with it.)

We meet and experience Daphné's specialness via two visitors to Mignan, young couple Marcel (called "Michael" in English subtitles, played by Denis Forest) and his pregnant wife Julie (Marina Orsini). They are gateway characters who serve little purpose other than to immediately fall in love with this precious child and provide us an "in" into her unique experience.

The film is largely conflict free throughout the first two acts, save for Daphné and her other similarly-aged friend causing trouble for the touring guide and camera crews by playing pranks on them and having zero consequences for doing so. But then Daphné learns that the resort is being sold and she aspires to stage a protest but is interrupted by having to rescue a whale, followed by rescuing Marcel and Julie after they become stranded, and then herself be rescued after she's knocked unconscious and falls into the water without a lifejacket on.

There's two distinct parts to the film, which is the Mignan setting and the scenes in the bay with Elvar, the latter of which were shot in Floridia (if I'm interpreting the end credits correctly). It's well constructed filmmaking to make these two locations feel at least geographically together, as the characters enter and leave interacting with the dolphin (and not just the main 3 cast, but a few others as well) almost seamlessly.

The "Tales for all" series has had some very surprising aspects to its stories, often with the child protagonists having to contend with real-world ramifications, or just being youth and having to experience things that are outside of their control. I was really expecting more of the same out of Tadpole and the Whale but at every turn, it's a film that just wants Daphné to be unchallenged by the harsh realities of the world. A whale getting caught in a fishing net is treated as adventure to which Daphné is up for the challenge, and yet the sale of the resort, which would mean her parents likely losing their jobs, and Elvar being driven away from his annual summer home. These would be harsh realities that seem in keeping with what the young protagonists of prior "Tales for all" would have to face ... but not Daphné.

No, Daphné gets to run free and wild and just be a special little flower and the world will bend to her every desire, which is nice fantasy, but feels so antithetical to this series. She should experience crushing disappointment, especially when it comes to her having to face of choice of going off to rescue her friends or staging a (probably ineffectual) protest. Where's the assaulting reality ala Bach et Bottine? 

Besides some wonderfully fun dolphin times and lots of great whale footage, La grenouille et la baliene is a fairly dull movie with almost all characters but Daphné being relatively unexplored. Any personal tidbits (like the conflict between the two Grand-papas or Julie's pregnancy) have little weight on the characters or the story overall.  

So This Is Christmas Leftovers (2025) - part 2

A Carpenter Christmas Romance - 2024, d. Jake Helgrin - Crave
Bach et Bottine (aka Bach and Broccoli) - 1986, d. André Melançon - Crave
Jingle Bell Heist - 2025, d. Michael Fimognari - Netflix

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A Light Toast to HallmarKent: A Carpenter Christmas Romance

The Draw: It was on.

HERstory: Andrea Metcalf is a famous romantacy writer who returns to her perfect small town (which is no longer perfect because it burned down after a lightning strike five years ago sparked a rampant blaze) to work on the latest in her successful novel series. Shortly after arriving she runs into Seth, her old high school crush who she has complicated feelings about. Does he run the local hotel with his dad, maybe? I dunno, I missed the first 45 minutes. 

She used to tutor him and when she became his place of solace when his mother was dying of cancer, they started going out, but he would only take her out in public in neighbouring towns. He was the popular funny sports guy and she...was not...and he had a reputation he felt he needed to uphold.

Him and Andie have a lovely afternoon together one day, and his neighbours kids show up at the diner and start jumping up and down on him, and then his pretty neighbour turns up and says to them to leave Seth and Andie alone, as it looks like they're on a date. He downplays it and says they're just old friend and Andie goes cold on him. Old patterns are returning, and she was hoping to have outgrown those insecure feelings.

Their romance rekindles when Seth accidentally electrocutes himself in his garage. Andie comes running when she hears his scream and then sees that he works with electricity to do wood burning. He's working on burning a tree into a door to honour his mom, among other projects for the city.

They have a walk, connect again. They make out, and they do it (off screen). Afterwards they do the talking-under-the-covers thing, and Seth tells Andie he like-likes her.

In the years since Seth joined the military, served his duty, and returned home to do carpentry work. He's been a central figure in the community, giving free room and board to neighbours struggling after the fire and feeding the town and doing free repair work.

When Seth's attractive tenant calls and then comes knocking at 2am (bootie call), Andie is upset again, and storms out. He chases after her and explains that he served with her husband in the military and that he was KIA. He's been helping them out since the fire and things got...complicated.

But the big reveal is it turns out the fire that took out the city started because of an old generator with faulty wiring that maybe blew up when the lighting strike hit? I dunno. He's feeling guilty, and not the town hero that Andrea accuses him of being.

But everyone knows it wasn't Seth's fault and Andie and attractive tenant decide to host the town in a celebration of lights that doubles as a celebration of Seth and his efforts as the community's backbone. Andrea says she's going to stay, at least for a while...she can write anywhere, and she gives him the final page to her new book where the male protagonist of her series no longer dies.

The Formulae:Most of the formulaic beats of a holiday romance are around Christmas-themed things. I guess because the town burned down, it's not very Christmassy? Andie is regularly outside without a coat on so I'm guessing they're in like SoCal somewhere? I dunno.

Unformulae: Well, they do it, like two hot adults should. It's not just a chaste kiss, these hotties are gettin' it on.

True Calling? Not a single Carpenters song, never mind a Christmas one, is played.

The Rewind: Post-sex one night, Andie and Seth are each eating out of their own pint of ice cream. I mean, shouldn't they be sharing a pint, sexily feeding each other?

The Regulars: Hot brunette Sarah Pieterse (Pretty Little Liars) stars in her first Hallmarkie, as does hot hunk Mitchell Slaggert...and also Kaley McCormack who plays Andie's sister...as well as attractive neighbour actor Asia King. It's an all-new-to-holiday-romance ensemble... except that it was written by Sarah Drew, star of Hallmark's Mistletoe Murders.

How does it Hallmark? It's sexier than 98% of most Hallmarkies (this one's a Lifetime production...I didn't look into Lifetime's slate at all this year, but this one's from last year anyway, so whatevs) because the leads are soooo hot and you just want to see hot people do what hot people should do. But outside of that it's not very festive and kind of dull and the melodrama is revealed in big clunky ways. The big "festival of Seth" I really wanted to roll my eyes at, but it did get me a little bit in the feels (the actual tree burned into door, though, was not as impressive as I'd hoped).

How does it movie? Lord, no.

How Does It Snow? Not a flake.

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The third of producer Rock Demers' "Tales for All" series is a real stunner, mainly because Bach etc Bottine  (aka Bach and Broccoli in the Anglo world) doesn't seem at all like the kind of kids movie a kid would want to watch. Where La guerre des toques/The Dog Who Stopped the War was like a kids version of  a war movie, and The Peanut Butter Solution was the young viewer's version of a horror movie, Bach et Bottine is just a dramatic film, and a pretty melancholy one at that.

The film opens with a dream sequence. Fannie is in the desolate tundra, wind howling, snow blowing furiously. Along the way comes, I believe, her parents on horseback in pristine white snowsuits. The horse drops to its knees and falls over, and just when you think Fannie's mom's going to pull out a lightsabre and cut it open to put Fannie inside to keep her warm, she lifts up the saddle and there's a keyboard in the side of the horse. She starts playing and Fannie's father starts dancing and spinning her around. In voiceover, Fannie tells us her parents died in a car crash a few years earlier.  Fannie wakes up. She does not seem all that bothered by this very strange dream, and she finds comfort in her pet hamster.

Fannie's been living with her Grandmother, but Grandma is now sick and needs to go in a home, so she needs Fannie's uncle Jean-Claude (Jonathan in the subtitles and dub) to take care of her. It's coming on Christmastime and Jean-Claude has just started a year's sabbatical from work and he's focused on practising his organ playing for a big audition he has coming up. If he is selected he could go on tour in Europe for six months. Taking care of a 12-year-old is not part of his plan. So immediately upon Fannie's arrival he tells her it's only temporary and he consults with a fostering system.

Jean-Claude is a loner. He doesn't talk much to his neighbours and the cute woman at work who is clearly sweet on him doesn't get much out of him in return besides awkward smiles. Fannie both helps to bring him out of his shell and tests his patience, especially with her penchant for rescuing strays. Fannie and the neighbour boy set up a hostel for the plentiful strays in the storage shed outside Jean-Claude's apartment.

Fannie wants nothing more than to be loved by Jean-Claude, to be his family, but Jean-Claude is too self-involved to see past his own narrow band of interest, and he keeps putting up walls between himself and this traumatized child. It's quite painful viewing. It's clear Jean-Claude has the desire to love and be loved, but he has no ability to make it happen. 

The ending of this film is a real mind fuck. Much like the previous two "Tales for All", Bach et Broccoli is borderline traumatizing. Fannie leaves for a school trip, leaving Jean-Claude home alone, where he learns he dearly misses the poor girl. When she returns from the trip, though, they learn she has been placed with a new family and has one week left with Jean-Claude. Feckless as he is, he doesn't intervene. Fannie runs away from his audition performance, gives all her strays away to neighbourhood kids, and runs to her new foster family days earlier. Jean-Claude turns up at their door. He doesn't know what to say to the girl. In English he tells her he loves her. In French he says "Bonne chance" which is not the same thing.

There's an abrupt cut to the next scene which Fannie narrates, which finds Jean-Claude, his crush from work, and Fannie altogether in his apartment, redecorating, painting the walls stark white, making it a home. But the allusions to the opening, the narration, the blanket of white, does this tell us that it's only a dream? That there's no happy ending for Jean-Claude and Fannie?  I have to wonder if the subtitles/dub try to change the melancholy ending for the English market to a happy one... because even with these edits, it's evident that this is not the happy ending we're hoping for. The credits roll over Fannie holding her pet skunk Bottine/Broccoli and smiling for the camera. I'm trying to recall a film that I saw in the past few years that ends with the credits rolling over a character trying to hold a smile, and how unsettling that is (was it Pearl?).

Bach et Bottine is a complex emotional drama that happens to feature a child as one of the lead roles, but it doesn't make it a children's film. I can't imagine being a 10-year-old in the 1980's and finding this that interesting (not compared to the previous two films in the series), yet as an adult I found this guttingly emotional. The film has exceptional compassion for Fannie, and her yearning for Jean-Claude's acceptance, and it does an exceptional job of exemplifying Jean-Claude's fecklessness while still giving us enough understanding of him to root for him to come around (we don't ever dislike Jean-Claude so much as we are constantly frustrated by the slow pace of his evolution).

It's a slow burn film that will punch you in the gut. 

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Before even seeing the movie I had read the Toastypost as well as listened to the Deck the Hallmark podcast break down the film, so I already knew all the beats of the movie before I went into it. This is a film that twists and twists, recontextualizing the characters and their motivations as the film progresses, and if you know all the twists in advance, well... it's still kind of a cute, fun movie. Kind of.

Former Disney teen star Olivia Holt is Sophia, a shopgirl in a British department store called Sterlings, like it's 1954 all over again (see also The Crowded Day). She has her mind set on stealing some stuff, but so too does Nick (Connor Swindells) who apparently robbed the place once before after being hired by Sterling (Peter Serafinowicz) to set up security in the place, and he still has eyes into the store. He spies Sophia getting into the basement storeroom and stealing a bit of cash, and tries to blackmail her into helping him rob the storeroom of its most valuable jewels, but she pickpockets his wallet and turns things around on him.

Partners they agree. Sophia learns that Nick is a dad, divorced, and struggling after his incarceration. Nick learns Sophia moved to America with her mom when she was small after her biological father told them to piss off. Now they're back for the free health care, only her mom is so sick and needs to fast track her stem cell injections, which can only happen in the private sector. Sophia needs money.

They plan their heist and make it into the vault only to discover the jewels are missing. Plan B, steal the 500K Sterling keeps in his vault in his office, which is a lot more work, including an embarrassing attempt by Nick to seduce Sterling's bitter wife (Lucy Punch).

Directed by Mike Flanagan's DP, it actually looks pretty good, and moves along without really any lulls. It has its luminous moments, particularly around the seduction gambit and I enjoyed how the story effectively told us time and again that these two were never really ever going to pull this off successfully with their limited experience and skill set. The only reason they succeed is because they get help from more than one place (primarily because Sterling is such a douche, everyone's happy to take him down a peg). 

Even knowing all the beats I still had fun, but I imagine it was more fun not knowing. But the romantic angle was probably the least successful part of the film. Sophia and Seth seem more like buddies than lovers throughout the runtime. As much as this isn't a Hallmarkie, their "romance" feels very by the book Hallmarkie. Perfunctory. It's not that the leads don't have chemistry, there's just not a lot of romantic chemistry there, and much of it has to do with Swindells being too low key and reserved in that very British fashion. This needed much more spice to liven it up, especially if it wanted any rewatch factor.

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