KWIF: Coyote vs Acme (+5)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Oldies, and some not-so-goodies. Let's try and be quick about this...ha!

This Week: 
Coyote vs. Acme (2026*, d. Dave Green - in theatre)
Love Wedding Repeat (2020, d. Dean Craig - netflix)
9 to 5 (1980, d. Colin Higgins - hollywood suite)
ABBA: The Movie (1977, d. Lasse Hallström - hollywood suite)
The Gumball Rally (1976, d. Charles Bail - hollywood suite)
Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (1974, d. Toshiya Fujita - tubi)

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At a holiday Monday matinee in a local neighbourhood repertory theatre, I expected a film like Coyote vs. Acme to have at least a few children loading up on sugary drinks and popcorn and running around the theatre. While there were probably over 100 attendees at this screening, I don't think I clocked a single person under the age of 10, and the vast majority were at least 30 or older.

The early millennials were probably the last to experience Looney Tunes as part of the general pop culture diet. Anyone younger, like my GenZ kids, would have probably experienced them on some sort of physical media presented to them by their parents, if at all. While these ridiculous cartoons were a very large part of peoples childhoods for over 60 years, the changing nature of entertainment has rendered these characters and their antics somewhat...obsolete.  There are other characters in other animations on other media that are doing the Looney Tunes thing, but in a modern context, servicing a modern audience.

This is all to say that Coyote vs. Acme is, maybe, the best thing featuring the Looney Tunes characters that I've seen in many decades.  It's not saying much. The efforts to bring these characters to a modern audience have largely been failures (whether artistically or commercially) outside of the original Space Jam and Tiny Toons back in the 1990s. I don't know how often I have though about the Looney Tunes gang since I started "adulting" half my life ago, but I can tell you, it's not very much, not really much at all.  And I think about this kind of stuff all the time.

Coyote vs. Acme was set to release in 2023, and the buzz at the time was that it was a real winner of a film. An honest-to-gosh funny, entertaining, and meaningful film revitalizing these somewhat antiquated characters. Anticipation was already starting to percolate when the film was unceremoniously shelved by Warner Bros. in 2023 for tax writeoff purposes (alongside a nearly completed Batgirl movie and a Scooby-Doo project already in production).  The belief was that we were never going to see this film.

Ketchup Entertainment stepped in and I guess offered Warner Brothers the correct sum of money to release distribution right to them.  I can't imagine that Ketchup did this for any other reason than a strong desire to see the film, because the Looney Tunes box office track record over the past 30 years speaks for itself. 

But it's here, and it's, frankly, magnificent, whether people are seeing it in droves or not, this is both a deliriously funny and entertaining movie and a real love letter to the Road Runner cartoons and cartoon violence in general.

The plot is pretty basic: after decades of faulty equipment and zero successful attempts at capturing and eating the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote decides he wants to sue Acme, the provider of all his bird-chasing gear. Kevin Avery (Will Forte) makes a living out of filing frivolous settlement claims with Acme for token sums to the point that it's a very routine and uneventful process. But Wile E. isn't interested in settling and communicating by using only paper cutouts, a limited supply of placard signs and wild gesticulations, he gets Kevin to commit to taking on Acme on a much, much larger scale.

Accompanied by his neice, Paige (Lana Condor), Kevin and the Coyote start investigating Acme only to start hearing scuttlebutt about secret projects and experiments, with their own carrot-chewing Deep Throat informant guiding them on.

This is an Erin Brocovich meets Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-type mash-up that somehow gets to the noble heart of the little guy persevering in taking on the big guy even though they know they will lose. It's a story about continuing to try even though failure is the most probable outcome, of making movements out of adversity.  There's a "thank you" to all the people who hold up signs and stand up and make noise in the credits, and it spells out perfectly what's at the heart of what should be just a silly live action/animation mash-up.

We've been living with real people in animated worlds on screen for decades upon decades now, but most of that is cgi (not that this isn't) and not the melding of toon worlds with the real world. There are more than a few examples dating back to classic Disney (the best of the more recents being the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers from 2022) but the gold standard has always been Who Framed Roger Rabbit, being a film that merges these realities into an odd yet cohesive place of existence. Coyote vs. Acme finds if not exactly that same balance then very, very close.  You believe these human characters are occupying the same space as these cartoon beings, and vice versa.

The way director Dave Green and his crew subtly (well, as subtle as a cartoon can be) inject animated things into the everyday world (like the screen on someone's cell phone being a cartoon screen instead of a real one) further serves this meshing. There's a super fun action sequence in the third act which finds a human character employing animated devices to wreak animation-style havoc on the real world (like grabbing the pavement on the road, pulling a section up like it were a carpet, and then jerking it causing ripples to wave their way down the road, tossing cars up into the air...really fun special effects).

The comedy comes from all angles, including physical and animated, wordplay and situational comedy, but Coyote vs. Acme, with its script from Samy Burch (with story by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Burch - based on a satirical New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier) finds its greatest comedy in the repurposing of tried and true Looney Tunes jokes and gags in different contexts throughout the film. This will be the litmus test for any viewer and their enjoyment...how familiar are you with the Tunes of yore? I imagine it's still a funny movie without getting these jokes, but it's probably significantly less funny if you don't.

And therein lies the challenge for this film. It can only be a hit if word of mouth is so resoundingly positive that it makes it an unavoidable feature, a real foundational pop culture piece. But if a large part of the audience is too young and unfamiliar, or similarly a large number of the critical/social media attention market don't have the familiarity, the enthusiasm will probably be much less than, say, someone like myself who just smiled the biggest, dumbest smile throughout the entire film, except when I was laughing, which was often. The whole family went to see it with 40 years between youngest and oldest and we all had a blast with it...we'll be shaking the dust off for weeks.

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You can't use a title that riffs on the tagline/second title of one of the all-timers in the time loop genre and not be a time loop movie. Whomever named Love Wedding Repeat should go to movie jail for a decade and think about what they've done (or didn't do).

No, Love Wedding Repeat is not a romcom spin on Edge of Tomorrow's alt Live, Die, Repeat (but could you imagine if this were a wedding romcom taking place at the same time as Edge of Tomorrow? Oh to dream!). Instead it's intoning the film's actual gimmick which, in all honesty, is not bad conceptually but terribly executed. But we'll get to that shortly.

The film opens in Rome where Englishman Jack (Sam Claflin, who is not Nicholas Hoult) was visiting his sister Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson, who is not Sophie Turner) but instead has found himself out on a non-date with his sister's American roommate Dina (Olivia Munn, who is Olivia Munn), and the two are just clicking. As they breach the distance for a kiss, they get interrupted by an old college pal of Jack's and the traditional awkward British pleasantness finds Jack swept away back to London instead of staying to spend more time with Dina.

Fast forward 5 years and Hayley is getting married to an Italian man in an Italian villa. Dina is on the guest list and Jack has one objective in reconnecting with her. He will, however, have to hurdle his spiteful ex-girlfriend Amanda (Frida Pinto) and her boyfriend-with-an-inferiority-complex Chaz (Allan Mustafa) and run interference when Marc (Jack Farthing), a coked-up classmate Hayley had a fling with not too long ago, shows up to disrupt the wedding.  Hayley asks Jack to effectively roofie Marc with a powerful sleeping aide she's been using and, due to divine intervention (or some impish children attending the weddings who rearrange the name placards for the seating at the table), the glass with the sleep aide becomes a game of Russian roulette. Who will get dosed? Is it Marc as intended? Or Jack? Or Dina or Amanda or Chaz? Or dull friend Sidney (a perfectly utilized Tim Key), or sarcastic friend Rebecca (an underutilized Aisling Bea), or Marc's best friend (and Hayley's Maid of Honor) Bryan (Joel Fry)? 

It's Bryan. And so having to handle a sleepy Bryan also falls on Jack's plate as he tries to reconnect with Dina. It's pretty much a catastrophe, and an hour later the groom winds up dead. 

But rewind...what if someone else drinks from the tainted glass instead?

Rather than play through a few of these scenarios, in the way that a time loop would, instead we get an extremely rapid -- to the point of being unintelligible -- montage sequence of other scenarios and blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpses of what the fallout of those situations might look like. And then the second scenario plays out where it's Jack, instead, who gets dosed.

Love Wedding Repeat is a frustrating movie. For a romcom it spends most of its time keeping the romantic couple apart, and offering mostly situational comedy with ringers Key, Bea, and Fry offering a little extra sauce (Fry's sleepy physical comedy is pretty good, Key's attempts to charm Munn are deliciously weird, and Bea's hilarious quips are too infrequent). The situational comedy, however, comes with a lot of questions, and, moreover, the sense that the only reason people are acting the way they are is for the sake of the story.  I mean, obviously... but their actions aren't logical or feel grounded in either reality or even this somewhat heightened reality.

A traditional comedy would put our protagonist(s) in a tight spot for comedic purposes and eventually they would find their way out of it again. The whole point is to build up the characters, to put challenges in their way, to observe their character flaws, and to show them overcoming them. Here, it meticulously goes through the wedding day and builds up all these catastrophes, and then, just, resets, presenting them with a whole other set of challenges to overcome, this time triumphantly.

But unlike a time loop where a character succeeds at leaving the time loop, and then life continues for everyone everywhere as if nothing happened, here, we're effectively dealing with alt realities, and in one alternative timeline Hayley accidentally kills her husband. I mean, where's the satisfaction in knowing that?

There's a kernel here in the story that really could have worked, but the fantastical premise sinks it. The cast is pretty charming, but it's not even close to being enough to save a fundamentally flawed production.

Rome looks nice.

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9 to 5 opens with that iconic low-register piano key (with bass accompaniment, a tapping of the hi-hat, and Dolly herself click-clackking her fingernails emulating a typewriter) and that's all this film needs to suck the audience in. The first couple stanzas of the song further draw you in as Dolly sings about getting up in the morning, forging your way to work and then toiling throughout the day, all while we see imagery of mobile women on the streets of New York on their morning routine. It's all a celebration of women in the workplace, to which the film that follows never lets down except in the last possible moment.

Recent divorcee Judy Burnly (Jane Fonda) enters the workforce for the first time, hired in the secretarial pool at Consolidated Companies under VP Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.  Judy is put under the wing of Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) the senior supervisor of secretarial, who should be in Hart's position but was passed over for not being part of the boy's club... and has once again been passed over for promotion by Hart, the role given to a far junior man (and also Hart recognizes that Violet's supreme competence elevates him, especially when he takes credit for her work).

Hart keeps his secretarial pool under a tight, regimented regime, observed by his subservient personal assistant Roz (Elizabeth Wilson), with Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) being his personal secretary less for her skills than because she is pretty and buxom.  Hart denigrates his female staff regularly, has no compassion for their personal lives, intentionally underpays them and sexually harasses Doralee multiple times a day, while spreading rumours that he and Doralee are actually sleeping together (ostracizing her from her coworkers).

Eventually Doralee snaps at Hart's advances one Friday night and hogties him with a telephone cord. Violet - whose tether was already ready to snap - and Judy, with lingering trauma from her divorce, decide to take matters into their own hands, kidnapping Hart and holding him hostage at his own house while they make incredible improvements to the working lives of the women on their floor - job sharing, flex hours, in-building day care, equal pay for equal work, and talks of unionizing.

There's a ticking clock to their hostage situation, with Hart's wife on vacation and Roz sent away for a multi-week French immersive learning course. Likewise Hart has them on many criminal charges (including attempted murder), but they have a smoking gun that Hart has been embezzling from the company, but a records request will take time to process.

The kidnapping, which is part of the promotion of the film in trailers and the poster, doesn't happen until past the halfway point. Prior to this, the film spins its wheels in two frustrating side-quests. The first finds Doralee, Judy and Violet bonding while getting high and fantasizing about revenge on Hart. The bonding is good-not-great, but the three fantasy sequences are each overlong and kinda corny (although the role reversal fantasy with Doralee being the boss sexually harassing Hart was amusing, to a point...even as I recognize any sexual harassment of any kind is not really funny).  The second finds Violet accidentally poisoning Hart's coffee and getting taken to the hospital after receiving a concussion (unrelated), and there's some stealing a dead body shenanigans that feel like they're from another film entirely.

The characters here work. They are well drawn with interior lives and there are both spoken and unspoken motivations that fuel them. The glimpses as each of their lives outside of work are great and could have been explored even further rather than, say, the whole body-thieving subplot.  The juice of the movie is all in Hart's kidnapping and the changes they implement in his absence, and the lurking people at the office and outside Hart's home that may spoil it all adds layers of intensity.  You want these women to succeed, you want this horrible boss to be exposed, but you know the real risk is that should Hart have any small liberty he will gain the upper hand because of status and gender.

The conclusion of the film finds Hart failing upwards, the trio's changes deemed a corporate success, and that old cliche of still-frame postscript text providing a little glimpse into our main characters' futures. And as successful as the movie is at being quite progressive and feminist forward, it lets our characters down with a lack of imagination and thematic resonance in these postscripts by turning Doralee into Dolly Parton as a successful country and western singer, while Judy gets married to the Xerox guy (and, it sort of implies) isn't working anymore. Only Violet has true success relevant to her character, gaining the vice-president position she's long deserved.  It's also disappointing that Hart's postscript says he gets kidnapped in Brazil and is never seen again, as opposed to, you know, being exposed as a no-talent fraud and philanderer whose wife divorces him, taking everything and he winds up working at McDonalds or something.

Tomlin was always a fiery comedic performer with a very strong presence and no-bullshit personality which served her very well for a time, but the usual Purple Suits seemed to have less and less use for her as she got older (not a new story for women in Hollywood). She's perfect here. Coleman plays a slimeball like no other, where he's imposing but not really threatening, and elicits disgust at almost every turn. Likewise perfect. Fonda's role as Judy is sort of the gateway into this world, and is meant to act as the audience's shepherd through the film, but Judy's journey is a bit thin and could have been beefed up more. She's not much of a presence in the film.  

And then there's Dolly, the petite gal with big hair and big personality bolstered by a big Tennessee accent. She is very pretty, but it's always been Dolly's personality that was her greatest allure over 60 years in the entertainment business. She is so positive and kind and charitable, and that resonates from her no matter what she's doing. Here, as Doralee, that positivity, kindness and charity is taken advantage of, and abused, and watching Dolly flip into a tough-talking, no-nonsense, southern broad is remarkable while still feeling authentic. Dolly was not a pushover. Her successes were her own because of how driven she was and clearly how she could demand respect and would not accept anything else. This was her first film role, and beyond variety shows, her first big acting role, and she destroyed it. Doralee isn't Dolly, but Doralee isn't the same if it's not Dolly in the role. What a magnificent performance and performer. Rest in peace.

Following 9 to 5 there were a handful of other working women movies in the 1980s and they sort of disappeared after that, particularly once the Julia Roberts effect took hold in the 90's, and films about women were either romcoms or sappy melodramas, and there's not been a lot of mainstream movies reckoning with how American workplaces still, by and large, fail women. Even most revenge-on-your-boss movies have been male led.  In that respect 9 to 5, rather than being an archive of a certain time and place, still has an unfortunate vitality to it, especially as angry, old white men in America are attempting to claw back the inches of progress made in the 45 years since this film debuted.

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ABBA was one of my mom's favourites growing up, such that many, many ABBA songs feel baked into my very being. I wouldn't say I was ever a fan, but I really can't imagine an existence without their music.  

When I saw that ABBA: The Movie was on cable (...cable...?) I was hoping for either a so-bad-its good Spice World-style wacky musical adventure around the globe, or else a concert film that would give me the feeling of being at one of their shows in their heyday of the late 1970's when they were the number one musical artists in the world.

It's really unfortunate that ABBA: The Movie is neither of these things. Instead it's a film that follows an Australian radio DJ (Robert Hughes) tasked by his boss to go out an nab an interview with ABBA while they're on their Australian tour. 

Thus much of the movie, rather than being concert footage is instead footage of this personality-deprived non-character trying in vain to worm his way into backrooms and concerts, and, sometimes, interviewing the public about how they feel about ABBA (that most people love ABBA because they're so joyous, wholesome, nice and "clean" winds up feeling like some kind of propaganda after a while).

The concert footage we do see gets us some of that big sound with those big voices, but, I'll be frank, the stage show leaves something to be desired.  Maybe it's the fact that we never get into a groove with the live performances... I don't think there's a single live song that isn't interrupted by cutting to what the DJ is doing in the meantime. 

We get a bit of interview footage (but not ABBA with this DJ) instead fielding questions from the media circus around them, including such hard hitting questions as Agnetha Fältskog being asked about having a "sexiest bottom award" (*eyeroll*), which is then brought up again late in the film (*double eyeroll*).

There are a few of ABBA's bangers presented here, as well as a couple not-so-bangers, and a weird music video at the mid-point that finds the DJ having a dream sequence I guess. It's all nonsense.

ABBA: The Movie is not very entertaining and a terrible waste of potential. For hardcore fans only.

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There was a spate of movies in the 70's that featured characters on long drives, chases or races across the United States, things like Vanishing Point, Death Race 2000, Cannonball!, Convoy, Duel and more. Americans were obsessed with their highways and it seems like they couldn't get enough of watching them be traversed.

It turns out it wasn't just in movies, but in real life as well. The Gumball Rally was inspired by the same unofficial New York-to-LA race that Cannonball Run was (officially?) based on: "The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash". For five years in the early-to-mid 1970's teams of drivers competed in a non-stop race from one coast to the other for little else but the glory of being the winner.  These events were covered by Car and Driver magazine as fun and whimsical adventures featuring some real personalities, and Hollywood was quick to capitalize upon the stories' popularity, pumping out both Cannoball (starring David Carradine, from the director of Death Race 2000) and The Gumball Rally.

The Gumball Rally features a dozen or so vehicles participating in the event, which begins merely with the mention of the word "Gumball" relayed across the land. The participants show up to New York, parking their flashy vehicles in a secret garage and meeting in a private room at a restaurant to discuss how the race will proceed. Lieutenant Roscoe of the LAPD has, for years, been trying to catch the participants of The Gumball Rally, the intonation that their race is a public safety issue (and, given some of the destruction we see in the film, he's right). The organizers of this affair are Roscoe's target: Michael Bannon (Michael Sarrazin) and Steve Smith (Tim McIntire), each hitting the highways in their own sporty coupe. 

The film spends a half hour establishing who the players are, with a little hint as to where they come from and their personalities, and then gives them an extended sequence where they're all putting the finishing touches on their vehicles in the garage, establishing a smidge of repartee between many of them. It's a half hour of movie time before the race begins, and I won't say it was a wasted half hour, but they could have compressed a little more to get to the part we're just waiting to see.

The racers leave the garage 10 seconds apart at 6am on a sleepy, sunny morning in New York. The vehicles race through the near-empty streets where only the construction workers, cops and newsstand agents are mobile. New York is so lovingly shot, we could have spent an hour just moving through those naked streets with rays of sun reflecting off glass, and I would have been happy. As such it's about a 10 minute sequence of the cars attempting to get out of town. It's kind of awesome.

Once out on the highways, the vistas are there, but they are less enticing than New York. The vehicles, particularly the sporty ones, are shot with a near-lustful lens... a real ogling of the AC Cobra, Ferrari Daytona, Chevy Camaro 7-28, Chevy Corvette, Porche 911, and Rolls Royce Silver Shadow among others.

Ostensibly a comedy, The Gumball Rally isn't terribly funny. While there are a few situational chuckles here and there, it's Raul Julia as Smith's ringer, an F-1 driver imported from the Ferrari team in Italy (along with some of his pit crew stationed across the country) that is the biggest personality. He is horny-to-the-point-of-distraction and there's more than a few good gags made from his skirt chasing.  The other big personality in the film is Gary Busey (paired with a suffering John Durren in the Camero) who is fully embodying ADHD in his performance, needing constant, escalating stimulation.

Having never heard of The Gumball Rally before, I was shocked with how expensive and visually appealing a film it is, excellent cinematography, some great (and once-unique) camera placements on the cars, and the sheer number of helicopter shots. There's some requisite smashing-through-shit sequences that are kind of the weakest parts of the film, yet still sort of impressive in the level of destruction (nowhere close to The Blues Brothers level of chaos, but then nothing is).  The best thing about The Gumball Rally, though, is how it doesn't try very hard at all to have character development or story arcs (really, it's only Roscoe that has an arc in this film).  It does what it needs to do, and I very much enjoyed it even if the stakes were very, very low.

I feel another project coming on... Cannonball, Cannonball Run, Death Race 2000, Speed Zone and the others of this ilk, I'm going to have to do comparison watches.

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The titular character of Lady Snowblood, aka Yuki Kashima, was born as a tool of revenge, raised to be a demon whose sole purpose was to avenge the family she never met, punishing the many responsible for their deaths. In the first film, Lady Snowblood accomplished her goal, and had become legend in the process, but by the end was grievously wounded.

While maybe not in top shape when this film begins, Yuki is definitely healthier than when we last saw her, and she's actively trying to evade the law, but eventually must give in. Before her sentence can be carried out, she's rescued by Secret Police and sent on a mission to spy on a revolutionary.  She become the housemaid of  Ransui Tokunaga (Juzo Itami), but it's not long before Ransui reveals he knows who she is. She fills him in on his important dissident work and implores her assistance in toppling some corrupt government officials.  Except they get the jump on them, Ransui is taken, Yuki escapes to find his brother and bring him some damning documents that could explode the country into chaos.

She flees to the slums where Shusuke Tokunaga lives and finds a man who loathes his own brother, and will not cooperate in taking down the government. Instead he plans to blackmail the men in power for the benefit of the slums, requesting much needed money and food. Instead, the slums are burned to the ground and it's up to Yuki to take revenge.

Unlike the first film, where Yuki is the quiet, driving center of the film, the plot moving with her wherever she may lead it, here she's frequently on the sidelines and one has to ask, in this story of class, segregation, veterans affairs, police brutality, corrupt politicians, and socialst revolution, where exactly is she supposed to fit? The story is not bad, but it's not well matched to the character, and it fees more like Yuki is swept up the the films events rather than steering them.  

A story set in two halves, neither dominates over the other, but then neither does either elevate itself. Given how brilliant the first film was, this one is quite the let down without really being bad. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Barbie

2023, Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) -- download

I need a new tag: Finally Got Around To It. Maybe someday I will even watch Parasite.

This movie is a dear of the film industry, in that it is considered topical, intelligent, and made boat loads of post-digital post-pandemic cinema money. We all know the Barbenheimer legend. But was it a good movie. Thankfully, yes. But was it a great movie? Ehhhhhnnn, somewhat.

Weeks after I wrote the above, the Oscar noms (nom nom nom) come out and its up for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actors (Ryan and America), Adapter Screen Play, etc. Notably missing are Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig. Seems... weird.

The best thing about Barbie is that it is exactly what it should be, but it is also a subversion of everything it is about. On the surface it is full of beautiful, known faces and even has a very very Barbie blonde playing "stereotypical Barbie" and one of today's most popular male faces playing Ken. It is all about the pink, and the plastic, and the so-called Great Lives the Barbies all live. It could have been just about that, as most of Hollywood would have been entirely satisfied to have a Barbie movie about the world they live in, producing a Pixels level movie about a popular toy franchise.

Instead, we get a feminism-lite subversion of what Barbie is -- the unattainable role model based entirely on looks and a life very few can have. This subversion leads to some very loudly heard but not very nuanced monologues on what it is to be a woman in the current age. It was the kind of commentary that pissed the fragile male ego off, made women around the world cheer, but also made others groan at the over simplifications made. 

In a way, it was a very tactical film, in that it played both sides but satisfied the Purple Suits well enough. The funny thing is that I don't think it diminishes what it was trying to attain. Our current age seems very determined to erode whatever progress women have made in my lifetime. At least in The West; the rest of the enlightened world is probably just facepalming hard. This is probably as loud Hollywood can be without being shutdown. This might explain the "Oscar snubs".

Wow, that is a lot said from the point of view of a cis het white male. And without even saying what the movie was about.

The movie is fun. Barbie (Margot Robbie, Birds of Prey) wakes up in her perfect world, until one day, its not so perfect. Something is wrong. Someone in the "real world" is playing with her... wrong. So, Barbie, on the advice of a Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon, The Bubble) goes to the real world to find the little girl playing with her wrong, to set things right. Stereotypical Ken (Ryan Gosling, Bladerunner 2049) sneaks into her pink car and joins her on her Hero's Journey, but only ends up discovering Male Fragility. And horses. The real world is just as plastic as the Barbie world, just more toxic, but Barbie has escape Evil Mattell with the disillusioned little girl (actually a disillusioned mom [America Ferrara, How to Train Your Dragon]; the little girl is quite fine actually) to return to the Barbie world, only to find out Ken has returned earlier and set about an incel revolution. Together they remind the Barbies of Barbie world that they are independent, strong Barbies that run their world. The movie is fun.

I will desist from having any more "enlightened" opinions.

Kent's post.

1-1-1-KsMIRT: Djanucembary

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month(ish) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  These are the shows I finished (mostly) in December '23 and January '24.

This "month":
For All Mankind Season 4 - AppleTV+
The Crown Season 6 - Netflix
Letterkenny Season 12 - Crave
Fargo Season 5 - FX
Slow Horses Season 3 - AppleTV+ (6 episodes)
Echo - Disney+ (5 episodes)

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For All Mankind Season 4 - (6 out of 10 episodes watched)

The Plot 100: There's an established multinational base of operations on Mars, but there's division between the military-bred employees of the government, and the for-hire menial labour, especially after a particularly catastrophic asteroid mining operation gone wrong. Meanwhile Cold War tensions reignite after a military coup in Russia.

(1 Great) The episode with the strife in Russia was easily the season's most compelling. It brought stakes to and fallout for every aspect of the show. Margot, particularly, was held captive as a dissident but who are her captors reporting to? On the Mars base tensions run high as there's division amidst the Russians as well as with the Americans, North Koreans and the "neutral" third-party work-for-hires.

(1 Good) Apple isn't shy with their budgets, and FAM never ceases to surprise me with how good the sets look, whether it's era-specific living rooms on Earth, control rooms on space ships, or outdoor settings on the Red Planet.

(1 Bad) Our lead character, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) was already an experienced pilot and astronaut at the start of season 1, which was set in 1969. This season starts in 2003, 34 years later. Ed is, conservatively, in his late 60s but seems to be acting closer to his early 80's with his bad grey hair dye and his thickly slathered-on wrinkles and his pained posturing. I can't believe this old man, regardless of his accolades, is still in the rotation. He's also a direly unlikable crank at this point, a self-absorbed hypocrite, and they hint at a romantic entanglement with a Russian cosmonaut at least half his age which was just...no thank you.

META: At this stage there's three original characters left from the first season. The rest have retired or been killed off or don't fit the storyline. It means introducing more new characters, which the show doesn't seem to care about as people, but just as devices for telling their story of class struggles. The carryovers from season 3, Kelly, Aleida and Dev, were supporting cast now bumped up to spotlight players, and I don't think any of the roles are up for the task. By the time I gave up on the show, I was only invested in Margot's story, and even then, hardly enough to keep watching.

FAM is a show built around moving forward in time quickly, and dreaming of a different reality where the space race never ended, leading to a much different focus for our modern conflicts, all centred around journeys into the great unknown. But it does so at the expense of stability. I think its creators (Ronald D Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi) have a clear idea in mind of each step of this series, where it's going and where it wants to end up in terms of advancing humanity's reaches into space, but it struggles with grounding itself in its characters. Conceptually they know what types of stories can be told within the framework, what type of intrigue and drama there can be, but it's always gotten weighed down by cast and striving for continuity. I think Season 4 might have played far better had it been an entirely new cast front and center, with maybe small cameos from old characters. I think then it would feel like it was advancing.

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The Crown Season 6 - (10 episodes)

The Plot 100: Broken into two parts this season, the first half deals with divorcees Diana and Charles, and the ever-growing circus around their lives, culminating in Diana's death. The second half deals with the fallout on the family, with Diana's spotlight now shining on William, as well as Elizabeth and Charles coming to terms with their futures as monarch.

(1 Great)  - This is a particularly banner season for its one-off stories of reverence for and scandal amidst the royal family. I'm not a tabloid guy so I didn't actually know much about the Diana/Dodi relationship, and it was fascinating to watch it unfurl, especially with the prior season's spotlight on Mohamed Al-Fayed and his fixation on the royals, and how he used everything, including his son (and his son's death) to try to ingratiate himself to them, only to be rebuffed (was it racism, or just being too keen, and trying too hard to be liked?). 

(1 Good) - My favourite episode perhaps was "Ruritania" which pitted Elizabeth against Tony Blair, who successfully petitions Bill Clinton's aide in the Kosovo War and is riding high, much to the Royals' chagrin. Losing a popularity contest against the PM, she consults Blair in "modernizing" the crown, but in the process unveils centuries of legacy traditions and roles that would otherwise be lost were the crown not to preserve them. I liked that spotlight, even though I still felt like Peter Morgan was taking bad faith pot shots at Blair because of his party's position on the monarchy that conflicts with his own.

(1 Bad) - this season, more than any other, seems less guided by a narrative for Elizabeth. In fact, Elizabeth shrinks into the background throughout most of the season, as the sensationalism of Diana's life and death captures all the attention. It is a series called The Crown afterall, so it should be about the monarchs yet to reign as well, but Elizabeth has been such the core of the series that when she's not, it feels like it's missing something, as compelling as it still is.

META: I think perhaps because of the time period this season takes place is when the royals were most in the public eye the dialogue felt the most overwraught and pointed, unnatural and hyperaware. It's not the first time I noticed the dialogue in The Crown but I have never noticed it this continually. It's not bad writing, but the family often felt like characters, and not real people, especially Diana and Charles. The glamour of Elizabeth Debicki and Dominic West, well above that of their real selves, was positively distracting, despite being incredible performers.

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Letterkenny Season 12 (6 episodes)

(1 Great) Episode 2 finds Jim Dickins wanting to make a country song and accompanying video, and learns that the gang, to his dismay, don't really have any time for country and western music. But they agree to help him anyway, which of course means they find Strt and Roald are involved on the creative side. They've broken down the components of country and western music into two essential elements: 1) a unique, dumb hook that's also the title (the dumber the better), and 2) as much hick shit as possible.  This leads to a music video that is at once a tribute AND parody to nu-country music.

(1 Good) The main story of last season found the gang taking in a former "good guy"-turned-upcountry degen Jivin' Pete in and trying to help him turn his life around (the implication being he's trying to kick a meth habit), but when he relapses they beat the shit out of him and his degen friends. It's a weird message. This season, Dary falls in with the degens, because, well, he's sick of being the punching bag among his friends. Up til now, the degens have largely been an amorphous group but here they get into the weeds of it all and, yeah, they're trash and proud of it, which just makes them that much worse. Dary gets in too deep, but the message of friendship prevails.

(1 Bad) Flashbacks? Seriously? Letterkenny, for 11 seasons, has been FULL of callbacks. It's not that it gets mired in the past, but rather, it's a show that's developed a population for its fictional town and a shorthand of patter to go along with it. The characters remember jokes they enjoyed in the past, stories told, fights that happened, and refer to them like anyone would. It's just a part of the rapid-fire comedy machine that Jared Keeso built. But they've never needed flashbacks. Flashbacks just get in the way of the rapid-fire comedy. The key trait needed to watch Letterkenny is an attention span, because paying attention pays off, so why in Season 12 do they think we've all of a sudden stopped paying attention. It's a not-very-funny comedic slap in the face.

META: I burned out on Letterkenny in December of 2022 when the wife and I did 10-season binge-watch leading into Season 11. At that stage I'd seen the first few seasons a half dozen times at least. I knew the show inside and out. Strangely my favourite part of Letterkenny was the relationship dramas (such that it was, it was always pretty subtle but made for good cliffhangers).  However once Marie-Fred and Long-Dick Dierks were out of the picture, the relationship drama didn't seem like it had anywhere else to go. Those were pretty high points. So season 10 and 11 felt a bit...floundering and directionless. But Season 12, in turning the relationship drama inward, into conflict between Dary and the group, made for a pretty good season, even with flashbacks. 

The season's other arc is found the characters exploring feeling "stuck" only to, in the end, find themselves content with their lot in life.  You're only "stuck" if you're unhappy with where you are. It's a satisfying end note that, like many a cartoon, signifies that this comedy machine *could* keep on trucking for another dozen seasons if it wanted to, but, perhaps, the creatives are thinking that they themselves are *stuck* and need to move on from Letterkenny.  So while the characters are left happy where they are, Keeso and Jacob Tierney are getting unstuck, set to prove that they can succeed elsewhere, outside of Letterkenny.  It's bittersweet saying goodbye, but it definitely feels like time.  I don't know that this gives the whole town the sendoff it deserves, but, besides those darn flashbacks, it otherwise doesn't feel too pointedly a "final season", which is a good thing. Fitting.

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Fargo Season 5 (10 episodes)

(1 Great) This season is incredible! Tackling toxic masculinity, domestic abuse, female solidarity, right-wing extremism (in its various guises), class structures, city-vs-country, the debt crisis, trauma, and, ultimately, compassion. It's a lot, and it is not shy about it.  It paints a very dense and intricate picture in how all these various components interact, and is sometimes blunt and sometimes sly in its messaging, but it's quite powerful throughout.  It's also darkly funny and frequently intense opening with an incredible sequence that turns the baseline Fargo kidnapping-gone-wrong on its ear in spectacular fashion, and doesn't let up from there. This is Noah Hawley's tightest season of scripts yet (I'm assuming the extra time during the pandemic really let him hone this season to a razor-fine edge) Every episode has its purpose on its own but also in fulfilling the whole picture, and I can't think of a single one that felt like it dipped in quality at all.

(1 Good but also Great) The cast in every season of Fargo have been incredible, but this one was a pretty huge surprise, starting with Juno Temple. Coming out of Ted Lasso, I wouldn't have thought she had this kind of performance in her. Munch calls her a tiger, and he's not wrong. She is absolutely fierce, and resourceful, but she's not an action hero, she's a survivor, and she's smart. It doesn't mean she's infallible, and the show never walks into the trap of having her be anything more than human. I seriously didn't see this in Temple before, but now I don't think I can go back to seeing her as Keeley.  Of course Jon Hamm is great. This character is basically the bastard offspring of Don Draper and Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (from The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), just a real self-entitled prick of a human who thinks god speaks through him and his extremist ideals and position of power make him untouchable. His comeuppance, 10 episodes in coming, is so sweet. Jennifer Jason Leigh delivers a stern, poker-face role of the smartest woman in the room, always holding the highest hand, but can still be taught a thing or two by the right person. Dave Foley pops up playing a fixer character, the likes we've seen him do a dozen times in sketches in years past, but bringing a certain aged entitlement and wisdom to it. New Girl's Lamorne Morris, Stranger Things' Joe Keery, and Never Have I Ever's  Richa Moorjani both deliver marvelous performances that show some serious dramatic range outside their popular past roles, and Sam Spruell as Ole Munch, this season's force-to-be-reckoned-with manages to be seemingly the most dangerous piece in the chess set, but also have us filp-flop in rooting for and against him time and again.

(1 Bad) There's really no bad in this, besides bad people. So many bad people. But if I had to pick a "bad" in the story it would come from Lars (Lukas Gage), Moorjani's absolutely useless waste-of-space husband whose tick-like parasitic mooching, driving her deeper into debt and despair. This culminates in a barf-inducing "I want a wife" speech. It's every last dollop of male privilege and white entitlement wrapped in shit and hurled like a grenade with "love" being the pin that's removed to let it explode. The danger he represents is not a physical one, but one of confinement, of restraint, how immature men, led to believe in their own superiority, hold women down by being emotional and financial burdens. 

META: Easily the best season of Fargo yet. It has all the same tricks -- all those Coen Bros. references, the metaphysical element, the cops, the dangerous hired help, the incredible set pieces -- but it transcends them. Season 1 took Fargo the movie and made a TV formula out of it. Each season was a remix of that formula, but still felt like the formula. This season felt like the formula was added to a whole new recipe, creating a much richer, more satisfying dish.

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Slow Horses Season 3 (6 episodes)

(1 Great) It cannot be undersold how incredible Gary Oldman is in this show as Jackson Lamb. He's committed to physically looking his worst, playing a disgusting, flatulent, belligerent sot who still manages to have the sharpest mind in all of intelligence and run circles around his superiors. Few can tolerate being in his presence, and those who can he pushes away at every opportunity. If he's punishing himself for something, we'd like to know it, but it's yet to be revealed.   

(1 Good) Lamb is in charge of Sloe House, and, in each season, you keep expecting the band of MI-5 rejects relegated to Lamb's employ to show a certain level of competency at some point, yet at every turn the Slow Horses manage to affirm exactly why they remain at Sloe House, should Lamb deign to keep them on at all. I love that about the show... you know these are trained field agents, and so you can never anticipate when their competency is going to fail them.

(1 Bad) Watching this season week-to-week.  We binged Seasons 1 and 2 together, but even compared to them, Season 3 was particularly cruel in its cliffhangers each episode. The latter half especially, where the shit started hitting the fan, and then just kept erupting like a geyser.  

META: The show is following the novel series by Mick Herron and each 6-episode season feels like a novel divided into chapters. It feels like a very different way to adapt a novel series into television, being unconcerned with building a cast, in as much as the cast only stays as consistent as the novels. It doesn't matter if the audience likes X or Y, they're staying true, which gives the show the feeling of "anything can happen" which few shows ever truly have.

This season really delves into the games people play when they're part of this world, and adding "independent contractors" to the equation is pretty scary shit, but I'm sure even scarier and upsetting in real life. By the end, the status quo is shaken (not stirred) yet again, and it's a mystery if all the surviving faces from this season will still be returning in the next. I wait expectantly. 

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Echo Season 1 (5 episodes)

(1 Great) Years before superhero fatigue set in globally, there was an entirely different fatigue felt about the Netflix series featuring the Marvel heroes of the streets of New York. They were series that came out the gate strong, a lot of good to great first seasons, but very quickly they started to feel samey and formulaic, and made for the sake of making them. Late stage superhero movies and TV shows feel like they've gone the same route, just a product made impulsively, without much or love or care. Echo is different.

Echo feels different. With lead actor Alaqua Cox, Marvel got a threefer, a Native American (Menominee) performer who is also deaf and wears a prosthetic limb. I'm not meaning to be reductive, since Marvel *could* have simply hired her to check boxes, but, on top of being who she is physically, she is also a very commanding performer. Tall, broad shoulders, with striking facial features that are both hallmarks of beauty and toughness. The jackpot keeps ringing. Alaqua doesn't change her facial expression much, but like tough guys of cinema past who were similarly stone-faced, the performance just makes you pay closer attention.

(1 Good) Echo would be nothing without having a story that embraces Echo's world, draws us into it. The show does so by having extended conversations in sign language, or extended action sequences without much audio, that put you alongside the star in her exploits. And it's so different as to feel shockingly fresh, even if it's largely using the same templates in the past.  The sound variances, the amount of quite moments, they attention getting. It trains you early on that quiet moments are when you read dialogue, but then they quickly also become the times when the action is happening. Being in Echo's hometown in Oklahoma brings with it a heavy Choctaw presence, and a completely different pace than New York's Hells Kitchen. Like Reservation Dogs (which shares many of its performers with Echo), the atmosphere is a lot different, and it seems less melodramatic as a result. Of course, Echo is trying to escape her past, from her adoptive uncle Kingpin, Wilson Fisk (a returning Vincent D'onofrio, gargantuan and fantastically threatening).  But Fisk is not just a ringer, he is both family and foe, and his story, which started way back in Daredevil which started 9 years ago, is deftly recapped here that provides something meaningful to both him and Echo.

(1 Bad) But Charlie Cox's Daredevil, heavily touted on the trailers and commercials for Echo is such a ringer. He's in one sequence, allowing a younger Echo from a few years earlier, have an encounter with the devil of Hells Kitchen and come out with basically a win, impressing uncle Kingpin. That is the extent of his appearance.  

META: The show's opening half hour is a bit of a muddy trek as it tries to strip out what's still important from the Hawkeye series in which Echo debuted for this series. It mixes in new footage with reuse and there is noticable minutiae between them that really feels like disconnected hodgepodge. At the same time as it's trying to either catch up new viewers or refresh prior viewers, it's also seeding in its own lore based in Choctaw ancestry for Echo's power-set beyond being a tough-as-nails fighter. Once you make it past the rough opening, and Echo returns home, it's three and a half really, truly solid episodes of action-drama TV that sometimes transcend. The finale, though, feels the weight of its reduced episode order (from 6 to 5) as it does feel hurried and certain characters do get a bit of short shrift (I could have done with much more Devery Jacobs). I appreciate how Echo sort of de-escalates the situation rather than making it larger. It was a much appreciated tactic for shifting the whole thing.  As a package, I liked it far, far better than I was expecting and it

KWIF: Poor Things (+5)

KWIF = Kent's week in film.

With the Amazon original The Black Demon, Toasty mentioned needing a post-Christmas palate cleanser. Even though I didn't go very hard into Christmas at all this year, just doing the requisite half of our Advent calendar, I too needed such a cleanser, moreso because the yoke of Godzilla has been weighing me down a bit (world's tiniest violin, I get it. I do these things to myself, folks). 

I wanted to spend my post New Years' time off work at the movie theatres, shaking off the shackles of the COVID years, and getting out of the habit of only going for the latest spectacle. The "best of 2023" lists were hitting and I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and into challenge mode. But now, as I look at my 5 selections from the week, with only one exception, these are all auteur directors who I am quite familiar with, so I'm not sure I stepped that far out of my comfort zone after all. Let's get into it.

This week:
Poor Things (2023, d. Yorgos Lanthimos - in theatre)
Anatomy of a Fall (2023, d. Justine Triet - in theatre)
The Boy and the Heron (2023, d. Hayao Miyazaki - in theatre)
The Zone of Interest (2023, Jonathan Glazer - in theatre)
Ferrari (2023, d. Michael Mann - in theatre)
Ikarie XB-1 (1963, d. Jindřich Polák - Criterion Channel)

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Is Yorgos Lanthimos a provocateur? Of course he is. He enjoys pushing the tolerances of his audience, especially when he's scripting his features. Dogtooth, the Lobster, and Killing of a Sacred Deer are each uniquely disquieting films.  In those films, it's the way in which Lantimos' lens observes everything and everyone, with a cold, clinical detachment, which only makes the injection of the surreal or fantastical even more of a challenge to the audience.

With writer Tony McNamara on The Favourite, and now Poor Things, he's found a partner whose scripts push buttons and boundaries but in a less-distancing way. The humour is still dark, but not nearly as faint or dry as Lanthimos' scripts (if his even offer any humour at all).

Poor Things is the pair moving to the next level. Where there was an opulence to The Favourite, it still felt...traditional, I suppose, for a period piece. Here, creativity is unleashed in a way I get the feeling Lanthimos has been wanting it to be his entire career. He's got a budget, and he uses every cent of it.

Best described either as beautifully grotesque (or, better yet, grotesquely beautiful) in art, design, make-up, effects, sound, score -- the whole creative spectrum -- everything is bold, ornately constructed, and just captivating to behold. The first act is in black and white, and even that doesn't mute its life and vibrancy (Lady Kent asked afterwards, "when did it switch to colour?").

Poor Things is a fantasy film that is Barbie for grown-ups only. I'm sure someone will draw out all the parallels in a youtube essay (if it hasn't been done already), but to paraphrase critic Alonso Duralde, both films find their lead characters go on a journey only to discover who they already know themselves to be.

Here Emma Stone, in her boldest performance to date, is Bella, a new take on Frankenstein's creature. I'll leave her origins to be teased out by the film, but where we meet her she is but an infant in a woman's body. Her creator, her father figure, the mad scientist/Doctor Frankenstein of the piece, Godwin (Willem Dafoe) she calls "God" for short, which was no doubt his idea. As in many a Frankenstein tale, it's the doctor, not the creature who is the monster, but here we meet a man who has been horribly scarred (both physically and emotionally) by his own father, and processes his trauma through his hilariously horrifying scientific feats (the English bull terrier with its head swapped with a duck was just one of many dark delights).

Bella starts out a mono-syllabic infant in our first meeting with her, but, as observed by Max (Ramy Youssef) her vocabulary, capacity for reason and intellect grow dramatically every day. Max, hired by Godwin, to be Bella's observer, is captivated by her ("what a beautiful ["r"word]", he says). It's the first of many uncomfortable thoughts the film brings out, and for about 15, maybe 20 minutes, the film wrestles with whether it's leaning into the "born sexy yesterday" trope. But it shifts the leering gaze away from objectifying Bella, instead looking sternly, eyebrow arched, at the men who would objectify her. 

Bella starts exploring her adult body, her sexuality, and when the men in her life try to control that side of her, she starts to distance herself from the men in her life. She sees the control they wish to yield, and she understandably doesn't want that. Eventually, as her intellectual curiosity grows, she wishes to be free of Godfrey's confines within the beautiful manor, but like an overprotective father, he wants to know she's safe by keeping her contained. When lawyer Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), a roguish Lothario, is brought onto the compound he becomes captivated by just the thought of Bella, and then, on her own volition, is whisked away on a Mediterranean journey of discovery, much of it sexual, but cultural and culinary as well.

Stone's performance as Bella, is an ever evolving one, and she handles the role masterfully. It's a very physical performance, that requires her to show a slow and gradual increase of control and ownership over her body. It's the entire metaphor of the film and so an essential element. But it's Stone's ability to show the intellectual growth, and not just through words, but through her eyes, that is outstanding.  The role requires a lot of sex and nudity which, both credit to Stone and Lanthimos, are never objectifying, and always empowered. Bella is not sexy, she's sexual. 

Ruffalo, meanwhile, brilliantly plays a cartoon of a man so out of control of his own desires that his own caddish game backfires upon him. He is the Ken to Bella's Barbie, just a husk of a person lacking inner depth or sense of identity outside of elitism and sexual conquest. He's used to a society where men have control, and has no concept of what to do with a woman who won't follow the patriarchal rules of "polite society". It's a wildly comedic performance, teetering on campy but just restrained enough as to be welcome instead of out of place.

If Barbie was "Feminism 101", Poor Things is at the very least a second year class. It's a fantasy setting, yes, but it reflects the fight still being fought today for women to have liberty over their minds, body and sexuality. It can be blunt about it but even outside of the theme, it's still an amazing adventure of self-discovery.

It's also been proffered that Poor Things is about an autistic character's sexual awakening and journey of self discovery, and from what I've seen on letterboxd, many people identify as on the spectrum have found a pretty deep connection with Bella, and the way she engages with the world. I look forward to deeper analysis on that front.  

This was the last movie I saw in 2023, and it's also, quite possibly, the best in a pretty great year for film.

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There's the "whodunnit", and the "howdunnit". Anatomy of a Fall ("Anatomie d'une Chute") is a "diddunnit", as it presents us with a scenario, the death of a husband and father in a remote mountainside chalet home, and then tries to parse out, given all the evidence it chooses to present us with, whether the wife killed him or not.

If it sounds Hitchcockian, it has that kind of a conceit, but director Triet tells the film almost entirely from the perspective of Sandra (Sandra Hüller, in an incredible performance) with an lens that presents such intense compassion while also managing to retain enough distance as to not betray the "diddunnit" conceit.

The first half of the film finds Sandra, a very cerebral and composed woman, working on her defence with her lawyer, an ex-flame Vincent (Swann Arlaud, who is going to have to live with the shorthand moniker of "sexy French lawyer" for some time), while the second half of the film is the trial (and French trials are intriguingly different from the American trial process we have seen a thousand times over).

Where American trial films are largely very much about "the story" (usually based on true-life or novel adaptation), with maybe some character driven elements, Anatomy of a Fall is about perceptions, about examining how we see someone based on the information given, and the judgements we make thereof. 

The opening scene, for example, has Sandra, an accomplished writer, being interviewed by a college aged female student. The scene, which takes place maybe an hour before the death of Sandra's husband, finds the two women already in conversation, but still at early stages. The student hasn't yet been able to segue into their interview, and any questions she asks, Sandra doesn't quite deflect so much as steer back towards the student as she almost counter-interviews...but casually. Knowing what the film is about, I'm already questioning Sandra, is she being cagey, or friendly? Is she controlling this situation intentionally or is she, maybe, just a little tipsy from wine? 

In the back half of the movie, the prosecuting attorney tries to re-contextualize this opening scene as flirtatious. The prosecutor knows that Sandra is bisexual and had cheated on her husband in the past. He's trying to build a narrative of who Sandra is for the judicial bench, just as he tries to build a narrative around the death of her husband.

But so too must Sandra and sexy French lawyer build a narrative. And so too does Triet build a third narrative that lies closer to the middle (but if it falls on one side or the other of the middle is up to the audience). All these narratives are a part of a whole, and it's a brilliant examination of what we know versus what we perceive. The trial is not one of of facts, it's one of perception. If you build the narrative one way, she's guilty. Another way she's innocent. The two are very hard to reconcile. Is Sandra cold and calculating? Or is she just German?

Language has a lot to do with it. The film is French-made, but is largely in English. Hüller is German, but never speaks it in the film, only speaking English and French. How does language play a role in our perceptions of someone? How does language play a role in controlling a conversation, a relationship? It's subtext in the film, but also a huge part of what it's trying to say about how we view and understand someone.

This was a fascinatingly thoughtful film while also being a gripping trial drama. It has things to say about the court system, about relationships, about parenting, about mental health. It's not offering answers, but it's keen to explore.

I didn't even talk about the huge role Sandra's son, Daniel, a pre-teen with low vision, plays in the film as a key witness. Young Milo Machado-Graner gives an outstanding performance that shows wisdom beyond his years, and taps into an emotionality most adult actors can't authentically reach.

Of all the films I watched this week, this is the one I immediately wanted to watch again.

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Anime and I do not get along great (much to my teen's chagrin). It's something I need to explore with a pop culture therapist who can help me unpack the reasons why. I haven't figured it out. But, of course, there's "anime" and then there's Studio Ghibli. There's Studio Ghibli, and then there's the auteur of auteurs of animation Hayao Miyazaki.  

Ghibli is held up on this other level from the term anime (just like, at least for a time, Pixar was distinguished from other "animated" movies), and Miyazaki is put on an even higher pedestal. I've watched over half of Miyazaki's oeuvre, and while I find his movies gorgeous, I still don't connect with most of them.

The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki's latest "final" film. I forget how many times he's retired and come back (maybe only twice) but he is an "event" director, so it's no surprise that the film has been doing some great numbers at the North American box office, and receiving heaps of critical attention. I was, once again, dazzled, but left feeling a sense of uncertainty over what I'd seen and how I felt about it.  It's happened with every Miyazaki film I've seen (save for Ponyo).  

Perhaps it's because Miyazaki intends for his films to be watched and rewatched, explored for meaning. There's obviously what Miyazaki is bringing to the film, but also what the audience is getting out of it, and the director is notoriously cagey about expressing what his films mean. In reading about The Boy and the Heron since watching it this past week, others have unpacked some of its inspirations, being Miyazaki's relationship with his Ghibli co-founders and his own relationship with animation. The denouement of the film has been interpreted as a relinquishing of the torch to the young animators of today, perhaps.  If you don't go into The Boy and the Heron as a Miyazaki scholar, are you going to grok any of that?

Re-titled from the Japanese name "How Do You Live?", it's a film that begins pretty stone sober, with the death of young Mahito's mother during a Pacific War bombing of Tokyo. Mahito and his father relocate to a rural estate to live with his aunt (his mother's sister whom his father is now married to) and the grannies. Mahito is traumatized over the loss of his mother, and is distant and angry. He's not particularly fond of his aunty stepmother either, even though she shows him only kindness and sympathy. 

On the estate, he has regular encounters with a blue heron, whom, over these encounters starts to reveal that it speaks, and is in fact, a horrendous toad of a man in disguise. Mahito's mother and aunt and some of the grannies are of a lineage that are attuned to the magic of the world, in particular a silo with a strong family lore and magical properties. When Mahito's aunt goes missing, he's drawn into the silo, Alice in Wonderland style, and goes down the rabbit hole.

Within this world within worlds (or world between worlds, as its a gateway outside of time) Mahito discovers his family history as well as younger versions of his one granny and his mother, who along with a reluctant heron, aide him in his journey to find his aunt.

A lot of Miyazaki's films feature the fantastical for fantastical sake. At least that's always been my perception. There could be deeper meaning in all of it, but if there is, Miyazaki's never telling. I think there are aspects to his work that have meaning to him, for sure, and sometimes in the fantasy there is meaning for the character, but I also think the director has a bold ability to bring stream-of-consciousness to the screen, and so a lot of his fantasy is just that, for pure imagination's sake.

Fantasy isn't my genre. There's often an absence of logic to it, an absence of rules. So The Boy and the Heron, while striking, left me perplexed, and not in a good way.  I think I'll have to do a full Miyazaki run at some point and try to engage with his repertoire, and thus this film, in a more metatextual sense.

I should note that I saw the film in its English dubbed version, which I initially bristled at upon realizing it, but turns out may be one of the best dubs I've ever heard. There's often a sense of disconnect between the animation and the vocal performance in a translation dub, but this one felt almost seemless, natural even, although I did get distracted trying to figure out who some of the voice cast was (best to leave it as a surprise for the credits, methinks).

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Jonathan Glazer's previous film, Under the Skin was a potent a non-narrative drama about an alien's exploration of humanity through sexual temptation? I referred to it as  "a moody (or perhaps moodless) art-piece that isn't so much a story as a concept, a 2-hour art installation about male sexuality in its various forms - primal, tender, brutal - masquerading as entertainment".

Where Under The Skin explored humanity through the lens of an alien, The Zone of Interest takes the same dispassionate lens and explores inhumanity instead. Call it "the mundane existence of evil". The film spends most of its time in and around the home of a Nazi Commandant. We witness Herr Hoss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller again, having a real moment), two boys, infant daughter (always crying) and the Jewish servants as they entertain guests, celebrate birthdays, play, clean, cook and serve. It would all seem very banal, if it weren't for all the fucking Nazi's about, and for the fact that, just on the other side of the wall of the yard is the Auschwitz concentration camp which Hoss is in charge of.

There's not really a narrative to the film. It's experiential. As we witness this family living their life, buoyed by their privileges and receiving tainted spoils of the murdered people from the other side of the wall, we are all too aware of the sounds of the trains, the gunfire, the screams, shrieks and yells, and the sounds of the furnaces, not to mention the gushing red flames coming out of the smokestack.

Herr Hoss takes meetings where the deplorable plans of evil men to make the eradication of a people more efficient are discussed with the casualness of a board room meeting about a new marketing ploy for, I dunno, salsa. Hedwig shows her visiting mother her home for the first time, and her mother wonders if the woman whose house she used to clean is on the other side of the wall. The boys play, and other children play with them, in the backyard while mass murder happens on the other side of the wall. The boys have a teeth collection. The infant is never in the arms of its mother, always with a servant.

The closest we get to drama in the film is news that Hoss is being relocated. Hedwig refuses to transfer and sends Hoss to his new assignment on his own. Her speech about having built a home for their family that is too precious to leave makes the bile in one's stomach rise.  There is a moment there where Hoss, facing being separated from his family, elicits just the smallest twinge of compassion, before one remembers that Nazi's deserve as much compassion as they showed the Jewish people.

It's a scoreless film, leaving the sound design to do all the heavy lifting. There is a near 3-minute overture performed to a black screen, a briefer interlude composition against a red screen, and the final end credits track. These Mica Levy constructs of sound aren't exactly musical. I almost dread learning what these sound collages are composed of.

The film's final 5 minutes or so, for me, were its most potent. It takes a time jump to the furnaces of Auschwitz today, now a memorial site, as it prepares to open. The cleaners come in and start wiping everything down with efficiency and dispassion.  It's swept up, as if any speck of dust is not allowed.  A memorial displays thousands upon thousands of pares of shoes are piled up, pressing against the window as the glass is cleaned. The floor is vacuumed. We cut back to Hoss, last seen retching in a stairwell, as if he just captured this glimpse of his legacy. 

There's much to be unpacked, in what is shown, what isn't shown, and how it was all constructed from a filmmaking standpoint. It's very deliberate in so many ways (editing most of all) but rarely feels staged in its (nonexistent) story and performances (which barely seem performative).

It is not a comfortable film, and as heavy and burdensome as I was expecting it to be, it wasn't. It's a film that settles you into its mundanity, and dares you to ignore, as this family does, the events on the other side of the wall that so often deign to call attention to themselves. We never see what goes on there, but we don't have to in order to feel the impact.

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The most recent of Michael Mann's films I've seen is Miami Vice which was released in 2006. I'd seen all his films that preceded that but have rewatched watched only a few of them in recent years. Between 2006 and the release of Ferrari in late 2023, he's only made 2 films: Public Enemies and Blackhat. The former I skipped due to Johnny Depp fatigue (I was already done with him by 2009) and the latter because of poor critical reception (though it's become something of a reassessed cult darling in recent years).  I like his movies, but I'm not a die hard.

I wondered going into Ferrari if I actually knew what a Michael Mann film was, beyond neon lights, heavy shadows and pulsating soundtracks. Partway through the film, I realized that what makes a Mann film is how he observes his characters. A lot of that is framing, and how people move within the frame, his direction on where he wants someone on the screen seems pretty precise, while still giving actors the leeway to perform. At this late stage, it looks pretty collaborative, if the performances Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz give in the film are any indication.

I'm not a car guy, nor am I a racing guy, so I had to ask, going into this film, what the point of it was. We meet a 50's-ish Enzo Ferrari, as he moves from the rural Italian abode of his mistress, Lina (Shaeline Woodley), to his city-side manor, pushing his car to its limits, his old racing instincts undying inside him. At home his wife Laura (Cruz) has been fielding calls from his people, reporting on their adversary's new arrivals to town, and she's pissed. When he arrives she reminds him, he can fuck who he wants, he just needs to be home before the calls start.  She then pulls a gun on him, and fires wide. He's shook momentarily, but unfazed. Their dynamic is set. They are honest with each other and spare each other no emotions.

The worries at the Ferrarri factory (as a Saudi prince picks up his new vehicle) are many. Maserati is going to break their speed record, and the company is spending money faster than they can make it. They need a financier, a partner, who can invest in increasing production. They need to keep on with their focus, improving their racing performance which sells the cars to the market, and not selling the cars to market to pay for the racing. Enzo is always a racer at heart, and not a car dealer.

The film is the B-side of the Hollywood biopic. Where the A-side is the attempt to summarized a whole life or career, the B-side is the "most turbulent year" biopic. Here, it takes place in the span of a week. Enzo faces a personal crisis as his two family situations collide, and his professional interests in racing and car manufacturing threaten to go belly up.

It's enough to build something out of, and Mann hammers away at it until it takes shape. It's not a boring process though, Driver's performance as Enzo is a sheer delight, as he portrays the Italian as charming, dry, and sardonic, revealing his heart only in private, and only to the dead (who sit heavily upon him). The first half of this film, while not an outright comedy, is damn funny, largely from Driver's delivery, but Mann is leaning into it just enough. With Cruz, he has a very gentle touch, allowing her the large comedic beats and a big melodramatic performance that still has room to be reigned in when she need to hit those real devastating emotional marks. She's magnificent. (Between Stone in Poor Things, Huller in Anatomy of a Fall, Cruz her and Da'Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers I'm having a hard time choosing the best performance, though Cruz and Randolph could probably push to slug it out for best supporting).

It's not a grounded film. Nobody should mistake this for real life. The film builds around the Mille Miglia an endurance race along the Italian highways and through the towns and cities along the way that is unlike any other race I've seen outside of maybe Death Race 2000 (which was maybe inspired by the Mille Miglia?) or The Great Race. But Mann's shooting of it is breathtaking, the gorgeous countryside, but also those beautiful Italian machines (this film doesn't thrust the beauty of its cars upon you, it lets you come to their beauty on your own). But, with beauty there is also danger, and we see that multiple times. Mann reiterates time and again that racing is a kamikaze pursuit, and that racers know what they're signing up for. And we learn why the Mille Miglia has not been seen since 1957.

It's not a flawless film, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the performances, the production, Mann's stylistic flourishes, the cars, the racing, the melodrama, all of it was pretty fun, until, at its moment of spectacle, it's not fun anymore. It can't recover from it, and it doesn't try. It knows there's no recovery. We only spend a few minutes more before the summary text of the next few decades fills us in briefly on who does what and when. 

I can see people being particular about the accent work here, especially when there aren't many Italians actually in major parts. It doesn't hold back my ability to appreciate it though.

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I must have caught wind of the Czech sci-fi drama Ikarie XB-1, or "Voyage to the End of the Universe" as it's been known in its heavily edited and dubbed form for decades, at some point in my life, but I've never really known anything about it, nor have I ever taken note of it as something to seek out.

But it popped up this January on the Criterion Channel in its restored, digitally archived form, and it drew my eye like a signal flare. Amidst all the films from "best of 2023" lists, I knew this 60 year old film was mandatory watching.

Based off a novel from Polish sci-fi legend Stanislaw Lem, here we have a film made years before Star Trek, presenting a humanist future and a space journey done for the betterment of mankind. It's set 200 years from when it was made (2163) but has still-potent things to say about the events of the first half of the 20th Century, while optimistically dreaming for a more ideal future.

The set design, sound design, sound effects, visual effects are all quite far above par for the early 60's. The film's influence on sci-fi for the subsequent 15 years (up to and including Star Wars) is tangible, sometimes it's just a little thing, an image, or the way the ships move through space, and sometimes it's a whole swath of the film feels like it's been completely copped by filmmakers who thought we would never notice. At the same time it's clearly aware of the popular sci-fi that came before it, most notable in Peter, this film's version of Robbie the Robot.

The restoration is gorgeous. The blacks are crisp, the whites are vibrant, it looks incredible. I was worried that this would wind up being Solaris  (another Lem novel turned into a notable sci-fi film), which is a monumental production but also monumentally boring. This is much pulpier than that, while still retaining some sense of science in its fiction (it's largely "hey, that's not bad science for 1963").  What perked me up when I was starting to drowse was a "future dance" number which was clearly copped by both Buck Rodgers and Logan's Run, yet somehow manages to (narrowly) escape campiness, I think primarily from a perplexing-but-intriguing score by Zdeněk Liška, and visually curious, simplified dance moves.  It's like future line dancing.

It's a surprisingly satisfying production, but even more potent as an artifact of sci-fi.  Anyone who's a Star Trek fan (or sci-fi in general) who has not seen this really should.