31 Days of Halloween: Hokum

2026, Damian McCarthy (Oddity) -- Amazon

Yes, a proper horror movie including creepy Irish mythos, ghosts and a haunted top floor to an quaint, old hotel. Oh, and a Dick American, but these days they are a horror unto themselves. We rather enjoyed McCarthy's last one, Oddity, creeped out by the actual oddity thing that played the titular role, and followed it not a few days later with his Caveat. He is keen on the creepy and if I can say one thing about this movie, it's that it elicited the first "AHHH!" jump scare in years -- I actually yelled out loud. 

The preamble gives us Ohm Bauman (quite the name; Adam Scott, Little Evil) sitting in his expensive concrete house, late at night, writing on his laptop. The book is about a conquistador seeking a lost treasure in the desert, which comes down to the treasure map stuck inside a bottle, and the only way (questionable) for him to smash the bottle, is on the back of a kid's head. But beyond the shitty whiskey fueled conundrum of his writing, he is also haunted by a ghostly figure he sees in shadows.

Later we find Ohm in Ireland, bringing the ashes of his mother & father to be scattered near the quaint inn where they had their honeymoon. Quaint means odd characters, like the one who killed a goat with a hand-crossbow and a creepy old man in a wheelchair who likes to scare children with tales of Irish witches dragging children through Hell at the end of chains. Ohm is not a shy man, letting everyone know his opinion on killing goats and scaring kids with stories. Oh, and the guy in woods drinking milk laced with magic mushrooms, who shares his uisce beatha ("ishka baha", or "water of life"; moonshine) with Ohm. Rural regions of any country are always colourful.

Ohm doesn't exactly endear himself with the staff of the hotel, quite literally burning the hand of the bellhop (Will O'Connell, Top Boy), who wants to share his manuscript with the famed writer, with a spoon heated from the candle inside a hollowed rutabaga jack-o-lantern (it's Halloween season), but the bartender Fiona (Florence Odesh, Foundation) doesn't draw his ire, nor he hers. Not long after being asked to drink his last at the hotel bar, she and the bellhop find Ohm having hanged himself. I guess the catharsis that brought him to Ireland did not go well.

He awakens in the hospital, weeks later. There is no awkward checking out or police, but its sure awkward when he goes to the hotel to collect his belongings. Now weeks after the Halloween party, and he learns Fiona disappeared that night, not long after finding Ohm. He learns that Jerry (David Wilmot, Bodkin), the mushroom milk guy, is their prime suspect, him being a vagrant with a shady past, and Ohm is compelled to track Jerry down, as her feels somewhat beholden to Fiona. 

Instead of a suspect, he gets a story of Fiona being murdered, Jerry having seen a ghostly visage of her, leading him to believe she is in the hotel's Honeymoon Suite, which has been cut-off since some sort of witch situation years ago -- the suite being accessible only via a chained & locked elevator, so the police (garda) never even bothered looking at the rooms. Jerry has already stolen the key and knows the hotel will be empty after that night, it being the end of the season.

Buuuut Jerry gets caught by the Fergal (Michael Patric, Frontier), the goat hand-crossbow guy, and is carted off, leaving Ohm to inspect the more-than-properly eerie Honeymoon Suite. He is helped by Mal (Peter Coonan, The Alienist), the concierge of the hotel, who finds Ohm after Fergal drives off with Jerry. And sure enough, he finds Fiona's body! She's in a dumb waiter that leads to a basement that has also been sealed off for years. Mal had led Ohm upstairs, hoping to put the whole thing to bed, not expecting Ohm to trigger the dumbwaiter's hatch and discover her body. He's the murderer, and rushes off, locking Ohm inside the room, chaining & locking the elevator behind him. 

This is when things get properly fucking scary. Interestingly enough, McCarthy does not present the movie with Ohm losing his shit. Sure, things have gone from weird to murder-y, and Ohm does start seeing ghostly visions, but he keeps his head, trying to figure a way out, while being haunted by memories and ghosts. You see, Ohm has had ghosts his entire life because, as a child, he acidentally killed his own mother with his father's gun, and his father drank himself to death afterwards. Mom is the effective jumpscare that got me, an apparition following around behind Ohm in her bloodied yellow dress. 

But that's nothing compared to the Barbarian style tunnel in the basement, that ends in a pair of "don't open me" doors. But no way out; just cinderblock walled up stairs. Oh, and the witch ghost that follows him up and OUT of the dumbwaiter. That's alright, Ohm remembers the chalk circle of protection and spends the rest of the night in honeymoon bed and she's gone by morning. Then a bloodied but determined Jerry shows up, having escaped Fergal and come back to find Mal, who already has a story cooked up about dropping the drunken Ohm at the airport. But Ohm has remembered what Jerry told him about Fiona's ghost pulling the long mechanical bell ringer, and alerts Jerry who goes upstairs to free Ohm. Alas, he is killed by Mal but not before Ohm can steal the keys to the still locked elevator (dude, you should have just left it opened until everyone was dead dead) and goes down into the witchy hallway to hide, hoping to fend her off with his chalk. It kind of works? He is captured in chains as well, but more importantly, Mal is carted off into the room at the end of the hall ... that is the doorway to Hell? Ohm, with the insistence of his mother's ghost, cuts himself free of the chains, escapes upstairs, and then back downstairs again via elevator and is rescued from the burning building by Fergal.

Again the hospital, the tale of woe is shared with the bellhop. Bodies were found, including Fiona's, but not Mal's. Mal had gotten Fiona pregnant and was worried by both what his boss and his wife would say. Fucking, men. Ohm has been saved, and relieved of his life long guilt and decides to finish off his conquistador story with a happier ending, as Fiona had asked.

Wow, I won't be doing recaps like that very often. It makes me tired before I can even mention how well-crafted the atmosphere of the movie was, being both eerie and ... capable? We even get some traditional questioning of our ghostly experiences, by the bellhop admitting he spiked Ohm's whiskey with Jerry's magic mushrooms, which probably explains utterly terrifying visions Ohm had (like the bunny costumed kids show host that blames Ohm for his mother's death) but not how Mal is carried off into Hell. Did he see ghosts? Was it all guilt and magic mushrooms? Hell of a lot to go through for family therapy. Yep, lots to chew on in this movie.

KWIF: Resident Evil (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. Sniffles. Cough. Sneezes. Vertigo. Madness. Stress. Rage. Anxiety. Sleeplessness. Aches. Indigestion. Reflux. In no particular order, and often on repeat. Let's talk about some movies and forget about the rest of the week.  I was hoping mirror this week's KWIF with last week's by watching another Cary Grant black and white comedy, another disaster flick from the '70s, another Fukasaku film, and Onslaught, set in the same shared reality as The Guest...but Onslaught is already gone from theatres and not quite yet on demand. Feh.

This Week:
Resident Evil (2026, d. Zach Cregger - in theatre)
Message From Space (1978, d. Kinji Fukasaku - tubi)
Avalanche (1978, d. Corey Allen - tubi)
Topper (1937, d. Norman Z. McLeod - tubi)

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I'm in danger of repeating myself (like that doesn't happen all the time), but I don't play video games so when the director Zach Cregger says that his latest film, and the latest adaptation of the Resident Evil video game franchise, is meant to evoke the feeling of playing a Resident Evil video game, rather than a straight adaptation of a game's story, I can't really tell you whether he was successful or not. The most I know about the Resident Evil franchise comes from binge watching the Milla Jovovich film series and listening to accompanying podcasts about the series. The most I've ever seen of the video games would have been commercials that I would have caught the first fifteen seconds of on youtube before hitting the "skip" button.

I have, however, seen Cregger's previous films, Barbarian and Weapons, and enjoyed them both. As time has passed, I recognize that Weapons and Barbarian are quite different types of horror movies, and that Weapons is much more my speed and style of horror than Barbarian was. Resident Evil is likewise a much different horror movie than Cregger's previous, but it absolutely proves he knows exactly what he's doing when he crafts his stories in bringing them to the screen. Barbarian and Weapons weren't flukes, this guy's got the goods as a horror auteur.

Where Weapons is a creepy, slow burn, non-linear, ensemble piece with a mystery to be unveiled that begins in a heightened reality, Barbarian starts extremely grounded, presenting as a situational horror that is rooted in the deep discomfort of never truly knowing what another person is thinking (or capable of), and then builds into escalating levels of surreal and then traditional horror.  Barbarian is genuinely scary and intense, while Weapons is primarily creepy. Resident Evil is scary, intense and creepy. Honestly, it maybe the most "horror" horror movie I've actually ever seen (I'm not a neophyte, but I'm also no expert), while also having Cregger's sense of humour sprinkled throughout.

It's largely a one-hander film. We follow Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he is takes on a critical, life-saving medical transport job. He has to go "up the mountain" to Raccoon City (makes me think they transported Raccoon City out of the midwest and into the Rockies somewhere) in the midst of heavy snowfall for which his economy-class vehicle is not equipped.  While driving he learns his girlfriend is pregnant talking to her over the phone, and he reacts badly. And then he hits something.

It kicks off from there. It starts out really small, and kind of funny, and just very slowly escalates. It's barely five minutes into the film before Things Are Happening, which is incredibly smart of Cregger. Weapons felt more like a sprawling novel adaptation, like prestige (not "elevated" thank you) horror, at 128 minutes. Resident Evil is over in sub-90 before the credits start. It is simply the story of someone who gets caught up in what is effectively a disaster and has to navigate his way through it. 

The closer Bryan gets to Raccoon City, the more things escalate.

There's not much to the plot here (not unlike a video game). There's a framework for Bryan to navigate. There are obstacles in his way. There are undead creatures that emerge that he has to face or flee. And there are sort of clues that could be interpreted as logic puzzles presented before him that he may or may not think through.

Yeah, from a character and story standpoint, it's thin (not absent, just thin), but boy is it thrilling. And gross. And scary. And gory. And clever. And funny. 

Abrams' first big role was as the titular Dash in the teenage Christmas romcom Dash and Lily, which is one of the best romcom TV shows ever made and one of the best Christmas romcoms ever made, and one of the best teenage romcoms ever made, and Abrams was great in it. His next big appearance was in Wolfs and managed to stand out sandwiched between George Clooney and Brad Pitt, as well as putting in a great performance as part of the Weapons ensemble. But this is a spotlight. Resident Evil succeeds or fails on whether you like this guy enough to care if he makes it through this horror show in one piece or not. And you do. It's hard not to like Abrams. He's got a pluck, a charm,and a down-to-earth, fallible quality that makes him seem so ... normal. He's an everyman, not a surperman. You never get the sense that anything Bryan is doing in this film is outside of what someone like Bryan is capable of. 

I mentioned the incredible opening act of Hope a few weeks back, just a propulsive 45 minutes of exceptional cinema teasing out the monster while following a woefully unprepared character through the chaos. Resident Evil basically does the same thing but instead of just throwing the character into the thick of it, he slowly wades into it. And it only does that. Where Hope then deviated into trying to tell a larger story, Resident Evil is just as non-stop propulsive a film, and it doesn't take its focus off Bryan. He is the larger story.

Just as I cannot compare this to the video game series, I'm also not a gore hound, so I can't really tell where this fits on the goriest movies ever list. I imagine it's not at the very top, but it's well past the middle. It's incredibly well made that grabs you from the start and doesn't let go. Toasty's going to love it.

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What a weird film Message From Space is. In part this statement is made because I watched Message From Space after watching Legend of the Eight Samurai. Both films are directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Both films feature Sonny Chiba (The Street Fighter) and Etsuko Shihomi (Sister Street Fighter) and baby-faced Hiroyuki Sanada (he looked so young in Eight Samurai, it seems impossible that he could be in another film 5 years earlier). Both films are based off the classic 1800's Japanese serial Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Kyokutei Bakin. The difference is that Message From Space is a sci-fi space opera adaptation of the material while Legend of the Eight Samurai is a sword-and-sorcery translation.

In Message From Space, the planet Jillucia has fallen to the tyrannical Gavanas Empire. The small hovel of unenslaved Jillucians send their princess Emeralida (Shihomi) off planet with warrior Urocco (Makoto Satō) and eight mystical Liabe Seeds that will reveal the fabled eight warriors that will help free their people from enslavement under Emperor Rockseia XXII (Mikio Narita) and his nasty mother.

The first chosen of the liabe seeds are roughneck pilots Shiro (Sanada) and Aaron (Philip Casnoff), as well as their shifty pal Jack (Masazumi Okabe) and also Meia (Peggy Lee Brennan) who is rebelling against her affluence by hanging with these low-lifes.

Much of Message From Space feels like live-action anime, for better or worse. While Eight Samurai had a definite Star Wars influence, with shot recreations and Japanese fantasy interpretations of Star Wars elements like the stormtroopers, Message From Space feels less like a rip-off of Star Wars than a capitalization on its success.

The best aspect of Message From Space is it's space ships and flying sequences. There is an anime energy to the astronautics and it's a pretty visceral viewing experience. There's definitely a bit of the trench run from Star Wars in what they were emulating here, but it seems more like the speeder bike sequence from Return of the Jedi and the podracing sequence from The Phantom Menace...as if Lucas watched this film and took a couple tries to match its sense of speed and excitement.

The ship designs are all over the place, but most of them are pretty great. Just like Star Wars, they feel cobbled together, like model kits that have been kit bashed and put together in unintended ways but making for unique and interesting looking pieces.  My lack of experience with manga and anime is such that I don't know if Message From Space was a huge influence on anime, or vice versa...or if it was sort of a feedback loop. One of the space ships is just like an old school sailboat with giant masts that I know I've seen in anime before.

It's a shame then that pretty much the rest of the film is nonsensical dross. The characters are poorly constructed with little to no development over the course of the film. There's not a single character arc in this film that carries any weight or resonance. The dynamics between the characters is underbaked at best, without any real sense of who these people are to each other, and what they mean.

The story itself is all over the place, progressing in a staccato fashion that has no sense of coherency or flow.  Oh, it takes big swings (the Gavanas have built rockets into Jillucia and move the planet into our solar system, and then proceed to blow up the moon) but none of the movements feel in concert with one another. 

Even though the effects are clearly on a tight budget and pretty unrefined, there is a quaintness to them that is appealing. There's effort put into this production that's pretty easy to appreciate, so it's just the more disappointing that it amounts to a pretty underwhelming film as a whole. As much as I prefer sci-fi to fantasy Legend of the Eight Samurai is the superior, and more rewarding of these two bizarrely similar films.

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As mentioned last week, one of my slow-burn projects is to watch all the 70's disaster movies. I love the formula of these, and hope we one day see it again, but I don't think disaster films will ever be the same because of modern digital effects and production design.  Disaster films of the '70's era are great because of the technical limitations and the creative solutions in visualizing the disasters and their aftermath.  They're also great because of their sprawling ensemble casts and the willingness to kill them off.  

Avalanche was Roger Corman's New World Pictures entry into this fray. Starring Rock Hudson, Mia Farrow and Robert Forester, it's not quite as low-rent a cast as you might expect for a Corman-produced B-movie version of a disaster flick...except that the remainder of the cast is a veritable who's who of "who's that?" No other names or recognizable faces involved (at least not 50 years later anyway).

Hudson is the proprietor of a new ski resort that faces some controversy over the ecological impacts of its development. Farrow plays Hudson's ex-wife, coming to the resort as guest of the owner, who has plans to woo her back if he can ever escape all the damn meetings he's in. Forester plays a celebrated photographer and naturalist who lives nearby and is concerned about the amount of snowfall happening on the mountaintops.

The film is mostly interested in the love triangle of Hudson, Farrow and Forester, while making it apparent to the audience that Hudson's aggressive advances of Farrow are unwelcome (so much arm-grabbing). There are other characters introduced, like Bruce the champion skier, and his mentally unstable girlfriend Tina, and the maybe unnamed skater that Bruce cheats on Tina with sending her into a dark spiral, and Tina's ex-husband the news reporter. There's also Hudson's mom and her chaperone, the resort's accountant McDaid (there's no romantic entanglement there, but there should have been). 

Where your average disaster film would spend about a half hour cutting between each of these characters before setting off the main event, here it takes about an hour before the titular avalanche kicks off.  Usually some aspect of the oncoming tragedy could have been prevented if not for the hubris of one of the characters, whether the disaster could have been prevented, or at least more lives could have been saved with early warnings. Here, however, despite all this set-up of Hudson not listening to Forester about the building snow on the mountaintops and how all of Hudson's ongoing development work and cutting down of trees will increase the likelihood and severity of an avalanche, the whole event is kicked off because of a totally random plane crash. Hudson had no true culpability here.

The avalanche, as might be expected from a Corman production, is a budget production, alternating between miniatures, stock footage, Styrofoam boulders and blowing soap flakes, and superimposition effects. It's delightful in its cheesiness. By the time the avalanche is over, there's barely a half hour left in the film to deal with the fallout of the avalanche, and, I have to say, it's pretty tepid. The carnage is not insane, and the response is pretty immediate. Two of our three leads are leading the rescue effort, and Farrow is just sort of off to the side, so nobody we've spent any quality time with in the movie, besides mom and McDaid, are in any immediate danger. Putting underdeveloped characters in peril is not very exciting.

Avalanche is a sub-par execution of the disaster film formulae. It's obvious that budget constraints were the reason for it spending 70% of its time on silly romantic entanglements and hashing and rehashing the same background details over and over. But at the same time, it is one of the most 1970s movies I've ever seen. The hair, the moustaches, the clothes, the earth tones, the wood... everything, the ski suits and snowmobiles and luggage, the dancing (oh the dancing) and the finger snapping, the live music in the lounge, the corny competitions being held at the resort...all of it is pretty damn glorious if you want a hit of pure 1970's into your eyeballs. I had a great time.

I forgot, when watching Avalanche this past week that I had actually seen it before, as part of Netflix's Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Gauntlet season back in 2017. It's not a memorable film, nor is it even close to good, but it still delighted me. 

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I have been reading film critic Nathan Rabin's series over on his substack on Manic Pixie Dream Girl movies. Rabin coined the term 20 years ago and his series of reviews of films featuring the character trope is a means of reckoning with its success in entering the pop culture lexicon as well as its misuse. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl is the construct of a male writer who imagines a lively, care-free woman who will snap a boring, depressed guy out of his dull-ass colourless reality and teach him how to live...and love. They are a complete fantasy, typically women who exist solely for the purpose of uplifting the most average of men out of their utter average-ness.

In Rabin's current writings, he's starting looking back to film's before he coined the phrase to find earlier examples of the MPDG in cinema, and there's no shortage of them (Barbra Streisand in What's Up Doc? being just one example). Without meaning to step on his spot, I submit Topper as being yet another one...only in this case, the twist is it's Manic Pixie Dream Ghosts (thanks to Lady Kent for coming up with that one).

In Topper, George and Marion Kerby (Carey Grant and Constance Bennett) are two affluent, hard-drinking gadabouts who seem to have less than a care in the world. When we first meet them, George is driving through the countryside sitting on the back of the seat of his convertible and driving with his feet.  They're heading into the big city for a board meeting in the morning at the bank (George is the majority stakeholder or something, I didn't actually follow) which means they have all night to party.  Marion takes delight in flirting with buttoned-down Cosmo Topper (Roland Young), a respectable man who really would just like to dance and let loose and play, but his prim and uptight wife Clara (Billie Burke) won't let him.

George and Marion get into a car accident because George is probably still drunk and speeding, and they die. They emerge as ghost and take the whole damn thing in stride (I guess if you die fully lit, you remain fully lit forever in the afterlife). They wonder why they haven't passed on to the pearly gates, and, they surmise, that they need to do a good deed. Marion's immediate thought is they need to teach ol' Topper how to let loose, and thus the flirtatious, vivacious, playful, life-loving, liberal woman starts messing with Cosmo, and he, of course, loves it.

How could he not? Constance Bennett's performance as Marion is so damn alluring. She's designed to be, of course, so that Topper will follow her anywhere and everywhere. In the wrong hands, Marion could be seen as mean-spirited, as really fucking with Topper, but Bennett gives the impression that Marion is genuinely delighted by Topper, and her flirtatiousness is strictly that. She's married to George of course, but she has the liberty, and desire, to run around with men who amuse her.  And it's true, Roland Young is kind of adorable. From the get go you understand Topper is a man burdened by rules, a man longing for fun and joy and pleasure, but he lives in a reality that seems to deny him that. And so he needs a Manic Pixie Dream Ghost to unshackle him.

Of course, Mrs. Topper finds out her husband has been running around with another woman, and part of the story is about Clara loosening up, and learning that being buttoned-down and polite society is seen as uninteresting (the society women she wants to hang out with only come around after Marion gets Topper thrown in jail and reported on in the newspaper).

For Grant, this seems like it was a contractual obligation... he had so many pictures to make in a year with a studio, lending his big name and handsome face to a marquee and poster, but he's barely in the film. This is Constance Bennett's show (and what a show). Normally a lack of Grant screentime would be a bit of a downer, but not here. Eventually George has to come back into the picture to reign Marion in. As footloose and fancy-fee as George is, even he realizes when Marion is being too much of a pixie, too much of a dream girl. In a just world, George would have been Clara's Manic Pixie Dream Guy/Ghost (and in a non-sexist world, he would have been right alongside Clara in helping Cosmo live life to the fullest).

It takes a little too long for Topper's premise to come to fruition, but when it does it's a very fun, often funny, and fully spirited tale. I would love to get a remastered version of the film as the Tubi version had quite poor sound quality (especilly for my half-deafness) and washed out contrasts. Apparently there are two Topper sequels which is baffling given how it ends, but I'm also very curious.

ReWatch: Beetlejuice

1988, Tim Burton (Dumbo) -- download

Betelgeuse?

Bay-tull-Gay-Ooos? 

I wonder what the audiences would have thought the movie was about if they had just stuck with the planet name as the title...

Anywayz...

So, surprisingly even with my current state of mind (a constant battle between nostalgic fondness and a disengagement with the past), the movie really stood up to the test of time. Everything remains charming, witty and entirely engaging.

As is my way with ReWatches, I don't feel compelled to relay the usual recap of plot, just muse on whatever crossed my mind as watching.

So, the Maitlands. I recall thinking, when I originally saw the movie, that they had only just moved to Winter River, given they were spending vacation time redecorating the house; I don't think I ever caught that the hardware store was theirs. That said, I still think they are also city folks who moved to The Country but unlike the Deetz family to follow, they embraced country life. It was not lost on me in the original viewing that the Maitlands owned the embodiment of "the haunted house on the top of the hill" but had turned it around with charming, folksy design aesthetic.

Their death isn't convincing; its rather slow and the river doesn't look that deep. I was always convinced the plot was going to reveal they were killed by some sub-plot(ter) from the afterlife.

The Afterlife, hereafter capitalized, is one of the stars of this movie. The World Builder in my head picks apart everything about it, but I still delight in its depiction. Of course death would be dominated by bureaucracy, but its kind of weird we end up in a pseudo-Hell before we actually go somewhere... nice, or... worse. Though, was there any binary definition of Moving On in the movie? I guess I will have to see what the sequel says about the status of the Maitlands, as they are not present in the new movie, AFAIK.

Lydia Deetz. In 1988 I was already too old to have a crush on a teen goth girl, but boy, did I love Winona Ryder in this role. This was the beginning of Tim Burton becoming a goth culture icon and nothing said it more than Lydia's black massively wide brimmed sunhat. She's morose, death obsessed, until the end of the movie when the Deetz family and the Maitlands have found a happy balance, and then she is dancing to calypso music cheerfully. My headcanon is that this scene created the sub-sub-culture of goths who are rather happy go lucky.

When Harry Belafonte passed last year, a bunch of stories popped up about the use of his music in the movie. Apparently the original script, and music choices, were to be more sombre, darker toned, especially the dinner scene, but Catherine O'Hara suggested livening up the scene with the "Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" --- aren't we glad she did? Its also rather great that the New England homey Maitlands would love calypso music, which is not altogether impossible -- even my mom had a couple of Belfonte's in her collection; he was pop music for "adults" at the time.

Beetlejuice himself. At least Barbara Maitland acknowledges he is a pervert, but having not seen the new movie yet, I wonder how "problematic" his *cough* antics will be. I mean, on one hand, he is supposed to be an utterly terrible being, but he's also an anti-hero, even in this movie. That said, every time I rewatch this movie, I am surprised how small his role is in the bigger play of the movie, and reminded that he becomes the real villain at the end.

In watching with my less rose coloured eyes (brown, actually) I notice things I never really paid attention to, such as the reasons Charles Deetz is moving to The Country (his boss and friends are assholes) and how much he adores his daughter; I always thought of him as a secondary villain, but really, he's just very capitalism driven mundane. We will ignore the actor being a true villain.

Yep, still love the movie, love the quirky characters, and the whole look & feel of everything. 

Yeah, that was all rather disjointed, even for you, more notes taken/thought than contiguous writing.

KWIF: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (+2)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, in other words (or the same words, just more of them) these are the films Kent watched this week. 

This Week:

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024, d. Gil Kenan - Crave)

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024, d. Guy Ritchie - AmazonPrime)

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014,d. Mark Hartley - Tubi)

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I *really* wasn't expecting much out of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire following its nostalgia-soaked-to-a-fault (let's call it "nostalgia-slimed") predecessor Afterlife. That film was cringe-inducing and I did not like it, and I vehemently did not want a repeat experience.

Frozen Empire did modestly well at the box office, repeating a pattern for all Ghostbusters films since the original. There is a brand name there, but it doesn't have the same cache as a Spider-man or James Bond. There's a loyal, devoted, multicultural, omnisex fans out there who are just eager to have more Ghostbusters in their lives, but they're a niche group (who aren't the same group as the toxic manbabies who shouted down everything 2016 Ghostbusters (aka Answer the Call) and threatened to kill the property in the process). Bigger than, say, the Avatar fanbase, but smaller than the Stars Trek or Wars die-hards, they're not enough of an entity to keep the Ghostbusters brand alive and active in the public consciousness between films, even when we've had the shortest gap between Afterlife and Frozen Empire in 30 years of ghost busting.

Something like Star Trek and Star Wars has a strong enough fanbase and large enough franchise universe to build entire major streaming services around. Ghostbusters isn't that. It needs to entice the public in, seemingly each and every time. As much of a nerd for nerdy things as I can be, I'm one of those people who needs to be enticed. With a promising teaser trailer, Frozen Empire piqued my interest, but then the subsequent trailer had me wary of it just being more nostalgia-slime, and the middling reviews at time of release seem conflicted on whether the film was or wasn't caked in it.

Having waited for it to go streaming on a service I already pay for, I was quite happy to find this second entry in this new Ghostbusters era had moved past non-stop, nonsensical nods to it's 1984 originating film, and instead embraced and incorporated the characters into its narrative in a much more organic way. Mostly.

The Spengler family, consisting of mom Callie (Carrie Coon) and siblings Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) have moved from buttfuck nowhere to New York City as practicing Ghostbusters, living and operating out of the classic firehouse and taking charge of the classic Hearse, Ecto-1. Their ranks now include Callie's boyfriend Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd) who's still sussing out his place as part of the family. The firehouse is owned by rich industrialist and former 'buster Winston Zeddmore (Ernie Hudson) who also is the bankroll behind the Ghostbusters, now a bigger organization with more scientists and researchers.

The mayor of New York City is former EPA agent Walter Peck (William Atherton), who still has a bee in his bonnet about the 'busters. The thing is, here, as in 1984, he's not entirely wrong to be concerned, but his resistance to understanding the greater threat is what makes him such a dick(less). But after a particularly problematic ghost trapping, Pheobe is sidelined because she is a minor. As she's left to her own devices, she encounters a cool, fiery phantasm and the two become friends...and potentially more than.

The second problem hits when the containment unit at the firehouse starts, seemingly, bursting at its seams. Winston has a solution, but the introduction of a mysterious artifact, and ancient lore about a powerful force via the curio shoppe owned by Ray Stanz (Dan Akroyd) winds up setting off a chain of events that could spell utter doom for NYC (and the world).

What works so incredibly well during the first two acts of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the sense of lived-in reality. Where each prior Ghostbusters film felt like it had to reset or start from scratch (by the time Ghostbusters II came out 5 years later, the team were already written off as relics and cooks and has-beens) this one comes out the gates with the Ghostbusters being a routine presence on the streets of New York. Maybe not the most welcome presence, but the calls were coming in pretty steadily from people who just didn't know what to do with strange things in their neighbourhood.

The film feels quite comfortable with its newer cast, as well as its older cast. Akroyd, Hudson and Atherton all feel organically placed in the narrative. Even when Annie Potts' Janine Melnitz seems to keep popping up out of nowhere, she still feels like she belongs. Bill Murray's appearances as Peter Venkman, though, feel like contractual obligation. There's no sense of purpose to Venkman in this story, and the quips are...kinda lazy this time around.

The cast is rounded out with three great comedic presences in Kumail Nanjiani, James Acaster and Patton Oswalt --all having their own essential role to play in the story of the film-- but two returning characters from Afterlife -- Podcast (Logan Kim) and Lucky (Celeste O'Connor) -- are unnecessarily shoehorned in, but GilKenan and Jason Reitman's script does find clever ways to make their move to New York make sense (as long as you don't think too hard about it).

For all the easy-going nature of the first two acts, and reintroducing the New York City of the original Ghostbusters in such a seemingly effortless and welcoming fashion, and even building a pretty compelling mystery leading to the big bad of the third act and the titular "frozen empire", once the third act launches, it all starts coming unglued. The film starts rushing through all the different character arcs it had set up, tieing them together often in forced ways and resolving many of them with a tossed off line of dialogue. The action of the piece results in a nonsense flash freezing of New York that should have killed tens of thousands but seemingly has had no lasting effect beyond some ashphalt damage and iced coffees.  

The problem with the final act is it goes too big. Every Ghostbusters goes big with a threat that only the power of proton packs can resolve, but this seems a little insurmountable beyond deus ex machina. This film even has the dreaded laserblast into the sky that was all the rage in the 2010s.  It needn't have been this visually catastrophic. It doesn't take much to fuck up a New Yorker's day. Even a summer hailstorm, as opposed to ice spikes violently shooting up from the ground (yet somehow impaling no one), would be as effective a device (just look at what happened in Calgary on August 5).

It also does that thing where a character who is otherwise inept at everything levels up so monumentally in literal minutes that it snaps the long thread of disbelief we give these productions.

With many reservations, though, the film is generally a winner. It's charming, and comfortable, and entertaining. It embraces its past in a participatory way rather than winks at the audience. Still doesn't know what to do with Slimer though. And it's still trying to make those Stay Puft minions a thing.

[ToastyPost - we agree-ish]

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A few weeks back some right wing nutjob (doesn't even matter who), an actual elected official in America (because some people just want to watch the world burn) was delivering a speech on how America entered the second world war to fight communists.

I shouldn't have to explain this, but the threat in World War II was Nazis, not communists. The communists, in fact, were allies. This shouldn't have to be explained, but in the "right wing" (so poorly named, given how they're almost always wrong) they taken to embracing Nazis (particularly the "nationalist" part, not so much the "socialist" part) as part of their voter base and ideology, and are trying to rewrite history to edit out Nazis being the worst-of-the-worst bad guys of the past 100 years (out of a whole pile of contenders).

So in times like these, with people being so unclear about who exactly we were fighting in a major war of not so distant past, it's good to have a film like this that reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that the only good Nazi is a dead one.

The plot of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, loosely based on real people and events (at least the end credits have pictures of some of the real people whose names are the same as those of characters in this film) find Britain in dire straits as the Nazi uboats in the Atlantic have been throttling their supplies from western shores (they only mention those American dilly-dallyers, as if Canada were a non-entity, and not already across the pond and in the fight... but I digress).  With the threat increasing and the military might growing, the only hope is to target the uboat manufacturing and supply depot of a Spanish controlled island in West Africa. Unable to mount any sort of direct campaign, they instead rely upon a small crew of ...ungentlemen... devoted soldiers whose "by any means necessary" tactics make them too much for regular service, but necessary for this off-the-books job.

It's a handsome people parade as Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Babs Olusanmoku and Eiza Gonzalez strategize and mount their assault against an unsuspecting enemy.

These are ruthless men who seem to relish in their task of killing and destruction, and are both efficient and effective. It almost makes them hard to root for...except for the fact that they're killing Nazis, so we root like each kill is a point-winning spike of the volleyball at the Olympics.

The film barely puts our protagonists in any peril. At any point, when it seems perilous, every person seems to have an out already at hand. It flies in the face of conventional action movie narrative, but it's oh-so-essential when the point is to remind us that the Nazis are the bad guys and we just want to see them dead.  The bloodlust is downright vampiric. 

It is undramatic, but cathartic. And so handsome.  

[ToastyPost - we agree]

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In the past decade or so it seems like the reputation of Cannon Group's films has become rather...elevated, certainly far beyond their rep at the time they were releasing films throughout the 1980s.

I think this 2014 documentary, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films was the inflection point, the catalyst reminding a middle-aged audience of a whole pantheon of weird, wild, raunchy, violent, and largely substandard film that, as teenagers (mainly teenage boys) were giving them everything they could want.

The documentary is the story of Israeli producers and brotherly cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. It paints them as lovably difficult scamps who forcefully injected themselves into cinema, first in Israel and then in America, through sheer determination, salemanship, and an ethos of fast-and-cheap but giving people what they want. Oh, and promises unkept and lies told along the way.

The doc is reverential towards Golan and Globus and their films...or at least the content of their films that made them a success story to start with. The documentary for the first hour is 1/2 talking heads and 1/2 clips of the nudity and sex scenes from the various Golan-Globus films. That extensive stretch of boobs, boobs, boobs is just as gratuitous (probably moreso) than any of the actual films. And to cut to the actresses in some of these films, some who are proud, but many who felt exploited or even abused, and then to intercut their description of their abuses with the scenes that resulted from said abuse seems utterly distasteful and disrespectul on the part of the director and producers (that Brett Ratner is a producer on this is not surprising).

The second hour shows the shift that Golan and Globus made when they came to America. Sex sold, but violence sold even better. So the clips in the second half are much more surrounding the violent side of Cannon's productions. Then many many explosions and bloody body parts being severed.

When I think of 1980s hyperviolent cinema, I'm mainly thinking of Cannon productions. Films like Missing in Action, American Ninja, the Death Wish sequels, Cobra... they were all escalating factors in America's appetite for, and consumption of violence.  And so much of it was... unsavory. Very racist and classist and downright ugly. 

That the film basks in the glory of nudity and violence is pretty much its only point being made. It does sort of highlight the rise and fall of the ambitions of Golan-Globus, and that their success came from sex and violence, only hinting that the marriage of the two would become repugnantly disturbing (and has no restraint in showing you what it's talking about).  Golan-Globus' downfall was in sacrificing their fast, cheap, and give-them-what-they-want attitude in favour of seeking prestige by giving notable directors free reign resulting in duds like Godard's King Lear, Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance, or Zeffirelli's Otello, or their attempting big-budget blockbusters on a constricted budget ending up with Superman 4: The Quest for Peace, Masters of the Universe, or the Indiana Jones riff Alan Quartermain. But if the doc winds up painting a portrait of Golan-Globus (which it barely, barely does) it's not as flattering as it thinks it is.

At one point a talking head makes a comparison between Golan-Globus and the Weinstein brothers. They basically state that Golan-Globus were trying to do what Miramax ultimately did. Unfortunately this was meant as a compliment. But the comparison is apt, and the sort of boy's club revelry tone that it sets leaves very little in the way of constructive criticism, and any constructive criticism that is laid down is completely undermined by tits and guns.

Is it watchable? Of course it is. But that doesn't mean it's any good. And that's the Cannon way.

  

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

2024, Gil Kenan (City of Ember) - download

Kent really didn't like the "first" movie. I was OK with it, as I am accepting we are now past the age of the "try something different" requel and squarely in the "pander to the masses" requel era.  I recently rewatched the first, knowing this was coming out, and thought, "You know, I actually kind of like this." Once I divested myself of comparisons and annoyance at retreading already covered ground, its actually a rather fun movie. And again I admired the way the young McKenna Grace handled the very neuro-atypical Phoebe, even more so in second viewing.

Record scritch.

Unfortunately, the now 17 year old McKenna Grace, whose IRL presence is a mix of pop star & IG star, does not so easily transform back into a now 15 year old Phoebe. There is this weird sense of uncanny valley, like she was badly tucking her blonde locks up under the uber-curly wig. I get she is supposed to stay awkward and what is more awkward than an awkward teen, but something was just .... off. AI generated awkward off.

Beyond that, similar to my original watch of the "first" movie, this one left me mainly in the "meh" realm. Sure, it had some fun bits and exciting bits, and the pandering references to the original Ghostbusters movie(s) were OK, but nothing made me gleefully giggle or go, "Oooooooo...." in reaction to something fantastical. Maybe it will improve with subsequent viewings?

So, three years later, the new ghostbusting team is actually a proper ghostbusting team headquartered in NYC, so yeah, in the firehouse. I was hoping for a few more nods to the ... 2016 interim (??) Ghostbusters (also occasionally subtitled Answer the Call) movie, but that's apparently only in my headcanon, as two minutes of research reminds me it was truly a reboot, not set in the same universe, so not even referenced here.

Said Headcanon: Patty was Winston's "niece" (not by blood, just a family friend she considered an uncle) and now that ghostbusting team works for Zeddemore's company of ghostbusting researchers.

The team seems to be surviving it as ghostbusters, got a bit of celebrity but also the ire of the new mayor of NYC, one Walter Peck (William Atherton, Die Hard), yeah that asshole EPA guy from the first first movie. Once again he doesn't seem to be grateful pesky ghosts are being busted, and once again he is annoyed by their use of nuclear devices to hunt & store ghosts. He's not wrong to be worried. Once again, something is up in the world and the almost full ghost containment tank is bursting at its seams. Also, a doofus (Kumail Nanjiani, Obi-Wan Kenobi) shows up with an evil artifact, something connected to his late grandmother and connected to an ancient, otherworldly demon of ice.

Of course, said demon gets released and only the Ghostbusters can stop him/it. Its as much a nod to the original sequel as it is anything. And at this point, I realize I don't really have much to say about the plot of the movie, as it is almost only ectoplasm, its so thin. Essentially the realize that the doofus's grandmother was a legendary protector of the world against the demon, and have to convince him to use his emerging powers to help them. The demon itself is only released when Phoebe meets a cute ghost girl (Emily Alyn Lind, The Babysitter), begins a budding friendship/romance only to be betrayed. Once demon is released, he freezes NYC until the Ghostbusters defeat him.

Meta-Questions! There is a scene where the icey cloud comes rolling in from the waters to freeze people on the beaches... well, no not exactly, this is PG level movie so ... everyone escapes? You would think that freezing an entire city would lead to thousands of deaths, especially considering the ice spikes everywhere. Anywayz, the meta is that this is likely the third time this scene has been done. Prior to this, in GeoStorm and in Kong x Godzilla where icey danger from the waters forces beach goers to run. These two movies have much more deadly consequences. I wonder what's going on in CGI world that they all fell in love with that scene, and I am not going to dig deep enough to discover that maybe the same team did all three scenes?

More meta! Is that actually the original Podcast (Logan Kim, The Walking Dead: Dead City)?!?! How the heck did that kid go from weird, frizzy headed goof to that gangly teen in only ... checks wikipedia ... four years. OK, that says something about my age. That is the exact time in life when people literally evolve from one being to another: ages 12 to 16.

Final meta. Ghosts. Some are human, some are monstrous. Many are in between. Why? What makes for a perfectly human looking ghost vs Slimer? I am feeling Ray (Dan Aykroyd, Pixels) should have something to say about that.

Again, I am feeling I need a rewatch already in order to say anything of value about this movie... no not value, as I have realized that as I churn out more of these posts on an almost regular cadence, that I am not trying for "quality of posting" nor really "quantity of posting" more just getting out what is in my head onto screen. I have embraced the blogging, for better or definitely for worse, and now in accepting, the fate of the blog suffers.

Its also a commentary on your mind of late. Nothing is very often coherent. I mean, you started that last paragraph saying one thing and ... SQUIRREL !!

KWIF: Madame Web (+4)

 KWIF = Kent's Week (or two) In Film. It would probably be easier on me if I just did as Toasty does and write-up each film as an individual post, but I seem to prefer just sitting down for three (or four or more) hours and plugging away at writing about movies when I'm awake way too early.  We're encroaching on 2000 published posts here at T&K Sometimes Disagree, and had I separated each movie or TV show into their own entry we'd probably be closer to 2500. Whatevs. Still it's quite a milestone.

This Week: 
Madame Web (2024, d. S.J. Clarkson - In Theatre)
All Of Us Strangers (2023, d. Andrew Haigh - Disney+)
Joy Ride (2023, d. Adele Lim - Crave)
No Hard Feelings (2023, d. Gene Stupnitsky - Crave)
Akilla's Escape (2020, d. Charles Officer - Crave)

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Of all the films I have to write about this week, Madame Web is certainly the least of them. It only gets the KWIF headline spotlight because it's the first 2024 film I've seen this year. I'm still catching up on 2023.

We all knew, from the first trailer, that Madame Web was going to be trash. The trailer hid nothing, and the complete disinterest of the cast was evident in a 2 minute montage. 

Some of us even knew back when Sony announced they were producing a Madame Web movie that it was going to be trash. There's never even been a Madame Web solo comic book, how are you going to make a whole movie around that character? Especially when, in the comics, she's a blind, chair-bound eeeellllderly woman. As an actress Dakota Johnson is not a lot of things, and those are three of them.

The most interesting thing about Madame Web is all metatext, the stuff that happened around it. If the reports are true, it started out as a 90's-set prequel to the Andrew Garfield-led Amazing Spider-Man franchise. Then, apparently, producers got cold feet and wanted to push it up a decade and make it a prequel to the Tom Holland-led Spider-Man: Home* franchise. Then they got complete frostbite, lost their toes, and decided to make it its own thing.

It's certainly it's own thing.

We all knew it was going to be a bad movie. Upon its release critics were savage, comic book movie fans even more so, but even still, when I suggested Toasty and I spend an entire Saturday watching at least 4 screenings of Madame Web, I was only half joking.

Why?

Because Madame Web is truly a film that should not logically exist. There's no audience asking for it, there's no fanbase for the character, and there's no "world building" impetus for it. It was a studio-mandated dumpster fire the purple suits hoped would turn into a barbecue.  And that's intriguing to me.  

It's not like Morbius -- which I skipped and had zero interest in seeing until it cropped up on Netflix this week and now it's on the "wee hours of the morning, maybe" pile -- who is a character and concept, much like Blade which has the potential to be its own thing. He has had his own comic book series at least. But Morbius seemed too self-serious, as any Jared Leto-led project does. Madame Web looked like there was potential for a good time.

And you know what...?

I had a good time.

It is a terrible movie, just bloody ridiculous. A ludicrous farce of a superhero origin story that never fails to boggle the mind with inept story transitions and character choices and expository dialogue. But in that, it felt kind of light, breezy, mindless. It's sort of like getting that glaucoma test at the optometrist, where you sit there in dreaded anticipation of that puff of wind going in your eye, and then it happens and you can't help but be surprised and react and laugh, and then, really forget all about it seconds after its over. This is just a puff of wind in the eyes.

I don't have a lot of experience with Johnson's prior roles, and what I have seen has not left me clamouring for more. Her performance, if you can call it that, reeks of embarrassment. You can totally tell she doesn't really want to be in this movie. I have seen Adam Scott -- who plays (Uncle) Ben Parker here -- in plenty of things, dramatic and comedic, and I have never seen him not even phone in the performance, he's still dialing the numbers here. The whole cast is lifeless and drained of any energy. It probably speaks to all the many reshoots done, but it's a listless product, save for one aspect that actually does work: women talking.

The life of this film is when all the female characters are on screen together. There's a support there that seems to elevate the dodgiest script, and a true sense of bonding between the performers seemed to have happened... like soldiers in a regimen at war, experiencing the same traumas brings you close.

That good time I had watching this, though, I think it's a one shot deal. I can't imagine rewatching it and getting the same sense of enjoyment. It's a real dog of a Spider-person movie.

With a re-edit and more reshoots, I could see a much better, completely Marvel-free horror movie made out of this, of a woman whose precognitive powers isolate her from society and the three girls she must save from a slasher who is killing orphans or something. 

Will Madame Web become a cult film, though? I could see people coming to screenings, holding pepsi cans and fake spiders in jars and doing fake chest compressions (the cure for everything) in the aisles.

---

All Of Us Strangers was a critical top-ten favourite of 2023 but missed out on the Oscars likely because Searchlight Pictures was putting its money behind nominations for Poor Things instead.  It's loosely adapted from Taichi Yamada's novel Strangers into a definite tone poem (and not a vibes movie).

Andrew Scott plays Adam (no, he's not playing Adam Scott of Madame Web...we've moved on...) is a screenwriter in London. He lives in a new condo tower that is largely vacant. He seems lonely and a little depressed. He encounters a drunk Harry (Paul Mescal, completely endearing), who seems very much in the same state, but rebuffs Harry's offer for company to retreat into solitude. 

Adam is trying to write about his parents, who died in a car crash when he was 12, but can't find the words, so he returns to his childhood home, where he encounters their ghosts. They catch up on their son's life. Adam is elated. He runs into Harry again and the two connect, first as two lonely and sad people, but then as two gay men whose lives just need more love and affection in them.

Adam and Harry become a fast couple, a very sweet, tender, romantic, caring couple, and together they venture out of their solitude and into the world. Adam, meanwhile, returns to his ghost parents on multiple occasions, some encounters not faring as well as others (like when he outs himself to his mother), but finding closure along the way.

Tone poems (like vibes movies) can be a challenge. I found myself a little bored during the first act, but when Adam and Harry finally connect, and get intimate, it's quite passionate. The second act, as Adam and Harry become more emotionally involved the colour palette gets really warm, and the bare skin of the men is just radiant. It reminds me just a touch of In the Mood for Love. The second act really endears you to these men and their gentle, supportive relationship. The vibestones leave no room for drama, there's not going to be any wild swings...except Adam's return visits to his parents' ghosts. 

At times, I had to ask myself, is this a romance or a horror? A drama or a ghost story? The answer is "yes", and it's hard to reconcile at times. The third act is a tearjerker and, I'm sure for many (like Lady Kent), a head scratcher. At one point I was telling myself "if the movie goes there, I'm going to be so very mad at it." The movie went there. I wasn't mad, because it found itself, seconds later, right back in the vibestones, and it kept vibingtoning, and I kept vibingtoning with it.

It won't be for everyone, as vibe movies are pretty much  exclusive to those who hit the same wavelength. I can see this emotionally connecting very hard with people who lost their parents young, or who have had strained relationships with them because of their gender or sexuality (or both) but, even if you can't personally relate, it offers a space on the couch, a little hit of something, and a set of headphones to feel the groove...if you accept it.

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I had planned to catch up on a bunch of 2023 comedies this week but only managed two, which is fine. More than any other genre, comedies are the ones I approach with the most trepidation. What the proverbial Purple Suits think the masses think is funny and what I think is funny tend to be two radically different things.

Joy Ride is like half a Purple Suits-derived movie, and half spitting directly in their faces. The road-trip-gone-wild (RTGW) subgenre of comedy is such a Purple Suits formulae at this point that it's an instant eye-roll generator for me. The RTGW in recent years, though, has been co-opted from the Purple Suits by the FUBU crowd and we're seeing culturally-specific RTGW movies hitting the screens and turning tidy profits. 

In this case, it finds two lifelong best friends, both Asian-American, but borne of different circumstances.  Audrey was adopted from China as a baby to white parents, while Lolo was raised by her immigrant parents, and they met as children in the very white, Dave Matthews Band-soaked community of White Hills. Now adults, Audrey is the consummate overachiever, handling microagressions from her ignorant-not-intolerant white lawyer colleagues as she climbs to the top, while Lolo is a sex-positive artist with little income living in Audrey's basement. Audrey is set to take a trip to Shanghai to close a business deal and is taking Lolo with her as translator, since Audrey never really learned to speak Mandarin. In China they're to meet up with Audrey's college roommate, Kat, who has become a famous soap opera actress about to make the leap into major feature films. Lolo's awkward cousin, Deadeye, tags along as she's supposed to meet up with some online friends from a K-Pop superfan forum. 

Audrey's experience in China at first is a mixed bag. Being surrounded by people who look like her lends her a quiet comfort that she never knew, but then finds that the language barrier, and the cultural barrier dampen that comfort. Lolo wants her to look up her birthmother while they are there, but Audrey seems to have no interest, until the business deal goes sour and proving her Chinese bona-fides to the Chinese investor involves recruiting her birth mom into action or losing everything she's worked for.

Of course nothing turns out right and the four women find themselves on a road trip gone very wrong that involves heavy amounts of drugs, aggressively sexy times with a basketball team, some distant relative connections, a breakdown in the friendships and an unexpected turn in Audrey's priorities.

I find the RTGW genre a fairly tired one, particularly the requisite "we're so high on drugs" scene and/or the absurd sex-stuff scene(s), because they're so often just relying upon the conceit for the laugh and not really working hard to elevate the jokes. The drug stuff here is so much the former, but the sex scenes with the basketball team leads to a pretty good group of gags, even if it's cartoonishly out of hand.

Our leads  -- Ashley Park (Emily In Paris) as Audrey, Sherry Cola (Shortcomings) as Lolo, Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once) as Kat and Sabrina Wu in a very breakout performance as Deadeye -- are all terrific, the chemistry is great, and they're all nimble comedic performers. Park nails the third-act drama so well, she had me tearing up along with her.  

There is a place for comedy-for-the-masses, but to me, the best comedy gets deeply specific. What will always take a general 3-star RTGW story up a level is cultural specificity, it's the jokes that are generated from the culture by the culture to appeal to the culture. I'm not sure the jokes here are deeply specific, but they are definitely specific, and, even though it's not a comedy playing to me directly as an audience, it's still a rowdy fun time overall.

---

I think film trailers are the number one reason why people don't go see comedies in the theatres anymore.  It's hard enough to get a comedy that swerves around the Purple Suits' expectations for what's funny, but then you got the Purple Suits' editors distilling a film down to two minutes and their particular sensibilites.

Thus No Hard Feelings trailer premiered to a swath of reactionary, unfounded "film about grooming" allegations that I'm not sure it ever properly shook. From my perspective it looked like a stupid "raunchy comedy" that certainly couldn't have anything interesting to say about an older woman trying to bring a teenager out of his shell for a new car.

The teenager in question is 19-year-old Percy who is about to head out to Princeton in the fall, but never leaves his room and worries his parents with his isolationism. As a parent of modern teens, I can relate. But these rich second-home-having New York elite types are also aggressive helicopter parents and they aim to do something about it. They solicit an ad for a college-aged woman to date their son in exchange for a new car.

Answering the ad is Maddie, a 32-year-old Montauk lifer is struggling to keep her house. Her car has been repossessed, which means she can't supplement her low-wage bartending job with Uber driving for the summer when all the rich idiots descend upon town. It's these idiots, buying up and redeveloping all the real estate, that is driving her taxes up to unaffordable levels.  She needs the car to drive the idiots to save her house, and she's willing to date a 19 year old to do it.

What results initially is highly awkward, very uncomfortable scenes of Maddie trying to get Percy's attention, trying to proposition him, trying to get him interested in having sex with her. Her plan is to get in and get out because time is money and time is a-wasting.  But Percy is a thoughtful, sensitive and caring kid. He finds Maddie attractive but he wants to get to know her before he does anything with her.

What happens, naturally, is Maddie develops feelings. Percy's not like the quick meaningless lays she's left around town, she has a genuine interest in Percy's development as a person, seeing a reflection of her own life lost by the promise of this fledgling adult. Of course, her feelings are not romantic, like Percy's start to become towards her, and there's not really any easy way out of this, especially if he were to find out about the deal.

Jennifer Lawrence is a fearless performer. She doesn't carry with her any sense of ego or identity in her performance. It's only the first few minutes of the movie where I was thinking "yeah sure, world-famous movie star Jennifer Lawrence is pretending to be a victim of the housing crisis and class inequality" to "Maddie really needs that car, and while her tactics are riotously wrong-headed, she's not wrong for going for it". The brassiness that Lawrence shows as Maddie is a very well constructed veil that is evident from the beginning, hiding someone underneath who is sort of lost and afraid, and has been for a long time. (There's pretty much a direct parallel between Maddie and Adam from All Of Us Strangers, both who lost their parents young, and both who have severe difficulty opening up to others with knotted up hearts).

Matching her scene-for-scene is Andrew Barth Feldman, a newcomer to the screen but played the lead in Dear Evan Hanson on Broadway. The kid's got chops. The film is set in this age of financial disparity, and offers no resolution to it, save for the poor to take advantage of the inane ways the rich wish to be served. But it's also about the generation gap, between the time Percy's parents remember (eg. the John Hughes years) and the way kids engage with the world today, and also in the way Maddie views the world compared to Percy.  It's not directly saying a lot about these things, but they're being put boldly up on the screen to examine and compare.

It's a far more thoughtful film than I had given it credit for, and it doesn't go for easy gags. Even it's most infamous (already) scene finds Lawrence engaging in fighting a trio of teenagers fully naked at night on the beach, at one point even suplexing a kid. In a comedy 20 years ago it would have been cheap titillation but, it's definitely not that. There's no leering. It's an action sequence. It's a brilliantly funny moment as she stomps out of the ocean in the background towards the teens like a Terminator fresh from the future, absolutely determined to destroy. And it's not funny just because she's naked, but because she's so unphased by her state when fighting with such wild gusto. It speaks to her as a character for sure, especially the conversation with Percy that immediately follows. 

There's so much to enjoy here (see also Percy's stunning cover of "Maneater" or the "abduction" scene). This isn't a throwaway comedy. It's also not a laugh riot that demands immediate rewatch, but any other time in the past 50 years it would have been an instant cable TV classic. I don't know where it fares from here, but its charms are sure to prevail. 

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How I came to the indie-Canadian urban drama of Akilla's Escape is an odd one. I was randomly searching movies on the various platforms I have accounts with. One connection led to another, six degrees of Kevin Bacon-style, and I came across Saul Williams. I know Williams primarily from a few tracks of his from the early aughts. He blends spoken word with hip-hop with activism in a very powerful manner such that the few tracks of his I've heard have really stuck with me over the years.

Williams is a multi-multi-hyphenate. He does a bit of everything writing, poetry, music, directing, and yes, acting. It was his profile on my Rogers cable box that brought me to Akilla's Escape. I watch the trailer, it looked interesting enough, but the list of people associated with the production included Robert Del Naja, aka 3D of the band Massive Attack as part of the soundtrack. Williams was the lead, and also the composer, with 3D assisting.

The next day I listened to the soundtrack to Akilla's Escape a half dozen times, which led to a strong desire to watch the production. This is not unusual, as it happened a fair number of times back in the 90's when I'd gorge on a soundtrack long before I'd watched the film.

The story of Akilla's Escape is fairly simple, but the simplicity betrays its depth. Akilla is operating a grow-op in Toronto, where weed has become legal and is controlled by the province. The profits are still there, but competition has gone legit and he wants out. In the process of making his pitch to the criminals he's tangentially beholden to, a robbery goes down. One of the three thieves is captured, and he's just a boy, a mute kid in over his head. Akilla takes responsibility for the boy and gets him safely home to his aunt. But the danger isn't over. Akilla's associates want their goods returned and some intimidation for good measure, and the gang the boy was running with figure him for a snitch that needs to be silenced.

Flashbacks tell us about Akilla's life with his abusive father, drummed out of Jamaica after the political civil war ended and his enforcer status with the losing side marked him a wanted man. He took his family to New York where he started the Garrison Army, a particularly vicious gang, and when Akilla was old enough, brought him into the the fold. But Akilla had to run to Canada after retaliating against his father after repeatedly abusing his mother. It's been nearly 30 years.

But this boy he's saved, he was running with the Garrison, and that makes it personal for Akilla. And when the boy is abducted, Akilla will make sure he's returned safely to his aunty.

Overall this is a well crafted, tightly structured, and contemplative entry in the street gang subgenre. It's well coiled around a remarkably introspective performance by Williams who doesn't come off as an action hero badass, but instead a man capable of doing whatever it is needing done. He wears the weariness of Akilla well. He's tired of the life he's leading. Rather than thinking about something more, it's almost like he wants something less. An escape, you might say.

The film has a great trick in its sleeve, which is casting Thamela Mpumlwana as both the boy Akilla saves and as young Akilla in the flashbacks. Styled completely different, and yet, the resonance of Akilla seeing himself is absolutely the point. 

At times this film bears the scars of its Canadian production budget. With better cameras, lenses, lighting and time, it would look a lot better than it does. It looks fine, but you can tell the late director Officer wanted it to look amazing.  This should look like a Michael Mann picture, but it can only reach.

It's very much straddles the line between vibes movie and tone poem, owing a great debt to its soundtrack which weaves in and out of genres from reggae, dub, electronica, ambiant, industrial, gospel, hip-hop and even Spanish guitar. It is a great listen, both in context and out of.

1-1-1-KsMIRT: A long day's January into night

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. Behold, the rest of January.

This month:
Monarch Season 1 - AppleTV+ (10 Episodes)
Ghosts (BBC) Seasons 1 & 2 - CBC Gem (6 episodes each)
The Prisoner - Blu-Ray (2009 mini-series, 6 episodes)
After Midnight - CBS weeknights (multiple episodes)

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 1

The Plot 100:
In the 1950s two scientists and their military liaison investigate Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms (MUTOs) while also navigating tangled emotions and government bureaucracy in founding a formal organization to support their activities, Monarch. In 2015, in the fallout of "G-Day" (from 2014 Godzilla), a young woman goes to settle her father's affairs in Japan only to learn he had a whole other family, and she is part of Monarch's legacy. She stumbles upon sensitive documents that send her, her half-brother and his tech-savvy ex on the run from Monarch's forces.

(1 Great): I mean, freaking Godzilla. The show uses the MUTOs very sparingly (as do most Godzilla films) but extremely effectively. Every scene with Godzilla here has an incredible sense of scale and there's a potency in the juxtaposition between the creature and the real world events and people surrounding it. Godzilla and the other MUTOs are forces of nature, not characters here and really are quite the spectacle. 

(1 Good): The flashback sequences set in the 50's are exceptionally well done, both in story and in visual execution (the costuming, sets, technology, etc, all on point).  They really hit home the sense of discovery and the frustratingly limited mindsets of Western white men of the era. The main cast of characters in this age, played by Mari Yamamoto, Anders Holm and Wyatt Russell are an exceptionally appealing trio, with Yamamoto's Dr. Keiko Miura doing an exceptional amount of the heavy lifting, navigating post-war racism and suspicion of the Japanese, getting respect from peers as a woman in her field, and dealing with both Bill Randa (Holm - a character later played by John Goodman both in Kong: Skull Island and in this show's prologue) and Col. Leland Shaw (Russell). She needs to be the heart and soul of Monarch and I think they manage to establish that very well.  

(1 Bad): The modern day is a mixed bag. On the one hand there's a pretty wild journey that newfound siblings Cate and Kentaro Randa (Anna Sawai and Ren Watabe) need to go on, both emotionally and physically along with their friend May (Kiersey Clemons), but they're the weakest part of the show, mostly in how the writers don't seem to know how to incorporate their adventure with navigating very complex emotions. The drama of it all - including Cate's post G-day PTSD, Kentaro's daddy issues, May's secret past - all feel like distractions and not well integrated. These subplots often leave the characters acting petulant or standoffish in very unappealing ways.  Thankfully, they manage to hook up with modern day Leland Shaw (Kurt Russell in full-on KR charm mode) and the Monarch team they are on the run from, Tim (Joe Tippett) and Duvall (Elisa Lasowski) are exceptionally likeable, especially as we're never quite clear on where they stand on the threat level to our leads, and it shifts more than once.

META: The ten episodes are very digestible and constantly engaging with the only lag points being whenever they detour into our 2015-era characters' past. These diversions into their history, Lost-style, pull the brakes on the propulsiveness of this very globe-trotting, multigenerational adventure.  In general, I like all the characters here, but Cate, Kentaro and May all take turns being the wet blanket on the season, and those moments are my least favourite.

But the effects in this show look expensive and incredible, and obviously having the Wyatt Russell/Kurt Russell gimmick of them playing the same character in two generations is goddamn delightful and one of the best things on TV ever. The younger Russell at times seems to be intentionally channelling his father in scenes and line deliveries and it's a blast to watch.

In general, I was very surprised by this show. I was expecting a cheap, inconsequential tie-in to the Legendary Studios' Monsterverse movies, but this seems anything but that. In some ways, the attention to detail and the care of the lore and the characters seems of even better, more improved quality than some of Legendary's shakier films.

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Ghosts (BBC) Season 1 & 2 (2019, 2020)

The Plot 100: Alison learns she is the only living heir left in the Button family lineage. She has inherited Button House, a rural manor. She initially wants to pawn it off, but with her husband Mike, they decide to leave London behind and attempt to turn the space into a hotel/events destination. But when Alison has an accident and nearly dies, the near death experience results in her seeing ghosts everywhere, but especially on the Button House property. They're a mixed bag of souls but elated to have the attention of the living. This is about how they co-exist.

(1 Great): Ghosts is deliriously charming. Each Ghost is a delightful comic trope that the show leans into but also allows little glimpses of depth into. 
There's Julian, the conservative MP from the 90's who died having an affair in Button House (he has no pants on). He was an awful human being, utterly selfish and self serving and not much has changed as a ghost. He's also the only ghost who can physically manipulate objects in the house.
There's Pat, the former scout leader, who was accidentally killed in the 80's on Button House grounds by a scout with an arrow through his throat.
There's The Captain, a WWII-era officer who likes things ordered and tidy and is still repressing his homosexuality almost a century after his death.
There's Fanny, the uptight, prim-and-proper Lady of the house who was murdered and whose PTSD has her reenacting her death nightly. She's constantly offended and turns her nose up at almost everything modern.
There's Thomas, the laughably romantic poet who died in a duel, who has the hots for Alison.
There's Kitty, the stuntedly naive, immature, and sexually curious noblewoman who desires nothing more (and nothing less) than being Alison's best friend.
There's Mary, an uneducated servant who was burned at the stake during witch trials. If someone passes through her, the smell of sulphur emanates. 
There's Robin, the caveman, whose speech is stunted, but he seems, more than any of the ghosts, to have evolved with the times. He can manipulate electricity and the lights.
There's also Sir Humphrey who was decapitated and whose head and body are often never in the same place, much to the head's chagrin.
And finally there's the plague victims, all confined to the basement, who seem a pretty cheery and helpful lot, despite their unsettling appearances.

Within two episodes, I loved all these characters and the performers who play them. With such short seasons, and such a large cast, the tropes of the characters don't really wear thin, and the teases of their backstories don't really have that much runway to get tired.  Watching how each of these different personas out-of-time react to modern day events is really what the series is all about.

(1 Good): Not to be outdone, Alison and her husband Mike are an adorable couple. Alison is a people pleaser so once she gets over the fact that she's seeing ghosts, she's very keen to keep the peace and help them out however she can. Mike is super chill, but also a little inept and very self-conscious about it. It's a hilarious mix for a sitcom, but it means Mike is constantly making tiny little mistakes into big freaking disasters. Alison, in trying to please everyone, often winds up in these same disasters with Mike, which is basically the situations in this situation comedy.

(1 Bad): Seriously, this is basically a perfect sitcom. Incredible set-up, incredible cast, and so many possibilities. If there's a quibble (and it's not even really a quibble) it's that it's not a "binge-worthy" show. There's no ongoing narrative thrust to it that drives you to absolutely must watch the next one. But that's not truly a bad thing. I like having a show I can just pick up and watch an episode of when I have a half hour to spare and not feel the urge to jump into another one. I like a show that has a status quo that changes so minimally, it might not matter too much to watch them out of order.  It's sort of an old school sitcom in that regard.

META: I had already seen many of the cast on different seasons of Taskmaster (maybe my favourite show ever?) - like Charlotte Ritchie, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Lolly Adefope, Katie Wix - so I was already charmed by some of the players in Ghosts before I even started watching it. Everyone is truly great.

My only problem was in access to viewing. In Canada all four seasons are on CBC Gem (a public, free streaming service) but it's so bogged down with ads that a 30 minute episode takes almost 45 minutes to watch. Some commercial breaks have 14 commercials. During the holidays in December, CBS was airing the first two seasons, but my PVR was having a headache in recording it. I think it's also on whatever BBC America or whatever streaming service is out there for British programming but I'm not getting yet another service.

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The Prisoner (mini-series)

The Plot 100: Number Six is new to "The Village", a remote desert location with seemingly no connections to the outside world. Six's memories play tricks with him, the villagers play tricks as well as all seem to be in on The Village life and its quaintness. There's a cheery facade of perfection to it all, but underneath everyone is afraid of stepping out of line, of Number Two's wrath. But Six seems to get away with more than anyone else in the Village, of pushing boundaries, and it's not like Two isn't watching. He watches everything.  Two is trying to break him specifically, but why? And why is he here? 

(1 Bad): There's more than one bad in this, but the part that I had the most trouble with, honestly, was the editing style. It really took to that post-Bourne series, Paul Greengrass quick-cut editing and ran with it. It drove me nuts in the opening minutes of the first act through to the final moments of the show. I know a lot of the intent behind the editing was to establish for the audience a sense of confusion that Six feels in the show, and to a very limited extent it did the trick, but it was also unpleasant viewing and more aggravating than immersive. I think I would have enjoyed the series maybe 70% more with cleaner editing and camerawork.

(1 Good): The flavour of The Prisoner was there enough to keep me watching. The Rovers popped up a couple of times (though not enough for my liking), and every time this version of the show got away from Six's backstory and focused more on the village and its strangeness, the more intriguing (yet familiar) it became. Unfortunately the story within the show is completely tied to Six's history, to the point that the finale gets muddied as to whether the backstory is actually the present or not (again, the editing here is a real hindrance to enjoyment).

(1 Great): Ruth Wilson. Can you ever go wrong with Ruth Wilson?

META: Look, I love the 1960's Patrick McGoohan-starring The Prisoner series. It's an incredible 18 episodes of espionage-tinged mind-fuckery. It's got surface level action-drama-intrigue appeal as well as deeper philosophical undercurrents to be picked apart: questions of identity, sanity, values, morals, society, authoritarianism, liberty, and on and on and on. It's a concept that has seemed ripe for a remake for decades since McGoohan shut it down (at 18 episodes, he felt the series was twice as long as it needed to be).

The remake debuted in 2009, from an ITV/AMC British-American co-production. While I don't remember any exact statements from the time, my recollection of the reviews I had read said the show did not live up to its predecessor, and, as such, I gave it a pass.  But after a rewatch of the McGoohan series recently, as well as doing a writing exercise recently of trying to recreate The Prisoner in another setting, and then seeing this come out on Blu-Ray for the first time recently, I decided to pick it up, as much as I didn't want to be seen as backing Caviezel and his right wing take on the world. 

It transfers The Village from the picturesque Portmeirion in Wales to a desert town that has a mix of downtown USA and Baltic architecture (it's Swakopmund, Nimibia, and much of the influence is traced to German colonialism). It's an place with some interesting details that are at times nicely shot, but it's flatter and more sprawling environment than the 60's set, and it does rob the modern of some of the original's sense of confinement. 

McGoohan's Six was a very stoic, some might even say cold blooded protagonist in the original series, and I can see why they went with Jim Caviezel in trying to find a similar match, but McGoohan's prickliness had the sense of "the only sane man in an insane world", while Caviezel just seems lost in his environment. Unlike McGoohan who was the key creative force behind the original series, I don't get the sense that Caviezel was all that engaged by the role, or he wrestled a bit with the directions. He's not a very charismatic lead regardless, and scenes where he's being "romantic" with Wilson or Hayley Atwell are painful to watch. They might as well be kissing a log.

I watched Caviezel in 5 seasons of Person of Interest and his performance on that show is fairly one-note, but it's pretty much exactly what that show needed. It debuted after this mini-series, but I wish that, like how McGoohan's spy series Danger Man led indirectly into The Prisoner, that PoI had led indirectly into this interpretation and he could have transferred that one-noteness here. But then this interpretation isn't really about a spy who has quit his job with no explanation, instead it's about someone working for a data collection and processing firm and quits when he discovers a secret about the firm, and the show wants us to be invested into what he discovered about the firm, but it's really hard to care.

SPOILERS, but in the end it's about a virtual reality simulation that is being used to help people with extreme mental health disorders (dissociative identity disorder, PTSD, depression) escape into a more controlled, healtier world for them (though most are unaware).  I really did not mind the reveal for the show, but I really dislike it for The Prisoner branding. And if you think about it too much it reveals a lot of complex questions around treatment of mental health and its representation thereof. 

I think about other shows or movies who had "VR" reveals in their finale and the ones I can recall (the American Life on Mars sticks out the most, but also 1899) and it doesn't bother me as much here, but maybe if I was enjoying the show more fully, it would have. I think maybe I was just resigned to the show going wherever it was going. 

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After Midnight

The What 100: A remake of the old Comedy Central series @Midnight, a comedy game show where three contestants (stand-up comedians or comedic performers) compete for comedy points by having snappy answers to stupid questions about trending topics on social media.

(1 Great): I knew of comedian Taylor Tomlinson but can't say I've ever seen her stand-up. The first episode of After Midnight I thought she was fine but also suspected she was fake laughing to hard. Turns out that's just how her laugh sounds, and she's very quickly settled in as a fake gameshow host where the points don't matter. She's very good at taking the piss out of herself, the show, producer Stephen Colbert, and their CBS corporate overlords, and she's pretty damn charming. Favourite bit is the "talk show portion" of the show that comes after the first act break. I love Taylor's absurd or faux banal questions.

(1 Good): What I really liked about the Chris Hardwick-hosted @Midnight was that it would introduce me to funny people who I didn't know before. So I fully expect After Midnight to do the same, in the easy and comfortable format of a competition/panel/game show (it's no Taskmaster, but then nothing is).  So far, I've only seen faces I already know, but most are very welcome faces, including a lot of familiar recurring panelists from the old show like Marcella Arguello, Doug Benson, and Milana Vayntrub. 

(1 Bad): The show has moved from 30 minutes to 1 hour, but really it's only about 36 minutes as they plug a LOT of commercials in between. Frustrating if you're not used to commercials (or at least being able to click past them).
But thankfully the episodes are all on youtube. The first couple episodes were presented in full, but later they partitioned them out in segments based on ad breaks. The only problem was they weren't labeled for viewing order so it was frustrating to watch that way too. But now they've assembled daily playlists so it is better.

META: The hit-to-miss ratio is only about 1:4 which, given that the bits are delivered at such a rapid-fire quip, is still a pretty high laugh-per-minute ratio.

I watched the first two weeks daily (usually next day) as matter of priority. Since then I've already fallen off daily watching, mostly because of the longer format.  It's easier to slot in a sub-1/2 hour show into the daily schedule than a 40 minute show. But I'm very happy it's back.