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. 

KWIF: The Invite (+1)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. A quieter week.

This Week:
The Invite (2026, d. Olivia Wilde - in theatre)
The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026, d. Kiyoshi Kurosawa - in theatre)

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Late in the week a whole slew of new releases dropped that I want to check out in theatre. Early in the week, I had nothing I was itching to see. So I saw The Invite.

I've enjoyed Olivia Wilde's films in the past (Booksmart was fantastic and Don't Worry Darling was a mess, yes, but an interesting one). The Invite really intrigued me until I started hearing critical feedback (almost universally positive and/or glowing) that talked about the premise of the film. Like The Drama earlier this year, another critically well-received movie (and very successful one at that, grossing over 100mil at the box office), I was intrigued but upon hearing that premise but my aversion to discomfort steered me away.

The Invite's simple premise conjured little but cringe comedy in my mind, and I just don't have the stomach for such comedic affairs anymore. Here Angela (Wilde) and her husband Joe (Seth Rogen) are hosting their upstairs neighbours Pina (Penelope Cruz) and Hawk (Ed Norton) for a getting-to-know you dinner. They get to know their upstairs neighbours alright, they get to know that they are swingers and the titular invite is not for dinner, but to have group sex. (Uh, spoiler, I guess)

You can already start to see the many, many opportunities to have one's hackles raised just in such a simple description. But it seems so much worse...potentially... when you learn, within the first ten minutes of the film, that Angela and Joe are both miserable in their relationship, do little other than argue, and Joe is totally not on board with the short-notice event Angela has arranged.  You can just picture the cringe-inducing moments as Joe and Angela put on their game faces and try to hid their bitterness towards each other for the benefit of the guests.

But that's not this film. Mercifully that's not this film.

Not to say that The Invite is a comforting watch by any means, but it is not interested in being cringe comedy in the slightest.

With a savvy script from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack (based of a 2021 Spanish film The People Upstairs), The Invite immediately cuts out the pretense the moment Pina and Hawk walk in the door. Joe is not hiding in the slightest his displeasure about this dinner date, while Pina and Hawk immediately fess up that they heard their hosts arguing through the door when they arrived.

The smart play in all this is that Angela and Joe are emotionally repressed, while Pina and Hawk are emotionally intuitive. Pina is also a therapist so she, in particular, has a way of approaching a hostile environment and cutting through the tension. Hawk has such an easy going, friendly demeanour that he not only seems open to talking about anything, he kind of draws things out of people.

And so the evening, set for disaster, is...well... a disaster, but a disaster that ebbs and flows in waves. Joe and Angela are unable to contain their hostility but Pina and Hawk are continually able to disarm them, to a point.  Joe wants nothing more than to confront their upstairs neighbours about their loud, middle-of-the-night sex noises, but Angela is committed to saying nothing and wanting to make friends (which are in short supply).

When the truth about Pina and Hawk's sexual proclivities come to light, suddenly you see Angela and Joe in a whole new light. Their elation and excitement and curiosity becomes a shared moment where they seem like a loving couple and best friends... for a little bit.  And then the ebb and flow begins again.

The Invite is a comedy-drama. It lives squarely between those two worlds. There are some pretty good laughs, but there's also dramatic intensity as the core of this film is not a goofy sex comedy but a break-up story. To paraphrase a review on Letterboxed, this may be the film that launches a thousand divorces. 

It's a pretty exceptional production featuring a cast of only four actors that carry pretty the entire hour and forty minutes with remarkable performances. Rogen provides a reminder that, yes, he may be a very specific type, but within that type he's got exceptional range and is undervalued as a dramatic performer. Wiled is a perfect bundle of tension looking for release.  Cruz is effortlessly alluring that you have to wonder if it's a put on and Norton is at his best in a very long time being affable, enticing but also a little weird and sad. 

It's a film that is part TV bottle episode, part stage play, but only feels at home structured as a movie. Wilde's direction is exceptional and intriguing that follows the appropriate action to accentuate the comedy or the drama (and sometimes cleverly elides over details for comedic or dramatic effect). The opening credits are an editing smorgasbord of repeating frames and or split screens that doesn't necessarily prepare you for the film to come based on the content of the images presented, but gives the feeling of a 70's relationship comedy and/or drama, which should tell you what you're in for. 

My immediate impulse was to compare it to Woody Allen's work of the 70's and 80's, sans-neuroses, and I only hesitate because Allen's reputation has been tainted so greatly by, well, you know (and if you don't, look it up), that it seems wrong to compare anything to his work. And yet, I can't think of much else other than Allen's work looking at relationships and sex and mixing it with awkward comedy and emotionally impactful drama that seems to have all but disappeared in the wake of, well, Allen's irrelevance (as if the whole realm or style storytelling was verboten). There's been few films that really trigger that sense of "oh, here's what we've been missing from our cinematic diet" so specifically.

I was indeed surprised to find not a cringe comedy, but a thoughtful, thought-provoking, funny, fascinating, mature and entertaining film that challenges the audience who may cross their arms with discomfort, but asks them to uncross them and open up.

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I am by no means an expert of samurai fare...though I have dabbled in it infrequently over my many decades. It's a subgenre of historical storytelling that fascinates me every time I watch (or read) it. While I have watched a decent amount (and read a not so decent amount), I have only the remotest of understandings of the many eras in which samurai culture was predominant, the tides of Japanese culture across those eras, the topography in which the samurai traverse, and meaningful understanding the social, political and economic structures as well as the deeper workings of the religious and samurai cultures of these stories tend to elude me time after time. It's not my history, it's not my culture, but it is something I'm almost always satisfied with spending time exploring.

This is all to say I'm going to have a tremendously difficult time really talking about The Samurai and the Prisoner, a new drama set in the late 1500's where much of Japan is in the midst of war. On one side is Lord Oda, who is barely seen in the picture at all, but his presence is felt almost constantly. He is a man to be feared, and his desire is nothing less than ruling the world.  On the other side is Lord Araki (Masahiro Motoki), who has banded a small collection of lords together to oppose Oda, with tenuous allegiances making a war council inside the impregnable walls of Arioka Castle (which Araki presides over having himself taken it with force as an ally of Oda).

Oda sends an envoy to Arioka Castle, Kanbei (Masaki Suda), who Araki tries to turn to his side, but he is rebuffed. Rather than let Kanbei return with a message, or killing him (which itself is a message), Araki imprisons Kanbei. Soon after there's a murder within the castle walls, a seemingly impossible mystery which Araki's closes advisors can't seem to make sense of.

At this early stage in the film, with this sweeping drama of politics and war in play, it seemed like the story was going to swing completely into a sort of police procedural/CSI-Samurai and I got pretty excited. So it was to my own minor disappointment that Araki turned to Kanbei's wisdom to tease out the solution, and suddenly there was an answer...sort of. In the next season there comes another mystery, and again the season after that, and so establishes a pattern within Arioka Castle between phenomenal events and its Lord seeking the counsel of the only man in his cells.

Running at almost 150 minutes, Kurosawa's incredibly patient-but-eventful film never ceases being interesting though it's hard at times to truly understand where it is going or why until well past the half-way point.

Eventually we come to understand that the protagonist of our film, Lord Araki, may be a merciful man, but his mercy is still a calculation, it's still strategy. He wishes for a world free of conflict, war and murder, but he's also a brilliant military tactician who can't stop thinking about the ways of war. He's haunted by senseless death, though well aware that sometimes one death can prevent many more.  His prisoner's life is spared, but Kanbei has no life in a prison cell except to serve Araki's requests, and the fate of his son, held by Oda to keep his loyalty in check, remains a torturous mystery for him.

The curious structure of the film told over the approximate span of a year, presents big events which lead to smaller events which lead to ripples barely noticed, but still felt by Araki. Every gambit or ploy Araki makes against Oda, or defends against, seems to result in just a little more chaos within Castle Arioka. Big waves to Araki are ripples to others, while little ripples eventually form into waves that cannot be ignored.  It's all connected in some way, but it feels both organized and chaotic...who can say. Kanbei? Maybe.

The world within Castle Arioka is so well realized and so intricately understood by its director that you feel like you could turn to practically anyone who passes by on screen and follow them as a fully fleshed out individual. Meanwhile, the world outside the walls feels vast and unknowable. All the reports we hear of Oda's machinations and manoeuvres, and the bending to his whims of other Lords, seem questionable...but there's no other choice except to trust it.

It's a well-composed film that only falters when it tries to go big. A battle scene seems lit by floodlights in an abandoned field with sneaker prints all over it, and feels starkly uncertain as a production compared to the assuredness of the remainder of the film.

It's a production that feels like it could do with some pruning, and perhaps its resolution isn't as satisfying (or unpredictable) as the remainder of the film, but it's time certainly well spent if this genre is at all in one's wheelhouse.

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KWIF: The Odyssey (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Well, two weeks. Time has been occupied. 

This Week:

The Odyssey (2026, d. Christopher Nolan - 70mm projection)
Gail Daughtry and the Hollywood Sex Pass (2026, d. David Wain - in theatre)
Operation Avalanche (2016, d. Matt Johnson - amazonprime)
The Truman Show (1998, d. Peter Wier - in theatre)
Irma Vep (1996, d. Olivier Assayas - hollywoodsuite)

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Look, I've been a geek my whole life. History and literature couldn't compete with superhero comic books and sci-fi movies. As such, I've never read Homer's epic poem Odyssey. But, as one of the first great works of literature, it's resonated for over two millennia, and influenced so much media. So even without having ever read it, I have at least a passing awareness of many of the Greek king Odysseus' trials and tribulations, including the siege of Troy and the Trojan horse, the encounters with mythical beings like the cyclops, Circe, and the sirens, and the temptation of the sacred cattle, among others misadventures. But I've never seen all these stories assembled as one full tale before. Some have said it was impossible to successfully adapt, but impossible is usually just not having the courage or confidence to try (and, when it comes to making movies, it's not the filmmakers, but the studios and money people behind them that chicken out).

After 20 years it seems like Christopher Nolan has earned the trust of his backers, and they have the confidence (if not courage) to feed him whatever he needs to make whatever he wants. $250-million dollar budgeted, R-rated adaptations of a 2000-year-old Greek poems aren't what's in vogue at the movie theatres these days, but Nolan is one of the very few, maybe even the only director who is given ostensibly free reign with each film, and it's paid off every time (the only asterisk is Tenet -- time-warping superspy adventure which is absolutely my favourite Nolan movie but a great many find utterly impenetrable -- which came out during covid and never got a proper test at the box office). I thought that, maybe, The Odyssey might break Nolan's incredible streak, that it might not click with today's audiences, but, just like with Oppenheimer and Dunkirk and pretty much every non-Batman related film he's made, it's a triumph and a spectacle and people want in.

My reservations were many, and a lot of it stemmed from my ignorance of Homer's poem. What relevance does something so old have for today? Will this just be spectacle without substance? And the cast speaking without affectation (you know, the usually British affectation actors tend put on for anything historical, foreign or needing gravitas) could prove disastrous.  Well before the ten-minute mark of the film, such concerns had left my mind completely. It's hard not to be mesmerized by the sheer scale of the production.

Nolan doesn't like to tell stories in a linear fashion, and The Odyssey is no exception, but rather than being an exercise in form or a stylistic choice, it seems a necessary mechanic in order to present the stories of Odysseus' journey without making the journey the narrative.  Instead, the tales of the lost king of Ithaca are told, either from the memories of others who were there, or from Odysseus (Matt Damon) himself as he tries to recapture memories from the void of his lotus-addled mind.  He tells his stories to Calypso (Charlize Theron), who may, or may not, be his captor. 

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Odysseus' long absence, and lack of word of his post-Troy adventures, have cast doubt upon his continued claim to the throne. His wife, the queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway), has spent years fending off a gaggle of suitors who gather in her hall, consuming the state's food and wine in lavish feasts, all in mind of claiming her and the throne. The Prince Telemachus (Tom Holland) is small and doesn't have his father's physical strength or cunning, but he has heart, still inviting beggars and travelers into the feast, as Zeus' will demands.  Telemachus lives in the shadow of his father, and while he doesn't desire the throne, he sees the suitors as boors and louts and not a one suitable to lead under the laws of the gods they worship.  Penelope, though, hasn't given up hope of Odysseus' return, and herself doesn't see any need for a man to claim the throne where she currently sits.  The suitors try to bait Telemachus into fights so that his claim to the throne can be "rightfully" disregarded if he's killed in an act of self defence.  Telemachus leaves Ithaca to seek answers, but that just puts him in even more danger.

We see the fateful climax to the Trojan War from at least three different perspectives throughout the film. The first is the legend, the tale of the glorious victors and Odysseus' strategic genius in the ploy of the Trojan horse. The second is the harrowing tale of the warriors' time inside of said horse, the unglamorous reality of it all. The third is from Odysseus' own recollections, using Zeus' law of providing hospitality, of welcoming offerings of peace as a gateway for their own violent ambitions.  Odysseus' men get the gates of Troy open, the waiting army of Agamemnon enter and slaughter the sleeping town with no discretion.

In leaving Troy, Odysseus opts to take the long route home, rather than follow Agamemnon, and this one ill decision leads to a series of misadventures which continue to cost him the lives of his men. The meeting of the cyclops is a horror show, but in managing their escape, Odysseus take a spiteful shot at the creature, a child of Poseidon. The men start to believe their journey is cursed as a result, the god of the seas taking his vengeance upon them.  They are assailed by giants, turned into pigs, eaten by sea creatures, and their only way to get back on track, to finding their way home is to visit the dead. There, Odysseus has to face the men he left behind, the men whose bodies he didn't honour, and the predictions of the future, the choices he will have to make. Odysseus has defied the gods over and over again, and is punished for it. 

The Odyssey is weirdly a pro-religion film, one that talks about obeying the laws of gods, and shows the punishments that happen if you don't. Odysseus' point for so long was that his will, his strength, and his intellect were all that mattered. In the belly of war for ten years, he lost his heart, his compassion, his humanity, and in doing so lost almost everything. If the film is telling us anything, it's not that religion is good or that obeying the gods is good, but respecting your fellow man is good. That charity is good. That contrition and compassion is good. At the center of pretty much every major religion is these ideas of being of service to gods is to be of service to your community and fellow man. But rather than look at this as a film telling you to go to church, or synagogue or mosque or whatever, it's telling you to respect and empathize, and look outside your own needs and ambitions, to use your status for something greater, not for self.

As well, the tale of Odysseus is about the traumas of war. History like to create heroes and epic tales out of battle, but such history ignores the humanity behind it.  By the time he returns home, Odysseus does not see himself as a great warrior, a hero or a legends, but a man with the burden of honouring those whose lives he cost. Accompanying him throughout the film is a spectre (Zendaya), a being that both haunts and guides him, setting him on a more righteous path, if slowly. In the end, when Odysseus says he needs to honour the dead, I don't think he's just talking about his men.  What we never actually see in the film are the gods themselves, but there's enough fantastical elements to makes us feel their presence.

The production of The Odyssey is incredible. The lighting feels so natural, in a Barry Lyndon  sort of way where all the indoor light seems to be coming from either torches, candles or windows, and the natural light outdoors is highlighting everything. I loved that there's minimal make-up in the film as well. The lines and freckles on Anne Hathaway's face weren't present in The Devil Wears Prada 2 but they make her stunning and captivating here. You want to study all the faces on screen, in a way glossier productions don't.

While most assuredly there's digital effects in the film, it seems largely a practical production. The ships look real, as does the beautiful wide shots and overhead views of them on the waters from ace cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema. I don't really want the mystique of it all spoiled, but I also want to know how far asea  they took those boats.

Back once again with Nolan is composer Ludwig Göransson. I'm a big fan of Göransson, his compositions usually are a highlight, often attention grabbing in their uniqueness while complementing the visuals. Here, for the most part, Göransson steps back, letting his compositions rest in the shadows, rarely calling attention to themselves, but nonetheless being fantastic and exactly what the film needs.

It's the first feature length film to be completely shot on IMAX cameras, but getting into one of the few proper IMAX theatres to see it is a challenge all its own at the moment, and given how in-demand the format is, there may not be enough time and enough seats to satisfy demand before (I assume) the latest Spider-man film takes them over.

I was rapt for the entire two hours and fifty-two minute runtime of the film. While the spectacle is what would normally entice me, my favourite moments were all two-handers, scenes between two characters. These moments of intimacy or intrigue are the film's greatest strength and what will have me returning to the film many more times.  Try to tell my younger geek self that I'd be more drawn to people talking than fighting giants or men getting turned into pigs or massive battles, and he wouldn't believe you.

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I listen to more than a few movie and comedy podcasts, and one of the recurring conversations is the sorry state of comedy in cinema. There just aren't many comedies released in cinemas anymore, and when they are they're certainly not reaching the surprise blockbuster status that they were in Jim Carrey/Ben Stiller/Steve Carrell/Will Ferrell/Kevin Hart heyday of the 2000s. There's many reasons for this, not the least of which the business model shifted from being American box-office centric to international box-office centric, and comedy doesn't tend to translate well into other languages, and some comedic sensibilities don't cross borders well.  As well, Marvel's success in all ages and all regions brought humour to action franchises, which meant that "funny films" had to also be spectacles.

The "Marvel Age" of cinema is over. We're in a new transitional state right now where all different types of films are hitting big, from horrors to epics to chick flicks to video game adaptations, but there hasn't been a blockbuster comedy in a long, long time. I can't think of one from this decade that jumps out to me, in spite of there being at least a few great comedies that didn't get a lot of attention or explode the box office (maybe the relaunches of The Naked Gun last year and this year's Scary Movie come close to blockbuster status?).

For comedies to be big they tend to need either an authorial voice (like a Judd Apatow or Taika Waititi) behind the camera, or a commanding comedic presence in front of the camera. The industry hasn't let either of these truly build over the past 15 years. Most of our former big names have receded to TV or their stand-up careers, and the good comedy filmmakers have moved into making more serious productions.

David Wain is a comedy writer-director who emerged out of the expansive comedy troupe The State in the late 90's, and director of the cult comedy Wet Hot American Summer. That film was released in 2001 but seemed to take a decade or longer to grow in popularity. His biggest hit, Role Models, was in 2006, but it didn't share the same sensibilities of Wain's State/Wet Hot/Stella/We Came Together work. It seemed more a work-for-hire film that succeeded on the back of Paul Rudd's plentiful charms. 

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, co-written with Wain's The State mate Ken Marino, feels very much like a Wain work, but the difference here is that Wain and Marino and their State colleagues have spread out among Hollywood in the intervening years, establishing connections and embedding themselves into the industry.  It doesn't mean their comedy style has been accepted and their films are any easier to get made though.

So many of my podcasts (both film and comedy podcasts) are celebrating the release of Wain's latest, and trumpeting its comedic delights. There's a real desire from the film nerds and comedy geeks to try and make original comedies successful in cinemas again, and it seems they want Wain's latest to be a part of that. The only trouble is, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass isn't good, and it's certainly not great. It's fine at at best.

The story of the film is narrated by Frank the mailman (Fred Melamed), a casual acquaintance of the titular Gail Daughtry, and sort of the outside observer of the events of this film (which makes no sense since he's in Gail's midwestern hometown and not in L.A. where the majority of the film takes place). He regails us with the brief history of Gail (Zoey Deutch), a super-upbeat, congenial, likeable, kind and slightly naive hairdresser who is keen to get married to her childhood sweetheart Tom Soursap McNoodleman (Michael Cassidy, putting in every effort to channel as much Paul Rudd-ness as he can). A salon conversation about "celebrity sex passes" spills out into Gail and Tom's evening out where Tom immediately answers "Tilda Swinton". But after attending a bookreading from Jennifer Aniston (who is doing a reading of her new cookbook, a solid joke), Tom muses that he might change his answer from Swinton to Aniston.  Next thing you know Gail's catching him boning Jennifer Aniston. 

A fortune teller tells her the only way to save her upcoming marriage is to balance things out. So Gail decides to join her salon-buddy Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley) on a trip to a hairdressing convention in Los Angeles, with the intention of find Jon Hamm, her celebrity sex pass, and getting dirty with him.

Upon landing in the airport, two mob-coded goons (Jo Lo Truglio and Matthew Jason Cwern) come across Henry Winkler and ask for a photograph (the joke here is they think he's John Travolta from Welcome Back Kotter). Gail offers to take the photo and puts down her suitcase, which is, of course, the exact same type that the goons just put down, and of course the cases get mixed up.

At this stage I thought the film was going to fully dovetail into Gail and Otto on the run from the mob to the point that we forget about the sex pass until a late third-act intervention of one Jon Hamm, leading to the reminder of the film's title, because that would be a good joke. But no, the majority of the film is about Gail and Otto collecting people on their quest to get Gail laid by the star of Mad Men while largely unbeknownst to them, the mob is after them.

They're joined by junior talent agent Caleb (Ben Wang) who gets fired for helping them, Hamm's down-on-his-luck Mad Men co-star John Slattery (John Slattery), and hard-up nice-guy paparazzo Vincent (Marino).  Their adventure starts with looking for Hamm, finding Hamm, getting turned away by security, but with the promise of a meeting if they pitch him a great movie. They find the mixed-up suitcase with all the nefarious mob plans and it spells out a big-time spy movie plot, only then the mafia get in their way, and the third-act becomes a silly, hyperviolent escape scenario before the inevitable climax (pun intended) and coda. 

Like I said, The State crew have proliferated in the industry, made some friends and contacts, and so there's a lot of resting on the mere appearance of a Jennifer Aniston or Jon Hamm or other celebrity cameos in this film to sell a joke. That would be fine if the film didn't transport the story into L.A. where so much of the humour rests upon inside Hollywood or L.A. jokes. Of course the movie podcasts I listen to love this, they're obsessed with Hollywood, and the comedy podcasts from L.A. types love jokes about their city. Put them together and this film has its head up its own ass for most of the production.

It seems like the product of people who don't have any other frame of reference to devise comedy from. It's not that there's not funny ideas, performances, or even good jokes, it's that the majority of them rest in this very narrow realm of interest, and rely so heavily on the audience to be invested in that very narrow realm of interest.  

It might just be that I was not in the mood for this movie when I watched it, but a good comedy -- a good movie -- should transport you out of whatever you're feeling and into the world of the film, and so much of what I was thinking about was how insular and annoying Hollywood and Hollywood types seem from the outside.  Perhaps in a few years this will unveil itself in a Wet Hot... secret success kind of way, but Wet Hot... had a pretty transcendent conceit (an 80's-style summer camp sex comedy where full grown adults are playing the teens). I don't see such a conceit here.

In a more robust comedy ecology, this would be just another satisfactory offering among many. Since there's not really any other comedies dropping, there's almost too much pressure for this little niche comedy to succeed. Also, not for nothing, the title is an unruly mess.

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Speaking of comedies, writer-director Matt Johnson's Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie has become the cult hit comedy of the year (not a blockbuster, but well reviewed and admired). I really enjoyed it, as well as Johnson's previous film Blackberry, enough that I've been extremely curious to watch Nirvanna The Band The Show (now available on Hulu in the U.S. and coming to Disney+ on August 7) and Johnson's first film Operation: Avalanche.

While Blackberry is a very different film than Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, Johnson's style is very specific. He has a preference for handheld cameras, he's seemingly disinterested in precise framing or  lighting and he likes things to feel in vérité style, as if it were a documentary.  In Blackberry Johnson didn't attempt the conceit of a documentary film crew, but in Nirvanna the yadda yadda, Johnson who acts and co-stars with Jay McCarroll, is keenly aware and often mugging directly to the camera. The cameraman is indeed a third-party in the film.  

I knew Operation Avalache had something to do about faking the moon landing, but I had no other expectations from the film. I was surprised to find that, much like Nirvanna the etcetera, Matt Johnson is playing Matt Johnson, and working with a documentary crew, only in this case this alt-reality Matt Johnson works for the CIA in the 1960's and is posing as a filmmaker in NASA trying to root out a Russian spy.  In the process Johnson and his crew discover that NASA can't actually land their lunar module on the moon, putting the U.S.'s success in the space race in jeopardy. 

So, Johnson decides to pivot, at first without the knowledge of his superiors, and then with the aide of, to fake the moon landing. The launch and orbit will be real, but the landing will be pre-recorded and transmitted from the spacecraft. The ploy is known as, naturally, Operation Avalanche.

It's a fun movie, but a bizarre one, especially in the metatext. The angle of Matt Johnson playing a character with the his own name, and Matt Johnson behaving in a not-too-dissimilar fashion to how the Matt Johnson character in Nirvanna the blah blah behaves, camera mugging included, it has a weird effect in confusing the audience about how they're supposed to feel about the tone at any given moment.

For the most part, the first two acts of this film are comedic, and so when it tries to frame a serious and/or meaningful conversation between Johnson and his CIA colleague Owen Williams (played by Owen Williams) it's hard to really settle into the drama of it. The third act takes a semi-logical pivot into conspiracy thriller, but it is a pretty wild tonal shift that doesn't fully hang together when Johnson can't stop mugging for the camera even when he's not really trying to. 

There's an immense amount of creativity and wonderful visual trickery in this film.  In the film itself the characters are trying to perform, ostensibly, a magic trick with their production, and the film we're watching is doing the same thing. It's never not entertaining even if it doesn't all hang together smoothly.  I do have to wonder what the fully comedic version of this would look like, just as I wonder what the fully conspiracy thriller version of this story would look like. The film itself doesn't satisfy either of these curiosities, but does largely satisfy on its own terms.

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Something I don't do enough is see old movies at the theatre, and by "old" I mean anything that isn't a current release. Beyond my favouritest movies, or older films I haven't seen that are kind of "event" movies when they're being screened, I don't see a reason for going out of my way when I can just watch it at home. I guess I love seeing new movies at the theatre, less enthused by anything else.

The Truman Show is not one of my favouritest movies... far from it. I watched it once in theatres back when it was released and I don't think ever again. It further cemented the fact that Peter Weir movies AND Jim Carrey movies just really weren't my thing. My favourite podcast, Blank Check, just finished going through the Wier filmography and they were pretty vocal about their admiration for their film. I mean, it was nearly 30 years ago, and I view films much a lot fairly a bit differently now than I did back then. I'm certainly a more experienced film-goer at the very least.  Perhaps, just maybe, there's some secret sauce to The Truman Show I didn't appreciate before.  Maybe the Blank Check crew taking me through Wier's films in such depth will have me appreciating his work in a way I certainly didn't before.

The answer to these hypothetical is "nope". Didn't happen. 

The lingering impression of The Truman Show was primarily how Carrey -- at the time attempting his first transition out of rubber-faced physical comedian persona -- was all wrong for the part.  With fresh eyes I know I was wrong on that assessment... he was mostly wrong for the part. If the Jim Carrey of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Man on the Moon were in the role, then I think it would have played for me much better. Instead, the Carrey of 1998 was still in extreme mugging and overly gesticulating mode. Yes, he reigned it it for The Truman Show, but it's also evident that he didn't know how to perform without it. He seems like he's fighting his true goofy nature every minute on screen and, much like watching Matt Johnson in Operation Avalanche above try to not mug for the camera while in conspiracy thriller mode, Carrey can't help himself even though the titular Truman is a really dramatic part.  Truman was a role he needed to break him out of the mold he put himself in, but I don't know that it served the film the best with him in the part.

Weir, I've probably mentioned before, is not a director whose work I have much affection for. I struggle to find the specific film of his that resonates with me, mainly because the ones I have seen (most of those multiple times and involuntarily) don't engender me to watch any others. Even the Blank Check recap didn't entice me to follow along, week-by-week, film-by-film. (I rewatched Picnic at Hanging Rock and that's it... I would like to reassess Fearless). Here, I find a solidly made, solidly executed film, but a real lack of style.  

If ever there was a film that needed style, it's The Truman Show.

Here we have a fantastical future reality where the TV and social landscape has been transformed by 24-hours-a-day coverage of Truman's life, all of it a manufactured reality around him, built inside the only other man-made structure to be seen from outer space other than the Great Wall of China (which you can't even, but nevermind... it's all flights of fancy anyway, so why fact check anything). The world Truman lives in is sort of a retro-50's/early-60's aesthetic which never evolved, but the production had the capacity to go really weird alt-history future in Truman's world and it's so sad they didn't.

Beyond just boring choices in costuming and sets, Weir doesn't effectively use the pov shot nor experiment enough with different aspect ratios or camera formats to most effectively tell the story. So very often in the movie it is absolutely unclear whether we're watching Truman as a viewer would watch from home in the world within the world (or perhaps the editing booth) or if it's the meta view from Weir's actual lens. There was such opportunity to do something really different there (I had just watched Backrooms again, and We're All Going To The World's Fair in the days before, both films which use different lenses to view the protagonist, as if we watching through different screens, and then, at times watching people watching screens... these films really get how to use media in a way Weir was only kind of thinking about, but didn't seem to put his full effort into it (unless the studio shut down the idea for being to "out there").

The Truman Show came out just when reality TV was taking off in North America. It certainly hadn't taken over most of the networks and account for the majority of TV programming like it does today, and the internet certainly wasn't a think for videos like it is today. The point is, there's a case to be made for rebooting The Truman Show and examining the attention and fame economy as a result.

The film is moderately enjoyable, but I found myself more frustrated than entertained. I'm sure others might find it charming or conceptually intriguing, and I can't deny that it has its charms and that the concept isn't strong. It's just not executed to my desired tastes.

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I remember hearing the title Irma Vep around the time it came out, possibly because it was playing at my local film fest, or maybe it was reviewed in my student newspaper at the time. However I heard about it, it's a name that's stuck fast in my brain for decades, even if nothing else about it was retained.

Smash cut to the pandemic times when director Olivier Assayas decided to remake Irma Vep into a TV miniseries starring Alicia Vikander. It was only at this time, over 25 years later, that I really knew what the plot was about. In the 1996 film, the great Maggie Cheung plays a fictional version of herself. She's come to France to appear in a remake of the classic silent film Les vampires, playing the lead role of Irma Vep.

Not really speaking or understanding French, Maggie is a bit lost amidst the conversations around her, and can only intone the chaos that's taking place around her on the set. The director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is having a meltdown, a crisis of confidence, and wants Maggie to be his muse for the project, which she just kind of rolls with. Meanwhile Zoé (Nathalie Richard) in makeup befriends Maggie and is really smitten. Things get a little awkward at a dinner party Zoé brings her to.  Maggie one night dons her character's cat suit and heads out into the night on her own adventure, sneaking around the rooftops and through hallways, thieving like Catwoman. And there's much fighting on set, the production seems troubled, and every reporter just wants to talk to Maggie about how awful and pretentious French films are compared to American films.

The film is Assayas trying to resolve where French cinema was in the 1990s. The new wave was far enough in the rear view mirror to not even be relevant anymore, and, at least in the film, nothing meaningful had taken place in the country since. There's a crisis afoot, about whether French film should be populist, or expand its appeal beyond its borders, or stay deeply and truly artistic and extremely French. It never really resolves these questions it asks.

It is in the cinema vérité stile, but really keeping with the single camera, and minimizing edits. It's not documentary style, it really gets intimate with its cast, getting right in their faces at times. It's a brief-ish movie at 99 minutes, but at times is a little naval gaze-y. It seems loosely plotted and perhaps unscripted (minimal research says it was loosely scripted and shot with only one take per shot) and it feels very run-and-gun. The performers are all charming, but the general idea of the film, to fall back on my critique of Gail Daughtry..., is up it own ass. It's a filmmaker making a film about how hard filmmaking is, and most of the film's commentary is about how hard it is to make a film. Hardly earth-shaking stuff...but maybe a little more unique in 1996? If this had been truly about viewing things from Maggie's perspective, then it would have been a pretty fascinating film, but she's only occasionally our central figure and the lens never really settles on her like it does for director Rene or Zoe.

My intent was to go straight from the film to the HBO miniseries, but the film was such a nothingburger of  a story that I couldn't be bothered. One's mileage may vary.

Ah-Ah-Argento #5: The Five Days

aka Le Cinque Giornate
1973, d. Dario Argento - blu-ray

Dario Argento's filmography is pretty consistent genre-wise. He works is the realm of horror, mystery and paranormal fantasy, usually a blend of any two, or all three. In that regard, The Five Days, is not just an outlier, but it is the outlier in his film canon.

The Five Days is a historical comedy, taking place at the onset of the Italian war for independence. Argento isn't exactly known for his period pieces, or his comedies, considering he had never attempted one or the other before, and, in part due to this film's commercial failure, he would never try again. It would be considered his "lost" work since it never really got much international distribution until Severin Films remastered it and released it on 4K and blu-ray in 2022. Casual fans of Argento didn't really know of its existence (or if they did, since it was such a tonal outlier, didn't care so much).

The Five Days opens in a prison in Milan, circa 1848. It a rotty, rat-infested dungeon of a place, with shaggy dirty men wiling their time away sleeping on hay-covered floors. If you look closely, there's a guy pooping in a bucket. Two men, patriots, talk of their impending escape, how the revolutionaries will break down the walls and provide them freedom...but they must be careful to ensure only their fellow patriots are let loose, for these other hardened criminals escaping to the streets would sew chaos, which is not their objectives. The Austrians must go! Milan for the Milanese!

But when a cannonball rocks a hole in the wall, the only man to escape is petty thief Cainazzo (Adriano Celentano), and from there it's a series of farcical events he finds himself thrust into as he searches the streets of Milan in the midst of a revolution for the criminal who owes him money (who just so happens to have become a leader of the liberation).

Until this point, Argento's films have all been murder-mysteries, Giallis that find someone thrust into the unintentional position of playing detective to solve a murder (or murders). That style of film, for Argento, is a patient one, one in which Argento can plan long tracking shots, or stage precise set-ups of his camera creating artistic compositions. The patience of his crime, and later, horror films is for the purpose of mood, of impending dread, and, on occasion, subversion or relief from the dread.  Here, there is no time for patience.

The Five Days moves at lightning speed. Title cards represent the many chapters of the film, but within each chapter is so much forward momentum. Cainazzo finds himself swept up in the revolution even though he's definitely no patriot... but, it turns out, he's not not a patriot as well.

Much of the film winds its way into a buddy comedy, as Cainazzo, fairly early on in his exploits, comes across the Roman baker Romolo (Enzo Cerusico, Il Tram). While Cainazzo is no thinker, he looks like Plato next to the simplistic Romolo, who follows him around like a lost puppy. There's real big-dog, little dog energy to their dynamic.  

The hapless duo at one point find themselves helping a pregnant woman deliver a baby, helping to build a barricade for a countess (far too enthused by all the conflict going on), and getting swept up with a vainglorious baron who is leading his own rebellion against the Austrians. They find themselves, more then once, caught up in the center of a massacre, sometimes on the side of the aggressors and sometimes on the receiving end. Cainazzo is none-too-enthused by either scenario. Along the way they get entwined with the elites of Milan who, if they're not boastfully leading the way, are otherwise pretending like nothing impactful is really happening. Argento, more then once, lays heavy criticism on the conflict, heavily indicating that the rich used the poor to drive the Austrians out of the city so the rich could benefit more from their absence.  

The Five Days borrows liberally from Buster Keaton's The General, by Argento's own admission (in the bonus features on the blu-ray, Luigi Cozzi, who co-wrote the film's treatment, further stressed how much they were trying to make an Italian version of that film). The screenplay was co-written by Argento with political socialist writer and poet Nanni Balestrini, as well as consulted heavily with professors of Milan's history for detailed accuracy.  These outside influences find a film at odds with itself. It wants to be a retro-styled slapstick comedy, it wants to be a historical drama, and it wants to be a political commentary, but the tonal shifts it needs to be all three create such whiplash as to make the film an highly uneven viewing experience.

The attention to detail is pretty phenomenal, it is an appropriately big production with fantastic wardrobes and redecorated streets to make everything feel as it would have 130 years earlier. Argento staged his first-ever battle scenes and mob scenes and worked on a scale that, by his own admission, made him uncomfortable (and he would never truly attempt again). He had a steady hand in legendary Italian cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, so the film looks amazing, especially in its restored form.

Celentano was a massive celebrity in the 1970's, both an actor and a pop star (I've been familiar with him for over 20 years, every since friend and reader GAK introduced me to Celentano's proto-hip-hop gibberish track Prisencolinensinainciusol, having dozens upon dozens of times watch him perform this song in a few different settings, as archived on youtube), and here makes for a pretty winning and game lead. It helps that Celentano is handsome, incredibly fit, and those pantaloons hug him juuust right. Not to be overshadowed, Cerusico is every bit as endearing as he was in Argento's entry in the Door Into Darkness anthology, while playing a wildly different role. Here, a loveable doofus, as opposed to Il Tram's savvy police detective.

These two scruffy, handsome leads are a pleasure to watch, and each vignette, on its own, pretty much works, but they all don't work together. The speed-ramped slapstick shenanigans contrast against the messages about the abuses of the poor by the wealthy, how liberation would only be for the few, not the many. The brutal realities of war, the cycles of violence, revenge and rage are presented here, quite intentionally, as not exciting or glorious, and the men who proclaim themselves as liberators have darker cores to them.  There's also an undercurrent to this film where the only women featured are either made horny by the heroism and/or bloodshed around them, or they are victims of assault by the supposed "good guys" (not our main characters). The pregnant woman is the only exception. I found the segment of the countess (Marilù Tolo) getting all hot and bothered by the tumult pretty funny (to a point), but the widow (Carla Tato) who just witnessed her husband hanged as a traitor and escaped death as a result of Cainazzo and Romolo's intervention working through a flurry of emotions before taking Romolo to bed was pretty confounding. The assault on a Milanese woman by the baron was both egregious and direct to the point Argento is trying to make about "heroes" of war, the elites and their entitlement. For a director who generally shies away from gratuitous sex or nudity, these scenes, especially when taken as a whole, are pretty unfortunate.

At first it seems like Cainazzo's sympathetic criminal is going to get swept up into the fervour of the moment, to become an unexpected leader and hero of the rebellion, but that is not Argento's story. There's no heroes in war, no glory, it's all a con job. "We've been conned" are Cainazzo's final words, as the city celebrates their victory over the fleeing Austirans. "They've conned us" he says, pointing to the men in the formal wear and high-hats, the elites who did not fight, now basking in the glory of the war that just passed. Cainazzo cannot sit with it. He also doesn't make the big speech at the end...he is not a big speech maker. All he can speak is the truth he sees, that many, many, many people died and he truly doesn't see what for.

By no means a bad film, but also by no means a great one, there's plenty to be both impressed and disappointed with in The Five Days. It is probably the most maintstream effort Argento ever attempted, so it's pretty ironic that it was the least successful of his films during this period of his career.

KWIF: The Devil Wears Prada 2 (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It was a real toss up: final two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again's second season, or the sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. It was no toss up. Daredevil has been, to put it bluntly, repetitive and boring, while TDWP2 is an event! It wasn't even a competition.

This Week:
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026, d.  David Frankel - in theatre)
Mortal Kombat II (2026, d. Simon McQuoid - in theatre)
Keyhole (2011, d. Guy Maddin - tubi)
Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (2002, d. Takashi Miike - tubi)
Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1988, d. Akio Jissoji - tubi)

I am not a journalist. Despite having been a writer and for many online resources for over 30 years, nothing I've done is what I would call journalism. The closest I came was a 3 year stint on editorial at my student newspaper in University (I thought this was an extraordinary and fundamental time in my life but in hindsight, turns out it was a somewhat juvenile and retroactively embarrassing era for both myself and the paper, full of (my own) sloppy work, ill-informed editorials, and errors in judgement. My desire to be more like the Harvard Lampoon or Mad Magazine than anything with journalistic integrity (which is not to diminish the work of my collaborators, but I was really not up to the task...but I digress). 

I got a degree in business, not journalism, and I cared about each equally (which is to say, minimally). It's probably for the best I never went into journalism professionally (though I tried on a few occasions). I don't have the stones for it. Much like being an artist, being a journalist requires sacrifice, and the rewards are not monetary, and you have to love it (which I don't...I respect it, don't love it so much). Plus, in the past 15 years or so, there's been a decided attack on journalism as an institution. Truth telling is now all a matter of perspective (or so the 1% overlords would have us believe). It's been a rough dozen-plus years for the media. Most of my favourite writers are now doing their own Substack or Substack-adjacent writing, and supplementing any written work with podcasting. The world is a lesser place for social media having supplanted traditional media as people's primary source of news (or, rather, "news"). There's no security to working in the world of journalism.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a sequel that doesn't need to exist. Nothing about the end of The Devil Wears Prada demands we know more. But now that it does exist, that it sets itself on top of the backdrop of the failing state of traditional media and the billionaire bros who snap up media outlets so they can control the narrative with their detached-from-the-layman world view...well, at least there's something for it say, something to explore in this moment, even if it doesn't quite have the firmest grasp on its message.

We find, when this film starts, Andy Sach (Anne Hathaway) has just won a journalism award but also, at almost the same moment, via text, finds out that she and her entire staff at the newspaper she was writing for have been laid off. Meanwhile Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) has just had an expose written about how Runway Magazine has promoted and supported a brand who runs a manufacturing sweatshop. This is a scandal, one which Miranda of 20 years ago would never have found herself in (it's telling in many ways that she has).  The owner of Runway's media parent, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) needs damage control, and thus returns Andy to Runway, the place where she interned 20 years ago, now as the new features editor.

She reunites with Nigel (Stanley Tucci) and Miranda (who doesn't remember her, or so she says), and is instantly swept into a meeting with their key advertiser, Dior, where Emily (Emily Blunt) now works as retail manager.

Andy finds Miranda in a subdued position relative to where she once was. Still a titan of the industry, print media is all but dead, and the online sphere for Runway has trouble competing with other scroll-and-like spaces. Andy's role is, at first, damage control, but also about trying to raise Runway's profile up.  It needs to be more than just about the pictures, people need to read it for the articles too.  Without saying it, it's attempting to "Teen Vogue" it (where in the mid-2010s Teen Vogue shifted its focus from fashion and entertainment and rapidly gained attention for it's provocative and insightful political articles.... Teen Vogue was collapsed into the parent Vogue in 2025 by its publishing overlords, according to many to stifle its anti-right wing messaging).

Andy's efforts to raise the status of the magazine is noticed in the media, but not represented in the site traffic. She needs a big gambit both to secure her place and to gain at least a modicum of respect from Miranda. She needs to land the white whale interview: Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu). The ex-wife of one of the world's richest men (a chuckling tech bro doofus played brilliantly under gobs of makeup by Justin Theroux) is now the world's richest woman, but Sasha hasn't given an interview in the three years since the divorce. Andy lands the interview (conducted by Miranda but the article written by Andy) and not only gets in Miranda's good graces once again but becomes a bit of a legend.  

The crux of the film, however, is that no matter what one good story brings for a day, a week, or a month, it's not enough. The cycles move on so fast that there's no time to rest, and media and journalism are still a dying form, unable to demand enough attention in the attention economy when there's injured baby foxes being fed milk from a bottle or video game live streams that run for two days straight to compete with. Runway is on the table to be sold...or on the chopping block to be axed.

While the first act is all about Andy getting reacquainted with a world she left behind 20 years earlier and noting both the similarities and shocking differences, the second act is about settling in, about establishing a new life in a roller-coaster world of uncertainty and insecurity. Miranda is the only one who seems like teflon-coated steel, nothing penetrates and nothing sticks...but even she is showing signs that that it's all actually getting to her too. The world is changing and she can only do so much to change with it.

The third act then becomes about Andy's perception of the situation, that the threat to Runway, one of the last bastions of traditional media, is the warning siren and that saving it means much more than just saving a magazine but providing hope for the entire industry of journalism.  It's idealist and optimistic, and it takes the audience on that ride of hope and scrappy-can-do attitude.

And then Miranda slaps her in the face with reality. It's only a matter of time. There's a boa wrapped tightly around every industry, squeezing tighter and tighter trying to milk them for everything they're worth, until they're worth nothing, at least monetarily. The solution to the troubles in this picture all rely on the good graces of an ultra-rich benefactor to whom minimal, or no returns (or even negative returns) are worth the investment for the art and integrity. You can't monetize artistry and integrity.

This, mercifully, isn't a naive film, although at times Andy is far too naive as a character, and Miranda is far too withholding to fully invest in the driving story forces at play. It does oversimplify its narrative so that it can have a satisfying ending while still being cognizant that there remains a dark cloud overhead and the struggle will continue after the last pan of the New York skyline.

The Devil Wears Prada was a really good movie that has become sort of legendary. The sequel doesn't tarnish the legend, though it fails to find its own legendary status in the process. It's a pretty picture, with tons of fabulous outfits, sets, and settings (and boy does Anne Hathaway look more amazing than she ever has), all of which are a must, and it mercifully doesn't wallow in the past. It does unfortunately seems obliged to put Andy kind of in the same place she was in during the first movie, even though she has two decades of prestigious experience, world travelling and her own life under her belt. It's natural for someone to find themselves repeating patterns of behaviour when with certain people, but I just felt like she should be much more assured than she is here. Similarly, Miranda shows next to no sign of growth, yet she feels muted compared to the ruthless ferocity which she had in the prior film. But she's also almost 70 now, and there does come something of a softening with age which we should find believable.

Already a massive box office success, the best we can say about The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that it does fine as a sequel. It doesn't at all diminish what came before, nor does it immediately discount its own existence. I find myself wishing that it were more interested in its setting, exploring the erosion of media and journalism, especially given the eyes it has on it, but that's not the audience its serving (this isn't The Paper 2 or Broadcast News 2). It serves its audience well...or well enough.

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I didn't see the 2021 iteration of Mortal Kombat (but Toasty did) and, to be honest, I didn't care to. From all reports it was attempting to be a character-driven narrative exploring the characters of Sub-Zero and Scorpion, and that there was not, in fact, any Mortal Kombat to be had. I mean, what's the point then?

I am by no means invested in Mortal Kombat as a property. The last version of the game I played was its original incarnation. But that said, I've long had a soft spot for the '95 cinematic treatment from Paul WS Anderson, a film that has aged surprisingly well in that it was always kind of hokey and wasn't taking the whole thing too seriously. The last thing we need to do is take Mortal Kombat too seriously.

It seemed like (at least from Toasty's report) MK2021 was taking things too seriously. Mortal Kombat II wants you to think it's not taking things too seriously... but it still is. What story there is within the film is wildly unfocussed and largely predictable, with absolutely no tension built along the way (for a number of reasons). The movie starts by introducing the concept of "Mortal Kombat", where two realms, instead of waging war, compete in a tournament of 10 fights. The first to win five of these fights is victor and the losing side's realm is theirs. Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) watches her father get brutally defeated by Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford) and her mother and people immediately subjugated under him. He takes her as his daughter (I can't say for certain the scriptwriter was just aping Gamora's story from Guardians of the Galaxy/Infinity War but it's basically the same) which I'm sure will work out fine for everyone as a big happy new family.

Meanwhile Johnny Cage (Karl Urban) is a washed up Stephen Segal-type 90's action star who nobody cares about anymore. He's sad about his life but Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano) and Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) recruit him for Mortal Kombat, Raiden promising him a greater, more fulfilling destiny. He declines, but, it turns out, he doesn't have a choice.

And so Kitana fights for her father, reluctantly, while Johnny Cage fights for Earth, reluctantly, only it turns out Kitana is a spy for Raiden and Johnny Cage has a warrior within, so the dramatic narrative arcs these characters can take are, well, straight lines rather than curves. Their stories go from A-to-C without even thinking about venturing towards B along the way.

So if there's no real character arcs in this film, surely it will have fun with team dynamics, right? Inner conflict and romances and whatnot? Notsomuch. Or at all. The "team" here, Raiden, Sonya, Johnny, Cole Young (Lewis Tan), Jax (Mechad Brooks), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) spend their time together largely spitting exposition. There's no real sense of camaraderie or any sense of these characters becoming friends or connected to each other in any way (we're told that Sonya and Jax are old friends, but do we feel it? Notsomuch). 

The film spends a lot of time trying to circle back on characters from the prior movie, even though they are not central figures here. As such, unless you are really invested in MK2021 then these beats have little to no weight on their own (like, Hiroyuki Sanada returns as Scorpion, but in the underworld, where he resumes his fight against the revived Sub-Zero to no real effect of the story at hand). 

So, if it fails at developing anything meaningful with its characters, MKII must be all about the tournament and the fighting, right? Yes and no. It does feature heavily its match-ups, the one-on-one fights, but none of them carry with them the weight of what the stakes of the tournament, and the fate of the "Earth realm". The film brutally fails at finding any tension within the tournament itself. With one or two exceptions, nobody witnesses the fights, so there's no crowd reactions, no cut to team-mates or friends as they watch their friends succeed or fail brutally. There's just nothing exciting outside of maybe a few cool manoeuvres or a particularly gory fatality, and there's not enough of those to justify a feature length movie this uninteresting.

It wouldn't be so bad if the film at least had style, but it's so evident that it was filmed on the Volume or similar on-set digital backdrop technology, and that the crew were either inexperienced with it or didn't have the time to refine their shots. The actors are lit so horrendously that they have a soft glow outline around them much of the time, while the backdrops too often don't feel tangible at all (I will concede that it's entirely possible that watching this on an IMAX screen made this so much more evident than a standard movie screen, or any home viewing implement). The few sets actually constructed feel cheap, much cheaper than an $80million budget would presume.  That, visually, this film feels inferior to the 1995 adaptation of Mortal Kombat is very telling.  That film used mostly practical sets that were well lit and well shot. This film seemed hampered by its constraints and is pretty ugly as a result.  At the very least the 1995 film had a still-iconic techno soundtrack, and this film's score doesn't even seem to be trying. 

There is one sequence not shot on a set, where Johnny, Liu Kang, Sonya and Jax venture into the home terrain of the excessively-toothed character Barada. It's an exterior desert set that has scale and doesn't feel contained by walls or barriers. Since it's outdoors there's a lot of natural light, and it does everyone a world of favours that the rest of the film does not. The fight between Johnny and Barada is fun and silly and feels like the only real payoff for Johnny (or any character for that matter) in the film.

Fans of the franchise will probably get more out of this than I will, but a films at this budget really should be trying for something more than fan service.

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I'm a bad Canadian cinephile. I don't spend enough time exploring the films or filmmakers of my home country. This is in large part due to the fact that Canadian cinema, by and large, doesn't have the resources that the films of other countries do. And with the exception of Quebec, which has an industry all its own, most of our best talents get co-opted by our neighbours to the South, obfuscating a film's Canadian-ness, if anything remains at all.

There are a few notable filmmakers who have made a name on an international scale that still largely work within the Canadian system and tell stories set within the country.  Guy Maddin is definitely such an auteur, one who likes to combine his fascination with the earliest era of filmmaking with a love of his homeland. Or so I've been told. I've seen maybe one or two of his films in the distant past, and have long been meaning to catch up.

Keyhole, his 2011 effort, was maybe not the first place to start. A psychological noir set in a haunted house, the film follows Ulysses Pick (Jason Patrick) and his gang of thugs as they barricade themselves in Ulysses' home. 

Our key signal that things are askew finds Ulysses' second-in-command telling the dead to face the wall and the living to face forward. The dead, then, march out the back door to face a proper disposal.

Ulysses emerges from the rain with Denny (Brooke Pallson) slung over his shoulder. They're both drenched. Eventually Ulysses will get dry, Denny will always seem perpetually wet, despite a change of clothes.

Ulysses warns the gang the house is haunted and to beware of touching ghosts. Meanwhile he searches the house with Denny in tow, her ability to read into his thoughts aid him in his quest to find his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) within the twisted maze of hallways and stairs and doors. 

He is vexed by the ghost of Hyacinth's father (a very nude Louis Negin), who manipulates environments throughout the house, though does not seem to have any real control.

The journey is an abstract one, lacking decisive logic, living between metaphors. As a film, it is an exploration of Ulysses' life, his failures as a husband and father, and it questions whether these failures mean anything to him.

It's a puzzling film which it both its greatest and most detrimental asset. Bending your brain to understand what it is Maddin is trying to convey has its rewards when you can reach an understanding in what you see, but the dream logic that prevails often has no meaning, serving primarily to keep the audience off balance.

Maddin's first digitally-shot film, it's a black-and-white production but doesn't have the olde-timey feel (the heavy make-up of the silent or gangster film eras, for example) and it doesn't look particularly good. The sets, lighting and costume seem constructed on a shoestring budget (which they probably were) and lack the usual hand-crafted flair of the films of Maddin's I'm (not-so-)familiar with.

What probably lets the film down the most, however, is the character of Ulysses, who just isn't very compelling. Whether it's Patrick's performance or what he was given to work with, I was never certain why we should care about Ulysses or his journey.

Once I get into the swing of watching Maddin's pictures, acquainting myself anew with his sensibilities, I might soften on Keyhole, but as stands I found it a pretty rough watch.

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If I were to attempt to catch up on the works of Takasi Miike, it would have to be the only movies I watched in a year. The director has made around 120 films since his debut in the early 1990s and dozens upon dozens of television episodes. That prolific level of output seems unprecedented, and one has to wonder what gets sacrificed in the process of producing as such speed.

Like Guy Maddin above, I'm not particularly well-versed in Miike's repertoire, certainly not enough to speak to any overall style or sensibilities (a quick search of this blog finds no entries of Miike films...which surprises, me. I thought for sure Toasty would have one or two Miikes written up). 

Deadly Outlaw: Rekka (aka "Noboru Ando's True Outlaw Tales: Raging Fire") opens with a primal scream over a heavy metal track. The camera tracks a young man running full tilt through the streets of Tokyo (intercut with flashes of...other things, a perplexing montage of images at this stage of a film to be sure). Finally the young man, guns drawn, leaps over a small barricading wall of an outdoor stairwell and begins firing on the group of men below (clearly mobsters, based on the way the one man is dressed compared to the other men around him). The gunman dispatches everyone, having hit the boss at least once at this point. The boss does not fall, he keeps lumbering forward, taking more and more bullets, until he has his hands around his assailant's throat. The only escape the gunman has is to cut the man's hand's off. Thankfully his partner has come by for clean-up.  The next shot of the young assassin, we see him naked on a couch, the severed hands still attached to his throat.

Yeah, this is kind of what I think of when I think of a Miike film. Extremes.

The story of the film finds Arata Kunisada (Riki Takeuchi ) freed from prison. The mob boss that was just assassinated was a father figure to him, and he is distraught and vengeful. 

But this isn't a one-man-assassin squad/John Wickian tale, at least not yet. The film cuts between different mob factions and Kunisada's journey, which for much of the film's run time finds him hiding out, rather than pursuing his revenge.  But eventually Kunisada gets back on track and, well, finds a missile launcher to help him on his quest.

Having just watched the excellent Italian mob-revenge actioner Big Guns, this very much feels like another take on the same story, right down to the police sort of standing by, or perhaps even aiding the protagonist in their mission of revenge. The difference is Big Guns felt quite calculated and detailed in its execution. Rekka on the other hand feels quite rushed and unrefined. That shagginess has a bit of an appeal, for sure, but it makes for some confusing story beats, or even whole acts. (There's a detour that Kunisada takes with a possible love interest that seems completely inconsequential to the overall story, and, for the amount of screentime it takes, contributes little to our understanding of this rather one note character).

The film dabbles with character drama and mafia intrigue but isn't particularly committed to either, and by the time the big rocket-launcher climax happens, it becomes a big old cartoon that betrays whatever it was trying to do emotionally before. 

The film closes with the ghost of a dead mob boss popping his head into frame, shouting "rock and roll!" It's not a vibes movie, per se, but perhaps Miike is a vibes director, and you're either on his wavelength or you're not. I dunno...Rekka wasn't boring, except when it was.

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One thing I'm always searching for is films from the 1980s with great special effects, including miniatures and big sets and puppets and stop-motion animation. I've exhausted most of the North American releases some time ago (though there is still the rare surprise) and have to look internationally for such pleasures. The main problem is I have no idea where to look, or what I'm looking for, and sacrificing a few hours hoping for something inspired to look at can be such a gamble.

The opening moments of Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (aka "Teito Monogatari") deliver instantly. A glorious barrage of manufactured clouds, impeccably lit with purple and red hues leads way to a massive set where a group of mages start mumbling incantations, causing the set to rumble and fracture and animated lighting to strike. There are rods sticking up from the ground that receive the lightning and are rotoscoped with a glowing red tinge. This is all glorious even if the dialogue of the scene is moving so fast that I had to rewind at least three times over to catch all the exposition.

The gist of The Last Megalopolis is that, centuries ago, Taira no Masakado led an uprising against the lords of Tokyo and failed. His spirit, though dormant, haunts the city. Should anyone dare to desecrate the site where he lay, he will awaken and destroy the city. And so, the demon Yasunori Kato (garbed in an Imperial Officer uniform, he is no doubt the inspiration for M. Bison in the Street Fighter video games) seeks to do just that, but in order to awaken the Masakado, he needs the blood of his descendant to do so. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

What follows is a convoluted but enthralling tale that takes place over three time periods from the early 1910s to the late 1920s. It's heavy on incantations, sorcery and witchcraft (of a type), and a bevvy of effects to go along with it. The best special effects in the film find paper being dispatched by both the good guys and bad, sailing on the wind before crumpling itself up and then transmogrifying into a bird or a wee little rat-like beastie. It's really, really cool.

The Last Magalopolis is based off the novel "Teito Monogatari" (adapted into Manga prior to the film's release and into an anime series in the early 1990s), and combines elements of real Tokyo history with epic fantasy and spirituality. A lot of the characters in this story are actual historical figures, and I guess the production team thought that it was enough of a shorthand to not really explore these characters at all.  It is completely a story-driven film, and figures wind their way in and out of the story in such a manner that if you're not used to Japanese names it can get confusing as to who is being referred to in a given situation and why. Also, this film is not waiting for you to catch up.

It's a propulsive narrative, even at two hour and fourteen minutes, and by the end while it has a resolution, barely feels resolved... because it isn't. This is effectively the first half of the story, condensed. A follow-up film, Tokyo: The Last War would be released the subsequent year. 

Part fantasy, part horror, part historical fanfic it's a wild and dense production that perplexes and delights in equal measure.