KWIF: The Master (+2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Surprisingly, this poster predates
AI slop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Side question: is this new weird?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gets real.

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

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

KWIF: Project Hail Mary (+2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm dying to get Toasty's reaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KWIF: Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's week in film. Busy weekend plus work stress equals late reviews. 

This Week:
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026, d. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett - in theatre)
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (aka "Toki o Kakeru Shōjo" - 1983, d. Nobuhiko Ōbayashi - blu-ray)
Reach for the Sky (aka "La championne","Tales for all #12" - 1991, d. Elisabeta Bostan - Crave)

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[Caution, spoilers for the first Ready or Not]

When we last saw Grace (Samara Weaving), she had just exited the mansion of the family of the man she just married, her wedding dress soaked in his blood, and the house on fire behind her. She sits down and has a cigarette as the first responders rush the scene. This sequel to Ready or Not pick up from that moment, with Grace being rushed to the hospital and passing out. When she awakens, she is immediately interrogated by a police detective, given that there were a few bodies found in the house and she was covered in blood (and perhaps some suspicion of arson).  Also, her emergency contact is her estranged sister, Hope (Kathryn Newton, Quantumania) who arrives only to continue their bitter relationship.

Meanwhile, some shenanigans with the devil-worshipping rich is happening in the background. It turns out that the deaths of the family Grace married into means that the head seat of this world-controlling cabal is now open.  The calls are made, the players are introduced, and everyone, except Grace, understands that the game is on. She will understand soon enough.

Grace (along with Hope) is kidnapped and coerced into yet another game of hide and seek at a new estate, to be hunted by the rich fucks who she's not even married into this time (at least, not yet).

Ready or Not 2 (why it's not just called Ready or Not, Here I Come without the "2" in between I really just don't understand) is not that vastly different from the first movie in terms of the events in play. Grace has just come through a traumatic experience and now is thrust right into another one. She hasn't had time to process and Weaving is really good at showing that Grace is a shaky mess. She may have found some internal strength in the first go-around, but she's not a total badass this time around, especially when she's handcuffed to her younger sister and they argue more than cooperate.

Hunting them are five different families (it was six, but one of them, played by Kevin Durand, was too eager and coked-up and tried to start the game before it was officially started, and "Mr. LeBail" blew him up but good). By the rules only one member of the family can hunt at a time, but should that member parish in the process, the next family member can step in. If any one of the seekers kills another seeker, Mr. LeBail would be displeased and their whole family lineage would be eradicated. Each of the families has to hunt Grace with a weapon of the era in which their ancestor first made the pact with Mr. LeBail.  All of this leads to some enjoyable variations in hunting styles and quirks in the game to differentiate it from the previous film. The hunters include Sarah Michelle Gellar (Cruel Intentions), Shawn Hatosay (The Pitt), Nestor Carbonell (The Tick), Olivia Cheng (Entertainment Tonight Canada) and more Canadian supporting players (gotta get that tax credit!), plus Elijah Wood as the lawyer and a cameo from David Cronenberg.

Given the stakes at play, the hunters each have the same agenda, but their appetites for the hunt all vary, and so there's more than just "I'm going to kill you" attitudes on the field. 

Much like the first film, this falls into the "horror, not horror" category. It's not really scary or intense, although there's one scene in which a character is beaten so savagely by another character (who clearly is coded a sociopathic misogynist) that it's pretty uncomfortable where the rest of the film is pretty light on its feet. It is meant to introduce stakes, and that this character, if to obtain the high seat, would mean something pretty dire for the world, so there is a point to it...but it's not a fine point, and it's not used tactfully. That savage beating is tempered by being intercut with the most whimsical fight set to Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart, so you take the good, you take the bad....

Grace and Hope's strained relationship creates an additional conflict dynamic in a film whose premise is all conflict anyway, so it adds another rung on the ladder for the hero to climb. Conceptually the estrangement between them is not a bad idea, however, when the characters get into the weeds of their conflict, it's...too familiar. In fact I'm pretty sure the issues between them, and even the words they say, were almost verbatim to those between Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega in Scream 6... directed by the same writer/directors of this film and co-written by Guy Busick, the same co-writer of this film. Like, really? Thought we wouldn't notice?

Anyway, it's absurd, it's violent, and there's quite a bit of fun to be had, but the one thing RON2HIC lacks is the surprises that the first one had, so in that regards, there's some diminishing returns. I'm not sure that this franchise has further legs beyond this one (when the stakes are the fate of the world, there's almost nowhere else to go, unless it's ... I dunno... Ready or Not in Space or franchise crossover like Ready or Not vs Predator, or Ready or Not Go(es) to Hell...[ok, I think I just sold myself on three viable sequels.]) But, of course, I love "the most dangerous game" stories, so this still worked for me.

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In our ongoing (if now infrequent) feature "Toast and Kent Go Loopty-Loo", we covered the 2006 anime feature The Girl Who Leapt Through Time through the lens of it being a time-loop movie. I think we made a fairly good case that it fit the bill, even if does not follow suit with the usual time loop cliches.

While we worked on that Loopty-Loo I learned in my (very limited) research on the film that it was effectively a sequel to the original prose story (originally serialized in 1967), one that it's been adapted many, many times into film, television, manga and even a stage play.  House director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi 1983 adaptation is my first encounter with a more straight adaptation of this very popular story.

But it is clearly not a time loop, far less so than the anime.

Teen Kazuko Yoshiyama (pop idol Tomoyo Harada, in her debut role) daydreams of her ideal boyfriend, while her small-bladdered friend Goro Horikawa (seriously, he mentions needing to pee a lot) and her tall, quiet, flower-loving friend Fukamachi Kazuo unknowingly become part of a her love triangle.  Nobody, including Yoshiyama herself, seems to understand the complicated feelings she has for both these boys beyond the friendships that she's known since childhood. 

At the end of a school day (on a Saturday?) the trio are cleaning up the science lab (which apparently has had mysterious instances over the past few days) when Yoshiyama enters the chemicals storage room only to find a flask has shattered on the ground and the resulting spill is smoking. She thinks someone was in the locked room, but no one is there. She passes out as a result of the fumes.

When she awakes in the nurse's office she relays what had happened, only nobody saw any broken glass or sign of spill. She said she smelled lavendar.  She walks home with her two boys, Goro's house first along the way, and then Kazuo's house where he lives with his grandparents where she is invited for tea. She fixates on the greenhouse, where she smells lavender, and inside she becomes a bit woozy and decides to skip tea and go home.

And then strange things begin to happen. Her movements through life start happening in a confusing pattern. In math class she doesn't understand the work, as if she's missed a lesson (and Goro sleeps through class) and in the evening there's an earthquake, and the place next to Goro's house catches fire. The next day, there's an impossible time on her digital alarm clock, she's late to school. She rushes and catches up with a sluggish Goro only to see the clay tiles of a roof come sliding down about to crush him. She rushes to save him, only to awaken to what she thinks was a dream.

And then she relives those two days again, aware that she's experiencing something unique and also becoming more aware of her feelings for Kazuo (less aware of her feelings for Goro)...only to learn that Kazuo is a time traveler from the future with telepathic powers of mind control, implanting false thoughts, feelings and memories in the people around him. Nothing problematic there (at least his objective is to learn about the plants of the past for there are so few in his dystopian future, and not to romance Yoshiyama...and in fact seems pretty distant from actually loving her back).

I guess you could call those two-ish days a "loop", but in the context of the film it's really time travel, as she ultimately winds up traveling through her own lifespan, witnessing events from her life from outside (but she can't stay long as two versions of herself cannot occupy the same time).

The surface of this rendition of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a melancholy journey exploring youthful yearnings for love, and how truly little we understand when we're that age. The film ends with Yoshiyama, now an adult scientist, focused solely on career and not at all on love. When Kazuo left and erased her memories, he fundamentally broke something inside her. 

There's an interesting conceptual idea here, that Kazuo interfered with the love that was supposed to bloom between Kazuko and Goro, and because of his interference it never happened. There's no "butterfly effect" to this in the film, but it's clearly what happened. And it doesn't need to have a sci-fi/fantasy trigger, it could be a normal situation where an outsider steps into a blossoming relationship and destroys the moment or moments where that relationship could have happened.

The time travel aspect of this film is fantasy nonsense, there's no true explanation for it, but it serves a purpose in exploring this moment in time in a play on the coming-of-age story. The fact that Kazuo has mental powers (most people from the future have some paranormal abilities, he explains) is pure real deus ex machina, but not far from usual for deus ex machinas to be employed in Japanese storytelling (at least from my limited exposure).

Director Ōbayashi had a fairly prolific career, but the only prior work of his I've seen is his most infamous work, House. It's a fever dream with an atomic bomb/generational trauma metaphor that I totally didn't jibe with, but perhaps need to revisit. Ōbayashi made his reputation on wild stylization and outre visual effect, which are on display here, though mostly reserved for the third act. Some of his techniques harken to the silent film era, others employing early blue screen technology. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time feels more akin to something Guy Madden would make, rather than Kurosawa (whom he would work with on documenting the making of Dreams). But it's a testament to the director's interests that the film truly focuses on the emotional journey of Kazuko Yoshiyama, placing less emphasis on the strange events affecting her life. 

While not monumentally mindblowing, this adaptation of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time still feels like a unique an important artifact both in the director's repertoire and of Japanese pop culture. (Also, the theme song is a banger, but it's not yacht rock despite that Doobie Bounce).

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A dozen films into the "Tales for all" series of Quebec-produced films for older kids/young adults, and the pattern, if there is one, is that each film plays in a different genre or story trope sandbox. In some respects it feels like the "Tales for all" films are meant to be someone's first, and perhaps only exposure to the filmic medium. 

In this case Reach for the Sky ("La championne", or "The Champion" in French) is the "Tales for all" version of a young adult sports competition movie... I'm specifically thinking the likes of The Karate Kid here. The only thing is the typical sports drama is full of tension, rivalries, and intense hormone-fuelled emotions of the youth.  But Reach for the Sky features a surprising dearth of drama.

A co-production with Romania and shot in Romania with a largely local cast (this film doesn't have the same problem so many other "Tales for all" do, which is cast members all from different regions speaking different languages and thus all voice performances, regardless of which language track you choose, are dubbed) it postulates itself in its opening moments as a peek inside the famous Deva training facility in Transylvania which produced many gymnastics champions, like Nadia Comăneci.

Young Corina (Izabela Moldovan), at 10 years old, has a deep desire to be a champion in gymnastics. She implores her local coach Mircea (Mircea Diaconu, who would go on to be a pretty big time politician) to take her to the next level, to do tryouts for Deva. Despite her father's objection, she goes. She's told she's too old, and not strong enough. She fails the audition. She's crushed. Mircea, though, seems to have a stubborn pride and commits to training her with ferocity, and when it comes time to reapply, she's not only accepted but Mircea is as well, as an assistant coach to former champion Lili Oprescu (Carmen Galin).  

Lili's approach to training is firm but full of tenderness, and the kids absolutely love her. When coach Lili accepts a new job to coach the Lichtenstein youth, Mircea takes over, and he is so the opposite:  harsh, brutal, uncompromising, full of toxic rage. He flicks the children in the head, calls them idiots, and pushes their young bodies to extremes. It is, put bluntly, abuse...but the film tries to reframe it as the champion's way, what's needed to push these kids to the next level, to international-level competitors. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, Mircea would be the villain, but he is not. He's clearly not a good guy when training these kids, but the film never specifically admonishes him for it. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, we would see Corina having a nemesis, someone she is either training with who is her rival, a mean kid who torments her...or on the international level some stuck up asshole American kid who denegrates her country and her people...something to really fan the flames...but Corina has no rival at all here, save for her own internal struggle with willpower in the face of severe abuse. 

In a traditional North American-styled film, Coach Lili leaving would be another rivalry, Coach vs. Coach, and when the third act comes to the big international competition, there is the framing that Lili is, for some reason, the bad guy, but otherwise the script never gives us a reason to dislike her (we have far more to dislike about Mircea).

In a traditional North American-styled film, it would ask if our young hero could conquer their base desires and become their respective sporting champion through training, self-control, and superhuman determination? And this film does indeed ask that, but with virtually no drama or stakes other than Corina's desire to be a winner.

Not to spoil it, but she does win, despite the film, at every turn, showing us she just doesn't have the chops. At one point she quits and runs away, tired of Mircea's abuse (go girl, get out). But like many an abuse victim, she returns to her abuser, too worried about what life would be like away from him.  So the fact that she comes up with the perfect routines when it really counts is nice an all, but even the framing of it, the editing and the shot structure, it doesn't capture the drama. At no point are we really given scores to track or any nail biting tension of "hey, this is her weakest event and she needs to do X to pull out the win, can she do it"?  

It's not entirely colourless, as the peek into the severity of Romanian gymnastics training present here is, if anything, truth (or, perhaps even less severe than reality, but far from sugar-coated), so there is a bit of flare there, but otherwise it's a pretty drab picture where the stakes (beyond the unintentional concern for the health and wellbeing of these younglings) are quite low. 

Of all the "Tales for all" I think this one is most ripe for a remake/reimagining, especially given how much has been revealed about Deva since.

KWIF: a double dose of 1985 (+1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

KWIF: Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Last two weeks, actually. With the Olympics last week and all the new TV shows popping up this week, as well as fending off a bug or two, I didn't get to many movies, but the ones I did get to...well...a couple of them are real gems. I'll let you determine which of the three I maybe didn't like as much.

This Week:
Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025, d. Matt Johnson - in theatre)
Lady Snowblood (1973, d. Toshiya Fujita - Crave)
Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood (aka Bye Bye, Chaperon Rouge; "Tales for all #9", 1989, d. Márta Mészáros - Crave)

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What an exceptionally bizarre and niche idea to take something as exceptionally bizarre and niche as Nirvanna The Band, the bizarre and niche musical-ish duo of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll, who had a short-lived, two-season bizarre and niche show on the bizarre and niche Viceland TV network, and turn it into a bizarre and niche movie that may well be the biggest (in ambition and scale) comedy movie of the decade.

I'm sure anyone reading this, like most of the population, have no idea what the heck Nirvanna The Band or Nirvanna The Band The Show are. Hell, I barely knew myself. If you know co-creator Matt Johnson from anywhere, it's likely from making Blackberry a few years back.

No, Nirvanna The Band is not a Nirvana cover band. McCarroll plays piano and Johnson...well, he talks a lot about what he's going to do over McCarroll's piano playing, and all the admiration and reverence he's going to receive from the audience without really having any other specific set of skills or talents put on display.Their deepest ambition is to book a gig at the famous Toronto resto-bar/performance space The Rivoli, but they don't actually attempt to book a gig at The Riv (as we locals call it) by contacting the bar. No instead they think they can somehow trick their way into performing there. The logical fallacy of all this is I don't think "Nirvanna The Band actually has any songs to perform should they get there, so what they're actually going to do with their platform should they ever achieve it remains a mystery.

Having never seen Nirvanna The Band The Show, I can infer from the story of Nirvanna The Show The Movie that each episode of the show is a Pinky and the Brain-style set-up of of Matt coming up with a scheme to get the band into The Riv that night, Jay reluctantly following along, and it all falling apart. The Show, if it's at all like The Show The Movie (and it must be) is all shot verite style, with a mix of Johnson and O'Carroll interacting with real people and actors in pre-planned if highly improvised situations. The Film just takes it to...well, not just another level, but to astonishing extremes.

It starts with Matt coming up with the plan "Seventh Inning Stretch" where the two will jump off the CN Tower and parachute into the Skydome (as it will forever be known) announcing that they have a gig at The Rivoli that night (and the stunt will be so spectacular that The Riv must give them the stage for the evening right)? 

Ambitious, but certainly there's countless things getting in the way of Matt and Jay in succeeding with this plan. Well, would you believe that the only thing that gets in the way of the plan is the Skydome's roof closing, and Matt and Jay's timing being off such that they land on the roof instead of in the stadium?

I couldn't believe it either. And yet, it looked very much like two people (though absolutely not Matt and Jay) were skydiving in downtown Toronto and landed on the roof other Skydome.

With today's level of digital and AI technologies, it's not hard to deepfake this sort of thing, and yet, there's a level of gritty craftsmanship here at play that definitely make it hard to tell what's real, what's staged, and what's trickery.

The main story of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, however, involves a second scheme Matt comes up with, which is to pretend to be time travellers from 2008 flung into the future, using Back to the Future logic, only for things to go awry and Matt and Jay actually travel back to 2008, mess things up, and then return home to find Jay has become a massive celebrity leaving Matt behind.

It's profoundly silly and insanely entertaining. The Movie is incredibly propulsive, moving a pretty rapid clip, not giving the audience a lot of time to sit with all the questions they might be having (the movie, so self aware, is savvy enough to address many of them anyway, if only to side step). At the same time, even if you have zero investment in Matt and Jay as a duo (like me) the film slowly starts investing you into the stakes of their friendship (I mean, there's really no other characters in the film beyond the camera guys and Matt's alt-future roommates).

As one of the most Toronto films ever made, it's bizarre, sure, but maybe not so niche. It's an extremely accessible film if (like me) you've never actually engaged with Nirvanna The Band in any capacity before. But I'm now hooked, and I'm ready to dive into Nirvanna The Band The Show and their precursor web series of the same name... if only there were anywhere that I could watch them (the presumption is that Crave, who partially produced The Film, will pick up The Series for when The Film hits streaming).

Much like, say, Strange Brew or Brain Candy, other Canadian comedy films derived from TV shows that preceded it, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is also a surprise gem of a film, but much more immediately recognizably a triumph than maybe the other tv-to-film comedies that came before it. (Do I need to watch that Trailer Park Boys movie now...?)

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Lady Snowblood is a big name in classic Asian action cinema (and classic manga), one that I'm sure was jotted down on one of my many "to watch" lists decades ago but, without ever truly understanding what the movie was about, and as such was never prioritized.

How unfortunate for me.

The film is the grandmommy of revenge dramas, or "revenge-o-matics" as Quentin Tarantino likes to call them, and in fact Lady Snowblood was QT's primary (but far from only) inspiration for Kill Bill.  There's little doubt in my mind that Lady Snowblood has inspired dozens upon dozens of films in the 50+ years since its debut.  Having such an influential legacy can actually tarnish a classic film when it's watched for the first time, as one might only see story ideas, action sequences, shot framing or other such ideas that have been used and probably bettered in the years since. 

Not so with Lady Snowblood.

The opening sequence, taking place at night, the moonlit road that much brighter because of the snow, is beautifully shot and staged. It finds our titular character in her tight kimono and sandaled feet shuffling quickly into place, a carriage quickly approaching. She gets in its way and proceeds to dispatch the entourage rapidly and bloodily, before fighting the man in the carriage. His skills are not even close to competing with hers.

This visually striking, blood-and-snow-soaked extravaganza is a marvel, but also the low point of the film. The action is stilted and Lady Snowblood's portrayer, the stunning Meiko Kaji, doesn't seem very adept at wielding the utensils of her character. 

But as I said, this is the film's weakest point. From there we delve into her wild backstory, which predates her even being born. It has it's roots in Japanese history from the later-1800s where the country's troubled leadership was directing it to build a grand army and conscripting the young men of villages across the land, disrupting the labour force dramatically. Yuko's mother's husband, a teacher, was killed when it was suspected he was an army recruiter, and her older brother was also murdered. Her mother was kept and abused and enslaved, but dreamed of nothing but revenge. She managed to dispatch one of the men who killed her family and was sent to prison for murder, cutting her revenge story short. She knew the only way of continuing her revenge was to have a child who could carry her burden, and so she aggressively pursued the prison guards and managed to get pregnant. She died shortly after childbirth but made her fellow inmates promise to have her child, who she likened to a demon, trained to pursue her vengeance.

We see Yuki's training from a young age to adulthood, a brutal inhuman life, but then, as has been reinforced by her trainer, she is not to be human. She is a demon of revenge. The first act is comprised of all this history, and it is told moving forward like running water, rather than cutting back and forth between the past and modern day, with elements referencing directly the Manga in a stylish way that seems incredibly ahead of its time.  The fact that it moves through the darkness of Yuki's mother's tale and her own training without being overly sensational and distanced from making the abuse seem alluring is remarkable for the era.

When it returns to the modern day, the story moves constantly in unexpected zigzags. It never moves towards the typical narrative choice, and at the same time is not playing with expectations that it will. It so secure it its storytelling that it feels assured in its atypical manoeuvres, and it's thrilling to experience.  I very quickly learned not to anticipate where it was going, and I don't imagine I can ever have that experience again. But it just highlights that what this story does, and how Toho and the director present it, hasn't been repeated, at least not to an extent that can deny the power of this production.

What is most surprising is how the film tries to humanize one of Lady Snowblood's targets. A unwell drunken degenerate of a man, with a sweet daughter who cares for him despite what she has to do to make money so that he can drink and gamble it all away. You would think Yuki's disposing of this man would be a blessing for the poor girl, but it's not the case. The man even seems to have a death wish, until death stares him in the face. There's some rather meaty drama amidst all the arterial spray.

Yuki's gets involved with a reporter, who begins to tell her tale, sensationalizing her and spreading her story across the country, more fable or urban legend than fact, but distinguishing between the two, at that time wasn't always the case. The stories are told to draw out her prey, and it works, but it's all so much more complicated than either thought it would be.  Magnificent twists and movements abound.

The doubt I had in Kaji's physical prowess really only held away in the film's first sequence. I don't know that she ever proved herself an agile swordswoman, but subsequent scenes she's definitely more confident in her wielding of the blade, and is just as often posing with it as she is using it.

Visually, I love this era of vibrant red gushing blood samurai story, but this one stands out as special, because it doesn't approach the world with a gawking lens. It's not revealing in its nudity and abuse, it's matter-of-fact in its presentation. It's honest about how harsh the world is and the truths of the time its set it, but it also gives way to its revenge fantasy elements without letting them overshadow those truths. 

It's fantastic, and I wish I'd seen it 100 times by now.

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The 9th entry of Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" series once again finds funding as a co-production, this time with Hungary, and filming there as well rather than in Canada. This once again leads to a release with no native soundtrack. You can watch the French or the English dub, it doesn't matter, because the entire production is dubbed as not all performers are speaking the same language.  (I don't like watching dubbed movies, and find it frustrating when the dub is so obvious, as it is here... the preferred alternative is watching the French dub with English subtitles, but I was too tired for subtitles for this viewing).

Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood, as you may have guessed, is loosely based around the classic fairy tale. Here, the film opens with five-year-old Fanny in her city apartment bedroom, decorated entirely in red, trying to fall asleep only to be roused by her parents arguing and her father walking out on her mom. We then hard cut to "Mother" (no other name given) taking Fanny through the airport and confirming that they're going to go live in the woods, near her Grandmother's.  

This hard cuts to a forest montage and Fanny is now twelve maybe (played by Fanny Lauzier, who was the young star of Tales for all #6 -  Tadpole and the Whale), and she's a free spirit roaming the woods with her pet lamb, when she comes across a wolf who, it seems, can telepathically communicate with her. It appears the wolf means her no harm, and in fact wants to be friends...but his tone of voice, sinister and sleazy, gives his intentions away.

Fanny's woodsy home with her "Mother" (who works as a meteorologist) is in a artistically brutalist construct of all odd angles and bizarre stairs to nowhere and brightly coloured nonlinear shape accents. There is no meaning to this bizarre structure, only that it's likely a building the production company found interesting and decided to use (you need some visual flair when 90 percent of the film takes place in the forest I suppose). 

Fanny's traipses through the woods aren't exactly established as "adventures" as they're poorly structured and really not edited to be framed as such, but on one journey to her grandmother's house, she encounters a magic tree, and on another, she gets lost and is rescued by a man in a grey hat and trenchcoat who she thinks might be her father. On another adventure she meets a gang of similar aged school children out on a field trip and she sparks up a friendship with a dashing young boy who is very curious about this red-clad woodland girl who doesn't go to school. 

Fanny's grandmother, despite what you might think, is not her mom's mom, but rather her father's mother, and she does not get along with Fanny's mom at all, so they don't communicate much. Also Fanny's great-grandmother is there, an old crone who never moves from her spot sitting in a carved out seat in the trunk of a tree grandmother's house seemed built around. Great-granmother has inexplicable mystical powers, including the ability to see what's going on outside her trunk-chair, as well as send telepathic communications across great distances. 

There is a general sense of the fantastical in this production, but it establishes no rules for them, so the stakes are never clear, nor are the paths to resolution. This whole production seems like it was crafted on the fly, without a tremendous amount of forethought.

Fanny seems charmed by the man in the grey ensemble, in part because he lives in a weird hovel with a tremendous amount of birds (he's an ornithologist) and he saves her in the woods more than once from getting lost or a heavy storm, but when she determines that he's not her dad and then finds out that he's hooking up with her mom, she inexplicably loses it and runs away... where she's lured into the wolf's den and he refuses to let her go, and needs to be rescued by her young male friend from the city but only after Great-Grandmother telepathically calls out to him to help her. After she's rescued, they set all the man-in-grey's birds free and steal his truck, heading into to the city where Fanny does some petty thieving.

Eventually she returns home, and Fanny is sent with a picnic basket of soup and other goodies to Grandmother's house because Grandmother is not feeling well, not realizing that the wolf has swallowed her whole and taken her place (but not before the wolf and man-in-grey have what seems like a metaphysical exchange which implies the two are connected but it's nothing the film ever elaborates upon). When Fanny arrives, we get the what big hands/eyes/mouth thing, when Fanny too is swallowed whole. The wolf is a furry TARDIS, bigger on the inside than it appears no the outside, and fanny and grandmother reunite next to the wolf's beating heart (a charming set piece to be sure).

Mother and the man-in-grey arrive, and the man-in-grey shoots the wolf, killing it and releasing Fanny and Grandmother, only Great-grandmother dies for some reason. It's sad, I guess. The story picks ups with Fanny - wearing heavy make-up and styled to look like an older teen I guess - back in a very red room in a city apartment...with no real explanation or even insinuation as to what this scene means or what the seemingly happy Fanny is going through. Are we to infer that this was all just in her head? Is that why the story seems to be so dream-like?

The story is one hundred percent nonsense, so very little of the characters' actions are explained, there's no logic to anyone's motivations, and personalities and intentions shift on a dime. It seems like there was an intentional story here, about a lonely little girl making the best out of life, and a single mother trying her best, but it all got lost when trying to film what may have been an English script but performed by a Hungarian and Quebecois cast.  

When it eventually gets to its interpretation of the classic fable, Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood seems like a completely different film. It's like if the characters of the film were performing in a play, it in no way seems organic to the story being told.

There is some really nice imagery here. The damp, lush, Hungarian forests are shot with reverence, even if the colour sense is pretty muted. Some sets are really quite impressive (Great-Grandma's tree-chair is outstanding, as is the wolf's innards, and lil' Fanny's very red bedroom), but there's not a tremendous amount of cohesion happening here.

Even dream-logic would imply a sense of logic, and there is none here. If the film's finale intends to intone that the whole film was but a dream, well, that isn't explicit, plus there's little more frustrating in storytelling than such a "twist". A deeply flawed and odd film.