KWIF: Coens crazy

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Spent much of the week with my feet shuffling along the cement floors of Toronto Fan Expo and the asphalt road of the Canadian National Exhibition. My feet hurt. But you don't need feet to watch movies.

This Week:
Honey Don't (2025, d. Ethan Coen - in theatre)
The Big Lebowski (1998, d. Joel [and Ethan] Coen - DVD)

---

Ethan Coen's two films sans his brother Joel have instead found him partnered with his editor/wife, Tricia Cooke, and the resulting Honey Don't  and Drive-Away Dolls before it are very much the result of that distinctive pairing. They are the first two entries of what they have informally described as "lesbian b-movie trilogy" (the film they co-directed prior to Drive-Away Dolls, the documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind is not part of said trilogy). Cooke is queer and there is definitely both a queer and feminist agenda (in a good way, not in the toxic manosphere way) with the first two entries in the trilogy. 

They are crime films on the surface - Drive-Away Dolls is much more a wild road trip sex comedy, whereas Honey Don't is much more firmly dime-novel pulp and grindhouse with all the accoutrements that come with it (sex, nudity and brutal, thrilling, squick-inducing violence). But at their core, they are taking genres, subgenres and sub-sub-genres that have normally been manufactured by men, for men and making them very, very gay.

Honey Don't opens beautifully, with a mysterious French woman on a scooter coming across an overturned car in the remote Bakersfield dusty terrain. The woman double checks that the car's driver is dead then pilfers a ring. She then goes and takes a refreshing dip in a nearby stream before venturing back on her way in her leopard-print outfit. She looks remarkably like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, and is styled like her too, hair and wardrobe. That should have itself been the tip-off to me of what this was going to be...a pastiche of a pastiche while forging its own paths off the trail.

The opening credits are fantastic... grainy footage of Bakersfield shot out the side of a moving car, with digitally enhanced moments where the footage pauses to reveal credits on billboards, signs, graphitti and other such locales. Underneath the images, dripping full 70's with a killer bass hook, and in full-blown rasp power vocals is Brittany Howard's "We Gotta Get Out of This Place"... it's an absolute killer.

The film introduces us to hardboiled P.I. Honey O'Donahue getting out of bed after a one-night stand that you know isn't going anywhere. She's brought onto the aforementioned crash site by Detective Marty Mekatawich (Charlie Day) who makes constant advances at Honey non-stop and is relentless in spite of her quite blunt and decisive rebuking. It's passed off as "good natured", and the sheer fact that it's Charlie Day means there's definitely a comedic (and non-threatening) edge to the delivery of his ineffective come-ons, but it's only funny if you don't realize how exhausting it obviously is for Honey to have to deal with. In spite of it, she kind of likes the guy... from a distance.

The person in the car is a client of Honey's, with connections to a local church, led by Chris Evans' egomaniacal cult leader Reverend Drew Devlin. He's in deep with some French investors, and the woman from the beginning, Chere (Lera Abova), is kind of the cleaner. Seems Devlin has found himself in a bit of a mess. Dealin is a guy who knows how pretty and charming he can be and he uses it to his every advantage at all times. Undernea big bright smile and beautiful physique is a vainglorious sociopath whose whole congregation is a front for drug running, and a vehicle to manipulate the women of his congregation into having kinky sex...err...congress with him.

We meet Honey's pregnant sister (Kristen Connelly) and her sprawling brood (she keeps admonishing Honey about judging her as a mother, and it's kind of clear she's got her own issues around it), including her niece Corrinne (Talia Ryder) who is seeing a dirtbag who turns out to be an abusive MAGA douche.

Lady Kent pointed out that the film is a "shaggy dog" story, the kind that is twisting and convoluted only to ultimately have a conclusion that negates or makes the story somewhat futile or irrelevant. The Big Lebowski is a shaggy dog story, and, having re-watched Lebowski days earlier, it's hard not to compare. But the tones are completely different.

With Honey Don't we're expecting a sort of detective noir caper, but it's not that. Honey investigates her client's death but only lightly. She has a client (Billy Eichner) who wants dirt on his boyfriend's infidelity, and she doesn't even manage to start that job before her Neice disappears, which then becomes her primary focus...outside of having frantic hook-upd with MG (Aubrey Plaza) from the police station.

Shaggy dog stories come together in ultimately unsatisfying ways, because they sort of mislead you into thinking everything you see matters, everything you see is connected. Well, it is...and it isn't. I am reminded, thought, that many a Coens film has taken multiple viewings before they click, and I can see that definitely happening with Honey Don't...it just might take a few more viewings then others.  There are definitely standout parts to the production, it's just hard to get a grasp on the tone its going for. I think the "lesbian b-movie trilogy" classification actually helps put it much more into perspective.

Much like in the first half of the Coens career where Joel was getting the director's credit and Ethan was listed as producer (due to Director's Guild b.s.) even though they were co-directing, I have to wonder if these films are co-directed by Ethan and Tricia Cooke. As much as there's a Coen-y vibe, there's also an un-Coen-y vibe that challenges what little expectations I have when approaching a Coen production. Cooke definitely has her hand in the editing, and there's a lot of choices made in the edits, some which are phenomenal and others which prove a little perplexing (at least upon first watch).

I'm keen to give this another watch with a little time a perspective. Right now it's pretty low on the overall Coen's ranking, but I do like it better than Drive-Away Dolls, which I still have yet to give a second viewing.

---

What still needs to be said about The Big Lebowski that hasn't already been said? Not much I reckon, but here we go anyway. Sometimes you just gotta put one letter in front of the other and see what happens.

After Fargo became and immediate and beloved cinema classic and masterpiece, eyes were hotly attuned to the Coens' follow-up. I remember seeing The Big Lebowski in theatre and just. not. getting it. I don't exactly remember if I tried again later on DVD or just wrote it off as "not for me". It wasn't until meeting Lady Kent that I was encouraged to try it again. She was a big fan of the film, see, and, as she likes to remind me, got it all from the first viewing. 

By the time I rewatched Lebowski it was in its pop-culture ascendancy, it was only just starting to become part of early internet memes, and you would see Lebowski cosplay out in public on Halloween. Something about all that meme-ification did make it snap it place. It provides an incredible frame for which to display a lively painting of pure irreverence.

Fargo is a perfect movie, and Lebowski perhaps even more so. The intent put into every line, every beautifully constructed Roger Deakins frame, every accentuating needledrop, it's all so very, very precise. It is truly a comedy goldmine, each watch unveils new performance flourishes, or new intentions in dialogue, or new realizations...it's a movie that, in its byzantine shaggy dog construct, keeps giving back to its audience the more familiar they become with it.

This go around, it became so amusingly apparent that Walter (John Goodman), despite being a hair's breadth away from full-fledged lunatic conspiracy nut, is actually right about everything that's happening in the whole scenario the Dude has gotten involved in. Even though Walter can't help but mess everything up, he's got his eyes open, he just can't see past his own issues to bring any situation to resolution. It's like he's looking for conflict.

Jeff Bridges as The Dude is by no means an aspirational figure. He lives a slovenly simple life. He needs his pot, his drinks, his bowling and his car. Anything else, like friendship, or sex, or making money, is equal parts bonus and hassle. 

The concussion/roofie-induced acid trip flashbacks by way of musical montages are magnificent gateways into the way the Dude's mind works, and it's truly as uncomplicated on the inside as it appears on the outside.

Also on this rewatch it stood out to me seeing Carter Burwell's name on the title credits as composer (with T Bone Burnett listed as "musical archivist") since the soundtrack to The Big Lebowski is the first of its kind for the Coens, where it marries so much of its scenes to a song, much in the way Quentin Tarantino or Danny Boyle were doing at the time, and later Edgar Wright and James Gunn (and many other modern auters) would.  We don't see a lot of "various artists" soundtracks from Coens productions (it's something that again jumped out at me about Honey Don't, which along with the shaggy dog storytelling kind of marries the two films, if only a little bit). It's a remarkably successful attempt at the song-story coherence, it's truly a wonder why they really never did it more.

The Coens use, manipulate and subvert the conventions of Raymond Chandler, or so I'm told...I'm not well versed. The Coens love the classic detective noir writers and those seeds form the foundation of so much of their work. But they're still film guys, who have a ridiculously extensive knowledge of cinema, its tropes, and its uniqueness, and they will abuse those classic genre conventions like a chef making ramen noodles, twisting and slamming and dusting and manipulating until something ready for the pot results, and then it just becomes the centerpiece of the Coens' soup. Delicious delicious soup. I think it may be dinner time.

KWIF: Hundreds Of Beavers (+4)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film, which in this case is actually Kent's Week in Film two weeks ago and then again this past weekend. Assuming I finish this post this weekend.

This "Week":
Hundreds of Beavers (2022, d. Mike Cheslik - Tubi)
Cast a Deadly Spell (1991, d. Martin Campbell - HBO)
Absentia (2014, d. Mike Flanagan - AmazonPrime)
Hush (2016, d. Mike Flanagan - Tubi)
Emilia Pérez (2024, d. Jacques Audiard - Netflix)

---

A lot of movies have tried to emulate zany cartoon energy in live action. It so rarely works. Whether they're taking inspiration from Tex Avery or Chuck Jones or they're trying to put live actors into a Hanna Barbera or Jay Ward property, the results have mostly been of the "not great" sort. Outside of films that blend human actors with animated characters (again, more misses than hits), the only flat out successful humans-as-cartoons production I can think of is Stephen Chow's masterpiece, Kung-Fu Hustle.

Hundreds of Beavers (surprise! It's not porn!) isn't quite that level, but as an independent production it is quite ambitious and remarkably clever in its aping of animated forms. The film's creators, director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, credit the slapstick of the 20's and 30's silent and black and white era of cinema as inspiration, but it's hard to not see the Loony Tunes influence painted all over the first act, especially as characters pop in and out of rabbit holes that join different points of the terrain.

The film opens with a merry melody that spells out the disaster that befell our applejack-selling protagonist, a drunkard name Jean Kayak. Left with nothing in the dire 1800's winter wilderness, Jean is forced to learn how to hunt and trap in order to survive, and square off against the ingenuity of the wild animals he cohabitates with.

He finds the trading post where he can exchange his hides or fish for goods that will level up his trapping ability. The trading post also houses a fair belle who can skin a carcass in record time, and their flirtatious connection in the lonely wilderness is much to the chagrin of her father. 

The "animals" of the film -- beavers, wolves, racoons, rabbits, even a horse -- are just people in cheap mascot suits, but in washed-out black-and-white contrast, the cheapness has kind of the perfect effect.  Especially early on, it's the suits as much as anything else that establish the surreal world of the film.  

The environments are snowy and vibrantly white, which gives director/editor/effects creator Cheslik all he needs to disguise his deceptively rudimentary effects. As much as the film takes inspiration from slapstick and cartoons, it's also feeding off of video game structures at their most primal level. Feeling much more "Commodore 64" than "X-Box One", Hundreds of Beavers finds over it's hero levelling up and level restarting constantly over its 108 minutes, until its final act which goes full-blown Super Mario as Jean Kayak must navigate his way through the massive and intricate fortress the beavers have constructed. There's a Temple Run chase, a Frogger-like crossing, there's map discovery and puzzle solving of the try and try again variety. 

The film's title card doesn't really emerge until the 30-minute mark, complete with another song and credits, but it feels like it should be at the point where a cartoon with this kind of energy would normally end. Yet it keeps going for [time check] another 75 minutes. From what we've seen to this point, it doesn't feel like there's enough juice to sustain another 75 minutes, but it's a clever switching of gears, changing the pace and rooting down into the silly character drama, establishing relationships and rivalries and running gags that, quite astonishingly, actually sustains the enjoyability and fun of the production.

I should also note the film is completely silent, or at least, there's no spoken dialogue (what dialogue there is we see on olde-style screen cards). The score, from Chris Ryan is absolutely essential to the success of the film, and it's flawless. It's doing so much heavy lifting in a film where every element is pulling more weight than it should bear.  To me it felt like Terry Gilliam drawing Looney Tunes but directed by Guy Maddin. It's irreverent, pushing boundaries, but also reverent towards old cinema styles. It's a film that shouldn't work at all, and that it not only works, but works resoundingly well and manages to sustain it's total running time is an absolute feat (even if I think shaving off 20 minutes would have done it some good).

Dam fun and dam enjoyable.

---

Cast A Deady Spell is a fantasy-noir set in an alternate 1940s where everyone seems to have some capability to use magic. It's a film that stars Frank Grillo precursor Fred Ward (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins) as former cop, now hardboiled P.I. Harry Philip Lovecraft, a good detective who refuses to do magic.  A case comes his way to recover a stolen book, the Necronomicon, which leads H.P. to a swanky club owned by his former partner, an ex-dirty cop also named Harry (Borden, as played by Clancey Brown, Highlander). Singing at the club is Borden's girlfriend, H.P.'s ex, Connie Stone (as played with full femme fatale sultriness by Julianne Moore, Boogie Nights).

There's undead henchmen, gargoyle spies, deadly magic, and clever tricks, not to mention the looming threat of a Lovecraftian elder god. It's a film full of special effects, extensive prosthetics and make-up, not to mention being a period piece, so it's all quite stylized.  Martin Campbell, not yet the man behind Goldeneye, or The Legend of Zorro, or Casino Royale, but he's been in the game for 20 years at this point and shows off all the skills that would put him at the helm of some truly great action and genre pieces [and, to be fair, some not so great ones *cough*Green Lantern*cough*). While not the most lush visual production, everything work quite well in unison. There are no flat beats, no wrong notes, it builds its world adeptly, leaning both into its fantasy and noir influences (it's far heavier on the noir, and it abandons any real attempt at the horror side of Lovecraft).  

So I have to ask... why have I never heard of this before? I know all manners of sci-fi, horror and fantasy films from the era, including a broad range of low budget, direct-to-video garbage (now on Tubi!) but I've never heard of this film from a known director of some renown, with a handful of quality (and, in Moore's case, A-list) actors, with really good special effects, and a thoroughly enjoyable production. 

The answer comes back to the same problem we're facing with streaming: movies that don't go to theatres get lost. They get no promotion, and so there's no awareness of them. They don't get a second life on video, so there's no secondary "new release" push. They just live on in the archives to be randomly discovered. Oh, here's a Jennifer Lopez sci-fi movie I've never heard of, or a hanful of Chris Pine action movies that nobody knows existed, or movies starring Chris Evans we've watched and all forgotten about. Without being released to theatres where it would reveive even a modicum of marketing push, there's no sustaining a movie in the consciousness. They just disappear, a faint whisper of a memory when playing a movie trivia game.

Even now, at the end of this write-up, I've already forgotten the name of this film and had to scroll back up to read it.

[Side note: there is a gay and a trans character in this film who are a couple, and I'm not certain how I feel about their representation. H.P. drops casual slurs and gets physically rough, which I feel is to the detriment of H.P.'s characterization. At the same time, I feel like the couple are treated sweetly and sympathetic by the filmmaker and script, and their fate is tragic which may fall into the "kill your gays" trope, but also so many people die in this thing...so Idunno. Is it inclusive or exploitative?]

---

As noted on my previous post, I'm all aboard the Flanagan train, and I'm wading knee deep in the Mike Flanagan waters, but I'm starting to worry it may be too much too soon.  After watching Midnight Mass, I started trolling Toasty's Flanagan reviews past, and I decided to hit up a personal favourite of his, Absentia. Both Midnight Mass and Doctor Sleep impressed me so much I really needed to go back and see Flanagan's beginnings.

Watching Absentia reminded me of watching the films of Benson and Moorehead, The Endless and Resolution... just supremely well executed small-budget indies that intone much grander conceits and ideas without needing any real budget for it.

Here, a woman is in the final stages of having her husband declared dead in absence of a body after 7 years. She's pregnant, having become close to an officer on the case, and she's looking for a new start on life. Her sister, fresh out of rehab from heroin addiction is there for the mutual support feedback loop. 

A couple weird things happen to the sister, and then the husband returns. Questions are asked, emotions are heightened, and the whole world seems to go pear-shaped. The sister's maybe relapse-fuelled investigation yields dozens of disappearances in the neighborhood in all recorded record. There's something going on here. It only gets worse from there.

It's an early example of what Flanagan seems to do exceptionally well, which is set up a supernatural scenario, maybe even a horrifying one, and then let his characters live in that world, getting really intriguing reactions from them as they try to psychologically rationalize what is happening to them, or get a little off kilter from the realization that their understanding of the world is completely upended. Flanagan also likes to toy with religious themes as well as ideas of perception, and with the sister's substance abuse history, her view of what is actually happening is perhaps distorted.

I liked the film a lot, but it's let down by many of its performances. I've noted that Flanagan enjoys giving his characters a monologue (we've watched The Haunting of Hill House since I watched Absentia and that show is absolutely rife with them). It's a stylistic choice of his, as he must know it's utterly unnatural for people to monologue like that in the presences of others. What has made it tolerable in most of his productions is skill of the actors in delivering their speech, but here, these indie, probably novice actors, can't quite get there, and they come off pretty clunky.  Also, the only "name" actor in this is Doug Jones, and I would have loved to have so much more of him.

I tried to watch Hush immediately after watching Absentia but it's a film starring a deaf character (unfortunately not an actual deaf performer, instead co-writer and Flanagan's wife Kate Siegel) and I was multitasking so I couldn't track the subtitles and had to stop early on. What I didn't know was that within 15 minutes there's no more sign language and most of the film is pretty wordless.

The gist is Siegel plays a deaf writer who is terrorized by a serial killer. The killer has murdered her neighbour and now is outside her home holding her hostage, toying with her rather than going straight for the kill.  It becomes a tense cat-and-mouse game as the killer waits to see what his victim will do, only she starts incrementally getting the better of him, though not without taking a few hits herself.

I don't like home invasion thrillers/horrors. It's a definite thing that causes me anxiety, so movies like this, even when they're not particularly very good, are still pretty effective in raising my blood pressure, and that's really all Siegel and Flanagan are banking on here.

It feels like a small, contained indie production, like Absentia, but with much better cameras and lighting. It looks good. And if you don't think, like, at. all. about it, it's pretty intense. But the more you start looking at it, the more the flaws become apparent. 

The mask the killer wore had a texture of melted flesh, with a slight smirk on it, which gave the killer a cockiness that made sense when he decides to toy with her. But he very quickly reveals his face and the threat level drops sooo many notches once he does.  Something about that mask really brought out the angry, misogynistic alt-right white kid vibes that dissipate once we see John Gallagher Jr.s face.

There's also not much, if at all, in this home invasion/hostage thriller that utterly necessitates the lead character being deaf, except for the gruesome opening murder scene in which Siegel's bloodied neighbour is banging on the patio glass with Siegel completely oblivious. It's not an essential element to the story, or really, the character.

Siegel does a very good job at alternating between afraid, in pain, and steeling herself to do something probably stupid or brave or daring. She's the defacto final girl by nature of being pretty much the only girl in the cabin in the woods.

Overall, I was entertained but it felt like it was maybe a 30-40 minute short film stretched out into a feature length, and it's easily the weakest and least Flanagan-esque of his works I've seen so far.

---

It's been a stressful few weeks at work with time being eaten up by demands in the off hours, so while I was working on a volunteer project I did so with Hallmarkies as a backdrop. I got three of them in before I finished by project and once complete I needed something ... not so trashy and mindless to watch.  I had clocked that Emilia Pérez was available on Netfilx and it was one of those titles I had stored in the back of my brain, even though only had a vague memory of what it was.  What I knew was it was boldly a musical about a drug kingpin who is a trans woman and wants to transition. It also won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

What I also learned, less than a minute into the film, is it's set in Mexico, almost completely in Spanish and stars Zoe Saldana (as well as Selina Gomez, of the familiar names), all from a white, cisgender French director.

Saldana is, Rita, an exceptionally competent lawyer overlooked by her superiors because of racism. She's approached by drug kingpin Manitas in secret with the promise of untold riches if she can help source out his transformation. Manitas tells her his whole life is a condition of his circumstances and as wealthy and powerful as he is, he cannot live this life anymore. He would commit suicide, if not for the desire to first live life as she truly would like to live it, to experience the world as her true self.

Manita's wife (Gomez) and children are escorted to Switzerland by Rita, while Manitas undergoes her surgeries, and Manita's death is faked and reported on television. Satisfied with the job, Rita is set free, with her riches, to live her life. 

Except, four years later, Rita, now living big shot lawyer life in London, meets Emilia Pérez, and Rita soon fears that this is a spectre from her past coming to kill her. Instead Emilia once again wants her help to bring her family back to Mexico, under the guise of being Manitas' beloved aunt.

While settling in, Emilia and Rita meet a woman searching for her son, who has been missing for 10 years. Emilia knows through old connections she can find out where the body is buried, and does. Emilia soon finds a path for her wealth and atonement for past sins, in trying to uncover the whereabouts of the hundreds of thousands of missing persons, all likely a victim of the drug cartels of which, in a past life, she was a part.

It is indeed a bold film, weaving between its criminal elements and its trans elements, it's attempts to be both an ally to trans women and innocent victims of the drug trade in Central America, all while jutting in and out of song and dance numbers that, more often than not, never fully flourish, or feel complete. The lyrics dip in and out of singing and dialogue in a way that's largely unsatisfying. Some tunes that have catchy hooks never play out in full song. I never thought about pulling up the tracks on Spotify because they never felt like whole songs.  

The nature of this hesitant musical is intriguing in its own right, and I found myself drawn to its rhythms, its beautiful costuming, its lush colours...even its dingy settings were captured so perfectly. But all the while  I was feeling uneasy in my gut with how it was portraying its transness, its victim advocacy and its conceptualization of the drug trade.  It all felt... at least to some small degree... exploitative.

I never truly got a sense of the characters in the film, what they actually were feeling. In a musical, emotions are supposed to come out in song, but the emotions presented seemed beside the plot of the film. I didn't connect with these characters like I wanted to, and every turn that sent the plot in a new direction seemed to put more distance between me and them.  I think the performances throughout were fabulous, but the material let them down.

I came out of the film feeling like I watched something very unique, but I didn't feel enriched by it. I didn't feel like the film ever really dealt properly with the material it was presenting. I was entranced, but not enlightened.

In watching the film, I was reminded of Annette, another askew musical by a French director that couldn't be more different, story-wise, and yet tonally felt so much the same.  Probably a very fucked up double bill to explore one night.

[I'll come back to all those Hallmarkies mentioned at the top of this review another day]

 

KWIF: I Saw the TV Glow (+2)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. Been busy with TV, particularly a binge watch of season 5 of Lego Masters Australia which I found all-consuming most of the week, and a Mike Flanagan series the week before. But this isn't KWIT, it's KWIF.

This Week:
I Saw the TV Glow (2024, d. Jane Schoenbrun - Crave/HBO)
Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024, d. Brian Taylor - rental)
Hard Target 2 (2016, d. Roel Reiné - Netflix)

---

I Saw the TV Glow is bound to perplex some people...maybe even most people who watch it. It is a highly stylized psychological horror film that acts primarily as - but not exclusively as - a Trans allegory. Actually, it's not even allegory. The text of it seemed so overt to me, but I also went into the film knowing only that it had something to do with Trans identity.  I can't imagine what most cisgender people who went into this without the Trans coding knowledge just what exactly they might make of it. 

But with the knowledge, I picked up on the subliminal very early. In the opening moments as young 11-year-old Owen is watching TV, a commercial for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer-esque program (by way of Canadian-produce kid's horror) "The Pink Opaque" provokes a reaction out of of their otherwise slack-jawed viewing. Later he's with his mother at a high school where she is voting to re-elect "the saxophone man", so that alerts us to it being around the start of Bill Clinton's second term. But in the booth, Owen's mom lets them press the voting buttons, and even though they knows who they're supposed to be pressing the button for, their finger starts trailing off for other options. "Don't ask, don't tell" is hard to ignore when his name comes up in an LGBTQ-framed context.

Milling about afterwards, Owen meets Maddy, a grade niner reading the season 1 episode guide to "The Pink Opaque". Owen is curious. Maddy, at first dismissive, senses something in Owen and engages. Owen can't watch the TV show she loves and she can sense that it will come to mean as much to Owen as it does to them. Owen fakes a sleepover at a friends in order to get to Maddy's to watch the show. It's a revelatory moment for Owen and a bonding moment for both. Two years pass and Owen is in high school and though they don't socialize together really, but Maddy leaves Owen messages and tapes of the show, and they start hanging out together to watch the show, season 5.  Late in the school year Maddy says they're skipping town, escaping it's small-minded trappings as well as an abusive stepfather. They encourage Owen to come with them, but Owen gets scared and tells on themself to get grounded so they can't be with Maddy when they leave.

Then Owen's mom dies, leaving them with their abusive, neglectful father. Shortly after that Maddy disappears, their TV set on fire in the back yard. Eventually everyone thinks Maddy is dead. And then "The Pink Opaque" is cancelled.  (The question I ask, was the burning of the TV in response to Owen's betrayal or was it in response to the cancellation, or are both, effectively, one-and-the-same...how real "The Pink Opaque" is is part of what makes this film so layered and fascinating)

This is the first half of the film, roughly, and generally. It's very much vibes...the music and the score, the neon haze and/or crackle of TV static as illumination sources. It's almost as if Owen and Maddy were floating between two worlds. Maddy says that, sometimes, "The Pink Opaque" feels more real than real life. 

The film is beautiful and atmospheric. It's patient and full of surrealism. It blurs lines between what we (and Owen) are seeing and what Owen is feeling (and therefore what we should be feeling). It's a difficult thing to really catch onto unless you understand Owen, the quiet, apologetic, mumbly kid trapped in their own head, narrating their own life from the inside. If you get the meaning it's like being sliced open and having your guts spilled out. Jaden Smith, who plays Owen, captures this hesitancy so effectively, as if Owen is this awkward bag of flesh and bone that seems to keep moving in spite of itself. 

The second half of the film jumps another 8 years ahead in time and we observe Owen's life...without Maddy, without their mother, as if there's nothing left in the world for them, but they keep going through the motions anyway. Owen is now in their early 20s, and their asthma is affecting them so direly that it's like they can barely breathe. But it's not asthma. Their skin is literally choking the life out of the not-Owen person within. Strange events keep happening to Owen, strange apparitions of TV static or pink haze that seem so alluring and yet Owen is so utterly wary.

And then Maddy, but not Maddy, returns. They return for Owen, but not Owen. They return for Isabel, the main character of "The Pink Opaque", but Owen is confused and doesn't understand. Not-Maddy tries to explain, to relate their life since they left this shitty town and its constricting mindset. Layers of analogies that should punch through only seem to make Owen dizzy, unable to accept anything they are saying.

More time passes, Owen ages faster than the rest of the world around them. They are trapped in a cage of their own making. Revisiting "The Pink Opaque" exposes to Owen an entirely different show than what they remember, something far more juvenile (much more the cheap Canadian Are You Afraid of the Dark, less of the Buffy), and containing none of the importance and meaning that it did to them for so long. They are lost in the world they've built around themselves, still apologizing for their existence.

I can tell you the broad beats of this whole movie and it won't even elicit a tiny fraction of the actual emotional wallop the film does. I was devastated throughout watching this film, tears streaming from my eyes uncontrollably. For an hour or two afterwards I just couldn't compose myself and I would still find myself sobbing in response to the intention of the film.

If you don't get it, it's not easy to explain. From a very high level, it's a film about being trapped. The Trans and non-binary messaging is the foremost intention, but the resonance, the emotion of feeling trapped, just in general, should feel at least somewhat familiar to most people. And finding escape, in television, in friendship, in shared experiences is so liberating to a point, but it's not everything if you're just not able to live life as you want to live it.

I refer to both Owen and Maddy as "they". When I call Owen "they/them" it's because there is who Owen really is and who they are pretending to be. Maddy's more subliminal story is about them understanding that they're not the lesbian everyone (including themself) though they were in high-school, but non-binary.

This definitely falls under the "horror, not horror" moniker, as there are no scares and not even really scary moments, but as a whole it is horrifying just the idea of being trapped in one's own skin, to have to wear not just an image, but an identity that is inauthentic, and to be aware of it, whether suppressing it or confronting it on a day-to-day basis. The film could have went really far into outright horror with metaphors of body dysphoria but Owen has so buried their authentic self that it's only in the films final moments that Owen is directly addressing that side of it.

After that the very end is so painful to watch if you are connecting with what you're looking at, a human in such excruciating emotional turmoil, a cage not entirely of their own making, but one they do actually have the key to escape from. It would be sad if I didn't have such empathy for Owen...instead it's heartbreaking.

The film has definitely connected with some (like me) and puzzled others, but it didn't break out into a cultural phenomenon, nor even a cult one...yet.  There's a lot of David Lynch in this, but where Lynch often doesn't seem to know where his ideas manifest from, leading to stories and scenes that are inexplicable, here Schoenbrun seems to know every intention they have in every moment, and every scene. There is not a single piece of absurdism or surrealism that doesn't have a specific purpose.  I felt a kinship between this and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Schoenbrun themself has also said Donnie Darko was a big inspiration. The inspirations are many beyond that. And it transcends them all. 

Maybe my favourite film of the year? I regret not seeing it in theatre.

---

When Hellboy debuted in comics in, I want to say, 1994 (what, research?) I was very much in. I loved the artwork of his creator Mike Mignola a tremendous amount and the mythos of the world of Hellboy expanded beautifully. Very quickly Hellboy became the best original creation of the 1990s.

But Mignola wasn't content to let Hellboy remain his sole vision, and the world of Hellboy grew, the stable of writers and artist participating in telling the legacy of the character expanded, and soon I was overwhelmed. I wouldn't say it was a deluge, but it was much more than I was prepared to take in. I don't know if any of it was watered-down, but I felt my connection to the character slipping.

The first Guillermo Del Toro movie re-sparked an interest, but my re-approach of the comics only showed me how far behind I had fallen and it felt daunting to catch up. The second Del Toro movie dove into fantasy in a way I couldn't connect with and I pretty much left Hellboy behind after that. That was 16 years ago.

I tried to watch the 2019 Neill Marshall-directed, David Harbor-led Hellboy feature and I just could not get into it. It's in a very small group of film that I've started watching and never finished (like, count-on-one-hand small).  I liked Harbor as replacement for Ron Perlman, but that's about it. This new, very low-budget (about 20 million) Hellboy is at the very least much more watchable than that.

Here Hellboy and fellow Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense Agent Bobby Jo Song are trying to take a demon spider back to home base, but get derailed. They're stranded in the Appalachian Mountains, coal mining territory which, they learn is besieged with witches. A World War II veteran, returning home after a long absense, seems to have much familiarity with what's happening and why. He tells the story of the Crooked Man, one of the first settlers to reach American shores, who played both sides in the Civil War, who was hanged for his treason and greed, but was given the task of collecting souls for the devil, with payment of one penny per.

Witches seem to be in vogue right now (see also Agatha All Along, Star Wars: The Acolyte for just two prominent examples) almost with a sympathetic eye towards them. Here, however, they're nasty creatures with nasty ways of dealing with things nastily, treating witches as humans-turned-creatures, less as humans transcending humanity.

Hellboy here is played by Jack Kesy, an actor I'm not all that familiar with (though I did watch some of the first season of The Strain which he was the lead in). He's seemingly emulating Ron Perlman's depiction of the character, and I'm not sure if that's for "consistency" (from the producers/director) or lack of his own definitive take. It's a good performance, even if he's not quite got the same presence as Perlman or even Harbor. 

Of the other key performers in the film  Adeline Rudolph as Bobby Jo I thought was the strongest actor in the film (and maybe got a little swooney over). She's a novice to the field, primarily an in-house researcher, and so Hellboy is quite protective of her (he's also a little swooney over her, but subtly). I also liked Jefferson White as Tom Fennell, the not-a-witch-man returning home and finding his old world in a bad state and feeling very much responsible.  Even the old, blind reverend, played by Joseph Marcell, is low-key incredible.  It's a good cast overall.

The film is, at 20 million, cheap for these kinds of things, and it feels it. In his review Toasty [we agree, almost] cites "fan flick that had been given a budget", and for sure it feels that way especially in its opening prologue where it uses a lot of unrefined cgi-effects to, well, ill-effect. I would say extract the prologue altogether and it would be a better film, but it does circle back into the story and is sort of necessary. I really wish they figured out a practical effect for that spider instead of a cheap digital render.

Most of that "fan film" feeling falls at the feet of director Brian Taylor, a filmmaker who has been in the Hollywood system since 2006's Crank, a movie I very much did not like. He made a lot of films with Crank co-director Mark Neveldine, including Crank 2: High Voltage, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and Gamer, all of which I very much did not like.  I have seen some of Taylor's solo work, like some of the TV series Happy! (which I also did not like) and Mom and Dad (which I found ok). 

The feeling of a Taylor-Neveldine film was one that is frenetic, high energy, but not in a controlled way. It's ADD on acid, just out of control and I found them very unpleasant to watch. Taylor on his own is more toned down but he still doesn't seem to know how to resist constant cutting between obtuse angles and weird stylizations with little consistency or always carrying purpose. Here, with probably one of his lowest budgets, but highest demands on that low budget, his lack of stillness winds up looking quite cheap quite often. That said, he also captures some fairly stunning shots, and there are some very visually striking frames in this film. Buuuut, for every one moment framed so acutely, there are two that are not, and they can be distracting.

As Toasty opined, it "presents as a horror movie but without embracing it". And that's true. But in true Hellboy sense, at least that of what I remember of Mignola's 90's works, it was always a bit more "supernatural adventure" than "horror". This lives in a John Carpenter's Vampires vein, and in that vein it works for me. It's not a spectacular production, but I think for what Hellboy has been in film in the past, we've hit the right budget and style to be an ongoing franchise of 20 million dollar direct-to-streaming productions, especially if it's going to have Mignola and long-time collaborator Christopher Golden on scripting duties.  It's not rekindled a fervour in me to start cramming more Hellboy comics in my diet, but I really would watch more of these it they can sustain this upper-echelon-of-90's-DTV sensibility.

---

I'm writing these in reverse order of what I watched them in. I watched I Saw the TV Glow immediately after watching Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and within literal seconds of Shoenbrun's film starting I said to myself, "this is what a real movie looks like". Not to diss Taylor any further, but there's an assuredness to Shoenbrun's craft that Taylor just never had. Oh, Taylor's work has often seemed cocky, but it rarely backs that cockiness up with ...well, being objectively "good".  But compared to Roel Reiné, Taylor looks like Scorsese... at least he's getting 1 out of 3 shots that are really something appealing to look at (and most of the rest at least have some level of competency even if they are erratic and sometimes ugly), watching Hard Target 2 was even like watching a fan film. At least fan films the people involved care about what they are trying to do. I think Reiné, whose credits include The Scorpion King 3, Death Race 2 & 3, SEAL Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines, 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded, and seemingly a dozen other cheap-and-quick in-name-only sequels and/or paycheck vehicles for action movie has-beens and never wases.

Now, I've said it before, I inexplicably enjoy the "most dangerous game" man-hunting-man movies, so seeing a Scott Adkins sequel to the not-a-classic classic John Woo/JCVD film Hard Target pop up on Netflix's "coming soon" roster made me uncontrollably "oooh", and click that "notify me" button. You can bet I watched this dogshit as soon as possible. 

It was on a sick day. I laid in bed, not wanting to move. The only reason I finished this film is because I let myself be held captive by it. It's definitely not a so-bad-it's-good, it's just bad. Bad-bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. Stupid, and bad. And cheap. Lazy. Dumb. Nonsensical at times.

There's a whole world of direct-to-video/streaming/on-demand filmmaking that's been in operation since the 80s. Before that it was sci-fi and horror B-movies, or cheap foreign knockoffs, or Spaghetti westerns as opposed to the regal American ones. There's always been a place in cinema for this type of garbage. But ever since the digital age made the "film" part of filmmaking unnecessary and the accessibility of editing and other digital tools a thing of the past, these types of movies have gotten so cheap, and churned out so lazily that I fail to see how anyone gets any joy out of watching them, nevermind making them. They're soulless product that are soon to be even further deprived of soul by being entirely AI scripted. We probably won't even know the difference.

Scott Adkins is, in this sphere of modern direct-to-whatever a well known and respected commodity. He's a fairly handsome guy, not too shabby an actor sometims, and he's fucking fit at hell and loves doing stunts. In this film, the stunts seem like an afterthought so they're as cheap and lazy as everything else in the film. 

As far as the man-hunting-man element goes, this is a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a ....well, you get it. Nothing, absolutely nothing original is happening here that has not been done in another story of this type, and any attempt to add "flavour" to this by way of some form of romance or intrigue or political message is handled, well, stupidly as to make the effort irrelevant. 

We know Adkins is going to escape his very stupidly set up predicament. We know hes going to give his ill-gotten riches to his newfound local lady friend, and we know his comidically burdensome guilt that he carries is going to be absolved by an external force rather than any internal resolution. Its climax is one of the worst boat chases I've ever seen ending in one of the stupidest standoffs I've ever seen. 

I couldn't watch 2019's Hellboy for more than 30 minutes but I watched all of this garbage? I must have been sick....

KWEIF: Will & Harper (+the Bounty Hunter Trilogy)

KWEIF=Kent's Weekend in Film, because I did a Kent's Week in Film already this week (twice!). I took a couple days off work to decompress an watched a pile of movies, and that continued over the weekend.

This Weekend:
Will & Harper (2024, d. Josh Greenbaum - Netflix)

Killer's Mission (1969, d. Shigehiro Ozawa - bluray)

The Fort of Death (1969, d. Eiichi Kudo - bluray)

Eight Men to Kill (1972, d. Shigehiro Ozawa- bluray)

---

Tactic number 1 of the conservative political playbook is to make the people afraid. Make them fearful, make them hate. Give them an enemy as the root cause of all their problems. Distract them from the real and exceeding complex issues of sustaining a democracy. Distract them from the glad-handing  deals, from the dissolving of social infrastructure, from the capitalism-run-wild that favours the few at the expense of the many. Keep them pointing fingers at anyone but the (primarily, but not exclusively) conservative political powers that are the true root of the problems.

Conservative politicians, and their public mouthpieces (from talk radio, to social media feeds, to 24 hour cable news channels) keep a large swath of populace under their sway through tactic number 1, and have been doing so for generations. They do so because it works. People want easy answers in a complex world. Explaining global economics or spelling out the complex chain of events that lead to a small town falling into ruin or understanding how a prosperous country slides into negative population growth and thus needs immigration to bolster it's economic infrastructure...well, the average person doesn't want to sit through that lecture. They just want to know who they should be angry at, and most conservative politicians have no moral compunction about pointing a finger. At any given time it's been Blacks or Mexicans or Asians or Muslims or gays or all of the above. It's only been recently that it's been trans people, and more specifically it seems to be pointing a finger at trans women.

The largely patriarchal world is a dangerous place for women. It always has been. Men have objectified and othered women as something less-than for centuries. Objects of desire, prizes, possessions, muses, tools, toys. When men don't see women as human, as equals they can do horrendous things. 

So imagine how scary it is when you've got politicians and political mouthpieces shouting to a massive and receptive population that you, as a trans woman are not even worthy of being an object of desire, a prize, possession, muse, tool or toy. That if you are not a man than you are nothing. It says a lot about how these men not only perceive trans women, but women in general.  But it's not that politicians and political mouthpieces are saying that trans women are nothing, they are actively saying trans women are predators, they are perverts, they are the root of leftist blabbetyblah (and these are the nicer things they say). They are making a populating dehumanize, hate and be angry towards a population that just want to be free, to have the liberty to live in a skin the is comfortable, to be who they feel they are inside on the outside rather than be trapped in a construct, in the confined definition that the patriarchal society has determined they should be.

Most trans people go through a period of deep depression and suicidal ideation before they come out. Most of us cannot truly understand this struggle, to feel so trapped by one's own skin by societal expectations that death seems like the most straightforward answer to it all.  And then imagine when a whole political segment is saying they would rather you kill yourself than wear the clothing of the opposite gender to what you were born with. It's frankly repulsive.

I have trans people in my life. I love, support and accept them unconditionally. Radical empathy should be mandatory teaching, not just in school but at work and throughout everyone's life. It's a health and safety issue. Not everyone has trans people in their life, or has encountered trans people socially, and so if you don't have exposure, it's easy to other, to give any credence to the inane ramblings of those political mouthpieces.  

Will Ferrell has made many movies which play well in conservative spaces. His comedies have rarely been political or exclusionary, they're usually pretty silly and play pretty broadly. He knows films like Step Brothers, Anchorman and Talladega Nights have earned him a wide audience of fans, and now he wants to attempt to engage that audience and introduce them to a trans woman, his dear friend Harper Steele.

Harper was, in her masculine disguise, a writer for Saturday Night Live when she met Will and they became fast friends, and remained very close over the decades. During the pandemic, Harper came out to everyone in her life as a trans woman, no longer able to tolerate living the lie she was living. Post-pandemic ("post"), the friends decided upon a road trip for the two of them to get reacquainted, for Will to meet Harper properly as the friend he's always known but now could truly know.

But the film is only half about Will meeting his friend in total, the other half is Harper coming to terms with being a trans woman in America, of exploring the spaces she used to freely engage with as a man...spaces that, by all accounts from news reports and political discourse, would be dangerous for her to enter.

With Will's celebrity presence acting as buffer, they set forth on a New York to L.A. trip that takes them to some of the most gorgeous vistas the world has to offer, and to some formative spaces in Harper's life, and to those rural red state places where she gets those leering looks that, if not for Will or the camera crew, could spell danger for her.

There are genuine moments of connections with people that Harper has that surprise her, but there are fresh wounds made by daring to even enter a space where she knows she's not wanted. I'm sure Will okayed it with Harper, but every time he announced her publicly as his friend who transitioned, I cringed. But it came from both a place of pride, and from of place of hope, that simply by stating he, Will Ferrell is an ally, he might get others to be so as well. It's bold, perhaps brave, but also naive. 

This is a funny, sweet, heartwarming film about friendship, but also intense, painful, and, at times, dispiriting film about Western society and its constructs, and the pain its very arbitrary and imaginary boundaries inflict upon much of the population.  

There were few times where I felt Harper was safe.  When she was among friends or family or alone with Will, I felt she felt at ease, and it was lovely to see. Every other public space felt extremely loaded, just bracing for someone to say something, to incite.  It makes me sad. I am worried for the trans people in my life, but also for those that I don't know. I'm most empathetic towards those who witness the discourse about them and decide not to come out, to stay trapped. I wish society wasn't so primitive, that it would evolve enough to see through patriarchal  rhetoric and conservative dogma, and see the spectrum of humanity for the beautiful thing it is.

I hope this film is effective, that cisgender people engage with it (I think it's much less vital for trans people, as it's not presenting them with much they don't already live or know), and learn and grow and become more open and empathetic. It's truly lovely.

---

I had never heard of The Bounty Hunter Trilogy before, a trio of films in Japanese genres of jedaigeki and chambara from the late-60's early '70s starring Lone Wolf and Cub's Tomisaburo Wakayama.  (If you don't know these terms, that's okay, because I don't really either.  "Jedaigeki" are basically period dramas, where "chambara" are the subgenre of sword fighting films. Both are kind of used, maybe inaccurately (?) as a general term to reference samurai movies.) I'm not well versed in these genres largely because they weren't very accessible when I was younger. Outside of Kurosawa and Godzilla, there wasn't a lot of access to Japanese cinema until the double-boom of Power Rangers and Pokemon started a whole mass wave of interest in Japanese entertainment, primarily manga and anime.

The chambara I started with were the Kurosawa movies, mainly through the references to them in my readings about Star Wars (if you look at the genre terms above, you see where Lucas got "Jedi" from). Kurosawa's samurai films are gorgeous, intelligent, and masterful cinema. But what I glommed onto most immediately was the pulpier, more violent, more stripped-down Lone Wolf and Cub. I watched most of the films and some of the TV series in the early 2000s thanks to an incredible local video store when I moved to Toronto (no longer exists sadly).  I coveted the collection for years, and finally acquired the six-film series on blu-ray last year. I really need to review it. I got halfway through before I got distracted. 

Outside of Kurosawa and Lone Wolf and Cub I haven't explored the jedaigeki much, in part because there's just so much of it out there, and also because it's still not extremely accessible. Unlike Chinese martial arts films, the jedaigeki and chambara films haven't been Sunday afternoon cable classics, video store hallmarks, or Tubi essentials. If you want to watch them, you have to seek them out, and if you don't really know what you're looking for it can be difficult (and expensive) to traverse.

I only learned about The Bounty Hunter Trilogy by visiting one of my local video stores (we have a few in Toronto, thank the gods - Bay Street Video, Eyesore Cinema, and Vinegar Syndrome, to name three) and spying the boxed set on the shelf. Released by Radiance and limited to 3000 copies, it features a quarter-sleeve on the box that tells you what this is: "Tomisaburo Wakayama [stars] in this triptych of violent samurai spectacles inspired by James Bond and spaghetti westerns." 

Films blending the genres of samurai, British super spy and Italian westerns...plus Wakayama in the lead? I had to see these.

Killer's Mission most fully realizes this promise of genre-blending. Wakayama plays Shikoro Ichibei, a doctor who moonlights as a "bounty hunter" (we'll get to that), taking missions to help fund his medical practice. The premise of this first in the series seems to stem from the same historical incident as James Clavell's story for Shogun. A Dutch ship is possibly selling firearms to a rogue state that could give them the potential power to overthrow the Shogun.  Ichibei is hired to prevent the sale from happening by any means necessary.

Ichibei suits up, assembling his armory of transforming weapons and hidden gadgets like an 18th century Japanese super-spy. It could only have been better if there was actually a quartermaster there who were devised these gadgets and explained their use to him.  He sets out on his mission using disguises, lies, and trickery, as well as lightning fast reflexes, expert swordsmanship, and a butt load of super-spy testosterone to make his way to his destinations.

Much like Sean Connery's Bond, Ichibei is a lustful being who thinks he's god's gift to women. In this same movie he tricks one woman into sympathy fucking him by pretending to be a blind man, and fights a female ninja who he'd rather be kissing.  There's a lot of that "the lady doth protest too much" attitude here where Ichibei forcefully kisses someone but though they initially resist, they ultimately cannot resist his manly manliness (and what a man, as a clowning, Don Knotts-esque sidekick catches a look at Ichibei's dick in the lavatory and is beyond impressed and effusively complimentary). This film, and the series, is not the best at serving its female characters, though Ichibei is less handsy in the subsequent films. It's one of the unfortunate ways in which it's in fitting with the Bond-ian stereotype.

Also like Bond films, Killer's Mission gets pretty convoluted plot-wise, as the political side of things weaves its way through multiple double-crosses and some shifting of allegiances where the motivation isn't entirely clear.

What the film lacks in plot clarity and respect for women, it almost makes up for in style. It's score is so 60's espionage with emphatic, propulsive guitars and horns (with just a little bit of surf energy), that it sets the vibe. The character, the swagger, the "romance" and even the almost free-flowing nature of the mission all have that 60's super-spy tinge to it, but in the guise of Japanese samurai tropes.

It's the staging though that evokes Westerns. The fights all have a dusty showdown nature to them, the camera closing in on Wakayama's eyes like he's Clint Eastwood, he will quickdraw his sword and return it to his sheath like a sheriff will his six-shooter in a showdown shootout.  It's hard not to be charmed by the mishmash.

The subsequent films in the series, then, are that much more a disappointment in their abandoning or the spy genre. While the music cues remain very brassy, the second, and especially the third in the series lean more into to the samurai-meets-western.

Of the three, I think The Fort of Death is my least favourite, primarily because it is effectively a lower budget, more primitive riff on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. It's the knock-off version, like Orca to Jaws, or Battle Beyond the Stars to Star Wars. It seems cheaper, more exploitative, and yet it's also not without its excitement or charms. While it mostly abandons the super spy element it adopts the 50's/60's British-esque war movie into its repertoire.

A coalition of farmers is being taxed literally to death by its regional lordship. They've protested and pleaded but their lordship has his own political aspirations, and whatever he achieves will be on the backs of the working class. They either fall in line, or get shut down. Though it doesn't pay much, and Ichibei is not a man to interfere in politics, he cannot dismiss the suffering of others, nor can he abide bullies.

He gathers a team, including his ninja love interest from last film (though their relationship has seemingly gone largely platonic since then) and they descend upon the fortified wall. Ichibei takes command and organizes the people, their few fighters, and the unruly ronin who have gathered.  They would be overwhelmed by the lord's forces if not for the gatling gun Ichibei has brought with him (possibly recovered from those Dutch traders he defeated in the prior film?)

There's something about gunplay in a samurai film I really, really don't like. Obviously guns were a game changer after ages of swords and arrows, and this ugly progression naturally would hit Japan's shores, but there's something so much more elegant and tangible to swordplay and arrows that is lost when you have people falling over after being hit with invisible bullets. The special spray of arterial blood is lost as hammy extras overplay their falling-over-after-being-shot moments.

That said, it's still pretty exciting, and has kind of a first-person-shooter feel to it when the forces are just so overwhelming that they're pretty much flooding the frame of the camera and being shot by Ichibei's gun at point blank range.  It does feel effectively overwhelming.

In terms of Ichibei being the number-one-lover-man-in-Japan, the film turns the tables. A widow in the village assaults Ichibei, taking his pants off while he sleeps and tries to force herself upon him repeatedly as he attempts to flee. It's played semi-comedically, but assault is assault. It's not right when Ichibei was doing it in the prior film and it's not fair play to have the tables reversed.  Another widow, who has gone mad following the deaths of her husband and baby, also assails Ichibei, and literally throws him around, mirroring his first encounter with his ninja love in Killer's Mission.

The film ends with a field of dead and the ruins of a community. An inspector from the Shogunate finally arrives to assess the conflict, but obviously too late to do anything about it. It's a dark note, left with the little promise of the children of the village emerging and being embraced by the farmers of neighboring communities.

These films do not shy away from being critical of government, and the corruption that lies within. Ichibei is often an agent for the government but he is not of the government.

Eight Men to Kill opens with a gold heist, which makes its way to Ichibei doubly so. First the government implores his assistance in recovering the gold as it's crucial to staving off an economic collapse. Second, a witness to the heist found a gold piece and swallowed it, but it's causing severe intestinal issues and Ichibei needs to operate on him.  Operations on screen before sterile environments really wig me out.

So Ichibei suits up and heads out to discover the whereabouts of the gold. He meets and kills and helps many people along the way. Unlike the first film, which establishes Ichibei as a sort of solitary badass, and the second film where he's like a military general, here he's a man for the people. His mission to recover the gold is so he can get a cut of it to fund more medical outposts in the region, something he criticizes his government contacts for not doing.

Eight Men to Kill is framed almost entirely as a western. The score still retains its super-spy tenor, but mixes in a lot more Morricone influence than before. The visuals are exceptionally dusty, and even the Japanese villages seem to be staged more in a way like Western towns, ready for a showdown.

There's also a lot more gunplay. While The Fort of Death was wartime gunplay, along with swords and arrows, there's more gunplay than swordplay here, a lot of horse chases as well. It's more American/spaghetti western than jedaigeki. Even Ichibei's outfit looks more gunslinger than samurai (he actually looks more like the Friendly Giant, if I'm being honest.) The mustard coloured outfit and the shaggy near-afro screams early 1970's.

While the first film was complicated by its political intrigue, here's its complicated by the ever-shifting allegiances of the characters. Everyone's shifting who they are aiding and it's not like they're double-agents, they just keep shifting sides. In the end I really lost track of who was supporting whom and what individual motivations were.

On the women front, again, not great. Ichibei threatens a sex worker who has info about the gold. She refuses to give up her knowledge and offers herself to him basically as a distraction. About the only Bond-ian element remaining in this film is the fact he fucks the villainess so good she immediately falls in love with him and leads him to the man with the gold, and she starts acting irrationally out of her uncontrollable affection for Ichibei.

The end of the film is very dark, and once again reiterates this films seemingly connective tissue about governments needing to be for the people and not exist for power, wealth and control.

Despite being the most misogynistic of the three films, Killer's Mission was the most successful at what it promised on the box (and honestly the misogyny of the film is absolutely aping James Bond, in an almost child-like, they-don't-really-know-what-they're-doing fashion) and the one I liked the most. I wished they had stuck with the super-spy genre and leaned into its tropes more. Period-specific super-spies may not be all that accurate but it's pretty goddamn fun. 

Chambara films already have a western feel to them as is, so leaning more into the Sergio Leone of it all isn't really redefining the boundaries of samurai movies... or maybe it's that I just care less about westerns than I do about spy movies.

These three films aren't great cinema, they aren't giving Kurosawa any challenges. They're pulp, their entertainment, and much like Ichibei himself they get the job done pretty efficiently (all of them clocking in around 90 minutes).  Yet, I really would like there to be more of these. It's surprising there weren't more of these, or that they didn't go on to be a TV series like Lone WOlf and Cub or Zatoichi. 

(Rewatch) The Talented Mr. Ripley (a comparison)

 1999, d. Anthony Minghella - the binder

I've seen the Matt Damon-starring Ripley movie a few times, but I sussed out with Lady Kent that the last time I watched it was likely around 2006 or 2007 when we were still dating and I was still in that awesome  phase of "here's a thing I like that you haven't seen so we're going to watch this" that guys in new relationships go through.  So it's been some time.

Partway through watching Ripley on Netflix (a clear passion project from writer/director Steven Zaillian) I started to get the itch to rewatch the 1999 film again. My pop culture tourist brain gets that way, and I'm in full on "Ripley" mode in my brain right now (a re-subscription to the Criterion Channel is likely so I can watch Purple Noon and My American Friend, a couple early Ripley adaptations).

This isn't so much a review of the film, but a sort of comparison to the show, and my vague, vague memories of the novel.  

I will, however, state unreservedly that the film is great. It takes the Patricia Highsmith novel and distills it down to about 140 minutes both retaining much of the same spirit and structure of the novel while adding its own highlights which are definitely not unwelcome.

The biggest difference with Minghella's version is the addition of three new characters to the story. Somehow, even with their inclusion, they don't get in the way of anything, and in a few small respects help the film maintain its pacing and intrigue.  

The first new character we meet is Meredith played by Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: The Golden Age). She's an upper-crust American who encounters Ripley at the landing port in Italy. Ripley, having already prepared to fake his way into the life of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law, The Young Pope), tells Meredith he is Dickie Greenleaf, likely figuring he would never see her again. I wonder if you can ever go wrong with Cate Blanchett, even creating a whole new character for a beloved property or story to slot her into. Like, if they made her Captain Kirk's estranged wife in the next Star Trek movie would anyone complain? Meredith comes back again once Tom has killed Dickie and tries to hide away in Rome. She's the consummate high society armpiece and seemingly a good egg to be around, but she just represents complication (Minghella speaks to how the relationship between Tom and Meredith is meant to mirror Dickie and Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow, Shallow Hal), and it does in a cracked mirror kind of way).  Tom lets Meredith down easy after a close encounter with Marge and Peter (Jack Davenport, Coupling), who we'll get to in a moment.  Meredith makes one last appearance, which we'll also get to in a moment.

The second new character is a real peripheral one, but Silvana (Stefania Rocca) lurks in the backgrounds of early scenes, her fetching short, mod haircut making her stand out.  She's Dickie's side-piece. In the story, traditionally, Dickie is with Maude quite committedly. They are a unit, but here, Silvana shows that Dickie has a more...free-flowing lifestyle, that he's not buckled down.  Silvana kills herself when Dickie rejects her (it's not until after we find out she was pregnant) and it wrecks Dickie, who starts to reexamine his life which means less time for Tom Ripley.

The third new character is the aforementioned Peter. He's a gay friend of Marge and Dickie who Tom meets originally at Dickie's place in Mongibello, but runs into again in Rome with Marge during intermission at the Opera (which Tom-as-Dickie is attending with Meredith). Peter's gaydar certainly pings wildly when he's around Tom.  Peter lives in Venice, so when Tom-as-Dickie finds the heat in Rome too much following Freddie Miles' murder, he returns to being Tom and starts building a life with Peter. 

Much how Tom-as-Dickie's relationship with Meredith is meant to be a cracked mirror of Dickie and Marge, Tom and Peter are yet another mirror. Being a mostly closeted gay man means having to pretend with Meredith, amid all the other pretending he is doing. Being Tom, and being open with Peter, about his sexuality at least, liberates Tom, except for his dark secrets which he can only allude to. But even as much as Tom and Peter mirror the other male-female relationships in the film, even more it holds a mirror up to the relationship between Tom and Dickie.

These new characters are all part of the nature of duality that Minghella is exploring in the movie, and the duality is layered. There's the duality of living in different class structures (Meredith speaks to the behaviour of those who grew up with money but try to shed the image that they care about it at all), and of course the duality of stealing someone else's life, and the duality of being a murderer, but then there's also Tom's sexual identity, of which, it's called out, homosexuality was illegal in Italy at that time the story takes place. Tom's not necessarily hiding his sexuality for criminal reasons, nor out of any sense of religious or social shame, he's really just trying to fit in to his surroundings, to be unnoticed wherever he is. Where the Tom Ripley of Zallion's TV series struggles with his ego, and having people recognize and praise and think well of Thomas Ripley, Matt Damon's Tom couldn't care less about protecting his name, he wants a lifestyle that he doesn't see any other way of achieving, but even more important to him is acceptance.

Silvana is a gateway to Dickie's dual nature, the guy who seems so carefree, nothing will tie him down. Jude Law's Dickie is into free jazz and free love and free time, he explores his passions at his whim without a lot of consideration for others. And yet, he's troubled by the spectre of commitment, to his family, to his girlfriend(s), to his friends, to what he should be giving back to the world for all that it has gainfully given him. Tom fits into his life so easily, because Tom wants that very free-wheeling life in the lap of luxury as well, so Dickie is happy to have a "yes man" to keep the good times going. It's Silvana's death, and the revelation that she was pregnant that causes him to reassess it all, to have his priorities flip. He commits to Marge and in doing so he needs to set his "yes man" free. And it gets him killed. Johnny Flynn's Dickie, in the Netflix show, is a lot more chill. He's not the radiant beacon of charisma that Law's Dickie is, nor is he as judgmental (Law's Dickie is mockingly cruel towards Tom on their first encounter), and rather than Jazz, it's art he's into. Flynn's Dickie is looking for something, something he can contribute to the world (writing and art clearly aren't it) and it's evident that, in both cases, the talents of one Mr. Ripley are greater than those of Dickie Greenleaf.. the difference is Flynn's Dickie is aware of it where Law's Dickie is not.

Peter is primarily a vehicle for exploring Ripley's sexuality. The book, if I remember correctly, doesn't keep it quiet but doesn't have the language to really explore it. Far more than I recalled, Minghella's script puts it right out in the open without being 1990's blunt about it. In Zallion's TV show, Andrew Scott's Ripley is far more taken with Dickie's lifestyle than Dickie himself. Becoming Dickie is a means to an end. In Minghella's version, Tom wants to be with Dickie, and if he can't then he will become him, as a consolation prize. Scott's Ripley is much more of a sociopath, while Damon's Ripley is much more emotionally driven.  Hence his relationship to Peter. It was as much sharing the lifestyle with Dickie that Minghella's Ripley loves, and so, with Peter, he's able to get the reciprocation that Dickie couldn't give him, and together they can share in the luxury in a way that it wasn't ever going to happen with Dickie.

Until the very end, a completely new story element devised by Minghella, where, on a cruise with Peter, Tom runs into Meredith. Meredith is kind of the last person who knows Tom as Dickie, and when they meet on the boat it's in a crowd of Meredith's family and peers. Tom is stuck. He cannot chuck her off the boat (as it's so evident in Minghella's direction that it's what he wants to do), it's far too exposed, but Peter...well, there's not really anyone else who knows they're together because of the very, very quiet lifestyle they're forced to lead. And so killing Peter is Tom's only out of this tense pickle.

One of my few complaints about 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley is that Tom winds up coming off more like a serial killer than an opportunistic grifter. The intensity of his dispatching of Peter (which is wonderfully done in voice over while Tom sits with his regret) signifies much darker impulses than the more kick-your-heels-up ending where Tom kind of gets away with everything (Andrew) Scott free, with a pile of Dickie's money freely given to him by Dickie's father, and a brand new identity to travel the world, although Zallion's direction there hints at Tom resisting temptation to panic every time he sees a cop or constantly look over his shoulder.

There are a great many differences between the two productions, while still working within the same story housing... same number of rooms, just more guests. As noted in my prior review of Ripley, it's a very decompressed show, very methodical, patient. Minghella's ...Mr. Ripley is breathtakingly brisk, but in being so brisk there are quite a few bits of shorthand that, in comparison to Zallion's show, seem blunt, such as the opening narration from Tom (never to be repeated throughout the film) or the clunky way in which Tom tells Dickie that he's able to mimic people, copy their handwriting etc. (though it does lead to its own smart way of showing Dickie's acceptance).  The shorter runtime is actually more appreciated, but the depth and time spent in the longer production has its own rewards.

Minghella's film is very, very well directed, and it's not a bad looking movie by any means, but it looks like a jar of mustard exploded in a sandbox compared to the luscious black and white, the exceptional wardrobes and flawless lighting of Ripley. 

Marge, played by Dakota Fanning in the Netflix show, is pretty wildly different than in the 1999 film. Paltrow's Marge is immediately friendly to  Tom, and, in bringing Peter into the fray, Minghella speaks to Marge being an early ally to gay men. It seems like Damon's Tom and Paltrow's Marge are friends, something you never even get close to in the show. Fanning's Marge is immediately skeptical of Tom, leery even. She really dislikes him, and he dislikes her. But he tries to put himself in Dickie's headspace and fakes his friendliness.  Once Tom starts posing as Dickie is when Paltrow's Marge starts to doubt him. Fanning's Marge starts to become even more wary of Tom as he tries to juggle being both roles of Tom and Dickie.  But it's in the finale when things really deviate. Andrew Scott's Tom's has woven such an extensive web of lies, Fanning's Marge is completely caught up in it. Tom doesn't know if she's strong enough to break the web, but she is not, and eventually fully concedes to the lies about Dickie. Paltrow's Marge, in the end, is in hysterics, with not a fraction of a doubt about Tom's guilt in Dickie's disappearance, something Dickie's dad hand-waves away.  It's a very interesting inverse character arc for the same character in the same story that yields almost no different result.

There's obviously other differences, particularly in casting. Freddie Miles, as played in the Netflix show by gender-neutral actor/musician (and Sting's kid) Eliot Sumner and by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film. Sumner carries Freddie with a quiet dignity and a defiantly wicked sense of style. Freddie is alluring and mysterious and attractive, and the plentiful queer vibes just radiate off them. Like with Peter in the film, Tom *should* be attracted to Freddie, but Scott's Ripley detests his very interloping presence.  Here's another man that has a relationship to Freddie and it makes Tom very, very jealous. Plus, Freddie seems to "see" Tom, and tests him with innocuous probing questions that discomfort Tom greatly.

Comparatively, in the film Hoffman's Freddie is a braggadocios American who just slides into Dickie's life and sucks all his attention away from Tom. Freddie, in Hoffman's hands, is the life of the party, but also the guy who sucks up all the energy in the room for himself. He is the epitome of the entitled asshole, and unlike Dickie or Meredith he has no reservations or distaste for his second-hand wealth. He seems like the kind of guy who would consume the whole world if it would give him a moment's pleasure.  Like his TV show counterpart, Hoffman's Freddie picks up on everything that is wrong about Tom and taunts him mercifully for it. He's not shy about it. Where Sumner's Freddie was discrete, Hoffman sees Tom as a parasite and wants to pop that tick right off Dickie's back. The big difference between the two is how with Sumner, you love his Freddie right away, and you don't share in Tom's view of him as a bad guy. His assessment of Tom as something unsavoury is just saying what we've been thinking all along. But Hoffman's Freddie...oh, you just want him dead, and Tom is more than happy to oblige.  Freddie's death in Ripley is a tragedy. His death in The Talented Mr. Ripley is a mercy on us all.

The last thing I'll say about this at this point is Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley has revealed itself as one of the great stories in fiction. Just between these two productions the vast differences in perceptions of the characters, their mindsets, their portrayals... it's a dark, tragic crime story that can be adapted over and over and over again and not feel the same way twice. I'm absolutely itching to get to Purple Moon and, in advance, I apologize for what will likely be a very similar post comparing the three productions.

KWIF: Madame Web (+4)

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

It's certainly it's own thing.

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

Why?

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

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

And you know what...?

I had a good time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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