KWIF: I Love Boosters (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Ol' Kent here celebrated the end of his 50th year with some epic boardgaming, epic toy and collectibles hunting, epic medical diagnostic imaging, and not so much epic movie watching (or reviewing)...just a little.

This Week:
I Love Boosters (2026, d. Boots Riley - in theatre)
Tuner (2025, d. Daniel Roher - in theatre)
Exit 8 (2025, d. Genki Kawamura - rental)
Made of Honor (2008, d. Paul Welland - hollywoodsuite)

---

I think this will wind up being my
 favourite movie poster of the year.
I want this as a puzzle.

As the credits were rolling on our sparsely attended early Saturday matinee of I Love Boosters, one white male millennial audience member stood up and stretched, turned around and engaged the other millenial couple behind him. The part my wife overheard him say was "I mean, I liked it, but can you tell me why you thought it was funny?"

Humour is subjective. I get that. But I Love Boosters is undoubtedly a comedy. It's part farce, part Looney Tunes (by way of Stephen Chow), part social satire, part absurdism, and so many other little parts of things that congeal to make a wildly appealing, chaotic, inventive whole.

Kiki Palmer (Nope) - one of the most charismatic performers of her generation - leads this film as Corvette, a wanna-be fashion designer who just can't seem to find her way into the industry. She lives in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant and steals clothes for a living to resell at steep discounts on the black market to the less rich. She's aided in the "Velvet Gang" by her best friend Sade (Naomi Ackie, Mickey 17) who is obsessed with a multi-level marketing scheme, and Mariah (Taylour Paige, Zola) who thinks her boosting is a revolutionary act.

They don't steal from just anywhere, or just anyone, but instead focus on the chain of Metro Designers stores which are owned by fashion mogul and certified genius Christie Smith (Demi Moore, The Substance). Corvette is obsessed with Smith, idolizes her, and in her own way sees her boosting of Smith's clothes as a form of flattery, but Smith, who calls the Velvet Gang "low class, urban bitches" is increasingly perturbed by them.  Corvette learns of a delivery of $100,000 suits and sets her sights on that being the ultimate target (especially after discovering that Smith has stolen a design Corvette submitted to a fashion contest earlier in the year, it becomes about revenge). To make a boost this big, they need to work on the inside.

So they get a job working at Metro Designers under Grayson (Will Poulter, Warfare), who has totally drunk the Christie Smith corporate kool-aid, and meet Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez, Bloodshot) who is trying to organize a union within Metro Designers.  And then they are robbed..the entire store gone in seconds.  

I could go on for paragraphs breaking down the larger strokes of this film. It is very busy, but earns its busyness.  Boots Riley cut his teeth with the incredible satire Sorry To Bother You, and takes the social satire and ambition of that film to a whole other level here. The picture is vibrant, with bold monochromes at each of the Metro Designers sets, while the wardrobe is off the charts with all the leads looking ridiculous or stylish or ridiculously stylish. It'd be the most fashionable movie of the year, if not for The Devil Wears Prada 2. There are extended sequences involving stop motion animation (that recall John Carpenter's They Live) an extended chase sequence done in minature (some shades of Wes Anderson there), a building on a canted angle leaving a set sloped at 20 degrees which all but Christie Smith seem to have difficulty navigating, and a gigantic ball of stress made up of bills and all the other things haunting Corvette, stalking her at random times.

I Love Boosters is unfettered creativity from a director who doesn't see limits on what can be done in storytelling. It's the first mass-released film since Everything Everywhere All At Once that feels like there are no restrictions in how a story can be told. Even if I Love Boosters is only nominally less successful at coherently conveying its central message than that Oscar-winner, it's still an exceptionally entertaining and provocative ride.  [I haven't even mentioned the soul-eating demon/love interest played by Lakieth Stanfield (Atlanta), but he's an intriguing distraction for both the picture and Corvette that pops up at both the most opportune and inopportune times. He's a total aside, but a deliciously amusing one.]

While its employment of magical realism and surrealist fantasy is wickedly enjoyable and compliments its anti-capitalism message in unusual but agreeable ways, I Love Boosters' use of a science fiction technology alongside abstract concepts of "situational acceleration and deconstructionism", as well as teleportation is a tad less concrete. There is a device introduced in the second act which then becomes the inciting agent for the rest of the film, and the employment of these speculative conceits become the hardest part of the film to wrap one's head around, particularly at the accelerated pace the film moves at.  It leads to a lot of fun and clever sequences in the film, and effectively incites the film's ultimate, pro-union, power-in-numbers message, but it does so with an asterisk.

What I Love Boosters ultimate goal is to promote a character who realizes that sometimes there's a greater goal, a greater purpose to one's actions than fulfilling their own desires. That perhaps too many of us are concerned more with individual achievement than collective growth is the realization Corvette needs to have on her journey, even if it isn't the most personally satisfying, it does seem the most rewarding. 

[As an aside, as a person who is basically deaf in one ear, I had a very difficult time with the sound mix on this film. As a musician himself, Riley loves music, and there's always music playing in the background of any scene, whether it's diegetic or the fantastic score from TuneYards, along with layers of ambient noise or sometimes background dialogue and/or TV footage.  In person, I have a hard time in cacophonous situations picking out what people are saying, and turns out it's the same with on screen situations. I can't wait for Blu-Ray, which I will absolutely be getting, so I can watch this with the closed captioning on and pick up on so much of what I missed].

---

Speaking of my hearing disorder, it was fascinating for me to watch a film about someone on the other end of the aural spectrum than I am. In Tuner, Niki (Leo Woodall, Cherry) has hyperacusis, an affliction in which he is exceptionally hypersensitive to sound to a debilitating degree. For the majority of the picture he is wearing custom ear plugs, and often with noise cancelling headset over that. Even then particularly sharp or loud noises can send him into disarray, even proving so painful as to render him unconscious.

Niki also has perfect pitch and starts the film working as protege piano tuner to family friend Harry Horowicz (Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie), a beloved figure in the music community. Harry is losing his hearing and starting to be a bit forgetful, but he's a delight to be around (I'm normally not a big Hoffman fan, but he is very likeable in the role). Niki is sweetly devoted to Harry and his wife Marla, like family. When Harry falls ill, Niki agrees to help out with the medical bills by buying Harry's truck and taking over his business. While on a job he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu, AfrAId), and over a few encounters their attraction becomes undeniable, but while on a different job, Niki meets Uri (Lior Raz, Gladiator II) and his boys as they attempt to drill into the safe of the house they are both working at. Niki learned his hearing disorder actually was a boon for safecracking and gets into the safe for the boys. Uri, who works in private security for elite individuals, offers Niki a job if he wants to make "real money". To pay Harry's bills, Niki has no choice, and he helps them steal from Uri's client's safes "things they wouldn't notice are missing".  Of course, getting involved with criminals is never going to end well for Niki and it threatens to destroy what comfort he has in life and maybe take everyone else he loves down with him.

Woodall is very unassuming as Niki, at first, with Hoffman dominating each scene they're in together early on. But eventually Woodall is handed control and Niki becomes quite captivating in his quiet temperament, and the reality of his affliction (handled with superb sound design) is clearly conveyed to the audience at all times. Canadian director Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar for his documentary on Alexei Navalni in 2022, proves he has an incredibly steady hand for directing a modestly budgeted dramatic thriller like this. In his debut narrative feature, Roher utilizes montages to perfect effect (time will tell if this is a signature move or just something stylistic for this feature, metering up with the film's soft jazzy piano score, and symphonic bits).

Tuner works very well as a character study but its crime element is unfortunately quite predictable, lacking a lot of real surprises. Thankfully Roher is more interested in the character than he is in the jobs Niki is assisting on, and so the segments of safecracking, for the most part, are pretty brisk and don't employ the tension of the risk of getting caught too heavily. There is one particular Chechov-ian item that presents itself early on, and the manner in which it goes off is such a deus ex machina that it borders on unforgivable...but just sits on that border.

Otherwise, this is an agreeable throwback to the kind of thriller we saw plenty of through the 70's, 80's and 90's, but have largely disappeared in the past two decades. We could do with more.

---

I knew nothing about Exit 8 except the concept: a man gets lost in a maze of subway hallways searching for Exit 8, finding horrors along the way. I was in. I love subway tiles, and hallways and escape rooms, so this movie was beckoning me like a siren of the sea. 

In the film, our "lost man" is played by Kazunari Ninomiya, a seemingly hapless and perhaps depressed young man who doesn't seem ready for the world. We first meet him on a subway train during rush hour as he witnesses a man in a suit berate a young mother for bringing her crying baby on the train. Everyone's looking at their phones, and, after he puts his earbuds back in, so does he. When he gets off the train he receives a phone call from his ex. She's at the hospital and tells him she's pregnant. She doesn't know whether she wants to keep it or terminate the pregnancy, and is asking for his input. He doesn't know either. Not paying attention, he finds himself in an Z-shaped hallway that seems to repeat without end...the same man walking past him, the same adverts on the wall, the same lockers and photobooth....

And then he spies a sign, telling him that he needs to leave through Exit 8. If he spies an anomaly, turn back, and if there are no anomalies, keep going.

I didn't know Exit 8 was based off an indie video game sensation, but really it didn't take me long to discern such a thing, especially when the "rules" were introduced. What could have just been cheap horror, though, is so much more from director/writer Genki Kawamura (co-written with Kentaro Hirase). It's not just an endless maze of repeating tunnels, but a metaphor for repetitive cycles in life, of fearing change and indecision., alerting us to look for the differences, and that we need to embrace those differences to make it out the other end.

If it were just our "lost man" encountering terrifying anomalies, it would have been a fine movie, but it's not just that. There is a delicious surprise (SPOILER) in act 2, where the film completely pivots away from our "lost man" and instead follows the man he's passed dozens of times at this point, and we learn the "walking man's" story. Both men, however, encounter a young boy who they each think is a facet of this purgatory they're in, but come to learn (if not embrace) that the child is as trapped as they are and, maybe, has better instincts for getting out.

Though slight on story, and maybe light on horrors, I absolutely loved this movie. It was completely my thing.  The repetition encourages audience engagement, looking at the same hallway walls and wondering what's different...if anything, and knowing it could come down to something so easily overlooked as the fine text on one of the posters, or a tile placed askew (although, mercifully it's never that).

The sound design is as crucial as the visual design, and as integral to the repetition. It's obviously largely borrowed from the video game, but it's brought into "reality" so effectively. Ninomiya has such a soulful face that your empathy is immediately with him, and he conveys his emotions so blatantly and effectively. The "walking man" played by Yamato Kochi is intensely terrifying in his early scenes where the lost man turns around the find the walking man immediately in his face with a grin that'll make your skin crawl, but then it only takes Kochi seconds with the second act pivot to bring you over to sympathizing with his plight in the corridors.

The film creates a text that the video game never had, a reason for why our protagonist(s) are in this purgatory, and letting the audience know that they need to have a reason to get out. I feel like we can apply this to life somehow....

---

I've made no secret out of enjoying cheesy romance movies and romantic comedies, but that's not universal approval of all of them. In fact, there are scant few romcoms I would consider good or worth watching again, and even fewer I actually want to watch in the first place. To some extent most romcoms I just tend to avoid because, in execution (if not conceptually), they're so cloying as to be repulsive.

In concept, Made of Honor should not be such a film. The story of a tomcat of a man who is best friends with a woman whom he learns after years and years that he's actually in love with her, only for her to turn up engaged before he can say anything...well, that sounds like a serviceable, if predictable romcom format, and not egregiously offensive. But show me that trailer, or even just the poster, and I'm steering clear like it's plague-bearing.

I never needed to see Made of Honor, there was nothing compelling me to watch it, but it was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and after I finished watching a film on dvd, it turned up on cable when the player shut off. I spied Patrick Dempsey and his basketball-playing bro-pals (including Kadeem Hardison and Chris Messina) attempting to help the man navigate his emotions over his best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) being away on a work trip and missing her so much he couldn't enjoy his many many dates with hot women in her absence.  It's a particular turning point in pop culture when men were allowed to support other men emotionally but only if it was in a really really butch situation, with like sports and/or alcohol, but points for letting them get there. But it treats these scenes as if they were comedy, not as if there's real emotional stakes at play which gets to what's so wrong with this film.... 

Made of Honor makes the biggest cardinal sin of the romantic comedy genre: it's not funny. It tries to be funny and fails pretty much every time. There's two possible reasons, and it's an and/or situation: casting and/or the director. 

Dempsey is cute, handsome and charming, but he's not innately funny. Ditto for Monaghan. Hardison and Messina both have comedic acting experience, and Monaghan's coterie of bridesmaids includes Busy Philipps and Whitney Cummings, but none of them squeeze out any real guffaws despite trying. 

Monaghan returns from her trip engaged to rugged Scotsman Kevin McKidd, who threatens Dempsey's masculinity in every way. Any attempt to one-up him ends in failure. Just as any attempt for either to be funny falls entirely flat.

There is a scene where Dempsey is going to meet Monaghan for the first time since her return home, only to be surprised by her new beau, and he smashes into a waiter and they topple to the floor, his bouquet of flowers everywhere (which he lies were never his). It's close to being a good pratfall. Later in the scene, after an awkward dinner, Dempsey gets up from his chair at an awkward moment and tumbles into the same waiter again. The whole sequence should be full of humour around the discomfort, complete with the pratfall starter and capper, but it doesn't take, like, at all. And that's direction. Director Welland seems to be too lost in finding an emotional center to really let the humour of the scene play, and its stars aren't gifted enough comedically to innately play up the humour and the emotion. 

But boy do they look good not being funny. Dempsey is real fit, and kinda dashing, while Monaghan is just so effortlessly pretty (with a team of make-up and wardrobe people putting great effort into that effortlessness).

Without the humour, this movie feels tedious, rehashing the same points over and over again. I don't know that Dempsey and Monaghan ever found the "friendship" dynamic this film needed to sell that part of it. They're just too good looking together and they play into the attraction even when it's not fully supposed to be there yet. This needed two decent-to-good looking comedic performers to pull this off. (Like Jason Segel and Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall...a far superior film, and one which I would definitely not sacrifice to put those leads into Made of Honor. What's a pairing that didn't happen... maybe like, Paul Rudd and Isla Fisher?)

There's both a good romance and good comedy waiting to happen in this script. It's been 20 years, maybe a remake is in order with a director and starring pair that can get it right.

KWIF: Godzilla Minus One (+3)

 KWIF = Kent's Week(ish) in Film

This Week:
Godzilla Minus One (2023, d. Takashi Yamzaki  - Imax)
Diabolik (2021, d. The Manetti Bros. - AmazonPrime)
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023, d. Zack Snyder - Neftlix)
Leave the World Behind (2023, d. Sam Esmail - Netflix)

---

If you've paid any attention to the blog in the past month (and if you're reading this now, most assuredly you have), you know I'm in the middle of a Godzilla kick, having recently just finished watching all the Showa-era Toho-produced films. 

So I was very, very hyped to see not only that there was a brand new Godzilla film in theatres, but that it was getting absolutely rave reviews and topping the box office...in America.

There's something thrilling about the meta context a genre picture that resonates with both fans and critics, and beyond that, a foreign film that the public is willing to see. [Of course, we're in the second generation now of kids who have been raised on Anime and Manga, so there's almost no barrier to entry for them with a Japanese movie at this stage.]

Godzilla Minus One is a modern retelling of Godzilla. The "minus one" of the title is a reference to Japan already being at "zero" post World War II (given the devastation American forces wrought upon their country), and then as fallout from all of that, Godzilla strikes. 

Where prior Godzilla films that ape or reboot the original went more macro, dealing with the bureaucracy of fighting a kaiju, Godzilla Minus One goes micro, focusing in on a very human story. 

The film's protagonist, Kōichi, was a kamikaze pilot at the tail-end of WWII. As he is deployed on sortie he fakes engine trouble and lands at the repair base on Odo Island. While he is there, a young, recently awakened Godzilla attacks, and perhaps being the only person who can help, Kōichi freezes up when he is needed.

One of two survivors, Kōichi, returns to Tokyo to his devastated home. His parents are dead from the bombings. He is doubly shamed for not fulfilling his mission or helping fight the beast, and wracked with grief. He suffers from both depression and PTSD. 

Out in the market, he meets a young woman who has turned to shoplifting to feed an orphaned baby.  Kōichi takes them in and over time, they are a unit, although Kōichi is still too burdened by his past to see any future for this woman and child. He gets a job exploding the thousands of mines in the seas, where a few weeks in he and his crew have an encounter with a much, much larger Godzilla.  The creature is awake, and ready to claim its territory.

Due to rising tensions between Russia and America, neither will assist in fighting this creature whose powers of devastation have never been rendered so potently. The Japanese government is prohibited from any formal military engagement of the creature, so it's left to a civil unit of citizens, mostly ex-Navy, with Kōichi their only pilot, to take on the creature with very last ditch plans.  Kōichi for his part, intends to atone for his past.

I said while watching the Showa-era Godzilla films that the best of them are the ones where there's a human story behind it, or at the very least, compelling human characters. Godzilla Minus One has both, and focuses more on its characters than any Godzilla film I've seen so far. 

Kōichi is an incredibly flawed hero, and often not heroic at all. It's what makes him so compelling to watch. Genuine care and attention is put into his experiences shaping him, and into the relationships he builds with his partner, his child, even his neighbour and his mine-diffusing crew. Every encounter with Godzilla, while not at all a personal attack by the creature, is very personal to Kōichi, to the point that the film establishes a credibly solid link between him and the beast. Ryunosuke Kamiki who plays Kōichi is a likeable lead probably the weakest part of the entire film, though. He goes melodramatic in his performance way too often when I think a subtler touch would have been more fitting, but this could be cultural differences in what constitutes an effective emotional performance.  

Godzilla is used sparingly, but more effectively than in any Godzilla film in the past. Every instance of the creature seems timed perfectly. Heck, there were time where I was so wrapped up in the human drama, I was surprised by the reminder that, oh yeah, Godzilla's in this too. 

In the Showa era, Godzilla gets pretty silly. He goes from villain, to anti-hero, to good guy, to child icon over those 15 films, and at times is dancing or doing wrestling taunts. It's easy to forget Godzilla was supposed to be scary. In Godzilla Minus One, he is fucking scary. My heart was literally racing every time he was on screen (meanwhile my ears were bleeding). When Godzilla unleashes his atomic breath, it's one of the most sobering scenes in a blockbuster film ever. Just incredible.

Godzilla is a CGI creature in this film, which reportedly only cost around 15 million US to make. The Japanese filmmaking industry is apparently more efficient but also less salary driven, so people get paid a living wage but are not at a premium like most of the related industry in America.  Regardless, it's still an astonishing movie for the price.  The creature looks best in water, as when we see him full-body on land, he looks somewhat robotic in movement.

I saw Godzilla Minus One in IMAX, and not only was the picture big, but so was the sound. It was so loud that I believe I have suffered increased hearing damage as a result (two weeks later, my ears are still ringing...louder than they were ringing before). I was not the only one plugging my ears often in the theatre. 

This was, to put it bluntly, and incredibly refreshing film, both from a blockbuster standpoint and a Godzilla standpoint. It's amusing that within days of seeing the film, the trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire came out and it looks insanely silly by comparison...like the two should not be co-existing.  But such is the nature of Godzilla, where he can be used for potent allegories about Nuclear proliferation, historical trauma, or environmental devastation, or he can be used for the most mindless of entertainment and cheapest of thrills.

Great stuff. It's being re-released in January in a director-initiated, completely reconstructed black-and-white version. I'll be seeing it again, for sure.

---

I love Mario Bava's Danger:Diabolik, like, a lot. It's a visual triumph and just a delightful pulp adventure. I realize Diabolik has a much larger life in comics and as a cultural touchstone in Italy, but they've never been readily available in English so I can't exactly say how or if Bava's vision of the character skews away from the comics. But if this new 2021 Diabolik (the first of a trilogy, which just debuted its third piece in November this year) is any indication, Bava wasn't far off the mark.

Unless the Manetti Bros. are taking direct inspiration from Bava than from the comics. I can't say.

Within the opening moments of Diabolik the titular character, in escaping the polizia who have the alley blocked off, presses a button and a section of the road raises up on hydrolics, and his Jaguar jumps over the patrol car in a very goofy, but practical, effects sequence. The Manetti Bros. with this moment, announce the tone of the film is, indeed, indebted to its comic book origins, and that you can't really take it as serious as its heavy shadows and even heavier score of haunting, ominous stings imply. 

The crux of the film is an origin story not for Diabolik, but instead his long-time paramour Eva Kant, and how they came to be together. It's completely a noir-inspired production... at least for its first two acts, and then utterly flips genres in its third act, becoming a heist film.

Given that this film retains a 1960s setting, it's hard for me not to compare this against Bava's original, and to conclude that it's nowhere near as stylish, nor is it as outright comic-booky. Diabolik's comic bookishness is intact, but more subtle. The film is striving to be something ... well, not more, but something else.

It's an enjoyable production, but I had to acclimatize myself to it. It's a little idiosyncratic, a little flimsy in characterization, and more than a little overlong at 2h13, and Diabolik is a really, really bad person as opposed to a deviously likeable anti-hero. The insight into how he handles his relationships prior to Eva are uncomfortably problematic...you know on top of being a murderer and a thief, he's a gaslighting, emotionally controlling partner. That Eva is invested in him speaks to her intelligence and boredom in life. She plays games in spheres that cause her trouble but she learns quickly to find routes out of them. A criminal career is kind of a logical next step. Its clear to see what he sees in her, both as one who challenges him and intrigues him, but what she sees in him is less specific except the attraction of a challenge, to learn something new.

If this trilogy starts with Eva wanting to be with Diabolik, it should end with her being Diabolik. Miriam Leone, who plays Eva, is a real winner in the role. You're never entirely certain what she's thinking as a character, which is entirely the point. She's elusive and alluring and not afraid of anything.  I was less sold on Luca Marinelli as Diabolik, he's not very fun. I see he's been recast for the subsequent two films (there's definitely an in-story reason as to why that is, but I wonder if there's a meta story for it). 

I don't know that this is anything above-par that will create new Diabolik fans, but if you're a Diabolik fan already, it's great just to see him back on screen.

---

If there's two thing to know going into this first installment of Rebel Moon, it's that it's director's Zack Snyder's repurposing of a failed Star Wars pitch and that it's structured around the basic plot of The Seven Samurai. 

Oh, wait, you don't need to know either of those things going in, you will figure them out soon enough.

I don't hate Zack Snyder. He seems like a nice guy. He's got a great eye for composition. But he's an awful storyteller, he lacks any ability to inspire awe and wonder as he always strives to weigh everything down with unearned emotion. I think Snyder would be a great photographer, or commercial director, or music video director. After 15 years of Snyder movies, of which only one (the zombie one written by James Gunn) I would call "good", I'm more than certain this field of filmmaking is not really suited for him.

Rebel Moon is uninspired and worse, direly boring. It runs 45 minutes before it gets to the crux of the film, which is putting the band together, and then spends over an hour doing that, before it abruptly comes to a head, remembering that it doesn't have a 4 hour run-time.  

The assembling of the band of "heroes" entails four different encounters with almost complete strangers each given a chance to prove themselves either by words or by deeds, all of which feels like stalling for time rather than character development. They are barely archetypes, nevermind people who we like, care about or are curious to spend any more time with.

The third act is just a compressed 20-minute action set-piece that holds no emotional weight and is of zero consequence to whatever Part 2 is going to be about. To spoil it, the small band that just got together are betrayed (which was telegraphed seemingly 90 minutes earlier) and then almost entirely quashed by the space Nazis (and there's no subtlety to them being space Nazis) before it becomes an utterly nonsensical shootout and our small band triumph with some wounds the need licking. It's to prove that, yes, this band of heroes can make a difference, but it's only by the sheer stupidity of the storytelling that they do. 

It's a purposeless, nonsense film. We already have a Star Wars-inspired retelling of The Seven Samurai in Battle Beyond the Stars, a Roger Corman production that somehow is utterly cheaper in production value but has twice as much charisma (it's still a bad movie, but less bad than Rebel Moon).  This feels like a Uwe Boll film but if he got a talented cinematographer. 

Rebel Moon, more like Rebel Moof!

---

Leave the World Behind is a film that warns of being nostalgic for a time that never existed (a comment mades about Friends, a show the younger daughter in the iflm is obsessed with). It's a trap that happens to far too many as they age and grow bitter at the changing world and the youth slated to inherit it. It's also a film that warns of complacency and the infecting WASP-y tendency to wave away warning signs, to override the gut instinct and insist everything is fine, when clearly it is not.

Julia Roberts is our lead here, playing a burned-out Brooklyn-dwelling mother and marketing executive who has grown weary and disillusioned with people. She books a last-minute Air B&B and hauls her husband, Ethan Hawke, and two teen kids out to a beautiful house upstate. It would be tremendously easy to say she's a real Karen, but it's not about entitlement, it's really about hating her life and the world around her. She's gone full pessimist and thinks the worst of everyone.

They're having a passively decent time until they're on the beach an an oil tanker grounds itself before them. Then Mahershala Ali and his college-aged daughter, Myha'la Herrold, show up at the door in formal wear, announcing that it's their home and asking to stay the night in the basement en suite. Roberts is evilly unconvinced by them, while Hawke wants to be nothing more than accommodating.  There's an undercurrent of racial tension in the situation, because it's America, so of course there is.  Esmail undercuts this tension, at least for the audience, by letting us in on Ali and Herrold's conversations, knowing they're telling the truth, and leaving Roberts exposed in the subsequent scenes where she's still being judgemental and confrontational.

Everything begins escalating around them, though, as information just dribbles out and scenes and signs become more and more ominous.

It is a film at its most effectively disturbing and distressing when it's being opaque about what's going on. Full of potent imagery that's handled by the performers just a little too calmly, the tension in the film is in the not knowing why, and so every little dribble of insight (yet revealing nothing) ratchets up that intensity.  

But it goes from subtle to blunt very quickly during its third act. Until then it's focused on delivering an intense scenario that could have multiple allegories applied (it could be an environmental allegory, it could be talking about societal decay and distrust of one's neighbours, it could be a critique on our dependency on the internet nut just personally but for infrastructure, or hell, at one point I wondered if it was just an alien invasion) and instead settles for just one definite answer which seems to me to be the wrong play (but may be a result of adaptation from the novel by Rumaan Alam or it may be Sam Esmail's invention). 

I can't really speak to Sam Esmail's track record. I watched Season 1 of Mr. Robot. I thought it was great, but I didn't need any more of it. I don't know that I've seen anything else he's done.

So I don't know if it was weird that I was getting M. Night Shayamalan vibes from Leave the World Behind.  It could be because it seems to share a similar same set-up to A Knock At The Cabin and then runs a story that could be The Happening, if those films had a rich soundtrack and a plethora of Friends references.

It's a potent production, but its power peters out the more it preaches rather than implies.

KWIF: Men, and Man...dy

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have usually have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This week, which really spans the past 3 weeks, is just two films, as I rewatched Across the Spider-Verse in theatre twice more, and I've been series watching both the classic Planet of the Apes pentology and the sextet of Lone Wolf and Cub. I'll write each of those up in their own time.

So for, this week, it's:
Men (2022, d. Alex Garland - AmazonPrime)
Mandy (2019, d. Panos Cosmatos - DVD)

---

Men is often very stunning visually, capturing vividly a gorgeous, tastefully decorated old house and very lush, wet and vibrant terrain despite seemingly perpetual overcast skies.

Men is also pretty ugly and uncomfortable to look at, at times, with makeup and digital face transplants and cgi... erm... sequences... of... things... happening, all juxtaposing against the beauty of the scenery. 

All of Alex Garland's films so far (and also including his mini-series Devs) are so full of intentionality, of thematic purpose, it's just that the purpose here is maybe a little muddier than his other works. Men trades so heavily in metaphor that it almost exclusively exists in metaphor. Where Garland's other works are entertaining outside of the metaphors, Men has little else but it to offer. This feels akin to Aronofsky's mother!, another ambitious and unsatisfying horror fable.

Having Rory Kinnear be every man in Men (save one) only for it to go unacknowledged in the film is making very much a "they're all the same" type comment (and perhaps as much a product of pandemic shooting as conceptual conceit?). Yet there's more nuance here than that blunt "all the same" statement, in the different ways Kinnear's men carry themselves, and the film's awareness of the systemic misogyny that's baked into them. The finale of the film -- an ugly, epic "birthing" sequence that is at once upsetting in it's unnaturalness in concept as its cgi unnaturalness -- is meant to hammer home the sort of generational handing down of toxic masculinity with little growth.  As the scene, and its cycles play out, what started out as frightening to Jessie Buckley's Harper eventually just becomes more of men's tedious bullshit that is being forced upon her. She walks away but the birthing keeps following her, as if to say "you must watch this , you must bare witness to my trauma for I cannot handle it myself" (and maybe also to say that there's a perpetual infant inside every man that comes out in the ugliest, and often most violent of ways).

The straightforward question of this film is "is this really happening?" Or "Is this really happening as we see it?" But even though there's a pretty chaotic aftereffect scene that hints at some reality to the events that happened, this question of "is it real" actually doesn't matter at all. It is what Harper has been going through, whether metaphorical or literal, or a bit of both.

Harper just wanted an escape after her husband's suicide/accidental death. She had filed for divorce and was immediately emotionally blackmailed by her husband. He threatened to kill himself, he put that on her. It's just one of so, so many things a patriarichal society puts upon women, and not the first of men in this film trying to put their figurative shit upon Harper, as if she owes them something, or that shes the solution to their problems, or that if she's not the solution there's something wrong with her . 

Margaret Atwood said "Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them." You can substitute "laugh at" with "reject" or even, in some cases just "make them feel anything", so trained are men to suppress emotions that aren't the "masculine ones" (that also tend to correspond with certain sins, like greed and pride) that often any strong feeling can be unfamiliar and induce any manner of irrational response.

The message here isn't so simple as "men are bad", but instead that there's an ugliness to how men are raised and how men perpetuate this ugliness, not just generationally but among themselves, and how that then spreads to how women have to think or behave or react in a society that forces them to coexist amidst this, in essence, traumatic psychopathy.

I think its an interesting movie that doesn't always get its intentions across cleanly. People will (and have) bristled at it's message, because on the surface it does seem a trite metaphor. I think given the past 10 years of politics it's a lot more loaded as subject matter than the film actually considers it to be, but the title is provocative and evocative in maybe the wrong spirit. I didn't come out of it thinking Garland was smug and self-satisfied with solving misogyny, but instead I see a storyteller wrestling with a concept too big and complex to really be contained in just a film, but trying anyway.  And what is art for, if not to wrestle with with the big concepts.

---

After watching Panos Cosmatos' episode of Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, subtitled "The Viewing", I was immediately reminded that I had missed out on Mandy, Cosmatos' second feature after the dreamy and weird Beyond the Black Rainbow. I genuinely love Cosmatos' style, and what his productions endeavour to do, which is try to capture the essence of classic 80's horror movie videocassette covers, but as an entire film. In the case of Mandy it's that PLUS making 80's heavy metal album covers into a live action movie.

As a result, Cosmatos' sensibility is imagery first, story second, which is certainly not to say that his works slouch in their storytelling, but capturing the aesthetic, the mood, the vibes, is really what its all about.  It's also to say that his movies are just a trip to behold (to quote Toasty on his viewing of "The Viewing"..."Ouch. My mind just got fucked.")

Mandy can ostensibly be broken down into two halves, with the first focusing primarily on Andrea Riseborough's Mandy, her life with her loving husband Red (Nicolas Cage), and her kidnapping by a cult at the behest of its smitten, disturbed, pampered, psychotic, fragile Manson-esque leader Jeremiah (Linus Roache). The second half then becomes what Tarantino likes to call a "revenge-a-matic", where Red is out for blood, and it gets bloody.

It's a wild, jarring film that constantly makes you question what reality it exists in. It makes you wonder if the people we're seeing are human or not, if the setting is Earth or some other plane of existence. It's a film where characters are drugged, either forcefully or self-administered, which means perceptions are skewed. We're constantly jumping between points of view, different characters' experiences of the world, and as such it's hard to tell what truth we're actually witnessing.  It's all very intentional.

It's totally a "vibes" movie, though not quite as completely as Beyond the Black Rainbow was. Once the revenge film kicks into high gear and Red goes on his most metal of crusades, it's just a hair away from being an action movie, yet still running high on fumes.

If anything pulls it out of its vibes, it's Cage. I'm ever so mezzo mezzo on Cage. I don't buy into his greatness, because I've seen enough of him that isn't great. When he goes "full Cage", it needs to be the right place and the right time. Here, there's a couple of "full Cage" scenes which just pull me right out of the film, where Cage isn't acting so much as improvising, emoting, and, you know, doing that thing he does.  It doesn't fit the vibes, man.

That said, in the first half, as Mandy's loving partner, Cage is perfect, delivering a very subtle, supportive performance, which is just him at his best. And when he gets to dive into those fight sequences, his years and years on both blockbusters and low budget action features really comes through in his ability to sell the physicality.

Of Cosmatos' three productions, this is maybe his most accessible, and probably most entertaining, and yet, because of the Cage of it all, it's kind of my least favourite of the three... and yet that's faint condemnation. I still thought it was a blast.

What I Have Been Watching: this pile

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is usually the domain of Toast admittedly spending too much time in front of the TV. Kent's stepping on toes (Toastoes? Toestys?) here mainly because he has a piles of TV shows in progress and maybe doesn't have too much to say about any of it. Maybe(?)

Best In Miniature Season 2 - CBC (8/8 episodes)

The Mrs. Kent has really gotten into miniatures over the past few years, and the first season of Best in Mini was a real kick in the pants for her start tackling doing her own minifying. I'm kind of envious of her dedication to the art form and the increasingly impressive results she's achieving.  As a competition show, Best In Mini stands out because it doesn't drown itself in contestant's personalities like far too many other shows of this ilk. It's about skills, and in the community of miniature artists, the skills are appreciated. These contestants, though all trying to win, aren't in competition with the others, they're in competition with themselves, pushing their skill sets to the limit, to try and meet or exceed the expectation of the judges. We only get the slimmest of glimpses into the personal lives of these artisans, and usually only in as much as it's relevant to the pieces that they're working on. It's a quiet, low-stakes, relaxing, and fascinating discipline, and it's amazing to see each artisan's strengths employed, but even greater to see them try something new and succeed or fail at it. 

Like the first season, it starts with building the house. Each subsequent episode is furnishing a specific room, with specific requirements, and it ends with the external setting. The level and depth of knowledge on design and multidisciplined craftsmanship required to succeed in the show is astounding, making the frontrunners evident from the get go, but also impressive to see artists find their groove, and improve and grow as the show goes on.  I felt the winner of the season came down to the one judge not understanding one of the contestant's stories and subjectively wanting something out of the story that the artist didn't feel fit, and was penalized for being true to their own sense of the story. 

Lego Masters Australia Season 3 - Discovery Canada (10/14 Episodes)

I freaking love Lego Masters Australia. After the Mrs. and I ploughed through season 1 & 2 on demand I craved more. Each episode is a freaking dopamine hit of giddy plastic joy. Each episode ends with a teaser for the next episode and I.just.want.it.now! 

Unlike the North American Lego Masters, the Australian version feels so much more connected to its builders, the community of Lego aficionados, and to the participants in the show. You get the sense that host Hamish Blake is having an absolute blast on set, as are the contestants, and they start to form kind of in jokes between them. It's very personable in a way that the spit-and-polish of the (North) American Lego Masters, as hosted by Will Arnett, is not. Likewise, the solitary judge, "Brickman" Ryan McNaught, seems to be personally invested in the brick building journey of the contestants. The level of emotion that comes out of him as he has to eliminate a duo, especially later on in the season, is so heartfelt and genuine. These aren't just contestants to him, they are proteges or pupils. He will lean into someone mid-build and offer a gentle suggestion, whether it's to help them get unstuck from a particular problem, or to try and push them past their comfort zone. The US Lego Masters judges, while definitely interested observers, do not seem to have nearly the same investment level.  There is a reason for that, and it's how the shows are structured.

The Aussie Lego Masters, unlike any other competition show, really wants to spotlight the builders skills, and gives them many, many opportunities to shine. It's a show that starts with 8 groups of contestants and this season didn't eliminate an group until episode 3, giving each team at least three or four builds before elimination. That's a lot of opportunity for them to prove themselves and something which I wish other such shows based around skill sets would take to heart and employ (Best in Miniature could do well with a structure like this at least early on, although, there's only so many rooms in a house).  Past contestants come back as special guests to great fanfare which speaks to the sense of community the show builds...it creates legends even in the losers of previous seasons (that young season 1 contestant Jordy is now a regular player on the show as a production assistant, but onscreen seen typically in a janitorial role, is a perennial delight).

It's the highlight of my week, tempered only by the fact that Discovery has started editing the shows down to an hour, which means there are dramatic jumps in the episode timelines and we miss some delightful content (in the Marvel themed episode, we missed an entire judging segment, much to our disappointment and frustration). 

Doom Patrol Season 4 - HBOMax (6/12 episodes)

[Season 1, Season 2, Season 3]

I think my problem with Doom Patrol at this point rests entirely in how disconnected the characters are from each other in this series. This season seems to be trying to reconcile past lives, as Vic (having had all his cyborg parts removed and is now just a boring normal guy) gets reacquainted with old friends in Detroit, Rouge tries to atone for her past misdeeds (which Rita cannot let go of, for obvious reasons), Larry is still wrestling with his closeted past as well as his alien offspring/parasite, and the saga of Jane and the war of her personalities continues. We meet a new character, Casey, as we return for a one-off with Dorothy, both of whom are dealing with daddy issues. Despite all the continued weirdness (which I love) and the great scoring from Clint Mansell and Kevin Kiner, it feels like we're treading so much water with these characters, particularly waters we've tread before.

I am, however, torn by my fatigue with the show because, at its heart, it's a show about trauma, surviving it, coping with it, and moving past it as much as one can. It's very potent, and kind of important in this regard. It's a show that uses its weirdness expertly as metaphor, without ever bashing you over the head with what they're doing. If you want to approach it just as a show about weirdos facing weird things, it works on that level, but digging even one layer deeper reveals so much more complexity, and there's a lot to identify and/or empathize with. But it just feels like it doesn't quite know how to get to where it wants to go, or how it wants to say things. It's like when I write my long-winded reviews that circle the point I'm making but take forever to get there.  Except I know I don't need to pad for time.  Hoping the "part 2" of this season brings the series to a satisfactory conclusion.

Ted Lasso Season 3 -Apple TV+ (6/12 episodes)

[Seasons 1 & 2]

The good news is Ted Lasso is funny again. Where the second season seemed really, really weighed down, and troubled, this season has inflated the flat tires and replaced the busted rubber. Its nowhere near as tight as the pretty-much-perfect season 1 -- its massive success means the show can run episodes at whatever length it wants, and it does.  I can only imagine how tight a comedy it might be if held to a 25 minute standard...or it's quite possible it might not even work.

This season seems to have clear directions, chief of which is to conclude with Ted ultimately no longer being Coach of AFC Richmond, but also it seems like the show is setting itself up for life without Jason Sudekis. It's trying for a redemptive arc for Nate (after his flat-out villainy last season, it's a tall order), it's setting Rebecca up for a pretty big journey, and the triangle of Keely-Roy-Jamie finds a fourth participant pushing the edges out. The members of the team, so far, are treated almost exclusively as a collective unit, with individual personalities and stories dismissed in favour of the hive, but a few wrinkles such as eccentric superstar Zava joining the team or reporter Trent Crimm being ever present as documentarian shakes things up in a very enjoyable way (James Lance's Crimm is such a welcome addition as regular cast member).

The show seems less interested in driving towards a happy ending than it does settling in, and I think that could ultimately be a good thing. I mean, if people want 3 seasons in-and-out with Ted as the gravitational center, it might be less satisfying as a result, but if the show is pivoting to a Ted-less spin off, it's certainly setting a good foundation for it.  Either way, I'm much happier with this season than the last one, and feel more entertained, and maybe even more invested, as it slips a bit more into sit-com mode than "prestige TV". Excited to see where it goes.

Stargirl Season 3 - AmazonPrime (5/13 episodes)

[Seasons 1 & 2]

Superhero fatigue is definitely real. I'm a lifelong comics reader and I used to devote myself to seeing every tangentially superhero-related mass media product out there. These days my comics pile is so much smaller than ever before, my investment in big superhero universes has dwindled to almost nothing, I'm not rewatching the big tentpole movies as frequently as I used to, and even good superhero TV, like Stargirl, feels exhausting to me. 

13 episodes? Why?

I like Stargirl, it uses themes of legacy (my favourite subject matter for comic book superheroics) to build its own in-world history, so it has a setting where battles between superheroes and supervillains existed before its first episode began. Over the past two seasons its teenage characters have been thrust into the midst of all that history and it all seems to come spiralling back improbably to this quaint town of Blue Valley.  It stretched that credibility for all it could, this season, everything comes springing back, and it feels like we're treading familiar ground. Getting caught eating your own tail is something all TV shows have to face inevitably, but it seems like superhero shows do it more frequently and more often than regular programming. I'm not sure what it is. Probably budget and contractual limitations, forcing the re-use of characters and sets and effects and whatnot... it means that the superhero worlds on TV don't ever really grow, they just get more crowded.

What Stargirl really needed, at this stage, was to break out of Blue Valley, to go out into the world beyond, but the show couldn't afford it, so instead we're stuck with new angles on returning villains to a not-unwatchable but ho-hum result.  Season 3 is the series' final run, and we'll probably get around to finishing it, but it seems like it's going to be a chore, rather than a delight, despite the presence of Joel McHale as series regular.  Hoping to be proven wrong.

Grand Crew Season 2 - NBC/City (8/10 episodes) 

[Season 1]

I was so excited for Grand Crew to return, that I kept looking and looking and looking for it since the start of the year, with no trace. Then, suddenly, I was three weeks behind. They just snuck out the gate as seems to happen with big three network TV shows that aren't returning reality TV competition shows. It's seriously to the point with network TV where it feels like legit dramas or sitcoms don't even belong there anymore.  Eyes are always upon cable or streaming, it's like nobody's paying attention to what ABC/CBS/NBC is doing unless you're over 60.

Grand Crew exists in the tradition of hangout comedies of yore. It's basically contemporary Friends, but, you know...LA instead of New York. And a wine bar instead of a coffee shop. The gender balance is also off, with Nicole Beyer's Nicky and Grasie Mercedes' Fay as the two lone female leads, and Fay is kind of positioned more as a romantic foil for Aaron Jennings' Anthony and Nicky's immediate new BFF rather than as a lead all her own.

It's a really funny show, with Carl Tart (playing Sherm) the clear breakout of the cast. I knew Tart from before the show from his devastatingly hilarious character improv on Comedy Bang Bang, and he delivers just as large here. My biggest worry is that nobody's really noticing. 20 years ago he would already have a movie.

This second season doesn't quite hit as high or as funny as last season, primarily because the writers are trying to involve us too deeply and seriously in the characters lives and their romantic entanglements. Where 25 years ago two seasons of a show could spread out this kind of storytelling over 50 episodes, here they're trying to do the same amount of investment in less than half the time, and I'm just not that into it. I would rather the funny over the character beats any day.  This is a proper sitcom, it's not "prestige TV" so its attempts at serializing even light melodrama comes off as too heavy for its weight class.  Still, it's a good crew, and I would like to spend more time with them. Hoping the season 3 pickup announcement comes soon.

We Agree: Shadow In The Cloud

 2021, d. Roseanne Liang - netflix

The film opens with a retro-styled WWII-era animated film meant to remind soldiers that there's no such thing as "gremlins" that will destroy their aircraft, that it's only human negligence that causes such errors.  It's a pretty great start, and seems to take more than a bit of inspiration from Roald Dahl's The Gremlins which was intended to be a Disney animated feature.  

Following the animated intro, the first note of score features Carpenter-style 80's synth cue, a cue which  pops up later in the film,  but only stands out in its sporadic use. This very well could be an homage to Carpenter-style action-horror(-camp) storytelling, but it's apparent they only wanted to hint at it, not commit to it.  It's a very Cameron-esque movie, complete with a modest budget, contained setting, the genre bits and pieces, and some semblance of a message underpinning it.

It's a tight 88 minutes full of creatures, aerial action, and so. much. peril. An ensemble piece where 90% of the ensemble is off screen and only heard over the radio 90% of the time. It asks a lot of Chloe Grace Moretz who has to carry all the weight of the film's ridiculous twists, as well as add some (no pun intended) grace to a character facing an agressively flagrant (and, unfortunately, not unrealistic) amount of mysogeny as she interlopes on the military boy's club aboard a war plane, seemingly with a clandestine mission which turns out to be something very personal.  Meanwhile, there's a gremlin tearing the plane apart, and Japanese fighters on attack.

In a film that posits plane-destroying gremlins are real, Moretz (no pun intended) grounds this to such a degree that it's only when she she has to extremely crawl out on the underside of the plane's wing like a seasoned freeclimber, using the bulletholes as finger and toe holds, (a simultaneously ridiculous and awesome sequence, especially given her character is operating with a broken pointer finger) that the film seems to be stretching its limits of credibility (relatively speaking).

Taking a script from (guh) Max Landis, director Roseanne Liang rewrote it into something that speaks truth to sexism women have constantly faced as they enter male dominated fields, and how they have to navigate insult and patronization with gritted teeth, courtesy and inner strength. Moretz's officer and pilot is confident, competent and more than capable, and certainly knows how to (no pun intended) navigate the patriarchy, but is still laid subject to it. Her character has to got to a lot of unusual places emotionally but she does so in a way that feel like a consistent character, that is until the finale. There she decides to go toe-to-toe against a wounded gremlin in what seems like it's revenge motivated, but it's such a typical movie machismo thing where the hero beats the villain creature with their own bare hands...something that a male writer would write to make a female character seem like a badass. It doesn't really feel like an in-character moment. But I liked Moretz ripping off her sleeve to reveal the muscles that just confirmed she was capable of hanging upside down from the underside of a plane wing while in flight.

It is a brisk romp that has no shame about the wild twists and turns it goes through. It doesn't try to explain gremlins, they just are. The parable here is that a woman faces many enemies, the monster that makes itself known, the shadows that lurk with potential to strike at any time, and the enemies she must walk amongst, the ones that say they're friendly but are perhaps the most dangerous of them all.  This, I believe, Liang shaped into a film about the lengths women have to go to to escape these threats, and the strength they possess is kind of beyond belief. 

It's not perfect.  There are definite questions left unanswered, and certainly inquiries about how certain things truly operate, but like Carpenter in the 80's, Liang doesn't slow down long enough for these questions to matter. Not perfect, but also not boring and quite a bit of fun.

[Toasty's take]

I'm Thinking Of Ending Things

 2020, d. Charlie Kaufman - Netflix

Like Paul Thomas Anderson who I returned to with The Phantom Thread, Charlie Kaufman was another one of the creators that was a key part of my formative cinephile years in the 90's.  Having been a lapsed cinephile throughout the 2010's, though, I feel like I've lost track of what Kaufman has done since, what?  Her? (I've been watching too much Arrested Development...typing "Her?" made me laugh out loud).  A quick something search tells me, first, that Her was a product of Kaufman's one-time collaborator Spike Jonze and that he was not actually involved with that picture, and second, that I've missed the TV movie How and Why (which I've never heard of, but starring Arrested Development's Michael Cera) and the stop-motion Animalisa in between this latest directorial effort and his first on Synechdoche, New York.  I'm only returning to his latest work because of ease of access, with I'm Thinking of Ending Things being a Netflix original film.

[Boy, that was a messy, messy paragraph.  I thought I knew where I was going with this review, but then it turns out my faulty memory and lack of research have derailed those plans.  I'm embarassing myself.]     

I'm thinking of ending things, like Synechdoche, is a story-as-metaphor, where what is happening is less about the reality of what is going on, and more about what the presentation means.  For someone like myself who appreciates creativity and weirdness, this type of film should really be something I lock into and just lap it up til it's done.  But stories that work only as metaphor, like Synechdoche or Darren Aronofsky's mother! I find both engaging and frustrating     Where mother! was about personifying environmental anxiety as human drama, I'm Thinking... is much more internal, much more individualistic.  It's almost a character study but it's not obvious until the end who the character it is that we're studying, or what the metaphor is... and even then, it may take a little something searching to find some discourse that helps explain it a little better.  I was mostly engaged (it does feel a little long) but at times I found it a little too esoteric, but I don't think I was ever actually frustrated with it.

[Where am I going with this, exactly? I seem to just be meandering, my thoughts unclear.  I'm distracted, Do I want to be doing this?  This film is more clever than I am, and I just need to admit it.  I'm embarassing myself.]

 The first half hour of the film takes place in a car, a segment of a lengthy road trip a woman (Jessie Buckley) is taking with her recent-ish boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to his parents for the first time.  It's sleeting outside, the wipers rhytmically sway back and forth providing the soundtrack to their conversation (I'm very impressed at how the editing keeps the rhythm of the wiping, it must have been a bit of a challenge in doing so).  We hear inside her thoughts, but the first time she thinks "I'm thinking of ending things", he say a little "Hm?" as if he heard her.  This is just one of many little curiosities that arise along the journey to the parents house.  At one point he asks her to recite the poem she's been writing... but on top of being a poet she has all these other majors that she's studying, and jobs that she has, and creative things she does.  And I think he keeps calling her a different name every time he says it.  Something strange seems to be going on here.  She recites her poem, and it's long.  Too long to be something she's just written and is unsure about, too well formed and well rehearsed.  People don't just remember poems that long.  Something seems amiss.  And every time she seems to start to talk about perhaps, you know, ending things with him, there seems to be a little blip in time.  Suddenly they're at his parents house.

[Am I saying too much, am I giving too much away? I've listened to at least two podcasts talking about this film already.  If everything I'm about to say just a regurgitation of what they said?  Do I have no original thoughts of my own?  Am I ruining this for everyone?  It's not what happens, but how it happens, right?  I'm embarrassing myself.]

even the posters seem to be
making reference to other art
and culture

The parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette) are an odd sort, and their surroundings likewise.  There's a weirdness in the air.  The basement door, somethings up with it.  The dog seems to appear out of nowhere, shake itself off vigorously for too long, then disappear again.  The parents sometimes seem younger and sometimes older. Why is there a picture of her as a child in his house?  What is going on, it's definitely eerie.  Not necessarily horrifying, but certainly not normal.  It's like the ending of 2001:A Space Odyssey only it's the middle of the film.  There are little things throughout that tell us she isn't who he says she is, little tells that continue to compound when they leave the house, get sidetracked at a dairy mart, and then wind up snowed in at his old high school, where they run into the janitor that the film has been occasionally cutting to all this time.  And then an extended interpretive dance sequence is used to, basically, explain what is actually going on...depending on how well you speak the language of  "interpretive dance".

[What am I doing? I'm just giving it all away here.  But then, the reality is, whomever is reading this has either watched the film, is intending to watch the film or has no interest in watching the film...I'm not going to change anyone's mind here.  That's not what I'm here to do?  What am I here to do?  I'm embarrassing myself.]

[SPOILERS (maybe)]

The metaphor - which I *kind* of picked up on, but searched on to corroborate - is about loneliness, about a life lived too deep in arts, culture and criticism to the the expense of actually living life, these passions getting in the way of connecting with others.  Both characters that Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons play here, are figments of this janitor's mind.  Plemons represents his younger self, almost unwavering in performance the way he sees himself.  Buckley is an amalgam of women, some perhaps real, some imagined, some maybe only characters from a story.  She is the focus of this story, and yet she is the most mercurial character, like in his mind he just can't lock down who she should be, and even in this fantasy she still doesn't want to be with him.  I don't know if the tone of this is more about regret or depression.  And is the title of the film, which seems to be about her thoughts of dumping him, is it actually about him thinking of suicide....?

[Is that the right read of this film? I don't know. I probably need to watch it again armed with the knowledge of what happens and therefore able to invest more in the investigation of the metaphor. I should just stop typing now.  I'm embarrassing myself.]

 

Rick and Morty Season 4 (part 1)

2019 - Adult Swim (5 episodes)

Rick and Morty came out of the gate fully formed.  Going back to the earliest episodes of the series, the characters are already willed into being and the structure of the show is already in place.  Few shows come out so self assured.  Community is the first show at the top of my mind where the pilot seemed to know exactly what it wanted to be, and largely who the characters were.  Of course the through-line here is creator Dan Harmon who seems to be able to fraction of his complex personality into distinct character units, and then build them up into unique and complex individuals that extend beyond him.  The characters start fully realized, and grow and evolve from there.

There have been 3 really terrific seasons of Rick and Morty so far, becoming a series resonating strongly and passionately among it's 19-49 year-old demographic.  It's a show that satirizes pop culture tropes frequently -- often critically, sometimes savagely, usually insightfully -- but its best moments are always those that dwell on the characters and the impact the events of the show have on them.  There's not really a dud episode in the run so far, though some clearly stand out more than others.

Season 4 is disappointing in that it only delivers five new episodes out of its remaining 70 episodes ordered by the Cartoon Network.  But, all five episodes are superb for extremely unique reasons.


"Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Repeat" finds a space crystal embedded in Morty's head granting him ultimate foresight, with Rick both envying Morty's power while also struggling to free him from the cage such power brings.  It's reflective of Morty's usual helplessness that he traditionally finds himself in that he embraces the crystal...but he also embraces it for such shortsighted reasons, being the vision of Jessica caring for him on his death bed.  Morty's unhealthy fixation on Jessica is such a teenage boy thing, but that toxic fixation is something that the show needs to clearly going to deal with at some point but is taking its time getting there.  In the meantime, we often see how this toxic fixation leads to Morty making some really bad decisions.


"The Old Man and the Seat" has two very silly threads, one about an alien-created matchmaking app (Harmon's insight into dating app culture here is as biting as his social media app culture commentary in Community's "Meow-Meow-Beenz" episode) and the other about Rick's most epic and exclusive pooping area which is discovered by an interloper.  Both threads, though, end up highlighting feelings of loneliness and isolation in very different ways, with Rick's pooping saga being surprisingly effective.


"One Crew Over The Crewcoo's Morty" screams Dan Harmon from moment one (even though these episodes each have credited writers, Harmon's showrunner status looms large, and from the sounds of things he was even more involved with this season than he was previously).  Clearly Harmon, with Rick as his avatar, needed to express his utter distaste for the "heist movie" formulae, and this absolutely hilarious episode is a non-stop piss-taking on the genre.  So effective it is, that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to enjoy a heist movie ever again.


"Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktims Morty" finds Morty demanding, and getting, a pet dragon.  This is a very potent and uncomfortable episode.  It's an extremely weird examination of how we deal with pets as property, how we may or may not bond with them, and how "ownership" of another living being is just weird.  Plus, poking at so many fantasy tropes.  And then it gets cerebral-sexual, which is really, really, really off-putting.  This is the show at its most provocative and twisted.  It is literally hard to watch.  I'm not sure if it's successful at what it really wants to say but it's certainly memorable.  Jerry's b-plot about the talking cat is total goofballs.

The final episode, though, is its masterstroke.  "Rattlestar Ricklactica" finds Rick and Morty accidentally killing a snake astronaut from an earth-like planet, but where snakes are the dominant species.  Rick and Morty replace the astronaut with an earth snake and the impact upon this other-earth society is monumental.  A 9-minute montage of this evolution is the brilliant result.  It's entirely wordless (only snake-speak and snake-jazz is heard along the way). This all culminates in Terminator-like time-jumping from multiple parties to try and correct the mistakes only to devolve into ultimate chaos.  Rick and Morty is always at its best when ultimate chaos ensues.  Of all the wonderfully conceptual things the show has introduced, from Mr. Meeseeks ("look at me!") to Pickle Rick, I think snake-jazz may just be my favourite.

Enemy

Twenty-for-Seven #8 (Day 4)
2013, d. Denis Villeneuve - AmazonPrime

(I was hoping to do a trilogy of doppleganger movie reviews, but 2013's The Double, directed by Richard Ayoade, is unavailable on the streaming services I have, so for now it's just a duo, which is more thematic anyway)

Jakey G has Toronto and spiders on his mind

In the Letterboxd app's decade in review, Denis Villeneuve topped the list of top 100 directors.  Now, I admit, I'm very late to the game on appreciating Villeneuve.  There are many of his films I've wanted to see over the years, and very few I have actually seen.  I was years behind on Arrival and certainly many months behind on Blade Runner 2049.  Both of these films impressed me greatly yet I spent no effort to review his back catalog, so I became quite surprised to recently find that Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario and Enemy (all films on my "to watch" list) were all Villeneuve films.  I see the connective tissue between Arrival, Blade Runner and (forthcoming) Dune, but none of these seem to fit together as a "type".  But then I haven't watched all of them yet.

Enemy I was curious about years ago, mainly because I like the idea of discovering a doppleganger and then tracking them down.  I had forgotten that the film is set in Toronto... and not "Toronto posing as X" as it so often does.  It's exciting to see Jake Gyllenhaal jump on the 504 King Streetcar or to look up an address in Mississauga and actually go out to Mississauga (and see those salt and pepper shaker apartment complexes in the background).  Toronto never plays Toronto, so this is an added thrill.

Beyond that, the film is very curious in the way the lead character Adam gets so worked up over discovering his visual double, Anthony, after seeing him as a background performer while watching a video.  It becomes obsessive for him, and once they finally meet, Anthony is absurdly angry about the whole situation.

What we learn is Anthony is quite an asshole.  He's a member of some weird sex club, he cheats on his pregnant wife and seems completely self-involved.  Adam meanwhile is demure and reticent.  He has a fuck buddy but they don't seem very intimate or close.  Gyllenhaal does remarkable work differentiating these two in both demeanor and physicality.

The accompanying soundtrack by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans infers something very sinister, while the heavy shadows and yellowish hue Villeneuve applies provides and overbearing gloominess and weight to the world Adam lives in.  There's a repeating motif of arachnids, which seem to be weighing on both Adam and Anthony's minds, a web of deceit spun that they both get caught in.

The end of the film is a puzzle, one that I had to look up other reviews to make sense of.  This is a film about duplicity and deception, the lies we create and then fall victim to ourselves.  Adam and Anthony, you see, are the same person, and with this understanding the film becomes much less literal and far more metaphorical.  There isn't a twist ending, that reveals this, it's all still undercover and inferred.  I'm not sure if it helps going into the film knowing this, or if it's better to discover it after, but I think the film works in either situation.   In effect, Anthony has created a whole other life in order to conduct his extramarital affairs, so segregated that he's effectively bifurcated his personality into two distinct characters.

It's quite brilliant in its execution, but I needed that extra outside nudge to get the message.  I've been thinking and parsing out the film a lot since watching it, and I'll defintely need to watch it again. I see how Villeneuve went from Enemy to Arrival from here, if only in style.

(Toast's take circa 2014)