KWIF: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I also saw The Odyssey in true IMAX. It's a big movie on the biggest screen. I don't know that the viewing experience was all that much different than the first, other than I could see a lot more sand and sky.

This Week:
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, d. Jane Schoenbrun - in theatre)
Illustrious Corpses (or Cadaveri Eccellenti - 1976, d. Fracesco Rosi - bluray)
Pavements (2024, d. Alex Ross Perry - bluray)
Synecdoche, New York (2008, d. Charlie Kaufman - dvd)

---

Jane Schoenbrun's latest academic-cum-schlocky meta head trip opens with heavy breathing, and camera work implying we're watching from someone's specific point of view. It's every masked serial killer since... Jason? Michael Meyers? Leatherface? The intensity is ingrained when we watch from this perspective and hear the sounds of someone's breath reverberating inside a contained space. And then into view is tents and cameras and sound gear and crew, and someone steps very closely into frame and seems to be adjusting whomever it is that is behind the camera.  This should be our first indication that this isn't going to play out how we expect.

The opening credits - set to Okay Kaya's cover of R.E.M.'s Nightswimming - takes us through all the pop culture hoopla and paraphernalia of the (fictional) "Camp Miasma" horror franchise and it's vent-headed killer "Little Death". News articles, posters, video games, toys, websites, all detailing the rise and fall of the Miasma series, much like the 80's heavyweights like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street.  It's a series that had its day, and then it's corporate overlords kept trying to make it a thing, outstaying its welcome. 

This credits sequence is so information dense and so evocative it's easy to get lost in. As a pop culture and paraphernalia junkie, I just wanted to watch this opening on a loop five times over just to take it all in (my favourite bit is that "Little Death" released a much derided rap album). This density serves as an intentional disconnecting break from the film's initial imagery (and sounds). It's there, in part, to make us forget what we initially saw, so that when we meet Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) we don't suspect what the film will eventually be telling us.  

Kris stops in at a gas station convenience store, loads up on candy (so much candy, too much candy) and finds a random copy of "Camp Miasma VI" on DVD. When she checks in and asks the hotel clerk (Kevin McDonald) if there's a DVD player she could use, he lets her know he had a small part in the locally-shot film. We learn that Kris has been hired to be the director of the Camp Miasma reboot. The series has a problematic past in that its killer is problematically trans-coded and the studio execs want a queer director to reboot it for, well, optics.

Kris is in the Pacific Northwest to meet up with the original Miasma "final girl", played by Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, adopting a thick Tennessee drawl... which I mean to say is she's doing Dolly Parton's accent...and laugh... RIP Dolly). Presley's been a recluse since declining to return for the sequels, and is basically a non-commodity, but Kris is infatuated with her, in particular the sex scene in the first Miasma film which was both a sexual awakening as well as kink origin story for her.

Billy, who now owns and lives on the camp grounds the original Miasma was shot, is introduced walking in on an obviously titillated Kris watching this scene. Billy is presented stepping out of the shadows, hair a vibrant golden yellow, lipstick a stark blood red, and an obscenely big hat, all making her look like a femme fatale straight out of a noir film.

This is all still very early in teenage Sex and Death at Vamp Miasma, and it's hard to fully describe what the actual experience of watching it is like. There is obscene, face forward product placement that, if it takes you out of the movie, it's acting as intended. If Anderson's just-shy-of-over-the-top drawl is almost too much, it's as intended. If you are, like I was, made to feel in awe of Anderson, to be reminded of how hot and iconic Dana Scully was in the X-Files then that too is intentional. It's all intentional and it's all part of the layers of artifice that this film puts on.

Kris is not at Billy's home just to recruit her for her reboot of the series, she's there for a more personal and intimate reason. She saw in a still frame of Billy's eye in that original film a look - at the crossroads of pleasure and pain - little death and Little Death. She's been fixated on this imagery and this idea and cannot get past it. Billy gets it. Kris has a kink that she's too ashamed to admit to, and she's a willing participant in unlocking that for her.  I don't think Anderson really cared for Scully being a sex symbol, but she certainly seems on board with making Billy Presley one. That there's a 30 year age gap between Billy and Kris hardly matters. There's no power imbalance, and nobody is taking advantage of the other. Consent is explicit.

The second act of the film finds Kris and Billy watching the original Miasma film, which Schoenbrun's spot-on riff on 80's slasher films (including making near-40-year-old Zach Cherry playin a teen sleepaway camp counsellor) is both entertainment and foreplay for them. The film-within-the-film (-within-the-film) explains the origins of Little Death, which dives into its own variation of the all-too-common transphobic origins of horror's cinematic murderers.

Schoenbrun examines the warping of young minds that comes with horror film's obsession with titillation and brutality, but from a feminine lens, not the masculine one in which most horror (particularly those of the 80's) were presented in. Schoenbrun doesn't cast judgement. That "Little Death" rises again and chases Kris (who intentionally doffs her clothes down to her underwear) all the way to Billy's rose-petal coated bed and skewers the both of them as they fornicate is all just part of the role play. It's not horror, it's leering and alluring. It's wrong, and yet, ok?

There's not a lot of direct horror in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but there is a lot of flesh and fluids, as Billy says. It is a satirical examination of horror as a genre... both a loving and biting one. It's almost a sex comedy, but also... not really.  

I am not well versed in 80's horror, nor do I have any first-hand familiarity with women's sexual awakenings (that I know of!), and though I've done some reading of trans media analysis, I too am not an expert in that to comment extensively in the context of this film (critic Willow Maclay's review is exceptional from that context), so ...Camp Miasma is, in some respects, not in any way meant for me, a straight, cisgender, horror-averse man. But at the same time, it's also not throwing a hand up to explicitly excluding me either. 

Beyond the aforementioned themes of film and sex and transphobic media, it's also asking the audience, whomever you may be, to think about voyeurism, about what it can mean to be the watcher, or to be watched. How do these different perspectives impact us? What does it mean to look...is it leering? Is it desire? Is it judgement? And what does it mean to be looked at? Is it affirming? Is it off-putting? Is it exciting or upsetting? And where does context fit into all of that?

It's only once Kris reports back to the studio big wigs her progress on the film, kicking off the third act, that we start to understand the context which the film has actually been presented to us all along. Kris insists it's not "meta" but it very much is. The artifice is also the substance. I don't think a film has thrown me for a loop this befuddling and inspiring since Synecdoche, New York. 

It's a fascinating picture, deep in thought, with multiple themes playing in concert together (including Schoenbrun taking some jabs at the Hollywood intellectual property machine), each that could be picked apart and analysed from an academic perspective, but at the same time being playful and having fun with it all, not taking itself too seriously.  

...also, fyi...miasma: a heavy vaporous emanation...
---

I have been dipping my toe into giallo movies the past little while, a very tentative dip that likes the temperature but still won't commit to jumping in with full gusto. The Italian murder/mystery subgenre of film is pretty vast with many names of directors and stars swimming in the pool (if you'll allow me to extend this metaphor), it almost feels too crowded to just dive in. Amid all the splashy titles, and the plentiful boutique physical media labels just trying to sell their wares, it's hard to know what's truly worthwhile, it's like I need a coach at the end of my lane to tell me where to turn (ok, I've lost a grip this metaphor).

Illustrious Corpses was a recommendation on the relatively new-to-me (but not new overall) podcast The Big Picture from regular Chris Ryan... a recommendation that would test whether he was a trustworthy source or not. Turns out this film isn't a giallo at all, but the recommendation was still a good one... nay, a great one.

The film opens in the real Capuchin Catacombs, looking at real desiccated corpses. It's a stark visual but not one meant to scare or frighten. The character, an older man with a real lived-in face, looks deeply into the mummified faces, intrigued and ponderous. He leaves and is promptly assassinated. It turns out he was a prominent judge. Assigned to his murder case is Inspector Amerigo Rogas (Lino Ventura, another very lived in face, but with a little more mileage left to go).  He monitors the big, stately funeral, and suspects, maybe, mafia connections were to blam. In the streets, youthful protesters decry the dead man as being connected to the mob.

As Rogas investigates, there's another murder, another judge. And then a third. Rogas starts piecing together that the three judges were connected by more than profession, there is perhaps a vengeful aspect to this string of killings. But as he digs into these men, he starts uncovering information that might not be directly relevant to the case, but certain powerful people want to keep buried.

Soon Rogas' hunt finds the tables flipped. There's potentially a conspiracy afoot, and not only isn't it something he cannot solve, he may not be able to get out from under.  

I may have mentioned in my review of Dario Argento's The Five Days  that my knowledge of Italian history is verrry slim, so the backdrop of Illustrious Corpses, the political tensions involving student protests, labour shutdowns, neo-fascism and a burgeoning communist undercurrent are all pretty new concepts to me, but director Rosi certainly captures the mood. The vociferous chants of protests are a common soundtrack to the picture tell of a country ready to explode, and more than once we catch wind of a government doing everything it can to keep such an explosion from happening, even if it means scuttling a murder investigation or three (and committing a few more of their own).

What starts out as a high profile murder investigation soon bursts into full-blown '70's conspiracy thriller, and it is pretty incredible. Ventura's Rogas starts out so cool and assured, so observant and above it all, and we slowly watch that confidence, that comfort, that sense of being untouchable erode away and, eventually, collapse into the sea.

Director Rosi and his cinematographer Pasqualino Del Santis frame everything in beautiful, massive, old spaces, as if Italy itself is constantly threatening to consume our primary characters. We often see Rome and Venice in film, but Rosi takes us to many different locals, each with their own charm, some decadent, some rugged. The camera's gaze, often, is snapshot worthy, even if the innate colour tone is almost always some shade of brown (with maybe a hint of blood red).

This was a total surprise, as I had settled in for a delightful picture about a crazed murderer and instead felt the wave of historical anxiety and tension Rosi so ably builds overtake.  It's up there with the best of the subgenre, a real damn surprise.

---

Pavement was never my band. I enjoyed the few songs I heard of theirs back in the heyday(s) of my indie-rock years (about 1993-2011), but never actively pursued them, never owned an album. I was always just happy to hear a new tune every few years, but always felt listening to too much of them would perhaps sour what I did enjoy.

I have to say, watching director Alex Ross Perry's 128 minute avant garde "documentary" on the band was the most time I've committed to the band since first hearing "Cut Your Hair" back in the mid-'90s.

In Pavements we have:
- A behind-the-scenes document of the 2022 reunion tour;
- An archival footage retrospective;
- A making of the cliche-laden Hollywood biopic;
- A behind-the-scenes telling of Alex Ross Perry's attempt to launch an off-Broadway jukebox musical adaptation of the band's music; and
- The opening of a celebratory museum gallery tribute to the band and their history.

It's a lot to string together into anything approximating a cohesive narrative, but editor Robert Greene gets pretty close, and in the end, for all the fake productions attempting to mirror reality (the Hollywood biopic is completely fake, the musical is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek cheeky production, and the museum is not entirely fake but constructed for the purposes of the film), it winds up somewhere honest and tributory without being overly sentimental or fawningly admiring.

At once pretentious and silly, there perhaps too much facade to Pavements and not enough introspection/retrospective to function as a satisfying introduction for anyone not familiar with the band, or, for someone like me who only ever flirted with them, never committing. 

It's pretty clear though, frontman Stephen Malkmus was never going to approve of anything remotely standard, nor was he going to sit for anything approximating a conventional interview, and had little interest in assessing his band's, history or his own.

As is, I think this one is for the fans.

 ---

In referencing Synecdoche, New York in the above Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review I was reminded how long it's been since I last watched the film, a time which predates this blog.

The impact of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut never left me, although the majority of the details had long since faded. Was the comparison even apt between these two films? Am I just a fake critic who really doesn't know what he's talking about? A. Yes and yes. 

Much like Miasma, Synecdoche... is a very personal journey through the working thoughts of a director's brain. I don't think if Kris in ...Miasma or Caden Cotard in Synecdoche... are fully meant to be stand-ins for the directors of their pictures, but both are certainly speaking for the director.

While the themes are somewhat different, I still see synergy in how they approach their stories, layers of surrealism to inform the viewer that what they're about to see, that the world the characters in the film inhabit is a skewed depiction of reality.  Schoenbrun is more obvious about it in ...Miasma than Kaufman is (at first) but when Kaufman wants it to be known, he hits you with a literal house on fire.

The story of Synecdoche finds Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a successful theatre director, inhabiting a life that's falling apart, but he's kind of oblivious to it, a passive player in a way. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is an artist who leaves him to exhibit in Germany, taking their daughter with them. She had been pretty disconnected from any engagement with him (though as we learn more about Caden, the disconnect seems to have started on his end). Caden also has had a string of maladies plaguing him that seem to reiterate his view that death is waiting specifically for him.  He flirts with Hazel (Samantha Morton) at the box office but he can't seem to take action even when Hazel couldn't be more direct about how she feels about him. His young actress from the play, Claire (Michelle Williams) is utterly infatuated with him, and at first he knows it's a line he cannot cross, but he crosses it when Hazel moves on from him. 

Caden gets a sizable grant to produce the play of his dreams, a very personal work, a play about death coming for us all, but the only story he knows to tell is his own, and so the world around Caden is largely shaped by his own reality, a mirror within a mirror within a mirror, without any real sense of identity or direction. Soon the world within starts to bleed with the world without and the become intractable. The one area of his life he proactively controls, he loses control of, and he needs someone else to step in and take over as him... and it seems the most comfort he has ever had in his life is when someone else tells him exactly what to do.

Time, in Synecdoche, New York, is the main thematic element. Kaufman lets us know without any exposition that time is passing in Caden's life and he's missing all of it, stuck in routine, stuck in ruts, stuck in his own mind, stuck in his own obsessions. The opening scene takes place over the span of the month, but plays as if it were one continuous scene. It's not obvious, but it's there. When Adele leaves, Caden thinks she's been gone a week or two, but Hazel tells him it's been a year, and she's not coming back, and the fashion magazine moments later tells us it's been two years.  Time in the film keeps moving like this, and Caden keeps losing track of it because he's so insular, so fixated on his own fixations.  The film spans Caden's life as he begins middle age to his very old age², and it seems to go by so fast.

In creating a lasting work of art, Caden misses out on actually living his life. His work misses the larger patches of what's going on in the world (things are bad outside of the confines of the warehouse he's operating out of, as implied by the increased military presence on the street, with no context given because Caden can't be bothered to pay attention to it). I'm not certain if this is Kaufman's specific point, but there's a reading that only drawing on one's own life for the sake of art can lead to one's art consuming one's life (as well as an obsession with not dying might result in losing out on actually living).

This is both a deep and purposefully obtuse movie. Kaufman is a very intelligent writer who obsesses about his own mindset and his career and the immediate world around him, and perhaps this is a self-criticism, but also with the awareness that he can't see another path for himself. Death is the inevitable. The end is prescribed at the beginning. 

I didn't really understand Synecdoche, New York when I first saw it. I understand it only a little better now, but I love the puzzle of it. A marvelous film.

---

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Sheep Detectives

2026, Kyle Balda (Despicable Me 3) -- Amazon

Cozy murder mysteries are our thing -- Marmy and mine, not Kent; I have probably said that before. Stealing / mis-quoting Kent's quip, which must have been used on more than half the reviews of the movie (right? right?) how can you get cozier than a wool sweater? But to be fair to the genre, it is set in the English countryside (but is it? as many people as not speak with an American accent) full of quirky characters (and sheep) and has a murder being investigated by an amateur -- you cannot get more amateur at detecting than a sheep.

Kent said coat and I said sweater -- the "cozy" is the wearing of the wool.

So, on a lovely green hillside, that could have a pie maker living nearby, lives a man named George Hardy (Hugh Jackman, The Wolverine), and his sheep. He's an irascible old coot who refuses to work with the nearby other shepherd, and has most of the people in the nearby village disliking him. Dispensing with the usual Scottish or Welsh joke, Hardy prefers sheep to people, so much so that each of his sheep are named and each night he settles them down with a reading, often from his own collection of murder mysteries. Its a good life for all involved; until he dies.

The local authorities-y think it must have been a heart attack, but it doesn't explain why one hand is painted blue, one is painted green. A small time reporter (Nicholas Galitzine, Masters of the Universe) who has come to town to do a story on the disappointing cultural festival (three booths setup by the same person) convinces the constabulary that it was murder, and soon after it is discovered George was indeed poisoned. The sheep, led by smartest ewe Lily, who would normally will themselves into forgetting anything painful, decide they have to investigate themselves -- after all, how different can a real murder be from the books George would read to them.

Its different, of course, and yet it is not, because, after all, this is actually a cozy murder mystery based on a murder-mystery German novel. But atypical because, well, not many have talking self-aware sheep.

The movie is just delightful. The sheep world building fills us in on what we need to know, but doesn't become overly expositional. There is the forgetting, there are "winter lambs" [not "winter sheep"] instead of just black sheep which is exactly what Sebastian [not Stan] is, the shunned members of their society. Death is "turning into clouds" and as expected, they are utterly terrified of the world outside the meadow they live in. Each sheep depicted is of a different breed, for reasons only George knew, and they each have widely different personalities. 

Of course, Marmy / the Peanut Gallery, figgered out who the murderer was right off the top, so the movie left us on the how's and the why's and the misdirections; and the who's. We have George's long lost daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon, The Bear), executor of George's will Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson, Dead Again), town butcher Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill, Game of Thrones), rival shepherd Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole, Supacell), quaint hotelier Beth Pennock (Hong Chau, Asteroid City) who was secretly in love with George, Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Paddington 2) and the idiot single (in both ways you're thinking) police officer Tim (Nicholas Braun, Succession) as our familiar cast of quirky locals. And in the meadow we get Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Onward), Mopple (Chris O'Dowd, Monsters vs Aliens) who remembers everything, Reggie (Brett Goldstein, The Garfield Movie) and Ronnie (Brett Goldstein, Fraggle Rock) the rams, Sir Richfield (Sir Patrick Stewart, American Dad!) who has Orf, Cloud (Regina Hall, The Spongebob Movie: Search for SquarePants), Zora (Bella Ramsey, Hilda), Wool-Eyes (Rhys Darby, Badjelly), and Sebastian (Bryan Cranston, Isle of Dogs). The motive is all tied up in the little known knowledge that George was rich from his development of a salve for the sheep ailment Orf. The how was poison from a berry which initially implicates Rebecca, but it is the green hand that reveals her innocence... by way of sheep detecting, of course.

Ah-Ah-Argento #6: Deep Red

1975, d. Dario Argento - dvd

In my pale recollection of my first time going through some of Argento's filmography, Deep Red was a particular standout for one reason: the score. Goblin's intense compositions set the tone for horror movies for decades to come, though most don't realize it. To hear Goblin's main theme to the picture is to be reminded of an even more monumental composition, John Carpenter's main theme to Halloween. I love Carpenter, but yeah, it's evident he lifted perhaps the most famous sound in horror from Goblin's score to Deep Red. Good artists copy, great artists steal. 

(Now, to be clear, the Goblin score is largely pretty great, but it also sometimes descends into impenetrable prog rock, and on occasion doesn't fit the tone of the scene.)

But Carpenter isn't the only horror luminary to steal from this picture. It's hard to watch the opening sequence here, where a woman claiming to have telepathic powers, Helga Ulmann (Macha Méril, a real life russian princess) is on stage behind a table before a meagre audience in a theatre, and starts receiving horrifying thoughts that trouble and pain her.  I couldn't help but anticipate her vibrating until her head exploded - so much this reminded me of David Cronenberg's Scanners - but her head never did explode. She was pointing out that someone in the audience was possibly a murderer. 

Turns out Helga was right, and she is then targeted and murdered in her apartment. Her death is witnessed from the street by English jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), her downstairs neighbour. He rushes up to her apartment to help, but it's too late. He spies through the window a figure in a black raincoat and hat walking away.

Unable to get it out of his head, Marcus begins to investigate with the help of a plucky reporter Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nocolodi) and parapsychologist Professor Giordani (Glauco Mauri), though danger, and more murder, await him the deeper into the spiral he goes.

There's a reason Deep Red was cribbed by two of North America's greatest horror directors of the '70's and '80's, because it's a feast of incredible staging, framing, and cinematography. It's a vibrant work of horror that uses shadows as well as anyone has but also isn't afraid of colour. Practically every sequence is either visually stunning or creatively curious. Argento's penchant for point-of-view shots is on clear display and never more effective. 

Scripted with author (and Fellini collaborator) Bernardino Zapponi, Argento's Deep Red is still a giallo, but an apex giallo. The masterstroke of Deep Red is not its score, nor its visuals, but how effectively Argento makes every encounter Daly has in his investigation suspicious. Without leavening the paranoia, Argento shades every character in the story with just enough detail to make them a possible suspect. You would even think Daly himself a plausible suspect if not for the fact that we actually watched him watch Helga get murdered from the street three stories below. 

With all this going for it, it's then a shame that the story itself doesn't move as fluidly as it should. There are logical leaps that are made, which sometimes might be for pacing purposes, but other times just seems to either be hand waiving or not even considered. As is sometimes the norm for a giallo, there's barely a police presence at all, like some odd world where policing doesn't exist and it's up to the everyman to work through a crime. There's never a concrete reason as to why Daly gets as involved as he does in trying to solve Helga's murder, beyond it being necessary for the script that he does.

In spite of its arguably minor (but many) story flaws, Deep Red is deeply entertaining. It's a giallo that verges on slasher territory, dipping a cautious toe into horror and delighting in a few extreme death gags that are sometimes both grisly and hilarious.  After the disappointment of The Five Days it was a resounding return to form for Argento and an immense success. Its success would find Argeno bound to being a horror or horror-adjacent director for the rest of his career, but he always seemed pretty comfortable in that lane.

KsMIRT: all groaned up

 KsMIRT=Kent's month in reviewing television. I haven't reviewed television in a while. Truth be told, I find reviewing television frustrating, as I don't have the capacity to review episode by episode, nor do I have the capacity to really, really dive into a full season. So why bother with these half-assed reviews? I mean, how can I not? Can I not? 

This Month:
The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins Season 1 (2026, NBC - 10/10 episodes)
Deadloch Season 2 (2026, AmazonPrime - 6/6 episodes)
Last One Laughing UK Season 2 (2026, AmazonPrime - 6/6 episodes)
Star Wars: Maul: Shadow Lord (2026, Disney+ - 10/10 episodes)

---

One of the things I hate the most about my brain is how deplorably poor it is at remembering clever one-liners or turns of phrases from the media I watch. I'm so direly envious of those who can, like, the next day after watching a new show or movie, perfectly use a quote or reference in correct situational context. I mean, I would rather be funny on my own, but part of being funny is remembering one's own bits and I have a real hard time remembering to commit to a bit. (Toasty has a running gag on this blog of citing an obscure or absurd reference point when bringing up an actor in his entries, and when I try to do it, I can commit about 12% to the bit, often forgetting mid-post about the bit.... We could really do with an editor ... if we were striving for any sense of professionalism... which I gave up on long ago).

I say this because shows from the Tina Fey and Robert Carlock school of situational comedianity (30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girls 5Eva) are so, so amazing at one liners and ridiculous turns of phrase that I want desperately to remember so, so many of them, but it's a futile want...my brain just ain't wired that way.  The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins is another Carlock production, co-created with Sam Means (who wrote on all three of the aforementioned Fey/Carlock specials) and serves as a spotlight piece for Tracey Morgan (Cop Out).

Morgan plays the titular Reggie Dinkins, an ex-NFL pro who was the hottest draft pick one year and an instant icon, until a gambling scandal drove him out of the sport and into a reclusive lifestyle for two decades. Daniel Radcliffe (Swiss Army Man) plays Arthur Tobin, a certain-award-winning documentary filmmaker who has convinced Reggie to let him film him as he prepares to mount a comeback into the public spotlight. Tobin himself is trying to mount a comeback after an epic (and viral) meltdown on the set of a Marvel movie he was hired for, and then fired from. 

Reggie's ex-wife Monica (Erica Alexander, Wu-Tang: An American Saga) is still his manager and they have a very friendly and familiar relationship, but whatever was between them romantically is long since dead. Monica is likewise venturing out into new terrain as she explores taking on other clients, but is constantly interfered with by a rival organization run by Barry Hu (Ronnie Chang, The Devil Wears Prada 2).

Reggie and Monica's son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall, Space Jam: A New Legacy) is kid of privilege but seems to really love and admire his dad, but harbours secrets that he fears would shame his father...really, geeky secrets. Reggie's much younger fiancee, Brina (Precious Way), is much more than a gold digger, for her social media influencer empire is on the rise and she's making her own serious money. She actually loves Reggie, and somehow the show makes it work.  And then there's Reggie's best friend and former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynahan,Hoppers), who lives in the basement but is utterly committed and loyal to Reggie.

The gags are, as should be expected, a rapid fire, just an incredible barrage of ridiculous things often said ridiculous ways. There's some fantastic physical comedy (the peak, for me, was Rusty chasing a hard boiled egg he left in a pocket of his laundry and dives into the top-loader washing machine only to get stuck in the machine, vertically upright...and then it starts agitating) and a strong roster of recurring characters such as Reggie's sports rival (Craig Robinson) and Arthur Tobin's hook-up with a postal worker played by Megan Thee Stallion (just seeing the two of them in the same frame is wild...and kinda hot, the size difference and sexual tension is palpable).

Of course the show lives only at the whims of Tracey Morgan who is quite in the pocket on this one. While it may be hard to imagine Morgan as a genuine physical threat on the football field, his physicality is one of the greatest gifts to comedy especially when they "age down" Morgan for flashback sequences that barely try at all. But Morgan also delivers his one-liners with his trademark inflection and gusto, and the writers sharply swivel back and forth between making Reggie surprisingly astute, educated and pop-culture savvy and ridiculously lacking self-awareness and being a goof. The treat is how these two sides of the character don't really contradict one another.

Even among all the riches of gags there's still a heart to this show, a desire to see these down-but-not-out characters actually succeed (although there's a definite Lucy Van Pelt to the whole thing where just as success seems to come, the football is pulled away). Excited to hear Season 2 is coming.

---

I quite loved Deadloch's first season, so I was super bummed when Season 2 came out and I no longer had a subscription to AmazonPrime to watch it, and there were no viewing alternatives.  Eventually I would have to feed the Bezos machine my daily quarters to get access, but I wasn't going to like it. Would it sour my experience of watching things on the Amazon platform? Turns out, no, not so much.

Season 1 ended with a nice pat ending for the mystery/ies at hand but did as so many series do and attaches a coda to the end that teases where a second season might be heading. In this case it was having detectives Eddie Radcliffe (Madeline Sami) and her/their partner Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) investigate the death of Eddie's former partner, Bushy, with Dulcie's exhuberant wife Cath in tow.

It's kind of amusing then that within minutes of the first episode of season 2 we find Eddie's quest for justice being pretty decisively slammed down by the copious evidence that all but confirms Bushy's death was a suicide...a dated suicide note in his handwriting perhaps the most damning piece in a trove of them.

So if Bushy's death isn't going to be the thrust of this season, what is? Well, Eddie's gone completely mental about the verdict on Bushy's case that she's/they're reluctant to go along with Dulcie on the new case in which a dead crocodile near Barra Creek on the north shore of the continent was found with a severed arm in its mouth. Whose arm is it? Does it connect with the mystery of two missing Swedish backpackers? And what's with all the dead and missing crocs? 

It turns out Barra Creek is Eddie's hometown, and most of the people there know her/them, and with few positive associations. Eddie's father was recently released from prison and it turns out Eddie was the one that put him there, convicted of killing crocs, which are a protected species.

But there's so many other mysteries afoot that it's hard to connect them all, or to see if they're even all connected. Eddie is too close to the situation to see anything clearly and is even more unhinged than she/they were last season, while Dulcie is getting lost in process and procedure, being swallowed by the job, which starts interfering in her relationships with Eddie and Cath.

This season of Deadloch builds an insane community around Barra Creek that is only a pile of mysteries heavier than an Australian riff on Letterkenny. There's the animosity towards city folk, and all the cultural conflict between the indigenous population and the redneck hicks in town, as well as the competing croc tourism business which finds the small-potatoes Darrell family (whose patriarch may or may not be the owner of the dismembered arm) competing with the aggressively bro-polished attractions of Jason Wade's (Luke Hemsworth) croc park. It's a rich, and very specific world that's a bit of a romp to visit but, woof, would be so much rougher to experience for reals.

This season is densely packed with both mysteries to unravel (concurrently) and hilarious line readings, many of which I would never have caught without the subtitles on. So often characters are talking/yelling over each other or muttering under their breath that it's pretty astounding how absolutely razor sharp the dialogue and the portrayals are here.

Dulce and Eddie get a new assistant in Leo (Jean Tong), a low-level journalist who is so low-key people barely register that they're even in the room with them. Of course when perky, ultra-polite forensics expert Abby (Nina Oyama) happens on the scene - ecstatic to be reunited with her work moms - she's uncontrollably jealous of Leo, and acts out in hilariously rude (for her, yet still quite tame) ways.

As with last season, I found it amusing how much the showrunners/creators (Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan...no Kate McHarrison or Kate McStarr?) love to reveal that so many of the female characters in this show are lesbians (or queer-coded) and the jokes about lesbians (by lesbians for lesbians) as well as feminism (by feminists for feminists) are a salve for an entertainment reality that's starved for this kind of representation.

That Deadloch had two less episodes this season was a sure sign that the first season was strong enough for Amazon to give the series a second shot but that they didn't have much confidence in it growing its numbers the second time around. McCartney and McClennan close out the series in its final episode, and we find both Dulce and Eddie in quite different places by the end of this season from where they started, and the ending is a happy one, though sad if this is the last we'll ever see of these genuinely fantastic characters.

---

If I write about a reality TV show or a competition show or a panel show, I will usually do one season but not usually any more than that. I feel they're the type of show that if I'm not talking about the format then I really only have what happens to discuss, and usually there's too much to remember and write through (or too much of nothing, so nothing much to write about). Plus, quality can warble dramatically, and it can all be too much.

 That said, I feel particularly inspired to write about the second series of Last One Laughing UK, the show that got me to subscribe to AmazonPrime again (dammit).  

I discussed LOL Canada and LOL Australia back when LOL first cropped up and Amazon proliferated the format across the globe. It's interesting that the only (English language) one to have a second season is LOL UK, and I think that has to do with the fact that the UK is sooooo panel show/game/reality show intensive in a way I don't think any other country is. There's something fundamentally British about comedians faffing about in a loosely structured format that hasn't really transferred to other countries in quite the same way. The UK is a densely populated island, but it's also pretty small, which results in the comedy scene being relatively close knit in a way we don't see in Canada (due to its vastness) or in the US (due to its size and capitalistic competitiveness).  

The format of the show hasn't really changed... 10 comedians get in a room and they can't laugh or even smile broadly... if they do they get a yellow card, and if they do it again they get a red card. Monitoring them are Jimmy Carr and Roisin Conaty, which Jimmy acting as the sort of ringleader/emcee/Jigsaw of the piece. Though the pretense is that Carr and Conaty are eagle-eyed watching and then triggering the alarm if there's a laugh or a smile, the facade is less strict this season and there's an awareness the producers are feeding them the possibilities.  I wish there was even more transparency actually.  We are only seeing about 3 hours of what is probably an 8-10 hour shoot (the clock is set at 6 hours for them to be in the room, but I suspect with stopping and starting and various set-ups that it last a lot longer) and even then it's only what we're seeing of the edit (and it's clear there's at least one camera for every couple of performers tracking their movements and face). At times we the audience are seeing things that it seems Jimmy and Roisin are not... but it's always hard to know in what order things actually happened as opposed to the edit.

This second series of contestants is a great bunch and the reason I wanted to write up this series is because I had thoughts on their performance and the way the show may or may not have favoured them:

[SPOILERS WITHIN]

The majority of the contestants this season I know from watching Taskmaster, with a few exceptions. It just goes to show how great a show Taskmaster is at exposing the world to the UK comedy talents. Each contestant had to prepare a "joker", or a one-person performance of approximately 5 minutes in length.

• Romesh Ranganathan - an exceptionally prominent competitor, like, probably the most involved in everything throughout the show. His standup persona is very snarly, so he seemed like he would be a tough act, but he was always on the verge of breaking. Ramesh's joker was hammering on his lazy eye and then having prepared bits for the crowd to read which, honestly, needed to be more discomforting in most cases...but he did get one person to break.
• Diane Morgan - I haven't spent much time with Morgan's Philomina Cunk character, but Morgan seemed like an early frontronner because she should be used to being funny with a straight face as she often does this with the public as Cunk. Her joker was reading Dylan Thomas with fart breaks. Incredible. While not the most vicious player, she was definitely in the mix in the room.
• Gbemisola Ikumelo - a 2 time BAFTA award winning comedy actor/writer/showrunner, but never been on Taskmaster, so I have no idea who she is. She will go down in infamy on this show for her attempt to not react to Morgan's farts. Ikumelo was holding in the laughs to the point of pain and tears, until finally letting out a gutteral wail of a sob laugh at the end of Morgan's performance. Once eliminated she didn't hang around the green room long, having fallen ill. If I had to guess, a migraine, because surely that would happen to me too.  She was a great presence but didn't go on the offensive much. We didn't get to see her joker.
• Maisie Adam - a delight on Taskmaster season 20 doesn't seem to get much room to stretch here, at least until she goes face to face with Ramesh and the two of them start to basically roast one another. We don't get to see Maisie's joker, which is a shame. She's pretty involved in the room, but not heavy on offense.
• Amy Gledhill - a contestant on the current season of Taskmaster, where she's a very lively, vibrant presence. She was pretty recessed in the room. I have to suspect being a younger comic in the mix and the other contestants not being as familiar with her, that she wasn't as comfortable inserting herself into the more seasoned group engagements and perhaps wasn't as included or targeted in them. I think she was taken out on a cheap call though (maybe as likely because she wasn't as active a participant)
• Bob Mortimer - a legend, apparently, in the UK comedy scene, and the winner of season 1 of LOL (meh, I think Richard Ayoade gave him the win out of some sort of reverential deference), as well as a former Taskmaster contestant. I don't find his schtick very funny, I don't vibe with it, but clearly a whole generation of comedians find his shit uncontrollably hysterical. I was ready to riot if he were to be crowned winner again. His songs are dumb and his jokes seem to amuse himself more than anyone (though for some reason they are very amused). He was very involved in the whole thing and seemed comfortable in the environment being the reigning champ. His joker was abysmal, but again, the crowd seemed to love it. I dunno.
• Alan Carr - another comedy legend whom I've maybe heard of... but don't remember. He was all over the place in this one, and generally pretty funny throughout, although his joker was a bit... vintage... being a somewhat hastily constructed game show. He was giggling throughout the introduction so I thought he was an easy goner, but he stuck through well into the second half of the show.
• Mel Giedroyc - the host of the Great British Bake Off and a former Taskmaster contestant. She seemed to be an easy get, a real laugher before the show started, but she figured out her "game face" early on (sticking her lower jaw out any time she was about to laugh) and she went deeeep in this one. She was probably the most aggressive player and the one who was looking for opportunity. Her joker was a really bold physical performance which... was... very... interesting (according to David Mitchell).
• David Mitchell - a big time sketch and comedy series performer and actor who I'm quite familiar with. He was as in the mix as Mel, Ramesh, Alan, and Bob, and was seemingly perplexed the whole time.  Did he want to be there, or was that the persona he was playing, of someone who didn't want to be there, to distract him from laughing? He seemed to be acting the whole time. His joker was a terrific really bad first-time stand-up comic routine which was very droll. The only problem is the show clearly shows him smiling a number of times (at least two) and doesn't call him on it.
• Sam Campbell - the odds on favourite for the win because Sam is unflappable. Whenever someone seems to have a comedic edge on him he can completely undercut their bit in surprising and hilarious ways that seem like absolutely no big deal to him ("that's a serious issue" he says to Mitchell during a particularly funny "edgy" run in his bad-stand-up bit). Sam's joker was patentedly absurd, but he let the comedic glory be not himself, but the Tim and Eric-quality community theatre performers he had tag along in his ridiculous set piece. Sam didn't attack enough, though whenever he did chime in it was usually quite sharp. I vibe with Sam Campbell in a way I don't Bob Mortimer.

The winner of the Series was David Mitchell, and almost well earned, except for the fact of the show letting him off the hook for his various smiles. Neither he nor Sam got a yellow card, and so the final tiebreaker came down to who made the most other people laugh, and David won 2-to-one.  I think one of those smiles/yellow cards would have been the tiebreaker otherwise.  

It was a fun series, but the one thing I noticed was how weak the attacking was. On other series we would see competitors smell blood, seeing a comedian on the verge and they would just hammer on them until they broke, and nobody did that here. Mel was the closest, as was Diane Morgan at times. I also noticed that, unlike other LOL series the prize here was just a trophy, and no big charitable donation or prize money.  Also, this series didn't have much in the way of guest interjections. A notable British TV interviewer stepped in with a pretty funny series of interviews with the contestants, and Natasha Demetriou (of What We Do In The Shadows) and Ellie White came out of a cubby as "intimacy coordinators" and made everyone hilariously uncomfortable. Put them both in the next series.

Fun show. 

---

In the wake of The Mandalorian and Grogu's middling box office and middling critical reception, there's a lot of angsty blogging, youtubing, tiktokking and podcasting around the state of Star Wars today (present company not excluded), and what the future might bring under Dave Filoni's guiding hand as co-president of Lucasfilm. 

Filoni was brought aboard the Star Wars train by George Lucas himself, to assist Lucas in overseeing The Clone Wars, animation being Filoni's forte. The Clone Wars got off to a rocky start, with a middling theatrical release of the first four episodes as a film (that The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like four episodes of The Mandalorian is not lost on me), but by the second season of the series the kinks had sort of been ironed out, and the series wound up being the glue that holds the Prequel Trilogy together, rather than vice versa.

Filoni went on to create the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, definitely in my top 5 Star Wars projects ever, but that too was a series that took time to build, being enjoyable enough the first season but making itself epic and its characters involving in its second season, increasing in scope for its subsequent two seasons. 

Filoni's works since then have been more in the live action space but not ignoring animation. A revival seventh season of The Clone Wars was an epic capper to the series as well as dovetailing into Revenge of the Sith, while The Bad Batch explored the fallout of the Clone Wars through a new cast of characters and featured the trademark Filoni touch of being a bit rough around the edges the first season, but gelling quite firmly and endearingly the second. What Filoni brought to these projects were incredible character-building, expansive galaxy-building, and a commitment to not forgetting what came before.

While The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and particularly Asoka had Filoni-esque highlights, there's a large contingent of the Star Wars fan base that want live action to be treated differently than the animation, as more accessible, less addled by Star Wars lore.  They're probably right. And the worry is that under his hand the future of Star Wars is going to be an ouroboros.

So when you get a nothingburger like The Mandalorian and Grogu, that worry is justified, but then you also get Maul: Shadow Lord, which expels the issues with previous Filoni-created series and manages to get up and running in a matter of a couple short episodes, rather than an entire season. 

Sure, Maul is a legacy character who has been seemingly killed on screen at least twice already, and it may be a little confusing for any casual fan to understand in what time the series takes place, but it's a show that doesn't get bogged down with the past, and it's also not overly concerned (at least with this first season) with extensively tying itself to everything else Star Wars.

Maul, here (played once again impeccably by Sam Witwer), is our anti-hero, a man who has been wronged by his former master, Darth Sidious, now the Emperor Palpatine, and also full of loathing towards the Jedi, who have gotten in his way more than once. He had, previously, attempted to create a criminal empire to take on his former dark lord, and was not just squashed like a bug, but his brother was killed in the process. He is a traumatized figure whose powers and abilities are both fueled and crippled by that trauma.

His goal, then, is to re-establish a criminal empire, as well as find himself an apprentice to help him take on his former master. The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive goals, but also focusing on both detracts from focus on the other.

On a remote planet, Janix, Maul operates in the shadows, but not deeply enough. His criminal doings have raised the attention of Brander Lawson, an inspector of the local police force played brilliantly by Wagner Maura. Lawson begins investigating Maul's operation and eventually confronts the villain, but is given a proposition, one which a good cop like him cannot accept.

Also entering the picture are Jedi master Eeko-Dio Daki (voiced by Dennis Haysbert) and his padewan Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon). They too are living in the shadows of Janix, scrounging for whatever they can get on the streets, when they confront the former Sith. 

But soon, enemies must be allies on all fronts, as the Empire becomes alerted to Maul's presence and a pair of Inquisitors begin hunting the Jedi and Sith down. As well there's a Star Destroyer full of Imperial troops and bureaucrats locking the planet down, and while it's not quite as invested in highlighting the grip of totalitarianism as Andor was, it's still unsettling and effective in showing how these types of agencies operate in tearing down existing structures of order and imposing their own.

Maul: Shadow Lord surprises at building a cast of characters worth caring about, investing us as equally in Lawson, his son, and his robot partner Two-Boots (Richard Ayoade) as we are with Master Daki and Devon as we are with Maul and his coterie.  We just know that at some point Maul has to turn on Daki and get Devon on his side. That could be a horribly clunky moment if done wrong, and at a certain point we wonder if it's going to happen at all, the show lulling us into a false sense of allyship between the parties. It's honestly surprisingly brilliant in how its story unfolds.

And then there's an epic clash that we thought would be reserved for a second season, but this show is wasting no time. It's not Filoni-pfaffing-about in its first season. It's kinetic and propulsive and easily consumable...too consumable. It is the Pringles of Star Wars, just salt, starch and grease making you crave more, and once it's over, the craving doesn't go away, only becoming stronger in its absence.

If the future isn't so bright for Star Wars live action, at least we know animation is going to be more than okay.

KWIF: The Sheep Detectives (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I originally had a snarky comment closing out last week's review of Mortal Kombat II where I was lamenting having seen the video game adaptation instead of seeing the one about investigative ewes. I deleted the comment because I had already heard that The Sheep Detectives was actually, surprisingly, a pretty decent film, and that neuters the joke a little bit. Plus, I was going to see The Sheep Detectives anyway, so there never really was an either/or decision in the first place.

This Week:
The Sheep Detectives (2026, d. Kyle Balda - in theatre)
Mile End Kicks (2025, d. Chandler Levack - in theatre)
Dark City (1998, d. Alexander Proyas - DVD)

---

I must have seen the trailer for The Sheep Detectives about a dozen times, most of them in the form of a preview before the screening of one film or another. Every time the trailer would start, I would balk at the very concept of a live-action movie about cgi sheep attempting to solve the murder of their shepherd. And yet, by the end of the trailer, every time, I was completely sold. Well, I guess not completely since the very same cycle would start anew the next time I would see the trailer.

It is, without a doubt, an absurd concept, but absurdity doesn't innately make for a film bad, and often the very absurd nature of a story's conceit is what makes it stand out, what makes it good, different and exciting.

I've been hearing a lot of comparisons to Paddington bandied about, but The Sheep Detectives really takes a greater nod from Babe, in that it's set in the real world, but when the humans aren't around the animals are speaking to each other. Yes, there are plenty of jokes where we watch the sheep talk in English and then cut to a human POV just to see them bleating at each other...and it's never. not. funny! (Director Balda is kind of restrained in his use of this gag to be honest, maximizing it's efficacy.)

Based on a 2005 German novel, this is "cozy mystery" at its coziest... I mean, we're talking wool coats for days, right? But the real surprise is that the mystery is not the most captivating part of the film. The reason The Sheep Detectives works so well is it establishes characters and it establishes a community (mainly with the sheep, but also with the humans) and it establishes a tangible world for them to inhabit. In this world, sheep are intelligent creatures. They sit and listen to farmer George (Hugh Jackman, X-Men: Origins: Wolverine) read mystery novels in the evening, and Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jack the Bear), George's favourite sheep, always solves the mystery before the end. George has a reputation about town of being a prickly bastard, but he's a kind and gentle loner who adores his sheep above all. He opens our story by narrating the letter he's writing to, it turns out, his daughter whom he gave up for adoption three decades ago (Molly Gordon, The Bear).

The sheep, we quickly learn, have the ability to force themselves to forget, which they do as a collective. Only Mopple (Chris O'Dowd, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) can remember the past. The sheep believe that they don't die but turn into clouds. Mopple knows the truth, but lets them have their comforts. Otherwise their understanding of death is restricted only to the stories George tells them, so when George turns up dead, the sheep community is rocked.

So too is the human community of the English town of Denbrook. The kind of hapless town constable Officer Derry (Nicholas Braun, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) is completely incapable of handling any sort of death, nevermind a murder. A wayward aspiring reporter (Nicholas Galitzine, Handsome Devil) seems intent on helping him break the case for his own reasons. The suspects are all in George's will, including the town butcher, a rival shepherd, the lovelorn innkeeper, and George's estranged daughter who just happened into town the day of his death.

In a conventional story, there would be much mileage about the sheep working through each of the suspects and eliminating them as the possible murderer. Instead, The Sheep Detectives is far more interested in the sheep community, and expanding their horizons. There is the whole concept in this community of a "winter sheep". Most sheep, they say, are born in the spring, but the occasional sheep is born in the winter, and they are shunned by the herd. And so a tiny, unnamed lamb George loves dearly, but is rejected by all. Part of the story is the herd confronting their prejudices, but in a roundabout way.  Even upon learning that their greatest ram, Sebastian (Bryan Cranston, Kung Fu Panda 3), is a winter sheep, it takes a lot before the herd truly understands the harm of their prejudice.

But that's just one facet of what these sheep need to learn. They have to leave the familiar safety of their farm and venture out into the world, where they are exposed to the realities they've otherwise chosen to forget. It's a potent moment when Lily realizes that Mopple has had to live with everything they've forgotten, but Mopple presents it as something beautiful, not horrible.

I'm not doing the best job of selling The Sheep Detectives but, to be blunt, I absolutely adored it. Funny, charming, sweet, sincere with a, yes, cozy mystery at its core to keep things moving, but just a delightful cast of characters and some of the most rewarding emotional stringpulls in some time... I cried at least three times and it earned every one of those tears. I never resented the film for them.

There is no reason The Sheep Detectives should be as good as it is, but we're so lucky that it is. A large contingent of my early-evening Wednesday screening applauded at the end of the film. I joined in. There was no one there to receive the applause, but it felt like the right way of mutually socially acknowledging that we all had a genuine emotional reaction to this film, and that we appreciated it. I do not recall the last time that happened.

---

Love the pseudo-American Apparel-
style poster for this film. Perfection

Mile End Kicks first shot is inside Toronto's legendary Horseshoe tavern. The band Islands is playing a gig. I am transported back in time.

Despite the caption "2011", I am transported to 2005, to seeing Islands in their earliest incarnation, possibly at the Horseshoe, but maybe at the Rivoli or Lee's Palace or some other joint and perhaps during the North By Northeast festival. Anyway, I'm there. I'm in. It has me. It took the film all of 9 seconds to completely reel me in.

By 2011 I was out of regular "gigging", going to shows around town, and certainly out of the pretense that my photographing and reviewing of such shows (sometimes for online media outlets, most often just for personal blogging) was a career path. Grace (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria) is 22 years old and already has a foothold in journalism.  She has four hundred articles in the local newspaper she's been writing for, including investigative journalism, interviews, and writing a sex column, as well as music reviews. She ponders the idea of writing a "33 1/3" volume on Alanis Morissette's album "Jagged Little Pill". Her boss at the paper (Jay Baruchel) thinks it's a great idea, and hooks her up with the "33 1/3" publisher who likes her take and gives her a small advance to write the book, but it needs to be done quickly.

The next we see of Grace, she's on a bus to Montreal for the summer, giving the middle finger to T.dot on her way out. Her mom doesn't understand why she has this sudden impulse to move elsewhere, and her dad...well, just seems depressed. Grace has a top 5 list of what she wants her summer in Montreal to be: write her book on Alanis, have real sex, climb Mount Royal, learn French and fall in love, probably not in that order.

She's renting a room in Montreal's Mile End from Madeline (Juliette Gariépy, Red Rooms) a hot DJ whose boyfriend Hugo (Robert Naylor) plays in a rock band called Bone Patrol. Madeline is super friendly and wants to be pals, while Grace is a bit reserved and really wants to focus on her writing. But Madeline insists she come to a loft party where she is DJing and Bone Patrol is playing. At the party, unfamiliar with the Montreal scene, Grace retreats to an outdoor space where she meets Archie (Devon Bostick, Diary of a Wimpy Kid) the bassist for Bone Patrol, and they form an immediate kinship... but when the band finally plays, Grace has a rather visceral reaction to Chevy (Stanley Simons, The Iron Claw), Bone Patrol's frontman. She chats him up and he's the most up-his-own-ass pretentious, faux-ambivalent, self-involved shitheel, but Grace can't see past his stage mystique.

Mile End Kicks is about Grace's epic summer in Montreal, becoming part of it's 2010's hipster scene and getting waaay too invested in a guy who can only ever think about himself (and even then not that deeply). There's an obvious love triangle happening between Grace, Archie and Chevy, but the will-they/won't-they isn't really the thrust of the movie. It's more of a "what the fuck, Grace?" as her logic just cannot find a way to overrule her libido when it comes to Chevy, and Archie pre-emptively takes himself out of the equation.

Mile End Kicks is about Grace building up her life, but also feeling completely helpless as it starts to crash down around her. A lesser film would have spent more time and energy on making more direct connections between Grace's life and the songs of "Jagged Little Pill", but the film doesn't need to link them firmly at all. Grace's fall from grace happens for many, many reasons, (almost all her own) and her only way out of the pit she's fallen into is to find self respect and confidence, to engage the world on her own terms rather than feel like she has to be deferential to the men she finds in the circles she's in.

There's an excellent, fundamental moment early in the movie where some of the men of the paper she's working at are having a debate over a couple of bands. It's clear she's not invited to this conversation and when she interjects her own input, she is dismissed immediately and, to put a finer point on it, laughed at. Late it the film (when she's back on her upswing) she reads an insightful and incisive text at a poetry slam about not just this explicit experience but all the general outside-the-circle-of-men experiences women have everywhere. It's a terrific 1-2-3 execution (especially when Grace returns to the bullpen late in the film).  I have witnessed these types of situations so many time (even well into adulthood) and have probably been a party to them more often than I've been cognizant of or care to admit. It's institutionalized sexism that often we (meaning men) are not even aware of. I mean I was aware of it before this film, but praise it for actually making it a part of the conversation.

The film contains three (or perhaps even four) of the most awkward make-out scenes I think I've ever seen on film. Given that Grace is our POV character, she's mostly not the one being awkward so our cringe isn't a sympathetic one but more of an "oh gods, what the eff" type of cringe. It's almost all Chevy and that boy, wow, is a fucking mess.  Either Levack dated a guy just like this or knew someone who had. The hyper-specificity here is too crazy to be made up.

The film effectively uses its setting as a real "Montreal is a main character" film, and it definitely captures what the Canadian hipster "scene" was like at the time (Toronto, a few years earlier, wasn't that much different, nor likely was Vancouver a few years before that, or Halifax a few years before that...the "it" scene sort of cycles through the major Canadian centers in five-ish-year spans). It effectively seeds in the tension in Montreal's art scene that's so distinct to it (the outsiders that come in and the French-English divide between them, as well as the Toronto resentment)

Mile End Kicks is a film about being in your 20's and fucking up, but also about learning from your mistakes and growing as a person, and understanding that you'll continue to make mistakes (just hopefully new ones, and not repeating them). It's also about empowerment, and while not being so aggressively Alanis about it, it's still a pretty bold awakening.

 ---

I had not watched Dark City for a very, very long time, though I had carried the DVD of it with me to at least a dozen different residences over the years. It would have been one of the first DVDs I bought, but I have no recollection if I ever actually put it in a DVD player and watched the film it contained.

A friend recently brought up the film, noting that clips of it had been popping up in one of his feeds ... somewhere. I recall that I liked the film way back when, and it has maintained a decent if not stellar reputation in the meantime... but would it hold up? Would I still even like it? Does the disc even work or has it succumbed to disc rot?

Turns out, mostly, mostly and yes, the disc still works wonderfully.

The most unfortunate thing about Dark City is that it opens with a narration from Kiefer Sutherland's Dr. Daniel Schreiber. Schreiber exposits about an advanced alien civilization late in its decline looking for some hope of salvation, and that hope is human. Schreiber is helping them in their experiments on humanity, and this film, then, in theory, unpacks just what that experiment is.

The second most unfortunate thing about Dark City is the affectation that Sutherland imbues Schreiber with. He gives the character an out-of-breath speech pattern, speaking in short bursts (not unlike Malcolm's asthmatic friend Stevie on Malcolm in the Middle). It's really a hat-on-a-hat as Schreiber also has a scarred lazy eye and a severe limp as well. Sutherland was making choices.

A few minutes in the proper film starts as Rufus Sewell's John Murdock awakens in the bathtub of a grimy hotel, completely unaware of where or who he is. He receives a phone call from Schreiber warning him some men will be after him, and he needs to leave immediately...it's then that he notices the dead sex worker on the ground with spirals and other sigils carved into her skin.  He moves with haste, just as a quartet of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers show up and check out his freshly abandoned place.

The streets of Dark City are just that, dark, dimly lit. Every light seems like a spotlight only illuminating in a cone shape exactly what it's pointing at. Also at midnight, the society of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers use their psionic abilities (called "tuning") to cause the entire city to grind to a halt, and it's denizens to go inert and unconscious. They also reconfigure the entire city, buildings twist up out of the ground forcing other buildings to shrink or retreat without causing any true damage to speak of. Reality bends to their whims...almost.  But these creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers need Dr. Schreiber to concoct new memories for the citizens of this dark city which most citizens have had done a few times over.

But it's John Murdock who has somehow repelled the new personality application and also developed the same tuning powers as the creepy overlords. He poses a genuine threat to the order of things.

As we learn all this, there's also a mystery... is John a murderer. His estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) can't conceive of it, and even John himself has to test whether indeed the impulses are there or if he's truly capable of being a psychopathic killer. The detective on the case, Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) can't see any other options, because to do so would be to admit that reality is not all that it seems.  While Sewell's efforts as Murdock are genuinely quite good, there's a case to be made that this works better if Bumstead is it's main figure trying to solve a murder and unraveling the case of John Murdock, which then leads to the revelation of where they actually are and who is actually in charge and why.

Dark City is a really decent sci-fi neo-noir that doesn't always tease its mystery in an efficient or effective manner (especially since the opening voice over gives up so much of the surprise), but the exceptional special effects (for the most part) and shadow-laden atmosphere of the picture do so much of the heavy lifting to keep things engaging when the story may falter. Even 28 years later, on one of the oldest DVD pressings in my collection, the film still looks really good, the copious practical effects, sets and miniatures and the well-masked digital effects standing up very very well.

The third most unfortunate thing about Dark City then is the climax is such utter nonsense. Murdock goes tete-a-tete with "tuning" powers against the...leader? (of a hive mind?) I guess of the creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers... and there's nothing more boring that two characters trapped in a mental battle just leering at each other while crazy cgi bullshit swirls all around them.  It's such a let down given some of the film's strengths prior to that point.

The fourth most unfortunate thing is how sleepy Jennifer Connelly is in the role of Emma Murdoch. I can hazard a guess that she's been told to play the character as if she's just had a lifetime of memories slammed into her brain only the night before, so she's effectively a new, but confused person...but for some reason that gets relayed as sedate, with most every line delivered in an unaffected monotone. She's a much better actress than this performance.

But a few unfortunates aside, Dark City holds up as a solid watch. Perhaps it's not the monumental sci-fi story of it's generation (hard to be when The Matrix comes along 13 months later) but it's got very little to be embarassed about, and despite not hiding what could have been some great surprises, still has a surprise or two under its belt.

KWIF: Sisu: Road to Revenge (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Lady Kent was down with the same cold that took me out last week, so weirdly I watched more movies this week than when I was down and out last week. It's all international cinema cinema week: Finland! "Persia"! Australia! Italy!

This Week:
Sisu: Road to Revenge (2025, d.  Jalmari Helander - crave)
Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989, d. Luigi Cozzi - tubi)
Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975, d. Peter Weir - xumo)
Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out - 1973, d. Duccio Tessari - tubi)

---

The first Sisu was a cartoon orgy of violence, but underneath it beat the heart of Finnish pride, fortitude and resilience. If there was a message to Sisu it was to tell the world that Finns are tough motherfuckers.  

But Sisu also set itself in a time and place that it didn't really explain. If you're Finnish or familiar with it's history (particularly during World War II) there was no explanation needed. I on the other had had to do some digging. It was a complicated situation with Finland already engaged in conflict with Russia when other battles in Europe started. Sisu took place at the end of World War II, with the Germans set to return home, but attempting to take as much with them as they could before they left, including the gold grizzled veteran Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) had just found.

I don't fully understand the timelines, but Road to Revenge, takes place shortly after the end of World War II, so I assume not long after the first film, just enough time for Korpi to heal. A treaty with Russia saw the ceding of much of Karelia (on the southeastern side of the country) to the Russians, with its citizens of the area being forced to leave within ten days. Korpi's home, which he built himself, remains in the ceded terrain. He crosses the new Russian border with a massive, massive truck, where he deconstructs the home and loads the truck on his own.

His border crossing, however, raises awareness that Koschei ("The Immortal") is in the country. Korpi had infamously killed 300 Russians himself in a rageful tear following the murder of his wife an children. A KGB Officer (Richard Brake) frees the man responsible for killing Korpi's family -- the war criminal Yeagor Dragunov (Stephen Lang) -- from his prison and gives him the resources to, quote "destroy the legend you created and you will go back home a rich man".

And so Korpi and his massive truck and big pile of wood have to travel the 120 kilometers from where his home once stood back to the border...chased by trucks, motorcycles, and airplanes. It's a scaled-down Fury Road but director Jalmari Helander continues to prove he's got the action goods. A lot of wild craziness happens along the way, beyond logic but gleefully entertaining.

The last act takes place on a train, and gets Koschei back into physical action, with some fun setpieces like traversing through the two sleeping quarters without awakening the soldiers (or taking care of them should they stir). The final duel between Korpi and Dragunov is maybe too slow and unrefined to be truely Wick-ian, but it's only one small moment in this 89-minute deluge of violence and survival.

Tommila doesn't speak a word the entire film, and this lack of dialogue really strips the film down to the barest of actions and emotions. Where Brake or Lang might have more to say, there's still likely no more than two or three pages of dialogue, max in the entire film. Whereas the first Sisu felt like a nuveau western, this one feels almost more like a samurai film...but with guns and vehicles and whatnot...but the same attitudes apply.

Helander's next film will see the director's first American production, being brought aboard to helm the John Rambo prequel starring Noah Centineo in the title role. I have no idea what the story might possibly be like, but I'm excited to see what Helander can do with big hollywood franchise budget.

---

One of the final releases of legendary 80's B-movie studio Cannon Film, Sinbad of the Seven Seas stars famous muscleman and former Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno as the storied Persian hero, Sinbad the Sailor. Yes, that's right, Italian-American Lou Ferrigno plays Sinbad. Seems a natural fit to me [/sarcasm].

The story is set largely in Basra, which the filmmakers seem to know as much about as I do, which is to say, nothing at all. All the characters here are played by white and/or Italian actors, nary a middle-eastern among them. If this seems like it could be offensive, it would be, if anyone, anyone at all were trying to convincingly portray this as an authentic tale. As it stands, it's one of the least egregious of its cinematic sins, afterall, Sinbad has been portrayed by white actors many times in the past (and will again...RIP Patrick Muldoon).

But Sinbad of the Seven Seas lies to its audience from the moment the film starts. Before its title card, a chunky block of text mentions how famed author Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote an additional adventure for Sinbad titled "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" and that this is an adaptation of that story. It is not. Not in the slightest.

As legend on this film goes, writer-director Luigi Cozzi (who had directed Ferrigno in two Hercules films for Cannon in the mid-1980s) had written the screenplay for Sinbad and the Seven Seas, but was (for unclear reasons) dismissed from the project and it was handed to Enzo G. Castellari. Castellari would proceed to make substantial changes to the script and then proceed to produce an unreleaseable three-hour film. The film sat on the shelf for years before Cozzi was hired back to make some sense of it, to salvage something out of the whole production.

And so, the film's story does not begin with Sinbad and crew on his boat, or in the city of Basra, or in Baghdad or anywhere fantastical, it starts in a bedroom, with a child (Cozzi's daughter) being read a story by her mother, played by Daria Nicolodi.  Nicolodi will proceed to narrato over a large portion of the film. The touchpoint might seem to be The Princess Bride for this framing sequence, but really, it's just a way of trimming down 3 hours of garbage footage into a barely, if you squint, serviceable 93 minute series of adventures.

The wicked vizier Jaffar (portrayed by English white guy John Steiner, it's a variation on Aladdin's Jafar both of which hearken back to The Thief of Baghdad films rather than One Thousand and One Nights) is fixated on the Caliph's daughter, Princess Alina [Alessandra Martines, a French-Italian white lady]. She is involved with Sinbad's ship-mate Prince Ali, but he's been away adventuring. The vizier steals the town's sacred gems of power, keeping one for himself and dispersing the rest across the seas. He then hypnotizes the Caliph into doing his bidding, including telling Alina to marry Jaffar. She refuses and thus is strapped to a fantastical chamber designed to (verrrry slooooowly) sap her of her will. She will marry him some day). When Hercules...I mean Sinbad and crew arrive in Basra, they beat up some bad guys, get captured, break free and then set out on a quest to find the four gems of power (but not before Sinbad escapes from a pit of cobras by *checks notes* making friends with the cobras and then tying them together to form a rope for him to climb out of.  You know how you make friends with wild creatures [totally normal] and then twist their bodies together, with their consent of course [nothing unusual, at all] and then climb them [all checks out, do it all the time].

The majority of the adventures of Sinbad and his crew (consisting of handsome Prince Ali [white guy], Cheropolis "the bald cook" [another white guy], Poochie the dwarf [not a rapping dog, but a white guy], Viking [played by an Italian actor, not a Scandanavian] and the Chinese mercenary Cantu [played by a Japanese-Italian actor]) are narrated over with the action or conversation or both happening silently under the narration from Nicolodi (yes, we see the characters have an exchange and our narrator explains what they are saying], all the while accompanied by the of shoddiest of synth scores.  

In the first stop, he fights a rock monster that shoots lasers from its head. Sinbad must use feats of his notorious Sinbad strength to defeat it and retrieve the gem from its head. In the second, Sinbad and most of the crew (except Bald Cook and Poochie) head to the isle of the amazons where their notorious beauty finds them immediately under their sway (except Prince Ali who seems to be psychically connected to Princess Alina for some reason). If not for Bald Cook and Poochie coming to the rescue with an magical anti-hypnosis potion...I don't know what would have happened, actually. The Amazon queen Farida was played by the stunning actress Melonee Rodgers, a Black, possibly American actress (there's not much available detail on her and seeing as she had no speaking lines left in the film - which doesn't really matter since all lines were dubbed anyway by different actors, except Steiner and one or two others) and all the Amazons were black, which I thought was fantastic...except when Queen Farida has her gem of power taken from her and she turns into an old lady...well, it's just some old Italian lady in blackface. Yeah. Woof.

During the adventures, we constantly check back in with Jaffar, and how progress is going on sapping Princess Alina of her will. The movie makes it seem like Sinbad's voyages are only taking him the better part of an afternoon in total and not days or weeks of sailing the seas. He tries to interfere from afar, but seems to only be able to do anything sometimes for some reason and most of the time looks like a sweaty guy whose going to lose his kneecaps if the team he's watching doesn't lose the match. He's also joined, bafflingly, by the witch Soukra (played by American bodybuilder Teagan, the only other actor not to be dubbed, it seems) for seemingly no reason. Jaffar sort of acts like she's the one who will break his kneecaps if his bet doesn't pay off.

The third adventures finds Jafar sending a gust of wind to send Sinbad's ship ashore (but why send them to the very island that contains the gem they're looking for Jaffar? The guy is an idiot). There they face, ghosts or something...? I dunno, I fell asleep for a bit. 

When I woke up Sinbad was having a conversation with Kira (another white lady), daughter of Nadir the wizard who speaks in gibberish. They landed on the Isle of the Dead in a balloon. They are jumped by a gang of ghouls, and while Kira puts up a good fight, which Hercules, I mean Sinbad immediately falls in love with her over, she gets kidnapped along with her father. Sinbad mounts his rescue but must face the Lord of Darkness, who is like a pot-bellied Swamp Thing who shoots lasers from his hands. Hercules uses his own gems of powers to shoot lasers and destroy the big gooey plant then head home with Kira and her goof-talkin' father in tow.

The big show-down is ...well, not so big. Hercules/Sinbad rescues Princess Alina and defeats Jaffar, but not before facing a Jaffar-controlled mirror version of himself in a match of strength and cunning. Ali and Alina are married, and so are not-Hercules and Kira, the end, go to sleep kid.

There were little glimmers that maybe the original production, under Castellari, was aiming for high camp, but the structure Cozzi rescues the picture with leaves a lot of the camp off to the side, sneaking in only occasionally. But it's obvious from the footage and dialogue left in why Castellari's first draft of this was considered unreleaseable: it's really really bad. I could never get past the idea of Ferrigno as Sinbad. As witnessed above, my brain kept defaulting to him as Hercules, and it would seem Castelli did too. Sinbad is not a legendary strongman, and yet so much of what Ferrigno does here is "feats of strength".

In the right setting, Sinbad of the Seven Seas might be a so-bad-it's-amazing cult classic, but as a tired adult just looking for a break from having to think about shit, this was just an awful 90 minutes. I had more fun recapping it above than watching it.

---

I was introduced to Picnic at Hanging Rock by a friend who I met on a dating website almost exactly 20 years ago. It was an odd time. We'd both recently gotten out of long term relationships and we were trying to figure out the next phase of our lives. We really clicked, but emotionally we just weren't ready for anything other than friendship. It was a friendship that forged quickly but not strong enough to survive eventual physical distance and other life demands (babies) and, frankly, the friendship-subverting suckhole that was facebook (it gives the illusion of being in contact without being meaningful contact in any way). Strangely, Picnic at Hanging Rock was the shared experience most cemented into my mind of that friendship, watching a VHS copy borrowed from the library on a strange couch in a brightly lit room next to a new friend where we were still trying to figure out our dynamic. 

At that time I went into watching Picnic... with a pre-conceived distaste for Peter Weir, having had a high-school art teacher who was a Weir fan and would play us Dead Poets Society, Green Book and Fearless in class at least once per semester...for inspiration? These were not really inspirational films to a 14-17 year old. They were grown-up films for parents.

At that time I found Picnic... a bit confounding. The film starts by letting you know that the titular picnic would end in some sort of tragedy, just as the film's poster does. "On St. Valentines Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock... some were never to return." It's an ominous, and it implies something sinister, something terrifying, something harrowing perhaps. The implication is there will be, at least, something to raise one's blood pressure in watching this film...and there is not. Not really.

It is a film that stuck with me though, left an impression. It's not just a totem but a representative point for a very specific, transitional moment of my life. My memory of the film is nothing to do with plot or characters, but images and tones.

This rewatch reaffirmed that it is a tranquil, vibes-based movie above all, loaded with melancholy (and the tranquil tones of Zamfir's pan flute) 

The girls are aflutter not for their picnic trip but for a Valentines card someone received. Where most of the kids are privileged, some are sponsored, such as Sara, an orphan who is kept behind from the trip because...well, I'm not exactly sure. We don't spend much time with any of the other girl to really get to know them, but there is focus on Miranda, the pretty and independent-minded blonde, and Edith, the cliched fat girl who whines about physical effort and is seen eating.  There at least doesn't seem to be any bullying, at least not in the traditional sense...not at this point. 

At the picnic site is already a young Englishman, Michael, who is there with his parents (grandparents?), and their driver, Albert, who Michael makes friends with. The presence of the girls is instantly exciting to them, and though Albert makes some crude comments to Michael which he finds distasteful, the girls don't even notice they are there.

Miranda, Edith and two others decide to venture up the rock (more than 500 feet high it is!), and they push themselves up until they can seemingly go no further. But they find a crevasse and venture into it, except Edith, who freaks out. She runs down the hill, the others are gone... as if purposefully taken by the rock. A teacher stays behind as the rest of the girls are sent home, and she disappears as well. End of act one.

The rest of the film covers next few hours, days and weeks that follow. There is a manhunt and an investigation. Both Albert and Michael are looked at and then dismissed. Both young men are troubled by thoughts and dreams of the missing girls, with Michael seemingly haunted by Miranda specifically. Michael takes on a dangerous solo search which he nearly dies from, and when Albert picks up the trail, he finds Irma, near death.

The school is in disarray. The teachers are having breakdowns, some kids leave school altogether, and Sara falls ill. Irma remembers nothing and has no answers. She's harassed by the other girls when she returns to visit. Everything's collapsing because nobody can process the tragedy. It's not being swept under the rug, but it's also not being addressed either.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a horror movie, but it is a haunting picture. It's hard not to be affected by watching others unravel in the wake of tragedy, unable to make sense of it and not having the support knowledge or infrastructure to work through it. With years in between, and some further exploration of the film and story in the meantime, I respect the picture even if I still have a hard time with its storytelling decisions and the routes it does not take.

It took some additional contemplation to realize that this is not a film about the incident, despite the title. It's not about the disappearance, but a story about the school, and the impact the incident has on it and the people within it.  That's a defined choice made by the storytellers (be it original novel author Joan Lindsay, or screenwriter Cliff Green, or director Weir) not to answer questions, not to give a resolution. It may be unsatisfying but it's most definitely intentional.  It's a film that has, in a way, haunted me for 20 years now, and I think that will never go away.

---

I have a watchlist on Letterboxd that I don't consult very often, but any time I do I'm bound to ask the question of "what the hell is that?" to about two-thirds of what's on there. My tastes and interests are mercurial to the point of self-aggravation and self-annoyance. I have to be in the right mood or zone to watch something, so just because I don't feel like watching it now doesn't mean I won't want to watch it later. But also, a lot of what is on my Letterboxd list is obscurities that, well, just won't be cropping up on any of the "mainstream" streamers I most regularly have access to.

But then there's Tubi, always full of surprises. I don't love the streamer, primarily because it's owned by Fox, but also because it has ads (which used to be all Fox News-based ads, but now just seem to be targeted Canadian market ads for dish soap and such), and no standards. You can find a lot of great stuff on Tubi, but in terrible quality streaming speed, bad digital transfers, godawful audio and frequently without closed captioning (a terrible combo for a half-deaf guy like me).

I don't know how the Italian action-thriller Big Guns (aka Tony Arzenta aka No Way Out) wound up on my Letterboxd list but I'm sure glad it did, and I'm also so happy it was among Tubi's fairly decent selection (if not decent quality) of Italian 70's crime pictures.

This one stars Alain Delon, the handsome French actor who played one of the first notable on-screen hitmen in Le Samourai, back again playing another hitman, but this time also a family man, and he wants out. He's done. No more killing for him. Except the consortium of mobsters he works for aren't willing to let him go and they know there's no talking him out of it.

And so before John Wick, before The Punisher, before Death Wish here we have an anti-hero whose wife and child are killed (accidentally mind you) and the response is basically warfare in the streets, one against one hundred.

Delon is Tony Arzenta, an astute, savvy, steely killer who has been wronged, and there's only one way to make right. He's going to dismantle multiple crime syndicates from the top down. At first Arzenta makes his plans and executes them, although not always with ruthless precision, it's a fight from the jump. The mob bosses aren't just sitting back, they have their own schemes as well, setting Tony up so that he has to improvise his escapes. The police are monitoring the situation, but they're sitting back. They're, in a way, buffering for Tony as they see him doing them a service, cleaning up all these syndicates for them.

Tony's bloodlust takes him from from Milan to Copenhagen, murdering on the street and on trains, wherever the opportunity needs to occur. He's not alone, he's aided by his pal Domenico (Marc Porel) and Sandra (Carla Gravina), as well as an ex-dom now living life as a priest who looks out for Tony's parents. 

The film isn't solely told from Tony's perspective and spends plenty of time with the various mafia dons as they start renegotiating territories as Tony picks them off one by one. But there's always one been one don, Nick Gusto (Richard Conte) who didn't want any of this and had tried numerous times to convince the consortium to push for piece. It's only when he's the last one left does he really have any sway, and it all leads to Tony's invitation to Don Gusto's daughter's wedding, and the tense, anything-can-happen environment.

Nothing about it is as straightforward. Tony seems to have ice in his veins, but family, friendships, these have meaning for him, it's where he's vulnerable and he knows it. The scenes where he brings Sandra to stay with his parents, and the awkward-yet-sweet encounters that occur there. There's no definition to what Tony and Sandra are to each other, except that they're family now.

I loved this movie. I'll be eagle eyed looking out for a physical media release. It deserves some special treatment.