Ah-Ah-Argento #5: The Five Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KWIF The Secret Agent (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It's Olympics week, full of figure skating controversies, ski jumping controversies, and yes, even curling controversies. All it really left time for was a Saturday double feature at the movies.

This Week:
The Secret Agent (aka "O Agente Secreto" - 2025, d. Kleber Mendonça Filho - in theatre)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026, d. Gore Verbinski - in theatre)
Summer of the Colt ("Tales for all #8", 1989, d. André Melançon - Crave)

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The Secret Agent is the latest of unlikely critical darlings to transcend the festival circuit into both audience attention and awards acclaim. The Brazilian film debuted at Cannes where it won best actor for Wagner Moura and best director for Filho and has now achieved the rare double nomination at the Oscars for Best Foreign Feature and Best Feature, along with other nods its way. 

I've been keen on seeing the film since it's Cannes triumph, intrigued by the title and its 1977 setting because I'm sort of an espionage guy. I knew little else going in, other than many critics casually described it as "weird", and "not really a spy movie". I hadn't even seen a trailer.

And, indeed, it is a weird film, but not weird for weirdness sake. It makes highly unusual storytelling decisions which are, in its own way, disarming without being shocking.. You cannot anticipate the moves this film makes, not without prior awareness, and even then, it would be really hard to see how the pieces fit without experiencing how they actually play out in concert with each other.

The Academy Awards have really embraced the atypical in recent years, starting with The Shape of Water, and continuing with Everything, Everywhere All At Once and Poor Things among others in recent years. Given how outre the storytelling is here, I would say this is maybe its most unusual best picture nomination thus far. And yet, all that uncommon narrative is in service of something. I'll come back to that.

When we meet Wagner Moura's Marcelo, he's pulled into a gas station in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Before he's even stopped the car he spies a dead body in the adjacent dusty field, covered by a sheet of cardboard. His gut instinct is to keep going, even as the portly station attendant comes out. It's a bad scene but it's evident there's more on Marcelo's mind than just the dead body. The title of the film crafts in the viewer's mind all sorts of paranoid thoughts on behalf of Marcelo. There's an incredible tension to the scene that the charismatic station attendant slowly disarms, finally easing when the attendant shoos a pack of wild dogs away from the body as if he's had to do it dozens of times by now. But then a police car shows up and the tension's right back up again as they're not there for the body, but to pay attention to the yellow VW they had passed (once again, the tension is only disarmed by comedy, as a family-filled car is about to pull into the station, only to spy the body and rethink their decision, the young children catch sight and scream). 

It's an incredible sequence, waves of tension and levity, masterfully crafted and beautifully composed. At the same time it's an aside but also sets the tables for the film. Carnival is happening and apparently crime and deaths are rampant while it goes on. Marcelo is anxious about something, police especially, but it will be some time before we find out what it is he's so nervous about. There's corruption aplenty, and Marcelo's is  tense but also a nimble thinker.

The first scene is prefaced by a series of pictures, pictures that look like legit photos of the era and not manufactured for the film. It's easy enough to intone that director Filho is setting the scene for the time, place and attitude of the film (as is the caption, "Brazil 1977, a time of great mischief" which seems to be an understatement). I do not have any context for Brazil of this time period, it's political turmoil of the time is not something I've ever delved into. The fact that there is political upheaval is not lost on the viewer, but what is actually happening is not explained. This is not a film interested in educating an exterior audience, and I'm sure Brazilians are very in tune with the the imagery, captions, billboards, and intonations made in the film that would float past or at least not fully register with an outside audience.

It is then credit to the film's writer/director that this film so readily resonates outside its home country. At first it may be his stylistic choices, but any examination of what the stylistic choices are about all lead back to the themes of the film, which are about corruption, class structures, money, power and justice, as well as the unusual bonds of families. There's also too much to unpack after only one viewing.

Marcelo finds himself in Recife - a northeastern coastal city in Brazil - hosted in a, for lack of better term, refugee hostel with others who we learn are fleeing persecution of some sort or another. Also in Recife is Marcelo's son and his in-laws. Marcelo's has to remind his son that the boy's mother died of cancer, but it seems unspoken that she was perhaps assassinated. Marcelo's intent is to get his son and flee the country, but obstacles are in the way. In the meantime, he's been posted at a documents bureau, where he searches for some form of identification of his mother, a seeming lifelong quest he's had to just prove her existence (the story, explained late in the film, is a troubling one, and seems to have specific cultural resonance to the country that I don't fully understand).

Meanwhile, a shark is found with a human leg inside it. The police chief and his two thug sons seem very intent on handling this discovery themselves. In the wake of Jaws' success, the film's reputation living large in the minds of kids too young to see it, the story of the leg takes on a life of its own in the newspapers. Urban legends are built up around the leg, the phantom limb starts taking on a life of its own. 

Marcelo is also being hunted by two hitmen, a father/stepson team. The repeating pattern of fathers and sons and parents and children seems very deliberate, yet I struggle to understand fully the significance. Again, this is a film that will need repeat viewings and probably some extracurricular reading for full dissection. And these seemingly disparate threads - Marcelo, the police chief and the hitmen - all become rather woven into the same thatch. 

Outside all of this is a piece of the film set in the relative modern day, where a young woman is listening and digitizing audiocassettes featuring the voices of some of the players in the film. The abrupt jumps to the modern day are just that, abrupt, and yet, there's a sort of comfort in the fact that this character is discovering the events along with us. She seems to know more than we do, but with less exacting detail. The bigger surprise of these segments is they progress without ever using them as opportunity for exposition, which could have easily been the case. The purpose of these scenes, though they interrupt only a few times in the film, is only made clear in the final sequence of the movie, and it's kind of the lynchpin to the whole thing.

The Secret Agent is not at all what I expected given the title, and it's a far more unique film than I could ever have anticipated. It's not far afield from the works of a Bong Joon Ho or Yorgos Lanthamos, and yet director Filho is also not aping other directors work either. If ever he was in the past, in this his fourth feature, he's operating with his own voice (I'll need to dig up his three prior productions).  Moura, who has been quietly proficient in supporting (and even lead) roles in North American productions, shines here as both a charming and adept protagonist. Expect Moura to get a few big chances to shine in the next few years. 

I predict The Secret Agent won't win any Academy Awards in its nominated categories except perhaps Best Foreign, but given how it penetrated this year's ballot, I expect Filho will be a prominent awards contender and higher profile filmmaker in the coming years. The film, however, will live on beyond this year. It's just too deep and too unique to get lost in the sea of generic movies.

[Poster talk... many of the Secret Agent posters adopt the aesthetic of 70's spy or paranoia thriller posters, whether it's using a painted style of the era, or establishing the feel of a hand-cropped photograph. I love so many of the posters for this film. The most common theme across the posters is the image of Moura holding a telephone, looking anxious...such a 70's vibe recalling the image of Gene Hackman with the headphones on in The Conversation or Robert Redford at the telephone in 3 Days of the Condor.]

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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is a time loop movie that doesn't show you start and end of the time loop, it takes place completely within the span of one loop. Loop number 118, if we're to believe Sam Rockwell's unnamed man from the future. 

The film opens with a rapid sequence of up close shots of aspects of a Los Angeles diner setting. Focusing more on the patrons than objects, but giving us little hints as to character or dynamics without showing us their faces. We get a sense that there's life here. And then there's a rattle, a barely noticeable skip in the image and a tell-tale "fwump" sound effect that tells us savvy audience members that something metaphysical, even temporal, has happened.

Into a busy diner walks Rockwell, sporting massive scraggly reddish-gray beard, a wild look in his eye, a manic trash-bin wardrobe, and complete disregard for any sort of social formalities. He interrupt the scene, starts spouting some end-of-the-world gibberish, touches upon his time-travel shenanigans and starts looking for recruits to help save the world. He's convinced the right combination of people in this diner will save humanity from a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence, but he just keeps finding disaster. Nobody is interested, which, he seems prepared for. 

But this time, he gets a volunteer from Susan (Juno Temple) who we learn in flashback, lost her son in a school shooting. No worries about that though, as she finds out her son can be cloned and because he died in a school shooting, the government will pay for most of it, and what they don't cover can be paid for by her son-clone having a sponsored ads setting.

The man from the future conscripts the rest of his crew, including troubled couple Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), teachers who we learn accidentally awakened the teenage social media hive mind and are now on the run.

The final team member was hesitantly accepted by the man from the future. At first Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), in her princess party dress and smudged makeup, was deemed too weird, but a trick of a fateful bottle of hot sauce convinces the man to bring her along.  We learn that Ingrid was born with an allergy to phones and wifi. The signals give her headaches and trigger nose bleeds. She kind of hates the technological world, as it's a bit of a hellscape for her to navigate.

The film jumps between the perilous journey the rag tag group needs to make from the diner to a 9-year-old's house where the child is busy inventing the AI that will disrupt the world and the flashbacks that fill in the blanks on the most prominent members of the group. (Asim Choudhry's Scott doesn't get such treatment, alas). 

The story in general, but flashbacks especially, feel like truncated, lighthearted episodes of Black Mirror, just technology accepted into society but making everything slightly worse when promising to make things better. It's hard not to call this "Black Mirror Lite" but it kinda is.

The third act makes some big moves and in doing so undercuts its own reality. The logic of the film seems to get tossed aside unless I'm missing a clear explanation/revelation somewhere.  It doesn't stop being entertaining, but it doesn't hold together conceptually.

The performances are fun, by and large, and there's a good sense of humour around the idea of technology destroying our lives but also being impossible to live without. It's really in how it's applied, awareness of the impact it has, and how we react to it that the film is concerned with, but...not that concerned. It's a satire, but it's also just silly. It's making statements but it's not committing to them. Things that would normally get a GenZ eyeroll would likely slip past them because it's not really old-man-yelling-at-clouds.  

Director Verbinski is known for being a visual stylist on The Ring and Pirates of the Carribean movies, and there's no doubt this is a film that looks a lot better than its twenty million dollar budget. But whatever style Verbinski brings is top loaded in a way, with some exceptionally interesting and well composed shots calling attention to themselves in the film's opening sequence and then seemingly falling away for the rest of the film (perhaps intricate compositions take time which costs money?).

I like both the main story and the flashbacks and they do all connect, but they almost feel like they should be separate pieces. There's probably a whole 90-minute "one crazy night" story in just the team getting from point A to point B, but the flashbacks interrupt that flow (and the lack of Rockwell in them is to their greatest detriment). Each of these microstories could have possibly supported their own feature, or maybe this could have been a multi-part anthology rather than a movie. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is solidly entertaining, but I imagine I'll have largely forgotten about it in a few months.

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As I prepared to do my Saturday double-feature this week, the intent was to finally knock The Secret Agent off my list (success) but the second feature was more up in the air. A few intriguing-but-still-February releases had just come out, but there were also a few Oscar contenders I could pick off. The biggest of them is Sentimental Value, a family drama centered around filmmaking (oh, the Oscars love films about films and filmmaking). I realized/remembered, in this decision-making moment, that I am never excited to see a dramatic movie. Nothing about watching characters deal (or not deal) with their emotions or confronting the challenges or difficulties they face in their lives has any appeal to me...that is unless there's some sort of genre twist to it. It doesn't sound like there's a genre twist to Sentimental Value, and I suspect I will never see that film in my lifetime, unless I wind up doing some stupid boy project where it slots into (I can't even fathom what that one would be).

So imagine my surprise when I get to the next "Tales for all"* film on the list, Summer of the Colt, which turns out to be a horse-centric family drama. I think what appeals to me even less than a dramatic film is a dramatic film centered around horses. Black Beauty or The Black Stallion, no thank you.

(*"Tales for all" being the series of family films made by Quebec producer Rock Demers, the earliest of its installments which were mainstays on Canadian weekend afternoon television through much of the 1980's and 1990's)

So it's no surprise to me that I found the first half of this film to be nearly interminable. The set-up finds Laura, Daniel and Felipe visiting their Grandfather's horse ranch in Argentina. They're met by their young friend Martin, whose family lives and works on the ranch.  But Laura is a young woman now, and not as interested in playing as the boys. There's horse riding aplenty and kids being kids and it's all so tranquil and kind of pointless for what seems like forever. 

It should also be mentioned that this is an Argentinian co-production with Demers, and it was most likely filmed in Spanish as both the English and French dubs do not sync with the performers' mouths. It's an obstacle. Also an obstacle, as we find with most of the "Tales for all" is the child actors are not the most seasoned performers and a lot of their performances can be very stilted and/or conveying incorrect emotion. The English dub voice performers are pretty solid though, but all this is barriers to enjoyment. It's important to establish all this film had going against it, because, in the end, I actually quite liked it overall.

What builds slowly in the film is Laura's sensing hostility from her Grandfather. He loved her just last year and now he's suddenly standoffish, cold, and even mean towards her. She sees it as sexism, that now that she's blossoming into womanhood, she's not such a tomboy, and he can't relate to her. But he's also not trying. So she takes drastic measures to try and fit in with the boys, by cutting off her long locks into a choppy bob. Her Grandfather can only retort snidely "Well, I hope you're proud".  The film sometimes presents Laura from Grandfather's point of view, and he sometimes catches sight of her and he sees an entirely different person. We can infer, based on comments made, that he's seeing in her the children's grandmother, who left for Paris and never came back, and it's too much for him to bear. It would seem  one tainted experience with a woman nearly 50 years ago just turned him into an old misogynist and a control freak.

Meanwhile summer pals Daniel and Martin are having a great time chumming around, doing horse sports and such, but when Martin points out a golden colt to Daniel, Daniel falls in love with the horse and asks his Grandfather if he can have it. His Grandfather agrees, but only if he can break the horse in... neither Daniel or Grandfather realizing that Martin has already bonded with the horse and has been slowly breaking the horse in for weeks already. 

It's a juvenile love triangle, but instead of a girl, it's a horse. Daniel becomes obsessed with the horse... some choice Daniel quotes:

D. "I've never seen a horse like that.... He's the one I want... Yeah, I want him for myself. He's beautiful!"
D. "Be quiet, Martin, he belongs to me!"
D. "you and me will do a lot together you'll see. You and me will go everywhere together...you're mine now."
D. "you had no right to let anyone else mount you! You're mine!"

Don't read these as gentle cooing, no read them as a steely-eyed psychopath, because that's how they come across (at least in the dub).

When Daniel catches Martin riding "his" horse, their friendship becomes a bitter rivalry. That is, until the horse bucks Daniel off and nearly kills him (for a second there, I thought it did, which I wouldn't put past one of these "Tales for all" to do), and then it's all bros before ho(rs)es. Well, not really, but the boys do talk it out.

The second half of the film spurts to life in full blown telenovela style. Just meaty melodrama with intense looks and leers, and heightened emotions which could lead anywhere. At one point Daniel pulls back his bed covers to find his grandfather has left him a silver-sheathed knife... a real Chekhovian play where we have to legitimately worry if this obsessed, nearly-psychopathic kid is going to stab another kid over a horse.

Laura's journey into young adulthood starts off as a real non-entity in the film, as Laura spends much of her time either alone or with her Great Aunt. But her delight in becoming a woman starts to sour because her relationship with her Grandfather calls into question how these changes in her body affect how others see her, it's a real mind fuck, and she doesn't understand it. She tries to get clarity and only gets pushed away. So the only way for her to process is through drastic measures and even those don't work. As coming of age stories go, it's pretty powerful at times. 

Likewise Grandfather is not just this nasty figure, he's actually pretty kind, but also myopic and out of touch with his own emotional core. His relationship with his grandchildren is based on a foundation of control, and suddenly with Laura and Daniel he's finding his control challenged. They are children, not horses, as Laura reminds him, they should not have to be broken in.

The film's second half shows the character developing emotional intelligence, realizing that the feelings they have inside don't need to stay there. Talking about things is the only way to make a situation better, even if it's uncomfortable.

Visually, Summer of the Colt is perfunctory, it does the job it needs to do. It captures the horses nicely and gets those emotive looks from the performers right center of the frame in full melodramatic fashion. There's little fancy here, but it all works. 

Next to Bach and Broccoli it's the most cohesive and resonant of the "Tales for all" but without a real genre hook, it's not quite as fun.

KWIF: The Fantastic Four: First Steps (+1)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025, d. Matt Shankman - in theatre)
Miller's Crossing (1990, d. Joel Coen - dvd)

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There was a lot of promises around the latest big screen interpretation of The Fantastic Four: that it would be a return to form for the Marvel Cinematic Universe; that it would stand on its own two feet, no homework required; that it would be super-retro and fun, fun, fun; that it would be a fresh start for Marvel's "phase six"... among other promises either made or inferred.

The film measures up to a few of these promises and struggles to do so with others, which is not to say it's a bad film, but it isn't quite the experience it needed to be and there's one reason, and one reason only for it: Superman.

I hate to review one movie by comparing it to another (lies, I actually love doing that) but I noted at the end of my Superman review that it felt very experimental, that it was pushing the form of superhero movies forward. The Fantastic Four: First Steps, for all its trying to do different, still feels like same old, same old in comparison to the James Gunn film that came two weeks before. My feelings about Superman were positive, but hesitant in coming out of that film, but my esteem for the film has grown and grown in the two weeks since. I find myself thinking about it, and all it does so very, very well, and I have had an ever-present urge to go back and relive it again. There hasn't been an inkling of that with The Fantastic Four. Where I'm holding onto the memories of scenes and characters in Superman tightly, I'm letting memories of The Fantastic Four slip away without a fuss, and after watching First Steps my affection for Superman has only gotten bigger. Unfortunately this movie's biggest mistake was coming out after Superman, and not realizing that the rules of the game have officially changed.

(I'm struggling with whether to lean into the Superman comparisons, or attempt to approach TFF:FS on its own merit, and I'm going to try for the latter but the former is potentially going to sneak in. Let's get back to those promises.)

When we think about the MCU in its prime, it was all about growth. Every film was a gateway to the possibility of other films. It was what made it so fresh and exciting. At times it was like it was a riddle to solve, and so many of us would look at the clues and try to tease out what was to come. Part of the game was the MCU's penchant for defying expectations. But we had a decade of that which culminated in Avengers:Endgame, a literal endgame for everything it started with Iron Man. So trying to replicate that in the 5 years since has been a wildly mixed bag. During peak MCU, countless other studios tried to replicate Marvel's successes and failed, and then Marvel phase 4 (and more specifically phase 5) started to feel like just another imitator. The Marvel machine couldn't get away from being a machine, they had set up their formula and didn't really want to tinker with it because it had been so successful. First Steps carries with it the promise of tinkering, and while the formula may have changed somewhat, the base of it is still too recognizable as the formula, and that's a problem.

The first act of The Fantastic Four introduces us to this superhero family, to Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and Reed's best friend Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) who have already become champions of this parallel Earth that seems to have never escaped the aesthetic of the 1960s. A "helpful" newsreel breezes through four years of the Fantastic Four's history, from origin to how their presence has reshaped the world for the better and garnered them the adoration of practically everyone. It's an intense infodump that unfortunately is what passes for world building here. It does carry with it that naivete of America that shattered after Kennedy's assassination, where idols were heroes and vice-versa. The early tone that there's been this half-century age of innocence is inferred but not really reinforced. The arrival of Shalla-Bal, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), herald of Galactus, should be the inflection point of the age of innocence, as she tells of the world's impending end. The world looks to the Fantastic Four for a solution to their doom.

In between the newsreel and the Silver Surfer's arrival, we gets some moments that sort of establish character and dynamics. It gives us Reed's logical and pragmatic mind, not entirely devoid of emotion, but emotion is hard for him to render. Sue is the diplomatic one, the peacekeeper, and discovers she is pregnant, although apparently it was supposed to be an impossibility. Ben, transformed into a man of rocks, is making the best out of living a life as a man of rocks... and you'd almost think he liked it if he didn't feel so isolated inside his rock body. And Johnny is...energetic, I guess. The film does a really good job of establishing their family dynamic, how they each engage with one another, but it succeeds less in defining them each as individuals within that dynamic. 

The second act finds the team racing off into space to confront Galactus, and besides the unnecessarily laborious takeoff sequence, the space venture and meeting Galactus sequence is the film's most stimulating (if only the trailers and the merchandise and promotional materials didn't spoil the visual for Galactus already). The encounter with Galactus goes poorly, and the realization is that this is perhaps the worst adversary to debut the team against as he's impervious to fire, the rock-man's punching would have no effect, Reed's super smarts can't really match that of a celestial (and his stretchy powers are of little use), and Sue doesn't quite know how to use her powers maliciously (like putting a bubble in Galactus' head and expanding it...even if that wouldn't work on a celestial, worth trying maybe?).

That opening newsreel tells us who these characters are and sort of breezes past their abilities, but the film really needed an opening sequence that showed us their abilities both in full action and being effective. Otherwise Reed stretches to grab things, Johnny flies around, Ben lifts a car to impress children and Sue turns invisible to avoid an awkward political encounter. Not really scintillating stuff.

I really wanted to luxuriate in the aesthetic of the film, but it so quickly becomes background, and the filter put over the film kind of muddies it all. I think it's trying to be gauzy but instead comes across more like AI slop. Superman proved you could have a vibrant, comic-booky world, and The Fantastic Four somehow, despite having the Mole Man and Galactus, still seems to fear bright colours and embracing the spirit of 60's comic books. It's a film that really wants you to feel the weight of the world ending and understand how the burden of solving this problem sits on the shoulders of these characters so heavily. It loses what sense of fun it had in the process. It feels like the Marvel machine in action. It feels like a film-by-committee with no personal flair or flavour. You can sense the producers in the background putting such pressure on "getting the Fantastic Four right" that they don't let the filmmakers play at all. This feels like work for them, if not necessarily homework for us.

But at the same time, the third act couldn't help but constantly trigger me into thinking about the rest of the MCU from which I this is supposed to be divested from. Reed's various solutions to the Galactus problem all feel like triggering points for the Fantastic Four's entry in the MCU proper, and I found that distracting. Again, part of the Marvel machine has taught us to exprect teases of "what comes next" and I think if we were having more fun we wouldn't be so distracted by it. I mean, we get a scene of a Kaiju-sized Galactus tromping through New York City...why are we not having fun with this?

Much of the film's plot centers around Sue's pregnancy and the fate of baby Franklin Richards. My wife wisely pointed out that Franklin becoming such a focal point pulls focus away from everyone else to their detriment. Perhaps it's because some of us comic nerds know what Franklin is, a living deus ex machina machine that unmake and remake reality, and rather than Franklin being the next step in this family, he feels like both a maguffin and a plot device seeded for the future.

The casting is really good, and it's a very small, contained cast. Beyond the main four, the Silver Surfer and Galactus (Ralph Ineson), there's FF's press agent Lynn Nichols (Sarah Niles), a talk show host (Mark Gatiss), a potential love interest for Ben (Natasha Lyonne) and the Mole Man Harvey Elder (Paul Walker Houser absolutely destroying his one big scene... this film should have opened with the classic first issue battle between the subterrans and the FF just so we could get more of Houser). That's pretty much it, besides Herbie, perhaps the best bleep-bloopy robot in cinema outside of Star Wars?

Michael Giacchino's score is brilliant, sweeping and bombastic, with it's main theme heightened by choral chanting that is both epic and kind of cheesy in a fittingly 60's vibe way. In a film where you have a near-comics-accurate Galactus, it's effusive praise to say it's the best part of the film. 

If this review sounds pretty negative, it's primarily because I'm slightly disappointed by the film. I wanted this Fantastic Four to be a blast, a rollicking good comic-booky time (like Superman was) and instead I got a good-not-great coldly impersonal Marvel movie that, while full of spectacle and the best representation of Marvel's first family so far, didn't deliver on what I felt it promised.

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My viewing of the films of the Coen Brothers continues with the Coen's first venture into period filmmaking, taking us back to prohibition era America (city unnamed). Of course Miller's Crossing is a film about crime, but where the Coens usual strength is in small-scale crime with perpetrators who rapidly get in over their head and frantically try to dig their way out, here they put their spin on organized crime.  

The usual sense of organized crime in cinema is grandiosity, making it feels epic in scale, and important. The Coens, though, make it small in focus, as we follow Tom (Gabriel Bryne), the right-hand to an Irish gangster, as he tries to avert a mob war, and then survive it when it starts. While a mob war may sound like an epic backdrop, the Coens mostly only show it from Tom's perspective, and he's manipulating the fringes, both trying stay out of it while being the eye of the storm.

Tom is, in true Coens fashion, a flawed protagonist. He seems to have a moral compass (for a gangster) and a fierce sense of loyalty to Leo (Albert Finney), and his advice always seems to be in Leo's best interest. But he's also a gambling addict, dedicated to paying off his own debts, but incapable of constantly incurring more. He's also sleeping with Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), and probably loves her, even though she's dating Leo and he knows she's bad news.

The Italian mobster Johnny Caspar (the incredible Joe Polito) asks Leo to whack Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) a problematic actor in his fight fixing scheme, but Leo refuses primarily because he's Verna's brother. Tom tries to convince Leo that Bernie is bad news and Verna's only keeping time with him to keep Bernie safe, but it falls on deaf ears. As tensions escalate between the Italians and the Irish, Tom does the only thing he can do to try and get Leo to listen, which is be 100% honest with him. It winds up backfiring and Tom is excommunicated. 

More than anything Tom seems to want to avert war on the city's streets, so he starts working for Johnny Caspar, which doesn't sit well with Johnny's right hand, and soon honest and loyal Tom starts spinning a web of lies that even he might get trapped in. It's a Coen Brothers specialty, making a mess and swirling it around and around watching the fragments scatter and collide. If it seems like Tom has a plan, it's a highly improvisational one.

I can't think of a move Miller's Crossing makes that is a wrong one. It's simultaneously tense but breezy, moving along fluidly without any stray motions. Byrne, Finney, Turturro, Harden, Polito and J.E. Freeman are all in top form in these fully realized characters, each seems to have their own inner monologue driving them that is telegraphed so readily in their performance without needing to externalize it. There's a lot of the comedic Coen Brothers touches to them which only serves to ground them as human rather than archetypes.

Barry Sonnenfeld as D.P. makes this film look phenomenal, and the whole picture is about having room to breathe, about space. So many sequences highlight the space between people or the distance one has to cross to bridge the gap. Sonnenfeld uses a lot of wide shots, and he holds the frame rather than cutting between the wide and the action shot. Miller's Crossing is patient in that regard, it's not quick to move, it lets the moments sit and play out. This is Sonnenfeld's last film with the Coens before he starts his own directorial career, but he, along with master composer Carter Burwell, are key components to the Coens early success. (Next up is Barton Fink with Roger Deakins providing cinematography, so there's going to be no degredation in the visual department, that's for sure, and Burwell's with the Coens for the long haul).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Cyrano

2021, Joe Wright (Hanna) -- download

I am doing something I generally don't do, start writing the post before I finish watching the movie. This one has been in my Downloads for quite a while, a few years maybe. I generally don't ascribe to musicals but something about the songs, as presented in the trailer, worked for me. And I have always been a sucker for love unrequited. 

Alas it is proving to be not as convincing, where I can cheekily say the trailers to me were like Cyrano's words pretending to be Christian's, and the movie itself is, perhaps as my full half-way-through opinion is not formed, more true Christian? The songs are dancing, as everyone in the background dances, between the exact kind of modern pop love ballad I gravitate towards and oh-gawds-cringe-can-they-just-stop-singing.

WTF, part of this write before finishing ideal was to comment on Kent having seen it and use some of his also-not-fond-of-musicals opinions to further fuel my own thoughts. But, he has no post, not even on Letterboxd. I really need a more reliable conduit into the alternate realities where I know some of the posts have gone.

Of note, this adaptation of the original 19th century play about a guy with a big nose, is based on a 2019 off-Broadway adaptation penned/directed by Erica Schmidt, who writes the screenplay here, and it also starred Peter Dinklage. For some reason, that makes it more appealing to me. It also dawned on me, that in a world where I am constantly watching the adaptations of my favourite properties (video games, comic books, novels....) successfully and unsuccessfully, I would imagine the fans of this stage production would like to see it carried on through an extended vision? Or loathe it? That is the adaptation way...

OK, done.

Look! That's Glen Hansard! A "real" singer! I was hoping the three singing soldiers, of which he was one, were all semi-known pop/folk singers, but alas, one more is, and the other is just stock-n-trade stage actor.

Do I write about the plot? I mean, we all know the plot, basically, right? Cyrano de Bergerac (Peter Dinklage, The Station Agent) is a French soldier, a bit of a pompous wordsmith, known for his fighting ability and for being the leader of a regiment of guards. He is in love with local noble Roxanne (Haley Bennett, The Magnificent Seven), who is being pursued by a nobleman. In appears Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr, Elvis), a penniless man who joins the ranks of Cyrano's regiment, is spied by Roxanne at a stage production, and instantly the two fall in love, classic love at first sight. Roxanne asks Cyrano, her oldest friend, who is also secretly in love with her, to help her connect with Christian. Meanwhile Christian can't put three words together with any sense, so Cyrano offers to be his voice, his words, his pen, and thus letters are written and love is expressed and a romance begun.

But I am not sure if I recall how the actual story goes after that. Tragedy, I guess? I have to admit, the primary adaptation I know is Roxanne the Steve Martin movie, "Because I was afraid of worms, Roxanne! Worms!" 

So yeah, tragedy.

As I mentioned, the music almost always didn't work for me. There were a few bits here and there that caught my heart, the way the music cut into the trailer did, but for the most part it all fell into the "interrupting a good story by breaking into song" category. But what did work for me was the setting, the Probably Not France shooting locations in Spain, the dusty, crumbling fort and streets,  the Probably Not Proper Period costuming... there is such a detail to everything even if it is not age nor location appropriate; it all looks so ... pretty. In the end, I believed Dinklage in the role, and I would have probably preferred the stage production, as at least then, I was going in for the exactly proscribed media.

KsMIRT: August wind-up [part 2]

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (or mebbe twice each month?!?) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format. 

This (half) Month:
Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4 (2024, 5/5 episodes, Netflix)
Batman: Caped Crusader Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, AmazonPrime)
G.I. Joe: Renegades Season 1 (2010, 16/26 episodes, Tubi) 
Time Bandits Season 1 (2024, 2/10 episodes, Apple TV+)
Derry Girls Series 3 (2022, 7/7 episodes, Netflix)

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Unsolved Mysteries Volume 4

The What 100:  The big pappy of true crime series returns with five new yet-to-be-solved events of a suspicious nature. These include new looks at Jack the Ripper and the mothman (having now migrated from its usual West Virginia stomping grounds to Illinois' Chicago area), as well as a "who did it?" in Calgary, a "whose head is that" in Florida, and a cold case of a murdered college student on campus in the late 1970s.

(1 Great) Having watched many a season of the vintage Robert Stack-led Unsolved Mysteries giving myself many a night terror as a result, I have to say the new, host-less, hour-long, true crime documentary-style format is pretty great. For the most part, I like how this format frequently teases out the mystery for a good while. The storytelling, the editing is exceptionally good, and as a result a lot of these stories have a stickiness to them that make them hard to easily forget or let go of. I puzzled over "The Body in the Basement", a captivating highlight (and gut wrenching tragedy) for days before my brain settled in on there being no answers to the questions it was asking. Did she fall or was she pushed? If those are her own footprints in her blood, why did she stop short of going upstairs? What happened to her phone? Was the door locked or not? Why were there no paw prints in the blood? So many questions that make no sense.

(1 Good) I like that even though it's using this new, host-less, hour-long, true crime documentary-style format, it's not just going with murder/death mysteries, but still exploring the paranormal phenomena the original series did with the same documentary-style lens as the other stories. The Jack the Ripper bit was probably the least intriguing because we're no closer to answers than we were two decades ago, but this was all about dispelling myths. "The Mothman Revisted" episode, though, was neat for how it cited the classic Stack episode on the Mothman, but had something definitely new to talk about. The middle episode, as well, neither a murder/death mystery, nor a paranormal mystery, but instead, a found embalmed head and the people trying to identify it. Curious.

(1 Bad) What's missing from this series that the Stack series had was updates. It directs you online for submitting any tips or info on the subjects at hand and for updates, but the old series used to do updates on repeats or in a subsequent episode, if there were updates to be had. There was something very satisfying about them. In this host-less, hour-long, true crime documentary-style format on Netflix, there's not the same space for updates that there was in a 20+ episode season of a weekly TV series. That said, they could drop Unsolved Mysteries updates on Netflix at any time, as part of a season or just stand alone.  I don't know why they haven't unless nothing material has come of any of the cases yet.

META: I don't really do a lot of true crime... I've dipped into a podcast or two, I watch the occasional documentary film or series, but it's not a regular part of my diet. Still, I actively look forward to each "Volume" of Unsolved Mysteries. Something about having a dose of the unresolved in my diet is very stimulating mentally, even if the subject matter is disturbing.  I can't explain it.

... Wait.... there's a podcast?!? And Volume 5 is coming... October 2nd!

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Batman: Caped Crusader Season 1

The What 100: It's a new Batman animated series from the co-creator of Batman: The Animated Series...Bruce Timm. He's backed by The Batman writer-director Matt Reeves as well as J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot production company. It's a more mature animated series set in a vaguely 1930's/40's noirish reality, and early in Batman's career as a vigilante. The over-arching stories are about district attorney Harvey Dent's fraught campaign for mayor, and corruption in both politics and the legal system.

(1 Great) As jarring as they may be, I absolutely love the swings this series is taking. Actually being set in the 1930's (ish) rather than the "neo-'30's deco-styled modern Gotham" of The Animated Series allows it to establish a very specific tone, that of the hardboiled, noir stories of the era. On top of that it plays fast and loose with established Batman lore. The Penguin who pops up in the first episode is not at all like any Penguin we've seen before, but I think she's incredible. Same with the divergences for Harley Quinn or Gentleman Ghost or Firebug, among others. 

(1 Good) It's a show aimed less at satisfying the comic book geek and instead scratching the pulp origins itch that clearly Timm always had and never shook.  It's aged up in terms of tone, for a cartoon it's happier with the darker corners of its world and emotions. It's not unapproachable for children, but it's not softened for them either. Batman's kind of a dickhead (every time he coldly calls Alfred "Pennyworth" I die inside just a little...but there's that moment of redemption in the finale that shows there's room for character growth in this series). They're also not afraid of finite ends to their stories or characters, so tread lightly with your expectations.

(1 Bad) As much as I understand the series is not much interested in a world of spandex, and that it's creating its villains as if they were out of 30's and 40's cinema, I still desperately want the mythology to flesh itself out. I want hints that Barbara is going to be Batgirl and Renee will become The Question. They're both agents of upholding the law, but they're both becoming more and more aware of how the system fails, and I wonder how long they can keep at it before they become disillusioned and join Batman in his style of justice?

META: If one is doing a new Batman for TV, it either needs to be a bold reset, or a near-continuation of what has come before. Rarely is it ever a near-continuation of what has come before, and bold resets can lead to disgruntled fanboys (is there any other type?). The word on the street for The Caped Crusader (despite the creatives saying otherwise) was that it was a continuation, or maybe a prequel to The Animated Series. It is not. If anything, though, because TAS was so art deco inspired and had that feel of the 1930s, it's almost like this didn't veer far enough away from that aesthetic to fully distinguish itself. I think that's what many fans who may wind up disliking this are feeling. But I dig it.

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G.I. Joe: Renegades

The What 100:  Scarlett recruits Duke, Roadblock, Tunnel Rat and Ripcord on a secret mission to infiltrate Cobra Industries and expose it for what it is, not a multinational manufacturer of diverse goods and services, but a secret military with designs on taking over the world with experimental, illegal technology. Not only do they have their hands in seemingly everyone's pockets, but they have their own 24 hour news network to spread whatever lies and disinformation they want. And so, our heroes, in trying to uncover this new world-class evil, are instead brandished as terrorists and outlaws and are on the run from their very own military employers.

(1 Great) I clued in during the initial two-parter that it seemed kind of A-Team-ish in its construction, and then the third episode rolled out its new opening credits:
"Accused of a crime they didn't commit, a ragtag band of fugitives fights a covert battle to clear their names and expose the insidious enemy that is... Cobra. Some call them outlaws. Some call them heroes. But these determined men and women think of themselves only as 'Ordinary Joes'. And this is their story."

Yah, it's the A-Team all right. Each episode is mostly just the Renegades roll into town, find the townspeople embroiled in something Cobra Industries related and they try to help out or expose it. It's formulae, and it's nothing groundbreaking, but it's pretty great.  

(1 Good) I was genuinely surprised by the episode "Homecoming Part 1" which jumps into flashbacks of the origin of Duke's rivalry with Flint which is some pretty deep character building for ostensibly a kids' cartoon. There's a lot of nuance introduced into their dynamic which then pays off in "Homecoming Part 2" where the Joes are captured by the military, with straight-laced, by-the-book Flint maybe seeing a crack in his worldview.

(1 Bad) I do get why this didn't resonate with Joe fans. Despite being exceptionally well animated, it's too divergent from the core G.I. Joe idea, that of a highly trained special mission force who are in an open battle against terrorist organization Cobra. The silent war of Renegades is so 2010, of anti-capitalism, and illicit behind-the-scenes dealings, of there being forces in the world so large that nothing will change in the way the world works unless they decide it should change... it's heavy shit, and G.I. Joe isn't really that known for its heavy shit.  Plus, like Batman: The Caped Crusader all of the characters are some type of reinvention of their previous incarnations. Snow Job, Shipwreck, Dr. Mindbender, all of them, with the exception of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow (again with this ninja shit) seem pretty vastly different from how they've been portrayed elsewhere. It's hard to just sit back and enjoy it, and not want it to just get over its "on-the-run" business and become outright Joes vs. Cobra.

META: It's G.I. Joe, but the A-Team! It seems incredible to me - the me of 2024 - that any regular series would so blatantly rip off the formulae of an old TV series (uh, like Poker Face did Columbo?) but a cursory look at 2010 and yeah, the Liam Neeson-led A-Team movie had just hit, and I think this was made in parallel production. I bet that they had banked on the A-Team movie being a massive success (where the first G.I. Joe live action movie truly wasn't) and they would look like geniuses for reformulating G.I. Joe in that manner. But the A-Team failed (not dismally, but not inspiring a whole new generation of A-Team obsessed kids) and so did Renegades. Even the long-running G.I. Joe action figure line produced a wave or two of figures styled after this cartoon (pretty great looking figures) but failed to ignite much fervour (much of it went on clearance, though they've since become pretty collectible). I'm just picking off episodes here and there, but I will definitely complete it (and probably be sad there isn't more when I'm done).

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Time Bandits Season 1

The What 100: A reimagining of the 1981 Terry Gilliam film by Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement and Iain Morris. Young, talkative, nerdy Kevin is 10 years old and not very well liked by anyone. He's bullied at school and by his sister, and his parents, obsessed with their phones, don't understand why their unusual, curious, intelligent child isn't into "normal" stuff. When a  troupe of time traveling thieves with a stolen time map use his bedroom as a passageway, he finds himself swept up in their journey, much to the chagrin of the Bandits.

(1 Great) The show, by and large, looks pretty good. There are some interesting sequences, displays of effects (both practical and digital) that are quite eye catching or stimulating.

(1 Good) Jemaine Clement plays a ruler of demons, a sort of devil, one might say, that is very interested in the bandits and their time map. The scenes of Clement in his ample prosthetic make-up and the absurd hellscape sets he's in are pretty imaginative.

(1 Bad) We only made it two episodes in.  Both episodes were written by Clement, Morris and Waititi with Waititi directing. We have ample love for Waititi and Clement, both individually and together Lady Kent and I do, and yet this did not work at all for either of us. There were a few chuckles but no real laughs, there was a twinge of interest, a glimmer of adventure, but most of it fell flat. Kevin is supposed to be annoying and young Kal-El Tuck really gets it, but there's too much of this riding on his nascent shoulders. The leaderless bandits are led by Lisa Kudrow's put-upon Penelope, but it's Kudrow's sense of smart-idiot quirk that doesn't jibe well with the sensibilities of Waititi and Clement as I know them.  Unlike Our Flag Means Death or What We Do In The Shadows, the writers and performers do not give their individual bandits enough unique character or charisma to stand out. They are a unit that all seem to behave much the same way, they're not very fun.  

META: I have only seen Gilliam's Time Bandits once as an adult, and it didn't resonate with me. At this point it's a vague memory. I more recently read the Marvel comics adaptation (like maybe last year even) and I can't remember that at all. Perhaps it's the property that doesn't work for me.  But specifically here, I look at the repartee of Our Flag... or The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin and there's a template there for these types of characters and how to make them funny and subversive and for some reason these very talented creators just couldn't figure it out.  But is it the writing, or the casting? I'm not sure any of the bandits besides Kudrow stands out, and she stands out for the wrong reason. It just doesn't work and I'm feeling completely uninspired to return to it.

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Derry Girls Series 3

The What 100: One final go for the girls from Derry, their families, and Sister George Michael. As The Troubles reach their revolutionary turning point in the mid-1990s, the girls come of age, ready to graduate and it seems all of Ireland is ready to move on to the next moments of their lives.

(1 Great) The best episode of the series is "The Reunion" which finds the moms and aunties and their friends reuniting for their high school reunion. This leads to all the old anxieties, hurt feelings, and pubescent emotions rushing back, with long buried secrets trying to crawl out of their grave and embarrass everyone. It's an episode replete with flashbacks of the women in their younger years of the late-70's with the obvious parallels to the main young cast of Derry Girls providing the most rewarding threads (especially considering that Mary used to behave exactly like Erin does and yet she comes down on her so hard for it). The whole long-buried (literally) secret is a great through line and provides a little mystery to unfold to really suck in the audience. It's a wonderfully crafted, hilarious episode.

(1 Good) After two highly, highly successful seasons, Series 3 seems to break out of its small-scale shell and go much, much bigger with every episode. It's almost like a different show, the scale of production seems that much larger, and the writing that much better at balancing the adventures of the young cast and their parents, grandparents and teachers such that it doesn't just feel like a teen comedy anymore.  In some ways it could be seen as a betrayal of what was established before, but in other ways it feels like it's finally coming into itself, somewhat unfettered by its previous limitations. Most of the episodes this season take place on location, whether it's another town, or on a train, or at a police precinct with Liam Neeson in charge.  My initial impulse is to bristle a things like appearances by Neeson or Fatboy Slim, but they're really just damn good fun.

(1 Bad)  Episode six finds the teens trying to get tickets to a Fatboy Slim concert being held in town. When they come up in the line to buy tickets, Clare has a meet-cute with the ticket girl, except they are the last tickets available. The street toughs behind them aren't pleased and accuse them of jumping the queue and then want to fight James for the tickets. Things take a turn, and later Michelle goes on a sob-story-leads-to-wish-giving TV program and lies about James getting beaten up and their tickets being stolen. This leads to the Girls being VIPs for the concert but Clare the whole time is just fixated on meeting up with the ticket girl. The Girls have another encounter with the street toughs, while Clare makes out with ticket girl, and they get thrown out, yet it's still pretty triumphant overall. A rollicking episode. Except Clare's dad dies and it ends with her big gay triumph undercut by weepy memorial for her Da.  Why? What does this serve, like, at all? Did we ever even meet Clare's dad in the series? Why decimate this triumphant moment for her like this? Even if it's something true from the creator or staff writer's lives, there's no time in this show for this rapid mood swing in the storytelling. It's the most bizarre creative moment of the series and leaves a real bad taste for the penultimate episode.

META: As I mentioned when I last wrote about this show, each series is too short. Even at 7 episodes it's not nearly enough. There's only a total of 19 episode in the entire run. There's something to be said about not milking a premise or quitting whilst one is ahead, but when you have this great of a setup there's so many possibilities for storytelling. I feel like they barely scratched the surface and we barely got to know these characters. Their growth from series to series seemed so spontaneous.  And it's not like you can just do a revival, since these performer are only getting older (Saoirse-Monica Jackson in The Decameron now looks like a grownup, no longer a viable teen), so they needed to do more when they could have. It's a shame.  Like, why not just a Sister George Michael spin-off show then?