KWIF: Coyote vs Acme (+5)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Oldies, and some not-so-goodies. Let's try and be quick about this...ha!

This Week: 
Coyote vs. Acme (2026*, d. Dave Green - in theatre)
Love Wedding Repeat (2020, d. Dean Craig - netflix)
9 to 5 (1980, d. Colin Higgins - hollywood suite)
ABBA: The Movie (1977, d. Lasse Hallström - hollywood suite)
The Gumball Rally (1976, d. Charles Bail - hollywood suite)
Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance (1974, d. Toshiya Fujita - tubi)

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At a holiday Monday matinee in a local neighbourhood repertory theatre, I expected a film like Coyote vs. Acme to have at least a few children loading up on sugary drinks and popcorn and running around the theatre. While there were probably over 100 attendees at this screening, I don't think I clocked a single person under the age of 10, and the vast majority were at least 30 or older.

The early millennials were probably the last to experience Looney Tunes as part of the general pop culture diet. Anyone younger, like my GenZ kids, would have probably experienced them on some sort of physical media presented to them by their parents, if at all. While these ridiculous cartoons were a very large part of peoples childhoods for over 60 years, the changing nature of entertainment has rendered these characters and their antics somewhat...obsolete.  There are other characters in other animations on other media that are doing the Looney Tunes thing, but in a modern context, servicing a modern audience.

This is all to say that Coyote vs. Acme is, maybe, the best thing featuring the Looney Tunes characters that I've seen in many decades.  It's not saying much. The efforts to bring these characters to a modern audience have largely been failures (whether artistically or commercially) outside of the original Space Jam and Tiny Toons back in the 1990s. I don't know how often I have though about the Looney Tunes gang since I started "adulting" half my life ago, but I can tell you, it's not very much, not really much at all.  And I think about this kind of stuff all the time.

Coyote vs. Acme was set to release in 2023, and the buzz at the time was that it was a real winner of a film. An honest-to-gosh funny, entertaining, and meaningful film revitalizing these somewhat antiquated characters. Anticipation was already starting to percolate when the film was unceremoniously shelved by Warner Bros. in 2023 for tax writeoff purposes (alongside a nearly completed Batgirl movie and a Scooby-Doo project already in production).  The belief was that we were never going to see this film.

Ketchup Entertainment stepped in and I guess offered Warner Brothers the correct sum of money to release distribution right to them.  I can't imagine that Ketchup did this for any other reason than a strong desire to see the film, because the Looney Tunes box office track record over the past 30 years speaks for itself. 

But it's here, and it's, frankly, magnificent, whether people are seeing it in droves or not, this is both a deliriously funny and entertaining movie and a real love letter to the Road Runner cartoons and cartoon violence in general.

The plot is pretty basic: after decades of faulty equipment and zero successful attempts at capturing and eating the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote decides he wants to sue Acme, the provider of all his bird-chasing gear. Kevin Avery (Will Forte) makes a living out of filing frivolous settlement claims with Acme for token sums to the point that it's a very routine and uneventful process. But Wile E. isn't interested in settling and communicating by using only paper cutouts, a limited supply of placard signs and wild gesticulations, he gets Kevin to commit to taking on Acme on a much, much larger scale.

Accompanied by his neice, Paige (Lana Condor), Kevin and the Coyote start investigating Acme only to start hearing scuttlebutt about secret projects and experiments, with their own carrot-chewing Deep Throat informant guiding them on.

This is an Erin Brocovich meets Mr. Smith Goes To Washington-type mash-up that somehow gets to the noble heart of the little guy persevering in taking on the big guy even though they know they will lose. It's a story about continuing to try even though failure is the most probable outcome, of making movements out of adversity.  There's a "thank you" to all the people who hold up signs and stand up and make noise in the credits, and it spells out perfectly what's at the heart of what should be just a silly live action/animation mash-up.

We've been living with real people in animated worlds on screen for decades upon decades now, but most of that is cgi (not that this isn't) and not the melding of toon worlds with the real world. There are more than a few examples dating back to classic Disney (the best of the more recents being the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers from 2022) but the gold standard has always been Who Framed Roger Rabbit, being a film that merges these realities into an odd yet cohesive place of existence. Coyote vs. Acme finds if not exactly that same balance then very, very close.  You believe these human characters are occupying the same space as these cartoon beings, and vice versa.

The way director Dave Green and his crew subtly (well, as subtle as a cartoon can be) inject animated things into the everyday world (like the screen on someone's cell phone being a cartoon screen instead of a real one) further serves this meshing. There's a super fun action sequence in the third act which finds a human character employing animated devices to wreak animation-style havoc on the real world (like grabbing the pavement on the road, pulling a section up like it were a carpet, and then jerking it causing ripples to wave their way down the road, tossing cars up into the air...really fun special effects).

The comedy comes from all angles, including physical and animated, wordplay and situational comedy, but Coyote vs. Acme, with its script from Samy Burch (with story by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Burch - based on a satirical New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier) finds its greatest comedy in the repurposing of tried and true Looney Tunes jokes and gags in different contexts throughout the film. This will be the litmus test for any viewer and their enjoyment...how familiar are you with the Tunes of yore? I imagine it's still a funny movie without getting these jokes, but it's probably significantly less funny if you don't.

And therein lies the challenge for this film. It can only be a hit if word of mouth is so resoundingly positive that it makes it an unavoidable feature, a real foundational pop culture piece. But if a large part of the audience is too young and unfamiliar, or similarly a large number of the critical/social media attention market don't have the familiarity, the enthusiasm will probably be much less than, say, someone like myself who just smiled the biggest, dumbest smile throughout the entire film, except when I was laughing, which was often. The whole family went to see it with 40 years between youngest and oldest and we all had a blast with it...we'll be shaking the dust off for weeks.

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You can't use a title that riffs on the tagline/second title of one of the all-timers in the time loop genre and not be a time loop movie. Whomever named Love Wedding Repeat should go to movie jail for a decade and think about what they've done (or didn't do).

No, Love Wedding Repeat is not a romcom spin on Edge of Tomorrow's alt Live, Die, Repeat (but could you imagine if this were a wedding romcom taking place at the same time as Edge of Tomorrow? Oh to dream!). Instead it's intoning the film's actual gimmick which, in all honesty, is not bad conceptually but terribly executed. But we'll get to that shortly.

The film opens in Rome where Englishman Jack (Sam Claflin, who is not Nicholas Hoult) was visiting his sister Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson, who is not Sophie Turner) but instead has found himself out on a non-date with his sister's American roommate Dina (Olivia Munn, who is Olivia Munn), and the two are just clicking. As they breach the distance for a kiss, they get interrupted by an old college pal of Jack's and the traditional awkward British pleasantness finds Jack swept away back to London instead of staying to spend more time with Dina.

Fast forward 5 years and Hayley is getting married to an Italian man in an Italian villa. Dina is on the guest list and Jack has one objective in reconnecting with her. He will, however, have to hurdle his spiteful ex-girlfriend Amanda (Frida Pinto) and her boyfriend-with-an-inferiority-complex Chaz (Allan Mustafa) and run interference when Marc (Jack Farthing), a coked-up classmate Hayley had a fling with not too long ago, shows up to disrupt the wedding.  Hayley asks Jack to effectively roofie Marc with a powerful sleeping aide she's been using and, due to divine intervention (or some impish children attending the weddings who rearrange the name placards for the seating at the table), the glass with the sleep aide becomes a game of Russian roulette. Who will get dosed? Is it Marc as intended? Or Jack? Or Dina or Amanda or Chaz? Or dull friend Sidney (a perfectly utilized Tim Key), or sarcastic friend Rebecca (an underutilized Aisling Bea), or Marc's best friend (and Hayley's Maid of Honor) Bryan (Joel Fry)? 

It's Bryan. And so having to handle a sleepy Bryan also falls on Jack's plate as he tries to reconnect with Dina. It's pretty much a catastrophe, and an hour later the groom winds up dead. 

But rewind...what if someone else drinks from the tainted glass instead?

Rather than play through a few of these scenarios, in the way that a time loop would, instead we get an extremely rapid -- to the point of being unintelligible -- montage sequence of other scenarios and blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpses of what the fallout of those situations might look like. And then the second scenario plays out where it's Jack, instead, who gets dosed.

Love Wedding Repeat is a frustrating movie. For a romcom it spends most of its time keeping the romantic couple apart, and offering mostly situational comedy with ringers Key, Bea, and Fry offering a little extra sauce (Fry's sleepy physical comedy is pretty good, Key's attempts to charm Munn are deliciously weird, and Bea's hilarious quips are too infrequent). The situational comedy, however, comes with a lot of questions, and, moreover, the sense that the only reason people are acting the way they are is for the sake of the story.  I mean, obviously... but their actions aren't logical or feel grounded in either reality or even this somewhat heightened reality.

A traditional comedy would put our protagonist(s) in a tight spot for comedic purposes and eventually they would find their way out of it again. The whole point is to build up the characters, to put challenges in their way, to observe their character flaws, and to show them overcoming them. Here, it meticulously goes through the wedding day and builds up all these catastrophes, and then, just, resets, presenting them with a whole other set of challenges to overcome, this time triumphantly.

But unlike a time loop where a character succeeds at leaving the time loop, and then life continues for everyone everywhere as if nothing happened, here, we're effectively dealing with alt realities, and in one alternative timeline Hayley accidentally kills her husband. I mean, where's the satisfaction in knowing that?

There's a kernel here in the story that really could have worked, but the fantastical premise sinks it. The cast is pretty charming, but it's not even close to being enough to save a fundamentally flawed production.

Rome looks nice.

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9 to 5 opens with that iconic low-register piano key (with bass accompaniment, a tapping of the hi-hat, and Dolly herself click-clackking her fingernails emulating a typewriter) and that's all this film needs to suck the audience in. The first couple stanzas of the song further draw you in as Dolly sings about getting up in the morning, forging your way to work and then toiling throughout the day, all while we see imagery of mobile women on the streets of New York on their morning routine. It's all a celebration of women in the workplace, to which the film that follows never lets down except in the last possible moment.

Recent divorcee Judy Burnly (Jane Fonda) enters the workforce for the first time, hired in the secretarial pool at Consolidated Companies under VP Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.  Judy is put under the wing of Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) the senior supervisor of secretarial, who should be in Hart's position but was passed over for not being part of the boy's club... and has once again been passed over for promotion by Hart, the role given to a far junior man (and also Hart recognizes that Violet's supreme competence elevates him, especially when he takes credit for her work).

Hart keeps his secretarial pool under a tight, regimented regime, observed by his subservient personal assistant Roz (Elizabeth Wilson), with Doralee Rhodes (Dolly Parton) being his personal secretary less for her skills than because she is pretty and buxom.  Hart denigrates his female staff regularly, has no compassion for their personal lives, intentionally underpays them and sexually harasses Doralee multiple times a day, while spreading rumours that he and Doralee are actually sleeping together (ostracizing her from her coworkers).

Eventually Doralee snaps at Hart's advances one Friday night and hogties him with a telephone cord. Violet - whose tether was already ready to snap - and Judy, with lingering trauma from her divorce, decide to take matters into their own hands, kidnapping Hart and holding him hostage at his own house while they make incredible improvements to the working lives of the women on their floor - job sharing, flex hours, in-building day care, equal pay for equal work, and talks of unionizing.

There's a ticking clock to their hostage situation, with Hart's wife on vacation and Roz sent away for a multi-week French immersive learning course. Likewise Hart has them on many criminal charges (including attempted murder), but they have a smoking gun that Hart has been embezzling from the company, but a records request will take time to process.

The kidnapping, which is part of the promotion of the film in trailers and the poster, doesn't happen until past the halfway point. Prior to this, the film spins its wheels in two frustrating side-quests. The first finds Doralee, Judy and Violet bonding while getting high and fantasizing about revenge on Hart. The bonding is good-not-great, but the three fantasy sequences are each overlong and kinda corny (although the role reversal fantasy with Doralee being the boss sexually harassing Hart was amusing, to a point...even as I recognize any sexual harassment of any kind is not really funny).  The second finds Violet accidentally poisoning Hart's coffee and getting taken to the hospital after receiving a concussion (unrelated), and there's some stealing a dead body shenanigans that feel like they're from another film entirely.

The characters here work. They are well drawn with interior lives and there are both spoken and unspoken motivations that fuel them. The glimpses as each of their lives outside of work are great and could have been explored even further rather than, say, the whole body-thieving subplot.  The juice of the movie is all in Hart's kidnapping and the changes they implement in his absence, and the lurking people at the office and outside Hart's home that may spoil it all adds layers of intensity.  You want these women to succeed, you want this horrible boss to be exposed, but you know the real risk is that should Hart have any small liberty he will gain the upper hand because of status and gender.

The conclusion of the film finds Hart failing upwards, the trio's changes deemed a corporate success, and that old cliche of still-frame postscript text providing a little glimpse into our main characters' futures. And as successful as the movie is at being quite progressive and feminist forward, it lets our characters down with a lack of imagination and thematic resonance in these postscripts by turning Doralee into Dolly Parton as a successful country and western singer, while Judy gets married to the Xerox guy (and, it sort of implies) isn't working anymore. Only Violet has true success relevant to her character, gaining the vice-president position she's long deserved.  It's also disappointing that Hart's postscript says he gets kidnapped in Brazil and is never seen again, as opposed to, you know, being exposed as a no-talent fraud and philanderer whose wife divorces him, taking everything and he winds up working at McDonalds or something.

Tomlin was always a fiery comedic performer with a very strong presence and no-bullshit personality which served her very well for a time, but the usual Purple Suits seemed to have less and less use for her as she got older (not a new story for women in Hollywood). She's perfect here. Coleman plays a slimeball like no other, where he's imposing but not really threatening, and elicits disgust at almost every turn. Likewise perfect. Fonda's role as Judy is sort of the gateway into this world, and is meant to act as the audience's shepherd through the film, but Judy's journey is a bit thin and could have been beefed up more. She's not much of a presence in the film.  

And then there's Dolly, the petite gal with big hair and big personality bolstered by a big Tennessee accent. She is very pretty, but it's always been Dolly's personality that was her greatest allure over 60 years in the entertainment business. She is so positive and kind and charitable, and that resonates from her no matter what she's doing. Here, as Doralee, that positivity, kindness and charity is taken advantage of, and abused, and watching Dolly flip into a tough-talking, no-nonsense, southern broad is remarkable while still feeling authentic. Dolly was not a pushover. Her successes were her own because of how driven she was and clearly how she could demand respect and would not accept anything else. This was her first film role, and beyond variety shows, her first big acting role, and she destroyed it. Doralee isn't Dolly, but Doralee isn't the same if it's not Dolly in the role. What a magnificent performance and performer. Rest in peace.

Following 9 to 5 there were a handful of other working women movies in the 1980s and they sort of disappeared after that, particularly once the Julia Roberts effect took hold in the 90's, and films about women were either romcoms or sappy melodramas, and there's not been a lot of mainstream movies reckoning with how American workplaces still, by and large, fail women. Even most revenge-on-your-boss movies have been male led.  In that respect 9 to 5, rather than being an archive of a certain time and place, still has an unfortunate vitality to it, especially as angry, old white men in America are attempting to claw back the inches of progress made in the 45 years since this film debuted.

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ABBA was one of my mom's favourites growing up, such that many, many ABBA songs feel baked into my very being. I wouldn't say I was ever a fan, but I really can't imagine an existence without their music.  

When I saw that ABBA: The Movie was on cable (...cable...?) I was hoping for either a so-bad-its good Spice World-style wacky musical adventure around the globe, or else a concert film that would give me the feeling of being at one of their shows in their heyday of the late 1970's when they were the number one musical artists in the world.

It's really unfortunate that ABBA: The Movie is neither of these things. Instead it's a film that follows an Australian radio DJ (Robert Hughes) tasked by his boss to go out an nab an interview with ABBA while they're on their Australian tour. 

Thus much of the movie, rather than being concert footage is instead footage of this personality-deprived non-character trying in vain to worm his way into backrooms and concerts, and, sometimes, interviewing the public about how they feel about ABBA (that most people love ABBA because they're so joyous, wholesome, nice and "clean" winds up feeling like some kind of propaganda after a while).

The concert footage we do see gets us some of that big sound with those big voices, but, I'll be frank, the stage show leaves something to be desired.  Maybe it's the fact that we never get into a groove with the live performances... I don't think there's a single live song that isn't interrupted by cutting to what the DJ is doing in the meantime. 

We get a bit of interview footage (but not ABBA with this DJ) instead fielding questions from the media circus around them, including such hard hitting questions as Agnetha Fältskog being asked about having a "sexiest bottom award" (*eyeroll*), which is then brought up again late in the film (*double eyeroll*).

There are a few of ABBA's bangers presented here, as well as a couple not-so-bangers, and a weird music video at the mid-point that finds the DJ having a dream sequence I guess. It's all nonsense.

ABBA: The Movie is not very entertaining and a terrible waste of potential. For hardcore fans only.

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There was a spate of movies in the 70's that featured characters on long drives, chases or races across the United States, things like Vanishing Point, Death Race 2000, Cannonball!, Convoy, Duel and more. Americans were obsessed with their highways and it seems like they couldn't get enough of watching them be traversed.

It turns out it wasn't just in movies, but in real life as well. The Gumball Rally was inspired by the same unofficial New York-to-LA race that Cannonball Run was (officially?) based on: "The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash". For five years in the early-to-mid 1970's teams of drivers competed in a non-stop race from one coast to the other for little else but the glory of being the winner.  These events were covered by Car and Driver magazine as fun and whimsical adventures featuring some real personalities, and Hollywood was quick to capitalize upon the stories' popularity, pumping out both Cannoball (starring David Carradine, from the director of Death Race 2000) and The Gumball Rally.

The Gumball Rally features a dozen or so vehicles participating in the event, which begins merely with the mention of the word "Gumball" relayed across the land. The participants show up to New York, parking their flashy vehicles in a secret garage and meeting in a private room at a restaurant to discuss how the race will proceed. Lieutenant Roscoe of the LAPD has, for years, been trying to catch the participants of The Gumball Rally, the intonation that their race is a public safety issue (and, given some of the destruction we see in the film, he's right). The organizers of this affair are Roscoe's target: Michael Bannon (Michael Sarrazin) and Steve Smith (Tim McIntire), each hitting the highways in their own sporty coupe. 

The film spends a half hour establishing who the players are, with a little hint as to where they come from and their personalities, and then gives them an extended sequence where they're all putting the finishing touches on their vehicles in the garage, establishing a smidge of repartee between many of them. It's a half hour of movie time before the race begins, and I won't say it was a wasted half hour, but they could have compressed a little more to get to the part we're just waiting to see.

The racers leave the garage 10 seconds apart at 6am on a sleepy, sunny morning in New York. The vehicles race through the near-empty streets where only the construction workers, cops and newsstand agents are mobile. New York is so lovingly shot, we could have spent an hour just moving through those naked streets with rays of sun reflecting off glass, and I would have been happy. As such it's about a 10 minute sequence of the cars attempting to get out of town. It's kind of awesome.

Once out on the highways, the vistas are there, but they are less enticing than New York. The vehicles, particularly the sporty ones, are shot with a near-lustful lens... a real ogling of the AC Cobra, Ferrari Daytona, Chevy Camaro 7-28, Chevy Corvette, Porche 911, and Rolls Royce Silver Shadow among others.

Ostensibly a comedy, The Gumball Rally isn't terribly funny. While there are a few situational chuckles here and there, it's Raul Julia as Smith's ringer, an F-1 driver imported from the Ferrari team in Italy (along with some of his pit crew stationed across the country) that is the biggest personality. He is horny-to-the-point-of-distraction and there's more than a few good gags made from his skirt chasing.  The other big personality in the film is Gary Busey (paired with a suffering John Durren in the Camero) who is fully embodying ADHD in his performance, needing constant, escalating stimulation.

Having never heard of The Gumball Rally before, I was shocked with how expensive and visually appealing a film it is, excellent cinematography, some great (and once-unique) camera placements on the cars, and the sheer number of helicopter shots. There's some requisite smashing-through-shit sequences that are kind of the weakest parts of the film, yet still sort of impressive in the level of destruction (nowhere close to The Blues Brothers level of chaos, but then nothing is).  The best thing about The Gumball Rally, though, is how it doesn't try very hard at all to have character development or story arcs (really, it's only Roscoe that has an arc in this film).  It does what it needs to do, and I very much enjoyed it even if the stakes were very, very low.

I feel another project coming on... Cannonball, Cannonball Run, Death Race 2000, Speed Zone and the others of this ilk, I'm going to have to do comparison watches.

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The titular character of Lady Snowblood, aka Yuki Kashima, was born as a tool of revenge, raised to be a demon whose sole purpose was to avenge the family she never met, punishing the many responsible for their deaths. In the first film, Lady Snowblood accomplished her goal, and had become legend in the process, but by the end was grievously wounded.

While maybe not in top shape when this film begins, Yuki is definitely healthier than when we last saw her, and she's actively trying to evade the law, but eventually must give in. Before her sentence can be carried out, she's rescued by Secret Police and sent on a mission to spy on a revolutionary.  She become the housemaid of  Ransui Tokunaga (Juzo Itami), but it's not long before Ransui reveals he knows who she is. She fills him in on his important dissident work and implores her assistance in toppling some corrupt government officials.  Except they get the jump on them, Ransui is taken, Yuki escapes to find his brother and bring him some damning documents that could explode the country into chaos.

She flees to the slums where Shusuke Tokunaga lives and finds a man who loathes his own brother, and will not cooperate in taking down the government. Instead he plans to blackmail the men in power for the benefit of the slums, requesting much needed money and food. Instead, the slums are burned to the ground and it's up to Yuki to take revenge.

Unlike the first film, where Yuki is the quiet, driving center of the film, the plot moving with her wherever she may lead it, here she's frequently on the sidelines and one has to ask, in this story of class, segregation, veterans affairs, police brutality, corrupt politicians, and socialst revolution, where exactly is she supposed to fit? The story is not bad, but it's not well matched to the character, and it fees more like Yuki is swept up the the films events rather than steering them.  

A story set in two halves, neither dominates over the other, but then neither does either elevate itself. Given how brilliant the first film was, this one is quite the let down without really being bad. 

1-1-1-KsMIRT: not enough and too much

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month(ish) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  It's back(!), because I'm feeling too scatterbrain to think unfettered.

This Month:

Fallout Season 2 - AmazonPrime [8/8 episodes watched]
Daredevil: Born Again season 2 - Disney+ [8/10 episodes watched]
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 - AppleTV [10/10 episodes watched]
Scrubs Season 9 - Crave [13/13 episodes watched]
Widow's Bay Season 1 - Apple TV [10/10 episodes watched]
Dark Winds Season 2 - Crave [6/6 episodes watched]

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Fallout Season 2
season 1
[created by Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet]

The Plot/What 100: Lucy travels the wastelands with the Ghoul, looking for her father who has run off to Las Vegas to enact the next phase of the plan. Whatever that is. Maximus tries to prevent a war, and in the process, probably starts a war. Stephanie, now overseer of Vault 32, seems to have her own machinations in play, while Betty in Vault 33 finds resources dwindling and an inbred uprising fermenting. Lucy's brother Norm has awakened the management, and finds his leadership skills wanting. Something big is about to start, and it probably can't be stopped.

[1 Great] Often flashbacks in a TV show serve as information dump or as a means of exploring a character's backstory a little more thoroughly. It's often aside from the main plot, maybe thematically connected, but having little bearing on the progression of the in-world story of today. The flashbacks in Fallout have served to show us the world before the wasteland, and the life of The Ghoul (Walton Goggins) back when he was a famous movie star, war veteran and pitch man for Valut-Tec. This season, though, Cooper Howard is brought in through the back door of the conspiracy to blow-up the world...you know, for profit! And he has to navigate not only the twists of the shady people involved in the conspiracy and those trying to prevent it, but also his wife's part in all of it. It's actually pretty gripping, and since it's largely all from Coop's perspective, we only really know what he knows and so the rug gets pulled out from us both multiple times. It's pretty awesome and Goggins is fantastic.

[1 Good] Since I don't play the games, all of the world of Fallout is new to me. So I never knew that there was a war between USA and Canada, as the U.S. tried to annex my country. Toasty filled me in that this has long been a part of the lore of the games, so it's not just a reactionary bit to the Trumpian whim of terrain expansion. It's not explored too deeply in the season, but we learn that Stephanie's nefarious machinations are all in the service of Canadian resistance, and while the show tries to play her off as the bad guy, I'm firmly on her side. "Don't think of them as human beings, think of them as Americans...." That line gave me chills and really speaks more to how the teaching of American Exceptionalism others everyone else to Americans, rather than any desire for Canadian aggression towards our neighbours to the south (many of whom are really good human beings).

[1 Bad] There's nothing really bad about this show. I found myself pretty enthralled by this entire season. I was maybe a little frustrated at nebbish Norm and his inability to level up, not at all like Lucy did. But that's Norm's character flaw, he's just not very good at stuff. Lucy on the other hand wants to remain an optimist but boy does the world grind her down. It's a little tough to watch, but her confrontations with Hank (and the Ghoul) when she's finally had enough, well, pretty great.

Meta: It had been over two years since I watched Season 1 and I had forgotten how richly constructed the world of this show was, all the different threats it weaves together in a way that may feel loose but is surprisingly cohesive.  The addition of Justin Theroux as Robert Edwin House, the billionaire Coop is told is going to blow up the world is an excellent addition, and the character's impacts both in the past and future are deeply felt. Funny, gross, and richly satirical about both capitalism and totalitarianism, it's a surprisingly deep show for how ludicrously fun it is.

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Daredevil: Born Again Season 2
Season 1
(created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord)

The Plot/What 100: Daredevil attacks a secret shipment of weapons through New York's harbour, a deal Mayor Wilson Fisk had made with the CIA (?), and now it's causing headaches. Anti-vigilante laws are enforced with brutality, anyone suspected of allying with a vigilante (or anyone Fisk just doesn't like) is rounded up and caged. Bullseye has turned "friend" to Daredevil, but his violence is too extreme for his liking (and people get caught in the crossfire). BB Urich manipulates Fisk's protege, Daniel Blake, in to revealing classified information, which she then uses as anti-Fisk propeganda. It's not going to go well for either of them.

[1 Great] I still think Charlie Cox is the perfect Daredevil, even if he's not written so perfectly.

[1 Good] Jessica Jones is back. Loved seeing Kristin Ritter back, if only for a minute.

[1 Bad] It's all just so goddamn tedious. It's a show that just keeps hitting the same points over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It's so damn exhausing. Matt doesn't want to kill anyone, but he's always debating with people whether he should. And debating with people whether he should let them kill. His conflict is now not even a religious one but one of a guy who has to decide whether he believes in the law and legal institutions of the country in the role he performs, or, you know, puts on a costume and doles out concussions on a nightly basis. We've seen it all before. And it's a show that just teases and teases and teases out it stories and threads as if it had 25 episodes to fill. It doesn't and there's so many of these characters we don't really care that much about (sorry BB, sorry Daniel, sorry Heather, sorry Karen, sorry to the rest of you...) mostly because  they're so boring. The sombre, sober tone of the series, the smug self-satisfaction over even attempting to comment on modern times and governmental descent into fascism, it's all so off-putting.  Fisk needs to be put aside for a good long while. He's not Daredevil's only villain, but outside of the Hand in season 2, it's been nothing but Fisk, and it's gotten stale. Nothing new is said about their relationship this season. And they totally mishandle Jessica, severely underusing her and ...depowering her in fits and starts? Why? Ugh.

Meta: I really gave Season 1 a pass. I decided I liked it because I was happy it was back. I really, really like Cox in the role and was just so plussed to see him again. But, in hindsight, Season 2 only highlight that Season 1 was just as much of a drag. I recall Lady Kent and I taking a day off work, ordering enough pizza for two meals and just binging 16 episodes of a season of Daredevil. It was exciting to us. By the third episode of this season, watching Daredevil felt like a chore, like something we had to do, and it was definitely not something we were enjoying. We were counting down the minutes until Jessica Jones' arrival and that little baloon of hope deflated almost instantly.  Cox's best appearances as Matt and Daredevil were not in the 17 episodes of his own series but in an episode of She-Hulk and a cameo in Spider-Man:No Way Home. 

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2
Season 1
(created by Chris Black and Matt Fraction)

The Plot/What 100: Keiko Mura has been rescued from Axis Mundi, 60 years after she disappeared into a wormhole, and she's only 60 days older than when Shaw last saw her. Her world is rocked to be reunited with her son and meet her granddaughter and grandson having missed most of their lives, but Monarch, the organization she founded with her husband Bill Randa, is not what it once was, and faces some stiff private sector competition.  Not just competition, but organizations looking to control the kaiju for their own agendas, and developing the technology to do so. But the immediate crisis is the reappearance of Titan X, last seen by Keiko, Bill and Shaw a lifetime ago.

[1 Great] It's never not awesome watching giant monsters fight, and the show does a pretty decent job of showing scale when it's happening.  Obviously the show doesn't have the budget of a Godzilla x Kong feature, or even the budget that Season 1 had, so the fights are few and far between, but pretty great when they happen. 

[1 Good] There is an episode where Shaw, in trying to figure out how to lure Godzilla out of Axis Mundi, winds up receiving an S.O.S. from himself decades before when he was briefly trapped in there. Since Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell are playing the same character, there's no reasonable way that they could share the screen together, but this is the next best thing. A novelty episode but still kind of great that has some real emotional elements for both performers to work through in completely different times in their characters' life. The show does a pretty good job throughout this season finding consistency between the Russels' performance of the character. 

[1 Bad] Much like Daredevil: Born Again this show frustratingly treads water because it needs to bide its time between its big budget setpieces. This results in some incredibly stupid (and sometimes very confusing) character threads where certain characters go off and do their own thing for reasons that never truly feel justified, and then return to Monarch for reasons that never truly feel justified, only to get into arguements that never truly feel justified, and then to do really stupid things that never truly feel justified. Most of this shit is our young cast of Kentaro, Cate and May. They make my eyes roll involuntarily far too often.

Meta: Monarch is not a good show. It's wildly inconsistent and seems to lack purpose other than to be an in-world flourish to the Legendary series of Kong and Godzilla features. The characters amble so much one has to often ask what they're actually contributing to the story.  The scenes set in the 1950s and 60's are far more interesting, as the setting gives a pastiche for the series to play into and often it seems like it would be a better program had it firmly set itself in that time and explore the Kaiju with their technological limitations.  I honestly don't know if I would watch a third season should it return (maybe if they get Bill and Lewis Pullman to play, like, an adversary to Shaw...that would be enough to get me back in).

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Scrubs Season 9 (aka Scrubs: Med School Season 1)
(created by Bill Lawrence)

The Plot/What 100: Sacred Heart teaching hospital now has a whole campus, where we see J.D., Turk, and Cox all hold classes, and Elliott is pregnant so she's on light duty. The new batch of recruits includes Lucy Bennett, a midwestern, daydreamy "horse girl" who's naive and optimistic, which Cox wants to drum right out of her, lest he wind up with another John Dorian. Drew dropped out of med school a half decade ago, had a rough bit of life experience, and is back with reinvigored focus, only Cox has taken an unsettlingly deep interest in him. Cole is a SoCal-bro all the way, a prototypical rich kid whose parents funded half the wings in the hospital, so despite how annoying he is, he's teflon (he finds a friend in retired and sexually rambunctious [to the point of sexpest-ery] Dr. Kelso), and Dr. Denise Mahoney, the sarcastic, and jaded T.A. It's Scrubs but with new people, and some of the old people.

[1 Great] I was honestly surprised at how quickly the Scrubs formulae worked being reworked like this with a nearly whole new cast. I think having some of the old guard around some of the time works quite well (especially John C. McGinley whose Perry Cox is maybe the most critical ingredient to the show, though Eliza Coupe as Denise certainly could have filled the void in the eventuality of McGinley's departure). Dave Franco nails perfectly the irritatingly entitled dirtbag Cole but never fully as the villain, and the writing staff find ways to round down his sharpest edges to make him pretty much a likeable character. Kerry Bishé as Lucy is and isn't just a female J.D. And putting them side by side for a few episodes early in the season (before Braff departed) was the perfect way to highlight both. The new cast, gels pretty quickly, and it helps that they're all pretty talented performers (Coupe and Franco, obviously, go on to bigger and brighter things) who settle into their roles quickly and the writers find a voice for really fast. It's basically Scrubs-by-way-of-Community just maybe a year too early. 

[1 Good] My favourite part of the season was the blossoming relationship between Denise and Drew. Denise is a Tough.Nut and is such an Eliza Coupe role that's perfectly suited for her. Drew has a hardened past and his own embarrassing secrets, but can almost go toe to to with Denise in the cynicism department. They find very quickly that they have similar world views, and yet they're two quite different people that have a real challenge with compromise or, you know, emotional vulnerability. Watching them actually negotiate being together is the biggest joy of the season.

[1 Bad] I haven't watch original flavour Scrubs in a very long while, but did it have so much gender-based "comedy" as well. There's so much name calling and put-downs, mostly to the point of calling someone (usually a male character) a "girl" or a "bitch" or something more clever insinuating that the guy is soft and/or feminine. There's also one episode that has a B-plot rotating around Turk and Cox dealing with a lesbian couple (both played by very attractive actresses of course) and being total children around the idea. It's pretty embarrassing for the show and the characters.

Meta: Having just watched the reboot of Scrubs earlier this year, I was curious about the ill-fated season 9 that was intended to be an independent spin-off but ABC chickened out in letting it be its own thing. I don't know if it was ever going to be successful, as people had a certain idea of what Scrubs was and that centered around Zach Braff-related silliness, of which this is in shorter supply. Maybe it is just having watched the reboot, which, quite frankly, feels more like a reboot of this season of Scrubs: Med School than it does of Scrubs proper, but this went down pretty smooth (dated jokes aside). I had a really great time with this and would have liked another couple seasons with this crew.  Maybe it's because I knew half of this cast already from elsewhere or maybe it's because this season of television the writers pointedly made a decision to focus on the new crew (as opposed to the reboot, where it's more than half about the old crew, and less than  half about the new crew) but I think I like this season better than the reboot. A little bit more at least.

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Widow's Bay Season 1
(created by Katie Dippold)

The Plot/What 100: Tom Loftis is mayor of the remote New England island town of Widow's Bay. Unlike most people who live there, Tom wasn't born there but married into island life, his wife having died during childbirth 17 years ago. Tom has lofty ambitions of being the new Martha's Vinyard, and rallies the town behind his new tourism push. The only real objector is Wyck Crawford, a grizzled fisherman who vociferously insists that the island is cursed and that outsiders should definitely not come. He is correct on both counts. 

[1 Great] It's so very hard to choose one single thing that is great about Widow's Bay since it is uniformly terrific. Merging horror, comedy, and emotional drama the show very ably builds a small island community where it makes sense whenever any two or three cast members share the screen and the personalities are so well defined without being too trope-y that we kind of know exactly who these people are, until we get to know them more. Any character can be given a spotlight and ably hold it, the performers on the show all very keenly get the assignment, while the directors (including Atlanta's Hiro Murai and horror director Ti West), writers (including comedic performers Colton Dunn and Neil Casey) and crew all seem to be completely enthused to be  working on the show that lets them toe so many lines, and step over them, and step back. By the show's third episode there was already a stand-out episode, and then they deliver another, and another.  It's still very much a genre show, but it's doing it as if it were Parks and Recreation crossed with Midnight Mass, and it's even been told that creator/showrunner Katie Dippold originally gestated this idea as a script for Parks & Rec, but just couldn't make it work).

[1 Good] The music by David Fleming is incredible, absolutely nailing the assignment. He's able to strike a tone that is ominously lighthearted when it needs to be but can go strange, mysterious or intense when necessary. His score leans into the conventions of scores from the more mass-audience friendly horror of the past like Poltergeist, Jaws, the Omen, or the Exorcist without ever directly referencing any of them. He's found the vibe, the tone of those scores perfectly, and using their most cliched aspects as much for terror as for punctuating the humorous or absurd. It's a very deftly conceived soundtrack, one that makes me take notice without pulling me out of the moment. 

[1 Bad] The premise of the series is sort of a Jaws scenario, where there's danger lurking but the mayor won't sacrifice the town's economic prosperity for the possibility of danger. There's also an X-Files set-up where certain people in the town are aware of its curse, and are pretty comfortable with it, in fact, but Tom wants to just shrug it off. Within three episodes, though, Tom can no longer shrug it off. As we get deeper into the season Tom may be in denial at points, but it's clear he knows deep down what's true about this island. And then it's staring him plainly in the face...

I don't generally agree that TV was better when it was 25 episode seasons, as that type of American TV show created a lot of bloat. What we lose in going down to 10 or 8 or 6 episode seasons is the ability to focus more intently on secondary characters, or sometimes, as with Widow's Bay things move a little bit faster than you had expected. Tom's journey from disbeliever to skeptic to true believer happens in about 7 episodes and while I wouldn't want this season to be split into two to slow the pace of his progression, if the season were longer, with more time to expand its focus to the town at large it could really have benefitted from such a scope increase, even just three to five more episodes. The "bad" is, basically, I want more.

Meta: Widow's Bay is probably the best season of television this year. Just a lightning bolt of a show that comes out episode one firing on all cylinders and then injects the nitrous oxide into the tank in the second episode. Matthew Rhys has had a trio of prominent dramatic series over the past 15 years, but this show lets him step out of being miserable and deadpan and instead into a funnier misery, and he absolutely excels at it, both physically and verbally... he has great comedic timing...who knew? While he's been a revered dramatic actor for years, Kate O'Flynn, playing Tom's assistant Patricia, steps out of small-time character actor shadows and into the limelight, and completely destroys. Patricia can be weird and off-putting to start, but O'Flynn is able to elicit deep compassion and sympathy for Patricia, eventually turning from loser to unlikely hero (though Patricia is still incapable of going full badass).

Episodes 4 and 5 jockey for best episode of the season, with episode 4, "Beach Reads" putting Patricia and her high-stakes party planning front and centre, while episode 5 , "What to Expect on Your Trip" finds Tom accidentally getting dosed with mushrooms and blinking in and out of consciousness (I don't think I've ever seen an episode of tv told from a POV like this, where it just keeps jumping ahead in time, the viewer as disoriented as the character). It's like season two of The Bear all over again ... "Fishes" or "Forks"?

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Dark Winds Season 2
(created by Graham Roland)

The Plot/What 100: Jim Chee has left the feds to be a private investigator, and gets called to look in on a robbery at a wealthy landowner's home by his wife. Jim's case dovetails into a truck bomb investigation Joe Leaphorn is investigating, the clues to which lead him to believe Jim's client is somehow tied into the murder of his son. Joe's deputy, Bernadette, looks elsewhere for growth opportunities, while Emma and Sally ward off a white reporter from L.A. looking for a story around the heinous eugenics practices at medical clinics and murdered and missing indigenous women.

[1 Great] Each season is adapted from one of Tony Hillerman's series of Tribal Police books. Much like Slow Horses six episodes seems to be the perfect length to fluidly adapt the story without any padding. It does lead to the feeling that time has passed between seasons/stories, and I really enjoy how the first episode works as both catch up on what's happened to the characters in the interim as we as the place-setter for what the thrust of the season will be. The only one who doesn't seem like they're on a different path this season is Joe Leaphorn, who seems all to settled in his ways. But a pretty serious blow-up with Emma as well as confronting the man who may have killed his son sets him on a new path by the season's end, and his relationship with everyone in the show is different by the end (or at least our understanding of those relationships is).

[1 Good] People take their bloody lumps this season. It's a pretty taxing and brutal affair that Leaphorn and Chee get caught up in, and they pay the price. But determination, resiliency, stubbornness, and, in Joe's case, pure blind rage, get them through. It's a little harrowing to be honest, but the fifth episode trek through the desert is an epic 40 minutes of TV.

[1 Bad] I do not begrudge the series at all for attempting to tackle some of the horrific and disgusting practices that indigenous women have been subjected to, past and present, in America (and most of the colonized lands of the world, frankly), it's pretty necessary to put a spotlight on it. It's only "bad" in that it's unfortunate how tertiary this story line is to the show. Despite having not read the books, it's still evident that this plot doesn't come from the source, as it just doesn't fit with the rest of the events of the show and is of a different tone entirely. It gives something for Emma (Deanna Allison) and Sally (Elva Guerra) to do this season, but it almost feels more like that (needing to provide a story for the characters) than to hit hard on raising the awareness of these atrocities. Such a thing deserves its own central spotlight

Meta: Such an easily consumable, enriching and entertaining show. The three leads, Zahn McClarnan, Kiowa Gordon and Jessica Matten, are all incredible performers and have such a great rapport.  McClarnan's face is one of the most captivating on TV, while Gordon and Matten are just so damn good looking, and ridiculously charming together you just want to see more of them as a romcom (although the show's just looking for reasons to keep them apart). This season features Jeri Ryan in a guest-starring role and she's superb as a middle-aged femme fatale who may or may not be playing games with Chee. Veteran character actor A Martinez also turns up as Sherriff Gordo, Joe's friend and mentor. We also meet Joe's father (Joseph Runningfox) this season, an ex-cop and a hard man who Joe's still trying to live up to. Joe tries to fight his father's influence while also actively emulating him. It's a fascinating dynamic which we need to see more of. 

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.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): One Battle After Another

2025, Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia) -- download

A few times, I have thought about doing this, balked, but I guess I am. I am starting this stub before I even finish watching the movie. Primarily because I hit the "record scratch" American Christmas Club scene of the movie and felt the sudden tonal shift tangibly, and I had to read (more) about the movie even before seeing the movie completely.

Of note, this was the last of the started-but-not-finished movies I mentioned.

In your post Kent, you mentioned a ... physical zine. Startling suggestion. Intriguing. How would that work? Become some sort of "French 75" of film writing, leaving guerilla style print outs in random spots around the city? Stacks of them on the window sills of 24 hr launderettes and health food stores? Smuggle them into OCAD ?

I guess that would make me Bob.

What an odd little/big fucking movie.

The novel Vineland, from 1990 by Thomas Pynchon, from which this movie is adapted, is also an odd little/big fucking novel. It tells a tale of the 80s and a break-away hippie/dope fiend "country" in Southern California called "The Peoples Republic of Rock n Roll", in particular the tale of Frenesi Gates who betrays the movement because of her unnatural attraction to fascist military leader Brock Vond. Its one of these infamous "American novels" that is imaginative, evocative, political and divisive and very very assured of its self-importance. Seems right down PTA's alley.

Its center message of a properly violent fight against a fascistic government was perfect for current times. Kent opened by talking about the Google Reviews and his assumption that the MAGA Heads would be down-voting the movie in competition with the Intellectual Elitists who would love this movie. My thought is that this movie was so far outside the scope of even the right-wing bot machine (its too long and thoughtful) that they don't know it existed. We didn't even get a Truth Social non-sensical post from Cheeto himself. For me, this just says that the politics down south are not really about politics, and more about the control of the people through pointed choice of outrage vs lunacy.

It did pretty well on RT, garnering a 94/85 and that makes it fully in the eye of the Liberal Elite machine, except I doubt many will see the full spectrum of political commentary considering how dismissive it is of the Antifa Warriors the movie depicts. They are not the most effective, nor well-organized, and have their reactionary heads so far up their drug-addled asses they cannot accomplish much. But at least that is more than the current Lefties IRL are doing, which is being nervously complacent and impotent.

Though, I remind myself, everything I know about the situation in the US right now is based upon what the media and the Internet itself is telling me, and that's never the Whole Truth. And I am as complacent as those I complain about, never doing the deeper dives necessary to see what is going on.

I am not going to do my oft long winded recap but suffice to know the plot is about a revolutionary group that calls themselves the French 75. I am sure that connects to something IRL, but I never bothered looking it up. They raid the encampments of border detention centres, releasing those interned. And they rob banks, violently and flagrantly, to raise funds for their movement. They are outrageous and self-congratulatory. "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio, Don't Look Up) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, The Book of Clarence) are the power couple at the front of the movement, that is, until Perfidia becomes the obsession of military leader Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn, The Gunman), and is in turn, perversely thrilled by the power she has over this "powerful" man. She betrays the movement, getting a bunch of them killed and incarcerated. Also, she gets pregnant from Lockjaw. Her final act is to abandon her newborn.

Sixteen years later Pat is Bob and the child is Willa (Chase Infiniti, Presumed Innocent) and they live somewhere small town, rural, in the trees of Northern California. Lockjaw wishes to join some weird Right Wing White Supremacist group that calls themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club (they are "saving Xmas") but in order to do so, he has to wipe clean any reminders of the affair he had with Perfidia, a black woman. So he tracks Bob & Willa down, concocts a reason to raid their town and tries to the kill the pair.

It took me a while to catch on that this movie was less political drama & thriller, and more comedy & farce. Yeah yeah, I know, but these days I am more immersed in the genres where the story telling is less subtle. That was the record-scratch I mentioned above, and it was further solidified by Bob being completely incapable of being "activated" because over the sixteen years he has spent being Bob, he has forgotten all the code phrases and passwords, which are unnecessarily complicated.

But its also so very precisely crafted, as I understand PTA to be, but honestly, I don't have the actual knowledge to back it up. I mean, other than Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love, being the career making movies I know of, the only one of his I saw was Inherent Vice. Even then, I knew him to be a film-viewers film maker, and I am just Not That Guy anymore. And its all over this movie, from the odd, quirky characters to the filmic flairs like the skateboarders parkouring every jump as they run across the rooftops to the fun rollercoaster car chase where their quarry keeps on disappearing over each hump of the horizon. I enjoyed myself, giving myself a reprieve from the usual easily-digestible action-thriller I gravitate to these days, giving me something to chew on, to think about, and to be annoyed by, all traits PTA wanted from us viewers.

P.S. None of the standard posters really illicit the tone of this movie, and I guess, as promotional pieces, that is intentional. But it also seems deceptive, telling us this is going to be a terse political action thriller, and I was indeed deceived. But, I believe the above "character poster" says more about the movie than anything else.

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.