31 Days of Halloween: Carrie

2026 - Amazon

How do I write about TV again?

Every year, at least one TV show appears near-to or during the season. This year, we get at least three, which are automatically on the slate: Yaga which starts at the end of the month, the Newfoundland shot and based monster-in-the-water series Below that starts tomorrow on Netflix, and this one, the latest from favourite Mike Flanagan.

Insert Fanfare Emoji

There have been a lot of Carrie adaptations, the debut novel from Stephen King, going all the way back to the 1976 De Palma / Sissy Spacek movie. Then there is its "sequel", the terrible The Rage: Carrie 2 in the 90s, and the 2013 version with Chloë Grace Moretz, and there was also a 2002 made-for-TV movie written by Bryan Fuller; it was meant to be a backdoor pilot, but that never happened. I will also mention there were two stage productions, but I refuse to even dig into them.

This is Flanagan, whom we love love love, but I have to admit... I had no great anticipation for this one. I might have to admit no great fondness for the King story, despite it being his first. It was likely my fifth or six of his books. I might have soured on it due my own high school drama; nothing involving buckets of pig blood, but I do not look fondly back on those years. But I will watch it, and I will enjoy it despite getting in my own way.

It begins with the death of Carrie's father (Tahmoh Penikett, Dollhouse), a construction worker, but more importantly, a prep'er and anti-government whacko who kept to himself. Nobody at work knew him at all. It continues with the authorities finding Carrie(ta) and her mother (Samantha Sloyan, Midnight Mass) in the closet. Nobody knew they existed. But, I should say it begins with the simul-cast preamble, interviews with people regarding the incident that started in the high school gymnasium during prom, and ended with the entire school burned down, and most of the town. The same interviews explain that, pending funds being setup for the now widow and her daughter, Carrie (Summer H Howell, Night of the Reaper) has to go to school and mom has to work.

Smart move from Flanagan, as most people watching already know the story behind Carrie in that a young girl with powers gets a bucket of pigs blood poured over her and she ... explodes, taking everyone with her. Not literally, but powerful telepathic response. So, we know the ending, but do we know the story.

The setup is familiar enough. Carrie is new to this world, pretty much all of it. She's weird but resilient, open to every new experience. High school girls are demons, cliques within cliques. New people are fodder, new & weird even more juicy. Her first few days of homemade clothing, sexual awakening, popularity machinations and her first school shooting drill do not go well. We also see that there is an emerging conflict between Carrie and her mother, as Carrie begins to understand how much she has been kept from.

The episode ends as the torture begins. Carrie gets her first period, something her mother neglected to prepare her for ("my daughter is a child...") and the other gym class girls go wild on her, throwing feminine protection at her, while filming her confusion and panic. The episode truly ends with the introduction of something new, an Xavier style school of other girls with psychic powers, one who is sensitive to Carrie's awakenings.

Like all Flanagan, we begin with characters, good and bad, slow burning our way into a story. He's brought only a few of the usual suspects along so far, but I suspect more will come along.  Its a sold opener.

KWIF: No Other Choice (+3)

KWIF=Kent's Week In Film. January's here. It's real movie time. 

This Week: 
No Other Choice (2025, d. Park Chan-wook - in theatre)
Train Dreams (2025, d. Clint Bentley  - netflix)
F1 (aka F1: The Movie - 2025, d. Joseph Kosinski - appletv)
The Young Magician ("Tales for All #4") (1987, d.  - crave)

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With No Other Choice, director Park Chan-wook is in full control of his craft as he presents a viewing experience that is so emotionally twisting that for pretty much the entire runtime (just shy of 140 minutes) the audience is proactively and continuously meant to ponder their allegiance to and affinity for the film's protagonist. 

Adapting Donald Westlake's 1997 novel "The Ax" with co-writers Don McKellar (with whom Park worked with on HBO's *The Sympathizer*), Jahye Lee (with whom Park worked on Netflix's *Uprising*) and Lee Kyung-mi, No Other Choice is a tale of corporate downsizing and the satirically desperate extremes people will push themselves to in order to perpetuate their status in the toxic and uncaring reality of capitalism.

Lee Byung-hun stars as Man-su, who, as the film opens, manages a specialty paper factory. The factory has just come under new American ownership and he's been told that staff needs to be cut by twenty percent. He's preparing to rally and fight for the men he's been working with for years, only to find that he is among the twenty percent. He has invested a tremendous deal into his role, sacrificing time with his wife (who also give up her career), his stepson and his daughter to educate himself to be a leader in his field. But finding work in the field of paper, when demand is down, automation is up, mergers shrink the number of available employers, and competition from similarly out of work people is fierce, it all means Man-su is lost and, from his vantage point, out of options. 

His beautiful house, his upscale cars, his dance lessons, his Netflix...even his dogs are all on the list of potential cuts if he can't find work before his severance package runs dry. His loving wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) is ready to make sacrifices but Man-su is not. After 18 months of desperate hunting, Man-su lands on the idea of killing the man in really the only position he is suitable for, but stops himself... and not because he cannot bring himself to murder another man, but because he can't guarantee that there aren't more qualified men who would get the available position before he does.

Thus ensues a pitch-black comedy of errors that runs concurrently with a grim, distressing existential journey where Man-su's whole sense of self and where he fits in his own life falls out of step with his ambition and self-determined necessity. It's a masterful exercise in defying expectations and audience manipulation. The Man-su we meet at the start of this journey is a very different man than the one we see at the end, as is Miri who is about as devoted a wife as we ever see in secular, modern stories without ever undercutting her agency or intelligence.

But for spoilers, this is a film I would really like to deep dive into writing about, because it is rich and complicated in theme and subtext, a lot of which is masked by its wicked sense of humour and the nastier, distasteful side of humanity it takes us through. It's a long movie, but we're always allied with Man-su on his journey even when we've stopped sympathizing with him (it's a film that warps the audience greatly in that "he really shouldn't get away with this, but we want him to get away with this" fashion).

Director Park's visual acumen is incontestable, with his cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung, this is as good as any of his films have looked, and they pretty much all look fantastic. Here, he stays on the warm side of the spectrum, even as our affinity for Man-su cools. The director wants us to know that no matter what twisted extremes Man-su has gone to, the film is still showing him in a favourable light (if not always positive). The film never wants us to fully disengage from Man-su. The refrain of "no other choice" goes from a laughable excuse for corporate greed to the aching plight of a desperate man to the words of a selfish and myopic person. The title of the film itself has its own journey.

I honestly cannot tell you if I liked this film, or if I enjoyed it. I am impressed by it. I was fully engaged with it, and in unpacking it, even just this little bit, I see much more of its depth that I was too emotionally distracted to fully take in during my first viewing. I have a feeling it will play much better upon rewatch.

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Without specifically spoiling the end of No Other Choice, it's final images are sights inside a fully automated paper factory, which juxtapose sharply against the busy, populated factory we see at the start of the film. In the last images we see, we are taken to a forest where we observe as a logging crane (excuse my lack of knowledge of the technical term) as it picks up a felled tree and relieves it of its branches in seconds. The scale of the machinery, its power and efficiency, and its dominance over nature was a surprisingly visceral visual, one I was surprised to have such an uncomfortable reaction to. Much like the factory scene that precedes it, there is not another person in sight and the message of consumerism and capitalism and its increasing disconnect from humanity is a potent one.

Train Dreams is the life story of a logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) working on clearing the way for railways in the summer months. At the film's start, logging is a fully manual profession, one man on either side of a massive hand saw cranking back and forth through a tree, their sweat moistening the ground beneath them. On a felled tree, men take their axes and hack away at the branches in just as demanding a physical effort. And then they need to section the tree. It's a labor intensive process that pays four dollars a day (minus expenses). It's extremely physical and dangerous work, but the need to expand the rails, and then the demand for paper during the second world war was great, so the job was dependable and the work steady. Robert would toil summer months, missing his beloved wife and later his young daughter and their remote cabin by a creek, but the money was good enough to keep them stable through the winter. Options, otherwise, were limited, as Robert would find out.

The film, through narration by Will Patton, is largely gentle and meditative, but personal and investing. It takes us through Robert's life, from his earliest memories as an orphan shipped out on a train, to his final year, without being at all pedantic about it. The narration helps step us back and forth through his life, with brief capsules of interest, some relevant to the moment on screen, some not. Robert's journey could have just been centered around tragedy - his earliest days on the logging crew he was confronted with the horrors of anti-Asian racism, as a Shanghai-born crewman is grabbed suddenly by a trio of men who drag him kicking and screaming before tossing him off a train bridge. Robert's brief motion to intervene is fruitless and he can do little but stand by, and then return to work with a seemingly disaffected crew. Robert is haunted by the man for the remains of his days... not perpetually, but the spectre never leaves him. The ghosts, in a manner of speaking, begin to pile up. 

Tragedy would befall Robert, and he would not return to logging for some time. His grief and misery would take a long time for him to come to terms with. When he returns to the work he did for so long, he's met with the future. A steam-driven truck roams the terrain, and the crew is stocked with chainsaws which Robert finds foreign and difficult to manage. The young crew treat him like a relic, but he wonders if he was the same in his younger years. Time marches on.

We spend most of Train Dreams in nature in various forms. There's not a lot of what you might call civilization in Robert's story because it seems like he avoided it. In Edgerton's portrayal, he's not the stoic, silent type, and he's not the cordial over-sharer, he's unremarkably average and he's so aware of the fact that nothing that happens in his life makes him any more special than anyone else. He's not a deep thinker, but he does contemplate existence, and meaning. His elder colleague in his early years (a remarkable William H. Macy) imparts on him the idea of nature and humanity's connection to nature and how our interference in nature has unknown consequences, ripple effects. Our understanding of the connectivity is still so very primitive, we evolved bipeds with our big brains think nature something to dominate, to control, to use and abuse without giving back. Robert fears nature also takes, and it's taken from him.

The end of Robert's journey takes him to civilization, and when we encounter a big city it's a shock to the system. It's the 1950s already (otherwise we have few guideposts as to the actual time periods within the film), there are cars and televisions and everything seems electric. Robert is a man out of time who just stepped into the future, but he's curious rather than frightened by it all. 

Reflecting upon capitalism and its effect on our conceptualization of standard of living is the centerpiece of No Other Choice, in Train Dreams it's more the byproduct of the story being told, but there's a curious sympatico between the two films. Robert does not want to be logging, but there are no other real choices for him. Similarly, the ending of No Other Choice informs the theme of Train Dreams unexpectedly. Where No Other Choice's ending visualization of logging specifically points to the lack of people involved in the largely mechanized process, Train Dreams makes us consider whether we should be logging at all, at least on the industrial scale we do.  No Other Choice bemoans the loss of jobs, while Train Dreams contemplates the impact of a whole many other kinds of losses.
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Earlier this year Toasty reviewed Joseph Kosinski's 2017 wildfire fighters biopic Only the Brave, with some commentary around whether he was going to be a Kosinski completist or not.  Spoiler, despite being somewhat affected by the film, he's opted out.

Kosinski's Tron: Legacy and Oblivion were visually captivating projects that boldly announced an exciting new director, one who is very design-centric and has an aptitude with kinetic movement and special effects. But, after Oblivion's less than stellar performance, Kosinski seemed to either abandon sci-fi, or he never wanted to be working in that genre in the first place. From Toasty's description it doesn't sound like there was much opportunity for design or kinetic action in Only the Brave, and his pandemic film, Spiderhead, didn't offer anything near to the scale of Tron or Oblivion.

He worked with Tom Cruise in Oblivion, and if Cruise likes you and works with you well enough on his terms, you become one of his guys. So he was tapped for Top Gun:Maverick, which, despite being held back by Cruise for two years until the pandemic lockdown was lifted, was a massive success, one of the highest earning films of the year. Largely because of Kosinski's camerawork on the flying scenes, he was widely praised as a key part of the film's success.  The status that Tron and Oblivion should have given him was now bestowed upon him. He's a premiere filmmaker. But before he's handed the reins to anything completely, he had to prove himself, thus F1, to show that it wasn't just the name brand of Top Gun and the starpower of Tom Cruise, that he brought something to the table as well. 

For the record, I love Tron:Legacy. It is one of my comfort films. There are a lot of elements to it that I love, but Kosinski's visual adeptness is a key part. I really disliked Top Gun: Maverick, but didn't blame Kosinski for its script, which was all about inflating Tom Cruise's ego, and appealing to boomer dads and grandads by having an old guy strut into a room, ignore everyone else's opinions and abilities, and let the praise heap upon him as the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled person alive.  It was a wish fulfillment power trip for an aging generation and it suuuucked. I guess the flying sequences were good, but they didn't do enough to pull me out of the ego boost/pander porn that was the film's story.

From the trailers for F1, it looked to be pretty much the exact same plot. Brad Pitt plays an aging driver who is brought in to help a struggling F1 team, only to steamroll everyone without consequence because he's the smartest, most talented, wisest and most skilled driver alive. Same plot, but race cars not planes, and race courses not military strikes. Why would I watch this? I really do not care for racing as a sport, and those Maverick vibes are very off putting.

When I loaded AppleTV, well, call it a moment of weakness. I saw it's 2h35 min runtime and nearly spat out my kombucha. I said I would give it 20 minutes and dip out. Then I watched the whole thing sitting on the edge of the couch, never bored, never intentionally doing a time check to see how long until it was over.

There are a few differences here between Maverick and F1, the first being Brad Pitt is not Tom Cruise. Without getting into Pitt's abusive alcoholic private life, the man has remained a pretty terrific actor, capable of letting go of ego and disappearing into a role. Tom Cruise, for the past decade (or more), just seems to be playing Tom Cruise, and the ego is inescapable. Pitt does not need his characters to be humanity's apex, so when he steps into a role like Sonny Hayes, an aging phenom who the script needs to walk into a room and take charge despite being the "new guy", well, Pitt doesn't play him with bully and bluster, but rather a sort of glib zen-ness. 

Sonny hasn't driven F1 in 30 years. In the meantime he's been a driver-for-hire across various motorsports. This movie postulates that anyone can just step into an F1 car and race and drive it without extensive time behind the wheel and qualifying trials, but we let it go, because the gist is Sonny is just that good at feeling things out. All the sensors and cameras and algorithms just can't tell you what gut instinct can.

But in Pitt's hands Sonny isn't perfect, he isn't flawless, he isn't so good his skills can defy all logic...just most logic. He makes mistakes that hurt others and hurt himself. Yet, it is a script that does pop in and out of making him magical sexagenarian but it's only eye rolling juuuust a little bit.

The film's plot is colour by numbers, there's pretty much no surprises in what happens here, and yet, Kosinski is not precious with it. He built a story that services the action in a way that builds tension for the characters, their relationships, the team and the race their in all at once. The stakes are presented, they're evident, and they just help lubricate the whole thing to move it forward without any resistance.  Hans Zimmer's score is symbiotically propulsive and, not unexpectedly, bombastic in Zimmer fashion, but he never gets cloying in his score around the drama, which I think may save the film.

It's all about the racing, and Kosinski levels up not just what he accomplished with the flying sequences in Maverick but also takes car racing cinematography to another level. It's maybe not quite as zany as Speed Racer, but there's a visceral and tangible nature to it that is undeniable. It made me a bit sad I didn't see this in theatres. As I said, I don't care about cars or racing, and the racing sequences in this are thrilling. Turns out, car races are fun when they edit down 60+ laps of a race to a 10-minute action sequence.

In some respects, both Top Gun:Maverick and F1 are like extensions of Tron:Legacy and Oblivion. Legacy had various racing and flying (and competition) sequences, while Oblivion had some great flying sequences. The former two and the latter two are otherwise quite unalike styilistically, but the DNA of propulsive filmmaking is there.  I half expect Kosinski's next project to be a Waterworld legasequel just to bring it all back around.

I think Kosinski is an exceptional technical director, another guy who can produce big screen-worthy, widely appealing productions. The aesthetic flavour that initially drew me to him is not a constant in his work, but it's clear he is very skilled at providing wow-inducing action sequences. I think the disappointment both Toast and I are feeling is we thought Kosinski would be one of us, a guy who liked nerdy shit and would be capable of getting big budgets and big names to make them. Instead he's like the nerdy teenager who started hitting the gym during the summer and now hangs around more with the meatheads and tries to hide his geekier tendencies.

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The fourth entry in Quebec producer Rock Demers' "Tales for all" is the highly bizarre Poland-Canada co-production of The Young Magician ("Cudowne dziecko" in Polish).  I mean, so far all of the "Tales for all" have had some aspect of "highly bizarre" to them (and The Peanut Butter Solution is straight up bonkers), but they all have an internal logic to them, no matter how weird they get.

Writer-director Waldermar Dziki was clearly inspired by American kids adventure cinema of the mid-1980s as this feels like a funhouse mirror reflection of its glossier across-the-sea counterparts. 13-year-old Peter (Rusty Jedwab) is having a challenging time...he's quit the hockey team because the captain won't play him, the girl he likes seems to like the hockey captain better than him, and, well, his parents take him to a magic show where he's pulled up on stage to help out with a trick (he "helps" by doing nothing).

After the magic show Peter becomes convinced that he should have telekinetic powers, so he keeps practicing until, eventually, he develops telekinetic powers. Only thing is, his telekinesis tends to make things go haywire. Being a teenager, he of course uses his newly developed superpower to show off, and then it gets him in trouble and then the military comes and takes him away for testing. They can't figure out at all how his powers manifested, so they want to drill into his head. Peter escapes and meets Alexander (Edward Garson), a young orphan cello prodigy who shows Peter the way to harness his power: practice.

Peter gets absolutely no practice in before they're off on another adventure, and then contacted by the police to help deal with a deadly canister of highly volatile material. Yup, let's get the kid with uncontrollable telekinesis who makes things explode all the time try to move the canister of highly explosive stuff. Genius. Turns out, it was genius. Peter removes it safe and suddenly the military doesn't want him anymore and he's a town hero. He helps Alexander get a philharmonic gig, the end.

What?

Yeah. This movie feels like it was made by taking a pile of note cards with plot points and character markers on them, shuffling them, cutting the deck in half and then tossing the deck in the air so that they land in a random order. Nothing about this story makes logical sense, beyond Peter being a teenager and using his power to do petty things. 

This is a dumb movie that introduces its secondary lead (Alexander) at the end of the second act. It probably had three times the budget of any of the previous "Tales for all" productions. I mean, there are so many helicopers in this film, and not always the same helicoper, and not stock footage.

It's clear this was made in Poland (even before seeing the credits, where most of the participants outside of the Canadian leads have Polish last names) but pretends to be Canada despite not looking Canadian at all.  There's no Polish audio track and I spent the first 20 minutes switching between the English and French dubs trying to see if either would synch up, and at times the English would mimic the movements of a character's mouth, but I suspect that there's not a version of this film with the original on-set dialogue. 

 

31 Days of Halloween: Doctor Sleep

2019, Mike Flanagan (Gerald's Game) -- Netflix

So many movies blur together when doing this month of watching, not just the movies I am watching for this year, but clearly the movies from previous years. While I enjoy the whole endeavour, enjoy the bad with the good, even enjoy the standard structures of the heavily "meh", I have to say I do love when some things emerge so strongly, stand out so much, that I am left thinking about them after.

Gone are the days from when I was the Stephen King fan (I bet you thought I was going to mention having been a movie fan again, didn't you?), and would have read every single one of his books as soon as the hardcovers hit the shelves. I knew this book was the sequel to The Shining, but I could not conceive of a continuation of the story that could be satisfying. This one definitely does it, takes the world that King introduced and expands upon it, moves it from one occurrence to a world of astonishing and terrible possibilities.

And yet, this was not a world present in the original Kubrick film. While I will never lose my absolute fascination for the movie, it is not something I am often eager to watch again. Its an impactful movie, somewhat too much for me. I think it really, truly represents fear for me. And yet, I cannot claim it did justice to the world King established, as Kubrick's film is less about Danny's shine, and more about Jack Torrance's utter collapse into insanity by way of an evil hotel.

And yet, Flanagan takes what we know from Kubrick's film, and adds back in all of the King magical realism elements. This is not just a world where a haunted house drove his father to madness, but a world where Danny "Doc" Torrance's supernatural powers both protect him and utterly endanger him. Its not just one kid, and one old man, but a world of people with powers, and monsters that prey on them.

The movie begins with Danny barely escaping the trauma of the hotel, especially since it follows his mother and him to Florida. But the spirit of Dick Halloran appears to give Doc a few tricks to protect himself. Alas, while he may be protected from the evil that the Overlook spawned, he is not able to escape his shine. And it haunts him constantly, driving him into the bottle. Eventually his running away takes him to New Hampshire, where he meets a kind man and a kind doctor, and they coax him into an AA meeting where he is saved. He also meets a nice little girl named Abra who lives far away, but not far enough away to stop her shine from being so bright that she can chat with Danny.

Alas someone, something else catches scent of her as well.

If there are those who shine bright, there are those that desire it. They are monsters, proto-vampires, humans that have learned to sup upon a particular byproduct of fear & pain that those who shine produce. They call it steam, and it feeds them, giving them long life. They may have once been people, but that time is past. They are boogeymen, the slayers of children with the shine.

Flanagan does not so much as make a horror movie, as he does a thriller about people with powers, good and evil, fighting it out. As I have commented about Flanagan's Absentia, there is a layer of heroic adventure behind the story. This was epic Good vs Evil, where the Good side does not shirk from its responsibility even when all can be lost. I absolutely loved that King and Flanagan could be so on the same page on how to present the next chapter for The Shining.

The Good here is Danny and Abra, two very bright shines. The evil here is called The True Knot, a group of wanderers in rotting RVs and camper vans, channeling the Travelers of UK infamy, especially so with their leader Rose (of the Hat) lilting a touch of an Irish accent, and displaying the affectations of Roma (Gypsy) folk. She is old, but some of her band are even older, maybe thousands of years old. But she is the most powerful and decides that she has to take Abra, for Abra's steam will be strong enough to sustain them for a very very long time. Rose and her people are not bad folk, but they are evil through and through, though I doubt they see it of themselves.

The movie does a full circle back to the Overlook, now abandoned, and to defeat the monster Rose, Danny has to release the monsters from the Overlook that he caged up all those years ago, with the help of Dick. Rose may be powerful, but she cannot stand to the utterly pure Evil that the hotel represents.

This movie was over two and a half hours long, but I didn't feel the time pass. It kept me attentive, but usually Ewan McGregor can do that. And Rebecca Ferguson as Rose, is just so beautiful and so dangerous, and so charismatic. They played off each other so well. I have heard there is a three hour version out there, and now I have seen the primary release, I shall endeavour to find and view this other Director's Cut. But not soon, I have much to let settle in.

What I Have Been Watching: The Chosen Few (Pt1)

What I Have Been Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV, especially during 2020 the Extended Version. But this time, I don't even barely attempt to tell you EVERYTHING I have been watching or we would be here all day.

The Nevers S1, HBO -- download

Why do our heroes have to fall? Or more likely, why do our heroes have to be human, and once more, with more precision, why do typical humans have to be such utter shites. Joss Whedon was a guy to be respected, in ages past, when he created shows that not only established a whole generation of pith, but also highlighted & empowered young women. Too bad he decided that he was owed something from those women, given the number of stories that have come out in the Post Buffy Years, about him being quite the prick. At first, I was an apologist: it was just the era, there was some sour grapes involved, at least he is not as bad as the rest. But really, that was my own hangups. The thing is, no matter what place in the power structure you have, you shouldn't be abusing it.

But does shitty artists means shitty art? Sometimes. At the very least, it should make it so that they have to work even harder to regain back that trust and respect. Alas, I don't think he is going to get there, as I suspect he doesn't really feel like a Bad Guy. I think he feels more like someone who got caught. And yet, I was still looking forward to The Nevers, his new HBO series about women with powers in Victorian England. And committing to being conflicted, I was also somewhat glad when he departed it, claiming "exhaustion". If you are tired of being called out for being a shitty person, too fucking bad.

Whedon aside, the show was rather enjoyable, if not revolutionary. And a cut above the vast number of supernatural Victorian era shows out there.

For a reason unbeknownst to the people of London, there is a spontaneous emergence of "powers" among the disenfranchised of the city, mostly women, but not all. Amalia True leads a small cadre of these women, having gathered them in a sort of orphanage, one sponsored by a wealthy widow and her meek brother. Meanwhile, to add to the misery, one of the Touched has proven to be a psychopath, which further taints the city's already lacking trust of them. People already distrust the different but if they are women or foreigners...

The season explores how they got their powers, a conspiracy in the shadows that is kidnapping Touched, the British governments utter distrust of them and a hunt for Maladie, the psychopath. All the while we are learning that True is not as true as she claims, nor are some others. In typical pithy Whedon fashion, characters are charming, complex and funny in their own ways. I completely fell for the steampunky inventor Penance Adair (Ann Skelly, Vikings), and her shy Irish accent. But what really shone was angry, dangerous, boiling beneath the surface Amalia True (Laura Donnelly, Outlander). The rest of the cast each has their charms, and oft get a chance to shine. And once again, in true Whedon fashion, the end of the season reveals something we kind of knew had to be revealed, but was done so in a unfathomable manner, much like the whole sudden jump to the future of the now painfully troublesome Dollhouse.

Jupiter's Legacy S1, Netflix

Speaking of creators that a lot of people do not like, the first series on Netflix from Millarworld (now that he sold the imprint to Netflix) is the adaptation of somewhat critically acclaimed Jupiter's Legacy, another in the many reworking of the Superman mythic figure such as Invincible and Homelander from The Boys. 

In the comic world, and yeah big ol SPOILER ALERT, a league of justice extolling superheroes is broken apart when their children murder them. Well, really just The Utopian and his wife, Lady Liberty. They are presented as overbearing, controlling entities that demand far too much of the next generation of superheroes, which leads to their demise. But then we learn it was all a manipulation at the hands of one of their own. The comic is rather short, and was followed by a few unsatisfying sequels.

The TV series is even less satisfying, in that they wanted to stretch out the whole introduction story into an entire season. And boy, does it get stretched out, taffy strung between two wide spread arms, stretched. But not as tasty. Not that the story is inherently bad, nor is the acting or production values, but OMG backstory filler! 

We learn that The Utopian, his brother and some close companions, emerged from the trauma of The Great Depression with superpowers (by way of a mysterious magical/alien island), powers that they controlled very closely, keeping a tight rein on how they would influence the world. Oh, they could have taken over, they could have influenced world politics, but Sheldon (Utopian) wants to gently guide the world to make its own better decisions, with their league, their Union of Justice to set the example. It starts off well enough...

But it has failed. By the time the 21st century spins around (the age much more slowly) their kids are drug addicts and hedonists, the products of terrible parenting and many are fame obsessed, in particular Sheldon's kids. The comic came out almost 10 years ago, and maybe this would have been shocking and enlightening then, but this rendition of "gritty superheroes" is just ... tiring. I am sure they wanted to do a mirror reflection of the Marvel movies, but it all seemed so forced, but without the "OMG shocking!" of The Boys. 

But it has failed. The series was cancelled soon after S1 being released on Netflix, and it makes me wonder whether the network is second-guessing what they got from Millarworld.

3 Short Paragraphs: Mortal

 2020, André Øvredal (Trollhunter) -- download/Amazon

Sometimes I feel I need to rewatch certain movies just so I can put a post in here, to remind myself how much I enjoyed a flick or two.  I recall really enjoying Trollhunter but I don't actually recall anything about the plot, but that it was found footage and there was a giant (and I mean, giiiiiant) troll. Mortal is his most personal feeling movie since that one (i.e. non Hollywood), once again set in Norway and dealing with Norwegian myths.

Eric is  an American backpacker who came to Norway seeking his roots, but all led to tragedy as the family he connected with died in a fire he believes was caused by himself. It was. Eric has weird elemental powers, fire and electricity and water, which he cannot control. It leads him to connect with Christine, a young, beautiful, blonde psychologist who is trying to protect Eric from the authorities, Norwegian and American, seeking to take him. He's killed people; it's understandable, and one vastly powerful confrontation on a bridge frightens everyone including Christine. And then people on the Internet start connecting Eric with Thor, God of Thunder and Lightning.

On the cover, this is just another of the movies since MCU became popular, exploring people with powers and the impact they would have in the "real world". But something has been itching at me since I saw it, the connection to Thor, and the recent rise of ties to "white power". Eric is American, where this racist ideal is very very loud, and he comes to his European roots to take that power as his own, to an almost welcoming (very white) support, as they begin to believe he is a God. The woman standing in his way, the "agent" from the US Embassy is brown, and she controls the shadowy American government forces that want fail to control Eric. While my brain cannot seriously think Øvredal intended this, I can easily see how certain radical groups would embrace the "writing between the lines" they find. And it ended up overshadowing, in my mind, a small story that wanted to connect ancient beings with power to the superhero trope.

We Agree: Fast Color & Prospect

2018, Julia Hart (Miss Stevens) -- Digital Rental
2018, Christopher Caldwell, Zeek Earl (the short Prospect) -- Netflix

When this blog was created, Kent(!) and I intended on seeing lots of movies together and picking them apart as we caught the TTC back. Alas, life. But last Saturday night, we pulled an idea out of our collective sofa sitting TV watching asses (his, when he gets a rare free few hours; me, well most often there) and watched some movies together. Like, together, in person, IRL !

I wanted him to watch Prospect and he chose, after charmingly over-thinking it, Fast Color. I heartily agreed as I had entirely forgotten it was on my watch-list, or more accurately, I forgot to keep an eye open for it. Also, Gugu Mbatha-Raw(r).

I thoroughly enjoyed the second watch of Prospect, which I knew I would, especially being able to share. I also am on a space kick, as I atmosphere dive into the latest major update to (much maligned but redeeming itself) video game No Man's Sky. Seventy-five percent of that game is landing on new planets, usually toxic to you, to mine their resources. And you have to spend the entire game inside your space suit hoping the toxins don't seep in.

Again, as Kent outlined, I was enraptured by the Much Bigger World at play here: the mish-mash of clunky tech, the enigmatic biological commodity, the period speak at play, which, that night, made me think of Firefly but after beginning our ReWatch of Deadwood, I feel is just a trope of the Shakespearean Old West, eloquent yet colloquial. So much is not explained in this movie, yet has such depths.

And from the pollen saturated air & rainforest of that nameless moon we travelled to the parched mid-west of America, 8 years after the last raindrop fell. Ruth is running from something, having kicked her way out of what looked like an abandoned warehouse and escaping into the night. She had been held against her will, but why and by who, we never really find out. But it had not been pleasant. In this PoAp world, it hasn't all fallen apart, but the US obviously hasn't bounced back from the drought. Shop shelves are near empty, water prices are crazy and signs are everywhere about the penalties for wasting water.

Ruth is on her way... home. She obviously left under dire circumstances, probably a situation or a familial conflict or all of the above. Her memories are flooded with broken water pipes and tragedy. And then there is that night in the hotel, when her trauma and emotions get to her and she goes ballistic. Ruth has some psychokinetic condition which she obviously cannot control, which displays as a massive earthquake on fault lines that shouldn't have such. Obviously whoever had her captive wanted to exploit this.

Ruth arrives home to an abandoned daughter (eight or nine) and a not-angry but challenged mother. Bo and Lila live together in this old farmhouse, no signs of income but obviously this is the place they rarely leave, maybe a few trips a month to town for whatever provisions they can buy. This struck me as a world just resigning itself to decay, not really science-ing the shit out of the issue and recovering. The family seems resigned to hiding out, as it turns out the condition is familial, albeit exhibiting much less dangerously than Ruth. The family has always been able to take things apart, molecularly, leaving them as dust. And then, as easy as that, reassemble it. Whatever happened to Ruth left her powers damaged and lacking the ability to control them. It left Ruth damaged, where she fell into drugs and infamy. Thus the rift between she and her mom.

What I really like about this movie is that it is such a small genre story. You know I have gone on and on about Small. This is not (yet; who knows what the impending TV show will bring) about a big world of people with powers hiding from the government. But obviously, if you talk about a single family having a singular (magic/mutant) power, there is something going on here. But its more about the family condition, the conflict and the resolution. And I cannot help but mention, but it's a black (African American, if you need clarification) movie. And black science-fiction or genre is rare on TV and in movies. And it needs not to be. The movie is not about being black, nor does it dispense or deny it. That is how pop culture needs to continue expanding.

How does the movie resolve? Painfully, gratefully and with no small amount of anguish. Genre always does best when it swims with emotions and connections. We are given an explanation of the broken world, connecting it ever so tragically with a broken soul. And then it is resolved, but not without sacrifice. But I cannot end my talk of the movie without going on about the performances. Gugu and Lorraine Toussaint are as spectacular as expected, but Saniyya Sidney is going to be around for a while. And I loved the insertion of David Strathairn as the inserted father figure and local heroic Sheriff, without needing to make him the central character. All around good.

Also, only one poster for Fast Color?!?!? What's up with that?