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. 

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. 

 

T&K's XMas (2024) Advent Calendar - Day 6: The Finnish Line

 2024, d. Dustin Rikert - Hallmark Channel/W Network

The Draw: It was requested, by my Finnish brother and frequent reader GAK. He's taken some (many) of my requests on his excellent radio programme, so it only seems fit that I return the favour and watch a Hallmarkie about Icelandic people pretending to be Finn.

HERstory: The film starts with the tale of a dogsled race in Finland, of fierce competition, of injury, leading to romance between a competitor and a nurse. Little Anya Kivelä has heard this story from her dad many, many times, and to her, it's been a story about missed glory. Her father had been an amazing sledder, but this defeat was his legacy.

Now grown up and following in her late father's path, Anya (Kim Matula, Fighting With My Family) is set to compete in the great 3-day, 300 mile Joulurauha ("Christmas Peace") race. Unbeknownst to her, she is competing against the very man who beat her father all those years, ago, a total blowhard jerkwad named Monty White. He constantly tries to belittle and infantilize her, but she can give as good as it gets. Anya is strong, driven, passionate, resilient...she is sisu. 

Supporting Anya is her associate and best friend Elyse (Nichole Sakura, Superstore) who is ready to elbow-dagger any reporters who dare get in Anya's way. Anya really dislikes reporters because of the way they had treated her father and his story.  So of course, when she gets in a bit of a bind, who comes to her rescue but a tall, dark and rugged reporter who happened to be a former sledder, Cole Olsen (Beau Mirchoff, Desperate Housewives), and his best sledding dog in tow [why is that important to mention, he said without a hint of foreshadowing?]. They have an immediate playful rapport, but...not flirty?

[I don't know what the rules are for travelling with one's five dogs cross-continent but it seems weird that they can just arrive with their dogs the day before the trials without any quarantine period or anything]

Anya's Finnish cousin Lavi (Benedikt Karl Gröndal) is her and Elyse's host and guide while in Finland, and he is also the race's lead veterinarian (he says there's not conflict of interest but there totally is).  He and Elyse are both yammering goofballs and they're a delight to watch. It's clear there's chemistry there (moreso than with Anya and Cole, at least to start).

Not Finland

During the qualifying time trials, Anya gets screwed over by a dirty kick to her sleigh from Monty, and in making up the time to qualify for the actual race, she pushes her lead dog too hard. He'll be fine, just in 4-6 weeks of recoup time. They visit the very un-goat-like Joulupukki in Rovaniemi (Santa's hometown) as Anya reluctantly wishes for a new lead dog from Santa. And Cole, of course, is there to offer up his best girl for the job, they just need to convince the race head that it's allowed.  Anya promises that Cole will do a big write-up profile on her in his sports magazine with millions of readers (what's this now?) which will promote the race, which has been sagging in international attention of recent years. Anya's stuck with Cole... good thing he's so uncharming and ugly and untalented. 

Apparently in Finland?

An actual Joulurauha, played by an actual Finn.

They spend the next five days trying to figure out how to get the pack to accept a new lead, and eventually figure it out. It's not a well oiled team but it will have to do.  They also take a horribly entertaining green screened ice bath that's clearly a set, and then cut to them a clearly non-functioning sauna. There's chemistry, maybe, but very little steam, both metaphorically and literally.

Not Finland

It's a Sauna, but is it Finland?

[If I'm missing out on describing all the explicitly Finnish things in this movie, it's because my mind is a sieve and everything seems to just pass on through with little filtered remains left behind].

Actually Finland

The three day race goes up and back down Finland (it's mostly bad green screen and red-line express, but a handful of grey-looking snowy vistas are spliced in between). Anya's team does fine, but she can tell they're starting to find their groove.

Making joulutorttu, but probably not in Finland.

During one of the stopovers Lavi sets up a big gathering of Anya's extended Finnish family and Anya does some baking with her aunt(?), making joulutorttu (I've had many times back in my gluten-ingensting days), and eventually Cole joins in, because Hallmark. Elyse asks Lavi to take her out on a date, and Lavi gets nervous and bashful and curses his Finnish charm and good nature for leading her on.  

The race the next day, Anya comes in second. She is psyched. Things are really starting to work, even if she screwed up a couple of things mid-race. That Monty guy is getting under her skin though.

Not sure if this is Finland...

The quartet of Anya and Cole and awkward Lavi and Elyse head to an ice castle restaurant which is a really neat environment. Later Elyse and Lavi make friends again, and Anya reads Cole's manuscript for a book he's writing. She likes it so she gives him some very personal insight into her motivations, and then she sucks his face real hard.

Finnish kissing, but not in Finland.

Monty gets into Anya's head before the final race, but she sucks it up big girl style and vows to take him on full force. Midway through the trail, Monty has had an accident, injured his leg and his sleigh is stuck between the ice and the rocks on the edge of a cliff. Anya helps this jerk out and nearly falls off the cliff, but with the help of Monty and another sledder she is saved and they all start off on their race again. Monty's injured leg means he's not going to win so he roots Anya on because they came to an understanding. Anya passes everyone and wins the race, but gives the spotlight back to Monty to tell the tale of derring-do.

The best green screening in the movie...also not Finland.

Lavi admits he was shy and does really like Elyse and she jumps him. Anya learns from auntie grandma that Cole is the almond in her oatmeal, and they go running to each other beneath the northern lights to suck face semi-obscured from camera.

The end.

The Formulae: I always forget to mention dead parents, but yeah, there's dead parents in this one. Or not in this one, as it were. 
I don't watch enough of the Hallmarkies that take place in other countries, but I'm certain there's formulae in how they explain the Christmas traditions of that country in a very primary and nuance-free fashion.
Oh, the  secondary male and female characters hooking up, total formulae.
There's a baking sequence, but not a montage.

Unformulae: So, Anya is pretty much all business. She's dedicated to her sport, and Cole is kind of a pleasant but also complimentary distraction that isn't much of a distraction at all. We don't see that much from the usual Hallmarkie. Basically, Anya's the lead dog, and Cole is happy to follow and support. It's pretty great change of pace actually.
Dogs, but not dogs being cute, just dogs being dogs and sometimes doing their job. It's pretty cool.
There was, like, some action happening in this film, with the racing and the big climactic cliffside sequence... again, a bit of adventure is not the typical Hallmarkie's forte.
And, like, actual winter weather. People wearing winter gear because they actually needed it. I'm sure it was late winter/early spring in Iceland when they shot it, but still looks so wintery, which is such a rare treat for a Hallmarkie.

True Calling? I guess, since it's set around race, set in Finland. (Theoretically it's set in Finland. It was primarily shot in Iceland...likely because they already had the crew for the Icelandic-set Chabert/Polaha joint The Christmas Quest).

The Rewind: Oh, some of the greenscreen shots of Matula "racing" are freaking hilarious. I delighted in every janky backdrop (there was even a janky greenscreen backdrop for the odd reindeer-drawn sleigh ride, where it's just one reindeer pulling a sleigh with two passengers and moving at walking speed since a handler walks with the reindeer...so...whaaaa?

I also had to go back and find out if that dude's name was GAK, but it Jaak. Boo.

The Regulars: Matula made her Hallmark debut with Ghosts of Christmas Always in 2022 and Checkin' It Twice in 2023 and she's a real spunky lead.  She doesn't seem to cave to the romance-obsessive female lead characters, and she's got a pretty great sarcastic wit.  Most of the other performers are Icelandic so they don't have Hallmark credits, and Mirchoff and Sakura are new to Hallmarkies, but are welcome back any time).  Gröndal, who played Lavi, was so much damn fun with really great comedic timing. He also had the best Finnish accent of all the actors (whose Finnish accents didn't seem to ring true to my Thunder Bay-born ears).

How does it Hallmark? Honestly, it was a tad light on Christmas and romance, so not great on that front which are basically the two fronts you want in a holiday romance... but it was heavy on winter and good vibes with two charismatic leads with two very entertaining, charismatic supporting players who we care about just as much, so hard to complain. Plus, the script was largely pretty tight, with surprising moments of maturity and self awareness, not often found in the more juvenile, traditional Hallmarkie.

How does it movie? Lady Kent likened it to a Disney adventure movie, and she's not far off. It's not really getting all the details 100% right, but I don't think it was ever really trying to. It's got quite a lot of laughs and smiles throughout (and the shoddy green screening was just part of the fun for me).  I really had to convince Lady Kent to watch it in the first place, luring her in with the promise of dogs (honestly not of the dogs) and she had to begrudgingly admit that it was surprisingly watchable, maybe even enjoyable. It did need more Christmas and lean more into the romance though.

How Does It Snow? So. Much. Snow. And real snow. Almost unreal how much real snow there was.

Going for a Reindeer sleigh walk...but in Finland?

KWIF: Poor Things (+5)

KWIF = Kent's week in film.

With the Amazon original The Black Demon, Toasty mentioned needing a post-Christmas palate cleanser. Even though I didn't go very hard into Christmas at all this year, just doing the requisite half of our Advent calendar, I too needed such a cleanser, moreso because the yoke of Godzilla has been weighing me down a bit (world's tiniest violin, I get it. I do these things to myself, folks). 

I wanted to spend my post New Years' time off work at the movie theatres, shaking off the shackles of the COVID years, and getting out of the habit of only going for the latest spectacle. The "best of 2023" lists were hitting and I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and into challenge mode. But now, as I look at my 5 selections from the week, with only one exception, these are all auteur directors who I am quite familiar with, so I'm not sure I stepped that far out of my comfort zone after all. Let's get into it.

This week:
Poor Things (2023, d. Yorgos Lanthimos - in theatre)
Anatomy of a Fall (2023, d. Justine Triet - in theatre)
The Boy and the Heron (2023, d. Hayao Miyazaki - in theatre)
The Zone of Interest (2023, Jonathan Glazer - in theatre)
Ferrari (2023, d. Michael Mann - in theatre)
Ikarie XB-1 (1963, d. Jindřich Polák - Criterion Channel)

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Is Yorgos Lanthimos a provocateur? Of course he is. He enjoys pushing the tolerances of his audience, especially when he's scripting his features. Dogtooth, the Lobster, and Killing of a Sacred Deer are each uniquely disquieting films.  In those films, it's the way in which Lantimos' lens observes everything and everyone, with a cold, clinical detachment, which only makes the injection of the surreal or fantastical even more of a challenge to the audience.

With writer Tony McNamara on The Favourite, and now Poor Things, he's found a partner whose scripts push buttons and boundaries but in a less-distancing way. The humour is still dark, but not nearly as faint or dry as Lanthimos' scripts (if his even offer any humour at all).

Poor Things is the pair moving to the next level. Where there was an opulence to The Favourite, it still felt...traditional, I suppose, for a period piece. Here, creativity is unleashed in a way I get the feeling Lanthimos has been wanting it to be his entire career. He's got a budget, and he uses every cent of it.

Best described either as beautifully grotesque (or, better yet, grotesquely beautiful) in art, design, make-up, effects, sound, score -- the whole creative spectrum -- everything is bold, ornately constructed, and just captivating to behold. The first act is in black and white, and even that doesn't mute its life and vibrancy (Lady Kent asked afterwards, "when did it switch to colour?").

Poor Things is a fantasy film that is Barbie for grown-ups only. I'm sure someone will draw out all the parallels in a youtube essay (if it hasn't been done already), but to paraphrase critic Alonso Duralde, both films find their lead characters go on a journey only to discover who they already know themselves to be.

Here Emma Stone, in her boldest performance to date, is Bella, a new take on Frankenstein's creature. I'll leave her origins to be teased out by the film, but where we meet her she is but an infant in a woman's body. Her creator, her father figure, the mad scientist/Doctor Frankenstein of the piece, Godwin (Willem Dafoe) she calls "God" for short, which was no doubt his idea. As in many a Frankenstein tale, it's the doctor, not the creature who is the monster, but here we meet a man who has been horribly scarred (both physically and emotionally) by his own father, and processes his trauma through his hilariously horrifying scientific feats (the English bull terrier with its head swapped with a duck was just one of many dark delights).

Bella starts out a mono-syllabic infant in our first meeting with her, but, as observed by Max (Ramy Youssef) her vocabulary, capacity for reason and intellect grow dramatically every day. Max, hired by Godwin, to be Bella's observer, is captivated by her ("what a beautiful ["r"word]", he says). It's the first of many uncomfortable thoughts the film brings out, and for about 15, maybe 20 minutes, the film wrestles with whether it's leaning into the "born sexy yesterday" trope. But it shifts the leering gaze away from objectifying Bella, instead looking sternly, eyebrow arched, at the men who would objectify her. 

Bella starts exploring her adult body, her sexuality, and when the men in her life try to control that side of her, she starts to distance herself from the men in her life. She sees the control they wish to yield, and she understandably doesn't want that. Eventually, as her intellectual curiosity grows, she wishes to be free of Godfrey's confines within the beautiful manor, but like an overprotective father, he wants to know she's safe by keeping her contained. When lawyer Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), a roguish Lothario, is brought onto the compound he becomes captivated by just the thought of Bella, and then, on her own volition, is whisked away on a Mediterranean journey of discovery, much of it sexual, but cultural and culinary as well.

Stone's performance as Bella, is an ever evolving one, and she handles the role masterfully. It's a very physical performance, that requires her to show a slow and gradual increase of control and ownership over her body. It's the entire metaphor of the film and so an essential element. But it's Stone's ability to show the intellectual growth, and not just through words, but through her eyes, that is outstanding.  The role requires a lot of sex and nudity which, both credit to Stone and Lanthimos, are never objectifying, and always empowered. Bella is not sexy, she's sexual. 

Ruffalo, meanwhile, brilliantly plays a cartoon of a man so out of control of his own desires that his own caddish game backfires upon him. He is the Ken to Bella's Barbie, just a husk of a person lacking inner depth or sense of identity outside of elitism and sexual conquest. He's used to a society where men have control, and has no concept of what to do with a woman who won't follow the patriarchal rules of "polite society". It's a wildly comedic performance, teetering on campy but just restrained enough as to be welcome instead of out of place.

If Barbie was "Feminism 101", Poor Things is at the very least a second year class. It's a fantasy setting, yes, but it reflects the fight still being fought today for women to have liberty over their minds, body and sexuality. It can be blunt about it but even outside of the theme, it's still an amazing adventure of self-discovery.

It's also been proffered that Poor Things is about an autistic character's sexual awakening and journey of self discovery, and from what I've seen on letterboxd, many people identify as on the spectrum have found a pretty deep connection with Bella, and the way she engages with the world. I look forward to deeper analysis on that front.  

This was the last movie I saw in 2023, and it's also, quite possibly, the best in a pretty great year for film.

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There's the "whodunnit", and the "howdunnit". Anatomy of a Fall ("Anatomie d'une Chute") is a "diddunnit", as it presents us with a scenario, the death of a husband and father in a remote mountainside chalet home, and then tries to parse out, given all the evidence it chooses to present us with, whether the wife killed him or not.

If it sounds Hitchcockian, it has that kind of a conceit, but director Triet tells the film almost entirely from the perspective of Sandra (Sandra Hüller, in an incredible performance) with an lens that presents such intense compassion while also managing to retain enough distance as to not betray the "diddunnit" conceit.

The first half of the film finds Sandra, a very cerebral and composed woman, working on her defence with her lawyer, an ex-flame Vincent (Swann Arlaud, who is going to have to live with the shorthand moniker of "sexy French lawyer" for some time), while the second half of the film is the trial (and French trials are intriguingly different from the American trial process we have seen a thousand times over).

Where American trial films are largely very much about "the story" (usually based on true-life or novel adaptation), with maybe some character driven elements, Anatomy of a Fall is about perceptions, about examining how we see someone based on the information given, and the judgements we make thereof. 

The opening scene, for example, has Sandra, an accomplished writer, being interviewed by a college aged female student. The scene, which takes place maybe an hour before the death of Sandra's husband, finds the two women already in conversation, but still at early stages. The student hasn't yet been able to segue into their interview, and any questions she asks, Sandra doesn't quite deflect so much as steer back towards the student as she almost counter-interviews...but casually. Knowing what the film is about, I'm already questioning Sandra, is she being cagey, or friendly? Is she controlling this situation intentionally or is she, maybe, just a little tipsy from wine? 

In the back half of the movie, the prosecuting attorney tries to re-contextualize this opening scene as flirtatious. The prosecutor knows that Sandra is bisexual and had cheated on her husband in the past. He's trying to build a narrative of who Sandra is for the judicial bench, just as he tries to build a narrative around the death of her husband.

But so too must Sandra and sexy French lawyer build a narrative. And so too does Triet build a third narrative that lies closer to the middle (but if it falls on one side or the other of the middle is up to the audience). All these narratives are a part of a whole, and it's a brilliant examination of what we know versus what we perceive. The trial is not one of of facts, it's one of perception. If you build the narrative one way, she's guilty. Another way she's innocent. The two are very hard to reconcile. Is Sandra cold and calculating? Or is she just German?

Language has a lot to do with it. The film is French-made, but is largely in English. Hüller is German, but never speaks it in the film, only speaking English and French. How does language play a role in our perceptions of someone? How does language play a role in controlling a conversation, a relationship? It's subtext in the film, but also a huge part of what it's trying to say about how we view and understand someone.

This was a fascinatingly thoughtful film while also being a gripping trial drama. It has things to say about the court system, about relationships, about parenting, about mental health. It's not offering answers, but it's keen to explore.

I didn't even talk about the huge role Sandra's son, Daniel, a pre-teen with low vision, plays in the film as a key witness. Young Milo Machado-Graner gives an outstanding performance that shows wisdom beyond his years, and taps into an emotionality most adult actors can't authentically reach.

Of all the films I watched this week, this is the one I immediately wanted to watch again.

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Anime and I do not get along great (much to my teen's chagrin). It's something I need to explore with a pop culture therapist who can help me unpack the reasons why. I haven't figured it out. But, of course, there's "anime" and then there's Studio Ghibli. There's Studio Ghibli, and then there's the auteur of auteurs of animation Hayao Miyazaki.  

Ghibli is held up on this other level from the term anime (just like, at least for a time, Pixar was distinguished from other "animated" movies), and Miyazaki is put on an even higher pedestal. I've watched over half of Miyazaki's oeuvre, and while I find his movies gorgeous, I still don't connect with most of them.

The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki's latest "final" film. I forget how many times he's retired and come back (maybe only twice) but he is an "event" director, so it's no surprise that the film has been doing some great numbers at the North American box office, and receiving heaps of critical attention. I was, once again, dazzled, but left feeling a sense of uncertainty over what I'd seen and how I felt about it.  It's happened with every Miyazaki film I've seen (save for Ponyo).  

Perhaps it's because Miyazaki intends for his films to be watched and rewatched, explored for meaning. There's obviously what Miyazaki is bringing to the film, but also what the audience is getting out of it, and the director is notoriously cagey about expressing what his films mean. In reading about The Boy and the Heron since watching it this past week, others have unpacked some of its inspirations, being Miyazaki's relationship with his Ghibli co-founders and his own relationship with animation. The denouement of the film has been interpreted as a relinquishing of the torch to the young animators of today, perhaps.  If you don't go into The Boy and the Heron as a Miyazaki scholar, are you going to grok any of that?

Re-titled from the Japanese name "How Do You Live?", it's a film that begins pretty stone sober, with the death of young Mahito's mother during a Pacific War bombing of Tokyo. Mahito and his father relocate to a rural estate to live with his aunt (his mother's sister whom his father is now married to) and the grannies. Mahito is traumatized over the loss of his mother, and is distant and angry. He's not particularly fond of his aunty stepmother either, even though she shows him only kindness and sympathy. 

On the estate, he has regular encounters with a blue heron, whom, over these encounters starts to reveal that it speaks, and is in fact, a horrendous toad of a man in disguise. Mahito's mother and aunt and some of the grannies are of a lineage that are attuned to the magic of the world, in particular a silo with a strong family lore and magical properties. When Mahito's aunt goes missing, he's drawn into the silo, Alice in Wonderland style, and goes down the rabbit hole.

Within this world within worlds (or world between worlds, as its a gateway outside of time) Mahito discovers his family history as well as younger versions of his one granny and his mother, who along with a reluctant heron, aide him in his journey to find his aunt.

A lot of Miyazaki's films feature the fantastical for fantastical sake. At least that's always been my perception. There could be deeper meaning in all of it, but if there is, Miyazaki's never telling. I think there are aspects to his work that have meaning to him, for sure, and sometimes in the fantasy there is meaning for the character, but I also think the director has a bold ability to bring stream-of-consciousness to the screen, and so a lot of his fantasy is just that, for pure imagination's sake.

Fantasy isn't my genre. There's often an absence of logic to it, an absence of rules. So The Boy and the Heron, while striking, left me perplexed, and not in a good way.  I think I'll have to do a full Miyazaki run at some point and try to engage with his repertoire, and thus this film, in a more metatextual sense.

I should note that I saw the film in its English dubbed version, which I initially bristled at upon realizing it, but turns out may be one of the best dubs I've ever heard. There's often a sense of disconnect between the animation and the vocal performance in a translation dub, but this one felt almost seemless, natural even, although I did get distracted trying to figure out who some of the voice cast was (best to leave it as a surprise for the credits, methinks).

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Jonathan Glazer's previous film, Under the Skin was a potent a non-narrative drama about an alien's exploration of humanity through sexual temptation? I referred to it as  "a moody (or perhaps moodless) art-piece that isn't so much a story as a concept, a 2-hour art installation about male sexuality in its various forms - primal, tender, brutal - masquerading as entertainment".

Where Under The Skin explored humanity through the lens of an alien, The Zone of Interest takes the same dispassionate lens and explores inhumanity instead. Call it "the mundane existence of evil". The film spends most of its time in and around the home of a Nazi Commandant. We witness Herr Hoss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller again, having a real moment), two boys, infant daughter (always crying) and the Jewish servants as they entertain guests, celebrate birthdays, play, clean, cook and serve. It would all seem very banal, if it weren't for all the fucking Nazi's about, and for the fact that, just on the other side of the wall of the yard is the Auschwitz concentration camp which Hoss is in charge of.

There's not really a narrative to the film. It's experiential. As we witness this family living their life, buoyed by their privileges and receiving tainted spoils of the murdered people from the other side of the wall, we are all too aware of the sounds of the trains, the gunfire, the screams, shrieks and yells, and the sounds of the furnaces, not to mention the gushing red flames coming out of the smokestack.

Herr Hoss takes meetings where the deplorable plans of evil men to make the eradication of a people more efficient are discussed with the casualness of a board room meeting about a new marketing ploy for, I dunno, salsa. Hedwig shows her visiting mother her home for the first time, and her mother wonders if the woman whose house she used to clean is on the other side of the wall. The boys play, and other children play with them, in the backyard while mass murder happens on the other side of the wall. The boys have a teeth collection. The infant is never in the arms of its mother, always with a servant.

The closest we get to drama in the film is news that Hoss is being relocated. Hedwig refuses to transfer and sends Hoss to his new assignment on his own. Her speech about having built a home for their family that is too precious to leave makes the bile in one's stomach rise.  There is a moment there where Hoss, facing being separated from his family, elicits just the smallest twinge of compassion, before one remembers that Nazi's deserve as much compassion as they showed the Jewish people.

It's a scoreless film, leaving the sound design to do all the heavy lifting. There is a near 3-minute overture performed to a black screen, a briefer interlude composition against a red screen, and the final end credits track. These Mica Levy constructs of sound aren't exactly musical. I almost dread learning what these sound collages are composed of.

The film's final 5 minutes or so, for me, were its most potent. It takes a time jump to the furnaces of Auschwitz today, now a memorial site, as it prepares to open. The cleaners come in and start wiping everything down with efficiency and dispassion.  It's swept up, as if any speck of dust is not allowed.  A memorial displays thousands upon thousands of pares of shoes are piled up, pressing against the window as the glass is cleaned. The floor is vacuumed. We cut back to Hoss, last seen retching in a stairwell, as if he just captured this glimpse of his legacy. 

There's much to be unpacked, in what is shown, what isn't shown, and how it was all constructed from a filmmaking standpoint. It's very deliberate in so many ways (editing most of all) but rarely feels staged in its (nonexistent) story and performances (which barely seem performative).

It is not a comfortable film, and as heavy and burdensome as I was expecting it to be, it wasn't. It's a film that settles you into its mundanity, and dares you to ignore, as this family does, the events on the other side of the wall that so often deign to call attention to themselves. We never see what goes on there, but we don't have to in order to feel the impact.

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The most recent of Michael Mann's films I've seen is Miami Vice which was released in 2006. I'd seen all his films that preceded that but have rewatched watched only a few of them in recent years. Between 2006 and the release of Ferrari in late 2023, he's only made 2 films: Public Enemies and Blackhat. The former I skipped due to Johnny Depp fatigue (I was already done with him by 2009) and the latter because of poor critical reception (though it's become something of a reassessed cult darling in recent years).  I like his movies, but I'm not a die hard.

I wondered going into Ferrari if I actually knew what a Michael Mann film was, beyond neon lights, heavy shadows and pulsating soundtracks. Partway through the film, I realized that what makes a Mann film is how he observes his characters. A lot of that is framing, and how people move within the frame, his direction on where he wants someone on the screen seems pretty precise, while still giving actors the leeway to perform. At this late stage, it looks pretty collaborative, if the performances Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz give in the film are any indication.

I'm not a car guy, nor am I a racing guy, so I had to ask, going into this film, what the point of it was. We meet a 50's-ish Enzo Ferrari, as he moves from the rural Italian abode of his mistress, Lina (Shaeline Woodley), to his city-side manor, pushing his car to its limits, his old racing instincts undying inside him. At home his wife Laura (Cruz) has been fielding calls from his people, reporting on their adversary's new arrivals to town, and she's pissed. When he arrives she reminds him, he can fuck who he wants, he just needs to be home before the calls start.  She then pulls a gun on him, and fires wide. He's shook momentarily, but unfazed. Their dynamic is set. They are honest with each other and spare each other no emotions.

The worries at the Ferrarri factory (as a Saudi prince picks up his new vehicle) are many. Maserati is going to break their speed record, and the company is spending money faster than they can make it. They need a financier, a partner, who can invest in increasing production. They need to keep on with their focus, improving their racing performance which sells the cars to the market, and not selling the cars to market to pay for the racing. Enzo is always a racer at heart, and not a car dealer.

The film is the B-side of the Hollywood biopic. Where the A-side is the attempt to summarized a whole life or career, the B-side is the "most turbulent year" biopic. Here, it takes place in the span of a week. Enzo faces a personal crisis as his two family situations collide, and his professional interests in racing and car manufacturing threaten to go belly up.

It's enough to build something out of, and Mann hammers away at it until it takes shape. It's not a boring process though, Driver's performance as Enzo is a sheer delight, as he portrays the Italian as charming, dry, and sardonic, revealing his heart only in private, and only to the dead (who sit heavily upon him). The first half of this film, while not an outright comedy, is damn funny, largely from Driver's delivery, but Mann is leaning into it just enough. With Cruz, he has a very gentle touch, allowing her the large comedic beats and a big melodramatic performance that still has room to be reigned in when she need to hit those real devastating emotional marks. She's magnificent. (Between Stone in Poor Things, Huller in Anatomy of a Fall, Cruz her and Da'Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers I'm having a hard time choosing the best performance, though Cruz and Randolph could probably push to slug it out for best supporting).

It's not a grounded film. Nobody should mistake this for real life. The film builds around the Mille Miglia an endurance race along the Italian highways and through the towns and cities along the way that is unlike any other race I've seen outside of maybe Death Race 2000 (which was maybe inspired by the Mille Miglia?) or The Great Race. But Mann's shooting of it is breathtaking, the gorgeous countryside, but also those beautiful Italian machines (this film doesn't thrust the beauty of its cars upon you, it lets you come to their beauty on your own). But, with beauty there is also danger, and we see that multiple times. Mann reiterates time and again that racing is a kamikaze pursuit, and that racers know what they're signing up for. And we learn why the Mille Miglia has not been seen since 1957.

It's not a flawless film, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the performances, the production, Mann's stylistic flourishes, the cars, the racing, the melodrama, all of it was pretty fun, until, at its moment of spectacle, it's not fun anymore. It can't recover from it, and it doesn't try. It knows there's no recovery. We only spend a few minutes more before the summary text of the next few decades fills us in briefly on who does what and when. 

I can see people being particular about the accent work here, especially when there aren't many Italians actually in major parts. It doesn't hold back my ability to appreciate it though.

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I must have caught wind of the Czech sci-fi drama Ikarie XB-1, or "Voyage to the End of the Universe" as it's been known in its heavily edited and dubbed form for decades, at some point in my life, but I've never really known anything about it, nor have I ever taken note of it as something to seek out.

But it popped up this January on the Criterion Channel in its restored, digitally archived form, and it drew my eye like a signal flare. Amidst all the films from "best of 2023" lists, I knew this 60 year old film was mandatory watching.

Based off a novel from Polish sci-fi legend Stanislaw Lem, here we have a film made years before Star Trek, presenting a humanist future and a space journey done for the betterment of mankind. It's set 200 years from when it was made (2163) but has still-potent things to say about the events of the first half of the 20th Century, while optimistically dreaming for a more ideal future.

The set design, sound design, sound effects, visual effects are all quite far above par for the early 60's. The film's influence on sci-fi for the subsequent 15 years (up to and including Star Wars) is tangible, sometimes it's just a little thing, an image, or the way the ships move through space, and sometimes it's a whole swath of the film feels like it's been completely copped by filmmakers who thought we would never notice. At the same time it's clearly aware of the popular sci-fi that came before it, most notable in Peter, this film's version of Robbie the Robot.

The restoration is gorgeous. The blacks are crisp, the whites are vibrant, it looks incredible. I was worried that this would wind up being Solaris  (another Lem novel turned into a notable sci-fi film), which is a monumental production but also monumentally boring. This is much pulpier than that, while still retaining some sense of science in its fiction (it's largely "hey, that's not bad science for 1963").  What perked me up when I was starting to drowse was a "future dance" number which was clearly copped by both Buck Rodgers and Logan's Run, yet somehow manages to (narrowly) escape campiness, I think primarily from a perplexing-but-intriguing score by Zdeněk Liška, and visually curious, simplified dance moves.  It's like future line dancing.

It's a surprisingly satisfying production, but even more potent as an artifact of sci-fi.  Anyone who's a Star Trek fan (or sci-fi in general) who has not seen this really should.