KWIF: The end of project "Tales for all" (for now)...and rankings

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Not a lot of time for movies this week. Too much board games and TV and personal stuff getting in the way. But I had to squeeze in the last of the "Tales for all" movies I had access to, both because I was intrigued by this entry very much as well as being keen to say adieu, at least for now, to this run on "Tales for all". I don't engage enough with the movies of my home country, and let's be clear, many of these "Tales for all" only qualify as Canadian because Quebec production company La Fête and its producer Rock Demers put money into them. After producing many a film, including about 25 "Tales for all" films, Demers sold La Fête to Dominic James in 2015.  La Fête resumed "Tales for all" in 2023, with Mlle Bottine, a remake of Bach et Bottine (Tales for all #3) being their second entry. 

This week:
Mlle Bottine (aka "Miss Boots", "Tales for all #26" - 2024, d. Yan Lanouette Turgeon - crave)

The easiest films to write about are sequels and remakes because you easily have something to compare them against. Mlle Bottine is a remake of 1986's Bach and Broccoli, and while it's somewhat the same story, it's not quite the same journey.

Here, Simone (played by an amazing young talent, Marguerite Laurence) has been living on her grandmother farm since the death of her parents in a car crash a couple years earlier, but her Grandmother's dementia is really starting to impact her life. Simone is fiercely independent, and has been not only caring for her grandmother at such a pre-teen age, but also the menagerie of animals, including the farm animals and ones Simone has obviously rescued...her favourite being Bottine, her pet skunk.

Simone's uncle Phillippe (Antoine Bertrand) is an Opera composer, but his last great work was 15 years ago. Phillippe has severe social anxiety and can't tolerate engaging with other people, even the young grocery delivery boy who is, improbably, a big opera fan (though shot in the early 2020s, the story feels like it was set in the late 1990s before cel phones were ubiquitous). His latest Opera is set to start rehearsals soon, and he's barely gotten started. The show's producer is dubious that Phillippe has another hit in him.

Challenging his life further, his mother dies, and a very forceful Social Services worker demands he take his niece in while she attempts to find a suitable foster home for her to live in. He does the bare minimum, at first, but the pressures of work cause him to blow up at Simone, so when the time comes for her to move on to her foster home, he doesn't have the emotional resolve to fight for her to stay. 

The setup of both Mlle Bottine and Bach et Bottine are, of course, the same. The names have changed (Fanny to Simone, Jean-Claude to Phillippe), and the specifics are different. For example, in the original, the Jean-Claude is on a sabbatical from his office job as he prepares for a concerto rehearsal that might see him tour Europe, rather than already having a professional career in music like Phillippe. Also Jean-Claude was just more of solitary, shy and grumpy rather than having Phillippe's diagnosed mental health disorder. Jean-Claude's apartment in the original is in the upper floor of a house in a residential neighbourhood, while Phillippe's here is in a very upscale apartment building downtown with a narcoleptic doorman. Also, the Grandmother in the original didn't die, but went into a nursing home, among other tweaks to the characters and their backgrounds.

In both, the young girl is very independent and high spirited, feisty one might say, with a deep love for animals ("they let me love them" Simone yells at her uncle during an argument). In both, she befriends a neighbour boy and together they create a little safe haven for animals they rescue. In both, there's a possible love interest for the Uncle (in the original it's a coworker from his office, in this it's a teacher from Sophie's school who has been brought on board the opera production to help Phillippe finish his compositions).

But theses similarities don't make for the same viewing experience, nor is it the slight deviations that make them both kind of distinct viewing experiences. It's the bigger picture, the focal point of each production that makes the biggest difference.

In the original, Fanny is the center of the film. It revolves around her and her experience with her uncle, as well as the effect she has on his life. It has the feeling of a kid's film, despite being a pretty meaty drama. Mlle Bottine however does not feel much like a kid's movie at all. Simone is a secondary character (despite being introduced first), this is much more Phillippe's story. The drama of the original revolves around Sophie trying to adapt to life with her Uncle (and displeasing him as often as pleasing him) with the threat of being moved to a foster family looming over the story. Here, Phillippe's opera takes cener stage, and more of the weight of the film and Phillippe's emotional story centers around the opera.  The point is, of course, he places too much weight and invests too much of his emotion into his work and loses Simone in the process, but the film's decision to put so much of the story weight on the opera takes away greatly from Simone's jouney. She's much more of a passenger in this remake than the driver of the story.

It is a far better made film than the original. It looks fantastic, the music is spectacular (as it needs to be if its even hoping to approximate a great opera composer) and it is very heart wrenching...it squeezes tears out even though you don't want it to. It's a quality production all around and all the performances, especially the leads Laurence and Bertrand, are very engaging. Even the opera plot, which steals focus from Simone's story is quite good, and it's used effectively as both a story motivator as well as finding an place in the story's emotional core.

Yet, the original has it beat in one key area: subtext. Too often Mlle Bottine will spell out exactly what emotions are in play, exactly what is at stake for the character, exactly how he is feeling. There's no subtlety to the emotional stakes, and it feels like if Phillippe is so in tune with where his emotions are at, he should be doing better with Simone than he is. 

The ending of Bach et Bottine is a stunner, leaving it up to the viewer to decide if it's coda is a fantasy or not, whereas Mlle Bottine is much more invested in having true resolution. In a way it is more satisfying to have the happy ending (and yeah, I cried real tears) but the opaque ending of the original was far more impressive.

Both are surprisingly great in their own way, while also having their flaws (yet not the same flaws...except that Bottine, the skunk, doesn't get enough screen time in either).

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The one thing missing from my "Tales for all" journey was understanding where they came from. I did some poking around into the history of Rock Demers as a film distributor and as a producer and the common theme is his interest in illuminating the minds of children. He started Faroun Films in the 1960s as a means to distribute quality international films around the world, with a focus on films for youths.  This led to his participation in new film festivals in Canada, establishing ties with the CBC, and helping form a government program for obtaining assistance for film production, distribution, research and preservation in Quebec. 

It was in the early 1980s that Faroun Films became La Fête, with Demers leaning into his dream of creating a series of youth-centric films, having originally planned "Tales for all" as a 12-movie series.

"I decided that the main characters would always be boys or girls between 11 and 13. They would always be in contemporary stories. Nature would always have an important part in them. There would be a lot of laughter and tenderness. No animation, no science fiction. And a certain number of animals would have an important part in each one of the films."

Demers wanted his films to be devoid of specific tropes of good and evil, that boys and girls were treated as equals, and that kids of all colours could be seen together without issue. Violence, science fiction and cartoony characters were off the table, he wanted things, despite how fantastical they got, to seem of the real world and relatable to the audience.  

His European travels and connections with international film led him to not just seek out Canadian stories but stories from creators across the globe, and not constraining the filmmakers to any particular style or storytelling formula. That the films be in any specific language was not a requirement, leading to a very detailed and meticulous dubbing process for all of his films for their Canadian and international releases. A lot of the dubs are really, really good, to the point that many younger viewers might not notice all that much, and from personal experience, most of them settle into their dubbing

More than half of the original twelve story ideas for the series were submitted before a single frame was shot. At least one of the stories (The Peanut Butter Solution) was workshopped by presenting them in classrooms with the writer to hone the story to maximum appeal with kids (it worked!). 

More than anything, Demers wanted his films to speak to children. "I want to help children leave childhood and go into adulthood with certain values. This is the age when they will build the values they will carry with them for the rest of their lives." It's less clear why he was so devoted to this arena of storytelling his whole carreer but it's evident from interviews that it was his driving force.

From my own perspective, Demers' ambition was a valiant one, and kind of unparalleled. A massive series of films that are largely disconnected in almost every sense except that specific vision of Demers, which is they be presentable and enjoyable for everyone (whether they're all enjoyable is subjective). The end result is over 20 family films that stand apart, intentionally, from what is typical of "family films" from Hollywood. That part of it, that atypical nature, is what I most enjoyed and also brushed up against the most in watching these films. They don't tell story in the conventional, American cinema way, and in many cases that's to the movie's benefit, but in others it isn't. You're not going to have a 20-film series and have a success every time.

But in almost each one of these films, there's something worth holding onto, and experience that makes it worth the time. Even if the quality of some of them doesn't match the ambition of the story, or vice versa, that in itself is kind of interesting, and kept me invested throughout this journey.

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Everything doesn't need to be a competition. This (incomplete) viewing experience doesn't demand a hierarchical ranking, but I do it nonetheless because it's fun to do so.

The "Tales for all" series is a fascinating one, if rough around the edges. Those frayed edges are part of their charm, but the result is, in my letterboxed ratings, none achieved higher than a 3.5/5 stars.

Here we go:

1. The Peanut Butter Solution ("Tales for all #2") - Nightmare fuel for young me. A kid gets scared by ghosts causing his hair to fall out. The ghosts give him the titular solution and his hair won't stop growing. He's kidnapped and his hair is harvested for magic paintbrushes.
2. Bach and Broccoli ("Tales for all #3) - A young orphan goes to live with her Bach-worshipping uncle. He just wants to be left alone.
3. The Dog Who Stopped the War ("Tales for all #1") - Neighbourhood kids play war over winter break. Things get a little too serious.
4. The Hidden Fortress ("Tales for all #17?") - Two different camps of kids play war over summer break. Things get a little too serious. A legasequel to The Dog Who Stopped the War.
5. Mlle Bottine ("Tales for all #26?") - A young orphan goes to live with her opera-making Uncle. He just wants to be left alone. A remake of Bach and Broccoli.
6. Vincent and Me ("Tales for all #11") - A Van Gough loving art student has her art stolen and passed off as Van Gough's early drawings. She heads to Amsterdam to reclaim it. Insanity ensues.
7. Summer of the Colt ("Tales for all #8") - City kids visit their grandfather's horse ranch in rural Argentina, drama ensues.
8. Tommy Tricker and the Stamp Traveller ("Tales for all #7") - A magic spell allows a kid to hop on a stamp and travel the world through air mail. Fun. Undercooked.
9. The Case of the Witch Who Wasn't ("Tales for all #10") - A pre-teen receives a visitor from her big city pen pal. They befriend and help a grumpy old lady who everyone thinks is a witch.
10. Reach for the Sky ("Tales for all #12") - A peek inside the world of Romanian gymnastics. Drama free and not as inspiring as I think it thinks it is.
11. Bye Bye, Red Riding Hood ("Tales for all #9") - a fairly nonsensical retelling of the Red Riding Hood fable. Some really neat sets.
12. The Clean Machine ("Tales for all #13") - a kid starts a cleaning business for the summer. Troubles ensue. Wants to be a teen sex comedy without the sex or teens or comedy.
13. The Young Magician ("Tales for all #4") - The action blockbuster of the "Tales for all" series about a boy who wants to be a wizard, then learns a trick, and is called upon to diffuse a bomb. It's a dud.
14. Tadpole and the Whale ("Tales for all #6") - a couple visit a remote tourist village known for its whale watching, and meet a pre-teen who has a dolphin best friend and can understand whale-speak. Fails to find much interesting to do with the concept.
15. The Great Land of Small ("Tales for all #5") - Siblings discover a dwarf in the forest from the Great Land of Small. The dwarf is being hunted so they retreat to his homeland, where they may have to stay forever. Ambitious. Incredibly cheesy. 

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Finally... I'm not going to say my dive into this series was responsible, but Netflix just added The Dog Who Stopped the War, Bach and Broccoli and Tadpole and the Whale. All of the "Tales for all" I watched on Crave.

2025 in film: Kent's Five Faves (plus two old ones)

I'm not a professional film reviewer. If you're here, reading this, you're keenly aware of that fact. I don't have any responsibility to anyone but myself to review and/or critique films. I do it because my brain doesn't work well at storing information, so if I want to remember what I thought of a film, or how it affected me, or trigger the memory of the film, I need to have it written down somewhere. If anyone outside of me wants to read it, or likes to read it, well, that's kind of nice.

Since I'm not a professional film reviewer, I don't see a lot of films. I mean I think I watch more films than the average person does, but I'm not in the theatre multiple times a week watching screenings of soon-to-be-released or newly-released movies. I'd like to, but I have a day job. If I get to the theatre to watch a film, it's because something drew me there, whether it's writer, director, star, theme, genre, property, word-of-mouth...and also I'm not the most adventurous film goer, so I only branch outside of my comfort zone a little bit.  Like, I've heard about the films of Jafar Panahi for years, but I've yet to see one, despite 2025's It Was Just An Accident being highly praised from the get go, and making many, many, many top ten lists. I'd like to see it, sometime, but there's no telling once we get outside of this review and awards season whether I will (once the conversation dies down, so does my interest).

I don't recall having done a "best of" list on this site before, primarily because I have never seen enough of a year's films to ever feel legitimate in saying "these are the year's best films".  Friend and reader Shawn asked me about a month back what my favourite film of the year was, and I didn't have an answer for him. I've been pondering it ever since. This is the result of that pondering.

This is not a "best of 2025" list. These are just the films that came out in 2025 that I have seen that excited me the most or had me thinking the most about them afterwards (it looks like it might be alphabetical order, but it's not). 

1. Bugonia - I can't even explain why this made the top of my list. It's a weird film that plays with all expectations and feels like a forgotten 70's sci-fi thriller mixed with experimental cinema that also doubles as an environmental crisis warning and anticapitalism screed. It feels old and very now.
2. Materialists - or how I learned to stop worrying and love Dakota Johnson. Probably making no one else's top ten list but mine... this one could have been something so superficial and yet it wormed its way deep into my brain.
3. Sinners - an incredible cast delivers incredible performances in a film from an incredible director with music by an incredible composer. Just a rich text that blends action, horror, music and historical critique at once. Plus it has the single best scene in cinema this year.
4. Superman - The new movie that I've rewatched the most this year because I can't believe there's a Superman movie that feels like the Superman I've been reading in comics for forever. Vying for top spot of my favourite superhero movies ever.
5. Splitsville - The surprise of the year for me, and ... another Dakota Johnson movie? It's no secret that comedies in cinema are scarce these days, and if they do pop up they're usually of the action-comedy variety (re: Anaconda) but here we have just a straight up comedy for adults that isn't centred on making the audience uncomfortable. What a ribald gift of a film.

Nearly made it (this is in alphabetical order): Frankenstein (pretty), Honey Don't! (I suspect I'm its only defender), One of Them Days (funny), One Battle After Another (theres...a lot going on), Train Dreams (mundanely dreamy), Wake Up Dead Man (Josh O'Connor is everything), Weapons (goddamn fun)

70% of the films I watched last year were not released in 2025, and less than 15% of what I watched last year were re-watches (mostly Coen Brothers movies). Of all the new-to-me older films I watched, two took up more of my brain space than any others: 

1. Purple Rain - Prince's origin story told in the guise of fiction. A bizarre movie that is either a full-on calamity or a masterpiece. Why not both?
2. The Swimmer - Burt Lancaster's story of a seemingly effervescent charmer who decides to pool-hop his way home slowly reveals he's in full-on crisis. Has a day gone by that I haven't thought about this film since seeing it? Well, yes, but not many.

KWIF: A House of Dynamite (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Usually when I take a week of work just to have time off I spend much of that time consuming and writing about movies. We'll stupid mice in the house have had me checking and repositioning and rebaiting traps, cleaning up messes and hunting for nests while only getting 5-6 hours of sleep at night because they're stressing me out. In the other times, I've been boardgaming or rearranging the house for new shelving so I haven't had much time at all for movies. Poo. 

This Week: 
A House of Dynamite (2025, d. Kathryn Bigelow - netflix)
Final Destination 5 (2011, d. Steven Quale - rental)
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025, d. Adam B. Stein, Zach Lipovsky - crave)

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A House of Dynamite is a political procedural taking the audience through a "what if" scenario from as many vantage points as it can in its just shy of two hour runtime. That scenario asks what would happen if a rogue missile was launched from an unknown source. What would we actually know? What could we actually do? And by "we" I mean the United States government officials and military personnel who are in charge of monitoring and responding to such things. [I'm not really part of that "we" statement].

Because of the nightmare landscape that America (and much of the world) is in now, politically and socially speaking, A House of Dynamite already feels out of date. It's a film that presents an intense and terrifying scenario that assumes competency at the helm of all these levels of decision making, which we're all (mostly) keenly aware isn't the case anymore. Hell, there's a character played by Moses Ingram that is a FEMA agent... does FEMA even exist anymore?

The commander-in-chief here is played by Idris Elba (with a real wonky American accent...didn't he have a better one nearly 20 years ago in The Wire), he loves podcasts and basketball, so he's very Obama-coded. Honestly, somehow I feel more comforted by an Obama-like presidency where there may be a nuclear strike on American soil than I do about anything the cheeto-in-charge is doing these days.

The film takes place in three segments, each focusing on a few central players. In the first it's Anthony Ramos at a military monitoring station, Rebecca Ferguson at the White House Situation Room ("the Whizzer") and Moses Ingram's FEMA agent as she gets evacuated to the safety bunker in the Appalachians. The subsequent two segments loop back to the other sides of conversations being had from different perspectives, be it Tracey Lett's STRATCOM Commander, Gabriel Basso's deputy national security advisor, Greta Lee's foreign military expert, or Elba's president, among others.

I get the impulse to really drill down deep into the procedural aspect and try to show this situation from as many different points of analysis and decision making as possible, but it only leads to diminishing returns as we keep looping back. There are far too many characters to really care about any of them, so all we have to really care about is the situation, and, somehow, it's not strong enough to sustain itself satisfactorily.

There's no doubt that Bigelow is a great filmmaker, and this is constructed so well, with a commitment to detail and nuance, and it is an incredible feat of editing, but it presents its conundrum, repeatedly, and it doesn't have an answer. America is about to lose a major city to a nuclear strike that may or may not have been intentional. Does America retaliate against an unknown enemy with a show of strength, and if so, against whom? Will the nuke actually hit the city, or the nearby major body of water? And will the nuke actually go off?

There's a lot of positing that this film teases and tease and never resolves. It's going for "clever" but it's just edging the audience with no relief, and it makes the journey a frustrating one.

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James Wong and David R. Ellis see-sawed on the Final Destination franchise for four years, each with a slightly different take on what the spectre of death should look like, and how the films' protagonists would deal with death's designs for them. It would have been more fun if each of the directors' second efforts weren't so bad.

With fresh blood in the form of unremarkable director Steven Quale from a screenplay by soon to be accomplished screenwriter Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Bird Box) they present the Final Destination equivalent of a workplace sitcom.

The scenario the protagonists here face is a ludicrous but thoroughly entertaining bridge collapse. It's a pretty epic spectacle that is the series' second best disaster to date (though about to be trumped by the next film). It's shot decently enough, the special effects aren't as atrocious as the previous two films, and the script has all but gotten rid of the cast of characters you just immediately want all dead.

Here wanna-be chef Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) is on a bus on a work retreat when he has a vision of the bridge collapsing. Stuck in traffic on the bridge, he manages to rile up a few other passengers who follow him off the bus and to safety as the bridge collapses. This includes his best friend/manager Peter (Miles Fisher), his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) who literally just dumped him, intern Candice (Ellen Wroe) and a few others who will all die horribly later.

This is a series that's all about the deaths, and the fake-outs leading to the deaths. It's about teasing the audience with possibilities before executing Death's design. Final Destination 2 did this the absolute best, and while this doesn't fully live up to that, nor does it really recapture the magic of discovery of the first one, it's pretty decently entertaining throughout, with some particularly squicky kills (one involving a laser eye surgery laser that had me flinching)

There are two big diversions here. The first is the inclusion of Courtney B. Vance's FBI agent who is investigating Sam's vision, wondering if Sam committed an act of domestic terrorism, only to come to understand that as connected as the dead are, there's no corporeal perpetrator. I really would have liked the whole movie to be from his perspective, as he comes across the scenes and he and his team need to try and unpack what happened, Will Graham from Hannibal-style ("this is my design"). The second is a new explanation as to how to end the cycle from Tony Todd, "Mr. Final Destination" himself. In this case, it's killing someone else and taking their remaining time for one's self. It's an interesting premise on its own that, while constituting the focus of the third act, doesn't get explored much outside of its needs for a horror film.

If you pay close enough attention throughout the film, the coda shouldn't be a surprise, but it's still a delight and probably the best ending of the series.

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14 years later and Final Destination is back, and bigger than ever. Enough time has passed with the series laying dormant to build up a nostalgic reverence, plus the current state of Hollywood is all about exploiting intellectual property so a new Final Destination was inevitable.

What wasn't inevitable was the love and care that seemingly went into this franchise re-launch. It's not that the film is straying very far out of its lane, but rather it just navigates the series and its concepts in a manner that seems to indicate the writers (Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor) and directors Stein and Lipovski are all real fans of the series and have been thinking about how to freshen it up for some time.

The centerpiece of the film is its opening prologue, an epic 20-minute sequence set in the late 1960's where a young couple (Max Lloyd-Jones and Stargirl's Brec Bassinger) are out for a special evening at the newly opened Sky View restaurant, a posh space-age joint at the top of a Space Needle-esque building. They encounter some class-based prejudice that threaten to ruin their evening, but it turns out all it would take is a little 10-year-old shit chucking pennies from the lookout to destroy the whole facility. It's a spectacular disaster, at least the rival if not the better of the highway disaster from Final Destination 2.

The whole sequence is so vibrant and colourful with that gauzy 60's feels to it, and the polite menace beneath chipper smiles that I really wanted the whole movie to be a period-set Final Destination. Alas, it was not to be, as we smash cut from the collapsing building to a modern day lecture hall where Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has just awaken, screaming, from the nightmare. It's a recurring vision she's had, and she thinks the woman in it is her grandmother.

It turns out it is her grandmother, Iris, in Stefani's vision. Iris has been estranged from the family for decades. She was an intense mother, overprotective to a fault, hounding the family about safety once grandkids were born. Nobody will talk about her, so with the only clue she has, Stefani goes to meet her grandma for the first time as an adult, at a remote cabin in a clearing in the woods surrounded by all manner of defences to ward off death. Iris is a kook, but we watchers of the franchise know that despite how nutty she appears, Iris is right.

Turns out Iris had that same vision and saved everyone from the Sky View disaster. But the ripple effects have been a constant in the 55 years since. Death is still cleaning up this mess, and it's only now catching up to Iris's family. [In this explanation, but no hard connective threads, it assumes that the events of the previous movies are all connected to this one event]. Stefani thinks Iris is crazy until Iris says "seeing is believing" and she intentionally lets up her guard for one second, affording Death the opportunity to claim her right in front of Stefani. Stefani tries to convince her dad, uncle, cousins and brother of the danger that's coming for them but it takes two freak accidents before they start seeing things her way.

As much as I wanted the fully-period-set Final Destination, Bloodlines offers a thoroughly entertaining and trope-twisting entry into the series. While I seem to like the hamminess of FD2 more there's a playfulness to Bloodlines that's hard not to be amused by. I mean the sequence where Stefani's cousin jogs off into the background only to get hit in the head by a soccer ball, sending her off balance and into a big garbage bin which is then promptly picked up with the side arm and dumped into the back... maybe the best single moment in the franchise for sheer delight in execution.

The deaths aren't as Rube Goldberg-ian as I would have liked them to be but they are plenty gross, with more than a few that had me squirming in my seat while also giggling in delight.

This also is probably the most accessible cast in the entire series. There are no annoying characters or performers here, for probably the first time since the first movie, we're actually not rooting for these characters to die.

This also marks Tony Todd's final on screen appearance, shockingly gaunt, but still full of gravitas and an absolute legend.

[poster talk, briefly - the Final Destination series has had a skeleton-based focus for most of its poster life, with the first two films being the very late-90's-styled muddy blue and black, shadow-heavy group head shot which got real boring real fast. But Bloodlines' main poster, selling the whole "space needle" thing is vibrant reds and oranges popping off, real solid seller. My favourite though is the series of four posters selling the backyard barbecue and the dangers lurking there...just a real deviation from the norm of the series while also maintaining the skull motif]

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I've really enjoyed my time watching Death work its designs out on screen. Regardless of how bad some of the acting or directing or scripting could be, there was always entertainment value to be had. It's super obvious that the third and fourth entries are the worst of the bunch, which means the rest are all great fun... four out of six is pretty good! Plus, Final Destination: Omen is apparently in production, this time a cruise ship disaster. Keep em coming I say.

Ranking Final Destination:

1. Final Destination 2
2. Final Destination
3. Final Destination:Bloodlines
4. Final Destination 5
5. Final Destination 3
6. The Final Destination

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Ranking the Coen Bros.

2018, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Netflix
[Reposted from my letterboxd, typos and all, originally written Nov 16, 2018]

Anthologies are always a challenge for me. Movies, books, comics... I'm never left satisfied. There's too many stories, usually of different length, sometimes connected by theme or genre, sometimes only tenuously connected, often not really connected at all. They usually vary in length and tone, often by different creatives, and invariably you have to compare one story against the rest, and even in the best cases there's always a dud, or one that overshadows all the others. It's never a satisfying experience.

I think the only place where the anthology can really work is television. We're talking The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Black Mirror, but also the idea of season-length anthologies like Fargo, True Detective, or American Horror Story. With the former, the episode by episode format of anthology gives separation, but also structure. Not every episode will be equal but the separation between stories (talking about old school weekly viewing, but also the separation provided by opening title and end credits sequences) provides a buffer to immediate juxtaposition. As individual episodes they're standalone, like short films, not treated as a necessary part of a whole package. The season length anthology is just more fulfilling, a mini-series that lives on it's own each year, all the benefits of regular television but with the satisfaction of both an intended story structure and closure.

Which brings us to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology feature from the Coen Brothers (Ethan Coen no stranger to anthology storytelling, having written more than a few collections of short stories). The early rumour was this exploration of the old West was intended as a tv anthology but it's six tales each run at wildly different lengths (from 10 to 40 minutes) which would make tv serialization impossible. [edit: the "series" rumour has been disproven]

The only real way to tackle reviewing an anthology is story by story, but that type of reviewing also exemplifies the fact that an anthology cannot really be viewed as a whole unit, rather only it's pieces.

The film takes its name from the opening story, following Tim Blake Nelson's singing gunslinger through a breif and violently whimsical journey (it makes me want a Shaolin Cowboy movie adaptation from the Wachowskis). I had incorrectly inferred that Buster Scruggs would be the film's Cryptkeeper, the connecting thread between stories, but no such luck. Just the turning of pages transitions us from one to the next.

James Franco robs a bank in the next story, but gets foiled by the teller played by Stephen Root. It's the shortest of the stories but tonally consistent with the previous, if a little less fantastical.

The third story follows a limbless orator as he travels the countryside with Liam Neeson as his caretaker making a meager living entertaining meager (and thrifty) crowds. Is this a friendship? A business partnership? Or an exploitative relationship? Ultimately, it's overlong, cast in such grey, and lacking the wit and charm of the previous entries, destroying the cohesiveness for the rest of the film.

The next story takes full advantage of Bruno Delbonnel's beautiful cinematography as Tom Waits panhandlers for gold. It's luscious color palette is in stark contrast to the four dankness of the previous story. It's just as deliberate a story as the last, really getting the sense of the time to spare on such endeavours people had way back when.

While the first two stories were rather pithy and energetic, these two slow things right down, peeling away the idealism of the old West, leading into the fifth story, a forty minute romantic tragedy on a wagon train to Oregon. Due to it's length it's easy to invest in the characters, and understanding the painstaking hardship of travel seems to be the point. The early romanticism of old West tropes have washed away, here there's bare practicality and excruciating nothingness, coupled with a gut blow of an ending.

The final story finds five heads in a carriage, talking, a spectre of darkness aptly surrounding them, but the Coen's see fit to return levity via the uncomfortable, forced interaction of strangers who would otherwise not associate with one another. It's an engaging dialogue but quite much to take after three tales of a more photographic quality and already nearly 2 hours deep. If anything, it serves as a reminder of how awesome Tyne Daly is, and she should be in more things.

As a whole, it's a Coen Brothers production so it's worth the time spent, but as a Coen Brothers production it's on the bottom end of their spectrum. I also wished the had better Native American representation than just as attacking war parties.

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I'm being lazy with Buster Scruggs i, not writing a brand new review because, well, I don't have a lot more to say about it, just as I didn't have much to say about it then. I did find it generally tedious to watch and frequently checked the timestamp to see how much was remaining. The Coens love a tight movie so whenever one goes over two hours, you feel it.

The Blank Check Podcast pointed out that the connecting thread of these stories is death, but it's tough for me to really think of it a theme of each of these stories. 

My ranking of the Buster Scruggs stories:

1. The Gal Who Got Rattled
2. All Gold Canyon
3. Near Algodones
4. The Mortal Remains
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
6. Meal Ticket

Now that I have rewatched all 18 of the Coens films together, here are my rankings, subject to change.

1. Fargo
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Hail, Caesar!
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. A Serious Man
6. No Country For Old Men
7. The Hudsucker Proxy
8. Blood Simple
9. Burn After Reading
10. Miller's Crossing
11. True Grit
12. Barton Fink
13. The Man Who Wasn't There
14. Intolerable Cruelty
15. Raising Arizona
16. O Brother, Where Art Thou
17. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
18. The Ladykillers

It's a difficult list to make because 60% of these films are flat out masterpieces, and most of the rest are troubled but still generally likeable. I mean, True Grit is an incredible, maybe even perfect film, and I have it out of the top 10, which is absurd.

My top 3 was my top 3 going into this rewatch and they remained relatively untested. LLewyn Davis and A Serious Man were both a lock for the top 5 and jockeyed back and forth, with Llewyn taking the edge because I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. The films in the 6-13 slots could probably be re-arranged any which way and I would still be happy with that ranking.

The only real surprise in making the list is that Raising Arizona jumped 3 spots from the bottom...and maybe that Burn After Reading made it into the top 10. It's probably the only non-masterpiece in the top ten, but it is so much fun. It's very possible that I may be finally warming to Raising Arizona but I just don't have the sentimentality towards it like so many others do. But sentimentality is why Fargo and Lebowski are my 1 and 2.

Of all these films, only the bottom three do I feel hesitant to watch again. In fact, I would probably watch The Ladykillers before O Brother or Buster Scruggs but it's pretty unanimous that The Ladykillers is absolutely their weakest film. For the record, if I were to add in Joel and Ethan's solo works, Honey, Don't would slot in between The Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable Cruelty while Drive Away Dolls would slot in just after Raising Arizona. I don't even know where to put The Tragedie of Macbeth because it's nothing like the rest of their oeuvre. It sits on its own outside of it all...or it's last, I guess even though it's clearly a better film than The Ladykillers at least.

But what an unbelievable delight it is to have all these films in the world, and to revisit them in succession. It was a real effort to watch them week-to-week and not gorge myself on them. But, next time there will be a gorging.

So This Is Christmas Leftovers (2024) - Hallmarkied Out

 Last Christmas (I gave you my heart), and even the 2022 holiday season, I barely watched any Hallmarkies... less than a half dozen each year.  I consciously uncoupled from Hallmark, but I just couldn't quit it entirely. I suspected at the time that I was missing the comfort of the formulaicness of Hallmark movies, and their stabs at stepping outside of those trappings was perhaps a painful transition and maybe Hallmark wasn't up for it, especially with their limited budgets and rapid production schedule.

This year (to save me from tears) it was almost all-Hallmark-all the time, with 10 Hallmark-produced movies, 4 non-Hallmark Hallmarkies, and 2(!) Hallmark-produced TV series.  And my impression is that the productions still suffer from lack of budget, but they've gotten much better at managing their ambitions within their budgets.  It's clear they still want to do the traditional holiday romance for 80% of their output but their stabs at "Holiday Magic" have really improved.  Hallmark has also is now actually letting comedy happen purposefully, rather than relying upon goofiness and irony (which, I get it... comedy requires timing which can mean more takes and run up the production costs), and while it's still a bit of a mixed bag storytelling wise, they're giving their writers, directors and stars a lot more freedom than it seems they ever have. As a result there are more films coming out of the Hallmark churn that are entertaining, and not just in the making-fun-of-the-tropes way.

It also seems like there's been a marked decrease in non-Hallmarkies. Lifetime and Netflix barely showed up this year, and the other outlets seemed to have gotten buried by the big "H".

All is not sunshine and rainbows with Hallmark though. Finding Mr. Christmas resulted in an absolute travesty of a movie with their "next Hallmark leading man" falling flat on his face. And their first holiday TV series, Holidazed, ended with a 40-minute wet fart of a finale... oh, but I forgot to write about those final 3 episodes...:

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Holidazed 

Episode 6: The Camarena Family: wherein Gaby is confronted with making nice with her high school bully Katie Manetti-Hanahan, who is now dating her brother, Kevin. Katie seems to be making nice with Gaby, and yet every turn seems to be an "accidental" assault or slight on Gaby by Katie. The family, though, loves Katie and poo-poos Gaby's concerns that Katie's true nature is not what they see.  Kevin asks Katie's dad Chuck for his blessing to marry her, and Chuck, who's been at odds with the Cabrera family for years, denies him. Gaby finds old footage of the moment where Katie came up with the nickname "Easy Bake" that Gaby couldn't shake for years. Turns out that happened because they used to be best friends, until Gaby got new high school friends and ditched Katie. The two reconcile, but not in time. Gaby's family finds the video and Kevin asks for time from Katie. There's a confrontation at the Christmas market stroll between Katie and Kevin, which then leads to a fight between Katie's dad. 

The "comedy" of someone reliving childhood trauma by having to confront their childhood bully is a difficult line to toe, and this episode does not handle it deftly. I think they were trying to go for cringe comedy, but it was just sad. I also wasn't sure whether the show wanted us to believe Gaby was misremembering Katie as a bully or if Katie was still actively Gaby's bully or not really either. I was dreading the expected scene where they have their confrontation and rather than owning the hurt she causes Katie has an excuse for being hurt first. Credit where due, they handle this quite well, actually, with Gaby first realizing that fighting fire with fire only leads to more fire and instead she works to douse the animosity and they come to an understanding as grown-ass adults, and maybe even rekindle a decades-lost friendship. The complication though has nothing to do with Gaby, and so the finale's going to need to get Katie and Kevin back together.

Episode 7: The Manetti-Hanahan Family: Of all the episodes of Holidazed, this is the one that focuses the most on the family of the episode title. When you have two mega-hitters in John C. McGinley and Virginia Madsen as the patriarch and matriarch of the family, Chuck and Connie, it should be something special. The family is of the teasing-and-sarcasm-is-our-love-language variety. Connie makes the family sign a pact that says no fighting, no swearing, no aggression. But with this family that's easier signed than done.

Chuck is that breed of person who always needs to be right, who always needs to have his voice heard loudest over everyone else, and uses his military background to intimidate everyone. One has to wonder if Connie has had enough, hence the pact, but no, turns out she just wants to have a nice family Christmas in case it is her last, as she's waiting on test results. It's a story beat that is aggressively manipulative, and it's not handled with any tact.

Chuck's not allowed to beef with his neighbours, so he starts beefing with his son Clark instead over Clark's "green energy". Turns out Chuck has an inferiority complex because of Clark's "university education". They settle their differences when Clark's green energy keeps the house lit up after the power goes out.

 Clark's wife Rebecca is at odds with Clark's sister Laurie because of their "clean living" and perceived pretentious superiority complex. But they settle their differences when Rebecca starts eating meat and Laurie discovers Rebecca is pregnant (after earlier in the episode exploding over not being able to have more kids, again more manipulative storytelling)

I actually liked this episode, the characters and the actors quite a bit but the key problem is it needs to set up character arcs for each character (or pairings of characters) which need to be resolved in 40 minutes (or quickly in the following episode) while also fitting into the over-arcing story structure of the series (which means heading to the holiday stroll and the eventual storm and power outage) and also sandwiching in Katie into the episode after the events of the previous episode.  It leads to oversimplification and predictable, telegraphed stories... something the entire series is guilty of... Connie at one point even says to Chuck something to the effect of "you never know when the neighbours might need our help" or something, clearly telegraphing the final episode...

Episode 8: The Finale:  In which the Manetti-Hanahan family is the only house on the block with power so they invite their neighbours over for a big Christmas day feast. Chuck agrees to a truce for the day with Manny Camarena, and then they start acting like real pals. Connie, with assistance from Grandma Lin, gets her test results which are negative. Chuck tells Clark he's proud of him. Ted confesses to Grandma Lin that he's gay, and she's heartbroken only because he lied to her, but Marcus smooths it over and Grandma then gets the whole neighborhood to plan an impromptu wedding. Gaby records her audition video with Katie's help, and then Gaby smooths over things between her brother and Katie and they're engaged again. Lucy and Sylvie reconcile, and Sylvie gets Cole back over for another date. Annie and Max talk, and they both like each other, so they play video games. Josh's girlfriend says it's obvious Josh wants something different than moving to Australia, and Josh and Nora kiss, and I guess Theo has a new father-figure. Most annoyingly, Evan steps aside and points Linda towards his new friend Robert, and they reunite, and head off on a Norwegian vacation together to see the Northern Lights.

It's aggressively annoying how obvious every single one of these story lines is, and so obviously telegraphed. While I liked some of the episodes and many of the performers, I legitimately hated this finale and I'm not feeling to positive about the series overall.  

It's a show with a massive cast of characters but only serves a third of them well. So many characters get shoved to the sidelines, to the point that any sub plots that there may have been in most of the families (the Lins, the Lewins, the Hills) are kind of forgotten about in the Finale. I'm certain that certain players aren't even in the episodes (and it's so hilarious that in most scenes in the Finale, in this crowded Minetti-Hanahan household, the background actors are not any of the characters from the series...seriously there's like another 40 people in that house on top of the 40 named characters we've already met.  That's one big cul-de-sac.

A show like this needs to be three times as long and juggle its storylines, let them breathe, and it needs to offer some real drama, not greeting card company happy endings to every story. Sometimes the happy ending is learning to live with a sad outcome. I wanted Robert to find a new life, not end up with his ex-wife. I wanted Laurie and Rebecca to become friends not because she finds out she's having another baby, but helps her to accept that she cannot.  And I wanted Grandma Lin to hold a grudge so much longer than basically 5 minutes.  I want there to be consequences in all this and there aren't really any. Even the fact that Katie took the Camarena family to a protected area to cut down their Christmas tree is resolved by having Josh step in and "I am Spartacus" it for...no real reason.  

A total waste of time, and quite frustrating when it teetered so close to being quite good.

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As noted the transition of Hallmark movies from bog standard formulaic romance to holiday fantasy and/or holiday romantic comedy (and even dabbling in adventure and mystery) has been a rocky transition in the early 2020's, but there have been definite signifiers of the promise of something more..."elevated Hallmark" if you will.

2023 was the banner year for this with Catch Me If You Claus delivering a "one crazy night" comedy adventure (with romance and fantasy) and coming out quite entertaining despite its budgetary limitations, and Hallmark's best-ever holiday movie, Round and Round which is a Hanukkah romcom that is also a time loop movie that absolutely knows what its doing.  There's a third massive entry in the 2023 elevated Hallmark stable that I neglected last year (although Toasty didn't) and that's A Biltmore Christmas (directed by John Putch).

The story is an ambitious time travel fantasy romance about a writer, Lucy (played by Hallmarkie regular Bethany Joy Lens) who is tasked with writing a remake of a classic Christmas movie (shot at the Biltmore Hotel) but struggles with the happy ending of the original and wants to make a more realistic, sober ending.  She is sent by the studio on a trip to the Biltmore to hopefully gain some inspiration and finalize the script. There she starts learning the behind-the-scenes history of "His Merry Wife" (the fabulously 40's-styled movie-within-the-movie) and getting access to authentic props and wardrobes.  But when she turns the infamous hourglass used in the movie she finds herself transported back in time to the set of "His Merry Wife", getting first hand experience on the behind-the-scenes...and meeting the suavely handsome co-star of the film, Jack Huston (played by Christopher Polaha), who is immediately taken by her. When the sands of the hourglass run out, Lucy returns to her time, but she's both freaked out and utterly intrigued by what happened.

Using the sprawling, gorgeous North Carolina estate of the Biltmore hotel (built by George Vanderbilt), A Biltmore Christmas has a built-in aesthetic that means the production crew didn't have to do much heavy lifting in making the production look good, which meant they could focus more budget on the costuming and make-up which made the 1940's set look more authentic than Hallmark could traditionally go for.

When she ventures into the past again, she accidentally breaks the hourglass, and becomes trapped on the set of "His Merry Wife". She and Jack start to grow closer, but the lies she's spun to remain on set start catching up with her, but she's made a few friends along the way who back her up.

Like the best Elevated Hallmarks it's surprisingly ambitious, calling its shot early on opening with black-and-white, cinematic-looking scenes from "His Merry Wife" which look and play so good you actually half wish you were watching that movie instead. But A Biltmore Christmas earns the viewer's attention.

Is it still stricken by budget limitations? Of course it is, it's Hallmark, so the cut corners are going to be evident. Here it's primarily in the present day scenes which feel less thought out, less refined than the events in the 1940s. The film builds to a series of cross cut as Lucy needs to escape the studio dogs in the 1940s, while in the present day a friend Lucy made is trying to stop the Biltmore concierge (Jonathan Frakes) from taking the hourglass away. The stakes feel so much higher in the 1940s, where it's clear Lucy has outstayed her welcome, than in the present day where the film hasn't established its time travel rules effectively enough (is it just the hourglass, or is it the combination of the hourglass plus the room it was in? What happens if you flip the hourglass before the sands run out, does time rewind, or do you go back even further in time? How are the two time periods connected?).

Polaha is absolutely incredible as Jack Huston. He nails the movie star charisma and charm, he has confidence and gumption, but also insecurities. There are a lot of Hallmark leading men who have charm and talent, but we're so used to seeing them in the same-old-same-old that we don't think too much about them as actors. This is absolutely a performance, and probably the best leading man performance ever in a Hallmark movie.  The 1940's cast is uniformly good, and Lens really carries the weight of the film with perfect energy (even if the stakes really aren't very high for her). The end of movie dress she gets to wear, a beautiful, layered, deco-styled silver black and gold number, is a work of art compared to the typical off-the-rack red/blue/green dress that a Hallmark leading lady would normally end their film in.

I really dug A Biltmore Christmas (we agree), so much so that I feel compelled at this time to do a tops list of elevated Hallmark :

TOP 5 ELEVATED HALLMARK MOVIES:

1. Round and Round
2. Three Wise Men and a Baby
3. Crashing Through the Snow (this is actually one of those in-transition Hallmarkies, but it's elevated based on scripting and performance)
4. A Biltmore Christmas
5. Sugarplummed 

These are all films I could see myself watching again (and in fact I've seen Three Wise Men... and Crashing... multiple times each).  If I were to make a list of more traditional Hallmarkies that I would watch multiple times it would be a list of 3:

TOP 3 SENTIMENTAL FAVOURITE TRADITIONAL HALLMARK MOVIES:
1. Nine Lives of Christmas
2. The Christmas Club
3. An Unexpected Christmas (this is another one of those in-transition Hallmark movies, part romcom, part traditional, but the traditional takes hold over the movie)

Go-Go-Godzilla: final thoughts and ranking

 Last year, on Halloween, when I decided to start watching All The Godzillas*, I didn't know that there was both a new Toho Godzilla and Legendary Godzilla feature in the direct path of my stupid boy project. It was genuine good fortune that my viewing experience culminated with the release of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. 

I also didn't expect that, just a few weeks prior to GxK, I would be cheering for a crew of Japanese visual effects artists as they held their Godzilla action figures in one hand and their Oscar in the other. Or that the best of all Godzilla films would be that latest Toho production.

As I reflect upon viewing  All The Godzillas*, it's a pretty messy blur of textured suits, destroyed miniatures and radiation blasts. If you were to pick out any pre-2010 Godzilla title and ask me to explain to you the plot, with the exception of the original Gojira I'm not sure that I could.  The Toho films run through so many of the same tropes and iterations of the same creatures, they reuse so many of the same actors in different roles, and their plots are so often labyrinthine or nonsensical or convoluted, and rarely ever with connective tissue from one film to the next, that it's really hard to make one stand out from the whole.  

Rather than a full or rich understanding of story or character, with each of the pre-2010 Toho films I am left with instead an impression, a sense of something that I liked or disliked about it, something that I reacted strongly or negatively to.

As I've said a few times, what I respond to most in Godzilla films is a strong character story. In almost every Godzilla film, Godzilla is not really a character. He is what the film is built around, weather as a force of nature, or as a planetary protector... he may have characteristics, or perhaps even a bit of personality, but he's never the central story character, certainly not like Kong usually is. I don't recall ever feeling a tremendous sense of sympathy or empathy for Godzilla.  Sure, you root for or against the big bastard, but you're never invested in him for his wants and desires, biting nails hoping he achieves his objectives.  And if Godzilla ever stares down a human, it's usually anyone's guess whether their monster is even clocking human facial expressions. Have you ever stared an ant in the eye and felt a genuine connection? There should be nothing remotely human about Godzilla, and he shouldn't care about us as a species at all.

As I wrote up each film for this "Go-Go-Godzilla" series, I assigned each film a ranking (out of 5 Zs). I also would enter my viewing in Letterboxd, assigning the film a ranking out of 5 stars. For the most part these rankings aligned (but not always, sometimes as I write things out my opinions can become more, or less, favourable). But I used these ratings to maintain my rankings list, adding to it with each film watched.

Very quickly the rankings list started to feel more and more arbitrary. By the time I was watching Tokyo S.O.S. do you really think I could earnestly compare it to Godzilla vs Megalon? All I really have to go on is my Z/star ratings as guide to establish tiers and then my general sense memory to sort the films within the tiers.

I mean, it was pretty obvious to me what my favourites were, and very clear what I genuinely did not care for, but everything in-between is the "mushy middle". 

Even with the Z/star rankings as guide, my "sense memory" of certain films wants me to push it higher, or perhaps question it's spot. Like Mothra vs Godzilla was a big win early on after two dudes, but is it really at equal stature or enjoyment to me as Minus One, 2014, or Shin?

Gojira is classic cinema, a massively influential and important film with a deeply resonant message. But its storytelling is disjointed and visually its perhaps not as potent as it was 50/60/70 years ago. But surely it's better than any film with MechaGodzilla, right?

And I feel like I would go to bat for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep any day, and think it should be in my top ten. So why isn't it?

I'm sure if I dared do a rewatch of all these that they would shift all around. I think Minus One, 2014, and Shin would all remain top 5, and that most of the bottom five would stay right there, but everything else could swing in unexpected ways. 

But I don't think Lady Kent would tolerate me doing a full Godzilla rewatch any time soon, and there's a whole lotta other kaiju tourism for me to partake in.

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RANKING
*********

1. Godzilla Minus One (2023) ****

2. Godzilla (2014) ****

3. Mothra vs Godzilla (1964) ****

4. Shin Godzilla (2016) ****

5. The Return of Godzilla (1984) ***1/2

6. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2004) ***1/2

7. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla (1974) ***1/2

8. Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993) ***1/2

9. Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) ***1/2

10. Gojira (1954) ***

11. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) ***

12. Godzilla vs Kong (2021) ***

13. Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999) ***

14. Godzilla vs Megaguiras (2000) ***

15. Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) ***

16. Godzilla vs Gigan (1972) ***

17. Godzilla vs Megalon (1973) ***

18. Godzilla vs Destroyah (1995) ***

19. Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster (1964) ***

20. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) **1/2

21. Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) **1/2

22. Godzilla vs Mothra (1992)**1/2

23. Destroy All Monsters (1968) **½

24. Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-out Attack (2001) **½

25. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)**1/2

26. Godzilla vs Biollante (1989) **1/2

27. Godzilla Raids Again (1955) **1/2

28. Godzilla 1985 (US version 1985) **1/2

29. Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002) **

30. Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla (1994) **

31. All Monsters Attack (1969) **

32. Invasion of the Astro Monster (1965) **

33. Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991) *1/2

34. Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956) *1/2

35. King Kong vs Godzilla (US version 1962) *½

36. Son of Godzilla (1967) *

Did not watch:
Godzilla (1998)
Godzilla Planet of Monsters (2017)
Godzilla City on the Edge of Battle (2018) Godzilla The Planet Eater (2018)