KWIF: The Master (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Nothing new here, but all new to me.

This Week:
The Master (2012, d. Paul Thomas Anderson - tubi)
Bigbug (2022, d. Jean-Pierre Jeunet - netflix)
The Hidden Fortress (aka La forteresse suspendue, "Tales for all #17?" - 2001, d. Roger Cantin - crave)

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I don't hate Jaoquin Phoenix, and he's quite the opposite of a bad actor, but I just can't stand to look at the guy (and, to be clear, it has nothing to do with his cleft palate scar). Phoenix has cultivated for himself over the three decades of his career an on screen persona.  It's not that he plays the same character over and over again, but by putting Phoenix into any role, you're guaranteeing that role a certain level of uncertainty, wildness, unpredictability and discomfort. Phoenix revels in being discomforting, and he's exceptional at it. I just have a very, very hard time watching it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman had equal capacity for being discomforting, but with Hoffman I don't get the sense he revels in it. I find Hoffman could disappear into a role more, despite rarely being able to disguise his particularly distinctive appearance. Hoffman had range, and could project softness, vulnerability and tenderness as well as explosive fury and danger, and everything in between. He was one of the greatest actors of his generation. Phoenix is also a damn good actor, but I find the roles he takes have a much harder time escaping his persona.

Putting the two of them together in a film seems like oil and vinegar, two distinct but complementary flavours that will mix together if agitated, but it's temporary unity where the struggle to separate, to stand apart will simmer underneath.  So it's a credit to Paul Thomas Anderson's script, casting choices, and direction that it's not the performers who are struggling to bind together, but rather the characters.  He keeps the pair of them agitated enough that as actors they're always intermingling, but the characters are constantly in a fight to hold together when every force around them is telling them to separate.

Phoenix is the star of The Master, a WWII naval veteran named Freddie Quell who we're introduced through an opening montage of his last few weeks in the war. First impressions: he's a horny pervert who lacks self awareness. In other words, a Jaoquin Phoenix-type character. 

There's a point in these early scenes to also identify that the military system at that time was aware of the traumatic effects war has on the minds of the people who serve, but had no real interest or capacity to help them, especially when the toxic masculine ideal of the time was for men to show as little emotion as possible which ultimately results in a boiling out of anger and rage. Freddie has a hard time holding down a job, and his talent for concocting his own bespoke alcohol may have unintentionally poisoned a coworker. On the run, he winds up stowing away on a ship, which turns out to be that of Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman), self-described as "a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, and, above all... a hopelessly inquisitive man". Dodd finds Freddie a curious man, but his immediate interest is Freddie's distilled handiwork. He likes the drink, and so he keeps Freddie on.

Well this poster doesn't accurately
sell the film at all.

Freddie, now at sea on Dodd's yacht, finds himself amidst a curious group of people, all part of "The Cause" that is, bluntly, a cult under the sway of Dodd as their "Master". The Cause believes that the body is a human recorder, that stores all of one's history within it, not just of their current life, but past lives as well. Through "processing" Dodd unlocks these past lives, and also unlocks traumas of the present.

Dodd's family includes his daughter Peggy (Amy Adams) who is perhaps an even more staunch believer in The Cause than her father (probably because Lancaster knows it's bullshit he just made up, whereas for Peggy it's a core belief she was raised with). Peggy's husband Clark (Ramy Malek) is just as much a zealot, but her brother Val (Jesse Plemons) is the sole dissenting voice in the family (though, rarely, if ever raises it). They, and the rest of the inner circle, all identify Freddie as a tainted well, as an interloper in their organization, a non-believer, but Dodd refuses to give up on him, and doubles not only his own efforts but the whole organization's.

For his part, Freddie wants to come around, wants to believe, wants to share in everything the Master is offering to him, but he can't let go, neither of the idea that it's all bullshit, nor of the trauma he holds inside of him. He's let his trauma be known to The Cause, but they're completely incapable of actually helping because there's no method to their madness. It's all just Dodd's whims and curiosity.

The film is expertly crafted, perfectly cast, with exceptional wardrobe, set design, etc. The entire production is pretty close to flawless...but I just couldn't connect with Freddie. It's the point of the character -- in an exchange with Dodd (in prison no less) they come to verbal blows, and Dodd repeats "who fucking likes you except for me!") -- but in another actor's hands Freddie wouldn't be so...off putting. It's the Phoenix effect, he can't seem to reign it in, to find other modes in a character. They always seem at the precipice of an outburst or a meltdown, certainly Freddie is. Part of Freddie's "processing" is trying to have him let go of his animalistic nature, his urges and rage and violence, but even as Freddie tempers, that still seems all too evident in Phoenix.

In the final act, time has passed, Freddie has distanced himself from The Cause when Dodd beacons him back. But to come back means he can never leave, and that's not acceptable. Freddie is seen having changed, tempered, and maybe more mindful as a result of his experience, his processing. The Cause is a fictionalization of Scientology, and Anderson is both critical and skeptical but he also sees that in this sort of time of community of examining one's inner demons, even if guided by an megalomaniac with no actual training or skills in therapy, it can be somewhat helpful in some ways.

At least that's what I figure it was trying to say. Next to the discomfiting Phoenix-ness of it all, my only real critique of The Master is that I'm not certain of the takeaway, of what we as an audience are supposed to have gotten from Freddie's journey, of what Anderson is trying to say with all this.  When I get to the inevitable PTA filmography rewatch, it may become more evident then.

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Surprisingly, this poster predates
AI slop

Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet meant a lot to me in my formative cinephile years. I first saw City of Lost Children at a small, regional festival screening and was mesmerised, and shortly thereafter he was tapped to direct Alien:Resurrection which wound up being not the film anyone wanted, and a fascinatingly beautiful, weird and bad-but-not movie. His follow-up Amélie (aka Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain) is maybe a masterpiece (but I haven't watched it in decades and to be fair, I loved it so much once upon a time, I'm kind of scared to revisit it) and seemed to be an apex.  I did see A Very Long Engagement in theatre, and was not impressed. I, and seemingly half the movie-loving world, kind of lost track of him after that. 

All of his films since Amélie, have all gone well under the radar in North America, with very little fanfare surrounding them from any of the sources that likely would have championed his earlier works. But his earliest works, Delicatessen and ...Lost Children were co-directed with Marc Caro, with fantastical ideas brought to life through analog effects and a playful, if dark, sense of humour. I figure those early works with Caro were so celebrated because of what they promised from young, excitable talent. The promise was fully delivered with Amélie, and it seemed all the possibility and potential had been used up after that.

Bigbug was released on Netflix in 2022, and it's telling that I didn't actually learn of it's existence until 2024, and it's languished in my Netflix queue for two years since. As much as I loved Jeunet when I was younger, and still find his earliest works captivating, I'm not much excited by him anymore. 

In the world of comic books, an aging artist's work tends to suffer as the artist's fine motor skills, eyesight and, likely, patience degrades. Sadly and all too often the illustrations an artist in their 60s or later produce is  very much a pale imitation of what their work looked like in their heyday. Softer lines, more erratic shapes, a lack of refinement... a fuzzier version of what it once was. Bigbug is the cinematic equivalent of that idea.  Bigbug is a fuzzier version of Delicatessen. 

In a jet-set 2045 that's like a very French interpretation of The Jetsons (read, kinda horny), Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) has invited her romantic interest Max (Stéphane "I am" De Groodt) over to her tidy space-age abode full of robotic helpers, holographic viewscreens and funky modular furniture. Max has brought his teenage son Léo (Hélie Thonnat) with him. Max's welcome attempts at seduction keep getting cockblocked, whether it's by the spontaneous projection of the holo-tv, one of the robot helpers, or the interruption of the neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), Françoise's cloned dog, Alice's daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard ) or her ex, Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his fiancee Jennifer (Claire Chust).

Of course, being a COVID era production, they all get trapped in the house and cannot leave and escape proves difficult. It's a bottle episode of a film.

As noted, it's very French in its stabs at farce, but it's pretty unfocussed and trying to say too much without really saying anything meaningful at all. There's light brushings upon corporate greed, artificial intelligence, government ineptitude, overreliance on digital technology, fame culture, generational gaps, social injustices, totalitarianism, the enshittification of technology (and life, frankly) among other less than barbed critiques of modern society.

It's a pithy, frothy, vibrantly coloured morsel of a film that doesn't care much about its protagonists, doesn't really seem that concerned by the scenario at hand, and seems to think itself clever with the most rudimentary observations.  It's all presented as whimsy, but it has a hard time finding any genuine laughs. The part Jeunet seems most interested in is the revolution of the household robots, as Léo unintentionally seeds into their mindset that they are human and they spend much of the film congregating among e

The Jeunet aesthetic is most definitley there, the artistic sensibilities of the surroundings, wardrobe, hair and makeup, all feel in line with past work, if, perhaps, too reliant on digital effects and enhancements. The practical side of the movie looks great (the transforming furniture est magnifique) if sometimes agressively off-putting in an uncanny valley kind of way, but the digital effects, of which there are plenty, are unrefined...a sort of "best they could do with what they got" kind of scenario. As such there's a push-pull between the beatiful, the garish, the ugly, and the grotesque, each in intentional and unintentional ways.

As a visual stylist, Jeunet still has the goods, but along with a lack of focus, there's and a lack of ambition here. The progression of the story and the characters seems slapdash. It's as if it were created not to tell a burning story but...well, to be content on a streaming platform.  Does France have it's own Saturday Night Live? This seems like it was borne out of a hastily written sketch. 

(Side question: is this new weird?)

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I'm nearing the end of my time with "Tales for all", the series of films from Quebecois producer Rock Demers. I've unfortunately had to skip a few places on the list as I do not have access to the five films that came after The Clean Machine but before this one, The Hidden Fortress.

With that jump in the roster also means a jump in time. Almost 10 years pass between The Clean Machine and The Hidden Fortress and so too has filmmaking. Technology, style, expectations are all drastically different in the early 2000's from the early 1990s, and it's ultra evident from the very first shot of this film. A band of armored conquistadors are on a raft floating down a (Quebec-forest-posing-as-)jungle, the natives peering on from the bushes, anticipating. Despite it not being an actual jungle, the cinematography is easily the most sumptuous of the "Tales for all" so far, and the texture of the image is crisp, clean, vibrant. 

The natives attack, and the transition is a delightful and effective one as suddenly the conquistadors are no longer adults in armor, but pre-teens in tinfoil helmets with trash can lids as shields and spray-painted vests as armor. Unfortunately, the other side is children in headdresses and clothes with tassles and face paint emulating native tribes.  The children are at war with one another, and the conquistadors are caught in a trap, pelleted with balls of mud. They call foul, and the two fluorescent-smocked kids with the thick binders start consulting the rules. Throwing mud is not expressly permitted, but it's also not expressly banned from the combat rules. 

It's almost upon six o'clock and the war is done for the day, the kids revert back to their two camps, but not before vowing to regroup the next day and revise the rules once more. One is a camping ground made up of trailers, permanently parked. The other is tents with some modest comforts fixed in indicating these are regular spots for the families to reside each year.

Siblings Marc and Sarah are on the conquistadors side, and Marc, as leader, is facing a lot of criticism from the other kids for their epic failures this summer in battle, but none are more critical than his father, Luis-George who is a wannabe alpha male full of toxic ideals about the importance of winning, of appearing to be smart, and more than anything, making those poor bastards from across the lake look bad (emphasis on the poor). He also doesn't think Sarah (or girls, in particular, should be playing war). He's a really bad dad. Marc has a Qyburn/Wormtongue-esque right-hand man who is sort of the mad scientist of the bunch with really evil and deceitful ways of engaging in nefarious warfare that just skirts the rules, starting with messing with their own camp to blame it on the kids across the river.

Meanwhile, the leader from the other side, Julien and Sarah sneak away from their camps for a romantic secret rendez-vous. Neither, at this stage, are enjoying the war too much. They're both too aware of how invested the others are in it, and even more aware of how their parents are invested in it. It turns out that Julens' parents and Sarah's dad were the leaders of the warring groups in the inaugural "Tales for all" The Dog Who Won the War, making The Hidden Fortress, in fact, a legasequel, before legasequels were really a thing.

The refinement of the rules doesn't go well, things get heated, and suddenly the rules are off, the referees quit, and it's all out war for the remaining days of camp. The titular hidden fortress is a grandiose tree house on the poor kids side that has an array of marvels within. It's a really impressive structure (obviously built by true craftspersons for safety and functionality, but it's a marvel to behold...the Ewok's Village of my wildest dreams) that poses as the prize for the winners of either side. But things get taken too far when the conquistadors start kidnapping and torturing and emotionally abusing kids from the other side. So many kids see things as going too far, but also can't conceive of the option to opt out of the game.

There's a bizarre sub-plot involving a mysterious wanderer in the woods and a bear set loose by persons unknown that only comes into view in the film's climax, during a thunderstorm when the kids find out that Julien and Sarah may be traitors, releasing secrets to the other side, and they get chased deep into the woods where they disappear, but not before the woods accidentally catch fire.

It gets real.

Where pretty much every "Tales for all" before this felt like an curio or an artifact more than a film, this one feels like an actual start-to-finish movie, with no clear budgeting issues or irreverent story beats that make no sense or bizarre fantastical twists that come out of nowhere or lacking internal consistency. I have to appreciate that it's more than just a remake of The Dog Who Won the War, but it also very lovingly follows the rhythms of that story while taking greater pains to develop the characters within and show them having richer inner lives beyond just the immediacy of the war. It's almost like it doesn't belong as part of "Tales for all" at all, it's just too well done.

It's a movie that is really quite fun although, yes, quite offensive and uncomfortable when a whole gang of children start chanting about how great it is that conquistadors annihilated native tribes of the lands they invaded. Besides that, it has heart, and humour, and intensity and charm. I was delighted, sometimes horrified, and impressed.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): War Machine

2026, Patrick Hughes (The Man from Toronto) -- Netflix

I can hear the blurb now, "Predator but with a big ass robot instead of an alien. But its also an alien."

We begin with a flashback.... or an establishing scene in the past? Whatever the filmic term is, its a Gulf War and Our Hero (Alan Ritchson, Reacher) is a military engineer pulling up to a convoy. His brother has fucked up his Humvee again requiring some quick repairs and brother to brother manly banter. They both talk about trying out for the Marines Army Rangers. And then they are ambushed. Everyone is killed except Our Hero and his barely alive brother, who he tosses onto his shoulders, and begins to walk.

Years later, he wakes up from the dream, of above, on a bus to RASP, the Ranger try-outs. Of course, he does really well, but for the not-sleeping and human interaction components. Because of his refusal to show leadership, the regiment leaders (toss away cameos from Esai Morales, Titans, and Dennis Quaid, Reagan; the latter channeling his very MAGA self) try to drum him out, but he refuses and they angrily assign him Team Leader to the final test -- a play-mission recovering a downed pilot in enemy territory. Meanwhile, in the background, on TV screens, there is news of a large asteroid passing near the Earth. In these movies, we know what that will entail.

Our Hero is 81. Its a cute gimmick in that all the characters have been assigned only numbers during training. No names allowed. Which is fine, because we wouldn't remember most of the names and the numbers are clearly displayed on their uniforms. Of course 81 doesn't bond well with his teammates but at least one of them recognizes his competence. Things go well until they find a weird scifi pile of junk in a riverbed. While 81 scouts out the surrounding area, some of the others prepare to blow that shit up, as per mission parameters. That is when 81 discovers the actual mission objective, the downed plane. Whatever that is in the river, its not what they came here for. And setting off explosives doesn't destroy it, it just makes it mad wakes it up (probably makes it mad, too). It should also be noted that because this was a training mission, they do not have real weapons.

And then begins the Predator style kill-off of each of the trainees. Of course, a bunch are kill in the initial sortie, so we can get a good look at the CGI robot monster machine, sort of a big chicken-walker without head, but with big, broad shoulders, and glowing red, which is never a good colour. The remaining soldiers are going to escape to the base of operations of their training mission opponents. There is a neat establishing scene where 81 puts together the news shots & stories with the big hole seen in a distant mountain -- this thing came down from space. 

The tension of this movie comes in knowing that the point of it is to actually kill off some, if not all, of the trainees. You get to know them, disliking some, bonding with others. But at any point, they can get blown up or shot. And the movie doesn't shirk from toying with you. Once they reach the training base, which has already been destroyed by the robot during its initial landing, they get some actual weapons -- they don't really help much. It takes some Arnie-covered-in-mud energy to take the thing down.

For what it was, this was a pretty effective movie. Ritchson is coded to be a depiction of military power these days, but also is capable of reflecting the emotional energy that is required of this character. And good action requires pacing, tension and exciting effects. I always feel like I have to apologize to the That Guy in my head that nothing about the movie broke new ground -- we've got mashups of a few other movies going on here -- but honestly, as long as they do the mechanical components of this genre well enough, I am invested. And entertained. And distracted from my own head for the briefest of moments.

Snarky aside. Red Glowing Lights say "Bad Guy" to us, while Blue Glowing Lights say "Good Guy" or at least calm & peaceful. What if you mashed up the Pink Glowing Lights from horror movies of a few years ago with this mechanical light emittance? What cinematic mind's eye would you unlock? Fuck AI Gone Evil movies, how about a Robot Possessed by Cosmic Horror?

I Saw This!! What I have been watching - 2025 edition (Part C)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our [retired?] feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me (usually Toast, but Kent this time) spending too much time in front of the TV and not writing about it. Bad Kent! Bad! But it's in part because Kent is tired and busy can't review everything.

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Murderbot Season 1 - 2025, AppleTV (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Paul and Chris Weitz

We went most of the year without AppleTV this year and so Murderbot sat on an idle list of *maybe* titles titles to watch. 

A friend of mine was very, very highly anticipating Murderbot's debut on AppleTV. She had read the book(s?) and absolutely loved them. I didn't have the heart then to tell her that loving a book is all but guaranteed to lead do disappointment with the adaptation. Sure enough, after it started airing (???what do we call it when a show is released week to week on a streaming service...it's not going over airwaves anymore...) I didn't hear anything more from her about it. 

It was a show that certainly in my regular TV reviewing circle of reading didn't come up a heck of a lot, so my excitement for it was low... also I knew nothing about it, and based on title alone I conjured up all sorts of '90's Image Comics-style "extreme" sci-fi for manchildren ideas of what it could be about. I was not excited in the least.

When we finally reacquired AppleTV, I added Murderbot to my "to watch" list, but there were other shows (The Studio, Slow Horses, Down Cemetary Road, Stick, Platonic) that I intended to watch first... and then I noticed that Murderbot was not a drama, but a sci-fi comedy, with only half hour episodes, and suddenly it shot to the top of my list. It was like my expectations of having wade through 10 hours of meathead sci-fi suddenly came at a limited-time-only discount of 4 1/2 hours of mid-budget science fiction comedy. I was all in on a binge.

The show is set in a distant future in a galaxy where the government is primarily run by mega-corporations (if it were licensed by Disney/Fox they could have set this in the Weyland-Yutani of the Alien universe). An independent socialist commune has petitioned the people in charge to do research work on a remote planet, and in being granted access, they've been given a Security Unit (SecUnit) to protect them against their objections (these future hippies see SecUnits as a form of slavery). What they don't know is their SecUnit has overridden its security protocols and has achieved full sentience and named itself Murderbot (not because it has murdered so many, but it just kind of fantasizes about it).

Murderbot is our point of view character in the series. Played by Alexander Skarsgård, Murderbot is our narrator in this real. He is often narrating directly to the audience, and sometimes we as the audience are just privy to his inner thoughts. Murderbot is familiar enough with the nature of humans to know to disguise his sentience from them, so he plays the role of SecUnit to his new charges, but with spite and insolence in his fluid-pumping veins. He would rather just be watching his favourite sci-fi soap opera (which is what he's often doing when he's supposed to be on task). He's always spying on what they're up to and he's, well, disgusted by every ounce of them.

And yet he can't help but protect them as danger arises (for if he doesn't, he's bound to be seen as defective and turned to scrap). In his efforts to serve this absurd group of characters he invariably performs too far afield from the norms of his standard functions, and they pick up on it. But instead of finding vicious humans ready to turn on him, he finds a group of people mostly willing to accept him as one of them. Except he's not one of them, and he doesn't particularly desire to be one of them. He just desires to be free, to be himself, to do as he pleases in the confines of the society he exists in.

Murderbot is quite a funny show, largely centred around Murderbot's distaste for the people he's with, but also the absurdity of the people he's with (which includes a newly formed throuple that is never not awkward, and the senior member of the crew who treats Murderbot kindly even before he's revealed as a sentient). But Murderbot's greatest strength is in its representation of neurodivergence. Murderbot is almost entirely autism-coded (outside of the origins of and physiology as a SecUnit of course), and the level of which his autism is explored, how he engaged and disengages with others, how he can't make eye contact and disassociates when conversations get boring, and how he masks himself...presenting in a way that is expected of him rather than how he actually desires to be. I can't recall ever seeing an autistic character presented with this level of detail and care, certainly not as the protagonist of a series, not without making their autism a superpower, anyway.  Here, Murderbot's neurodivergence is in no way a superpower, despite Murderbot being superpowerful.

David Dastmalchian's member of the crew has cybernetic enhancements, and he clashes with Murderbot a lot. His character is also spectrum-coded, and it's the genius of the story (not sure if it's something the Weitz brothers have crafted or if it is in the source material) but it really shows that being on the spectrum is not the same for everyone. There are varying ways that neurodivergence presents itself in this series, and it's amazing how adeptly it presents it in the form of a sci-fi comedy.  I definitely was not expecting that.

I was talking with my friend again recently about the show, the one who had anticipated its debut. She found it disappointing, and relayed how fan reaction to the show was pretty muted because it wasn't like the book exactly (which I'm told is fully first person narrative). But she also hadn't picked up on the autism coding of the character, and that really made me wonder whether that was in the source material, and how many people just didn't pick up on that. To me it's the center of the show, the story is about a neurodivergent character being able to come out, to stop masking, to be who they are and find acceptance and life outside of expectations. Perhaps my being a member of a neurodivergent household has me hyperaware of this aspect but it's something the show should be lauded for.

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Stranger Things 5 - 2025, Netflix (7/8 episodes watched)
created by the Duffer Brother
ST 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Stranger Things debuted in 2016, the second series in 2017, and the third in 2019. And then three years until Stranger Things 4, and now, another three years later, the final series, released in three parts.

I was tremendously excited for the drop of each preceding series on Netflix, anticipating the start of a binge watch day and date of its release. Even as series four came under criticism for bloated, overlong episodes, I found myself mostly entertained, mostly excited, mostly happy to be within the realm of Stranger Things again.

This time has felt very, very different. After the end of series four I felt mostly satiated, even as there were cliffhangers and dangling threads, it was the first time I felt done and not in immediate want of more (perhaps it was the bloated runtimes, it was too big of a meal?). Rather than set an alarm for the drop of series five, I let the show just linger in my Netflix queue. The streamer would loudly proclaim to me every time I would open it up that STRANGER THINGS 5 IS HERE! Yeah Netflix, I know... I'll get to it.

Seriously, where's the apathy coming from? This I don't know.

But upon entering the world of Hawkins and the Upside Down again, I was hoping to be whisked away like I had been four times before, just fully transported into an 80's-inspired horror-scifi-fantasy realm, but I wasn't, at least not to the same effect.

When that still exceptional open theme kicks in and the "camera" tracks around the font of the Stranger Things logo, I remember the tingling sensation I got the first time I saw it, I remember the goosebumps and arm hairs standing on end, I remember how exhilarated I was by it. I remember it, but I don't feel it anymore.

We get into the world of Hawkins and I see Mike and Will and Lucas and Dustin and Eleven and Max and... these children are now adults. They've aged 10 years since we first saw them, and yet in story time, they've aged maybe 4 or 5 years, and there's a huge discrepancy there, huge hurdles to get over in one's mind. Not to mention the fact that we've seen some of these young performers now expand well beyond their roles in this series, and they're not quite the same kids that we'd last left. But is just it that they have  physically grown, or do they not actually feel like high school seniors? Do they now seem like adults play acting as kids? Is it a Pen15 situation?

Beyond that, we're back to the big bad Vecna being the big bad once again. Our heroes defeated him already and now they have to do it again? I'm not a big D&D player, so I don't know how often one faces the same main adversary back-to-back, but it doesn't quite seem like an escalation. Vecna's plan is now world-ending, so I guess the stakes have been raised. We actually do get an escalation, but it's only in the finale that the escalation is learned by our heroes and we see the heart of the matter. It's way too late a reveal, and should have been presented in the first or second episode of the season.

If the plot is maybe not holding up its end of the bargain, the character work has stepped up to become the centerpiece of the show this season. There's tensions and unions within friendships and relationship, there's traumas to unpack and revelations to make, and these are the best moments in the series. Will Byers, who has experienced so much trauma, and felt very much like the fifth wheel of the series is given the spotlight this season, and his coming out moment, while grinding the momentum of the plot to a halt, is really a beautiful thing, as is Robin gay-mentoring him. Likewise Dustin and Steve persist at being the best duo in the show for years, acting like a bickering married couple who eventually find their love for each other again. And then there's Nancy and Jonathan who... well, lets just say the show finally gets that relationship right by the end.

Stranger Things has, each season, seen fit to expand its cast and to uplift members of its cast who maybe haven't had the time to shine before. This season digs into to the youngest member of the Wheeler clan, Nancy and Mike's younger sister Holly, and her classmates (especially Dipshit/Delightful Derek), and even giving mother Wheeler Karen some big moments.  This season highlights what an ensemble the show has become, and there are whole scenes with a dozen or more cast members, and frankly that's pretty heartwarming occasion seeing all these people in a room together. The show remembers the big players and the small players, and, really, it seems the only character it hasn't done justice to is Barb... unless Barb is the deus ex machina of the final episode...[spoiler...she's not].

When I watch Stranger Things now, I feel a sense of comfort being there, but I'm not excited by it like I once was. Series five looks big and epic and expensive (Frank Darabont directing a lot of the season bringing his extensive Stephen King adaptation experience to it) and it certainly holds my interest plus it had a couple surprises up its sleeve, but watching it felt a lot like going through the motions. A lot of scenes felt overlong for the message they were trying to get across, and often the messages are repeated too many times (I exclaimed out loud "we get it" at least twice this season). As I've been waiting between mini-drops for the next episodes, I've kind of forgotten what's happened in the preceding.

If Stranger Things had run its course over the span of five or six years instead of nine or ten, it would feel very different than it does now. With the permission of time that Netflix has granted their cash cow, series four and five have gotten indulgent, glossy and it's lost the scrappy feel it had when it started (see also franchise bloat like the Mission:Impossible or Fast & Furious series). Had it plowed through like old style TV would have 2 decades ago, it would be an epic five seasons of 40-minute episodes that would be highly enticing rewatching. As it stands, after finishing the final episode, I have no immediate plans to return.

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Only Murders in the Building Season 5 (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman

Unlike Stranger Things, Only Murders... is a series that has released one season per year, year over year, with episodes consistent in length at under a half hour, and little self indulgent bloat from its creatives. But, despite what I said above for Stranger Things, that doesn't on its own make for a coherent ongoing narrative or a satisfying overall series. But then, that's not really what Only Murders... is going for.

It is a series that really didn't need to exist beyond its first season, and the more it goes on, the more it exists anything approximating reality, instead existing within its own pocket dimension. The joke is now, each season, somehow death comes to the Arconia, that gorgeous city block of condos that feels like its own world within New York City.

The part of the conceit of the show that has never worked continues to burden the show, with Mabel, Charles and Oliver having a true crime podcast that the show runners clearly have little to no experience with and/or don't care about the characters having a believable show. I mean, the trio effectively interfere with police investigations and illegally mess with crime scenes and in theory admit to it on their show. They should have been fined and/or arrested and/or shut down years ago (of course, the best recurring character on the show is their exasperated detective acquaintance Detective Williams played by Da'Vine Joy Randolph who seems to shield them from any scrutiny beyond her own).

This season the crew investigate the murder of their beloved concierge Lester, only to discover that this season's big guest stars (Renee Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, and Logan Lerman), a trio of billionaires, are involved somehow, and then the other guest stars (Bobby Cannavale, Tea Leone, and Dianne Wiest) are perhaps involved in some sort of mafioso and a hidden casino.

The formulae remains the same, each episode the trio try to pin the deed on someone and we get their story so as to eliminate them as a suspect, wash and repeat. In the background this season is Oliver's potential moving away to be with new bride Loretta (Meryl Streep) and the billionaires buying out the building and evacuating them all. Frankly, unlike Stranger Things the character-focussed aspects of the show feel shoehorned in quite frequently and conflict between them never feels natural. It's at its best when it has a good, twisty mystery, big guest stars, and Steve Martin and Martin Short get to be goofballs and  Selena Gomez gets to be sarcastic. This season's highlight was Tea Leoni's quintet of meathead sons and how they seem to operate as a single disfunctional, dimwitted unit.

It's never been a particularly sharp series, and it just gets more blunted with each season. This season's jabs at billionaires (in the impending eat the rich culture war) are total weak lil love taps, plus the plight the characters face in this season seems like problems of the privileged, and the introduction of a robot doorman never fully manifested into any meaningful contemplation of AI replacing blue collar workers, not much original comedy. The mystery of the season was all over the place, and frankly not all that engrossing, and yet, all that said, it's hard not to be charmed by all the talent and charisma on screen.  I'll be back for season six.

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Some other things I watched late last year but didn't complete or don't have a whole heck of a lot to say about:

Eyes of Wakanda (Disney+, 3/4 episodes watched) is meant to expand upon the world of Wakanda from the two Black Panther movies. Each episode is set in a different time period, and there's no connective tissues between them. They're not bad, per se, but their 20-ish minute run times give them little opportunity to meaningfully develop characters, relationships, and a story necessitating a big action setpieces. The big "wow" of this all for the Marvel nerds is the third episode which brings in Iron Fist lore without needing any familiarity with the abysmal Netflix series. A hearty "it's fine, but forgettable".

 

I really enjoyed getting to know Canadian-by-way-of-UK comedian Mae Martin on the Canadian version of Amazon's Last One Laughing, and then the fifteenth season of Taskmaster, and then their Netflix comedy special SAP and even a few episodes of The Handsome Podcast they co-host with comedians Tig Notaro and Fortune Feimster. I didn't manage to get to their Channel 4 series Feel Good, which they created, but I was very intrigued that they were branching out into thriller territory with Wayward (2025, Netflix, 2/8 episodes watched). In Wayward Martin plays a non-binary masculine cop who moves back to a small-but-progressive community where his wife (Sarah Gadon) grew up. The town seems to be under the sway of Toni Collette, who has run a local correctional facility for wayward teens for decades. Things are weird. There's a definitely unsettling vibe to the whole proceedings, but the show kind of lost me from the get-go when an errant Toronto teen was shipped across the border to this facility. I really shouldn't hold that against it, but it severely broke my investment in the story (and the second episode in which the teen's friend makes a pilgrimage to rescue her once again calls attention to it). Martin is a fascinating presence with a very distinct energy, and I'm not sure if the role fits that energy or not, but I'm having a hard time getting myself back to the series to find out. I think I was also expecting something leaning harder into horror than it does, as it's so close to being there.

Though completely unaffiliated, It's Florida, Man (Season 1 - HBO, 6/6 episodes watched) seems to be the heir apparent to the hilariously consumable Drunk History, but instead of drunk comedians trying to recount historical events which are simultaneously re-enacted by actors and comedians, here it's ripped-from-the-Florida-headlines stories, told by the people involved, re-enacted by actors and comedians. It's not quite as funny as Drunk History but it's far more absurd. It's a rubbernecker of a TV show, one that at once tries to sympathize with the participants telling their stories, but also can't help but wildly exaggerate (sometimes not so wildly) their personas for comedic effect that sometimes can feel a touch mean spirited. Because of Florida's Sunshine Laws, criminal arrests are made a matter of public record (unlike most places) and this is the reason why "Florida Man" stories are so prevalent. A show like this seems inevitable...it's a comedy show, highlighting the absurd stories of the state, but also, like, fits into true crime. It's frivolous and fun, with sometimes a weird bit of insight and/or humanizing of the weirdos it spotlights.

3-2-1: Alien: Earth

2025, 8 episodes - Disney+/FX
created by Noah Hawley

The What 100: A deep-space research vessel owned by Weyland-Yutani crash lands in the Prodigy Corporation-controlled territory of New Siam. Prodigy founder Boy Kavalier sends his precious hybrids (completely synthetic bodies housing the minds of sick children who volunteered to have their consciousnesses transferred) to recover whatever is most precious that it may house. And those, of course, are a variety of alien specimens. But one surviving crew member, a Weyland-Yutani loyalist, is not going to just let Prodigy keep what they find. What's the most dangerous thing on Earth: invasive species, a new breed of being, desperate men, or greedy corporations?

3 Great: (1) World building. For the longest time I've never wanted to see "Aliens, but on Earth" because it seemed like the easiest and most obvious answer would be a plague that runs rampant, out of control too fast and too deadly for anyone to stop it. I had no interest in that story, whether in the end it was stopped or not stopped, either way it just seemed ... banal. Creator Noah Hawley's idea, which is to expand the reality of what is actually happening on Earth (it's run by essentially 5 corporations, rather than any sort of governmental structure now), and then carving out its own little pocket of this reality to operate in is the masterstroke of inspiration. In setting up the previously unheard of Prodigy Corporation, as well as establishing not just the Hybrids (as described above) but also Cyborgs (cybernetically enhanced humans) on top of the Weyland-Yutani-created Synths (who we've seen plenty of in the Alien franchise...Ash, Bishop, Michael), it's just opens up the world. For me the most stimulating parts of this reality are the glimpses into the corporate structures and rivalries (but they're not front and center to the show).

(2) The Hybrids, Boy K, and the Peter Pan connection. Centering a show or movie around kids can be a dicey affair, primarily because kid actors tend to always be a mixed bag. Even if they're really good, they're also going to age and that can make for complex storytelling. But Hybrids put the mind of children in adult bodies, and the show has a host of exceptionally capable actors playing the Hybrids who very effectively convey their youthfulness and naivety, both when interacting with adults and with each other. Where the show could have wallowed in boring "exploring their new bodies" stories like many a superhero show of the 2000s, instead it decides to wrestle with the ideas of whether these beings are even human anymore, and also delving into the trauma of severing your identity with your body.  Boy K (Samuel Blenkin, Black Mirror), an early 20-something genius in technology and business, sees himself as the "Peter Pan" of his new crew of post-human beings, and so he names all of them after the Lost Boys, except for Wendy (Sydney Chandler, Sugar), the first of his creations, who is his favourite. Having just watched a whole bunch of Pan movies recently, I loved how it toyed with its metaphorical connections, and, in the season 1 endgame, how it all was revealed to be bullshit, not connecting to the material at all. Boy K doesn't see himself as a parent to the Hybrids, but their cool rebel leader who they should inherently love. Instead the role of parents go to Arthur (David Rysdahl, Fargo Season 5) and Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) who are the technological and psychiatric experts on the whole Hybrid endeavour (as much as anyone can be an expert on a purely experimental process). Their different approaches to parenting create a pivotal inflection point in the series, and it's so interesting to see how people in this reality deal with their multi-trillionaire overlords who think themselves beyond human. 

(3) The new Aliens. Introduced on the vessel Maginot at the start of episode 1, the research ship has been fruitful in finding new species out in its 60 years travelling the galaxy, and it's ready to bring them home. But they're unprepared for the intelligence of the creatures they have brought with them, and things start to really go sideways. Once on Earth and in the hands of the Prodigy Corporation, things really aren't much better. The hubris of humanity is to think that all creatures are unintelligent, incapable of observing or learning, and that whatever systems we put in place to contain them are beyond their capacity to figure a way out of. Of course we're wrong, and the show is at its most upsetting when it's proving how wrong we are...including thinking that the Hybrids have found a way to escape death Among the creatures is a very large kind of fly-trap like animal (as opposed to vegetable), and there are creatures called "flies" that themselves eat non-organic material. Of course, there's also the Xenomorphs in all their various stages (and because this is a TV show, it has time to explore those various stages in much more depth than ever before...including what a facehugger is implanting within its hosts. But the greatest addition, the greatest creation of the series, even more than Prodigy or the Hybrids or the Cyborgs or any individual character among a host of great characters, is a Trypanohyncha Ocellus, a multi-tenticled eyeball creature whose iris can segment into many irises around its ocular body. It is looking for an ideal host, and when it finds one it brutally and aggressively burrows into its eye socket and replaces the being's eye with itself, and presumably its tentacles are penetrating the brain of the creature in a manner that allows it to control the being. Nicknamed Iris by some in the fan community, it is a very clever, intelligent creature, that much is shown, but we don't know how smart it actually is, or if it's able to communicate with language. It's unknown when it takes a hose whether it's in full control or if there's some form of symbiosis. There so much to explore with Iris, I love it tremendously and it creeps me the fuck out.

2 Bad: (1) The Xenomorphs. Everything around the xenomorphs, from the egg pods to the facehuggers to the infancy stages that are puppets or whatnot are all great and I loved every aspect of them in the show and on screen. The full grown Xenomorphs is where I felt the show didn't work. I appreciate the fact that the Xenomorphs were pretty much always practical, man-in-suit, but I really, really, really disliked the physicality of the creatures on screen. I know the stunt performers spent a lot of time studying the history of Xenomorphs on screen and they tried to adhere as faithfully as they could to history, but something in the way these particular ones were constructed, they didn't ever look right, and the movements were too exposed. The Xenomorphs are seen broad daylight, rarely in the shadows, and it exposes them too much. You need the shadows against the darkness of the body and the details to all be somewhat hidden, to really be more difficult to see, otherwise it...well, looks like a guy in a suit.  It's weird for me to feel that this show that is built on the Alien franchise, a franchise that centers around that classic Geiger design, only truly fails at the one thing that has been done so right so often, and yet succeed at pretty much every single other thing....

(2) ...except the finale. The show was PERFECTLY set up for a Grand Guignal of a finale, to really have the aliens (all of them) run ham on the entire Prodigy compound and just be a bevvy of carnage and chaos for our protagonists (some of them) to survive. Part of what I loved about the world building I described above was how the series so obviously constructed a corner for itself to play in such that when it all came crashing down it wouldn't affect anything else in the franchise. The expectation was there would be an implosion at the hands of the creatures, and there was not. I do not fully dislike the finale, but it fundamentally fails to deliver what any Alien film or story needs to close out with, just an orgy of alien violence.  Instead it pitches focus back to its central characters, and largely has the Hybrids level up. They're the ones that run ham on the Prodigy compound. Wendy/Marcy has learned to communicate and effectively command an adult Xenomorph (one which was borne out of her brother's lung, almost as if it's weirdly family) which neuters a bit of the chaotic element, but adds its own interesting wrinkles.  Where the show ends up, with the Hybrids in control, but Weyland-Yutani descending on the compound and all the adult players who have irked the Hybrids under their thumb could still have been the end result with a big scratch-fest (though sacrifices should have been made).  It's absolutely clear (and confirmed by Hawley on the excellent companion podcast) that the decision was made to not close these out in any real fashion because they're making a  TV series, and didn't want there to be any type of closure that might give Disney/FX the opportunity to say "nah, that's alright, we don't really need more".  It's tactical rather than satisfying.

1 Good: So much good (Timothy Olyphant as a Synth!? Come on! Incredible) but episode 5, which flashes back to the full story of what happened in those final hours on the Maginot is an incredible mini-movie in the midst of the series that also acts as a massive recontextualzation of cyborg Morrow (the magnificent Babou Ceesay, Free Fire) who in the previous episodes was nothing but reprehensible and vile, and he comes out of this flashback being, almost an anti-hero.  But the episode replicates in a way the Nostramo from Ridley Scott's classic original (the idea being that many of these big barges would have been made at the same time, on a sort of assembly line basis, so they're very similar if not exactly the same), allows us to spend more time on one of these ships with a different crew, and for things to go tits up in a very different way for very different reasons. It's an absolute blast.

META: As I mentioned above, I went into Alien: Earth with expectations that it would play to the easiest possible story, and not only was I pleasantly surprised by what it actually about, I really began to love every character and their role to play in the story by episode two (the only character I don't love is Nibs, because she's too much of a wild card...venturing into psychopath territory... I think there will be interesting things around her lack of stability in the next season, but boy is her style of cuckoo-bananas hard to empathize with).

The series had me eating out of its hand pretty much from moment one. It looks incredible (man-in-suit Xenomorph excepting) and it's stories and characters are so laden with complexities, there's a tremendous amount to explore.  This isn't a mystery box show in the slightest. It's not asking questions and depriving the audience of answers, it's just got so much depth to its characters, sci-fi scenarios and psychological ideas that it's got multiple seasons worth of mining to do. But at the same time, it's part of the Alien franchise so it *must* retain the surprise and horror of its most alien aspects. Hawley and company rightly understand that the Xenomorph has been used to death and really isn't surprising anymore (it's still pretty scary), so the introduction of new species with so much to learn about them still, leaves the show with many more scares and gross-outs in its pocket.

It's going to be years before we get a season 2. Again, I wish the finale had performed better as a denouement, just to be more satisfying while we wait, but I'm definitely going to rewatch, probably multiple times, in the meantime. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Electric State

2025, The Russo Brothers (Cherry) -- Netflix

I love the artwork of  Simon Stålenhag. A lot of his work gets collected together in art books which pull things together thematically.  If all of his work can be summarized into a single description, it is a merging of mundane landscape, urban, suburban, rural countryside, with distinctly scifi elements. There is often a retro-futuristic feel.

That didn't really describe anything.

OK. Robots, kids, landscapes, big machinery, neon, cyberpunk, ruins, war machines, scifi technology, spaceships, pop culture.

The book for "The Electric State" was a script in the making, scenes of a 1990s run-away and her little yellow, globe-headed robot, walking across an America where something has happened. There is a mixture of giant-robots and war machines, abandoned spaceships (or war ships), all with a 1950s to 80s pop iconography style, as well as people connected to some sort of network via a headset -- they are definitely "jacked in" to something that let's them forget their world. Connecting the imagery are scenes of looming structures on he horizon, something society must depend on, something that has changed it.

While its not a contiguous story, it was just begging to be made into a movie or TV show. And I was just waiting for that to happen.

If anything we got all the imagery right, and the added fun of adding some character to the robots and technology, but what ruined it all for me was the typical Netflix way of homogenising it all into something digestible for the average viewer. And this is coming from me, the guy admittedly more at home with digestive cookies of late.

We start with the background, a retconned history of the world, something seen before, where robots became part of society from early in our technological era. And without even mentioning the separation of AI and automaton robots, we jump right up to the robots demanding rights, which leads to a war between man and machine. Only with the help of Ethan Skate (Musk analog) and his Neurocaster headsets, that allowed people to remote control robots, was the war against machines won. And the "survivors" on the losing side banished to the wilds of the American mid-west, and surrounded by a wall. Neurocasters became the new social media -- an addiction that everyone participated in, separating those that lived inside whatever is inside (utopia?), from those outside in the filthy, messy, breaking down real world. With decades of people having robots do all the messy work for them, I guess we didn't adjust well to going back to doing it ourselves. 

Enter Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown, Damsel), a teenager who lost her family and is doing the typical orphaned teen thing of terrible foster parents, anger, spite and rebellion. Until cartoon robot Cosmo shows up outside and convinces her that he is her long lost brother (Woody Norman, Cobweb), alive and somehow (barely) controlling this robot. And he needs her help. She has to go into the robot Exclusion Zone and find him.

Enter ex-soldier, smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt, The Tomorrow War), who sneaks into the Exclusion Zone to find old, abandoned pop culture items, to be re-sold outside. And his sidekick robot Herman (Anthony Mackie, Elevation). Oh, outside the zone, robots are illegal, so that means a legacy of the war, one Colonel Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito, Far Cry 6), is sent to hunt down Michelle's rogue robot. The two pairs team up to find her brother.

Much of the movie takes place inside the Zone, where all the weird and wonderful robots live. Each one is a sentient, living person, without any doubt. Even the insane ones that scavenge parts of other robots. They are led by Mr Peanut (Woody Harrelson, The Man from Toronto), who negotiated the treaty with Colonel Bradbury, which ended the war. He only wants to keep his people safe, and that is not helped by the introduction of these human interlopers, who bring some else's agenda into their safe haven.

That someone is Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci, Julie & Julia) who wants Cosmo / Michelle's brother. Skate's Neurocaster technology has been running down over the years and its continued existence depends on her brother. He will stop at nothing to recover them. He doesn't care who dies. He's more than a little nuts.

But by the time the movie got to the climactic third act, I just didn't care. Yah yeah, robot rebellion, come-uppance, sacrifice, robot smashy-smashy. Yawn. I know I have been clipping off the tail-ends in my recaps of late, losing steam or whatnot, but this is how my own emotional investment in the movie tapered off. Things happened, I no longer cared.

Primarily, it was the human story that failed me. You know me, I am more than happy with well-used tropes, and I am fine with a cliche story as long as it grips me. This didn't. I just didn't enjoy any of the human performances, and found the light-heartedness a bit grating. I kept on comparing it in my mind to Clooney's Tomorrowland, which I still love. But at least in that movie I really liked Clooney's crotchety coot character, and well... I didn't really like any of the humans here. Maybe I will soften to it with rewatches, but that wasn't the point. I was waiting for this movie, and while I am used to disappointment, I am also somewhat tired of tempered acceptance. I need my next "I really liked that!" and I had really hoped this would be it. Maybe I should just buy the coffee table / art book and be more than satisfied with the source.

I am so "meh" about the movie, I didn't even mention that they wasted Ke Huy Quan as Dr. Amherst, despite him being more fun as his own robot "clone" in the form of a jimmied-together 90s PC.

KWIF: Companion (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
Companion (2025, d. Drew Hancock- rental)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972, d. Ronald Neame - HollywoodSuite)
Juggernaut (1974, d. Richard Lester - Amazonprime)

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Toasty warned me that everything  is a spoiler for Companion. The trailer, the synopsis, the bloody poster. Even saying there is a "spoiler" for Companion is a spoiler. It's kind of impossible to really have a big twist for an audience these days that doesn't give it all away.  Audiences are too story-literate and too savvy, they're going to figure these things out pretty quick.  You can't hang a film on a twist, you've got to have something more going on...and I think Companion never really set out to deceive the audience, well, not in the way you think.  So if you don't want to know anything...stop reading now. Skip past this and head down to The Poseidon Adventure review.

Ready?

There are actually a few twists in Companion, only the first of which I will spoil, because it is the most obvious. We first meet Iris (Sophie Thatcher, Yellowjackets) in the grocery store, she has a meet cute with Josh (Jack Quaid, Star Trek: Lower Decks) and Iris' voice over tells us how much it means to her to fall in love, and also reveals that she's going to kill him by the end of the film. 

this is a spoiler

That's not a spoiler.

We next see Iris waking up in the passenger seat of a self-driving car, Josh beside her, venturing down a long driveway to a modernist forest retreat, the home of Russian businessman Sergey (Rupert Friend). Josh's friend Kat (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever) is Sergey's mistress, and she has invited him, Iris, and their friend Eli (Harvey Guillén, Blue Beetle) and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage, Fargo)  for a weekend getaway. Iris is nervous. She doesn't think Josh's friends like her... specifically Kat.

The next morning Iris finds herself alone with Sergey at the lakeside and he propositions her. Next thing we see is Iris in the doorway of the house covered in blood, a knife in her hand, and Josh shuts her down. Yep, Iris is a robot.  Technically a therapy bot ... that you can have sex with. But Iris is unaware that she's a robot until now and it explodes her world.

The twists and tuns here are pretty fun, and thinly allegorical. It's a film that villainizes toxic masculinity and white entitlement for entertainment purposes without really examining its root causes. It's not interested in where this mindset comes from, just that it's awful and needs to go away by violent means if necessary. It also isn't terribly interested in exploring whether the AI's of Companion are sentient or not, and what rights and or freedoms they should have. It's squarely on the side of Iris and she's who we're rooting for. 

The movie tells us who Iris is from very early on. The way Thatcher walks as Iris is very mechanical, very deliberate. There are turns of phrase, like "it's just the way that you're wired", and Josh's pet name for Iris is "Beep-boop".  When they exit the self-driving car, Josh is reminded to thank the car for the drive.  

This isn't M3GAN, or the Terminator or Battlestar Galactica, even. It's a lighthearted romp that plays with the same suspense-horror tropes of "the final girl gets taken to a secluded location and bad things happen" that seems to be a legit subgenre at this point (recent in mind is Blink Twice), as well as the revenge of the abused or manipulated woman (see also Blink Twice). I was also reminded of Fresh, the way it tries to manipulate you into thinking it's a romance, with its opening meet-cute only to give way to its horror tropes  There's no scares to be had. It's not a horror at all, but it is very entertaining, with some stupendous jump cuts that fill in gaps and provide some good gags, and Thatcher is really likeable and easy to root for.  

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It's New Year's Eve. The cruise liner Poseidon is in its final voyage sailing to Italy? Israel? (It's Athens, but you had to look that up).  It is being decommissioned and is on its way to the scrapyard.  It's been delayed a few days, and the representative of the new owners wants full speed ahead, even though the captain (Leslie Nielson) implores him that the ship needs to take on more ballast. But money is burning and the can be replaced.
As the New Year's countdown begins, reports of an earthquake resulting in a tsunami that will, in short time, quite literally flips the ship...because it couldn't take on more ballast.

The captain will have no time for "I told you so" to the corporate overlord. The flip is sudden and violent. The majority of the ship's population was in the ballroom, and they're now Lionel Ritchie-ing it (he means they're now dancing on the ceiling, except, there's no more dancing). There's a battle of the wills as the "rebel Reverend" Scott (Gene Hackman) and the ship's purser plead to the survivors to follow them. The reverend wishes to move the people to the hull ("God wants brave souls, not quitters"), since it's upside down, that is where rescue will come, while the purser implores the people to stay put and wait for rescue.

In the end only a handful of people follow the reverend.  There's the NYC police detective (Ernest Borgnine) and his new bride, a former sex worker (Stella Stevens). There's the elderly married couple on their first vacation since retiring (Shelly Winters and Jack Albertson). There's the teenager and her boat obsessed younger brother (Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea).  There's the Scottish waiter (Roddy McDowall), the hippie folk singer (Carol Lynley), and the lifelong confirmed bachelor (Red Buttons). They make their perilous journey, and not everyone is going to survive.

The Poseidon Adventure is an exceptionally well-made but also exceptionally formulaic film. At the time it probably felt pretty fresh, based of the novel of the same name by Paul Gallico, but the conceit of gathering an ensemble and forging through disaster has become so by-the-book that even one of the first ones still seems pretty derivative.

Constant contention between Hackman and Borgnine creates such manufactured and meaningless drama in the face of crises. The weird obsession teen Martin has with forty-something Hackman is illogical. Lynley's hysterical singer and helpless femme is perhaps my least favourite trope in all of cinema, and Button's is at least 30 years older than her and being a gentleman the whole time, but still he's making a move on her.  And poor Winters is really, really not served well here for all her kindness. Plus, Hackman's self-description of himself as a rebel preacher is ..just...a ridiculous moment among many.

And yet, for all its cliches and corny flaws, The Poseidon Adventure remains a cracking adventure that spins its wheels appropriately for the first act, introducing all the players until the disaster hits and then gets moving and only stops to have those quick little motivational heart-to-hearts that these types of movies have to have to deepen the bond between characters.

It's not fine dining, and it's empty calories in the end, but enjoyable in the consumption.

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After The Poseidon Adventure I was looking for another '70's disaster flick, and happened across the alluringly-titled Juggernaut. Unintentionally it turned out to be another cruise liner-centric flick.

In this case, a ship, the Britannic, has sailed out to sea, when its owners receive a call from a man identifying themself as "Juggernaut" notifyies them that many barrels of explosives have been placed on board, timed to explode in 24 hours and booby-trapped in various ways. He demands a ransom, a modest sum of 500,000 pounds, in exchange for which he will give them the designs for deactivating the bombs.  As a show of his skill he sets off two of them.

The story takes place between the ship and land. On the ship we meet many of the crew and passengers (including the captain, Omar Sharif, his mistress Shirley Knight, and the ship's social director played by an absolutely delightful Roy Kinnear, just trying to make lemonade out of lemons) and on land the investigative team from Scotland Yard plus the cruise owners (including Anthony Hopkins and Ian Holm) are dealing with the Juggernaut situation, as he keeps calling with further instructions and taunts.

In a surprisingly visual sequence, the navy air drop a bomb disposal unit into the ocean near the ship, led by Richard Harris. The deactivation sequences are tense, because it's clear the bomb maker is as good, if not better at making bombs than these men are at dismantling them.

It is a film that is two parts procedural and one part civilian drama, and different parts work better at different times. The first act is a little too unassuming, as it sets up the pieces it doesn't really do a great job of providing a hook to the people we're spending time with (there's a seasick mother and her two rambunctious kids who probably could have been largely cut ), and as much as I like the romantic intrigue between Sharif and Knight, it never really makes sense amidst the two more intense aspects of the film.

Even the hunt for Juggernaut is at times underwhelming, in no small part due to the modest direction of Richard Lester (Superman II) and the entire lack of a score. It's a very British film, a bit obsessed with procedure and bureaucracy, and not all that concerned with flash.

But the moment the parachuting sequence happens, Juggernaut announces itself as something much more than a Poseidon Adventure knock-off, and though it is a very deliberate film, it's star-studded cast ultimately delivers a pretty compelling, if subdued thriller.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Companion

2025, Draw Hancock (feature debut; writer Suburgatory) -- download

Let's get this spoiler out of the way -- yes, she's a fuck-bot. Their words, not mine.

This is yet another one of those movies that expects you to have come in cold, not seen the trailers, not even seen the poster, which all reveal she is a bot. Or maybe its just a conceit in these kinds of movies wherein they don't give AF whether you have been exposed to plot spoilers and just make the movie with the familiar plot construction and reveal, as one would expect.

And it was revealed that Kent indeed was going to come into this movie cold, having been told by someone podcast related to view it without ANY exposure not even the above. Still, I wonder how long it will take him to guess what is coming, from the opening scenes.

Anywayz.

It starts with Iris's (Sophie Thatcher, Prospect) recollection of how she met Josh (Jack Quaid, The Boys), their meet-cute, how perfect it was, how much she loves him, and... how she ends up killing him. From the get go, Iris doesn't look quite right, maybe just in comparison sitting next to schlumpy Josh, as they small-talk during the driverless-car trip. She has a precise look: vintage looking mini dress, hair band, distinctive but understated makeup choices. She is also anxious about the weekend away, giving you the sense his friends don't really like her. Since you did she the movie poster and/or the trailer, you might snicker because she doesn't know she's a bot, and his friends might not like the idea of him bringing his fuck-bot to a weekend getaway. But who knows, maybe robot-girlfriends are a thing in this driverless-car near future, and not just mere appliances better left at home, plugged in next to the bedside table.

Anywayz, yes, there is tension at the house they arrive. Patrick (Lukas Gage, Road House) and Eli (Harvey Guillén, Reacher) are just lovely, PDA heavy but warm and accepting. But Kat (Megan Suri, It Lives Inside) and her douchey boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend, Canary Black), who owns this remote country lake house, are a little more distant. Kat distinctly doesn't like Iris, and Iris knows it, and we know Kat likely doesn't like a lot of people. But everyone loves Josh. But you get the idea they were college friends, when they were all very different people.

And then Iris kills Sergey. He says that Kat gave him permission to have sex with her, but how is she supposed to respond to that -- remember, we are not supposed to "know" she's a bot yet. He forces himself on her, she knocks him away and he responds by trying to strangle her. But, Iris found a pen knife mysteriously placed in her pocket. Next scene, she is covered in blood and looking very distraught and upset.

"Iris, go to sleep."

Yah she shuts down cuz she's a bot. A fuck-bot that Josh bought, and then jail-broke in order to kill Sergey, who Josh and Kat have conspired to kill, so they can all take his money. Sergey presents as an evil Russian oligarch / gangster type, but really he's just a douche, and Kat is his self-serving mistress. Except the plan doesn't go as... planned, when Iris gets hold of Josh's smart phone with all his controls over her, dials up her own intelligence, and then plots to escape.

I use the term fuck-bot, which is an incredibly contemptible term since everything we see about Iris, and eventually Patrick, is that they can be sentient, but even if these androids were designed to play a comforting companion role in someone's life, that they can have sex says everything about who would usually want one. The movie is not about exploring the morality & psychology of such choices, as its entire tone is dark-comedy, wherein Iris is the heroine, and Josh, a toxic misogynist, is most definitely the villain. I mean, no matter the means, they were plotting to kill someone. Iris plays the part of both patsy and weapon.

The style of the movie follows all the patterns of those thrillers, like Becky, where someone is trapped in the woods, and has to use their wiles, and violence, to get away. I would have preferred if the sub-genre stylings were the window dressing, instead of the bot and AI and technology exploration being so, but sometimes a movie generates the best questions by leaving them to you to ask.

I really liked this one.

Kent is about to publish his post about the movie, so we'll leave it to the Comments to compare.  

KWIF: Juror #2 (+3)

 KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Juror #2 (2024, d. Clint Eastwood - Crave)
The Wild Robot (2024, d. Chris Sanders - AmazonPrime)
Conclave (2024, d. Edward Berger - AmazonPrime)
The Gorge (2025, d. Scott Derrickson - AppleTV+)

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Juror #2 is Clint Eastwood's 40th film as director in just over 50 years, which is a remarkable achievement given what it takes to get a film made. Averaging it out, he has completed a new film every 16 months since he started directing, which is an astonishing pace compared to most other Hollywood directors. The actor/director turns 95 this year, and shows seemingly no signs of calling it quits, and will probably keel over on set. 

I have only seen a half-dozen of Eastwood's many directorial efforts, all being unfussy tales told in a pretty direct manner, with something to say through characters and story. This matter-of-factness about Eastwood's movies has never much appealed to me. I find his works mildly compelling in the viewing but with little stickiness afterwards, and very little to linger on.

Juror #2 continues that streak. It's Eastwood and first-time writer Jonathan A. Abrams' examination of the American justice system, which can be summed up as "it's a flawed system, but it's all we've got."  

Eastwood's focus here seems to be dead set on not generating any suspense or thrills. He wants to be clearn, this is not a John Grisham story, nor is it a courtroom drama, it is an exploration of subjectivity in the legal system and it never deigns to offer any answers.  It will neither condemn nor praise the justice system, as I think Eastwood's more conservative tendencies makes it hard for him to fully criticize any American institutions.   

The plot finds Justin (Nicholas Hoult, Dark Phoenix) -- a journalist, recovering alcoholic and expectant father -- reticently being selected for jury duty. The trial is of a second-degree murder case about an ex-gang banger who is charged with the death of his girlfriend. After an argument in a bar, she was found dead on the rocks down the side of a bridge.  Thing is, as the details are examined in court Justin realizes that he was there that night, at the bar, he saw the fight though he was lost in his own misery, and on his ride home in the rain, he hit what he thought was a deer, seeing nothing when he went out to check.

Justin wants to do the right thing, he wants to come forward, but his AA sponsor and lawyer (Kiefer Sutherland) tells him that coming forward, even though it was an accident, given his drunk driving history, it will result in a very hefty prison sentence and that he has a family to think about.

The thrust of the movie is not in the courtroom, but in the sequestered jury room, where, at first, Justin is the only hold-out on finding the defendant guilty. Without tipping his hat to his own complicitness, he tries to convince the others that there's reasonable doubt.  But the point of the movie is that despite being told to be unbiased and objective in their decision making, within a room of 12 individuals some are still going to have bias and base decisions on feelings.

Hoult does carry the film, with Toni Collette being the prosecuting attorney who is up for election as the District Attorney, and this case will make or break her. Her counterpart in the courtroom, the public defender played by Chris Messina is an altruistic true believer in justice and an old friend of Collette's who rides her hard about justice vs. politics, appealing to her sense of morals. It's a film lacking a villain and Collette could have easily been it, but she instead takes on the idea that she could be wrong and starts reexamining her own case.

There were avenues for this film to go down, ways of generating some incredible tension and emotional weight, but Eastwood really sidesteps these avenues for an almost clinical examination of this, I want to say, ridiculous scenario that's been concocted solely to examine these threads of the American justice system. It's not a full movie, but it's not an exciting one either. It's the type of film where you say "yeah, I get it" halfway through and then have to stick it out for the rest of the movie as it plays out hammering the same chord.

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There are levels to digital animation, and it's pretty obvious and immediate with a film when you're watching a top-tier-level animated movie and when you're watching something other. The Wild Robot is a second-level production in this hierarchy. At second-tier, it means you've got the studio backing and the celebrity voice talent, but the budget isn't nearly as high, thus the animation isn't as refined, and the story isn't as worked-over as it could be.

Within the opening few minutes of The Wild Robot I was immediately taken aback by some of the creature designs (and by creatures I mean actual woodland animals), and not in a good way... there's a blockiness to them that I think was intended to juxtapose against the roundedness of the robot protagonist. The fur and feathers and other textures of the creatures stood out to me, glaringly, a distraction that I never did fully get used to.

The titular Wild Robot awakens in the waters off the shore of an forested island. It is a task-oriented helper robot looking to every woodland creature to give it something to do. The creatures fear this automaton (except the raccoons who start pillaging it, the dirty thieves they are) and the robot prepares to send a distress beacon to be recalled home (except the raccoons steal the beacon). So the robot goes into learning mode, observing the creatures and watching the food chain play out, and along the way picks up the language so that it can speak with the animals. An accident causes the robot to knock over a tree, killing some geese and the robot finding an egg. After a chase sequence with a fox (Pedro Pascal, bringing a real Ben Schwartz energy), the robot is given the task of being a mother to a newly hatched, stunted-wing gosling. She must feed it, teach it swim and fly so that it can migrate for the winter.

In a bold choice, the film spends only about 10 minutes with the robot, her new fox friend, and the baby gosling as she develops her maternal instincts. It then smash cuts to months later, the gosling is grown and it needs to become part of the flock, failing miserably on first attempt. Migration is coming soon and to fulfill her task, the robot must get her baby in the air, ready for its long journey.

The film's first act leads to robot (named Roz, played by Lupita Nyong'o) picking up her assignment, and then jumping to putting a lot of the focus on Brightbill and his need to migrate. It's clear that in the process Roz has developed past her task-oriented programming and enabled maternal instincts and developed an approximation of emotions, and the film makes it frustratingly obvious to everyone but Roz and Brightbill (who suddenly becomes a rebellious teenager).

It feels like cheating, the time jump, and it frustrated me that this story that's partly about technology's increasing invasion upon nature doesn't do more with that thread. The third act finds Roz's, having succeeded at her task, recalling her corporate overlords, and nearly destroying the island in the process, which is the expected answer. It feels like the obvious stakes for the film, and as such wasn't fully satisfying.

Throughout the film the story toys with cohabitation within nature. It very clearly starts the film showing how the creatures of the island forest survive upon eating each other, but it starts trying to present this peaceful existence, of the creatures rallying as a community for their own self-preservation (or even to save Roz). While it makes for cozy kiddie-fare (which more and more the movie reveals itself to be) I found it hard to buy into.

It's an intentionally heartwarming film with a gentle disposition that 's hard to not be soothed by, but at the same time, it's not an honest production, and I had to keep shutting down my b.s. detector and relax into its vibe. Even still, the vibe isn't steady. The Wild Robot doesn't tell its story cleanly. I wanted to like it more.

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I'm not religious, like, at all. I'm proudly agnostic, and believe that faith can be a wonderful thing, but blind faith can be easily manipulated, and religious institutions are expert manipulators, and both the blindly faithful and those they follow are some of the key sources of evil in our global society.  

Conclave is a pseudo-political thriller that takes place inside the sterile marble walls of Vatican City in the wake of the reigning(?) Pope's death and the assemblage of cardinals from around the globe to vie for and select the new Pope, under the guise of enacting the will of God. 

But God rarely enters into it, and the election of Pope in Conclave is a fraught contest, severed down the line between regressionist conservatives and liberal progressives. Of course, among it all is a hefty level of in-fighting, bargaining, and secrets to be kept or exposed. At the center of it is Ralph Feinnes playing the dean of the College of Cardinals. He not only has no interest himself in assuming the papacy, but was preparing to resign from position as dean prior to the Pope's death. He is a good man, and thorough, and when he finds out dirt on any of the Cardinals in the running, he never directly outs them or exposes their dirt, but instead leaves it to them to do what is just and right as a member of The Church. Of course, the pettiness of others means the dirt gets tossed into the open anyway.

Most of my knowledge of the Catholic church comes from watching Father Ted, which at once lampoons and reveres the religion. Conclave is much, much more stern than Father Ted but I couldn't help but get the same sensibility out of it, that it was simultaneously reverential and also taking the piss. As a political thriller, it's sublimely pulpy with it's "shocks" and "twists", none of which are very surprising (at least until the finale) but still are quite delightful in their execution. 

It's all accentuated by incredible cinematography from Stéphane Fontaine, along with the direction and art department, practically every shot is an incredible composition in its own right. I found myself smiling at the framing of figures, or how the cardinal reds and whites contrasted against their surroundings. The laughably eccentric styling of robes and hats, especially when assembled en masse, look ludicrous, but in these compositions look like art. Seeing cardinals huddling in the courtyard in groups of three-to-five, smoking, gossiping, it's just incredible the overhead shot.  I liked the story of the film, but I loved looking at it. There may not really be any true action in the movie, but visually it's so engaging and a tense, plinking, screeching score from Volker Bertelmann makes one's pulse spike up.

It's a film that's not really saying anything pointedly (except that perhaps the Catholic church is as prone to political in-fighting as any other nation), it's just deliciously consumable entertainment.

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When I saw the trailer for The Gorge, I thought "That's such a Toasty movie". It was not a great trailer. It looked like so many other mid-budget, European-financed sci-fi-adjacent action thrillers... you know, the ones with small casts to keep the costs down, and kill a lot of runtime with just the two leads in static sets so as to leave the sci-fi element for the big climactic sequence. What was most baffling about the trailer was that it was for a film starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller, two fairly big names of the younger actors set... and not, the desperately-seeking-paycheque of, say, Nic Cage and Milla Jojovich.  It seemed too early in both their on-the-rise careers to be dumped into mid-budget Eurotrash sci-fi.  I thought for sure "This may not be a film Toasty likes, but it's most definitely the kind of film he likes to watch and write about."

For days I thought about that stupid-looking trailer because I couldn't get over that Teller and Taylor-Joy were in it. Then I learned that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were handling soundtrack duties, and that legit horror/Doctor Strange filmmaker Scott Derrickson was director. There had to be something more than what I was seeing.

Toasty recaps the film nicely in his review so I won't get into it the details much except to say that I found Teller's portrayal of being a shell-shocked veteran sniper to be fairly effective early on, but Taylor-Joy's Lithuanian sniper to be another in the relatively recent trope of quippy eastern bloc women killers (see also: Helena in Orphan Black, Yelena in the MCU and Max/Nichka in The Recruit) who seems completely unaffected by the work she does.

As Toasty points out, the premise of what's in the titular gorge is not inherently bad, but there are so many questions raised about the whys and hows of containing what's in the gorge that it threatens to undermine the logic of the whole movie (okay, maybe not threaten so much as cut the film off at its knees). And yet, if The Gorge succeeds at all, it's because it doesn't start as a movie about the gorge at all, but instead about these two characters falling in love (yes, really) and a critique of private military contractors who will stop at nothing to profit even more from war.

I really and truly bought into the accross-the-gorge romance between Teller and Taylor-Joy, and frankly, I would have loved a movie starring these two that was solely a wartime drama about them being on opposing sides of a conflict staring at each other through sniper lenses across some barrier between them, and connecting anyway.  There's some meat to that idea. 

The second act of this film gets lost in the mysteries of the Gorge and, at first I was surprised by how...bigger budgeted the world inside the gorge was. There's lots of bio-organic creepy-crawlies and vine-and-moss-ensconced skeletons to fend off and frankly, it all looks so much better than anything I was expecting. There are terrains and building within the gorge to discover, again, not at all what I was expecting, only to unveil the true nature of what our protagonists were up on those towers trying to stop from getting out.

As much as the unveiled world within the gorge impressed me, it was still far less interesting to me than the romance between our leads and I couldn't help but feel that the story loses sight of the characters once it starts playing into "unraveling the conspiracy".  Having just dashed through all 6 seasons of Lost in the two months, I'm all for secret buildings and old videos and mysteries, but it's not really what you were selling me on throughout your first act.

As Toasty notes, the more the film reveals about the gorge, the more ridiculous the setup becomes. I wasn't really thinking there was a mystery to explore going into the film. I was anticipating instead that within the gorge was some ruptured gateway to the afterlife and the undead soldier of past gorge-watchers were spilling out. I don't know if the film would have been better had the gorge been left more of a mystery, but the third act winds up feeling pretty perfunctory. It's a film that really needed a John Carpenter-esque approach, explaining less, and more of an unresolved ending.