KWIF: I Love Boosters (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Ol' Kent here celebrated the end of his 50th year with some epic boardgaming, epic toy and collectibles hunting, epic medical diagnostic imaging, and not so much epic movie watching (or reviewing)...just a little.

This Week:
I Love Boosters (2026, d. Boots Riley - in theatre)
Tuner (2025, d. Daniel Roher - in theatre)
Exit 8 (2025, d. Genki Kawamura - rental)
Made of Honor (2008, d. Paul Welland - hollywoodsuite)

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I think this will wind up being my
 favourite movie poster of the year.
I want this as a puzzle.

As the credits were rolling on our sparsely attended early Saturday matinee of I Love Boosters, one white male millennial audience member stood up and stretched, turned around and engaged the other millenial couple behind him. The part my wife overheard him say was "I mean, I liked it, but can you tell me why you thought it was funny?"

Humour is subjective. I get that. But I Love Boosters is undoubtedly a comedy. It's part farce, part Looney Tunes (by way of Stephen Chow), part social satire, part absurdism, and so many other little parts of things that congeal to make a wildly appealing, chaotic, inventive whole.

Kiki Palmer (Nope) - one of the most charismatic performers of her generation - leads this film as Corvette, a wanna-be fashion designer who just can't seem to find her way into the industry. She lives in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant and steals clothes for a living to resell at steep discounts on the black market to the less rich. She's aided in the "Velvet Gang" by her best friend Sade (Naomi Ackie, Mickey 17) who is obsessed with a multi-level marketing scheme, and Mariah (Taylour Paige, Zola) who thinks her boosting is a revolutionary act.

They don't steal from just anywhere, or just anyone, but instead focus on the chain of Metro Designers stores which are owned by fashion mogul and certified genius Christie Smith (Demi Moore, The Substance). Corvette is obsessed with Smith, idolizes her, and in her own way sees her boosting of Smith's clothes as a form of flattery, but Smith, who calls the Velvet Gang "low class, urban bitches" is increasingly perturbed by them.  Corvette learns of a delivery of $100,000 suits and sets her sights on that being the ultimate target (especially after discovering that Smith has stolen a design Corvette submitted to a fashion contest earlier in the year, it becomes about revenge). To make a boost this big, they need to work on the inside.

So they get a job working at Metro Designers under Grayson (Will Poulter, Warfare), who has totally drunk the Christie Smith corporate kool-aid, and meet Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez, Bloodshot) who is trying to organize a union within Metro Designers.  And then they are robbed..the entire store gone in seconds.  

I could go on for paragraphs breaking down the larger strokes of this film. It is very busy, but earns its busyness.  Boots Riley cut his teeth with the incredible satire Sorry To Bother You, and takes the social satire and ambition of that film to a whole other level here. The picture is vibrant, with bold monochromes at each of the Metro Designers sets, while the wardrobe is off the charts with all the leads looking ridiculous or stylish or ridiculously stylish. It'd be the most fashionable movie of the year, if not for The Devil Wears Prada 2. There are extended sequences involving stop motion animation (that recall John Carpenter's They Live) an extended chase sequence done in minature (some shades of Wes Anderson there), a building on a canted angle leaving a set sloped at 20 degrees which all but Christie Smith seem to have difficulty navigating, and a gigantic ball of stress made up of bills and all the other things haunting Corvette, stalking her at random times.

I Love Boosters is unfettered creativity from a director who doesn't see limits on what can be done in storytelling. It's the first mass-released film since Everything Everywhere All At Once that feels like there are no restrictions in how a story can be told. Even if I Love Boosters is only nominally less successful at coherently conveying its central message than that Oscar-winner, it's still an exceptionally entertaining and provocative ride.  [I haven't even mentioned the soul-eating demon/love interest played by Lakieth Stanfield (Atlanta), but he's an intriguing distraction for both the picture and Corvette that pops up at both the most opportune and inopportune times. He's a total aside, but a deliciously amusing one.]

While its employment of magical realism and surrealist fantasy is wickedly enjoyable and compliments its anti-capitalism message in unusual but agreeable ways, I Love Boosters' use of a science fiction technology alongside abstract concepts of "situational acceleration and deconstructionism", as well as teleportation is a tad less concrete. There is a device introduced in the second act which then becomes the inciting agent for the rest of the film, and the employment of these speculative conceits become the hardest part of the film to wrap one's head around, particularly at the accelerated pace the film moves at.  It leads to a lot of fun and clever sequences in the film, and effectively incites the film's ultimate, pro-union, power-in-numbers message, but it does so with an asterisk.

What I Love Boosters ultimate goal is to promote a character who realizes that sometimes there's a greater goal, a greater purpose to one's actions than fulfilling their own desires. That perhaps too many of us are concerned more with individual achievement than collective growth is the realization Corvette needs to have on her journey, even if it isn't the most personally satisfying, it does seem the most rewarding. 

[As an aside, as a person who is basically deaf in one ear, I had a very difficult time with the sound mix on this film. As a musician himself, Riley loves music, and there's always music playing in the background of any scene, whether it's diegetic or the fantastic score from TuneYards, along with layers of ambient noise or sometimes background dialogue and/or TV footage.  In person, I have a hard time in cacophonous situations picking out what people are saying, and turns out it's the same with on screen situations. I can't wait for Blu-Ray, which I will absolutely be getting, so I can watch this with the closed captioning on and pick up on so much of what I missed].

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Speaking of my hearing disorder, it was fascinating for me to watch a film about someone on the other end of the aural spectrum than I am. In Tuner, Niki (Leo Woodall, Cherry) has hyperacusis, an affliction in which he is exceptionally hypersensitive to sound to a debilitating degree. For the majority of the picture he is wearing custom ear plugs, and often with noise cancelling headset over that. Even then particularly sharp or loud noises can send him into disarray, even proving so painful as to render him unconscious.

Niki also has perfect pitch and starts the film working as protege piano tuner to family friend Harry Horowicz (Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie), a beloved figure in the music community. Harry is losing his hearing and starting to be a bit forgetful, but he's a delight to be around (I'm normally not a big Hoffman fan, but he is very likeable in the role). Niki is sweetly devoted to Harry and his wife Marla, like family. When Harry falls ill, Niki agrees to help out with the medical bills by buying Harry's truck and taking over his business. While on a job he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu, AfrAId), and over a few encounters their attraction becomes undeniable, but while on a different job, Niki meets Uri (Lior Raz, Gladiator II) and his boys as they attempt to drill into the safe of the house they are both working at. Niki learned his hearing disorder actually was a boon for safecracking and gets into the safe for the boys. Uri, who works in private security for elite individuals, offers Niki a job if he wants to make "real money". To pay Harry's bills, Niki has no choice, and he helps them steal from Uri's client's safes "things they wouldn't notice are missing".  Of course, getting involved with criminals is never going to end well for Niki and it threatens to destroy what comfort he has in life and maybe take everyone else he loves down with him.

Woodall is very unassuming as Niki, at first, with Hoffman dominating each scene they're in together early on. But eventually Woodall is handed control and Niki becomes quite captivating in his quiet temperament, and the reality of his affliction (handled with superb sound design) is clearly conveyed to the audience at all times. Canadian director Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar for his documentary on Alexei Navalni in 2022, proves he has an incredibly steady hand for directing a modestly budgeted dramatic thriller like this. In his debut narrative feature, Roher utilizes montages to perfect effect (time will tell if this is a signature move or just something stylistic for this feature, metering up with the film's soft jazzy piano score, and symphonic bits).

Tuner works very well as a character study but its crime element is unfortunately quite predictable, lacking a lot of real surprises. Thankfully Roher is more interested in the character than he is in the jobs Niki is assisting on, and so the segments of safecracking, for the most part, are pretty brisk and don't employ the tension of the risk of getting caught too heavily. There is one particular Chechov-ian item that presents itself early on, and the manner in which it goes off is such a deus ex machina that it borders on unforgivable...but just sits on that border.

Otherwise, this is an agreeable throwback to the kind of thriller we saw plenty of through the 70's, 80's and 90's, but have largely disappeared in the past two decades. We could do with more.

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I knew nothing about Exit 8 except the concept: a man gets lost in a maze of subway hallways searching for Exit 8, finding horrors along the way. I was in. I love subway tiles, and hallways and escape rooms, so this movie was beckoning me like a siren of the sea. 

In the film, our "lost man" is played by Kazunari Ninomiya, a seemingly hapless and perhaps depressed young man who doesn't seem ready for the world. We first meet him on a subway train during rush hour as he witnesses a man in a suit berate a young mother for bringing her crying baby on the train. Everyone's looking at their phones, and, after he puts his earbuds back in, so does he. When he gets off the train he receives a phone call from his ex. She's at the hospital and tells him she's pregnant. She doesn't know whether she wants to keep it or terminate the pregnancy, and is asking for his input. He doesn't know either. Not paying attention, he finds himself in an Z-shaped hallway that seems to repeat without end...the same man walking past him, the same adverts on the wall, the same lockers and photobooth....

And then he spies a sign, telling him that he needs to leave through Exit 8. If he spies an anomaly, turn back, and if there are no anomalies, keep going.

I didn't know Exit 8 was based off an indie video game sensation, but really it didn't take me long to discern such a thing, especially when the "rules" were introduced. What could have just been cheap horror, though, is so much more from director/writer Genki Kawamura (co-written with Kentaro Hirase). It's not just an endless maze of repeating tunnels, but a metaphor for repetitive cycles in life, of fearing change and indecision., alerting us to look for the differences, and that we need to embrace those differences to make it out the other end.

If it were just our "lost man" encountering terrifying anomalies, it would have been a fine movie, but it's not just that. There is a delicious surprise (SPOILER) in act 2, where the film completely pivots away from our "lost man" and instead follows the man he's passed dozens of times at this point, and we learn the "walking man's" story. Both men, however, encounter a young boy who they each think is a facet of this purgatory they're in, but come to learn (if not embrace) that the child is as trapped as they are and, maybe, has better instincts for getting out.

Though slight on story, and maybe light on horrors, I absolutely loved this movie. It was completely my thing.  The repetition encourages audience engagement, looking at the same hallway walls and wondering what's different...if anything, and knowing it could come down to something so easily overlooked as the fine text on one of the posters, or a tile placed askew (although, mercifully it's never that).

The sound design is as crucial as the visual design, and as integral to the repetition. It's obviously largely borrowed from the video game, but it's brought into "reality" so effectively. Ninomiya has such a soulful face that your empathy is immediately with him, and he conveys his emotions so blatantly and effectively. The "walking man" played by Yamato Kochi is intensely terrifying in his early scenes where the lost man turns around the find the walking man immediately in his face with a grin that'll make your skin crawl, but then it only takes Kochi seconds with the second act pivot to bring you over to sympathizing with his plight in the corridors.

The film creates a text that the video game never had, a reason for why our protagonist(s) are in this purgatory, and letting the audience know that they need to have a reason to get out. I feel like we can apply this to life somehow....

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I've made no secret out of enjoying cheesy romance movies and romantic comedies, but that's not universal approval of all of them. In fact, there are scant few romcoms I would consider good or worth watching again, and even fewer I actually want to watch in the first place. To some extent most romcoms I just tend to avoid because, in execution (if not conceptually), they're so cloying as to be repulsive.

In concept, Made of Honor should not be such a film. The story of a tomcat of a man who is best friends with a woman whom he learns after years and years that he's actually in love with her, only for her to turn up engaged before he can say anything...well, that sounds like a serviceable, if predictable romcom format, and not egregiously offensive. But show me that trailer, or even just the poster, and I'm steering clear like it's plague-bearing.

I never needed to see Made of Honor, there was nothing compelling me to watch it, but it was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and after I finished watching a film on dvd, it turned up on cable when the player shut off. I spied Patrick Dempsey and his basketball-playing bro-pals (including Kadeem Hardison and Chris Messina) attempting to help the man navigate his emotions over his best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) being away on a work trip and missing her so much he couldn't enjoy his many many dates with hot women in her absence.  It's a particular turning point in pop culture when men were allowed to support other men emotionally but only if it was in a really really butch situation, with like sports and/or alcohol, but points for letting them get there. But it treats these scenes as if they were comedy, not as if there's real emotional stakes at play which gets to what's so wrong with this film.... 

Made of Honor makes the biggest cardinal sin of the romantic comedy genre: it's not funny. It tries to be funny and fails pretty much every time. There's two possible reasons, and it's an and/or situation: casting and/or the director. 

Dempsey is cute, handsome and charming, but he's not innately funny. Ditto for Monaghan. Hardison and Messina both have comedic acting experience, and Monaghan's coterie of bridesmaids includes Busy Philipps and Whitney Cummings, but none of them squeeze out any real guffaws despite trying. 

Monaghan returns from her trip engaged to rugged Scotsman Kevin McKidd, who threatens Dempsey's masculinity in every way. Any attempt to one-up him ends in failure. Just as any attempt for either to be funny falls entirely flat.

There is a scene where Dempsey is going to meet Monaghan for the first time since her return home, only to be surprised by her new beau, and he smashes into a waiter and they topple to the floor, his bouquet of flowers everywhere (which he lies were never his). It's close to being a good pratfall. Later in the scene, after an awkward dinner, Dempsey gets up from his chair at an awkward moment and tumbles into the same waiter again. The whole sequence should be full of humour around the discomfort, complete with the pratfall starter and capper, but it doesn't take, like, at all. And that's direction. Director Welland seems to be too lost in finding an emotional center to really let the humour of the scene play, and its stars aren't gifted enough comedically to innately play up the humour and the emotion. 

But boy do they look good not being funny. Dempsey is real fit, and kinda dashing, while Monaghan is just so effortlessly pretty (with a team of make-up and wardrobe people putting great effort into that effortlessness).

Without the humour, this movie feels tedious, rehashing the same points over and over again. I don't know that Dempsey and Monaghan ever found the "friendship" dynamic this film needed to sell that part of it. They're just too good looking together and they play into the attraction even when it's not fully supposed to be there yet. This needed two decent-to-good looking comedic performers to pull this off. (Like Jason Segel and Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall...a far superior film, and one which I would definitely not sacrifice to put those leads into Made of Honor. What's a pairing that didn't happen... maybe like, Paul Rudd and Isla Fisher?)

There's both a good romance and good comedy waiting to happen in this script. It's been 20 years, maybe a remake is in order with a director and starring pair that can get it right.

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.

KWIF The Secret Agent (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. It's Olympics week, full of figure skating controversies, ski jumping controversies, and yes, even curling controversies. All it really left time for was a Saturday double feature at the movies.

This Week:
The Secret Agent (aka "O Agente Secreto" - 2025, d. Kleber Mendonça Filho - in theatre)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026, d. Gore Verbinski - in theatre)
Summer of the Colt ("Tales for all #8", 1989, d. André Melançon - Crave)

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The Secret Agent is the latest of unlikely critical darlings to transcend the festival circuit into both audience attention and awards acclaim. The Brazilian film debuted at Cannes where it won best actor for Wagner Moura and best director for Filho and has now achieved the rare double nomination at the Oscars for Best Foreign Feature and Best Feature, along with other nods its way. 

I've been keen on seeing the film since it's Cannes triumph, intrigued by the title and its 1977 setting because I'm sort of an espionage guy. I knew little else going in, other than many critics casually described it as "weird", and "not really a spy movie". I hadn't even seen a trailer.

And, indeed, it is a weird film, but not weird for weirdness sake. It makes highly unusual storytelling decisions which are, in its own way, disarming without being shocking.. You cannot anticipate the moves this film makes, not without prior awareness, and even then, it would be really hard to see how the pieces fit without experiencing how they actually play out in concert with each other.

The Academy Awards have really embraced the atypical in recent years, starting with The Shape of Water, and continuing with Everything, Everywhere All At Once and Poor Things among others in recent years. Given how outre the storytelling is here, I would say this is maybe its most unusual best picture nomination thus far. And yet, all that uncommon narrative is in service of something. I'll come back to that.

When we meet Wagner Moura's Marcelo, he's pulled into a gas station in his yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Before he's even stopped the car he spies a dead body in the adjacent dusty field, covered by a sheet of cardboard. His gut instinct is to keep going, even as the portly station attendant comes out. It's a bad scene but it's evident there's more on Marcelo's mind than just the dead body. The title of the film crafts in the viewer's mind all sorts of paranoid thoughts on behalf of Marcelo. There's an incredible tension to the scene that the charismatic station attendant slowly disarms, finally easing when the attendant shoos a pack of wild dogs away from the body as if he's had to do it dozens of times by now. But then a police car shows up and the tension's right back up again as they're not there for the body, but to pay attention to the yellow VW they had passed (once again, the tension is only disarmed by comedy, as a family-filled car is about to pull into the station, only to spy the body and rethink their decision, the young children catch sight and scream). 

It's an incredible sequence, waves of tension and levity, masterfully crafted and beautifully composed. At the same time it's an aside but also sets the tables for the film. Carnival is happening and apparently crime and deaths are rampant while it goes on. Marcelo is anxious about something, police especially, but it will be some time before we find out what it is he's so nervous about. There's corruption aplenty, and Marcelo's is  tense but also a nimble thinker.

The first scene is prefaced by a series of pictures, pictures that look like legit photos of the era and not manufactured for the film. It's easy enough to intone that director Filho is setting the scene for the time, place and attitude of the film (as is the caption, "Brazil 1977, a time of great mischief" which seems to be an understatement). I do not have any context for Brazil of this time period, it's political turmoil of the time is not something I've ever delved into. The fact that there is political upheaval is not lost on the viewer, but what is actually happening is not explained. This is not a film interested in educating an exterior audience, and I'm sure Brazilians are very in tune with the the imagery, captions, billboards, and intonations made in the film that would float past or at least not fully register with an outside audience.

It is then credit to the film's writer/director that this film so readily resonates outside its home country. At first it may be his stylistic choices, but any examination of what the stylistic choices are about all lead back to the themes of the film, which are about corruption, class structures, money, power and justice, as well as the unusual bonds of families. There's also too much to unpack after only one viewing.

Marcelo finds himself in Recife - a northeastern coastal city in Brazil - hosted in a, for lack of better term, refugee hostel with others who we learn are fleeing persecution of some sort or another. Also in Recife is Marcelo's son and his in-laws. Marcelo's has to remind his son that the boy's mother died of cancer, but it seems unspoken that she was perhaps assassinated. Marcelo's intent is to get his son and flee the country, but obstacles are in the way. In the meantime, he's been posted at a documents bureau, where he searches for some form of identification of his mother, a seeming lifelong quest he's had to just prove her existence (the story, explained late in the film, is a troubling one, and seems to have specific cultural resonance to the country that I don't fully understand).

Meanwhile, a shark is found with a human leg inside it. The police chief and his two thug sons seem very intent on handling this discovery themselves. In the wake of Jaws' success, the film's reputation living large in the minds of kids too young to see it, the story of the leg takes on a life of its own in the newspapers. Urban legends are built up around the leg, the phantom limb starts taking on a life of its own. 

Marcelo is also being hunted by two hitmen, a father/stepson team. The repeating pattern of fathers and sons and parents and children seems very deliberate, yet I struggle to understand fully the significance. Again, this is a film that will need repeat viewings and probably some extracurricular reading for full dissection. And these seemingly disparate threads - Marcelo, the police chief and the hitmen - all become rather woven into the same thatch. 

Outside all of this is a piece of the film set in the relative modern day, where a young woman is listening and digitizing audiocassettes featuring the voices of some of the players in the film. The abrupt jumps to the modern day are just that, abrupt, and yet, there's a sort of comfort in the fact that this character is discovering the events along with us. She seems to know more than we do, but with less exacting detail. The bigger surprise of these segments is they progress without ever using them as opportunity for exposition, which could have easily been the case. The purpose of these scenes, though they interrupt only a few times in the film, is only made clear in the final sequence of the movie, and it's kind of the lynchpin to the whole thing.

The Secret Agent is not at all what I expected given the title, and it's a far more unique film than I could ever have anticipated. It's not far afield from the works of a Bong Joon Ho or Yorgos Lanthamos, and yet director Filho is also not aping other directors work either. If ever he was in the past, in this his fourth feature, he's operating with his own voice (I'll need to dig up his three prior productions).  Moura, who has been quietly proficient in supporting (and even lead) roles in North American productions, shines here as both a charming and adept protagonist. Expect Moura to get a few big chances to shine in the next few years. 

I predict The Secret Agent won't win any Academy Awards in its nominated categories except perhaps Best Foreign, but given how it penetrated this year's ballot, I expect Filho will be a prominent awards contender and higher profile filmmaker in the coming years. The film, however, will live on beyond this year. It's just too deep and too unique to get lost in the sea of generic movies.

[Poster talk... many of the Secret Agent posters adopt the aesthetic of 70's spy or paranoia thriller posters, whether it's using a painted style of the era, or establishing the feel of a hand-cropped photograph. I love so many of the posters for this film. The most common theme across the posters is the image of Moura holding a telephone, looking anxious...such a 70's vibe recalling the image of Gene Hackman with the headphones on in The Conversation or Robert Redford at the telephone in 3 Days of the Condor.]

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Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is a time loop movie that doesn't show you start and end of the time loop, it takes place completely within the span of one loop. Loop number 118, if we're to believe Sam Rockwell's unnamed man from the future. 

The film opens with a rapid sequence of up close shots of aspects of a Los Angeles diner setting. Focusing more on the patrons than objects, but giving us little hints as to character or dynamics without showing us their faces. We get a sense that there's life here. And then there's a rattle, a barely noticeable skip in the image and a tell-tale "fwump" sound effect that tells us savvy audience members that something metaphysical, even temporal, has happened.

Into a busy diner walks Rockwell, sporting massive scraggly reddish-gray beard, a wild look in his eye, a manic trash-bin wardrobe, and complete disregard for any sort of social formalities. He interrupt the scene, starts spouting some end-of-the-world gibberish, touches upon his time-travel shenanigans and starts looking for recruits to help save the world. He's convinced the right combination of people in this diner will save humanity from a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence, but he just keeps finding disaster. Nobody is interested, which, he seems prepared for. 

But this time, he gets a volunteer from Susan (Juno Temple) who we learn in flashback, lost her son in a school shooting. No worries about that though, as she finds out her son can be cloned and because he died in a school shooting, the government will pay for most of it, and what they don't cover can be paid for by her son-clone having a sponsored ads setting.

The man from the future conscripts the rest of his crew, including troubled couple Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), teachers who we learn accidentally awakened the teenage social media hive mind and are now on the run.

The final team member was hesitantly accepted by the man from the future. At first Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), in her princess party dress and smudged makeup, was deemed too weird, but a trick of a fateful bottle of hot sauce convinces the man to bring her along.  We learn that Ingrid was born with an allergy to phones and wifi. The signals give her headaches and trigger nose bleeds. She kind of hates the technological world, as it's a bit of a hellscape for her to navigate.

The film jumps between the perilous journey the rag tag group needs to make from the diner to a 9-year-old's house where the child is busy inventing the AI that will disrupt the world and the flashbacks that fill in the blanks on the most prominent members of the group. (Asim Choudhry's Scott doesn't get such treatment, alas). 

The story in general, but flashbacks especially, feel like truncated, lighthearted episodes of Black Mirror, just technology accepted into society but making everything slightly worse when promising to make things better. It's hard not to call this "Black Mirror Lite" but it kinda is.

The third act makes some big moves and in doing so undercuts its own reality. The logic of the film seems to get tossed aside unless I'm missing a clear explanation/revelation somewhere.  It doesn't stop being entertaining, but it doesn't hold together conceptually.

The performances are fun, by and large, and there's a good sense of humour around the idea of technology destroying our lives but also being impossible to live without. It's really in how it's applied, awareness of the impact it has, and how we react to it that the film is concerned with, but...not that concerned. It's a satire, but it's also just silly. It's making statements but it's not committing to them. Things that would normally get a GenZ eyeroll would likely slip past them because it's not really old-man-yelling-at-clouds.  

Director Verbinski is known for being a visual stylist on The Ring and Pirates of the Carribean movies, and there's no doubt this is a film that looks a lot better than its twenty million dollar budget. But whatever style Verbinski brings is top loaded in a way, with some exceptionally interesting and well composed shots calling attention to themselves in the film's opening sequence and then seemingly falling away for the rest of the film (perhaps intricate compositions take time which costs money?).

I like both the main story and the flashbacks and they do all connect, but they almost feel like they should be separate pieces. There's probably a whole 90-minute "one crazy night" story in just the team getting from point A to point B, but the flashbacks interrupt that flow (and the lack of Rockwell in them is to their greatest detriment). Each of these microstories could have possibly supported their own feature, or maybe this could have been a multi-part anthology rather than a movie. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is solidly entertaining, but I imagine I'll have largely forgotten about it in a few months.

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As I prepared to do my Saturday double-feature this week, the intent was to finally knock The Secret Agent off my list (success) but the second feature was more up in the air. A few intriguing-but-still-February releases had just come out, but there were also a few Oscar contenders I could pick off. The biggest of them is Sentimental Value, a family drama centered around filmmaking (oh, the Oscars love films about films and filmmaking). I realized/remembered, in this decision-making moment, that I am never excited to see a dramatic movie. Nothing about watching characters deal (or not deal) with their emotions or confronting the challenges or difficulties they face in their lives has any appeal to me...that is unless there's some sort of genre twist to it. It doesn't sound like there's a genre twist to Sentimental Value, and I suspect I will never see that film in my lifetime, unless I wind up doing some stupid boy project where it slots into (I can't even fathom what that one would be).

So imagine my surprise when I get to the next "Tales for all"* film on the list, Summer of the Colt, which turns out to be a horse-centric family drama. I think what appeals to me even less than a dramatic film is a dramatic film centered around horses. Black Beauty or The Black Stallion, no thank you.

(*"Tales for all" being the series of family films made by Quebec producer Rock Demers, the earliest of its installments which were mainstays on Canadian weekend afternoon television through much of the 1980's and 1990's)

So it's no surprise to me that I found the first half of this film to be nearly interminable. The set-up finds Laura, Daniel and Felipe visiting their Grandfather's horse ranch in Argentina. They're met by their young friend Martin, whose family lives and works on the ranch.  But Laura is a young woman now, and not as interested in playing as the boys. There's horse riding aplenty and kids being kids and it's all so tranquil and kind of pointless for what seems like forever. 

It should also be mentioned that this is an Argentinian co-production with Demers, and it was most likely filmed in Spanish as both the English and French dubs do not sync with the performers' mouths. It's an obstacle. Also an obstacle, as we find with most of the "Tales for all" is the child actors are not the most seasoned performers and a lot of their performances can be very stilted and/or conveying incorrect emotion. The English dub voice performers are pretty solid though, but all this is barriers to enjoyment. It's important to establish all this film had going against it, because, in the end, I actually quite liked it overall.

What builds slowly in the film is Laura's sensing hostility from her Grandfather. He loved her just last year and now he's suddenly standoffish, cold, and even mean towards her. She sees it as sexism, that now that she's blossoming into womanhood, she's not such a tomboy, and he can't relate to her. But he's also not trying. So she takes drastic measures to try and fit in with the boys, by cutting off her long locks into a choppy bob. Her Grandfather can only retort snidely "Well, I hope you're proud".  The film sometimes presents Laura from Grandfather's point of view, and he sometimes catches sight of her and he sees an entirely different person. We can infer, based on comments made, that he's seeing in her the children's grandmother, who left for Paris and never came back, and it's too much for him to bear. It would seem  one tainted experience with a woman nearly 50 years ago just turned him into an old misogynist and a control freak.

Meanwhile summer pals Daniel and Martin are having a great time chumming around, doing horse sports and such, but when Martin points out a golden colt to Daniel, Daniel falls in love with the horse and asks his Grandfather if he can have it. His Grandfather agrees, but only if he can break the horse in... neither Daniel or Grandfather realizing that Martin has already bonded with the horse and has been slowly breaking the horse in for weeks already. 

It's a juvenile love triangle, but instead of a girl, it's a horse. Daniel becomes obsessed with the horse... some choice Daniel quotes:

D. "I've never seen a horse like that.... He's the one I want... Yeah, I want him for myself. He's beautiful!"
D. "Be quiet, Martin, he belongs to me!"
D. "you and me will do a lot together you'll see. You and me will go everywhere together...you're mine now."
D. "you had no right to let anyone else mount you! You're mine!"

Don't read these as gentle cooing, no read them as a steely-eyed psychopath, because that's how they come across (at least in the dub).

When Daniel catches Martin riding "his" horse, their friendship becomes a bitter rivalry. That is, until the horse bucks Daniel off and nearly kills him (for a second there, I thought it did, which I wouldn't put past one of these "Tales for all" to do), and then it's all bros before ho(rs)es. Well, not really, but the boys do talk it out.

The second half of the film spurts to life in full blown telenovela style. Just meaty melodrama with intense looks and leers, and heightened emotions which could lead anywhere. At one point Daniel pulls back his bed covers to find his grandfather has left him a silver-sheathed knife... a real Chekhovian play where we have to legitimately worry if this obsessed, nearly-psychopathic kid is going to stab another kid over a horse.

Laura's journey into young adulthood starts off as a real non-entity in the film, as Laura spends much of her time either alone or with her Great Aunt. But her delight in becoming a woman starts to sour because her relationship with her Grandfather calls into question how these changes in her body affect how others see her, it's a real mind fuck, and she doesn't understand it. She tries to get clarity and only gets pushed away. So the only way for her to process is through drastic measures and even those don't work. As coming of age stories go, it's pretty powerful at times. 

Likewise Grandfather is not just this nasty figure, he's actually pretty kind, but also myopic and out of touch with his own emotional core. His relationship with his grandchildren is based on a foundation of control, and suddenly with Laura and Daniel he's finding his control challenged. They are children, not horses, as Laura reminds him, they should not have to be broken in.

The film's second half shows the character developing emotional intelligence, realizing that the feelings they have inside don't need to stay there. Talking about things is the only way to make a situation better, even if it's uncomfortable.

Visually, Summer of the Colt is perfunctory, it does the job it needs to do. It captures the horses nicely and gets those emotive looks from the performers right center of the frame in full melodramatic fashion. There's little fancy here, but it all works. 

Next to Bach and Broccoli it's the most cohesive and resonant of the "Tales for all" but without a real genre hook, it's not quite as fun.

KWIF: No Other Choice (+3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What?

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

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

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

 

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2025 Edition (Part A)

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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Nobody Wants This Season 2 - 2025, Netflix (10/10 episodes)
created by Erin Foster
[Season 1]

Season 2 picks up where Season 1 left off, with Noah (Adam Brody) realizing that being with Joanne (Kristen Bell) may cause waves in his Synagogue, but he's willing to ride those waves for love. But just because they've committed again doesn't mean anything is going to be easier for them. 

Alright, let's be frank, I barely remember what happened in this second season of the show. If you want a recap, I'm sure there's many websites out there doing episodic recaps. I'm not that guy, this is not that site. Here's what I recall (and how I felt about it):

Joanne strives to win over Noah's mom. I like that Joanne doesn't take much shit from anyone, including Noah's mom, and she's not the cliched romcom lead who is quirky and klutzy and neurotic about her relationship... ok, she is a bit neurotic about her relationship. But in order to put complications into the show, the main characters need to overthink things, and be in their head too much.

Joanne and sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) get into a fight which drives a wedge between them for a significant part of the series, and the feud also leads to Joanne getting evicted from her apartment, and so some of the conflicts of the series is about whether Noah and Joanne are ready to move in together.

Meanwhile, Noah has lost the promotion, and so he leaves his beloved Synagogue, and finds himself instead at a nu-age Hollywood synagogue (run by Seth Rogen in his 500th TV role this year) that really doesn't seem to be interested in the traditions of Judaism at all, and it makes him miserable.

My favourite part of the series is the friendship between perpetually unfiltered Morgan and Noah's awkward brother Sasha (Tim Simons). Sasha is married to ball-busting taskmaster Esther (Jackie Tohn) and this season works hard at humanizing Esther, showing that she knows her attitude puts people off and she's self conscious about it. Her getting in the way of Morgan and Sasha's friendship loosens to funny time-limited, supervised visits, but the season starts driving a wedge between Sasha and Esther (because Sasha wants another child, Esther most definitely does not) and seems to be leaning towards actually pairing off Sasha and Morgan, which seems like a terrible idea.

A romantic comedy is typically all about the chase and/or overcoming the obstacles. When there are no natural obstacles left, a TV show built as a romcom needs to start manufacturing them, and while Nobody Wants This maintains a pretty high level of likeability and a pretty solid assortment of natural obstacles, the big complication that threatens to divide Joanne and Noah at the end of the season is pretty much bullshit.

I look forward to a third season but I also worry about it.

(Also, both Brody and Bell are in their mid-40's but it's clear that the show is presenting them as if they're in their mid-to-late '30s. The tone of a relationship and the future it presents is very different between these two ages. It's a good thing both performers are in incredible shape... Bell's shoulders and lats, migawd.)

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The Lowdown Season 1 - 2025, Disney+/FX (8/8 episodes)
created by Sterlin Harjo

When I put on the first episode I was in the midst of rewatching all the films of the Coen Brothers, and what was clear as mud was that the Coens were a particularly big source of inspiration for Sterlin Harjo in the execution of this series. 

There's a cinematic wasteland of bad Coens-esque productions out there, and this is most definitely not one of them, in part because it's clear that Harjo is inspired not just by the Coens but also by the same materials that inspire the Coens, particularly vintage detective fiction.

It also doesn't hurt that Harjo has his own decidedly strong and singular voice honed over a number of film projects (all remain relatively unheard of but now must be demanding eyes on them) and seemed to come out fully formed in the FX series Reservation Dogs, undeniably one of the best TV series of the past 25 years.

The day after watching the pilot I saw One Battle After Another, a film which rapidly consumed my excess brain space, and a film which, in many respects, seemed to have kinship with The Lowdown...or at least operating in the same temperature. A refrain in the first episode of The Lowdown - "There's nothing worse than a white man who cares" could very much be applied to Paul Thomas Anderson's latest as well.

The Lowdown stars Ethan Hawke (in probably my favourite performance he's ever done) as Lee Raybon, an investigative journalist, or "truthstorian" as he dubs himself, and very much a white man who cares. And it's not performative caring. He legit is fighting for everything he believes in and to great sacrifice to himself.  There's no glory in what he's doing. The papers and magazines he writes for are not in the least prestigious and, like all news media these days, just flailing to keep their head above water. 

Lee had written an article, an expose on the man campaigning for the Oklahoma governorship, Donald Washburn (Kyle MacLachlin) and his family, and shortly after its published, Washburn's brother (Tim Blake Nelson) apparently committed suicide. Lee smells something fishy around it all and begins peeling back the layers of a potential conspiracy involving the rich Oklahoma muckety mucks and a white supremist church with their own private army of ex-cons.

Lee's life is put in jeopardy many, many, many times, but where with most it would be a deterrent, for him its just more fuel and ammunition to charge forward. 

The show is an incredible tonal balance of comedy, mystery, intrigue, drama, intensity, the whole spectrum. With all apologies to Noah Hawley's Fargo TV series (a show I love, mostly), this is the best example of what a Coens-esque TV should or could look like. It's an incredibly exciting and entertaining and thought provoking ride the entire time, and even the singular interlude episode winds up being an entirely welcome interruption thanks to Peter Dinklage's incredible performance.

The show is entirely well casted, with Jeanne Tripplehorne as the femme fatale, Kaniehtiio Horn as Lee's ex, Star Wars:Skeleton Crew's Ryan Kiera Armstrong as Lee's daughter, Keith David as a concerned party to Lee's actions, and the dozen other supporting players that pop in and out in this wild neo-noir. 

The best show of the year? Yeah, probably.

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The Studio Season 1 - 2025, AppleTV+ (10/10 episodes)
created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

Spoiler Alert, but The Studio ends with Seth Rogen's character, Matt Remick, head of Continental Studios, standing on stage in front of a theatre full of people trying to get a chant going... "Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies" and invariably the chant picks up and ultimately fills the theatre. Remick is elated.

It is, in context, just another of the many utterly absurd moments of the series. Here Matt and company have been trying to "Weekend at Bernies" their CEO Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) who had overdosed on mushrooms at Matt's party the night before, and ..ah, it was a whole thing. But the point being, a theatre full of people chanting "Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies" is so, so stupid in context, and yet...and yet, there's a power to it, to reaffirming that, yes, movies are awesome, and sometimes you just want to be excited about the concept of them and that they exist.

I don't take to cringe comedy well. I've done my time with it, and I generally try and avoid it when I see it coming. I can small-dose it, but I really am not enamoured by people being awkward and making things worse for themselves with either no self awareness or an inability to stop themselves. The Studio is sort of a cringe comedy, but it's so nestled within satire that it effectively tempers the cringe. 

The series finds Matt Remick appointed as the new head of Continental, and it's a role that Matt feels he's earned, but it rapidly becomes clear he maybe doesn't have the stomach for it. He loves movies, but loving movies doesn't make a studio money, and the compromises Matt must make at every turn seem to tear him up inside. But at the same time, Matt has to contest with his own pretentiousness, his own ego, his own film snobbery, he has to play politics with artists and agents and press and public relations and his own producers at the studio. He has to contend with the ever-shifting nature of Hollywood and what is trending, what is successful.

The Studio is the latest in a long line of "behind the scenes" at a studio, but it does so with stars in its eyes and a knife with which to stab it in the back. It loves it and reveres it and loathes it wishes there were something better at every turn. It's this balance of admiration and detestation that makes the studio work so well. It's a show that's aware that it's better to have studios than not, but that they're also fundamentally broken and will probably never get fixed.

Rogen and Seth Goldberg direct each episode, and their style for the series is to construct the episodes as a series of one-shots. So each episode will have anywhere from one to a half dozen edits, and that's it. If you don't notice it, it means the show is doing its job at being entertaining, and if you do notice it, it's hard not to be impressed.

It's a series loaded to the gills with guest stars, from Charlize Theron to Zac Efron to Ron Howard to Zoe Kravitz to Ted Sarandos to Martin Scorsese to getting Sarah Polley out of acting retirement, but it's all backed up with a core cast of great comedic performers including Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Hahn and Catherine O'Hara.

I can't get out of this review without mentioning that the big "tentpole" picture at Continental Studios is a Kool-aid Man movies starring Ice Cube. It's ridiculous and never ceases to be entertaining as the studio execs labour over the decisions they need to make on such a production.

There's also an irony to having a TV show that's really an honest love letter to movies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies. Moo-vies Moo-vies. Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies. Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies Moo-vies!