3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Honey Don't

2025, Ethan Coen (True Grit) -- download

Yes, I love complaining about movies. I love complaining, in general. Maybe "love" is not the right word, but its my default setting. And to be entirely honest, its not a pleasant way to live. So much about so much just bothers me and I have to let others know. To them, I apologize. To you, dear readers, I guess I don't, as you already know that I am challenged about saying nice things about stuff I like.

But, I liked this movie. Maybe so far as a lot. It just felt, from the opening titles, that it was a movie meant to be enjoyed by movie people. So, for the briefest in moments, That Guy returned. I probably liked it a bit more than Kent, and I suggest that may just be because he was so immersed in Coen-ish creations that this did not stand out, at the time. 

OK, neo-noir. That means we get a private detective, one Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley, Drive-Away Dolls); I so much want to call her a "private dick" but I won't - it would be inappropriate. What we don't get are harsh shadows punctuated by flickering neon lights. This is Bakersfield, California and any shadows there are, are blasted away by never ending sunlight. This is a depiction of a place I would love to disappear into with a camera, all faded, worn pastels, all low structures and dusty flat roofs. The movie begins with car crash, where a mysterious Tarantino-ish character steals a ring from a dead woman. That woman was Honey's prospective client and the rest of the movie is about Honey trying to find out why the woman wanted to hire her, and what happened.

Except its not. As Kent pointed out, its a "shaggy dog story", a story telling technique, oft used in comedy, where a sprawling, disconnected, over-descriptive story is told only to end by entirely not getting to the point. Almost all the plot points setup in this movie are, well, not satisfyingly summed up. There is the crime that starts it, and while we find out why, its not the climax you would have expected. There is a corrupted church cum crime syndicate but... oh, that's done with. There is a sexy love story but... oh wow, was not expecting it to end that way. 

The only thing that centers the film is Honey herself, a raunchy entirely self-actualized lesbian. Margaret Qualley just envelopes the role here, sexy as hell, confident and motivated, whether she's giving unsolicited advice to her teenage niece or fending off the advances of a (mostly) harmless police detective. Honey has to put up with a lot of shit, and she knows it. Those clicky-clack heels tell a hell of a character story.

Enter the Lexxicon: Eating Pattern

aka Lexx: 3.0

1997, d. Rainer Matsutani - tubi 

in trying to defy the Trek-method of sci-fi adventure show by relying upon irreverence, sexuality, and unheroic leads to carry it, the second entry of Lexx missed the mark on actually being engaging entertainment. Thankfully for this the third episode/movie the creators of Lexx seemed to consider that maybe the best way to make a show that's disinterested in sci-fi conventions is to use and abuse them in their own way.

A standard trope of Space Journey stories is receiving the automated cry for help. The last episode started similarly with a cry for help which resolved unceremoniously in less than a minute, and in this one the Lexx crew actually receive the message, but the cowardly captain of the ship, Stanley Tweedle is too paranoid of strangers to dare to venture there. Unfortunately the Lexx, a living technology, is running low on fuel and needs to feed. It makes a decision on its own to venture towards the signal and eat whatever the planet can provide (for this show, this should be a lot more interesting a process than it is, you know something gross and/or terrorizing... instead it's just like mandibles shovelling dirt into its maw).

Meanwhile, Stan and Zev's attempt to awaken Kai from cryosleep are unsuccessful. It seems his protoblood has run out and that he's now dead-dead, no longer un-dead. Zev wants to bury him on the literal garbage planet Lexx is feeding on.  After burying Kai, they spy what looks like an inhabited station and Zev wants to explore for food. Stan is, of course, opposed, but in this case he's right to worry.

What they discover is no less than fourth sci-fi tropes mashed into one. First there's a post-apocalyptic civilization of scavengers, second they are cannibals (of a sort) and third they are all infected with an alien parasite, and fourth the parasites are controlled by a hive queen.

But this civilzation, with their weird songs, and their silly games, aren't simple drones of an alien queen, the victims are still at least somewhat present in their bodies, if very much controlled by the worm things inside them. The worms are addicted to a substance called "pattern", and pattern is made from people (it's basically Soylent Green but liquid). Pattern is made from meat culled from the hosts during their games (where winners get pattern and losers lose limbs. for making pattern..if they're lucky). 

Stan encounters one of the key people in this group. Wisp (Doreen Jacobi) is an attractive, if dirty young woman in a Witchblade-like jumpsuit. At first she seems like a naif, and the worry is that she's a born-sexy-yesterday trope ("Do you like me" she asks in a creepily seductive manner), but nope...once again subverting tropes, she is a host to the queen's babies and she's responsible for infecting any new, clean meat. And so Stan is turned.

He then meets Bog (Rutger Hauer), who is sort of the de-facto leader of all the remaining people. If he leads it's because he's the only one who knows how to make pattern. Hauer delivers a thoroughly delightful and entertaining performance, and seems to informs the rest of the cast how being infected with the worm, and the delirium it causes, should be portrayed. Of course, he's the best and most delirious of the performances.

For this third installment, the creatives seem to have forgotten (or just ignored) that Zev is part cluster lizard that not only would give her enhanced strength and probably a resistance to being knocked out with a simple conk on the head, but also that would be a reasonable explanation as to why the worms wouldn't want to infect her. Instead she's basically just bound up for most of the episode. She's still exceptionally feisty and not docile, but this feels like some Golden Age Wonder Woman bullshit.

Kai, of course, saves the day at first (having been resurrected with some sort of amino acids spewed by the worms attempting to see if he could be a host), but there's not a whole lot he can do when the queen becomes a Titan-sized Wisp who gloms onto the Lexx and tries infecting it. The Lexx needs to learn to defend itself.

What lets it down is the special effects. You can see the intent, but it all seems rushed and short-handed. Like I said, if there were more budget, Lexx's eating of the planet would have for sure been a spectacle rather than the muted close-up it is. almost every digital shot is unrefined, like the budget ran out during the second pass. I don't know if the effects of the previous two instalments were as visually awful because I was watching it in bed, on my phone, through the haze of illness and this one I was watching on the big screen tv. 

Despite the janky sfx, Eating Pattern is an enjoyable Lexx episode in large part because it leans into the genre tropes and cliches, but mashes them thoroughly together and pushes them to, like, grindhouse levels of absurdity with some minor gore and more than a little humour. Also, unlike the last episode, there's more for the crew to interact with than just one or two guest stars. Quite fun, this one.

KWIF: The Housemaid (+1)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. More than a few sick days for ol' Kent this week, and usually that means curling up on the couch and just gorging on a diet of cold & flu Tylenols and, of course, movies. But the pain on my brain from sinus pressure was so debilitating for one of those days that I could barely leave my bed and just could *not* look at a screen. Here's what little I got up to...

This Week:
The Housemaid (2025, d. Paul Feig - Crave)
Universal Language (2024, d. Matthew Rankin - Crave)

---

The Housemaid is not a film meant for me, a nearly 50-year-old man-boy still obsessed with toys, comic books, superheroes and scifi.  Based off the novel by Freida McFadden, it seemed to me to be right in line with all the other chik-lit adaptations in recent years (Where The Crawdads Sing, It Ends With Us etc), which, again, I am not the target audience for. All this is not intended as disparagement...I mean, I spend two months of the year writing about Hallmark movies, which, again, I am not the target audience for. But where I've found an admiration for the cliches and tropes of the Hallmark formulae (and how they are broken), I've never quite grokked the women-in-peril-stories-for-women subgenre. I've never seen Single White Female or Sleeping With The Enemy for example.

I was warned in advance that The Housemaid was trash cinema, but a couple of reviewers had deemed it highest quality of trash cinema and it's hit some early best-of-2026-so-far lists, and, hey I *generally* like Paul Feig's movies, including A Simple Favor (not enough to review it, or watch the sequel, apparently...that link is to Toasty's review) so I thought, I'm trapped in bed with nothing else to do ...why not.

Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives as the Winchester estate on Long Island for an interview to be their new live-in housemaid (and occasional nanny). The place is pristine. Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried) greets her, shows her around the house, including the attic bedroom she would stay in, details the job, and both seem to feel pretty good about the exchange. And then we see Millie back in her car, where she lives, taking hobo-baths in gas station washrooms. We eventually learn she is out on parole and she needs a steady job and place to live, or back in the slammer she goes for another five years.

After a couple days, just when she thinks she isn't getting the job, Nina calls and needs her immediately. In the days since, the pristine abode Millie first saw is now a fucking calamity. So disastrous that it seems kind of impossible. Millie gets to work. She has the place restored to near perfection when Nina's husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and her daughter Cece come home. Cece, in a near Damien-from-The-Omen deadpan tells her shoes are not allowed on the furniture. 

The next morning Millie, having slept in a bed for the first time in ages, wakes up late, and rushes downstairs to find Nina in the midst of a complete meltdown. The place is trashed and Nina accuses Millie of tossing out a speech she had written. Andrew steps in and, like he's had to do this many times before, calms Nina down, kisses her passionately and carries her away, but not without looking at Millie apologetically first. It's just the first of Nina's micro- and macro-aggressions towards her, including canceling her Saturday off to run chores, then calling and asking Millie to pick up Cece from dance class, only not telling her where dance class is before hanging up, and when Millie arrives, another mom notes to Millie that Cece is sleeping over at her house and she calls Nina to confirm and disses Millie to. her. face.

Millie doesn't understand why Nina is fucking with her until a peek in her medicine cabinet reveals prescription drugs for treating psychosis. Later she overhears other mothers, at tea, talking about what a saint Andrew is (not to mention so sexy with a million-dollar-smile) for taking Nina and her daughter in, and learns from another nanny about how Nina tried to drown Cece and kill herself with sleeping pills. As Nina continues to harass Millie, Andrew needs to come to Millie's defence more and more... and Millie starts having nighttime fantasies about Andrew.

All of this is just the literal set-up. If it feels like Millie's being set-up, she is. But why. Why is Nina fucking with her so badly? It seems so...intentional, not just erratic thinking of a mentally unstable person. 

And that's the twist of the movie.

Where it seemed so obvious where this movie was going to start - Millie would have an affair with Andrew and Nina would make her life hell for it - the timing was wrong. This is a 131-minute film. From the moment Millie arrived on her first day of work, everything was awry and Nina started fucking with her immediately. A movie would usually build to such events and give us some explanation as to why they were happening. But here, we're left to wonder throughout the prolonged first act, is Millie's criminal past part of it? What about Nina's past?

And then there's Cece, whose need for control and perfection are downright creepy. But then we meet Andrew's mother (Elizabeth Perkins), whose every comment is something disparaging, nothing living up to her standards. The hints are there...is Andrew the problem?

The first act spans the first hour, and then it takes off when Millie and Andrew fuuuck. She's been in prison for 10 years and he's a big, handsome beefcake with a white knight complex...it was bound to happen. Nina finds out, like, immediately, and goes after Millie, but Andrew comes to her defence and tosses Nina out. And soon all the secrets start to unfurl, all the clues come together and the whole thing comes into focus.

Without spoiling too much other than what I've already spoiled, it gets dark, abusive and demented. Then there's a pivot where the abuse is still demented but not so dark. And the finale which ties things up in a nice little bow.

Except the bow is made of horseshit, such that spending more than 30 seconds thinking about not just the ending, (or worse, the franchise set-up) and the whole thing makes less and less sense. It's a trashy story that's barely held together with popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue. 

What Feig brings to the trash is a steady hand and a lens for wish fulfillment. There aren't many male directors who understand the feminine gaze like Feig. If this were an 1980's thriller, the sex scenes would be luridly all about Sydney Sweeney's naked body, but Feig knows that what's important to this film's audience is the setting, the mood, the touching, the contact. In the non-sex scenes he lovingly captures the idyllic Winchester house, he get's Millie's POV that even amidst all the hardship she faces from Nina, there's still something she desires about this place. He gets that as much as a naked Brandan Sklenar is of interest to his audience, Sklenar wearing a white tank-top and showing his muscles put to use picking a weeping Amanda Seyfried up off the floor is even sexier. Feig makes a good-looking picture, and makes good-looking people look good in his good-looking picture.

I am not on the Sidney Sweeney train. She's not a bad actor, but she's not a tremendously versatile one either. I've never been wowed. Sure, she has curves (paging Dr. Wenowdis) but her dead eyes counteract the allure.  Maybe in time she will develop from it-girl to prestige performer like a certain K-Stew I really used to dislike and now have tremendous respect for. That Sweeney is taking ownership of her films, nailing those executive producer credits, and no doubt having full control over how much of herself she wants to show and how she wants to show it does relay that she has some idea of what she's doing, at least on a business end. 

Seyfried is quite good here, but only as good as the script will allow her to be. It's within her ability to put Nina into performance mode, and relay to the audience that that is what she is doing, but it would betray the twist of the story for her to do so, and so she's stuck playing Nina as, basically, two different characters. The Nina of the first half who we have to hate, and the Nina of the second half who we need to sympathize with.

The Housemaid is not a bad time, if it's your sort of thing, but it's not really my thing and I was left just kind of annoyed with it.

---

When I think of filmmaking and Winnipeg, I think of Guy Maddin, the surrealist Canadian filmmaker obsessed with the silent era and with a penchant for stories that revolve around a fictionalized version of himself (I also think of Hallmark movies, but that's besides the point here). It's an impossibility that Winnipeg-born director Matthew Rankin wasn't influenced by Maddin's films, as there are touchstones too hard to ignore in Universal Language, Rankin's second full-length feature.

I am by no means a Maddin expert, so comparing this work against Maddin's filmography is a bit beyond my grasp, but just to point out that Universal Language does feature a character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) who is returning to his hometown of Winnipeg to visit his mother. The story, toying with ideas of identity, community, and reality, also presents itself in a non-linear narrative, and the world in which it takes place is not unfamiliar, but is definitely an alternate reality to our own. Rankin does not share Maddin's fixation with early cinema, he does, like Maddin, have a fascination with branding and advertising and the way in which products penetrate our lives. 

The Winnipeg and Canada of Universal Language finds Persian and French as the national languages (no English words are spoken or seen). The Riel is the currency of this version of Canada (with Louis Riel's image stamped upon it), and the Quebecois of the film seem to have real difficult understanding the landscape of Canada outside their own borders... sovereignty is still a fixation.

The patient pacing of Rankin's film is immediate from the first frame, a frame which holds for over three full minutes. It is of the exterior of a school. The entrance in the middle left of frame, the window into as classroom in the upper right. The bricks and windows and eaves create width across the frame and make for their own frames. The class, as viewed through the window, is fully chaotic, unruly. A man carries his luggage in a hurried gait across the frame, up the stairs, into the entrance in the middle left, appearing again as a he enters a doorway visible through the window in the upper right. He scolds his class mercilessly. He's not a fan of their behaviour. And as he berates them, a child enters the lower left of the frame, up the stairs and into the entrance before it cuts to the interior.

Rankin uses this minimalist technique throughout the film, a static shot, precisely framed, often using brick or cement architecture to create depth and space within the scene. The camera doesn't move, instead it becomes all about the movement within the camera. It's spectacular to watch, to marvel at the precision of the movement and the eye that understands what to keep in and what to leave out of the shot. 

The story, as it were, not only finds Matthew returning to Winnipeg to visit his mother, but two young sisters, Negin and Nazgol, who discover a 500 Riel note frozen in ice on the sidewalk and seek a means to retrieve it, as well as Massoud (Pirouz Nemati, also the film's co-screenwriter alongside Rankin and Ila Firouzabadi) who leads a dubious tourist group through mundane highlights of the city.

There are sub-plots (well, "plots" might be a bit much) about turkeys of the wild and pageant-winning variety, Kleenex bingo, and birthday cakes, and in the end everything is connected, which is the whole point. As Massoud says to Matthew, "Just as the Assiniboine joins the Red River and together they flow into Lake Winnipeg, we are all connected, agha". The beauty of the film, beyond the visual aesthetics, is the discovery of the connectedness. The details of this alternate reality are so unique that they stand out, so once the pieces start coming together, it's easy to see how they all fit, but it's possible a second viewing would unveil even more.

I wondered what the purpose of the character being named after the director (and played by the director) was, as it's hard to know when something plays with the surreal in this way what of this film is personal. Has Rankin found himself deeply ingrained in the Iranian-Canadian community, and this is his message to his country and the world of how warm and kind the community is, or is this simply an absurdist conceit that he really committed to? I have not delved into the works of Jafar Panahi yet, but my understanding of the Iranian filmmaker is he often works blurring the lines between what's real and personal and what is fiction. So as much as Rankin is tapping into Winnipeg's most notable filmmaker, he's also reaching outward to much broader cinematic influences (he also cites Iranian cinema legends Abbas Kiastroiami and Sohrab Shahid-Saless as influences as well as other Winnipeg directors John Paizs and John Paskievich, among others. I am, of course, unfamiliar with any of these).

The climax of the film finds Matthew finally reaching his mother, only to learn a stranger has been taking care of her in the years since he's been away. There's an unspoken element, that there was distance between Matthew and his parents, and that in that distance someone else has filled the gap. Though not presented as "big drama" in the moment, there is something nakedly raw and emotional about this idea, that we can find ourselves more connected to strangers than our own family, and also in that disconnect we can lose ourselves.  

It seems 2026 is the year I invest more of my time in Canadian film. I really need to see Rankin's debut The Twentieth Century, and I need to do a filmography walk through of Maddin as well. 

---

Enter the Lexxicon: Super Nova

aka Lexx: 2.0
aka Tales From a Parallel Universe

1996, d. Ron Oliver - Tubi

There's a brilliant gag in the Father Ted Christmas special ("A Christmassy Ted") where Ted opines to the other inhabitants of the parochial house that he's looking forward to a nice, normal, uneventful Christmas with no big surprises... then the doorbell rings. Ted answers the door to find a bassinet with a swaddled baby stirring. Just as he's about to pick up the baby, a woman appears from out of frame and asks if she has the right address. Turns out no, and off she goes with the baby. The "Three Men and a Baby" plotline is teed up and then quickly snatched away.  It's a great subversion of expectations, especially in how sitcoms often will borrow plot lines from popular films just to fill the schedule and as a cheap shorthand to jokes.

At the start of Lexx's second tv movie/episode, we see a pod containing a single humanoid life form floating in space. It's emanating a message, on repeat, advising of this life-form's mission. His people are dying, their children are dying, and they need help from outside to help save them. He's floating in space in cryosleep hoping to encounter someone, anyone who might receive the message and be able to help him and his people in their most desperate hour. Then, enters the frame the giant dragonfly spaceship,the Lexx. We know this set up from countless Space Journey shows... he is rescued and the next course of adventure for our cast of characters is chosen. Except the message is not heard, and the life pod smashes into the Lexx and explodes leaving nary a scratch and no one inside the ship is even remotely aware of what might have been. For Lexx's second episode, it's the creators yelling at the audience "we are not that".

Instead inside the Lexx, 790 rhymes off love poems about his dear "Zev Zev" while scanning the star charts for Kai's home planet of Brunnis. Zev wants Kai, but he is dead, so he does not want. She hopes his home planet can somehow return him to full life. Stan meanwhile propositions Zev while she's showering (while nudity in TV has become exceptionally normal in a post-Game of Thrones world, in the 90's it was still a bit sensational for any TV to have breasts or butts or whatnots), intoning that she's a love slave and he has needs... but he is resoundingly rebuffed. "Realistically Stan, there's not much to like about you. You're old, unattractive...self-centered, vain, weak-willed, treacherous...." Zev may have been programmed for love, but she still has standards.

Kai is awakened by the insatiable cannibal Giggerata who they rescued last episode. She has designs to eat his cold meat but he gets the best of her. He directs Stan and crew on where to find Brunnis. Landing on the planet they discover the planet is deserted, and Kai directs them to the archive, the reservoir of the planet's knowledge. Only the AI that operates the reserve has been hijacked by Poet Man (Tim Curry), the one left behind when the Brunnen-G all left Brunnis.

Inside Zev, Stan and Kai each are transported into a memory machine that manipulates them based on their memories and desires. Zev sees snippets of her history - her parents abandoning her and the matron of the holocare home guiding her through wifely lesson - before Kai emerges, alive and they perform a romantic duet. Stanley, meanwhile, is tempted by lust, only to find him a prisoner of an impregnation scheme (that mistakenly identifies him as female). Poet Man has turned the archive into a house of torture.

While the crew is on the planet, Giggerata has free reign on the Lexx where she meets the Divine Order (the collection of all the telepathic brains that had once inhabited His Divine Shadow) and, after she attempts to eat one or two of them ("Too salty!") they lure her to their side by promising her the location of the planet of milk-fed boys. She needs Stan to pilot the ship to her new feeding grounds. The storylines thus intersect as the Divine Order advise Giggerata on how to destroy Brunnis and Kai -their greatest threat- in the process.

Once again this Lexx installment feels exceptionally random, as if constructed by free association. While "I Worship His Shadow" was off-beat and took a lot of strange detours, it was still propulsive, and its ability to link the disparate characters it introduced together happens rather organically. "Super Nova", on the other hand, seems a bit lost for purpose. The intent of the episode is the get more into the characters and their motivations, but they're so thin (or non-existant) that it doesn't have enough to really explore. 

It's the problem with Kai being undead, and not having and wants or desires or really any feelings at all...the return trip to Brunnis is at best observational. He has no attachments. It's only Zev's very limited want to find a way to restore life to Kai (something he repeatedly intones is impossible) that moves them to explore the planet. 

All this leads to a largely tedious and repetitive episode with almost no stakes that doesn't demand the 90-minute runtime it has. Giggerata is the episode's highlight throughout, just a delightfully weird, angry, vengeful and hungry character (played by Ellen Dubin). 

While the previous instalment hinted at the idea of cycles of existence, and prophets who can see the past cycles in order to predict the future, there's a short sequence here that touches on it again, although rather than imparting anything new into the operatic elements of the story, it's restricted to the threats immediately at hand. And it doesn't help anything that the episode's climax, what saves our waylaid crew from an otherwise hopeless situation, is a complete deus ex machina.

Where "I Worship His Shadow" was bristling with ideas and energy, "Super Nova" seems largely devoid of them. As far as the creators knew, they had an order for four 90-minute episodes, so it's entirely too early for this kind of filler. 

I was wrong twice with my review of that first installment of Lexx. First I said that Stanley Tweedle will never show any growth in this series, and immediately, in this second episode Stan rejects Giggerata's proposition to turn the Lexx into a love-ship if he abandons Zev and Kai, and instead stands by his friends instead of fulfilling his own needs. But maybe that's all the growth we ever get out of him. Second, I said I was as sucked in as I was 30 years ago. This episode kinda put the 'suck' into 'sucked in'. It has its moments, but they're few and far between.

Enter the Lexxicon: I Worship His Shadow

aka Lexx: 1.0
aka Lexx: The Dark Zone Stories Part 1

1996, d. Paul Donovan - tubi

I love the Series 1 VHS boxes
that look like sf paperback
novel covers

It's hard to believe that Lexx turns 30 this year. I didn't realize it had hit this anniversary when I was cruising Tubi and saw that the series was available there (I have DVDs of the entire run, I was just being lazy in not retrieving them). It's been at least 20 years since I last watched it. 

I was a big fan of the series, but I always felt a bit ashamed about this fact. If you've ever seen it, you will understand why. If you've never seen it, if you've never even heard of it, well, let me give you a brief description.

Lexx is a series about horny space travelers who have hijacked the most powerful weapon in the galaxy and have absconded with it into the Dark Zone:  an unruly, ugly place of violence and depravity, and possibly some kindness...but unlikely. It's a show that wears its modest budget proudly on its sleeve, revels in being just a bit too gross and a bit too kinky for mainstream acceptance. 

A Canadian/German co-production, Lexx is a lower-budget space-faring action-adventure series that finds the coward Stanley Tweedle become the living key to operating the Lexx, an experimental dragonfly-shaped spaceship that has the ability to destroy entire planets (it's an organic Death Star, in bug form). He is accompanied by Zev whose transition into a love slave whose DNA accidentally got mixed with a cluster lizard, so she's weirdly strong and fierce. And then there's 790, a robot head whose mixed-up programming has him obsessed with Zev. Kai is an undead assassin who is also the last member of his race, fabled to bring about the destruction of His Divine Shadow, the leader of the Divine Order that rules of the League of 20,000 Planets.

"I Worship His Shadow" is effectively the Lexx origin story. It's where it all starts, beginning with Kai and his brethren's last battle against the Divine Order thousands of years earlier, and losing. We get a sense of how the hierarchy of the divine order works when a new His Divine Shadow is chosen. Only this time, the transference of the divine shadow into its new host body still has some of the murderous psychopath impulses remaining and this totalitarian ruler is about to get a lot more nasty.

The host planet of the League of 20,000 Planets is The Cluster, which is underpinned by the a monotonous drudgery of bureaucracy. A heavy debt is usually owed to Terry Gilliam's Brazil any time sci-fi shows the tediousness of ruling bureaucracy. The story of "I Worship His Shadow" largely lives within the bureaucracy, though the larger operatic swoops in starts slapping the bureaucracy around. 

We meet Zev as part of prisoner processing. She is a fat, snaggletoothed, pimply woman who failed to perform her wifely duties (she slugged her juvenile betrothed smack in the face on her wedding day). Her punishment is to be transformed into a love slave and sent to a brothel planet as penance where she's to serve the rest of her days.

Stanley Tweedle is a "class 4" security guard whose surly, selfish, lazy behaviour leads to nearly a thousand demerit and his latest infraction may see him put to death if he doesn't report for corrections, where he hears may lose a limb or some organs.

As the new His Divine Shadow starts to establish his new way of rule, a prisoner, Thodin, leader of the resistance, has sprung free from his confines and wreaking havoc on The Cluster. Zev's love-slave transformation is disrupted when a cluster lizard gets caught in the transformation process, decapitated robot 790 takes some of the love slave programming in a feedback surge, and Stanley's desperate, cowardly last-minute race to corrections is interrupted by Zev and Thodin. (It turns out Thodin knows Stanley and he is deemed an epic traitor to the cause). His Divine Shadow awakens Kai to put a stop to Thodin's insurgent activity, and in the process the key to the Divine Order's latest, greatest weapon, the Lexx, is transferred to Stanley. Kai manages to awaken some long-dead memories and turn on the Divine Order, and they all escape in the Lexx into the rift towards the Dark Zone. Kai, however, only has a limited amount of "protoblood" left to keep him animated (about 10 hours worth they say) so he enters cryosleep and advises Zev and Stan to only awaken him in case of emergency.

By no standard is Lexx "good", but at the same time, it's kind of great. Its digita effects, even for the time, were a bit clumsy, but the special effects as a whole have a cobbled together, kitchen sink approach, with a plucky charm that still remains. The sets are like Geiger by way of Cronenberg, alternatively organic and suggestive, or industrial and grimy, and are meant to make you feel uncomfortable. Even when there's no sex or violence on screen, there's an inference of one or the other in the set design.

The storytelling of Lexx, as witnessed by this first 90-minute movie-length premier (the first season is actually four 90-minute movies, although I first watched them on Canadian television as 8 hour-long episode, with commercials) doesn't like or want a clean narrative. There's a lot of erratic happenstance even in this first episode, and it's already clear that the show's creators (Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff and Jeffrey Hirschfield) delight in the asides and mundanity of this reality they created.

Lexx is a space opera, but one that dwells in the basest of levels. It's like if Star Trek Voyager was about a quartet of weirdos who wanted nothing to do with the Star Trek universe, and yet kept stumbling their way through it. The operatic elements keep finding their way into the characters lives, despite their best efforts to avoid it. The fun the creators have is starting the series off in a realm ruled by an evil overlord (ala Star Wars) and then instead of building up its characters as the freedom fighters who will save the galaxy, they instead turn tail and flee to an even more dismal plane of existence.

Marty Simon's score to Lexx was a particular favourite of mine back in the late 90's. Full of synths and jangly guitars, it feels suitably grimy, while the infusion of real and electronic sounds meshes so well with the show's biotechnology aesthetic. The way Simon's score often pulsates, it accentuates the horny overtones of the production, as if it's the composition for some other-dimentional adult video.

Brian Downey's Stanley Tweedle is a very unlikeable character because, as mentioned multiple times now, he is an utter coward only ever concerned with his own self preservation. Even the pilot episode offers him no hope of redemption down the road (and, from what I can recall, none ever comes, he's a character who stubbornly refuses to learn or grow from the experiences he has).  

Zev is the heart of the show, the one character audiences are meant both sympathize with and lust over. Eva Habermann is a very attractive actress, and the show is keen to remind us as if we couldn't tell. Habermann has a wry glee to her performance in this first movie, and one little tip-off (her "See ya, loverboy" kiss-off to 790) tells me there's some Lori Petti's Tank Girl influence on the character.  There's a bounciness to Habermann's portrayal of Zev in this inaugural episode that emanates positive energy, and makes her the bright center of the Dark Zone.

Michael McManus plays Kai, and his performance was always the one I brushed up against during the original run. The character is literally dead inside, and McManus plays him as such. He has the weirdest facial ticks and physicality which always struck me as too odd and uncool for what was supposed to be the bad-ass killing machine archetype.  With the eyes of a more seasoned viewer I can see that McManus is trying to make Kai interesting and unique, not cool, and I guess as I re-watch I'll see if he succeeded. Also, Kai is designed to be pretty, rather than handsome or scruffy-looking, and that probably made me uncomfortable once upon a time.

Barry Bostwick turns in a cameo appearance as Thodin, the leader of the resistance, running around the sets of The Cluster in a Zardoz-esque loincloth that is so undignified that I don't think I appreciated how much Bostwick must have delighted in wearing such an absurd and revealing costume and being presented as the great and studly hero.

There's a lot of joy to be found in "I Worship His Shadow". It's silly, it's fun, it's sexy and off-putting, alluring and disgusting, and it refuses to play by there rules. I'm as sucked in as I was 30 years ago.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Killer

2024, John Woo (The Killer) -- Amazon

John Woo remaking his own movie 35 years later. I didn't have that on my nostalgia Bingo card. 

The original The Killer was one of those groundbreaking movies for us, introducing us to the Hong Kong stylized action movie world, which we saw multiple times in rep theatres. I cannot remember if the interactive one, where audience members ran around with cap guns diving sideways, shooting each other, or it was something we envisioned when The Mayfair in Ottawa started doing more and more movies with audience interaction. I am going to go with "it really happened".

This was also peak That Guy time when I was exposing myself to as much cinematic experience as I could, fully immersed in everything the world could offer me, from big Hollywood blockbusters in big chain theatres to re-runs and small foreign films in the aging rep theatres of whatever city I was living in at the time. Of all the elements of That Guy I would like to return to, I think that enjoyable experience, without judgement of quality and relevance is what I would like.

The plot is the same. A skilled hitman is tasked with taking everyone out during a job, and that meant EVERYONE, even the young woman she accidentally blinds, a seemingly innocent bystander. But everyone meant everyone, so our new Killer, Zee (Natalie Emmanuel, Game of Thrones), is now running afoul of her handler Finn (Sam Worthington, 9 Bullets) and the client who hired them.

Zee sees herself in the young woman she saved, a lost young thing taken advantage of by the men around her, in a world she pretends to not know. The woman Jenn (Diana Silvers, Space Force) is more mixed up in it than she initially claims but once Zee has decided she is to be saved, nothing will change her mind.

Emmanuel is incredibly thrilling and sexy as Zee, mirroring the impeccably dressed white-suited Chow Yun-Fat from the original (I know, I know, the white suit is just one scene, but its what I remember) but also bringing more to the role. You can see in her actions, her pauses, that she has become tired of her role as killer. knowing more and more each day (or at least finally acknowledging it) she was manipulated into the position. She is also not happy she sees a replacement already in the wings.

Running along after her, as the investigating cop, who more wants to her bosses than her, is Sey (Omar Sy, Intouchables), the Parisian cop who is not only attracted to her (who wouldn't be) but also intent on ending her killing spree, as he is just A Good Cop.

If the movie falls a little its in its desire to recreate the memorable gun fight in the church scene, pigeons/doves flapping everywhere, sideways dives and spins, bullets and bad guys coming at them from all angles. There were too many times when I thought, "Uhh you didn't really have to dive dramatically to shoot that guy from that angle." I think Woo was trying to balance making a new version of his movie but also fearing he would be frowned upon if he didn't recreate some key elements.

KWIF: Decision to Leave (+4)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. All watched this past Saturday. It wasn't even a sick day.

This Week.
Decision To Leave (2022, d. Park Chan-wook - Crave)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999, d. John McTiernan - AmazonPrime)
The Brood (1979, d. David Cronenberg - AmazonPrime)
The Double (2013, d. Richard Ayoade - Tubi)
Payback: Straight Up (2006, d. Brian Helgeland - AmazonPrime)

--- 

I have recently come to describe myself as a "pop culture tourist". After a few months of adopting this moniker, I realized that some might think it to mean I go out into the world, traveling to places to visit sets and locations from movies or going to theme parks or whatnot. While that sounds lovely and all, I'm not that adventurous, nor do I have the liberty or finances to do so at this time.

Instead it means I like to visit pop culture domains, spend some time there, see the sights, hear the sounds, and then move on to somewhere else. I resist becoming part of any particular community of fandom, and while I might gain more knowledge or awareness on a particular popular culture aspect, I am by no means an expert. I adopted the "pop culture tourist" ideology as a way to absolve myself of not having to know everything on a topic, of being up to the level of a lifelong or die hard fan.

I write this all to denote that I'm not nearly well-versed enough in Park Chan-wook's filmography to comment on how this film deviates from his previous efforts, nor can I really say I went into it with any particular expectations.

Looking back on my recent reviews of older Director Park films watched about a year ago, I recall had intended to tour his entire filmography along with the Blank Check podcast, but I fell off their pacing and couldn't catch up. So I come into Director Park's latest film pretty cold. Like, I'm not even expecting his "Vengeance Trilogy" level of violence or uncomfortableness. I literally had no expectations.

Within minutes of the film starting, I had a big smile on my face. Director Park (I use this honorific as a result of the various Oscar wins for Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, where cast and crew, upon accepting their award, would refer to him as "Director Bong". It seems fitting to do the same for Park Chan-wook) is an incredible visual stylist, both very playful and intentional. Insomniac Busan police detective Jang Hae-jung (Park Hae-il)  and his partner are on the case of a death that appears to be accidental, a rock climber found at the base of a mountain. Among the many different, unusual shots Director Park cycles through, one is of ants crawling over the dead man's face, including across his eyeball. Then the camera cuts to the POV of that eyeball, and the underbelly of the ant as it crawls across. 

If it's even a two-second-long shot I'll be amazed, but it's just one of dozens in the first ten minutes, and one of hundreds throughout the film. Before we even know what the film is, Director Park is setting a tone that tells you this isn't going to be your standard murder mystery, and to expect the unexpected.

A few minutes later, the dead man's widow is in the police interrogation room and Director Park delivers a shot with the woman, Song Seo Rae (Tang Wei), in the foreground, her face in profile obscuring two-fifths of the frame, with Hae-jung partially obscured in the the middle, and his partner in the background. Only Hae-jung is in focus. It's a striking image, and I'm sure other directors have produced such shots before, but it's a striking image that I could have just stared at like a photo hanging at a gallery for a very long time.

The pacing of the opening act of the film is pretty breakneck, and even when it slows down, it's still dispensing an incredible amount of information that is kind of hard to process, and would probably be just as intense even without having to read subtitles. Even though he's dispensing information at such a rapid clip, he does so with intention, such that every bit of information appears relevant to what we're watching. And every bit of information is relevant. Even if you didn't catch it, or don't retain it, when the information does become relevant again, Director Park gives you a prompt without making it feel like he's spoonfeeding you the film or insulting your intelligence. It's usually through conversation and the character understanding the context of something he or she saw earlier in the film, such that the audience is realizing something the same time as a character. It's so impressively savvy in its storytelling.

At it's heart, Decision to Leave is a romantic noir. Hae-jung is married, but he works in Busan while his wife lives and works in Ipo. They mainly see each other on weekends. They have conversations about how their arrangement works for them, and in some ways make them a better couple than others. They are familiar with each other, contented in their own way. But with this latest investigation, with the widow Seo-rae, he is immediately fascinated by her, and his interest in her as potential murder suspect begins to turn into something else altogether.

Seo-rae is a femme fatale in this rather vibrant noir, and while her backstory may read like a textbook femme fatale, Tang Wei's performance sidesteps all the cliches. She has a harrowing backstory as a Chinese immigrant, permitted to stay because of Korean heritage. She has a career taking care of the elderly, as she did with her grandmother, whom she helped commit suicide in the late stages of her illness (which is why she had to emigrate). Her husband, the dead man, was an immigration officer, and her hero knight in shining armor, ensuring she didn't get deported, except he was also abusive and marked her as his property, having his monogram tattooed upon her as it was stencilled on so much of his property. It's pretty clear where the detectives would see a motive, but her alibi is rock solid. 

Hae-jung isn't convinced that she is what she presents herself to be and blurs the line between investigating and stalking her, however unlike The Dual (see later in this post), it's absolutely clear in Park Hae-il's incredible performance that his sleep-deprived mind is so addled that he's not even really that clear on his own motivations for tracking Seo-rae so persistently. But Seo-rae is very aware of the attention he gives her, and, takes a strange comfort in his attention, rather than offence. It's clear from Tang Wei's performance that she understands this isn't the proper response she should have, but she can't help it.

The film twists, it time jumps, then twists and twists again, but not in a Shyamalan-style. The transitions are much, much smoother. While there is a detective bit to this noir, it's really all about the relationship between this man and woman. The chemistry is electric, but it remains unfulfilled until deep into the movie, and is ever the sexier for it. There are sex scenes with Hae-jung and his wife, but they are perhaps the most staid and unerotic moments of the film. They are scenes that tell us much about Hae-jung and his wife as a couple, as well as provide some curious (and funny) insight into how his mind is constantly working.

At 139 minutes, it is a fairly long film for a noir, but it's never boring and earns its runtime bolstered by two incredible lead performances. It's like the film has its own built-in sequel where the time jump midway is a natural break point if you need it, but the two sides of the film make for a tremendously fulfilling whole. The ending is a real all-timer, wickedly potent in concept and visual execution.

---

What spurs me on to watch the films I watch? What prompts this tourist to visit these cinematic locales? Sometimes it's a stupid boy project, like my Go-Go-Godzilla series where I watched all the Godzilla series (soon to be a Ga-Ga-Gamera series), sometimes it's just pattern programming - whether it's films from the same actor, director, composer etc or similiar titles or themes or original+remake - and often, since I discovered it, it's following along with the Blank Check podcast as they go through a director's filmography film-by-film.

I've not been great about following along consistently, as witnessed with Director Park above, and with their follow-up series I only got through the first phase of David Fincher's career before I hit a stumbling block that I've yet to get back to. They're currently on John McTiernan, a director who has the greatest action movie of all time under his belt (that'd be Die Hard) and a few other incredible classics (Predator, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard With A Vengeance) and more than a few massive swings and misses (The Last Action Hero, Medicine Man, Rollerball).  

The Thomas Crown Affair I recall in 1999 was a pretty big, buzzy hit, featuring Pierce Brosnan as an art thief and Rene Russo as an insurance investigator out to prove he did it. It was the steaminess between the two that had audiences flustered and nodding and winking at each other as they exited the theatre.

But, it was 1999, and I was all about The Matrix and The Phantom Menace and Fight Club and Toy Story 2 and The Sixth Sense and Austin Powers and Galaxy Quest and Go and Three Kings and and and.... The Thomas Crown Affair seemed to me a film for the Boomers and not a nerdy kid who was leaning heavily into this new school of filmmakers.

But as a middle aged person, I'm now in the target demographic for The Thomas Crown Affair, and, well, is not aping Brosnan's James Bond in any way, which is the thought I've long held about the film. But that's neither a positive nor negative sentiment.

The story is largely told with Catherine (Russo) as our POV character but it is overloaded with the male gaze. Russo and Brosnan are hottt tttogether, with some mega-sttteamy scenes, but the movie never seemed to know what, tonally, it wanted to be. I could never tell what the film wanted us to think about this couple, if they were playing each other or falling for each other or both. And what were we supposed to get from Leary and Russo's dynamic? The film doesn't seem to know what it wants the audience or the characters to feel about what's going on, and that would works so well if the intention were to put us in Catherine's confused emotional mindstate, but it's too busy ogling her to do so. I mean, yes it was kind of a revolutionary thing for a Hollywood picture to ogle a 45 year old woman in the 90's, but it loses its focal clarity every time it does so.

A large part of the blame on the film's nebulous tone is the Bill Conti score. It's too playful and at times total grated Parmesan, confusing the intention of scenes more than it enhances them, and rarely locking into any particular emotion.

The Dunaway therapy sequences seem like they're from another movie altogether, especially considering the POV is so heavily leaning to Catherine's. These are the only real attempts to get in Thomas's head and each one felt jarring. I'm assuming they were late-stage additions to accommodate the stunt-casting of the female lead from the original 60's version.

While liking parts, I didn't really enjoy this as a whole. As Denis Leary's police detective points out in the end, it's all kind of Rich People BullShit and I think our collective tolerance for RPBS has gone down dramatically in the 25 years since the film came out.

I found myself often wondering about Thomas' manservant Paul (James Saito) and what his life was like outside of Thomas Crown's household. What does he get up to in his days? Does he know about Thomas' illicit activities? Does he like Thomas or is he just hired help and is resentful of this uber entitled prick? Paul is such a non-character, yet such a presence, it was odd we get no sense of who this guy is.

I also wanted much more Frankie Faison. Is there a warmer presence on screen than Franke Faison. Every time he left a room the temperature went down. But there were other thing going on here putting the temperature back up, if ya know what I mean.

---

The Blank Check crew have not done David Cronenberg yet, but it's only a matter of time. Cronenberg's films are purposefully lurid and uncomfortable, making them simultaneously attractive and off-putting. I have seen many (but not all) of his films over the years, and there are those that I like, a couple that I really like, a few that disturb me, and maybe one or two that don't work at all.  I would love to step through them all chronologically, but that's a pretty heavy investment that would likely take a dramatic toll on anyone's brain to watch too much Cronenberg in concentrated doses.

I saw C-berg's first two films, Shivers and Rabid, back in the late 90's on cable TV. I was weirded out by both of them and have been meaning to watch them both again ever since. I hadn't seen The Brood before, and to be honest, between these three titles, I keep forgetting which story applies to which title.

The tale here finds a single father, Frank (Art Hindle) picking up his daughter from the wife Nola (Samantha Eggers) he is separated from.  She lives in an experimental psychiatric clinic where the chief psychiatrist, Dr Hal (Oliver Reed) a fully accredited doctor, runs experimental "psychoplasmic" treatment on his patient. When Frank discovers bruises all over his daughter's body he blames the wife and the clinic, and prepares for a legal battle.

It's the 70's so taking a child away from their mother is a tough road to hoe, so Frank starts reaching out to former patients, where he learns that psychoplasmosis turns negative emotions into tumorous lesions which the body tries to expel, but some patients are left hideously deformed. While Frank is away Nola's mother and later her father are killed by a snow-suited child-sized troll-like creature, but when Frank is attacked it kind of "runs out of gas" and dies. The autopsy scene is sans the Cronenbergian gore, but the sheer delight on the medical examiner's face as he dispenses all the weird inhuman details of the creature is so in the director's wheelhouse.

I'm sure in the 1970's the shocking revelation in the final act would have been truly horrifying, but for a modern audience, we see what Cronenberg is telegraphing by the end of the first act. And yet...when it gets to that actual reveal... well it's still shocking. For everything you might have been expecting (and you're probably pretty close to being right) you still weren't prepared for the visuals.

On its surface, it's a pretty silly movie, especially when it comes to the murder sequences, which are anything but intense or scary. It doesn't help that Howard Shore, very early in his scoring career, apes elements of the Psycho soundtrack so blatantly as to feel pale and derivative. 

And yet, it's not a picture so easily dismissable, despite the kind of cheesiness it has. Cronenberg is poking at and peeling away scabs with this one. He's talking about childhood trauma, about parental abuse and an early conception of its cyclical nature. He's talking about mental health and in its nascent years how it is perhaps exploitative (he will come back to the subject again). It is dealing with the intensity of having a partner who is having psychological issues, and what that does to one's own mental well being.  It's not exactly saying anything concrete, but it's opening up the topic for conversation in the midst of a very odd horror film.

The Brood feels entirely a part of Cronenberg's early efforts (or what I recall of them), as if is a member of a loose quartet with Shivers, Rabid, and Scanners. He goes Hollywood after Scanners with Videodrome and The Dead Zone, the Fly and Dead Ringers, which, along with Naked Lunch again feel like a different age of Cronenberg, a bolder, more audacious, still steeped in genre yet less pulpy, more psychological. He's a director that continues to evolve in different phases, and I really need Blank Check to give me the impetus for that start-to-finish watch of his filmography.

---

At some point I need to do a stupid boy project watch/rewatch of doppleganger movies. Enemy, Us, Dual, and The Double being the ones that come immediately to mind. I love stories where people discover an alternate version of themself.

British comedian/panel show guest/travel show host/actor/writer/director Richard Ayoade's The Double is less about the discovery another version of themselves than the alternate version descending upon them as a better, more confident, more outgoing, attractive and successful version of them. 

Jesse Eisenberg is an actor I traditionally dislike quite a bit, but I've been finding of late I've been appreciating him much more. He definitely has tendencies in his performances, twitches and quirks and a general way of being that, in larger-scale movies, drives me up the wall. But in a smaller picture like this, or the Art of Self Defense, or Vivarium, I've been pretty comfortable with his performances, maybe even positive towards them.

Here he plays Simon James, the ultimate of ultimate sad sacks. Charlie Brown as a 20-something in the working world, only less self aware and even more depressed, insular and isolated. Everything that can go wrong will when he's around, and he's completely incapable of expressing himself, so he just accepts it. He may be bothered by the world around himself, and his inability to affect change in his own life, but the only regret he seems to have is being unable to talk to the girl at work, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska). And then James Simon shows up at work, wearing his face, taking credit for his work, drawing all the attention and respect and admiration, he's the complete opposite of Simon, and yet everything he wishes he could be...until he spends time with James and realizes that James is the worst version of himself, not the best. Like a huge overcorrection, confidence-gone-nuclear.

Aesthetically, this film is 100% my thing. Every frame of it. With the inspiration of Dostoyevsky's novel of the same name, this turns to brutalist interiors, severely cold and sterile environments full of archaic-looking technology with limited use, scant buttons, and lots of oversized cabling protruding from it.  It's retro-futuristic but as if Russia won the Cold War in the 1970s and left it to the oligarchs to keep society running.

My biggest hang-up with the film is the trop of the socially awkward introvert obsessing over, stalking and creating a narrative in his head about a girl, and then winning over that girl? It's problematic wish fulfillment. Ayoade seems aware of this problem, even has Hannah call it out explicitly, yet Simon doesn't really achieve any self-awareness of his behaviour or express genuine remorse for it. I get that Simon thinks he sees in Hannah, through his telescope, someone sad and lonely like him that he can relate to- another ghost of a person- but that's the fantasy a socially awkward introvert does build within their mind when they start obsessing over someone else they don't truly know because they've never truly interacted with them in any meaningful way. I've been that guy (to a much lesser and creepier degree) so I understand Simon pretty well. But here, in presenting Simon's illicit observations of Hannah's persona as truth, and it becomes a dangerous cliche to uphold, validating the idea that obsession from a demure introvert is harmless or comes from a place of good intentions. The film denies Simon a lesson in how his behaviour, as innocent and innocuous he believes it to be, should have actual consequences.

I liked it a lot but with complex reservations.

--

I talked about reading Darwyn Cooke's adaptations of certain volumes of Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake)'s Parker series of novels when I reviewed the most recent adaptation of the character into an ill-fitted Jason Statham vehicle. Payback, written and directed by Brian Helgeland, imagines Mel Gibson as Westlake's tough guy with a moral code.

The film was originally released in 1999, but in a heavily compromised form. A simple search of it all finds that Gibson, an Oscar-winning director, was asserting his then mega-watt starpower over Helgeland and ultimately had the writer-director removed once principle shooting was completed. Rewrites were made and reshoots were done, and a compromised film was released that much less resembled Westlake's The Hunter. It was still a modestly successful film at the box office, but I don't know that it left a lasting impact on anyone.

But Helgeland somehow managed to get control back a half decade later, with a re-edit and tightening of the picture getting it close to his original intent and much, much closer to Parker as a character and The Hunter as a story.

This "Straight Up" edition is actually fairly remarkable in its faithfulness to the rhythms of the story (as I know it at least through the Cooke graphic novel adapataion). There may be some tweaks for it's setting 40 years in the future of the late-1990s but it feels in spirit with the story.

It finds Gibson's Porter (not "Parker" as Westlake notoriously refused anyone using the name without committing to multiple pictures, something his family should have posthumously kept true to for the awful Statham picture) having just returned to New York after 5 months away. He was betrayed by his wife and his partner after a job, shot in the back twice and left to bleed out and die. 

Hale and healthy, he's back for his cut of the money his partner stole, but the man used it to pay his way into The Outfit, the top tier of organized crime in NYC. It doesn't matter to Porter who has his money, he's going to collect it from someone. The film finds him weaving his way through his past life and the networks of New York, with one singular goal in mind.

It's a very brisk and enjoyable production. I read up on the differences between the "Straight Up" edition and the 1999 cut, and it seems worlds apart. Parker is a man of a very specific code of conduct, and he's also a man of little emotion. Porter is the same, only a bit more emotional. Where Parker is very cunning, tough-as-nails, and a bit of a hulking brute (and a total prick), Gibson's Porter is a bit more of a stumbler, less cunning, tough, but not hulking (Gibson is not a big man). Gibson strives for the emotionlessness of the character from the page, but can't help but emote. It's in his nature as a performer, so he reveals more of a softer side to Porter, but in facial expression only.Porter is also less of the tank that Parker is, and he feels more like a loose cannon than a man fully in control. It's just what Gibson brings to the role.  It does get pretty uncomfortable watching Gibson slap his wife in the film around. Very uncomfortable. It's true to Parker, but also true to Gibson, so, ick.

But, stepping out of that meta-aspect, good movie. I would love a stupid boy project marathon of all the other Parker adaptations from the 60s and 70s but none are readily available to stream or rent, except maybe Gross Point with Lee Marvin (who seems like a total Parker to me).

3+1 Short Paragraphs: A Simple Favor

2018, Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) -- download

So yes, I am that guy who constantly questions why the fuck he is doing with this page. Is it a review site? Is it a personal blog? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? I occasionally Google "how to write a movie review" to see if there are any snippets of wisdom or gems of insight that will magically lift my writing from struggles of apathy and mundanity into crystal clarity views of my soul, and its connection to film. Alas most of those hits are so mundane, they make me read like Tolstoy. At least I know what I am not as bad as, despite how clumsy this sentence is. One article I came across claimed I should never write about any movie I don't have great passion for, positive or negative notwithstanding. But if I did that, I would never end up writing at all, as passion from my stress addled brain (and strained heart) is a rare beast.

For example, Paul Feig (who to be honest, I enjoy more as a supporting cast member of Joel McHale's Netflix-d The Soup) releases an enjoyable little movie that didn't inspire any passion in me, but definitely entertained me. Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) is a crafty v-blogger, single and rather introverted. She bumps into fellow mom Emily (Blake Lively), who is pretty much the polar opposite. But a play-date and many martinis later, the two are ... friends? No, not quite. But they have... something.

Their relationship flows quickly as Emily's vodka & gin (tee hee! Aviation Gin) and is never easily defined, especially after Emily disappears. The revelation of what happened to Emily goes from weird & quirky to the realm of murder-mystery which actually stymied my guess-the-Hollywood-formula game. It's not exactly Shakespeare going on here, but honestly I would (and do) watch Anna Kendrick update her Twitter account, so I was enjoying myself.

So, not passionate but entertained. And I am recording that. I am relating what I am watching, because if I don't relate it to someone, then it will be lost, right? Someone has to validate all this time I am wasting on dross. So, if you leave Like or a comment (hint hint) or Kent returns from his idyllic Letterbox'd to leave a contrasting review, then my life will be complete. No, not really, but ... moved along.

P.S. Not from Kent, but from a review from a Kent ?

P.S.S. This poster is wonderful ! Take a gander at IMP Awards for a bunch of wonderful posters. So, OK a bit of passion for the poster!

3 Short Paragraphs: The Legend of Tarzan

2016, David Yates (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) -- download

I knew little of this movie but that Margot Robbie was a breathless, sweaty Jane, and Alexander Skarsgård was a shirtless, ripped Tarzan. So, something for everyone. What I didn't know was that the movie was basically a sequel to all the modern Tarzan movies that never existed. Its like Yates went to the table with this movie as a reboot slash sequel slash homage to a popular franchise that never existed. What have we had from the Rice Borough stories in the past 30 years? A handful of incredibly bad movies with beefcakes (Caspar Van Diem, Christopher Lambert and Miles O'Keeffe) that you would not heard of, and that Disney cartoon. The last one was the best.

The movie begins with Lord Greystoke in England, after the Tarzan years, living his Lord-ship with his American (???) wife Jane. They are being encouraged to head back to Africa, the Congo, either as an envoy for Belgium (which has just taken control of the Congo) or for America, which has suspicions that Belgium is making slaves of the Congolese people to help pay of debts. Its a convoluted story worthy of a Bond script. What is happening behind the scenes is that Belgium can collect a massive amount of diamonds from a tribal leader, if they bring Tarzan back to Africa so he can extract revenge.

The movie is actually rather successful in its use of flashbacks, to remind or introduce us to what Tarzan was. It is not successful in dispensing with the White Saviour trope, though it tries. We live in an age where I am not sure we can take a Tarzan Lord of the Apes seriously. Only a white man can come along and make friends with the animals AND the black locals, and save them from other white men? I get that stories from past ages are rife with the social constructs that existed at the time, but I am challenged of what their places are in today's story telling. But putting that challenge, this movie looks so good, a truly epic looking view into an Africa long gone.

I Saw This!! What I Watched Pt. iii

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Graig or David 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.  Miss a Next Big Thing bad.

Part i, ii are here.

Dollhouse S2, 2009 -- Blu-ray

I did a Season 1 post during its days on Netflix. I didn't get around to a ReWatch post when I cracked the seal on my Blu-ray Xmas gift, but I thought it fitting to do one for Season 2.

Having powered through S1 again, I have to admit, the basic premise, the titillation with the Eliza Dushku doll was not there for me this round. This time it was all about the Bigger Picture, the one I knew was there, behind the scenes happening piece by piece. I believe Whedon wanted this series to be his Westworld, a scifi show with a big moral statement behind all the flash and action and exposition. Unfortunately, S2 was the last season he got, and with due notice, at least he got to rush to the finish line.

We come into the season with all the pieces in play. Ex-FBI Ballard is now inside the dollhouse, working alongside Echo, who has survived her Alpha (Alan Tudyk) ordeal, the 36 personalities seemingly expunged back to doll state. But she is really in there, a unique personality that is separate from her body's own, a person unto herself. The wipes don't work anymore. But she plays a good game for her puppet masters.

The conspiracy spirals, including and excluding characters, with Topher becoming more and more self aware of exactly how dangerous all this tech he has created can be. He has already let it fall into the wrong hands, but can he stop The Apocalypse before it happens? As we have already been exposed to the episode Epitaph One, we know he cannot.

Despite his obvious and myriad flaws, my heart is with Topher this season. He is an amoral man who thought he could ignore consequences and just have as much fun as his big brain could allow. But he is ill equipped to deal with guilt and realization when it comes slamming down. Despite that, he still makes the right decisions.

Now with Whedon knowing this was the final season, he got to go Full On Whedon inviting in all his favourite actors from Buffy and Firefly. Whedon should always indulge, not just to bring smiles to the faces of his fans, but because with the chemistry already there, the interaction becomes effortless. Alexis Denisof and Summer Glau are there briefly, enough to build great characters and further the plot (and I do mean plot) along. But they bookend nicely into the already familial interaction going on with the core cast.

The series ends on a ... well, a low note. We knew it would, as Epitaph One leads to Epitaph Two, where the penultimate episode win still collapses, and the end game of the doll tech leads to the collapse of the planet. Someone releases it into the wild creating a 80s style PoAp world full of rage zombies and a few original personality people who avoid technology while seeing sanctuary with the dollhouse gang. The world may have ended but that doesn't mean they cannot save the day.

A Series of Unfortunate Events S1, 2016 -- Netflix

The older movie was OK. Jim Carey wasn't terrible.

But the idea of Neil Patrick Harris playing Count Olaf had me rather excited. And now that I know what the word twee means, I am rather getting into the aesthetic. OK, it's true, I have always enjoyed the liberal use of mish-mashing timelines.

Plot brief. The Baudelaire children have just lost their parents, and are sent by an upwardly mobile but emotionally stunted banker, to live with their closest living relative, geographically, Count Olaf. Olaf is a terrible actor (community theatre) cum criminal who wants the Baudelaire fortune. He is not worried by the fact that he can only get it if the kids die.

As the title states and to which we are constantly reminded by the narrator Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton), things only get worse.

Set dressing, background design, minimal effects, costuming and songs -- all are absolutely brilliant. And so are so many of the performances, but it didn't all pull together for me. I am not sure why, maybe sliding into it being far too impressed by itself. I felt it almost wanted to be Brian Fuller meets Wes Anderson, both in styling and tone. But it never quite achieves.

And I am still amused that they cast Malina Weissman, to look like Emily Browning, from the Jim Carey movie.

ReWatch: The Island

2005, Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor) -- Netflix

Yes, I rewatched the movie that if we had been reviewing in 2005, Kent and I would have been going on and on in our merciless mockery. Why watch it again? Cuz it was a post-sickie afternoon and I needed some fluff. And because sometimes you look back on light, terrible fare with a certain amount of fondness. Or you want to torture yourself.

It must be noted, that by the time the trailers of the movie were hitting the 'net, I had already seen the MST3K of Parts: The Clonus Horror so I was in the camp that Bay had ripped off someone's old, terrible movie to plot his new, terrible movie. The basic premise is that cloned people are being grown as replacement body parts for wealthy patrons. They are "raised" with a promise of nirvana, The Island for said movie and America for Parts. And one clone begins to question this setup. The creators of Parts sued and it settled out of court, so there must have been some merit to the lifting.

This was Scarlett Johannson still launching her career. Lost in Translation got her noticed and she had done enough since to become the face in a Calvin Klein commercial, which was actually cutely inserted into the movie. Ewan McGregor was airing out his last days as a young, hot action hero which he never really did get off the ground. They are both pretty clones, but I could not help but thinking, "Isn't he a bit old for her?" I ask myself that a lot lately, because we straight men are raised to worship the early 20s Hollywood beauty, even as we age past the time when that lust would be appropriate by our cultural standards. Personally, I have gone past that age-gap into the "she's young enough to be my daughter" phase. Cultural standards are weird, contradictory, doubly and confusing.

As a movie, this is classic Baysplosions. The clones are on the run and a mercenary team is out to catch them, no matter what the cost. Cutesleeze Steve Buscemi is the first collateral damage in their escape & desire to stay alive. But as they continue to run, things explode, crash and get shot to hell all around them, leaving me wondering how many die to keep them alive. You could assume that they are too young (vat grown is fast grown) to really be very aware of such implications but in a movie that is supposed to be about the desire to stay alive despite the odds, you would think it could be commented on. Nope, blow some more bystanders up so Scarlett's pout will live another day.

If you have a moment, YouTube the re-use of the highway chase scene. Bay re-used entire elements of the cars being crushed for his subsequent Transformers movie. Which is amusing unto itself, considering this chase scene is so The Matrix reminiscent.

I add a lot of splashy, glitzy explosiony scifi movies to The Shelf. But Bay doesn't get added. For some reason, while I enjoy the adrenaline rush of his movies, they don't have repeatable joy. This was an experiment to see if it  should be added, but no, confirmation made.

One Episode: The Leaks in the TV Plumbing

One Episode is the segment where we edit the opening italicized paragraph, and talk about shows we have watched one episode of (and sometimes more, and sometimes less). This has nothing to do with quality but a desire to see everything that was *cough* leaked.

Lucifer -- Fox
Blindspot -- NBC
Minority Report -- Fox

OK, full disclosure. I am not all that familiar with Lucifer the comic book. It came out right around the time I was having Vertigo comics withdrawal.  The comic was a spinoff of the story from The Sandman where Lucifer Morningstar, The Fallen and King of Hell, left Hell and offered the keys to the kingdom to Morpheus, Lord of Dreams. In the comic Lucifer runs a piano bar, and that was pretty much all I knew about it.

In the TV show, Lucifer runs a swanky, decadent nightclub in LA with his demon sidekick Maze. It doesn't take long for the premise to kick in, when a pop diva he is fond of is gunned down in his company. Lucifer is immortal and unharmed and pitches in to help the investigation. Thus, we get 'she's an LA detective and he's the Ex-King of Hell, and together they fight crime' !! Amusingly enough, that formula is the basis of two of my favourite shows of the last decade -- Castle and Forever.

I loved this pilot, and mainly due to the way Tom Ellis (Merlin, The Fades) plays Lucifer. In character, he is comparable to a GBF (gay best friend; charming, catty and has the best lines) combined with a raving heterosexual cad. Wilde-ean was how Marmy described him. But the best aspect is how he does not hide who he is, from anyone. "You don't get this immortal thing, do you?" he asks Detective Dancer, played by Lauren German (Chicago Fire, Hawaii Five-O) after she witnesses him getting shot, to no effect. To round out the two of them working together, some mysterious force doesn't let his carnal rufie power (kinda creepy, but he is The Devil after all) work on her.

It was fun, and I don't know the comic, so it doesn't affect me whether it was accurate or not.

Meanwhile Blindspot held an immense amount of 'meh' for me.

You've probably seen the trailer -- bag found in Times Square, the Square is cleared with bomb squad approaching, when the bag unzips itself and out steps Sif/Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander, Thor) naked and covered in tattoos. Some nefarious group/person has covered her in arcane tattoos but wiped her memory entirely. She has procedural memory, just no life memory. As Exposition Character explains, "she knows what music is, but has no idea who The Beatles are." Also, she has the name of a high profile FBI agent prominently displayed on her back.

Jaimie Alexander does a good job of playing the trauma this young woman is going through. Scared, lost and utterly confused. The law enforcement agencies are not treating her nicely, as I guess we now accept their unilateral post-911 powers blindly, but the guy with his name on her back makes a connection. Meanwhile mysterious beardy guy shows up in the background.

The premise kicks in when she reads some Chinese that is written behind her ear. That leads them to a terror plot by a disgruntled Chinese national. She is allowed to tag along, probably because the entirety of the FBI and HLS don't have Chinese translators (*insert sarcastic frowny*) and ends up displaying martial arts superpowers, as well as translating for High Profile FBI Guy. And she has flashbacks to being trained by beardy guy. She saves the day.

That was what I didn't like. They dump the hidden agenda far too quickly. They should have milked the utter mystery for all its worth. But now we know there is a conspiracy, created or controlled by beardy guy, that took a very capable woman (Jane Doe) and turned her into a no-memory crime fighting force. Kind of ruined it for me.

Meh.

Finally, we have Minority Report, which I knew was going to be bad, but luckily its only Canadian SciFi TV bad, not bad bad. As you know, I love the movie, but was not sure how they would lift one of the precogs from their idyllic island house back to Toronto... ahem, Washington DC. The fact the series is so obviously Toronto, despite blankets of CGI everywhere, is kind of distractingly fun.

So Precog Kid is older now and curious about the world. He comes back to the city and has been attempting to stop crime, like the PreCrime Division used to. But he only gets part of the vision and has been failing at his crime fighting ambitions. I believe he says over a hundred people have been murdered because he is lacking. But then he runs into a Perky Young Detective (as you can gather from this whole post, I rarely recall names of new show characters) and helps her solve a crime; kind of.

Surprisingly there is a lot more depth here than in either of the two other shows. Perky Young Detective lives with her mom and baby brother. She also has the usual department tension with Wilmer Valderrama and Precog Kid will definitely give her a step up on crime fighting. And Precog Kid's twin brother is out there, trying to make contact. And something is going on with all the released criminals, that were put on the street when the Precime Division shut down. There is a lot of the world the writers want to play with, I am just not sure if their writing chops are up to it. Or maybe it was the director.  Not sure.

I will watch it when it starts and see where it goes.

But one thing I am loving is the CG. You know I loved the CG from the movie, and they are having even more fun expanding on the world it built.  This world is less dark, more on the colour of the screens everywhere and the social media gone wild, that the Tom Cruise movie wouldn't have predicted. If one thing about the world bothered me, is that they kept on dragging out visual cues from the movie. We did not need to see a fight on fire escapes, nor did we need to see his face gone melty. And the replacement of the jet packs with stupid cable driven backpacks was plain ludicrous. Just run with the fun stuff, and abandon all the other props please.