KWIF: KPop Demon Hunters (+4)

 KWIF= Kent's Week in Film. So much this week. Like, almost a Toasty-paced week of film watching. And a lot of pulling from the binder.

This Week:
KPop Demon Hunters (2025, d.Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang - netflix)
O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000, d. Ethan (and Joel) Coen - dvd)
Marathon Man (1976, d. John Schlesinger - dvd)
Superbad (2007, d. Greg Mottola - dvd)
Sorcerer (1977, d. William Friedkin - dvd)

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As a lifelong "outsider", I'm intrinsically suspicious of anything that's popular. Suspicious, and sometimes dismissive, perhaps even resentful, and often curious.

KPop, as a genre, is not designed for me, and as music, it is most definitely designed. Like girl and boy bands the world around, it's taking sounds that are popular, hollowing them out, and ramping up the feel goods in multi-part harmonies, unique hairstyles and choreographed dance moves. It's as much about aesthetics and performance as it is about music. It's as much about commodifying images as it is about meaningful sounds. It's just pop. It's for the populace, of which I so rarely feel (or desire to be) a part of.

KPop Demon Hunters is most definitely not designed for me, as it's so designed around the conventions of KPop and KPop celebrities, and yet it is a film that, if you give it half a chance, challenges you, and challenges you hard to not be charmed by it, at least a little.

It is the product of North American writers and directors, based off a story originated by Korean-Canadian Maggie Kang, with Korean-American and Korean-Canadian voice actors as well as Korean and American singers. It's firmly set in Korea, with Seoul being its primary backdrop. Aesthetically it's vibrant and full of life, and its rhythms feel one-part anime, one-part music video, and one-part Nickelodeon comedy.  I went into the film, unintentionally, with walls up, and the humour knocked the first brick out.

The story tells of the the history of demons preying upon the people of earth, and of the legacy of women with golden voices who hold those demons at bay. Now, because of the popularity of KPop, the trio known as Huntr/x -- consisting of brash Mira, peppy Zoey, and leader Rumi -  is so very close to turning the Hunmoon (a protective magic barrier) golden and permanently disconnecting the demons from this world. But Rumi's secret is she's half demon, and the closer she reaches to her goal to cutting her demon half off, the more she loses her confidence.

Meanwhile their adversary, the demon god Gwi-ma, senses his defeat impending, and agrees to let one of his most adversarial demons, Jinu, fight fire with fire by starting a boy band to steal some of the glory of Huntr/x and stop the golden Hunmoon.  Naturally Jinu finds out Rumi's secret, and she sees something in him he hasn't seen in himself in 400 years, and they crush hard on each other. But can they really trust each other, especially when Zoey and Mira are beginning to have doubts about Rumi.

This is a movie full of songs, but it's hard to call it a musical, given that the characters don't bust out into song and dance, except for when giving performances, and they seem to always be giving performances. There is, seemingly, an album worth of songs here, most of them derived/appropriating their style and swagger from modern popular hip-hop and R&B, again with the edges sanded off and the whole thing polished into something shiny and reflective. The songs are mercifully well-crafted (this wouldn't work at all if they werent) and deviously infectious (if you're of a certain mindset, you'll find them aggravatingly catchy, and hate yourself for admitting that you like it, if only a little).

There's potentially some culturally Korean aspects that I didn't pick up on, like its main theme around shame and guilt are relatable to a certain degree, but I wonder if there's deeper cultural context to the struggles the lead characters are facing. For all the soda pop-iness of the picture, there is aspects that dive deeper than just the saccharine sweetness and empty calories that it could have subsisted on at the surface.

By the film's finale, which climaxes in a big song that is at once a reunion, a declaration of self-love and respect, and of a promise to not blindly follow the path that's always been taken when one can see a different way forward... it's powerful and had me swelling with emotion. 

There's been talk of a Buffy The Vampire Slayer reboot, but Buffy had her time and KPop Demon Hunters is clearly the heir apparent to this kind of story. 

It's a well-earned phenomenon. Not intended for me, but I liked it all the same.

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The power of film is often to transport us into another reality. It could be another place, another time, another world, or another mindset or perspective than our own. Movies are an escape, but not all movies are escapist movies. Some are reflective, mirrors of the world we live in or of the self, and some will stir up traumas, intentionally or not.

O Brother, Where Art Thou is intended as an escapist film. Loosely based off Homer's The Odyssey, it follows three convicts of varying intellects and educations as they escape off the chain gang and into a series of vignettes in late-Depression Era Mississippi. It is, at its core, a comedy - full of old timey slapstick and farce - subcategorized as a musical and an adventure.

There are some great visual gags and physical performances in this film, a lot of it from Clooney who really does lead the film with every watt of star power he has within him. Save for some little moments I don't find the film very amusing as I actively resist being transported into the world the Coens are trying to drag me into.

The Depression Era is, like, a total bummer, man, and the deep south is so, so, so very racist (even more so than the film lets on, and it lets on a fair deal...there's an extended Klan sequence that I have a real hard time with). These are not places I particularly want to spend time in, and I can't ever help but question the motivations of characters and the authenticity of how scenes play out. I know it's fiction and it can push and pull and twist its characters how it wants, but I have a real hard time relaxing and letting the Coens push and pull and twist me along with it.

Music plays a very big part in the film overall, with a key moment in the film finding the trio (made up of Ulysses, Pete and Delmar, played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, respectively) stumbling into a radio station/recording studio with Tommy, a bluesman they picked up at a crossroads in a stolen car. They record a very uptempo, impromptu rendition of "Man of Constant Sorrow", which, unbeknownst to them when they continue on their travels, becomes a massive success.  

The music of the film, produced by T Bone Burnett, ripples through gospel, blues, bluegrass, swing, folk and country. It all owes a complete debt to the Black musicians of the south but is largely performed by white vocalists, and the movie is, by and large, excessively pale. I have a hard time spending this much time with culturally appropriated music that really seems like "Black music for white people"... which is exactly what it wound up being. The soundtrack won "Album of the Year" at the Grammys in 2002, and it has sold over 8 million copies since its release, but much of it really sets my teeth on edge.

Like the film, the songs are exceptionally well crafted. The film looks great (thanks Roger Deakins) and the sounds are exceptionally well-produced, but for me I just cannot get into it. When the soundtrack blew up in the early 2000s and indie music bloggers were raving about it, I really didn't know what the hell was happening in the world. The film was a slow burn success but I didn't wind up seeing it for years because it didn't look like something that would appeal to me (and when I did watch it the first time around, I was most definitely right about my assumption).

I've said many times now that Coen Brothers films can take time and repeat viewings to get into. I really had no memory and basically an absence of an impression of how I felt about the film from my first viewing between 15 and 20 years ago, so in essence this rewatch felt like a first viewing all over again. It may truly just be that I need to give it another watch, and soon, to see if I can move through the film with maybe anticipation of certain moments that I liked, but for now it's truly sitting at the bottom of my rankings list.

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I had never seen Marathon Man before, but the dental torture scene, with its "Is it safe?" refrain was unavoidable piece of cinema history. (Did the Simpsons parody it? Probably.) It was a reference I've been meaning to put into context for decades, to wit, I've had a dvd copy of the film since the mid-2000s and have only now gotten around to watching it.

The film opens so damn curiously with a road rage incident in New York that finds a Jewish driver aggressively confronting a German driver, before an intervening tanker truck filled with gasoline calms the whole situation down with fiery death.

The connection at first is obtuse. The film takes its time setting its players up. There's the graduate student, Babe (Dustin Hoffman) practising to be a marathon runner. There's Doc (Roy Scheider), a spook practicing his craft in Paris, who turns out to be Hoffman's brother (have there been two more distinct noses in a film that are playing kin?). There's Christian Szell (Lawrence Olivier), a Nazi scientist who has escaped to South America, but whose brother was the German who died in the New York car crash.

How these three come into engagement with one another is convoluted, and involves Babe's new girlfriend Elsa (Marthe Keller). It is the process of discovery as director Schlesigner pulls on the individual threads that starts binding them into a tighter and tighter knot.

I was never exactly certain where Marathon Man was going, and it's surprising how many genuine surprises it retains even 50 years after its debut. The "Is it safe?" sequence, while memorable, is actually of so little consequence in the film. It's a scene of futility, of a man trying to extract information out of someone who has no information to give him.

I would flat out love this film if not for Dustin Hoffman. I've never been much of a Hoffman fan, even as I admit that his sort of nerdy, naive presence in this film is so close to being exactly what this role needs (he's sort of the Jesse Eisenberg of his generation). But Hoffman goes large too often. Too often the ego of the actor appears in his character and he falls out of servicing the role and instead services himself.

I'm also left with the question (no, not "Is it safe?") of ...how old is Babe supposed to be. Hoffman was in his late 30s shooting this film, and he looks every bit his age. It's clear the film is trying to age him down, but he looks like a middle aged man attending college. If he's supposed to be a college-aged student, then Marthe Keller (who looks like a grown-ass woman) seems way too old for him, but if he's supposed to be his own age, then it's like, she's far too attractive to be interested in a nearly 40-year-old man who is still going to college.

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By the time Superbad debuted in 2007, the majority of crass teen sex comedies of the 1980s had already aged poorly. The "gotta get laid" urgency mixed with the ogling male gaze meant that the gender and sexual politics of the film were beyond juvenile and often criminal.

Going back to Superbad for the first time in quite some time was met with a little trepidation. I mean, in the intervening years, somehow, Seth Rogen has become the busiest man in Hollywood, starring in multiple award-nominated TV shows, appearing in goofy comedies and prestigious auteur-driven movies alike, producing a plethora of successful TV shows in both animated and live action formats, and being a highly accomplished writer and director himself, alongside his partner Evan Goldberg. All this to say, he's gotten to where he is for a reason, so in that I had some trust that Superbad was maybe not going to completely disintegrate with age. 

Rogen and Goldberg started writing Superbad even before they had a career in Hollywood, but when they were given the opportunity, this was the script they knew could be their calling card, the script was very personal to them, an embellishment of their time at the end of high school in Vancouver. The characters played by Michael Cera and Jonah Hill are not coincidentally named Evan and Seth.

As the film begins, Grade 12 is winding down. Evan and Seth are seemingly attached at the hip, best friends for life, but college is going to tear them apart as they're attending different schools. Evan seems eager for change, though not as a slight to Seth, but Seth feels like Evan is going to move on without him. As school winds down, they both have girls they've been crushing on, but have been too awkward to really make a move. They sort of make a pact that they'll both make moves, especially when one of their crushes throws a party and invites them. Their friend, Fogel (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), has just gotten a fake ID, and so they promise to bring the booze. Of course, nothing in the transaction goes smoothly, and what results is a wild and crazy night for these outsider kids as they try to make it to the party and impress the girls they like.

Seth, in Hill's hands, is an abrasive motormouth with no off switch. He seems incapable of over sharing, and has no filter. He's a lot, and, although it takes a while, the film shows us he knows it. For it's many hilarious scenes and the McLovin of it all, the film's greatest accomplishment was casting Emma Stone as Jules, who seems to see through the coarse surface and finds something charming in Seth, something which Jules seems to match and feed off of. Likewise, the pairing of HIll with Cera, who is still in full George-Michael in Arrested Development mode at the time, is spot on. Cera plays the awkward nerd who clearly gets frustrated with his loudmouth friend because he approaches the world so differently, but also he just as clearly admires him for moving through the world in a way in which he never could.

The film's finale, which finds Seth rescuing a passed-out Evan by carrying him from the house party being raided by the cops, is the sweetest damn thing. It ends with the boys having the easiest of reconciliations after a fight earlier and drunkenly dozing off in sleeping bags on the floor of Evan's basement professing their platonic love for each other. It's freaking adorable and warms my jaded heart. If only every story were so open as to show two men sharing honest emotions with each other so as to provide men with both exposure and the roadmap how to.

Also, the cops in this film, played by Rogen and Bill Hader, who take McLovin under their wing, are an absolutely brilliant construct of two guys who abuse their every power, and are representative of cops kind of being the worst (ACAB), and yet, as supporting characters for Fogel, they're fantastic.

Any worries I had about the film not holding up are non existent after the rewatch. If anything, it's the precursor to Netflix's Big Mouth which would debut a decade later, but feels so indebted to Superbad. It's a hilarious movie, with richly formed central characters, an incredible supporting cast, and it executes one of the best in "one crazy night" subgenre of comedy.

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William Friedkin's Sorcerer - a remake of the French thriller The Wages of Fear, itself an adaptation of the French novel Le Salaire de la Peur - has been sitting on my "to watch" list since the 1990s when Tarantino cited it as one of his favourite films and called it one of the best films ever made.

It was a film that came out in 1977, up against some garbage called Star Wars which consumed all the air on the planet and choked it to death. Sorcerer has developed a cult following, in large part thanks to the Tarantino citation, but it has never quite dug itself out of the grave Star Wars put it in.

I found a copy of Sorcerer in the used DVD bins last year and snapped it up. I imagine there has been a more prestigious release (yup, in fact Criterion just released a new edition in June), and I have to imagine a new 4K restoration probably adds something to this film. The old DVD is a "fullscreen" version that is muddy as hell (but then it is literally a muddy pictures... so much wet dirt).

Like Marathon Man the film opens obtusely, with a series of disconnected events. The first shows the murder of a man in Veracruz, Mexico, the next a Palestinian bombing in Jerusalem and very brief manhunt. The third jumps to Paris with a very Fargo-esque vignette about a man deep in debt and desperate to find a way out (without trying to appear desperate), and finally a heist gone very wrong in New Jersey.

All of this leads to a character from each of these segments having fled to a remote village in South America. There's an operation taking place, setting up an oil pipeline, and there is need for a lot of manual labour. The village is largely local, but with no shortage of international players, all who seem in the same escaping-from-something position. When an accident occurs and the well catches fire, the only means the company can find to put it out, given their remote destination, is an old supply of highly volatile TNT.  They need to teams to venture thought the jungle in refashioned, Mad Max-style trucks to transport the dynamite to the site so they can smother the fire.  The journey is, quite literally, killer.

There are certainly political and sociological subtext to examine in this film but it works so remarkably well just on the surface as a riveting and intense procedural, where the procedure is delicately navigating harsh jungle paths and the craziest of bridges while transporting cargo that seems ready to explode at the slightest provocation. There's not really much need to dig deeper even though you can.

There are remarkable "how'd they do that" sequences that feature no indoor sets and no miniatures, just crazy preparation and a little on screen magic. In modern cinema, they wouldn't take on the expense or the discomfort and variability of remote shooting, they would just CGI it all, and it's a gazillion times more impressive in all being practical. As well, the film never oversteps its peril, it shows you the stakes and it lets its scenarios play out those stakes without adding complication upon complication. It's tense enough thank you without having to overtax the audience.

It is, at its core, a dark story about desperate men, and not, say, two evil wizards throwing fireballs at each other in the jungle as I originally surmised it to be. But don't hold that against it.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

 2012, d. Benh Zeitlin - Crave

A place called "the Bathtub", a sinking island off the coast of New Orleans. The culture there is one of community, self-sustaining, and utilizing the discards of the mainland in creative ways. They teach the ways of their land from one generation to the next, whether it's catfishing by hand or what mix of herbs to help an ailment. To outsiders their little slice of life might seem like the direst poverty, but to them it's the only way, and there's little worthwhile in the outside world, though they're painfully aware of its existence. 

The culture is painted with its own history, its own stories, its own sensibilities, which gives it such a distinct tangibility that one would mistake it for a fictionalized version of a real place, but it's all a fantasy... which in a weird way makes it one of the great fantasies put to film, and yet one cannot help but think that this is an uncomfortable glorification of poverty.

After a great flooding of the Bathtub, our protagonist, her father and what remains of her people are wrangled up and taken to a temporary evacuee shelter, where they're given clothes, food and medical attention, force upon them against their will. The severity of it recalls E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, where the people charged with generally caring for these people as a whole are villified...somewhat. There's definitely allegories at play (think of "for the greater good" policies inflicted upon indigenous populations all over the world) and yet is living unbathed in filthy squalor something we should be celebrating and championing Hushpuppy, our 6-year-old hero played by the captivating Quvenzhané Wallis, to return to?

It's a complex subtext to wade through. The traditions and the pride in community are enviable to the utmost degree, but the routine drunken nights, the squalid 3rd-world living conditions, the floating whorehouse with a heart of gold ten miles off the coast (where perhaps our hero's estranged mother works)... this isn't a healthy ecosystem. As a routine the Bathtub teeters on the brink of life and death and yet it's denizens seem more than content with it. But is it choice, or lack of choices that keep them there?

Fascinating movie especially after recently watching Nomadland which also has a complicated narrative with America poverty, and the "choice" of poverty as a liberating value.

[Toasty's take]

Double Dose...of Dornan

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...pretty simple.  Today: two films co-starring Jamie Dornan)

Synchronic - 2019, d. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead - Netflix
Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar - 2021, d. Josh Greenbaum - Crave

Let's talk, very briefly, about Jamie Dornan.  Up until I put on Synchronic I didn't quite know who Jamie Dornan was.  Honestly, I thought he was an actor from Game of Thrones but I couldn't place which character he was.  My wife, the GoT expert had to set me straight that he was not in the show...and wasn't he the 50 Shades of Gray guy? 

Yeah, that's him.

Like an older Robert Pattinson, Dornan's big break was as the lead male love interest in the most egregious of housefrau book-to-film adaptations, the type of film that actively rebuffs any sort of hetero male or critical viewing.  The type of film we look down upon the stars of for nothing else but association with the property what deigns to have a rabid fanbase of female followers.  The type of film that said stars have to crawl out from under the weight of.  It took Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson years to get out from under the Twilight shadow.  Dornan's 50 Shades co-star Dakota Johnson has had a bit of an easier time escaping the series, but the perception of Dornan seemed to relegate him to second-string man-candy, and the generic black-haired handsomeness that likely gets him confused for Sebastian Stan, Kit Harrington or Richard Madden by the populace at large.

Synchronic was never going to be the breakout movie for him.  He, alongside Anthony Mackie, lend the film some low-wattage star-power that gives its two directors, indie genre darlings (and Toast&Kent favourites) Benson and Moorehead, a bit brighter of a spotlight.  

Mackie is the focal figure here, a New Orleans paramedic with a brain tumor who becomes very intent on figuring out the strange deaths he's encountering throughout town.  Dornan is his paramedic partner, his best friend.  Where Mackie is terminally single, Dornan feels bogged down in his marriage and being father to a once-suicidal teenage daughter.  He's envious of Mackie's freedoms, but doesn't see the loneliness that Mackie bravely smiles through, weary of the one night stands.  They both look at each other with the view that the grass is greener on the other side.

The strange deaths seemed to be linked to the drug "synchronic", but it doesn't explain the weird, anachronisms that surround the bodies, like sword wounds and venomous snake bites.  Mackie tracks down the source of the drug and buys out the supply, and has a weird encounter with its creator who explains how it allows the user to time travel for a short period of time, but only younger users whose pineal glands are less calcified than a normal adult (as a result of his tumor, so is Mackie's).

When Dornan's daughter goes missing after taking the drug, Mackie starts experimenting with Synchronic, to learn how it works, and how he can possibly return her home.

Like Toasty , I think a lot of Benson and Moorehead, and their thoughtful, creative and playful endeavors into sci-fi via left-field approaches. Their prior features The Endless and Resolution are part of the same reality and play with time in complimentary ways while remaining independent films.  They have greater plans to explore that universe, and I had hoped, knowing that time travel was part of Synchronic that this film would further expand that world. 

Such is not the case, which is not to say that's what disappoints me about the film.  To be clear, I liked it, I enjoyed viewing it, I was happy I watched it, but I was disappointed, mainly in how the story broke down.

With the mystery of the weird deaths as a result of the drug, I was expecting an atypical detective procedural where Mackie, and maybe Dornan along with him, would start piecing together the mystery and discover the bigger scale time travel reveal.  But when Dornan's daughter goes missing towards the end of the second act, the film fractures, and Mackie is on his own in his experiments, while Dornan (and Katie Astleton [Legion, The League] playing his wife) sees his marriage disintegrating before his eyes.  

The story doesn't know exactly what it wants to do with these disparate elements.  Benson and Moorehead really like the grounding of characters and placing their woes and relationships at the forefront while the weirdness of their reality creeps further and further in until it can't be ignored.  It's a good formula, but in severing Mackie and Dornan it creates multiple streams, one kind of awe-inspiring, the other uncomfortably mundane, that don't compliment each other well.  It's to the point that you almost don't need Dornan in the film at all, that Mackie, facing death anyway, could have gone on a solo detective adventure through the whole film, then help rescue just a random girl who disappeared.

It's a film that keeps Mackie in the spotlight and tries to give Dornan something beefy for his character, but Dornan still seems shunted to the background, and he doesn't pop much at all beyond a supporting player.

It would take something very bold, very bizarre to make this handsome, raven-haired Irishman to really pop off the screen (besides his handsomeness and Marvel-esque physique).

I didn't even know he was in Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar when I put the film on.  Honestly, I didn't even know what Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar was when I put it on, except the latest Kristen Wiig-starring vehicle which she co-wrote with co-star Annie Mumolo (her real life BFF and co-writer on Bridesmaids).  In the wake of The Pause, a LOT of films were shunted on to Video-On-Demand or streaming services with little advertising or fanfare.  Barb and Star was one of those.

The most I knew of Barb and Star... was the promotional poster images, the bright Floridian inspired pastels that seem...I dunno, like Postcards from the Edge: Redux.  It wasn't inspiring me to watch, or even seek out more information.  It just said "comedy...for your parents."

The thing I forget is, I'm now a parent, and the comedy that's made for me is, well, often made for me.  But all too often comedy features are just bland, for-the-masses-but-for-noone comedy (like 75% of Melissa McCarthy's or Jason Bateman's individual outputs [and 100% of their together-output]).  I was lumping Barb and Star... into that tired "for the masses" group.  Even loving Bridesmaids and knowing that Wiig's sensibilities of comedy aren't really that mainstream, I couldn't even bother to watch a trailer.

It was a podcast recommendation that got me to put the film on... and all the person said was that they were watching Barb and Star... again and their cohosts seconded how great an idea it was.  I still knew nothing about the film, except that one group of reviewers seemed to think that this was a film worth watching repeatedly.

Well, I've watched it twice now in the span of a week, and I may watch it again very soon.  Wiig is great, playing dual roles (we'll get to that), Mumolo who I don't know if I've ever seen (or at least noticed her) on screen is fabulous, and, oh, Jamie Dornan steals the whole goddamn thing out from under them.  Yes, that Jamie Dornan.  He's the goddamn highlight of the movie and the most central part of what will bring me back to the film.

But what is this film?

Let me explain the opening sequence.  A young Asian-American boy rides his bicycle delivering newspapers, headphones on, singing emphatically along to the Barbara Streisand/Barry Gibb duet Guilty.  The production of this opening sequence is phenomenal, with Greenbaum creating a grandiose sense of scope providing overhead shots of the bike riding down the center of the street, and the boy's very casual distribution of the newspapers until he stops dead in front of one house, his last paper to deliver, the music cutting out, and an ominous moment of score subbing in.  From the POV of the house the newspaper hits the porch with a thud.  We cut back to the boy, who gives a menacing look, and without changing expression, busts back into "Guilty" and the music kicks back in over him and his emphatic expressions return.  

It's a brilliantly crafted opening that upends every expectation I had going into this film (and I honestly had no expectations).  But what was that all about?  Why the sinister moment?  What the actual eff....?

Moments later the boy is biking out of civilization, stops in front of a tree, is scanned by a robotic owl perched on a branch, and the tree opens to reveal an elevator.  It descends into the secret lair of Sharon Fisherman, a strikingly pale albino woman, with a severe jet black wig and a gap in her front teeth. Is that... Tilda Swinton?  Nope, it's Kristen Wiig basically made up to look Swinton-esque.  She's basically a Bond villain who is crafting a plan of revenge involving killer mosquitos.  The boy, Yoyo (Reyn Doi), is adopted/abducted child/protege while the doe-eyed, doting handsome Edgar (Dornan) is her loyal lackey whom she has wrapped around her finger.  She is sending him to Vista Del Mar to enact a revenge plot against the town that abused her as a teen.

Yeah, this is where the movie starts.

It's a good 10 minutes before we meet the titular Barb and Star, sitting on the couch having an old fashioned mid-western gab session, speaking a mile a minute, occasionally pausing to enjoy the rhythms of Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like A Woman" and drink their tea.  We catch a glimpse into their lives, their history, their personalities in this introduction, it's everything we need to know. These women are best friends, with shared losses (one is widowed, the other divorced).  They work and live together, and are basically inseparable.  They're so of the same mind that they continue each others run-on sentences.  But that means that when their lives are uprooted suddenly that they dare to do something wild, like go visit the middle-age paradise of Vista Del Mar ("View of the mar"/"View of the swordfish" they say in tandem).

Arriving in Florida and their hotel, they are greeted by a grandiose musical song-and-dance number.  It's that kind of movie.  They are like kids in a candy store, just awed by everything without any sense of where to start.  They want to do it all.  In the evening at the bar (with arch piano accompaniment from famed comedic lounge act Richard Cheese) they meet a lovelorn Edgar and they hit it off, and the night.gets.weird.

The next day, Edgar makes his walk of shame only to discover he's accidentally botched his mission, while the two once-inseparable women start talking deceit so they can go see Edgar independently.  From there Star learns that she can be loved even as a divorcee, Barb learns to embrace her independence, and Edgar learns that relationships don't need to be toxic.  Even Sharon Fisherman learns that, if she lets go of her bitterness, she can find acceptance.  But it's a radically goofy ride along the way.

Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar is just utter bananas.  Every scene is completely unexpected and the laughs are so unique, most of which is derived from this veritable swarm of delightful characters crafted in this film.  Barb and Star are indeed so alike and yet Wiig and Mumalo still manage to give them distinguishing characteristics and personalities.  

Dornan's boy-in-puppy-love routine is endlessly hilarious, even if it hits its goofiest heights in his adorably literal rock-ballad musical-number "Edgar's Prayer" early in the film.  It's the shot in the face that the dull but handsome rich man of 50 Shades... needed.  It takes that image and twists and twists and twists until its unrecognizeable, and Dornan is so earnestly game, but also completely capable comedically. 

This is a big, friendly cartoon of a movie.  There's nothing threatening here (except the hilarious Vanessa Bayer as the sole perpetrator of the famous midwestern passive-aggresive pleasantness in the role of grand diva of Talking Club), and it doesn't punch down on anyone which is why it works so well.  It could easily be taking a chunk out of midwestern women, or Floridians, or that guy who is always walking around in his yellow speedo, but it embraces them all for their own quirky weirdness.  It's a film that accepts everyone.  Everyone except Gail, who arrived just after 6:00 and is therefore not welcome to Talking Club - nor a bowl of hot dog soup - this day.

Logan Lucky

Twenty-for-Seven #11 (Day 5)
2017, d. Steven Soderbergh - Netflix

I wish I had seen Logan Lucky before I saw the season 4 Rick and Morty episode ""One Crew over the Crewcoo's Morty", wherein Rick get out all his frustrations with (or really, vehement hatred of) the heist genre of films.  The episode takes a very satirical look at the overused cliches of the genre, and then drums them into the ground so effectively that one may wish to never see them again.

I didn't really know that's what Logan Lucky was about when I chose to watch it.  I remembered the advertising from back when it came out and it had an almost Coen Bros. vibe to it.  With some star players putting on a thick southern drawl, I was perhaps hoping for a Carolina's-based Fargo-type story.  Alas, it's another heist movie.  Soderbergh loves his heist movies.

Logan Lucky walks a fine line between mocking and sympathizing the North Carolinians in his picture. He at once upholds dumb southerner stereotypes while also allowing for the fact that the accent can undersell one's intelligence, even perhaps manipulating the audience into thinking all the characters are rubes or idiots, when it may well be that Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) is somewhat of a genius, and a few of his accomplices have their own deep competencies.

His crew consists of his hairdresser sister Millie (Riley Keough), his one-armed veteran brother Clyde (Adam Driver), explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) and Joe's cousins Sam and Fish Bang (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid), with the latter two really inhabiting the bumpkin cliche.  The plan is to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in a crime of opportunity.  Jimmy has devised a plan based on some inside knowledge he gained while working construction to repair sinkholes.  The one catch is there's a particular safe style that they need a particular skill set to bust open, that being Joe Bang, who, unfortunately, is currently incarcerated and the window to getting things done is fast closing.  Thus the plan also entails Clyde getting arrested and then busting Joe Bang out of prison, and returning him after the job, without anyone being the wiser.

There's the usual fake-outs and deceits along the way but the job goes off with complications, and then the feds get involved.

There's some side-plotting featuring Seth McFarlane as a rich energy drink mogul and Sebastian Stan as a NASCAR driver sponsored by said energy drink, as well as dealing with Jimmy's custody issues surrounding his daughter with his ex-wife (Katie Holmes).  The daughter stuff seems important to Jimmy's character but the NASCAR side story is tangential, until it isn't.

By the end we get the "look how clever" montage and perhaps the hint of a not so happy ending afterall.  It's light and fun, but it's saying next to nothing.  It has no real cultural statement, no commentary on racing, or southern culture, or American culture or crime.  It seems to revel intentionally in drinking and fighting and children's pageantry and racing and crime... as if Soderbergh truly wanted an Oceans 13 for the redneck set.

I had never really thought about how repetitious heist films are until Rick and Morty and while I don't have quite the fervent disdain for them as Rick does, I certainly understand the apathy towards them now.