ReWatch: Constantine

2005, Francis Lawrence (Red Sparrow) -- download / The Shelf 

Yes, I have this on The Shelf, but no, we haven't started a project yet, and I don't think we did a tag? Anywayz, the movie was made 20 years ago and this year it came out with a nice, crisp, beautiful looking 4K copy. Did I buy it? Gosh no, but I sure downloaded it, and geeze almighty, it shure is perty.

Yes, there is a Tag. Use it.

In 2005 I was not that far removed from my fondness for the Hellblazer comic. John Constantine was an anti-hero, a swearing, smoking, betraying spell-caster in a modern urban environment, who was constantly at odds with Hell. He carried the air of a supernatural noir detective with a constant halo of cigarette smoke and an iconic camel trench coat, but with a hint of punk via his spiky/messy blonde hair. John Constantine was not a nice guy, not a good guy.

Then it was announced that Keanu Reeves would play John. Despite the goodwill he generated from The Matrix, he is and will always be the "whoah" guy. Few were pleased; even fewer were pleased by moving it to America, switching out the camel coat for a short black trench, and leaving Keanu with his dark hair. I recall being hesitant but also realizing I would probably just enjoy the idea of a contemporary magic-realism thriller. I also recall being less than thrilled by a lot of it, and yet, it must have stuck with me well enough, to eventually end up on The Shelf. Twenty years later, I am more than just a nostalgic fondness for the movie, I truly, really like it, Keanu and all. 

In Mexico two men who appear to be homeless addicts are literally just scratching in the dirt in the ruins of an old church. They are not just any old wooden classic church remains, but some brutalist concrete frame that just screams ritual. One of the men puts a foot through the floor / ground and finds... something. Its the Spear of Longinus, the Hofburg Spear version of it in particular, the blade that struck Jesus in the side, killing him. We are given the impression he is possessed by it, but I see something more, for it is just a tool and it is those desiring the tool that possess the man, making him invulnerable to harm (he steps onto a road, is struck by a car, it destroying itself around him, like he was Superman or The Hulk) and setting him on a path... north.

Meanwhile in LA, John Constantine (pronounced, scandalously, -teen; Keanu Reeves, John Wick) is asked to look into something by Hennessey (Pruitt Taylor Vince, The Mentalist), a priest who looks more street beggar than holy man. With John's intro, we get all the little details: the trench (albeit altered), the white shirt with tie askew, and the cigarettes. This was twenty years ago when the cinematic world still considered smoking on screen as taboo. But that is absolutely necessary to the character portrayal. As are the consequences.

That opening exorcism just smacks of style. Sure, its a rote Christian style exorcism but the man performing it is more a noir gumshoe taking out the trash than a man performing a holy ritual. He's angry, vindictive, ruthless, and more than a little pissed off that the demon inside her is not following the rules. We even get a hint of a popular comic sidekick character -- Chaz the cab driver (Shia LaBeouf, Holes), now a bit diminished as a youthful paranormal investigative wannabe who John has no problem using up. Anyone who read the comics saw where that relationship would go.

Then we get the story setup. A suicide, and Angela (Rachel Weisz, The Mummy), a police detective, a twin, who cannot believe her sister, a Good Catholic, would commit suicide, despite her incarceration inside a mental health facility. While she goes to her parish priest for consolation, confirmation her sister is not in Hell, John is in the same church to confront the Angel Gabriel (Tilda Switon, Orlando), angry at the fact that the legions are no longer following the rules. John reminds Gabriel that he has been doing his job well, finding demons who break the rules and deporting them back to Hell. But this one was not just possessing, but actually trying to manifest itself on Earth. That's entirely against the rules. Gabriel doesn't care, and only sees John as trying to bargain his way to Heaven. He is, of course, but that's not the point.

Oh, and Gabriel is a "half-breed", while it is not fully explained, they are lesser versions of angelic and demonic beings able to actually walk around on the Earth. The half-breeds are always conspiring against each other but are not allowed direct intervention. The implication is that they have been on Earth for a while, and "mingled" with us. And yes, there are half-breed demons as well.

And that's the setup: the Holy Lance, demons breaking the rules, a death by suicide, and John trying to pull together all the details. He tasks Hennessey with finding out more, badgering the man into taking off the talisman that protects him from... the voices. John doesn't care about the cost on the man's sanity; John's an asshole. He's also an asshole to Angela, the detective, starting when she seeks him out for assistance about her sister's place in the afterlife, and we get to see a ritual John casts to temporarily visit Hell, where he does indeed find the sister's soul. Angela is not happy with that news. John also tells her he himself is Hell Bound, as he committed suicide as a teen, so he knows where he eventually will go.

To confirm to Angela that something supernatural is going on, something even more out of the "ordinary", something involving Angela and her sister, we are given the incredible street scene. On a quiet LA street, as Angela is leaving John, the street lights go out, but more so, all light fades, and sounds are heard -- wings, talons. As the darkness encroaches on the two, John lights up something. In previous viewings, I thought it might just be a cloth soaked in alcohol, but now we believe it might be something more, maybe a holy relic he had in his pocket, something that when ignited could keep manifested demons from attacking them, its holy light & fire sending them back to Hell in droves, leaving naught but ashes. And confirming to Angela that Hell has come to Earth. And it wants her.

The holy relics. Another comics sourced character, Beeman (Max Baker, The Island), presents John with a bunch of "stuff", items with supernatural significance, to help John on his ... quest. Meanwhile Hennessey has learned... something, and the demon Balthazar (Gavin Rossdale, musician in band "Bush") is not happy about it, doing some evil magic on on the man, who drinks himself to death in the briefest of moments. Direct intervention; naughty Balthazar. John finds Hennessey with a symbol on his hand, a symbol Beeman says is for Mammon, who is Lucifer's wayward son, who is part of a prophecy wherein he takes over the Earth with the help of "divine essence" and a powerful psychic. Said powerful psychic was to be Angela's sister, but she died. And the Beeman is killed as well, and John is attacked by a full-blood demon on a street, only protected by one of Beeman's relics, a matchbox full of screeching beetles, little bugs that demons cannot abide the sounds of. Angela admits she also has the same psychic powers as her sister. She is abducted right from under John's nose, and this little coup is underway.

The final act, the confrontation, the battle for Earth's sanctity. In the hospital with Angela's sister died, the hordes of demon half-breeds have gathered. John assaults the place with his holy relic weapons, including a "gearing up scene" produced shotgun that fires dragon's breath from holy shells. Its ridiculous, very Hollywood, but its fun, smacks of the vampire death club scene in Blade. After dealing with the minions, he pulls Angela from the pool and interrupts Mammon's return. But then Gabriel returns, a turncoat, jealous of humanity's favour from God, hoping to see Mammon wipe the planet clean of the human taint. When all seems lost, John cast aside and injured, he does a Hail Mary (religious pun intended) -- he cuts his own wrists knowing that there is one soul that the King of Hell, Lucifer himself (Peter Stormare, Armageddon), would come to Earth to collect. That gives John the chance to show daddy dearest what his son is up to. Lucifer deals with Gabriel and his son and then offers John his life as thanks for catching all this. Instead, in an act of unexpected selflessness, he asks Lucifer to release Angela's sister's soul from Hell, forgive her suicide. So, with John's soul being dragged behind him Lucifer begins a trod back to Hell when.... selfless act rewarded ! John's forgiven his cardinal sin and will be going to Heaven instead. Not to be foiled, Lucifer decides to heal John, of his wounds, of his terminal cancer (remember, the integral smoking?). John is properly saved.

This whole final act is incredible. I remember thinking Peter Stormare as Lucifer was far too camp, but over the years, I have not only softened to him as The Devil but love it now, fully. He's always been a bigger than big actor so his over-the-top Satan is delectable. He didn't need to be overshadowing to be intimidating. He obviously has it in for John, and while its not clear to the non-comic-reader, has been messing with Lucifer's plans for ages. And Gabriel -- cocky, self-important Gabriel who hates Earth and humans is now one of them... us, except for those stubby, burned bits of wing bone on their back. Tilda Swinton is so great as the non-binary angel.

Yah, still love the movie, and this 4K copy was just sooooo pretty. The colours, even though most of them are earth-tones, are clear and lush. The sets look incredible, from John's big industrial loft style apartment but with the odd wood detailing everywhere, to the bowling alley in which Beeman hid, with its soul bottles hanging everywhere, to that initial apartment complex where John exorcised the demon in he opening act, so large and from another era, very noir, very LA, almost cyberpunk. Keanu had already pulled away (mostly) from his "whoah" personality with The Matrix movies, but here he's embracing the bastard. He is surrounded by a bunch of character actors who play up their parts well.

Some final thoughts. I always felt, and still do feel, that the Angela character, while integral to the plot, is handled... rather extraneously. She's a cop but we barely see her investigate. Her character is a pawn for the most part. There was originally supposed to be a love interest for John, a demon half-breed played by Michelle Monaghan, but that was all cut out, leaving most viewers wondering why she has a brief scene in the final act, no lines, she is just blown away by the shotgun. I never liked the way they presented Chas, the cab driver who was always one of my favourite characters from the comic, who is played by Shia LaBeouf in the movie in "huh huh, can we Spike, can we fight demons Spike!" lapdog who, like all John's friends in the movie, dies. And finally, Papa Midnight, or just Midnite, a voodoo priest that dislikes John but are more peers than pawns is a classic Magical Negro (trope term), but with bite and is the template for a lot of characters in urban fantasy movies to come. Its almost turning the trope on its head. In the comic, he was just another rival of John's, another example of a magician/sorcerer from a different culture, that John runs into, but that's lost to the movie so only the trope remains, and Djimoun Hounsou just owns it.

Despite hints of a sequel, one which could be interesting now that Keanu has replaced Neo with Wick, I am not sure it is really needed, and would only be a disappointment.

KsMIRT: October bleeds

K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (uhhh..?) Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  These "reviews" were actually written at the end of October and just needed to be formatted...so precious little time/energy to do so. I mean, formatting documents is what I spend half my days doing as is, who wants to do more of that when the work day is done?

This Month:
Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy Season 1? (2024, Disney+, 4/4 episodes)
Only Murders In the Building Season 4 (2024, Disney+/Star, 10/10 episodes)
Midnight Mass (2022, Netflix, 10/10 episodes)
Agatha All Along (2024, Disney+, 9/9 episodes)
Lego Masters Australia Season 5 (2023, CTV, 14/14 episodes)

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Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy 

The What 100: Sig (Gaten Matarazzo, Stranger Things) is a total Skywalker fan-boy who also is force-sensitive kid and eager for adventure. His loving brother Dev (Tony Revolori, The Grand Budapest Hotel) finds out Sig is force sensitive he encourages him to follow what the Force is telling him, which takes them to an ancient Jedi temple. Sig accidentally pulls out a single brick holding the fabric of the universe together, and when the dust settles everything's fucked right up.

(1 Great) When I saw the trailer for this, it looked like a lark, a goof, just a ridiculous "what if" scenario where nobody is like we remember them. Turns out, underneath, there's actually a character-centric story which pits Sig as the new hope against Dev, who is now a sith lord.  Where I thought the story would just be stepping through all the changes eventually being made right, instead, it's really just about one brother caring for another while trying to do the most good he can.  Matarazzo and Revolori are great in their voice roles here, even if the character drama is simplified for a child audience.

(1 Good) In the end, the universe isn't righted, it remains all fucked up, and given that it's Lego, that's OK. It's more fun that way. It's kind of bold to abandon the known Star Wars universe in favour of this weird remixed one.

(1 Bad) I've seen a few Lego Star Wars productions at this point (on top of the video games) and what I have the most difficulty with is the Lego look. It's not the reality of Lego...where characters and spaces are limited to their blocky brickiness and the kind of knowingness that their reality is made of of brick parts. Instead, it's literally the look. With Star Wars I want amazing ships and cool lightsaber fights and oddball designed sets, and while those are here in principle, they look terrible in Lego form and I never stopped wanting them to be in nearly any other medium than animated Lego brick.

META: This is a 4-episode mini-series that...well, doesn't end. Altogether, the 4 episodes *could* form a short Lego Star Wars movie, perhaps the first in a trilogy? It features some great voice talent on top of Matarazzo and Revolori, including a bunch of Star Wars veterans reprising their roles in a different context: Mark Hamill, Naomi Ackie, Ahmed Best, Kellie Marie Tran, BIllie Dee Williams, and many of the Clone Wars voice cast. 

It's Lego Star Wars so it's not deeply memorable, nor is it as funny as The Lego Movie or even The Lego Batman Movie, but it's also surprisingly not as interested in being a joke machine as its trailer may have indicated. It's nothing I'll obsess over, but it's enjoyable enough with some fun little gags for the Star Wars nerds. 

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Only Murders in the Building Season 4

The What 100: In one of the biggest losses for the show thus far, Charles' longtime friend and stuntperson stand-in Sazz Pataki was shot and killed in Charles' apartment, a seeming case of mistaken identity. This leads Charles into a bit of an emotional tailspin. Mabel is verging on homelessness, and is unsure of the career opportunities before her. Oliver and Loretta try a long distance relationship which puts him in as much of an emotional tailspin as Charles. A movie is being made out of the podcast which brings celebrities, excitement and more attention to the Arconia and the mysterious west-building tenants. 

(1 Great) The central murder here is a pretty good one, with Sazz being killed, and then completely disposed of before anyone finds her, it's dark and haunting...at least to start. It gets pretty out-of-hand quickly, at times taking pretty broad strides away from the central mystery into complete other mysteries. It's a bit chaotic, but the show makes it work... even if it undercuts how seriously bummed, and angry, Charles is. But the sentimentality, the performance Steve Martin gives of Charles' grief (and maybe guilt) is very affecting.

(1 Good) The show's penchant for bringing in celebrities in smaller parts hits a whole new dimension this season. With the movie of the "Only Murders..." podcast being made, our trio gets casted, with Eugene Levy as Charles, Eva Longoria aging Mabel up, and Zach Galifianakis resentfully playing Oliver. And that's just the start, with Paul Rudd, Meryl Streep, Amy Ryan, Jane Lynch and Davine Joy Randolph all returning, as well as Molly Shannon, Melissa McCarthy, Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Kind among others. You can either find it very "stunt-y" or you can embrace how much fun the show is and how many people want to be a part of it. And, honestly, I have to give the show credit for not stunt-casting every role. There are still quite a few plum parts that are being filled by characters actors and up-and-coming comedic talent. As much as season 1's very story and character focus was the highlight and it's only been a bit in decline since, it's still committed to dishing out fun, and it's fun.

(1 Bad) I was initially very enthusiastic about this season, but that has waned a bit as it falls into its usual rhythms of drumming up a suspect Number 1 each episode and then writing them off by the end of the episode. While this season doesn't do so each episode, it does keep pedalling on that particular cycle. 

META: What I thought was going to be a pretty heavy season, based on how it started, has wound up being one of its sillier ones, but the final two episodes do start to circle back on the emotional aspects, particularly on the just mutual respect and admiration in Charles and Sazz's friendship. It all ends with, of course, yet another murder in the building (though I already have my theories) but not before Tea Leoni, looking very sterling, and with the huskiest "noir dame" voice tantalizes the crew with a seemingly unrelated mystery that's clearly going be the focus. 

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Midnight Mass

The What 100: Crockett Island is home to a small, remote fishing village off the east coast with a populace of around 120. A new priest is assigned to the island church, noting that the vacationing octogenarian monsenior fell ill while on holiday in the holy land. But Father Paul has a secret, a secret he's sharing with the faithful, and only the faithful. The sudden spate of "miracles" cause some islanders to question whether these are truly gifts from God, or something else entirely.

(1 Great) The first episode is an absolute masterpiece. It's an ensemble mini-series and the first hour so adeptly introduces us to every major player in the story without needing to drop gobs of clunky exposition. We get a sense of some characters by their actions, or their demeanour, or how other characters talk about them. We learn about some characters more from what they're hiding than what they're showing us. We meet probably two dozen characters in this town in this first episode, and we kind of know each of their deal, at least on an instinctive level by the end of that first hour. Plus we have a total sense of the island, its tempo, the dynamics of working and living there...we know the confines, the limits of the place and how people are able to reach the mainland. It's just an incredibly immersive environment, even without the creepiness and weird shit that is just lurking in the backgrounds. This isn't a show about a horror visited upon people, but a show about people who have a horror visited upon them...and they're convinced its a godsend, so they welcome it. 

(1 Good) I am not a religious person. My spirituality could best be described as "absent for attendance". While I have no patience for overtly religious productions that largely serve as confirmation bias propaganda, I do always appreciate a production that clearly comes from a point of examining what it means to be faithful and religious, especially in modern times.  And I have even more respect when it's critical of blind faith, or faith weaponized as a tool of power or control, or faith as superiority complex. In having a large cast of characters Flanagan could explore faith and religious belief in layers, with Bev (Samantha Sloyan, Hush) on one end of the spectrum -- the most vile of people who choose to interpret the text of the bible to serve their own selfish, racist and judgmental nature -- to Riley (Zach Gilford, There's Something Wrong With The Children) who has completely lapsed in his belief, to Ali (Rahul Abburi) a Muslim teen who gets caught up in the fervor of the miracles at the church and abandons Islam for Catholicism. It's a rich show, with a lot to say while still very adeptly delivering some good spooky shit.

(1 Bad) There's a moment where former childhood sweethearts Riley and Erin (Kate Siegal, Hypnotic)  talk about what happens when you die that was really overwritten. I liked the sentiments each of them had, but the way in which they were conveying them to each other was not like two people in a room who were having a conversation, but like stage monologues with the performers projecting out into the audience. Its relevance comes back again later on, twice even, so it's not purposeless, but it's like Flanagan just had these ideas which needed to be expressed, point-counterpoint essays that carry the themes of spirituality vs science in the show forward, just very awkwardly. To be honest, I'm really nitpicking. I absolutely loved this mini-series. It was incredible.

META: Toasty's been singing the praises of Mike Flanagan for the better part of the last decade, and I'm only now catching on. I blame Toasty for not selling me on it hard enough.  Midnight Mass is very, very Stephen King influenced, but for me King is an idea man who writes to his idea, where Flanagan, from what I've seen of his work so far, is a planner. I don't know if I've ever gotten the sense that King knew where he wanted a story to end where I thing Flanagan, at the very least with Midnight Mass, the path, while not at all obvious, seemed entirely deliberate and purposeful. It's an exceptionally satisfying watch.

[ToastyPost: we agree, other Toastypost: we still agree]

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Agatha All Along

The What 100: Since the events of Wandavision, having been bested by the Scarlet Witch, Agatha (Kathryn Hahn, Free Agents) is caught in an unreality, and can't seem to find her way out, until a witchy ex-lover (Aubrey Plaza, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) snaps her out of it, and a teen injects himself into her life looking for help to find the legendary "Witches Road". They're going to need a coven...

(1 Great) Episode 7 "Death's Hand in Mine" is a particularly great episode of television and just an incredibly well constructed character spotlight piece for Patti LuPone's Lilia. The structure of the show started with two episodes of getting the coven together and discovering the Witches Road, making the journey through a series of trials that should ultimately provide them with a power upgrade. The episodes that follow had a pattern of being character-centric to a member of the coven, and then they die at the end (spoiler). So when this episode put Lilia in the crosshairs, its end result was inevitable. And yet, it's the journey, and the journey is one incredible example of timey-wimey storytelling that would make even the best Doctor Who scribe green with envy. 

Also great, Aubrey Plaza. Always.
Kathryn Hahn too.

(1 Good) If there's one thing the basement-dwelling, mouth-breathing neckbeard trolls hate, it's an empowered woman. If there's another thing they hate, it's an empowered gay character. If there's a third thing they hate, it's a d-tier superhero character getting a prominent spotlight over whatever "kewl anti-hero" is in their top-50 personal favourite of boy-rage-power-fantasies.  So, just on its mere existence, Agatha All Along gets a big thumbs up from me. But even more so because it's not in any way, shape or form intended as a loogie-in-the-face to the aforementioned trolls. If anything it's not even paying any attention to them, not considering them in the slightest. It's just selling the shit out of this witches adventure that's part folklore, part Wizard of Oz, and part escape room horror (it's not too far askew from Cube, in its own way).  It's the right mix of genre premises with a nod to both its MCU history and future but dwelling in neither. 

(1 Bad) If there's a "bad" to Agatha All Along at all, it's that it's saddled with "Marvel" expectations. The show is small, and contained. It's a cast of seven primarily, with each episode introducing a fairly static set-piece as the "escape room" they need to solve. I'm sure just because it's Marvel it cost more than the average show, but for Marvel, it still pared things down in a way that some might call ...theatrical-looking.  The road, for instance looks every bit its on-set homage to Wizard of Oz, complete with painted backdrops that, at one point a character literally cuts into and walks through. But even that is an intentional choice in the end, to not completely mask the pastiche. As I said, being "Marvel" is going to set expectations, even when expectations have seemingly been dashed over and over, that Agatha All Along isn't going to live up to. But it did quite well anyway. 

META: There's a scene early in Star Wars: The Acolyte (I seemingly bring this show up once a week) where a group of space witches start an incantation that leads to singing and moaning and undulating, and in my head, if not out loud, I said "this is where it loses people". And I smiled. I was challenged by that scene of women moving and moaning not with any sexual connotation but as a moment of power induction, as a moment of collective purpose. I acknowledged my immediate reaction to it, which was to balk, but I then analyzed that reaction and came out on the other end appreciative of the fact that we don't get much representation at all of the power of feminine collective, especially in the masculine-dominated space opera and superhero genres. So when the coven in Agatha All Along begins their, well, far more harmonious chant that was the song "The Ballad of the Witches Road" (from Frozen songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez) I got the same feeling of this event being about feminine unity and solidarity, even as I whinged a little bit (the song is reinterpreted many ways throughout the show, and I think this initial example was maybe my least favourite?).

Was this whole show all an excuse to bring Wanda's superhero offspring Wiccan into the MCU for the inevitable (and anticipated) Young Avengers? I think if it were a far lazier show that didn't really care about any of its other characters, it would be an easy criticism to lob, but it does so much without putting too much weight or expectations on Billy's shoulders, nor without the burden of setting up expectations. It lives entirely within its own microcosm of Wandavision and Agatha All Along without needing to easter egg the hell out of it.

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Lego Masters Australia Season 5

The What 100: Contest of champions (and almost-champions), the winners and runners-up and a wild-card or two from the past four seasons of Lego Masters Australia return in their teams of two to see which pair will be dubbed "Lego Grandmasters". Some of the most insane challenges and incredible builds in all of Lego Masters, globally, happen in these 14 very bingeable episodes.  

(1 Great) I don't watch a lot of "reality" or "competition" television, but, next to Taskmaster (original UK flavour), Lego Masters Australia is my happy place. I've written before about some of the differences between LegoMA and the American version, but what really, really comes through in LegoMA is the sense of community, not just between the contestants but the also host and judge. Especially with all these contestants being returning contestants, there are established dynamics and running jokes that continue. Plus, the contestants are fans of the show and know each other's work, so they know the calibre of the competition, and it's pretty fierce. Also pretty loving. But they're pushing each other to the breaking point.

(1 Good) Lady Kent and I have watched a lot of brick laying between four seasons of US Lego Masters, the prior 4 seasons of Australia, whatever that was in Lego Masters UK... and episode 7 might have been the most stressful and intense build of them all. It finds the remaining teams having to collectively build a Rube Goldberg machine that will move a tennis ball through a continuous obstacle course from one build to the next, start to finish. There are easy ways and hard ways to go about it with design challenges needing to be met in each segment, but with square blocks and notoriously finicky motor systems, there's a lot of potential for things to go awry.  

(1 Bad) Why did they need to bring Kale back? In season 1 of Lego MA, there was this wee squeaky-voiced know-it-all who was so full of self-importance and arrogance that would constantly tell the judge, Ryan "Brickman" McNaught (recognized as one of the world's premiere Lego builders) that he had no idea what he was talking about. Kale's partner in that season you could tell was suffering by the end. Here he returns with a runner-up from Season 1, Trent, and, at the very least, Trent seemed to know what he signed up for. It's hard to see Kale as anything but a drama-generator, and it's minutes before he starts pissing people off (least of all, me).  If what works for the show is the sense of community, this man is like The Big Bang Theory (that's a joke for me and my Greendale Human Beings out there) 

META: Unlike American reality TV shows, LegoMA doesn't eliminate contestants every episode, or even every other episode. With 8 pairs of contestants, 14 episodes and 3 sets of contestants advancing to the finale, that means 5 of 13 episodes are elimination episodes. It would be easy to say there's drama every episode when we don't find out until the end whether it's an elimination contest or not, but I've figured out the formulae. Basically the first two or three episodes are non-elimination as they are showcases to see what the contestants can do. Then if there are any challenges of a technical nature, those are non-elimination because the technical side can unfairly advantage the experienced (and a lot of randomness present in technical challenges). And, if there's ever a "sponsored" episode (eg. Disney, Marvel, Star Wars) there's no elimination. So, I think with only one exception, I predicted when an episode would be non-elimination.

 

KWIF: I Saw the TV Glow (+2)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. Been busy with TV, particularly a binge watch of season 5 of Lego Masters Australia which I found all-consuming most of the week, and a Mike Flanagan series the week before. But this isn't KWIT, it's KWIF.

This Week:
I Saw the TV Glow (2024, d. Jane Schoenbrun - Crave/HBO)
Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024, d. Brian Taylor - rental)
Hard Target 2 (2016, d. Roel Reiné - Netflix)

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I Saw the TV Glow is bound to perplex some people...maybe even most people who watch it. It is a highly stylized psychological horror film that acts primarily as - but not exclusively as - a Trans allegory. Actually, it's not even allegory. The text of it seemed so overt to me, but I also went into the film knowing only that it had something to do with Trans identity.  I can't imagine what most cisgender people who went into this without the Trans coding knowledge just what exactly they might make of it. 

But with the knowledge, I picked up on the subliminal very early. In the opening moments as young 11-year-old Owen is watching TV, a commercial for a Buffy The Vampire Slayer-esque program (by way of Canadian-produce kid's horror) "The Pink Opaque" provokes a reaction out of of their otherwise slack-jawed viewing. Later he's with his mother at a high school where she is voting to re-elect "the saxophone man", so that alerts us to it being around the start of Bill Clinton's second term. But in the booth, Owen's mom lets them press the voting buttons, and even though they knows who they're supposed to be pressing the button for, their finger starts trailing off for other options. "Don't ask, don't tell" is hard to ignore when his name comes up in an LGBTQ-framed context.

Milling about afterwards, Owen meets Maddy, a grade niner reading the season 1 episode guide to "The Pink Opaque". Owen is curious. Maddy, at first dismissive, senses something in Owen and engages. Owen can't watch the TV show she loves and she can sense that it will come to mean as much to Owen as it does to them. Owen fakes a sleepover at a friends in order to get to Maddy's to watch the show. It's a revelatory moment for Owen and a bonding moment for both. Two years pass and Owen is in high school and though they don't socialize together really, but Maddy leaves Owen messages and tapes of the show, and they start hanging out together to watch the show, season 5.  Late in the school year Maddy says they're skipping town, escaping it's small-minded trappings as well as an abusive stepfather. They encourage Owen to come with them, but Owen gets scared and tells on themself to get grounded so they can't be with Maddy when they leave.

Then Owen's mom dies, leaving them with their abusive, neglectful father. Shortly after that Maddy disappears, their TV set on fire in the back yard. Eventually everyone thinks Maddy is dead. And then "The Pink Opaque" is cancelled.  (The question I ask, was the burning of the TV in response to Owen's betrayal or was it in response to the cancellation, or are both, effectively, one-and-the-same...how real "The Pink Opaque" is is part of what makes this film so layered and fascinating)

This is the first half of the film, roughly, and generally. It's very much vibes...the music and the score, the neon haze and/or crackle of TV static as illumination sources. It's almost as if Owen and Maddy were floating between two worlds. Maddy says that, sometimes, "The Pink Opaque" feels more real than real life. 

The film is beautiful and atmospheric. It's patient and full of surrealism. It blurs lines between what we (and Owen) are seeing and what Owen is feeling (and therefore what we should be feeling). It's a difficult thing to really catch onto unless you understand Owen, the quiet, apologetic, mumbly kid trapped in their own head, narrating their own life from the inside. If you get the meaning it's like being sliced open and having your guts spilled out. Jaden Smith, who plays Owen, captures this hesitancy so effectively, as if Owen is this awkward bag of flesh and bone that seems to keep moving in spite of itself. 

The second half of the film jumps another 8 years ahead in time and we observe Owen's life...without Maddy, without their mother, as if there's nothing left in the world for them, but they keep going through the motions anyway. Owen is now in their early 20s, and their asthma is affecting them so direly that it's like they can barely breathe. But it's not asthma. Their skin is literally choking the life out of the not-Owen person within. Strange events keep happening to Owen, strange apparitions of TV static or pink haze that seem so alluring and yet Owen is so utterly wary.

And then Maddy, but not Maddy, returns. They return for Owen, but not Owen. They return for Isabel, the main character of "The Pink Opaque", but Owen is confused and doesn't understand. Not-Maddy tries to explain, to relate their life since they left this shitty town and its constricting mindset. Layers of analogies that should punch through only seem to make Owen dizzy, unable to accept anything they are saying.

More time passes, Owen ages faster than the rest of the world around them. They are trapped in a cage of their own making. Revisiting "The Pink Opaque" exposes to Owen an entirely different show than what they remember, something far more juvenile (much more the cheap Canadian Are You Afraid of the Dark, less of the Buffy), and containing none of the importance and meaning that it did to them for so long. They are lost in the world they've built around themselves, still apologizing for their existence.

I can tell you the broad beats of this whole movie and it won't even elicit a tiny fraction of the actual emotional wallop the film does. I was devastated throughout watching this film, tears streaming from my eyes uncontrollably. For an hour or two afterwards I just couldn't compose myself and I would still find myself sobbing in response to the intention of the film.

If you don't get it, it's not easy to explain. From a very high level, it's a film about being trapped. The Trans and non-binary messaging is the foremost intention, but the resonance, the emotion of feeling trapped, just in general, should feel at least somewhat familiar to most people. And finding escape, in television, in friendship, in shared experiences is so liberating to a point, but it's not everything if you're just not able to live life as you want to live it.

I refer to both Owen and Maddy as "they". When I call Owen "they/them" it's because there is who Owen really is and who they are pretending to be. Maddy's more subliminal story is about them understanding that they're not the lesbian everyone (including themself) though they were in high-school, but non-binary.

This definitely falls under the "horror, not horror" moniker, as there are no scares and not even really scary moments, but as a whole it is horrifying just the idea of being trapped in one's own skin, to have to wear not just an image, but an identity that is inauthentic, and to be aware of it, whether suppressing it or confronting it on a day-to-day basis. The film could have went really far into outright horror with metaphors of body dysphoria but Owen has so buried their authentic self that it's only in the films final moments that Owen is directly addressing that side of it.

After that the very end is so painful to watch if you are connecting with what you're looking at, a human in such excruciating emotional turmoil, a cage not entirely of their own making, but one they do actually have the key to escape from. It would be sad if I didn't have such empathy for Owen...instead it's heartbreaking.

The film has definitely connected with some (like me) and puzzled others, but it didn't break out into a cultural phenomenon, nor even a cult one...yet.  There's a lot of David Lynch in this, but where Lynch often doesn't seem to know where his ideas manifest from, leading to stories and scenes that are inexplicable, here Schoenbrun seems to know every intention they have in every moment, and every scene. There is not a single piece of absurdism or surrealism that doesn't have a specific purpose.  I felt a kinship between this and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Schoenbrun themself has also said Donnie Darko was a big inspiration. The inspirations are many beyond that. And it transcends them all. 

Maybe my favourite film of the year? I regret not seeing it in theatre.

---

When Hellboy debuted in comics in, I want to say, 1994 (what, research?) I was very much in. I loved the artwork of his creator Mike Mignola a tremendous amount and the mythos of the world of Hellboy expanded beautifully. Very quickly Hellboy became the best original creation of the 1990s.

But Mignola wasn't content to let Hellboy remain his sole vision, and the world of Hellboy grew, the stable of writers and artist participating in telling the legacy of the character expanded, and soon I was overwhelmed. I wouldn't say it was a deluge, but it was much more than I was prepared to take in. I don't know if any of it was watered-down, but I felt my connection to the character slipping.

The first Guillermo Del Toro movie re-sparked an interest, but my re-approach of the comics only showed me how far behind I had fallen and it felt daunting to catch up. The second Del Toro movie dove into fantasy in a way I couldn't connect with and I pretty much left Hellboy behind after that. That was 16 years ago.

I tried to watch the 2019 Neill Marshall-directed, David Harbor-led Hellboy feature and I just could not get into it. It's in a very small group of film that I've started watching and never finished (like, count-on-one-hand small).  I liked Harbor as replacement for Ron Perlman, but that's about it. This new, very low-budget (about 20 million) Hellboy is at the very least much more watchable than that.

Here Hellboy and fellow Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense Agent Bobby Jo Song are trying to take a demon spider back to home base, but get derailed. They're stranded in the Appalachian Mountains, coal mining territory which, they learn is besieged with witches. A World War II veteran, returning home after a long absense, seems to have much familiarity with what's happening and why. He tells the story of the Crooked Man, one of the first settlers to reach American shores, who played both sides in the Civil War, who was hanged for his treason and greed, but was given the task of collecting souls for the devil, with payment of one penny per.

Witches seem to be in vogue right now (see also Agatha All Along, Star Wars: The Acolyte for just two prominent examples) almost with a sympathetic eye towards them. Here, however, they're nasty creatures with nasty ways of dealing with things nastily, treating witches as humans-turned-creatures, less as humans transcending humanity.

Hellboy here is played by Jack Kesy, an actor I'm not all that familiar with (though I did watch some of the first season of The Strain which he was the lead in). He's seemingly emulating Ron Perlman's depiction of the character, and I'm not sure if that's for "consistency" (from the producers/director) or lack of his own definitive take. It's a good performance, even if he's not quite got the same presence as Perlman or even Harbor. 

Of the other key performers in the film  Adeline Rudolph as Bobby Jo I thought was the strongest actor in the film (and maybe got a little swooney over). She's a novice to the field, primarily an in-house researcher, and so Hellboy is quite protective of her (he's also a little swooney over her, but subtly). I also liked Jefferson White as Tom Fennell, the not-a-witch-man returning home and finding his old world in a bad state and feeling very much responsible.  Even the old, blind reverend, played by Joseph Marcell, is low-key incredible.  It's a good cast overall.

The film is, at 20 million, cheap for these kinds of things, and it feels it. In his review Toasty [we agree, almost] cites "fan flick that had been given a budget", and for sure it feels that way especially in its opening prologue where it uses a lot of unrefined cgi-effects to, well, ill-effect. I would say extract the prologue altogether and it would be a better film, but it does circle back into the story and is sort of necessary. I really wish they figured out a practical effect for that spider instead of a cheap digital render.

Most of that "fan film" feeling falls at the feet of director Brian Taylor, a filmmaker who has been in the Hollywood system since 2006's Crank, a movie I very much did not like. He made a lot of films with Crank co-director Mark Neveldine, including Crank 2: High Voltage, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and Gamer, all of which I very much did not like.  I have seen some of Taylor's solo work, like some of the TV series Happy! (which I also did not like) and Mom and Dad (which I found ok). 

The feeling of a Taylor-Neveldine film was one that is frenetic, high energy, but not in a controlled way. It's ADD on acid, just out of control and I found them very unpleasant to watch. Taylor on his own is more toned down but he still doesn't seem to know how to resist constant cutting between obtuse angles and weird stylizations with little consistency or always carrying purpose. Here, with probably one of his lowest budgets, but highest demands on that low budget, his lack of stillness winds up looking quite cheap quite often. That said, he also captures some fairly stunning shots, and there are some very visually striking frames in this film. Buuuut, for every one moment framed so acutely, there are two that are not, and they can be distracting.

As Toasty opined, it "presents as a horror movie but without embracing it". And that's true. But in true Hellboy sense, at least that of what I remember of Mignola's 90's works, it was always a bit more "supernatural adventure" than "horror". This lives in a John Carpenter's Vampires vein, and in that vein it works for me. It's not a spectacular production, but I think for what Hellboy has been in film in the past, we've hit the right budget and style to be an ongoing franchise of 20 million dollar direct-to-streaming productions, especially if it's going to have Mignola and long-time collaborator Christopher Golden on scripting duties.  It's not rekindled a fervour in me to start cramming more Hellboy comics in my diet, but I really would watch more of these it they can sustain this upper-echelon-of-90's-DTV sensibility.

---

I'm writing these in reverse order of what I watched them in. I watched I Saw the TV Glow immediately after watching Hellboy: The Crooked Man, and within literal seconds of Shoenbrun's film starting I said to myself, "this is what a real movie looks like". Not to diss Taylor any further, but there's an assuredness to Shoenbrun's craft that Taylor just never had. Oh, Taylor's work has often seemed cocky, but it rarely backs that cockiness up with ...well, being objectively "good".  But compared to Roel Reiné, Taylor looks like Scorsese... at least he's getting 1 out of 3 shots that are really something appealing to look at (and most of the rest at least have some level of competency even if they are erratic and sometimes ugly), watching Hard Target 2 was even like watching a fan film. At least fan films the people involved care about what they are trying to do. I think Reiné, whose credits include The Scorpion King 3, Death Race 2 & 3, SEAL Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines, 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded, and seemingly a dozen other cheap-and-quick in-name-only sequels and/or paycheck vehicles for action movie has-beens and never wases.

Now, I've said it before, I inexplicably enjoy the "most dangerous game" man-hunting-man movies, so seeing a Scott Adkins sequel to the not-a-classic classic John Woo/JCVD film Hard Target pop up on Netflix's "coming soon" roster made me uncontrollably "oooh", and click that "notify me" button. You can bet I watched this dogshit as soon as possible. 

It was on a sick day. I laid in bed, not wanting to move. The only reason I finished this film is because I let myself be held captive by it. It's definitely not a so-bad-it's-good, it's just bad. Bad-bad. Bad bad bad bad bad. Stupid, and bad. And cheap. Lazy. Dumb. Nonsensical at times.

There's a whole world of direct-to-video/streaming/on-demand filmmaking that's been in operation since the 80s. Before that it was sci-fi and horror B-movies, or cheap foreign knockoffs, or Spaghetti westerns as opposed to the regal American ones. There's always been a place in cinema for this type of garbage. But ever since the digital age made the "film" part of filmmaking unnecessary and the accessibility of editing and other digital tools a thing of the past, these types of movies have gotten so cheap, and churned out so lazily that I fail to see how anyone gets any joy out of watching them, nevermind making them. They're soulless product that are soon to be even further deprived of soul by being entirely AI scripted. We probably won't even know the difference.

Scott Adkins is, in this sphere of modern direct-to-whatever a well known and respected commodity. He's a fairly handsome guy, not too shabby an actor sometims, and he's fucking fit at hell and loves doing stunts. In this film, the stunts seem like an afterthought so they're as cheap and lazy as everything else in the film. 

As far as the man-hunting-man element goes, this is a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy-of-a ....well, you get it. Nothing, absolutely nothing original is happening here that has not been done in another story of this type, and any attempt to add "flavour" to this by way of some form of romance or intrigue or political message is handled, well, stupidly as to make the effort irrelevant. 

We know Adkins is going to escape his very stupidly set up predicament. We know hes going to give his ill-gotten riches to his newfound local lady friend, and we know his comidically burdensome guilt that he carries is going to be absolved by an external force rather than any internal resolution. Its climax is one of the worst boat chases I've ever seen ending in one of the stupidest standoffs I've ever seen. 

I couldn't watch 2019's Hellboy for more than 30 minutes but I watched all of this garbage? I must have been sick....

KsMIRT: step timber

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month (ahem) I step through the TV series I completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.

This Month:
Bad Monkey Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Apple TV+)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 (2024, 8/8 episodes, AmazonPrime)
Nobody Wants This Season 1 (2024, 10/10 episodes, Netflix)
Slow Horses Series 4 (2024, 6/6 episodes, Apple TV+)
Squid Game Season 1 (2022, 9/9 episodes, Netflix)
Unsolved Mysteries Volume 5 (2024, 4/4 episodes, Netflix)

---

Bad Monkey Season 1 

The What 100: Andrew Yancy is a police detective with a problem... he can't let go. It's got him in trouble before, and it will get him in trouble again. Having been booted from the Miami PD to a small cape on the southern tip of Florida, Yancy's motormouth and unwavering conviction that the worst should be punished have now got him suspended and working as a health inspector. When a severed arm is reeled in by a fishing tour boat, Yancy can't just follow his chief's directions to just get rid of it. Instead it takes Yancy on a winding whirlwind of romance, action, deceit, and even a little magic.

(1 Great) Vince Vaughan. I was reticent to watch the show, mainly because I haven't watched anything with Vince Vaughan in it in a long, long time. Sometime after Made I just realized I didn't like his energy, his arrogance. But either I have softened or Vaughan has, because the energy he gives off as Yancy is astounding. Yancy is a very upbeat guy, very positive even in the face of bad things happening. Even if he genuinely dislikes someone he still tries to go at them with positive vibes, kill them with ...well, not kindness...affability. He's a lot. He's always talking, but the way in which Yancy twists moments, changes the timber of a situation...it's not that he de-escalates (though I think in his mind, that's what he's doing) but instead of making people want to shoot him, they just want to smack him.  It's a skill. He's charming in a way I haven't seen from Vaughan.  He carries a high energy vibe that still seems, somehow, chill.  And I like the way he wins people over with compliments, just as much as I like it when he pisses people off with the very same tactics.

(1 Good) It's so hard to limit myself to just 1 Great and 1 Good thing with this show. I enjoyed it so, so thoroughly. I haven't mentioned that the show hops between South Florida and The Bahamas, where an unscrupulous land developer has impacted the small coastal town there. Jodie Turner-Smith was a real surprise for me in After Yang, a stunning woman but also a strong performer who, seemingly out of no where is acting alongside Colin Farrell. She turned up again in a smaller part earlier this year in Star Wars: The Acolyte and had real presence. Here she's The Dragon Queen, the mystical protector of the island who doesn't quite believe in her practice. Her role in the whole proceedings seems very outside the centre, but she gets her own story arc that weaves in and out of the main thread and it is both beautiful, intense, and tragic. 

(1 Bad) If I had one complaint, which is not even really a complaint because I enjoyed this show pretty thoroughly, it's that it felt maybe an episode too long. The eighth episode felt like it was barrelling towards its conclusion and the ninth episode felt like it was resetting for the finale.  In actuality the ninth episode was more about setting up character resolution where the finale was about closing out the plot, so it has its place...I think in this modern age of shortened seasons, any sort of breathing room feels like wasted space, even when it's certainly not wasted. It speaks more to changes in modern storytelling on television and how we consume it, than it does about quality of storytelling or even purpose of storytelling.

META: What got me into Bad Monkey, past my Vince Vaughan reticence, was Bill Lawrence's name in the trailers. I liked Scrubs, I loved (still love) Cougar Town, I really liked both Ted Lasso and Shrinking, so he has a very winning track record with me.  I knew that there would be something here that I would enjoy, as I always do in his productions...I just didn't think I would enjoy pretty much everything.  This may be, I'm boldly stating, Lawrence's best show.

There's a minor character, the owner of the charter fishing boat that opens up the series played by Tom Nowicki, who winds up being the narrator for the series. He's somehow in the head of every character (including Neville's pet monkey Driggs) telling you there innermost thoughts, sometimes at inopportune times. He also provides the best "previously on" recaps maybe ever, or close to it. The bit is he hates doing the recaps, and he lets you know this. They're spiteful recaps.

I could see some people finding the show a little unfocussed, the way it darts between Yancy's story, the Dragon Queen, Neville, Yancy's sometimes-girlfriend Bonnie, and others in ways that don't directly connect to the central crime story that Yancy is working on... but I love the fact that this show is more interested in the characters as characters than it is in them as agents servicing the main story. It a show where the world doesn't exactly gravitate around its main character and the main character's interest, and that's damn refreshing.  

The cast is uniformly phenomenal, with Vaughan, Turner-Smith, joined by Michelle Monaghan, L. Scott Caldwell, Rob Delaney, Meredith Hagner, Natalie Martinez and so many more. Even minor players in the story make multiple appearances, and it's always a delight to see them pop up again.

I imagine a second season will only see some of these players return, for obvious reasons, but the experience to see how it jumps around a whole new ecosystem of characters Yancy endears himself to (or pisses off)  absolutely puts a smile on my face just thinking about.  

An utter treat of a series.

---

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2

The What 100: Lord Sauron has disguised himself as an elfin deity and wormed his way into Celebrimbor's forge, encouraging him to make more rings of power, rings that he himself will taint with his darkness, thus eliciting control over their wearers. The dark elf Adar and his army of Orcs, aware of Sauron's return, are on the warpath to find and vanquish him once and for all, and they don't care what they have to destroy along the way. King Durin, wearing one of the tainted rings of power starts making some terrible decisions for the Dwarven realm, leaving his son Durin conflicted over his devotion to his father and doing what's right. The Stranger and his Harfoot companions get separated but each find new allies who are somewhat familiar. Back in Númenor, following the awful defeat against Adar's army, the queen finds herself challenged, and her throne wrested from her by the most evil-looking guy in history. And other stuff.  A lot going on in Middle Earth.  

(1 Great) I could have just watched just a whole series about Prince Durin IV and his turmoil over, first, his spat with his father following his actions last season, and then the dire situation as Khazad-dûm enters a dark age following a tremor. And when King Durin III puts on that ring, and starts getting money hungry and going mad with an unquenchable thirst for riches, it's just really wonderful melodrama. I love all the dwarf actors - Owain Arthur is probably my favourite performer on the show. Just real soulful, deep-thinking performance in such a heavyweight layer of makeup and prosthetics and wigs and wardrobe.  

(1 Good) I've been strangely invested in the journey of The Stranger and the Harfoots Nori and Poppy in both seasons, even though their trials have kind of been the most gentle and most disconnected from the central plot. As disconnected as they are, they also provide a very whole-view look at Middle Earth, a "what else is happening" outside of the main conflicts, and their Hobbitsy adventures are so much more gentle than what's going one elsewhere, it's a nice respite.  But that gentile nature of their story means that any threat seems that much more severe.

(1 Bad) There are entire character plots that just get shoved aside, like Isuldur seems to be an afterthought every time he pops up. It's like "oh right, him!" His story gets tied up with Arondir, the ronin Elf, who I loved in the first season, but has no storyline at all here. His human love interest died last season, and his attempts to connect with her son don't work out, so he takes off and just roams realm looking for action. He's a badass fighter with the coolest chest plate ever, but he gets nothing. Ok, that's actually 2 Bad...well, here's a third... I freaking hated everything going on in Númenor.  Just the most blatantly evilest group of fucks with the most obvious tactics of riling up crowds into supporting them in overthrowing the queen.  They're goddamn Republicans and it was just too real.

META: At about the midway point of this season of The Rings of Power I was starting to stretch a leg out, ready to step away altogether. I didn't but so much of the show was about the corruption of power, of the people in charge, and how it was all so inevitable that it was all going sour everywhere. Given that this show takes place, what, 1000 years before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it just means that it all goes very dark, very quick and doesn't come out of that darkness for a very long time.  I don't know if showing people the descent into darkness works as a cautionary tale or just reinforces the hopelessness of opposing it when people are acting so irrationally. There really isn't any light this season to guide the way and it's feeling quite oppressive...and feels like it's only going to get worse from here.

---

Nobody Wants This Season 1

The What 100: Joanne hosts a successful dating and sex-themed podcast with her sister, Morgan. She's been very unlucky in love and her frankness about talking about it has garnered her a sizeable audience and a pretty relaxed lifestyle.  Noah is a rabbi -- some might even go so far as to call him "Hot Rabbi" -- who has just exited a long term relationship with his very devoted (and attractive) girlfriend after she dug out an engagement ring out of a locked drawer. Everything was perfect on paper, but the sparks were not there. At a mutual friend's get-together Joanne and Noah meet, and sparks fly, but can a rabbi really be with a gentile and keep the respect of his family and congregation, and will being in a stable relationship impact Joann's podcast success?

(1 Great) One of my favourite aspects of the delightful friends-sans-benefits sitcom Platonic was how low stakes it was. It didn't spend much time at all revelling in drama or tension. It presented its characters as conscious, conscientious, thinking human beings who don't immediately always jump to the tropey sitcom conclusion to create tired hijinks for our amusement. It's a comedy of rapport, and I'm on board for any show that wants to be such. Here, not only are the characters presented as thoughtful, but they're also observant, and they're open to conversing about difficult topics. Sitcom comedy was borne out of withholding and misunderstandings. Cringe comedy exploded out of the rise of Seinfeld which was not just withholding, and misunderstanding, but genuine selfishness and bad behaviour. It's really time for our entertainment to show us a new way of coexisting, a new way of engaging with one another, a way that shows us that bringing up a mistake or a shameful emotion with a loved one is far better than hiding it, only for it to explode like a time bomb.

(1 Good) The cast here is uniformly awesome. Kristin Bell is a bankable and reliable comedic presence at this point, and though it's sometimes hard to shave the Eleanor-from-The Good Place feels from my brain, she's really fun. Adam Brody is charming, funny, and thoughtful, very aware and receptive and open. He is the ideal dreamy nice-guy boyfriend, who happens to be a rabbi. As a duo they're exceptionally cute together and they play off each other well. They're both over 40 now, but playing like they're in their late 30s, which works, but just barely.  The real flavour of the show though comes from their respective siblings. Morgan (Justine Lupe, Mr. Mercedes) is both fearless and shameless and will shake up any room she's in, usually for the better, but not always. Sasha, Noah's brother, (Timothy Simons) is less fearless and shameless than he is kind of oblivious. He's desperate to be included and so he includes himself in everything whether he's invited or not, wanted or not. Morgan and Sasha become platonic buddies is one of the most far fetched but delightful spins of the show (a lesser show would create some weird secret romance, but here Sasha clearly loves his domineering wife [probably because she's domineering] and family, he's just happy to have a new friend who actually wants to talk to him).

(1 Bad)  Nobody Wants This does a great job at showing the stakes for Noah: he's up for head Rabbi at his synagogue, and the faith has a very strong edict to congregate and procreate, so his relationship with Joanne, while providing him the sparks he's always thought a relationship should have, threatens his professional life, as well as creates friction with his family (his sister-in-law is best friends with his ex, his mom is really against the pairing). For Joann, there's less intense focus on what she's risking.  According to Morgan, at least, her being in a happy relationship is having an effect on the podcast (she's telling boring stories), which is being eyed for purchase by Spotify. Most of the gamble here is the romcom threat of "losing the guy". It's a fairly savvy show, but (from my very male perspective) it doesn't adequately emphasize what she's giving up or sacrificing, it rather seems to only imply that she should.

META: A very quick blast of research finds that show creator Erin Foster a) looks a lot like Kristin Bell, b) worked a lot with her sister (including as Insta influencers and as creative heads for the dating app Bumble among other things), and c) converted to Judaism before getting married.  So this show, while not autobiographical, comes from a place of authenticity and truth. It's a really charming romcom that isn't about the act of getting together, but about what it takes to stay together.  It's not even that interested in the drama of tearing Joanne and Noah apart but instead the joys and rewards of unifying and being together.  I feel like this is such an antidote to Hallmarkies, and we're still a week away from those things ramping up.  EEP

---

Slow Horses Series 4 (aka "Spook Street")

The What 100: There's a terrorist attack in central London. Meanwhile River Cartwright's grandad, suffering from dementia, shoots a man he thinks is River in his house. River fakes his own death and takes the place of this man, heading into France on a passport that's actually a "cold body", one of many MI-5 fake identities created for their field agents. But how is this one "in the wild" so to speak, and now in River's hands? It all billows out into something very personal and very dangerous.

(1 Great) This is the first season where it feels like Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb is a supporting character and not the lead, and that's actually a good thing. Lamb has been so front-and-center that it's left him a little exposed as a character, as someone who is very much who he is, and not likely to change. River's always been the secondary lead of the show, and giving him the full spotlight here reveals the wild depths of his history and, in learning his origins, has potentially disastrous ramifications for The Park.  It's the most character-centric of the series yet, and it really, really works.

(1 Good) Nothing is stagnant in this show, things are always moving. When we ended last series, Taverner was looking to finally be accepting her place as First Desk, but this season we learn she's right where she was last season, with instead new First Desk Claude Whelan, a died-in-the-wool bureaucrat appointed to the position. He's an idiot, and an idiot is dangerous in his position. Taverner's used to playing games with other very intelligent intelligence officers, so manipulating an idiot is surprisingly difficult.  Whelan is played by James Callis who played the conniving Baltar in Battlestar Galactica... his character here is not that different than Baltar in ambition, but Callis plays him much, much differently. Kristin Scott Thomas as Taverner really revels in that steely, all-business, woman-with-secrets-that-you-will-never-know energy. I really hope one of these series deep dives into her life and history.  The games at the Park were some of my favourite bits this season.

(1 Bad) Oh God, I get angry watching this series week-to-week. I just want to eat it all up in one bite. It's so consumable, and it just pulls you through its story.  You can tell these were crafted out of novels because they're so perfectly structured to deliver the right amount of story and character moments for every ongoing character. We lose some, we gain new ones, and it's a roller-coaster where you're not sure what's happening to start with and it unfolds alluringly and brilliantly.  So yeah, it's great, but I don't like being confined by AppleTV's pacing (I could always wait...but I can't, I look forward to it too much).

META: Mick Herron's Slough House series currently consists of eight full length books and five novellas. I really, really wish that they would produce the novellas as like a standalone episode or extra-length episode between the series'.  So far we've only missed one, between series two and three, and there's two more series before there's another one, so we'll see... or maybe once they tap out of the eight books, they'll just do the novellas as specials to keep it going... I dunno, I just want it all...without having to actually read. Yuck!

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Squid Game Season 1

The What 100: You know what Squid Game is already. I'm just that fool who waited two years to watch it. Ok, quickly... 456 desperate individuals sign up to play games in hopes of winning a massive cash prize. Once they learn it's games of death, well, it ultimately doesn't change much, and the people enlisted will see it through to the bitter end. A detective, looking for his missing brother, infiltrates the compound and starts to uncover what, or who, is behind it all.

(1 Great) Despite this series being absolutely something right up my alley, it got real popular, real quick and you know me with popular things...I bristle. Well, if that many people like it, then it can't be any good, because people who make things popular generally have terrible taste. It was watching Lee Jung-jae in The Acolyte (second Acolyte references this post) that drove me to finally watch it. He was such a charismatic and soulful performer in The Acolyte that he really made an impact and I wanted to see more from him. And yeah, he's absolutely great in this. Here he's Gi-hun, a man in debt, divorced, and just mooching off his diabetic mother. He's not a good guy. It's not even that he wants to be a good guy, but he knows he should be. If he wants his daughter to respect him, if he wants his ex (whom he obviously still loves, but knows she's better off without him) to respect him, if he wants his mother to live and have a good life... then he needs to be a better man. But he doesn't have the tools for it.  And then he's offered an opportunity. It's within the confines of this horrifying environment that Gi-hun learns to be a better man, supporting other players, trying to understand people and help them survive, and giving most people the benefit of the doubt when it's obvious he shouldn't.  He's obviously going to be the victor, because the show is centred around him from the beginning, but can he actually live with himself if he does survive? 

(1 Good) So much of the show, being such a phenomenon, was spoiled for me before I even watched it, but  even if it hadn't been so popular, I probably could have guessed the rhythms of it. It's a formulae for a group of people in a confined space. They tribe up, there are betrayers, there are people who appear one way but are revealed to be something else...there are archetypes to these things and this plays right into them. But, the Squid Game offers the contestants an out...if they collectively, by majority vote, decide to end the games, they all get to leave. And after the first game, in which over a hundred of them are murdered, they decide to leave. So the second episode finds them back in their lives, back in their abysmal lives which have no hope, no promise of reward, just more misery. It's its most bold critique of capitalism in this second episode showing how without a social safety net people fall into despair and ruin with no opportunity to get out. As such, the Squid Game, with its death-or-prizes alternatives, seems like the more appealing option. It's unfortunate that it's the high-point of the season only two episodes in, but it's a great episode.

(1 Bad) Like I said, Squid Game relies upon tropes for character drama and conflict so it can feel pretty routine. It's only the games themselves that electrify the series, but even then I found the games to be oddly primitive, and designed with a lack of competitive spirit in mind.  They're games of death designed to kill, not to be won. The way the games masters manipulate their players especially outside of the games is all part of their fun, which is less fun to watch knowing that it's all stacked against them.  it feels like the games masters are just the writing staff who want to see as much death and misery and heap it upon the audience It should be a poignant commentary, about our fascination with observing human misery from a distance, but it never really does ask the audience to consider their role as spectator in all of this. So it loses its juice, its motivating factor if it's just entertainment and not asking anything of its audience in return.

META: I've said before how much I like the "man-hunting-man" subgenre of thrillers, your "Most Dangerous Games" and "Hard Targets" but this sort of "game show" version is another sister subgenre in the "Running Man" or "Hunger Games" style where it's a spectator sport. I thought it was going to be more of a spectator sport, much more public in a dystopian future, but no, instead it's a secret spectator sport for only the richest of rich to observe.  The detective who finds his way into the back-end of the Squid Game, and starts digging into its secrets unfortunately demystifies it too much, in a way that breaks the logic of it.  If they're stealing 400+ people off the streets of Korea each year for decades, leaving behind a lot of trace evidence like their weird cards, surely people will take notice.  I dunno, I found the more I learned about the behind-the-scenes, the less I bought into it.

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Unsolved Mysteries Volume 5

The What 100: An upsetting double homicide in broad daylight in a public park in Cleaveland. Roswell revisited. A paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion. Cattle mutilations are back (and really haven't ever left).

(1 Great) "Great" sounds too enthusiastic to talk about the very upsetting story of the two friends murdered in Cleveland. It's not great, it's fucked up and horrible, and the interviews with the loved ones of the victims is heartbreaking.  But it's also compelling the circumstances around it, and just how bizarre the situation is. Each season of Unsolved Mysteries on Netflix has had one of these... a murder case so unusual that it kind of breaks one's brain about how it could happen in the first place... and they linger with you, unanswered questions that, were I closer to the case, would drive me mad.  In this case, two friends of about 40-years-old meet up on a park bench. Within clear eyeshot is a parking lot where sits a truck. The two friends are executed, shot in the back of the head, and the guy in the truck sees and hears nothing. Less than 15 minutes pass between the time the woman last used her phone and their bodies are discovered. There's a busy road that goes right by there. Any suspects that knew the victims have been ruled out. Gang related? Hate crime (the man was black, the woman white)? But how brazen an act, and how is there nothing to go on? It's viscerally upsetting.

(1 Good) The investigation into the rash of cattle mutilations in Oregon in between 2019 and 2022 is just freaking bizarre on its own, but when put into the context of thousands of reported cattle mutilations across the US and Canada since the 1960s it's the silent epidemic that nobody talks about. The surgical precision of the removal of skin and the tongue and, often, genitals, why? To what end?  And the weird states that the cows are found in, sometimes upside down on fences, or sitting upright in full rigor, with very little blood on the scene... just completely eerie.  A true unsolved mystery that wants to lean into the "alien abduction" of it all but holds itself back at least somewhat by talking all angles.  Just wild.

(1 Bad) As much as UM gives us some upsetting cases of murder, and mysterious mysteries, sometimes its exploration of the paranormal just seem like weirdos or mentally unstable people putting on a show, being excited about things they're making up. The case about the paranormal investigator and his ghostly companion just made me giggle. The revisiting of the Roswell crash made it seem more and more like "this is a thing because people want it to be".  Here's where I've settled on Roswell... if there were actual aliens, and the President of the United States is advised about it, do you think Trump could shut up about it. He's worried about Mexicans, you don't think he'd be stirring up shit about grey aliens if they were real? He would not be able to contain himself. 

META: The past couple UM volumes have been more paranormal-heavy than I'd like. It's always been an aspect of the show, but I like the weird crime (doesn't even have to be murder) aspect far more, and it seems far more helpful to talk about unsolved crimes than it does about sasquatches and aliens.  But I love how the show upsets me with the horrors of humanity, and I've always had a bit of a soft spot for entertaining these flights of metaphysical fancy. I wish this were a weekly show again.

31 Days of Halloween: Baghead

2023, Albert Corredor (feature debut) -- download

This was Corredor's first feature, adapted from his award winning short of the same name. Unfortunately, this movie fell into the all too familiar category of ... streeeeetch it until you have a feature film. There were some genuinely creepy things about it, all drawn from the original premise, but to make a full film, with a proper ending, they needed to expand the story.

I really need to find how many movies I think fall into that trap, but obviously enough for my brain to say "they made a short, now its a full length feature!" It has to be more than "Mama".

This season is going to be like most, rife with "meh" movies wading through the dross to find gems in the muck. Its not like we are choosing to watch bad movies, for if we wanted to do that we have Tubi or the "suggested" piles under Amazon movies, but an interesting premise and a decent trailer does not always beget an enjoyable movie, and rarely a good movie. At least we also rarely run into those that force us to turn them off.

Premise. A man (Peter Mullan, The Vanishing) somewhere in the UK owns a pub with a creature in the basement. A young man (Jeremy Irvine, Treadstone) is demanding access to "her" which the pub owner denies, as he goes into the basement, finds a witchy looking womanly creature strapped to a chair with a bag over her head. He basically claims that her hold over him is at an end, douses her in flammable alcohol and ... click, his lighter fails. When it finally works, she knocks it from his hand and he catches on fire. Screaming, he escapes the inferno in the basement only to die at the top of the stairs, as the fire dies as well. We also see these scenes interspersed with the "in case I am dead" video he is making, the exposition to tell us the viewer WTF is going on here.

Enter his daughter, his heir, Iris (Freya Allen, The Witcher), a screwup breaking into her own apartment/art studio that she has been evicted from, when she Gets the Phone Call. She immediately flies, which in UK-set movies means a really long distance, like the length of England, but possibly another country? She meets a "solicitor" (Ned Dennehy, Zone 414) who hands her keys and a deed, but claims he can have the pub sold off before the end of the week.

The wikipedia article says this is Berlin but absolutely NOTHING in the movie implies they are in Germany beyond a few, small details that could be easily hand-waved away. I am pretty sure the original script had it as such (Germany) but it was edited out and left... ambiguous.

The pub really is a character here. While it does the annoying thing of depicting the structure inside (cramped, ornate, lots of wood) not matching what we see on the outside (industrial building, big windows, lots of space) the whole space is really cool. Beyond having some alcohol on the premises it doesn't strike me that dad was running the place as a proper pub but Iris is intrigued, more as an opportunity to better understand her estranged father.

Then the young man with the money arrives. He offers her a lot of money to see what is in the basement. He walks her through what is going on. They draw the woman out, force her into the chair, give her something "the deceased" owned and then the baghead woman transforms into the dead one, so questions can be asked. But only for 2 minutes; any longer and the interaction is corrupted. The first time the young man tries, he gets his mother and lots of abuse heaped on him.

It may be indicative of horror movies, or my writing style, but I more often than not start with a detailed play-by-play of the opening, but then... fade out into the broader strokes. I think it is part of how these movies play out for me, especially the "adapted from a short" ones, in that once the premise is played through, and they have to get an entire rest of a movie from it, things get ... strained. I get bored.

Iris really likes the idea of getting money for this utterly fucking scary, insane, truly supernatural situation. Sure, her dad is finally, in death, giving her something. But she has numerous warnings this won't go well, but as per the equivalent of "don't go down into the basement" shouted (by the audience) entreaties, Main Characters never do the smart thing.

They don't even do a good job of expositing what she actually is. A witch. OK, yeah but she's immortal and angry and.... what? There needed to be something more than a secret society with an undead woman trapped in their basement.

In the end, the movie follows some tiresome trope laden paths until it does a weird WTF twist, which I guess is supposed to leave things open to a possible sequel? Too bad the only character I cared about (the pub) is finally successfully burned to the ground.

KWIF: Wolfs (+ a double dose of Flanney)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. TV has exploded with great new and returning shows, so filmic viewing has dwindled in its wake. These are what I managed to squeak in within the past two weeks.

This Week:
Wolfs (2024, d. Jon Watts, AppleTV+)
Doctor Sleep - Director's Cut (2019, d. Mike Flanagan, Blu-Ray)
Oculus (2013, d. Mike Flanagan, Netflix)

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What a terrible poster

Marvel has been picking out directorial talent from the most random of places for over 15 years now. I don't know if Swingers or Elf were really telltale benchmarks foretelling a successful Iron Man movie. Kenneth Brannagh on Thor was a surprising choice. Joe Johnson on Captain America: First Avenger was pretty logical. The Avengers seemed to be the thing Joss Whedon was born to make (besides inappropriate passes at women). But then the Marvel machine took over, Alan Taylor, James Gunn, the Russo Brothers, Peyton Reed, Scott Derrickson, Ryan Coogler, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, and on and on. None of these directors really had "tent pole action/sci-fi spectacular" notable in their background. Certain directors figured out how to work within the machine and thrive, others were swallowed by it. With few exceptions (Gunn, Taika Waititi and Sam Raimi primarily, and maybe Chloé Zhao) the voice of the director gets buried under the spectacle.

Jon Watts did three (dare I say it?) amazing Spider-Man movies. But what stands out to me about those Spider-Man films is not the action or special effect, but the characters, the performances, the pathos and the comedy.  Sequences don't stand out to me because of super-powered action, but instead because of character engagement, how people are relating to each other in a scene. Watts' gifts as a director aren't necessarily striking visuals, but drawing out fantastic performances from his actors, having young talent hold their own in the same scene as heavyweight veterans.

So Wolfs, being sold as a George Clooney/Brad Pitt reunion, has two such heavyweights, but it's the tertiary lead, Austin Abrams (from the spectacular Xmas teen romance Dash & Lily), is the absolute scene stealer of this film. This kid (playing "Kid"...he's actually 28) dominates every scene he's in, which is kind of hard when you're dealing with such sexagenarian handsomeness on screen.

The premise is the Kid is dead, and the politician who was with him when he overdosed (the everywhere-these-days Amy Ryan, Sugar) calls for help in cleaning it up. Enter the Wolf, Jack (Clooney). He's seen everything, and knows how to handle it. Nothing to worry about. Until there's another knock at the door. Enter the Wolf, Nick (Pitt), called in by the hotel. Two cleaners? Complicated things get even more complicated as a stash of heroin is found, and the Wolfs are charged with working together to find the owners and return it, lest the heat catch up to them. Doubly complicated things get even more complicated when, it turns out, the Kid isn't dead after all, leading to an incredible and hilarious foot chase that had me giggling nonstop (Abrams' verbal noises and the sound design of his sock feet slapping the pavement are just incredible).

It's all framed in a "one crazy night" cinematic fashion, going from location to location, one strange or tense encounter after another, as the odd couple start to find kinship with one another, and even start taking a very unprofessional shining to the Kid.  It's a tried-and-true formulae, and it works really well here. Clooney and Pitt have a very easy chemistry with one another, and even when they're not supposed to like one another there's a playfulness to their rivalry. 

Written into the script is the fact that both these men are aging. They have wounds and aches and problematic parts which plague them, and as fit as they are, they're still hovering around six decades on this earth. They aren't ready to leave it just yet, but there is a weariness about the life they're leading. It's used for humour, sure, but it's also used (mostly silently) to provide context. Jack specifically looks at the Kid and every time you can read into Clooney's eyes that he will probably have to kill this kid, and he really doesn't want to.

It's a fairly lightweight, breezy watch. There are no Spider-Man vibes to it at all, but Watts draws out a surprising amount of depth from what could have been two very cookie-cutter lead characters.

[I'm choosing to sidestep any particular discussion about Brad Pitt, as it didn't really impact my reaction to the film. There's a recent hit piece on him in Slate poking at the cracks in his well curated image if you want to explore it.]

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Toasty is a big Mike Flanagan fan, and has said so on multiple occasions, and more than once has inquired with me if I have been exploring the Flanagan fundamentals. But, not being the horror guy Toasty is, I haven't had the impulse to dive into his various Netflix shows of the past half-decade. His films work all came out pre-2020 and haven't had the same groundswell of cult support that the works of, say, Ari Aster or Ti West has. 

Independent of Toasty's provocations, the Blank Check podcast crew have very much championed Flanagan's adaptation of Steven King's Doctor Sleep. I wrote off King years ago (quickly: full of ideas, consistently terrible endings that frequently ruin the whole story), and I thought a faithful adaptation of King's sequel to The Shining would be full of King's sour grapes stemming from the Kubrick film.  But these Blankies, these titans of film nerddom, kept bringing it up...for years now. There must be something to it... specifically denoting the Director's Cut being the superior rendition.

So I wound up with a Director's Cut of the blu-ray of Doctor Sleep earlier this year and stashed it for a rainy day. I didn't realize that I needed to set aside over 3 hours to watch it, but was pretty happy I did, almost immediately.

Flanagan's TV storytelling sensibilities from The Haunting of Hill House very much infected this film it seems. While it isn't episodic, per se, it is told in "chapters", and the juggling of a cast set in three different locations from each other (as well as flashbacks) until basically the final hour of the film feels more television than movie. 

The story starts in 1980, first with Rebecca Ferguson, who looks flat-out gorgeous in a sort of bohemian aesthetic but is also scary as shit as her character Rose the Hat sacrifices children so her and her coven (including prominently Zahn McClarnan, a Kent favourite) of nomadic, ageless, psychic vampires suck their "steam" and get high. Theirs is a tale of addiction, and the desperation they have in acquiring their hits.  At the same time, Danny Torrence and his mom (Alex Essoe, doing a very uncanny valley impersonation of Shelly Duvall) are attempting to recover from the fallout of their time at the Overlook Hotel. It's not going great, but Danny's still learning things from his Shining pal, Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly, taking over from Scatman Crothers), despite Dick being dead.  It's sort of a force ghost thing.

30 years later Danny's living the life of a junkie (not unfamiliar ground for Ewan McGregor), barely scraping by, when he finally abandons his hedonistic, addictive ways for a small town life, where he settles in comfortably. A few hundred miles away, a young girl named Abra has been exploring her powers, and she may just have the most powerful Shine of anyone. Unlike Danny, she's not afraid of it.  She connects with Danny remotely and they become pen pals, of a sort.

8 years later, Danny is clean and sober and stable, and though the "weird girl" at school, Abra is generally comfortable and confident in life. But when she sees Rose and the crew sacrificing a young boy to steal his Shine, she can't let it stand and gets Dan involved.  From there it's a cat and mouse game between all the players, the advantages ever shifting.

For the film, Flanagan takes King's sequel novel in earnest and also makes it a sequel to the Kubrick film via visual reference: Danny's parents are visual cues (Henry Thomas is made up to look like a haggard Jack Nicholson and the sort of confusing uncanny valley of it all is deftly used), and Flanagan reshoots some of the Overlook Hotel sequences as they suit certain narrative purposes in the story but serve to only remind that this lives in the shadow of greatness. In some respects, I felt the film at times leaned a little too heavily on the references, repeating things where there could have been more invention, and Essoe's impersonation of Duvall I found highly distracting.

But Doctor Sleep could live outside of the Shining, outside of needing it as a reference, at least in the Director's Cut.  You'll have a head start if you're familiar, but it does fill in the gaps if you're not. 

It's remarkable to me how sinister Ferguson's Rose is, how credible a threat she and her coven feel, and yet the peril that young Abra could face never actually materializes. Where Danny has cut himself off from his powers for decades, Abra has been exploring, and she is powerful. She is so powerful that Rose, as dangerous as she seems, is barely a credible threat to her. So it falls upon McGregor to be both the protector and the prone, he's the one most susceptible to the villainous troupe, but as the adult in the situation he's also responsible for protecting Abra from these vampires.

I really dug this world of "shine" and "steam" as fleshed out by King and Flanagan. I understand why some may see any form of sequel to Kubrick's masterpiece as blasphemous, but it's a pulpy story with a lot of world building around these superpowered individuals so it makes sense why I keyed into it so readily.  It feels like a space that has rules and boundaries, and different levels of access. If the logic isn't overtly presentd on screen, then it seems for damn sure Flanagan has it all figured out in his head. 

But it's not just about the flights of fancy. At the core of Danny's story is the cycle of abuse, trauma and addiction. The supernatural elements do undercut the potency a bit, but it is a key element to the story and generally it cohabitates well.

Doctor Sleep isn't a horror movie. At best it's a supernatural suspense film in the guise of a legasequel (it fits all the earmarks of one), but has a quite satisfying ending (is it King's ending or did Flanagan refine it).  I don't doubt that King has an Abra novel in him that will go bonkers-wild in exploring the world of Shine in the modern day (whether it gets made into a halfway decent film or not).

[Toastypost - we agree]

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do all of Flanney's posters have a 
"hands over the eyes" thing?

With my first venture into Flanagan territory exceeding my expectations, I immediately wanted to dive into another. Ouija: Origin of Evil was not available on any of my streaming services but Oculus was... and, what? Karen Gillan? Katee Sackhoff? Yes please!

If I'm being perfectly honest, I do remember when this was coming out. My crush on Gillan was already on firm foundation, but my disdain for stupid-sounding horror movies was stronger than whatever libidinous impulses might draw me to watch a particular performer in a film. An evil mirror? Come on....

What I *just* realized whilst watching Oculus is that most, if not all horror movies sound stupid if you distill them down to their most basic premise. It's all in the execution.

Oculus takes place over two time periods following siblings Kaylie and Tim. The younger versions, around 12 and 10 respectively, have just moved with their parents into a new home. Their prosperous father, Alan (Rory Cochrane) has deferred to his wife Marie's (Sackhoff) decorating tastes, which is largely antiques. A gorgeous, massive wood-framed mirror is the centerpiece of Alan's home office. 

In the modern day, Tim (Brenton Thwaites, Titans) is just being released from an institution where he's been in its care since childhood, having shot his father and experience severe trauma. Kaylee (Gillan) is there to pick him up, and immediately throws him back into the fire. They had made a promise as children and now she intends they keep it.

In their old vacant family home she has set up an elaborate, controlled scenario, with once again the mirror as centrepiece to the experiment. Cameras positioned everywhere, with timers set to go off reminding them to eat, drink, change out data storage, etc, and should all else fail a massive homemade swinging anchor set to a timer that will bash the mirror to bits should they be unable to.  

This tantilizing scenario, elaborately, painstakingly detailed by Kaylie, poses the question for the audience: what is this all about? Certainly it's personal for the two of them, but Tim's time in the facility has reshaped his understanding of their shared history. The memories of that horrible time just a manufactured trauma response to the ugliness of an abusive father who killed their mother.

But the film jumps back and forth in time, revealing the "truth", or as much of it as the mirror's distortions will allow. And therein lies the problem for our protagonists, just as it was a problem for them and their family as children... the mirror's evil deceives, spreads lies into the mind, makes one think they're seeing what's not really there.  

Flanagan's deft use of his two time periods comes to a head in the third act when the lines between them literally blur. Adult Kaylie might cross her 10 year old brother, or Tim might be running down a hallway just as 12-year-old Kaylie slams a door he's running past. At certain times it's unclear which time, which reality we're in or whether the time periods have merged. Flanagan's use of deceit is pretty masterful here, even if the conclusion is all but inevitable. 

As far as horror goes, it's not far afield from the James Wan camp, dark, but playful, in structure here rather than tone. The finale feels like a bloody homage to Rod Serling, a real downbeat ending that also seems like the only place it could go. 

I'm definitely in for more Flanney! 

[ToastyPost - we agree]