Ah-Ah-Argento #4: Door Into Darkness

 Door Into Darkness (aka La Porta Sul Buio) was a four episode anthology created and produced by Dario Argento for RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana, nee Radio Audizioni Italiane - the national public broadcasting company of Italy) following his third film, Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Originally airing in 1973, part of the intent of the series was to give friends of Argento some directing exposure, including Luigi Cozzi, one of his early assistants, and Roberto Pariante, an early assistant director. The series was modelled somewhat after Alfred Hitchcock Presents... wherein the director himself would introduce each episode, which Argento does here sporting a shaggy mop and stylish '70's clothes.  It turned Argento into an unlikely, but legitimate star in the country where he would become known as a media personality almost as prominently as a director.

The series originally aired in black and white (since RAI could only broadcast in black and white at the time) but Argento and company was asked to shoot it in colour for the eventual re-airings when they would appear in colour. The crew, however still shot the series optimized for presentation in black and white, so it's bizarre to me that the physical media collection this series is featured on ("Dario Argento's Deep Cuts" from Severin Films) does not have the episodes presented both ways (but from all signs, it seemed a difficult task to find even decent copies of these episodes...the transfers are exceptionally noisy and grainy with frequent haziness or film errors, so it almost feels lucky we even get them like this).

The episodes are:
1. "The Neighbor" (aka "Il vicino di casa") - written and directed by Luigi Cozzi
2. "The Tram" (aka "Il tram") - written and directed by Dario Argento (direction credited to a pseudonym)
3. "The Doll" (aka "La bambola") - written by Marcella Elsberger and Mario Foglietti, directed by Foglietti
4. "Eyewitness" (aka "Testimone oculare") - written by Argento and Cozzi, directed by Argento with Cozzi but credited to Roberto Pariante.

---

For The Neighbor, prior to the story starting, Argento introduces the series as a concept before introducing the episode. He's a gentle, contemplative speaker, unassuming for someone considered a master of the macabre. This staged setting transitions sharply to Argento slamming the hood of a car on the side of the road on a highway where he continues to introduce the episode. He then flags down a car, and a young couple pick him up. He gets into the back seat and we see the resulting conversation from his POV. It's truly and odd sequence, lasting about 90 seconds or so before Argento asks to be dropped off and the car drives off. 

But the charm of the sequence reveals itself when it turns out we will be following this couple as our protagonists for the story. They've just bought a beach-front apartment that they're moving into. The truck is to arrive with all their stuff the next morning. However, their upstairs neighbour has just murdered his wife. They would have been none the wiser if not for the fact that he forgot to shut the tap off to the bathtub and it starts to leak downstairs. He's gone out to fetch a shovel and the couple allow themselves into his apartment to shut off the water only to find the body.

With their car stuck in the sand and neither their electricity nor phone hooked up they're trapped with nowhere to go. Their only hope is the murderous upstairs neighbour will be unaware that they found out about his crime... if only the didn't leave something inside his apartment.

The Neighbor has suitable tension, but it's only got about 30 minutes of story in an over 50 minute episode, so it feels every moment of its padding. Much of the padding is meant for ratcheting up the tension but it's more frustrating than intensifying.

Aldo Reggiani plays the husband, Luca, and has the lightest work to do, while his wife, Stefania, played by the beautiful Laura Belli is our primary POV character, and the one who has to interact with the titular neighbour (Mimmo Palmara) the most. Palmara sports a big 70's moustache and a high head of aged grey hair, and at first seems tired and unassuming, but when he needs to take an unconscious Luca to the beach, we see what a beast of a man Palmara is, throwing Reggiani over his shoulder with relative ease, and moving around with him with no difficulty. The threat level triples after we see this strength.

---

Argento shines with The Tram, a really fun piece of detective/mystery fiction directed with Argento's usual assured hand and only a slightly tamped down version of his traditional flair. Shot on 16mm (as all the episodes were) there are a number of beautiful shots and impeccable use of his environments (the titular tram car as well as the tram depot), neither of which I've seen used anywhere near as well in TV or cinema in the 50+ years since. While Argento (and his cohorts on the other episodes) did not have nearly the time and definitely not the relative budget of his feature films for this production Argento makes a mini-Argento movie that feels as accomplished and as entertaining as anything he's done (Argento cites the lighting being the biggest sacrifice, but he still does well with what he has here).

In The Tram, a body is found under a streetcar seat when the car is being cleaned. The police arrive and investigate, what seems to be an impossible crime. How could someone be murdered AND stowed without anyone seeing it, including both the streetcar driver and ticket taker who were on the vehicles trip from start to finish.

Enzo Cerusico plays the Inspector on the case, Giordani. He has habits and ticks on display as he thinks through his problems, and Cerusico is not only a handsome lead but absolutely charming one as well. Giordani should have spun out into his own series of mysteries, either on TV or film. Having only one adventure with him was definitely not enough.

But part of it is the case, as well. It is a perplexing one, especially if we're to take all the eyewitness testimony (none of which provides any immediate clue to the killer's identity) as fact, then there seems to be only one or two answers that remain. 

The intelligence of the script is that Giordani follows the remaining threads, and it does point to the most obvious answer, through to completion of the accused being convicted but, his please of innocence haunt Giordani. So even though the case is close, justice has been served, Giordani can't shake that he's missed something. So off the books, with his partner Giulia (the beautiful Paola Tedesco), he takes another crack at it, and it leads to an exceptional climax.

The only weakness of this episode is the off-topic, preachy coda that feels like something Argento just wanted to get off his chest (he's not wrong, but it's just such an aside).

---

For the third instalment of Door Into Darkness, Argento brought his friend, journalist Mario Foglietti, whom he collaborated with on Four Flies..., for his first directorial effort.

The story begins with an escape from a mental hospital completely shot from a first-person POV perspective. It's an effective sequence (apparently shot by Cozzi, who stepped in as second unit director when Foglietti fell behind).

From there, it's a confounding and yet kind of compelling puzzle. A police inspector meets with the head professor from the mental hospital. They agree to collaborate on finding the missing patient, whomever they may be, noting that they're a schizophrenic and potentially dangerous.

We follow a handsome, but slightly rumpled man (Robert Hoffmann) around a small town as he checks into a rooming house and looks out upon the street, clearly searching for someone. He finds her (the beautiful Erika Blanc), and follows her, but stops tailing her when she meets up with another man. Later in the evening she is killed in her fashion warehouse.

The inspector and the professor have a follow-up conversation, which only serves to obfuscate rather than illuminate what is actually happening. The man starts following another woman (the beautiful Mara Venier) who looks like the same woman he was following earlier, and he starts messing with her. She seems to let him mess with her. The dynamic is incredibly perplexing and uncomfortable. 

The climax is even more discomforting as the inspector leads a dragnet in the town and the man and second woman play out their psychodrama in hiding. It all comes to a head with the reveal of who these people are.

It's a challenging hour of television, and maybe the payoff doesn't reward the effort, but, as I noted I was pretty compelled the entire time trying to figure it out. Cozzi, in his second-unit direction, really seemed to reach for Argento's-style of first-person shooting, which finds some element of visual consistency across the episodes.

---

The final episode, Eyewitness, turned out to be a bit of a mess. From what Cozzi said about what happened behind the scenes, Argento was not pleased with the quality of what Foglietti shot after the first few days of shooting (each episode shot for around 8 days) and he and Cozzi stepped in to take over production, reshooting what they could (Argento's take was that cast and crew were unhapping with Foglietti and asked Argento to take over... in both cases Argento seems hesitant to disparage anyone, and wished that Foglietti retain credit). That the episode is as engrossing as it is proves that the talent of the directors and the series crew.

The plot is an interesting gialli. Roberta (the beautiful Marilù Tolo...there's a lot of beautiful women in Italian cinema and more than a few of them in this series) is driving to her rural home after a day and evening in the city. On the familiar road home, she turns a bend and something jumps out in front of her. She screeches to a halt and sees a woman's body laying in the road. Roberta gets out, certain she hadn't hit anything. She checks the body. It is dead with a wound in the back. There's a rustle in the bushes and a man with a gun emerges. Roberta runs, knowing the local tavern is not far. She makes it without incident. The cops arrive. The chief inspector (Glauco Onorato) questions her, then takes her back to the scene where he explains that he believe she believes she saw something, but there was no body found.

There's one mistake Argento made with the rest of the story. Where we should be following Roberta and her husband as they're, maybe, terrorized by the perpetrator of the crime, or maybe it's all just a series of weird coincidences and Roberta really did "just see something" (the way it's shot largely allows for both possiblities) instead a transitional sequence does show us gloved hand disposing of the dead woman's bloody clothes, thereby eliminating the possibility, at least for the audience, that Roberta might have just been making the whole thing up.

But this "mistake" then does lead to the most surprising part of the story, the inspector, after another incident or four in Roberta's life, which could all be chalked up as random events or even fabrications, he believes her. He intuitively trusts his instincts on her character, and believes her. It's a surprising and wonderful scene when one expects tropes out of stories from this era. 

The climax plays out as it should, and it's satisfying (if the final note a bit weird), but this is a story that really could have been filled out nicely into a full-length movie, really the only one of these stories that has that in it.

---

I enjoyed all of these entries, with The Neighbor thrilling me the least, and The Tram exciting me the most. In all, as much as these were made for TV, they are all put together with cinematic professionalism. Argento had to cut costs, but I don't think he knows how to cut corners when he directs. Even when he's not successful, he's always intentional and it shows in the work. He was on set for most of the productions, so his guiding hand is there over the whole procession even if he wasn't writer or director on everything.

The Hitchcock/Rod Serling-esque episode introductions are an anthology convention, and Argento serves the role well. Unfortunately the clever way in which Argento's introduction was incorporated into the story set-up of The Neighbor did not happen in the remaining episode. It was an exceptionally interesting way to get an episode started. 

The series ran into trouble with the censors even before the first episode aired, and then ran into more trouble after the first episode aired. All the censorship issues displeased Argento that he abstained from producing another series or even working in television again for years. But what we got is an absolute treat.

KWIF: 28 Years Later (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. One brand new movie and a lotta real old shit. Yes, stuff from the 90's is now real old.

This Week:

28 Years Later (2025, d. Danny Boyle - in theatre)
Earthquake (1974, d. Mark Robson - HollywoodSuite)
The Swimmer (1968, d. Frank Perry - HollywoodSuite)
Look Who's Talking (1989, d. Amy Heckerling - HollywoodSuite)
Sudden Death (1995, d. Peter Hyams - HollyWoodSuite)

---

28 Weeks Later was my inauguration into the post-apocalyptic trope of "the worst thing about the end of the world are the other survivors". Ever since that film, any time I'm watching anything po-ap I've come to expect the worst out of the people we haven't met yet, the others alluded to off in the distance. It is, frankly, my least favourite part of po-ap, but also probably the most honest.  Zombies, aliens, natural disasters, giant/tiny monsters we can survive...but each other? We're showing ourselves Right.Now. we really can't do it, we can't learn a goddamn thing about peace and harmony and coexistence as long as there are people who want more than what others have and are willing to go to any extents to have it. But I digress.

So imagine my surprise when the spectre off in the distance is not what they are believed to be, and in the darkest of spaces we find humanity, and humanity not just caring about life, but caring about death. 

In 28 Years Later, the UK is closed off from the world and the survivors are left to the infected, and the infected are left to the survivors. Our protagonists Isla (Jodie Comer), Jamie (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Spike (Alfie Williams) live in a busy, close-knit village on an island connected to mainland Scotland by a causeway. Tide goes out, one way in, one way out, tide comes in. Jamie is taking 12-year-old Spike to the mainland for his first hunt, a right of passage among the villagers. Isla suffers from an unknown malady and is only sporadically aware of the here and now. There is no medication and no doctors to aide her. So after a very tense hunt full of close calls, when Spike hears of a doctor, even one gone mad, out on the mainland, he takes Isla out by himself to get her care.

I'm skipping over plenty, but that's the glory of discovery in a film like this, where our protagonists (and the filmmakers, and us, the audience) have gotten to a certain comfort level with the setting, surroundings and threats... it's the unexpected, and scripter Garland and director Boyle have much up their sleeve in this regards.

This includes hints at the nature of the infected, survivor subcultures on the mainland, the status quo of the outside world, and a bookend that... well... let's just say there'll be a lot of discussion around it until the sequel comes.

I had no expectations when it came to 28 Years Later, so they were neither met, nor dashed. Boyle both impresses and frustrates with his choices in direction and editing, but more the former than the latter. His shots of wilderness (with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle) are incredible, but his zombie frenzies, full of quick cuts and abstraction, are the weakest part of the film, and the style pulls me out more than enhances the chaos and scariness. 

Garland's script takes a turn that pleased me greatly, as I worried Jodie Comer's whole role was to be the frail, discombobulated matriarch whose whole purpose and contribution to the story is to motivate young Spike into rash action. I mean, it's a bigger role than just that, but doesn't exactly serve a nobler purpose (in a turn in Garland's script that displeased me only minorly).

But, that ending is bound to baffle, or even infuriate some, especially if you didn't know there's more on the way. Even if you did... I mean... I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it, which, after nearly 2 hours of stone-faced severity in muted, grainy colours, to have this blast of pizzazz and vibrancy...it's jarring. It hearkens to British subcultures, nodding to the droogs of A Clockwork Orange and the Inglorious Basterds, and promises something quite different in the picture to come.

---

The disaster movies were the superhero movies of the 70's. All spectacle, where big stars would grab their paycheque to entertain the masses with an eventful show of calamity and destruction. There are the ones with the lasting legacy, like The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and Airport, and then there were the rest.

I don't think I had heard of Earthquake before this year (if I had, it definitely didn't stick in memory), the Charlton Heston-led production which attempts the same ensemble cast put though their paces through not dissimilar story beats in the aftermath of calamity. In this case, if it weren't evident, there's an earthquake in Los Angeles.

Of course, the first act is all about setting up our cast of characters whose personal drama don't really matter at all once the shit goes down. It's all just kind of about survival. Ol' Chuck plays an ex-football star with a trope-addled wife (Ava Gardner) one could only call "queen of the harpies". There's a young woman (Geneviève Bujold) with a pre-teen kid who Chuck likes to visit. The film plays it off as altruistic, Chuck helping the widow of a colleague, but his wife thinks he's having an affair.  

There's a good cop having a bad day (George Kennedy), the seismologists who, in Jaws-like fashion, warn the mayor of the earthquake, but refuses to sound the alarm, and there's a motorcycle stuntman (Richard Roundtree) and his team who are also here because Evel Knievel (only took me 3 tries to spell it correctly) was hot at the time. There's also a few other odds and sods, including a creepy grocery store manager and Lorne Greene playing Chuck's father-in-law (only 8 years older than him in Last Crusade fashion).

The earthquake kicks off the second act with a whole lotta miniatures, and Star Trek-caliber flopping about as the camera shakes and tilts and applies an in-camera distorting effect to make it look like buildings are wobbling. It's delightfully corny, but the titular earthquake is not the threat of the film... it's all the crumbling infrastructure, downed power lines, and, of course, the human component afterwards that are the real threat.

Earthquake is not a great movie, it's most definitely a product of its time, but it is tremendously entertaining. I loved all the creative effects and model work and set pieces and matte paintings. I also really appreciated how the filmmakers here really tried to think logically about what the threats would be in a post-earthquake scenario, and how normal people, not superheroes by any stretch, could work through their treacherous situations. In keeping with the formulae, not everyone comes out unscathed.  If only there were any real weight behind it all. The characters are so basic and average, you almost forget most of them are movie stars.

---

When we first meet the titular Swimmer, Ned, he's running through the woods in his swim trunks... it's a 55 year old Burt Lancaster looking better than I ever did at my absolute fittest. He breaks through the clearing an dives into a pool. It's not Ned's pool, but he is also not an unwelcome guest, although he has missed the party by 8 hours or so. The hungover men love him, the hungover women love him even more, and Ned ably flirts with them all. He's far from home, but obsessed with pools and swimming and reckons he can "swim" home, backyard hopping from pool to pool.

As Ned progresses through his journey, hitting on anything with breasts along the way, it becomes clearer and clearer that Ned isn't right in the head. He's having some kind of existential crisis mixed with a nervous breakdown peppered with a psychotic episode.

The closer Ned gets to home, the more the real Ned comes to light. He's not that life of the party to those who had really gotten to know him, he's not the wonderful father he purports to be, and as a lothario he's left them wanting, but not wanting more Ned. He's a cad, a deadbeat, and probably broke.

The journey of The Swimmer is one of character discovery for the audience, the teasing out of information that paint the picture of the man, but leading to no decisive clarity as to what triggered Ned's break, and leaving dangling the question of "how did he get here?" (both in the physical and metaphorical sense).

It's at times a riveting journey, but also at times a tedious one. The film could easily shave 25 minutes of montages and kaleidescopic lollygagging and not be the lesser for it (it's s film padding out a short story and it shows). I have to imagine that Matt Weiner, creator of Mad Men is a huge fan of this film, as Ned's journey seems to have made the map that Don Draper would follow.

I never knew where The Swimmer was going. It opens with such jovial frivolity, that it seemed like it was just to be a simple lark of a movie, a real late-stage Rat Pack-style hangout film with good looking people in swim trunks having whatever kind of conversations people in the 1960's had. Instead it doglegs pretty sharply into uncomfortable and darker terrain that had me saying "nope!" out loud, only for the film to be fully aware of its impropriety. It is a fascinating film, one I knew nothing about as it played immediately after Earthquake (it self sort of a random find one evening) and so happy to have had the chance to watch it.  It's stuck in my mind more than almost any other film I've seen this year so far.

---

My favourite film podcast, Blank Check, has been covering the films of Amy Heckerling the past two months. As is typical with me and Blank Check, I want to follow along, but if the films aren't readily available on the streaming services I have (or in my DVD binders), then I tend to fall off the "follow along" train pretty quickly. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is streaming nowhere at the moment, nor is Johnny Dangerously  (while National Lampoon's Euorpean Vacation seems to have just popped up on Crave, weeks after "the two friends" have ripped the movie a new one so I think I safely pass that one up)  Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too popped up on the cable package Hollywood Suite last weekend, and I couldn't set the PVR to record any faster.

I can't remember how many times I saw Look Who's Talking, but it seemed like a lot. I was pretty into Rebecca from Cheers at that time -- hot messy women were my thing as an adolescent -- but even so, this Kirstie Alley-starring vehicle about a woman who has a baby as a result of an affair with a married man was such a quintessential 1980's "chick flick", I really shouldn't have cared. But for that baby to have an inner monologue voiced by Bruce Willis, suddenly this "chick flick" was the comedy sensation of the decade, drawing in people from pretty much every age group.  I mean, can you believe the things Baby Mikey is thinking?

Honestly, it was a revolutionary concept at the time, one which very quickly got beaten into the ground with subsequent sequels, TV spin-offs, and other shows and movies and commercials pilfering the gimmick.

The reality is Look Who's Talking is a sort of charming film about a woman, Molly Jensen, becoming a single mother and struggling real hard at it, trying to date and find a dad for her baby (the wrong way to date), while she strikes up a weird alliance with a hairy taxi driver (John Travolta) who agrees to babysit for her so that he can use her address to set up his grandpa in a local care home. There's definite chemistry between them, but she doesn't see him as being a good baby daddy, even though he's awesome with kids. *Shrug*.

The fact that baby Mikey has his inner monologue said aloud it Willis' playfully wry cadence kind of gets in the way and undercuts the journey Molly is on by more than half. At least a third of Willis' interjections were jarring in their insertion and, since we've all long gotten over talking babies, not contributing anything of real merit to the plot or story.

It is a strangely personal films for Heckerling, who found herself pregnant as a result of an affair, and George Segal's character reflects Heckerling's frustration with her real-life baby daddy, and doesn't paint a very kind picture.

It really is a hard film to hate. It's bright and filmic with two leads who are the opposite of unappealing, but whatever it was about its gimmick that made it such a phenomenon in 1989 has mostly worn off.  My apathy towards this one has left me with zero desire to watch Look Who's Talking Too.

---

Director Peter Hyams has not gotten a series on Blank Check, where they review directors' filmographies one film at a time, nor will he likely ever. He is a journeyman director, one who had a stable career for over 30 years, and he quietly made some of the sleepiest of sleeper cult hits during that time. Three of his films have been covered on the Quentin Tarantno/Roger Avery podcast Video Archives (Bustin', Narrow Margin and The Relic) all with largely favourable critiques, and they haven't even touched 2010, Outland, Capricorn One, Timecop or Sudden Death.

It's almost too easy to look at the cover of any 90's Jean-Claude Van Damme flick and snicker, at least just a little, but Sudden Death is probably the least JCVD-esque vehicle of all JCVD films. In what can only be called "Die Hard in a hockey arena", JCVD is playing a fire marshal at Pittsburgh's Civic Arena, and he's scored seats to the Penguins' Game 7 Stanley Cup final against the Chicago Blackhawks bringing his pre-teen son and younger daughter. In attendance at the game is the vice-president so security it high.  But not high enough.

A large, well prepared team of mercenaries have descended on the stadium and successfully taken the vice president hostage, murdering plenty along the way. A deeply complicated money transfer scheme is their aim, based on seized off-books reserves the US government has access to, and their leader, Joshua Foss (Powers Booth), will stop at nothing to coerce the VP into getting it for him, including blowing up the arena.

The surprising thing is that there's really only one lengthy choreographed fight sequences (between JCVD and a stuntwoman in the Penguins' mascot costume) that shows off JCVD's usual fighting prowess. In this, his fire Marshall isn't an ex-marine, or has a black belt in tae-kwon doe, he's just a scrappy person with a few power moves, but he still gets his ass beat up quite a bit.  Most of what JCVD is asked to do is look stressed and panicked as he tries to disarm bombs and figure out how to rescue his kids, all while a big-time hockey game goes on inside, and the Secret Service attempt to reign in control on the outside. Is it the best use of JCVD's talents (and butt)? No, but he serves it just fine.

It's all second-tier Die Hard stuff, but it's still really damn enjoyable. Booth may not have the same gravitas as Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons, but you want a big bad on a budget the man can deliver.. He's absolutely vicious, and the death toll he and his team are responsible for is ridiculous. They really don't care (they even pull the trigger on a child at one point!).

Hyams and crew use the Civic Arena to its fullest. The arena sports a moon roof feature where a wedge of the roof retracts to reveal the night sky and fireworks.  It also is wide enough to, infamously, drop a helicopter into. There's such an energy added to the movie by having a hockey game going on in the middle of it, with the big roar of the crowd and the excitement of the goals being scored. It's a film taking its threat and its scenario seriously while also remembering to have fun with it (at one point JCVD needs to go out on the ice disguised as the Penguins' goalie, to which he keeps repeating "oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit" as the play starts streaking towards him).  

I delighted in this movie. Hyams is such an ultra-competent director, he keeps the suspense suspenseful, the action actiony, and paired with JCVD manages to keep the protagonist of the film the underdog throughout.

[Updated] Black Mirror - Kent ranked

28 episodes, 6 seasons and Christmas special and an interactive movie (so far)

--------

Ranked from 1-10 each for:

T - thoughtfulness (how much it makes you think afterward)

WB - world building (how well the world building works and holds up to scrutiny)

H - horror (how scary is it)

E - enjoyable (it may be smart or scary or conceptually interesting, but is it a fun/good view?)

And finally Ranking 1-20
--------

s1-e1 National Anthem - the Royal Princess is kidnapped, and the Prime Minister is blackmailed into doing something really gross on live television to get her back. This one's uncomfortable as fuck.  Not the episode to start with (I didn't come back to Black Mirror for 6 months afterward)

T - 9 | WB - 2 | H - 10 | E - 2 or 8 depending on your disposition -- Ranking #31/34

s1-e2 15 Million Merits - in the future the average person's job is literally keeping the lights on.  As they work they watch entertainments and ads, and they gain credits.  When they're not working they live in tiny cubicles where every surface is a screen...gaming, entertainment, porn, and advertising, always..their lives are consumed by it.  The only escape for some: an American Idol-style talent competition.

T - 9 | WB - 7 | H - 2 | E - 7 -- Ranking #9/34

s1-e3 The Entire History Of You - an implant records every moment of your life for you to obsess over and play back.  There's no need to misremember things when literally everything is documented.  How does this access to one's past affect relationships...not well.

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 3 | E - 8 --  Ranking #11/34

s2-e1 Be Right Back - a woman loses her husband after moving to the countryside.  She can't stop grieving.  She catches wind of a service that will place her husband's memories (extrapolated from all social media and other digital records) in a bio-engineered version of him.  It gets a little awkward (stars Agent Carter herself Hayley Atwell)

T - 6 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 9  --  Ranking #3/34

s2-e2 White Bear - a woman wakes up, having been seemingly drugged and kidnapped.  Everyone she encounters refuses to talk to her, only monitoring her with their cel phones.  Then some masked crazies start hunting her.  WTF is going on!?! The world building kind of falls apart at the very, very end but still scary as hell

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E- 9  -- Ranking #8/34

s2-e3 The Waldo Moment - what if a foul-mouthed cartoon character ran for office? It basically predicted Trump.  Easily the weakest episode yet still worth watching.

T - 8 | WB - 7 |  H - 7 | E - 4 -- Ranking #34/34

Christmas Special - White Christmas - John Hamm tells a story to a coworker at a remote outpost, and the stranger tells one back.  There's a mystery here.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 6  -- Ranking #24/34

s3-e1 Nosedive - Bryce Dallas Howard is obsessed with her social media score, an app that allows people to rank each other that the whole world is obsessed with and makes every decision around, but it's not high enough to get into the living community she wants.  Her efforts to be a better person totally backfire.  So casually horrifying.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 8  -- Ranking #14/34

s3-e2 Playtest -  a man subject himself to playtesting an experimental, immersive virtual reality gaming experience, but what's the game and what's real start getting very confusing.

T - 4 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #33/34

s3-e3 Shut Up and Dance - a young man has his life upended when a hacker threatens to release compromising video of him to his entire contact list.  The only way out is to perform 24 hours of errands without fail.  The panic level is high on this one, and the ending is a total gutpunch.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 9 | E - 8  -- Ranking #10/34

s3-e4 San Junipero - people can retire into the virtual reality of their choosing, while the young can only visit.  Two women fall in love but their ability to find one another and stay connected is a challenge.  It's an absolutely beautiful, and hopeful, story.  Won two Emmys.

T - 8 | WB - 10 | H -0 | E - 10  --  Ranking #2/34

s3-e5 Men Against Fire - an alien enemy has taken over, they're seemingly everywhere.  Military tech help identify them, but what happens when one soldier's tech goes on the fritz?  Better taken as an analogy than literal.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 6  -- Ranking #21/34

s3-e6 Hated in the Nation - it's a murder mystery, a police detective show mixed with a bit of X-Files or Fringe.  It's practically movie length, and enjoyable but feels so outside of the usual Black Mirror episode...more like a Law and Order episode, or a pilot for a new detective series.

T - 4  | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 7 -- Ranking #30/34

s4-e1 USS Callister - technology that allows you to live within a virtual fantasy scenario finds its incel creator living a totalitarian fantasy life within a Star Trek knock-off, where his servile crew are stolen mind-maps of people from his real life.

T - 4  | WB - 8 | H - 4 | E - 9 -- Ranking #6/34

s4-e2 Arkangel  - helicopter parenting taken to the next degree.  As a parent I can relate to the impulse to protect your child, but when does protection start leading to control?

T - 8 | WB - 8 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #20/34

s4-e3 Crocodile -  a hit-and-run in a remote coutryside returns to haunt a successful architect when an insurance investigation, using memory-reading technology, threatens to unravel her life.  It asks you to relate but it may be the biggest ask in all of Black Mirror.

T - 4 | WB - 5 | H - 8 | E - 5 -- Ranking #25/34

s4-e4 Hang the DJ - a little hopefulness and romance nodding back to San Junipero.  It's a cute/sad look at on-line/app dating, how people meet and whether algorithms can truly account for chemistry.  The reveal/twist is maybe the most eye-rolling of all though.

T - 7 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 6 -- Ranking #29/34

s4-e5 Metalhead - oops, drone technology got out of hand.  Directed by David Slade in glorious black and white, these metal dog things are freaking terrifying.

T - 3 | WB - 7 | H - 10 | E - 9 -- Ranking #5/34

s4-e6 Black Museum - a young British woman (Letita Wright!!) waits for her car to recharge, passing the time at the curious Black Museum.  There we see artifacts from across Black Mirror's episodes and are introduced to a few more curiosities.  Honestly, I forget how this one shakes out.

T - 5 | WB - 10 | H - 7 | E - 7 -- Ranking #32/34

movie - Bandersnatch - in the 1980's a choose-your-own-adventure novel is adapted by a mentally troubled young man into a video game, but aspect of his past and events of the present threaten to drive him to madness, or murder...you decide.

T - 7 | WB - 8 | H - 5 | E - 9 -- Ranking #4/34

s5-e1 - Striking Vipers - a married man and his estranged best friend from college reunite in a new virtual reality version of the video game they play, which leads to questions about sexual identity, marital fidelity and what constitutes an affair.
T - 8 | WB - 5 | H - 2 | E - 8 -- Ranking #18/34

s5-e2 - Smithereens - a distraught widower takes a hostage in order to talk with the billionaire creator of a social media platform

T - 5 | WB - 5 | H - 3 | E - 8 -- Ranking #19/34

s5-e3 - Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too - Ashley O is one of the world's biggest pop stars, but she's trapped in a life she doesn't believe in.  Rachel is a lonely teen in a new town and she gloms onto her Ashley O fandom as her identity, while her sister Jack is too rebellious for it all.  Rachel gets an "Ashley Too" robotic interface which winds up connecting the sisters with the celebrity in a most unusual way.

T - 2 | WB - 4 | H - 1 | E - 6 -- Ranking #28/34

s6-e1 - Joan is Awful - Joan pops on the in-world Netflix to find a TV show starring Salma Hayak who is styled like her and is reenacting moments of her immediate life. Joan's world is thrown into chaos. It gets pretty meta from there.

T - 6 | WB - 2 | H - 2 | E - 8 - Ranking #16/34

s6-e2 - Lock Henry - A young documentary filmmaking student turn his attention on his depressed Scottish hometown, and the murders that rocked it a decade earlier.

T - 7 | WB - 7 | H - 7 | E - 7 - Ranking #22/34

s6-e3 - Beyond the Sea - in a different reality of 1969, two astronauts are on a long-term space mission, but are able to send their consciousness between their real selves aboard the ship and the androids on earth that allow them to continue their lives. Things go unexpectedly bad and then get predictably awful.

T - 2 | WB - 3 | H - 5 | E - 5 - Ranking #26/34

s6-e4 - Mazey Day  - In mid 2000s, a reluctant paparazzo chases after a famous starlet who has seemingly disappeared after being fired from a shoot for unknown reasons. What she doesn't know is the starlet was involved in a deadly hit and run and is having a very hard time.

T - 5 | WB - 6 | H - 7 | E - 8 - Ranking #13/34

s6-e5 - Demon 79 - In 1979 England a young shoe sales woman of Indian descent experiences constant racism - overt, veiled, systemic, etc - but when she's accidentally tethered to a demon, she's given the opportunity to let out some of her pent-up frustrations...because she has to kill 3 people or the world will end.
T - 6 | WB - 8 | H - 6 | E - 9 - Ranking #12/34

s7-e1 - Common People - She was dying with a brain tumour but a new technology saves her life by backing up her brain. But is life worth living when there's a subscription cost that, like all subscription services, just gets worse and worse and more expensive over time.

T - 9 | WB - 8 | H - 8  | E - 7 - Ranking #23/34

s7-e2 - Bete Noir - A snack food developer finds her past comes back to haunt her when a nerdy kid from her old high school gets a job working with her. But even if she could get over the past, the fact that reality starts changing around her is bound to drive her mad.

T - 6  | WB - 5  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #17/34

s7-e3 - Hotel Reverie - A brand new type of movie production finds an actress taking the role of leading man in a classic 1940's film, reconstructed as a simulation. When the simulation glitches. the movie stops and time starts racing forward, the actress and her leading lady, who has gained a level of sentience, fall in love.

T - 6  | WB - 6  | H - 1  | E - 7 - Ranking #27/34

s7-e4 - Plaything - A man is brought in for questioning on a cold case murder from the 90's. He tells the story of being a video game reviewer, dropping acid, and helping a species within a videogame evolve, and how that led to the murder.

T - 6 | WB - 7  | H - 6  | E - 8 - Ranking #15/34

s7-e5 - Euology - A man is given a high tech package to help eulogize the recent passing of an old love. His journey into photographs help unlock memories long buried, opening old wounds but also finding a closure he never thought he could get.

T - 10 | WB - 7 | H - 2  | E - 9 - Ranking #1/34

s7-e6 - USS Callister - Into Infinity - a true sequel, the cloned crew of the USS Callister struggle to survive within the open world of the online video game Infinity. When they've drawn too much attention to themselves, the outside world starts to intervene.

T - 6  | WB - 9  | H -  6 | E - 9 - Ranking #6/34

---

Ranking Black Mirror

1. Eulogy

2. San Junipero (-1)

3. Be Right Back (-1)

4. Bandersnatch (-1)

5. Metalhead (-1)

6. USS Callister - Into Infinity (new)

7. USS Callister (-2)

8. White Bear (-2)

9. 15 Million Merits (-2)

10. Shut Up and Dance (-2)

11. The Entire History of You (-2)

12. Demon 79 (-2)

13. Mazey Day (-2)

14. Nosedive (-2)

15. Plaything (new)

16. Joan is Awful (-3)

17. Bete Noir (new)

18. Striking Vipers (-4)

19. Smithereens (-4)

20. Arkangel (-4)

21. Men Against Fire (-4)

22. Loch Henry (-4) 

23. Common People (new)

24. White Christmas (-5)

25. Crocodile (-5)

26. Beyond the Sea (-5)

27. Hotel Reverie (new)

28. Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too (-6)

29. Hang the DJ (-6)

30. Hated in the Nation (-6)

31. National Anthem (-6)

32. Black Museum (-6)

33. Playtest (-6)

34. The Waldo Moment (-6)

KWIF: Black Bag, Anora and The People's Joker

 KWIF=Kent Watches, Intermittently, Film. I'm just, like, too tired, like, all the time.

This post:
Black Bag (2025, d. Steven Soderbergh - in theatre)
Anora (2024, d. Sean Baker - AmazonPrime)
The People's Joker (2022, d. Vera Drew - Blu-Ray)

---

A sexy espionage thriller starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender from Steven Soderbergh? That was an easy "yes, please and thank you."

Soderbergh's second release of 2025 (after Presence, which came and went so fast in January barely anyone noticed) certainly has the feel of this current stage of Soderbergh's career, marked by a curious use of different types of lenses (my knowledge of lens types and the effects they give is fleeting so I won't even attempt to elaborate any further) and natural lighting that give his digital movies almost the texture of film, while providing the filmmaker the tools to shoot fast, cheap, mobile, and prolifically.

The director "retired" from filmmaking in 2013 after his Liberace biopic went straight to HBO, skipping theatres altogether, and decided to focus his efforts on entering the golden age of television. Since "retiring" he has directed 40 episodes of television (across 1 series and 3 mini-series) and, oops, 9 more films before this one. That's Soderbergh in retirement mode. Since returning to film in 2017, he's become fascinated with digital technology, including shooting entire films on his iPhone. There are obvious limitations to that kind of exercise, and some of those productions wear their experimentalism quite proudly. This isn't one of those productions, but it's not a straightforward Hollywood-glossy production either.  It settles in somewhere in the middle between daring and refined.

A large part of the polished feel comes from a script by veteran David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible) who has scripted three of Soderbergh's last four productions. Black Bag finds Blanchett and Fassbender as a long-time married couple who both work for British intelligence. It is a field that can be difficult for romantic partners to maintain trust in one another as they can bury any secret (including infidelity) under the "black bag" paradigm. But, Fassbender's George Woodhouse is utterly devoted to his wife, even more so than to his country (which he is very devoted to). When he's given a tip that someone in his circle of friends is possibly a double agent, including potentially his wife, he holds a particularly tense dinner party with the two other couples-from-work in question (Tom Burke, Naomi Campbell, Rege-Jean Page, and Marisa Abela).

The other couples provide a contrast to the pairing of George and Kathryn St. Jean, but also leaves the audience wondering if there are similarities too. After the party, the signs seem to point to Kathryn selling government secrets, and George's devotion to Kathryn is put to the test the more he investigates. The question the film asks isn't so much a "who's really the double agent?", but instead "is Kathryn as devoted to George as she says she is?", and conversely, "is George as devoted to Kathryn as he says he is?"

This isn't a big flash-bang Mr. and Mrs. Smith action movie, but something much more cerebral, and even more so emotional, despite George's steely, near-robotic demeanour when he's in dogged pursuit of his lead. As the film delves further into their relationship, and the intermingling of relationships of their colleagues, the intensity threatens to boil over. The metatext of the messy business of international espionage is only tangentially commented upon, this is more a relationship thriller than a political one, but it's also one laden with attractive people flirting and more. What's not to like?  

---

I've been hearing about Sean Baker for quite a few years now, about his dramas starring characters who are in the sex work field that sound like they're going to be real bummers but wind up being quite entertaining.  Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket were all films outside the mainstream but received a lot of commentary with each release. I don't know that anyone could have anticipated that Baker was about to level up to become the most decorated person at a single Oscars ceremony in history.

Baker won four Oscars for Anora, in the categories as director, writer, editor, and producer (the only other person to win four Oscars in one year: Walt Disney) and star Mikey Madison took home the best actress Oscar in a hotly contested year.

I have not seen any of Baker's prior films, because I've been afraid to. I have heard of the reputation of his films, and despite what they say about his fairly light touch, I still was thinking it would be a bait-and-switch and I was going to be challenged a lot more than I want to most of the time.

Anora opens in a strip club, with dancers strip teasing and lap dancing, tits out within seconds of the opening frame. I'm still that guy who gets uncomfortable with nudity in a motion picture (what's the appropriate reaction here?!?), and the first act of this production was pretty heavy duty with nudity and sex. To Baker's credit, his camera is never leering, it's pretty passive in its observation. Madison plays Ani, a dancer, who is pulled in to the VIP lounge to work the young Vanya since she's the only one who speaks Russian. The son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, Vanya is living in the States to escape the expectations of his parents. He and Ani hit it off, and he invites her out for a private gig, which extends into a weeklong, whirlwind gig as his girlfriend, and a lot of sex. A lot. But also, seemingly, connection. The girlfriend gig ends in an impromptu trip to Vegas, where they decide to get married, and a hard line between the very uncomfortable, sex-and-nudity laden first act and the rest of the movie is drawn.

As rumours of Vanya's marriage circulate, the family fixer gets involved, bringing in some goons to sort out the truth. Vanya fights for his marriage, tries pulling rank on the thugs, and Ani fights back herself. Things would feel pretty serious and pretty dangerous if Baker didn't really twist the physicality into something more akin to slapstick than brutal violence. Once Vanya hears his parents are coming, though, he, quite literally, runs, leaving everything and everyone behind (it's such a comedic moment, you could almost picture the cartoon trail of dust behind him).  It's all kind of shenanigans thereafter, as Ani and the goon squad try tracking down Vanya in the clumsiest manner possible, and the third act brings Vanya's parents into the picture.

It was as I heard it was, a surprisingly entertaining, light on its feet drama that basically sits on the Pretty Woman trope and farts quite loudly upon it. It's not a rousing or uplifting comedy, it's still a drama, but it's much much lighter than what I was expecting and the laughs come more from performance than situation (as the situation remains pretty intense for Ani). Madison's Oscar winning performance at the front of the film require her to craft a character who is comfortable with her profession, and knows how to handle herself in pretty much any situation. The second act finds her taking a back seat (sometimes literally) to the goon squad and much of her role is reacting to her increasingly desperate situation, quietly assessing the level of threat to her, and contemplating what her connection to Vanya really is. What Madison is able to get across in these quiet moments is, at least for me, the more impressive part of her performance.  Saying a lot while saying nothing can often go under the radar, but the film absolutely hangs off it through the latter 2/3s of the film.

I'm not going to debate whether Anora was the best film of 2024 or even the most deserving of the Oscars best picture nominees...awards do have meaning, but they are never unimpeachable (and the categories are so subjective to one's particular tastes anyway).... I will say I have no problem with its successes at all, I think Anora earned them.  I will work my way back through Baker's filmography at some point. Anora has confirmed the expectations that were set for me.

---

The People's Joker debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 with the threat of a copyright infringement hanging over its head. The film screened once and was pulled from its remaining screenings, the result turned an unofficial, ultra-low-budget, cult-ready satire of the Batman-mythos-as-trans-allegory from maybe a blip on the radar of the Festival into a full-blown cult phenomenon. 

On the blu-ray menu screen, writer-director-star Vera Drew, in her "Joker Harlequin" guise, introduces the menu, and then proceeds to vamp for near upon five minutes before starting to launch into reading the letter from "an unnamed media conglomerate" and also to read from the multi-paged legal review of her film from a battery of lawyers she hired to ensure that her use of the characters fell under the fair use and parody banner. (Drew does mention that she was told the menu screen can handle up to 20 minutes of recorded content, and she seemed intent on pushing it all the way).

The People's Joker is a very personal tale for Drew, who starts off as a young boy (whose dead name is bleeped out whenever it is said, save for one choice moment) in Smallville, rural nowhere America, feeling lost in her skin, with a mother whose expectations for her child are utterly conformist (and a father visually absent from the story despite still being around). Young Bleep upon expressing her feelings of discomfort is taken to Arkham Asylum where Dr. Crane (not Frasier) assesses the child and prescribes Smilex, which chemically helps Bleep get through the next 20 years of life by numbing their everything with a smile.

Bleep becomes fixated on Lorne Michaels (voiced by Maria Bamford) and his UCB Live sketch comedy show, and its star Ras Al Ghul (David Liebe Hart of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! of which Drew was an editor on), and ventures to Gotham to be a part of the UCB, only to find it's a multi-tiered system requiring a lot of money to progress through.

Bleep meets the Penguin and the two start an outsider comedy club which brings in more outsiders like Bane and Poison Ivy, and also the Joker, a trans man who Bleep immediately falls head over heels for.

The film is an exceptionally personal one for Drew, pretty much an autobiography told through a superhero filter. A scene between Nicole Kidman and Val Kilmer's Batman in Batman Forever was the key that unlocked Drew's gender awakening as a child, and her relationship with a trans comedian contained the combination that finally opened the vault. 

It's also a film about Drew's experience in the comedy scene and the various institutions that cowtow to profit-driven expectations rather than art (though Drew is the first to admit that her comedy, and that of her collective, is also pretty out there in its experimentalism, and often not very good).

This intersection of comedy and superheroes is certainly two of my big pop culture interests, and having trans and non-binary people very close to me in my life makes trans film a gateway to helping understand their experiences better without having to be totally invasive about it.

I found the story of The People's Joker very compelling, even if I did spend a lot of the run time doing mental gymnastics trying to translate Joker Harlequin's experiences in the film to maybe Vera Drew's real-life experiences with Lorne Michaels and the UCB. It's all the more disappointing then that I found much of The People's Joker to be somewhat painful to watch, especially when I have so much respect for the creative effort that was involved in its creation.

Drew's primary visual vehicle for the film is green screen acting in front of digital backdrops. The effects is not much different than the backdrop you might have on a Zoom call, and the weird fading and halo effects it causes. It's a style of production that was clearly one Drew was familiar with from her Tim and Eric years (as well as her many low budget and public access projects beyond that), but what's maybe entertaining for a 2-minute sketch is just rather ugly to sit through for the better part of a 93 minute runtime of a movie. 

There's a heavy dose of mixed media throughout, including extended fully animated sequences in different styles (as well as animated sequences inserted into TV screens), some stop motion and experimental visuals. It's a visually dense production that regularly and brazenly shifts styles that it embraces in the editing rather than feeling like a patch. It's pretty scrappy, and, as I said, admirable, but it doesn't make it any prettier to look at. (I should note that some of the costuming and makeup is pretty terrific...and also some of it's pretty bad). Drew's editing though, bridges it all into something quit legible.

But it's that personal story at the centre, with Vera Drew's writing, editing and acting talents carrying the film past it's less than appealing aesthetics and into key trans cinema, and its wild experimentalism, not to mention it's barrage of multimedia asides (like the in-world "Suicide Cop" TV show) that is certainly what has already made it a cult classic ready for midnight screening rotation.

(I should note the blu-ray comes with a low-budget pilot, a full 20+ minute production of Suicide Cop which felt like ready-made Adult Swim programming and I enjoyed quite a bit).

KWIF: Mickey 17 (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week(ish) in Film.

This Week:
Mickey 17 (2025, d. Bong Joon Ho - in theatre)
Bravestarr: The Legend (1988, d. Tom Tataranowicz - YouTube)
Red Rooms (2023, d. Pascal Plante - Crave)
Problemista (2023, d. Julio Torres - Crave)
Wicked Little Letters (2023, d. Thea Sharrock - Crave)

---

Mickey 17 is a satirical sci-fi romp from the fantastic Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho. His vision for the film is one that is delightfully odd, replete with director Bong's usual nuanced touches and social commentary, but this is the first of his films that I've seen where he seems like he's wrestling with the construction of the narrative.   

The plot finds Robert Pattinson's Mickey on the run from particularly sadistic loan sharks after his macron business failed, and his only hope of outrunning his fate is to get on board one of the long-distant colonizing space ships (as is noted, the environment of Earth is becoming increasingly uninhabitable and so competition for spots on these ships is fierce). Mickey's got no particular special skills, knowledge, or influence so his only option is to take on the designation of "Expendable". As such, Mickey's physiology, personality and memories are downloaded and should Mickey die in the process of doing his jobs (all jobs which are all but guaranteed to kill him, such as being the guinea pig for catching the virii on their new planet, and for testing vaccines to inoculate against them).

There is a tremendous exposition dump in the first act of the film that would feel interminably long if it weren't so entertaining.  A lesson we've learned from, like, time loop movies, is dying over and over again can make good comedy fodder.  It also squares us up for the politics of the era (not too dissimilar from our own) and that the spaceship Mickey is aboard is led by failed presidential candidate, and definite center of a cult-of-personality, Kenneth Marshall.  As played by Mark Ruffalo, Marshall is like a mix of Trump, Musk and televangelist Jim Bakker (with Toni Collette being his sauce-obsessed, intellectually superior co-conspirator, ala Tammy Faye). Marshall is an absolute clown of a human being, an absurd egocentric who has failed upward with the support a gullible populace. He's uncomfortably comedic, and just as reprehensible. Ruffalo puts on a good show.  

When we first meet Mickey, he's the 17th version. He has fallen in an ice cave and left for dead. But the native potato bugs rescue him.  Being a man made of soup, he just thinks his meat is bad, and the potato bugs rejected him. Returning to the ship, he comes to find that his replacement, Eighteen, has already been made, and the woman who's always by his side, Nasha (Naomi Ackie) is already cozied up with him. Eighteen is a much brasher, no-nonsense version of Mickey, while Seventeen is much more timid and reserved. The two of them, through a series of increasingly odd events, spark a revolution aboard their ship, but first spark outrage being Multiples, an affront against God and all that's good apparently (as a soul can't be shared between two bodies, or so they say).

Following the massive international and award-winning success of Parasite in 2019, Bong Joon Ho got a budgetary upgrade for his follow-up, Mickey 17. The film's price tag at nearly $120 million is well over double his next most expensive film (Okja, for the record) and triple that of Snowpiercer which played like a blockbuster, but was made pretty modestly.  In Mickey 17, it's all up there on the screen, though. The sets are plentiful, and feel all of a whole, creating a world aboard a spaceship that is tangible and lived-in. The alien planet that is the destination is a desolate and frigid place populated by a race of gigantic potato bugs, and, yeah, it's all well-realized too.  Could Director Bong have made this on a slimmer budget? Absolutely, but it wouldn't look nearly as good.

Pattinson and Ackie are great together, and I loved how Pattinson seemingly channelled Joe Pesci from Home Alone for Seventeen but Joe Pesci from Casino for Eighteen.  I enjoyed watching the movie, quite a bit, it is so fun and weird, but I didn't come out loving it as I had hoped. Nothing sticks out as particularly bad, or egregious, but it doesn't quite all gel together smoothly. There's not really a clear message to the picture, as it seems to be working through a multitude of societal critiques.  I think were this a film from the 1980s and I'd just seen it for the first time, I would be just agog, absolutely blown away by it, so maybe I just need to give it a little time. In the end, even if it is more of a lark than another Oscars-worthy movie from Director Bong, it's still an entertaining picture that should be worth a revisit.

---

The 1980's were the golden age of action figures. G.I. Joe, Masters of the Universe, Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers were the top tier "boys toys" lines of the era, bolstered by syndicated cartoon series or big franchise movies.  These major properties still live today not just out of nostalgia, but a rich sense of world building that keeps sparking the imagination of young and old alike.

The pervasiveness of these toy lines was in part due to the loosening of restrictions around advertising to children, and so the accompanying weekly (or daily, in some cases) cartoon became a necessity when launching any new toy line.  It was no guarantee to success, however, and each also-ran toyline has its own unique story to tell (see the excellent pop-culture histories on the Secret Galaxy youtube channel).

Filmation, makers of the fine He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power cartoons wanted to find success with their own ideas, not just producing cartoons based another company's intellectual property. Long story short (again, watch Secret Galaxy's recent retrospective), Filmation brought Bravestarr, a mash up of nearly everything popular in the 80's -- sci-fi, westerns, magic, and superheroes (it only needed dinosaurs) -- to Mattel, and the toy company ran with it... but too fast for Filmation. The plan was for Bravestarr's origin story to debut in theatres in the summer of 1987 along with the toys, followed by the ongoing series in the fall to bolster continued sales of the toys, but Mattel jumped the gun, excited to get the toys on shelves for Christmas 1986...where they died on the vine.

The cartoon series debuted on time, in the fall of '87, but the movie was delayed, and released in 1988 with little to no fanfare, the toy line already languishing on shelves and Mattel having moved on. Filmation as a studio was sunk and Bravestarr: The Legend was all but forgotten (in fact it was only upon watching Secret Galaxy's recent video that I even learned there was a Bravestarr movie).

Did it deserve its fate? The toys have become a bit of a cult classic, certain toys reaching pretty astronomical prices in the nostalgia-laden aftermarket, but unlike the big names of the 80's, there's been no revival for Bravestarr (maybe in part because licensing is a bit of a clusterfudge). But having caught the feature (it's on youtube), I have to say...I would have freaking loved this as a kid, and I quite like it now.

There aren't a lot of toy lines or multimedia properties, even to this day, with a person of colour as the lead, and most lines feature no Indigenous characters at all. Bravestarr is a series built around a futuristic society where a Native American is the titular hero.  "The Legend" is Bravestarr's origin story, and it starts with the history of Bravestarr's people, a civilization of Native Americans with very advanced technology and magics, being assaulted by Stampede, a power-mad invading force that wants to take the civilization's power for its own. I don't know if the allegory of colonial genocide was the intention, or if they just kind of stumbled into it, but it's there. 

Bravestarr's people escape to the stars as the planet is literally destroyed by Stampede's greedy thirst for power (again with the allegory), and only settle again when a new colony on the planet "New Texas" is formed as a result of the "gold rush" like atmosphere for the precious fuel jewel Kerium. But the planet is already besieged by Stampede and his proxy, Tex Hex. So the mayor of New Texas sends for help, which comes in the form of Bravestarr, the newly recruited galactic marshall, joined by J.B. the tough woman judge (and love interest) appointed to the planetary county.  He's there to clean things up, but he fails...at first.

It takes Bravestarr reconnecting with his roots, granting him great powers (strength of the bear, speed of the puma, eyes of the hawk, and ears of the wolf, all very nicely visualized in the show), and joining forces with the indigenous Prairie People of the planet that he is properly able to take on the evil forces New Texas faces.

In total, "The Legend" is an unevenly told story, waffling in and out of exposition, at one point running through a montage of, I presume, all the action figures available to buy. It makes use of the same well-trod 80's mold of good-vs-evil toy cartoons, and of the equally well-trod origin story formulae (that would get a workout for a good long while to come). But at the same time, the combination of influences and genres does make for a unique scenario that is quite enticing, and the animation is, often, quite stellar. Filmation's cartoons of the 80s were always a cut above. They were know to reuse animation to cut costs, but their beautiful background paintings and live-model character references always made their work stand out. Here, it's animation meant for cinematic release, so it's at another level to what we're used to seeing out of the studio's TV output. Anime influences can be felt in the work, and the visualization of Stampede is an homage to the classic Disney moment in Fantasia, "The Night on Bald Mountain".  It's all really a cut above.

The story ebbs and flows, showing signs that the Filmation team isn't fully comfortable working in feature length storytelling, but for the most part it's a satisfying watch (in spite of a frequently grating synthesized orchestra score). What gives me pause is the general conceit of using non-descript Native American culture as backdrop for a sci-fi-superhero-western meant to sell toys, a literal commodification of the culture. It would feel less...icky... if there were more Native Americans directly involved with the whole production. Bravestarr is voiced by a white man (Pat Fraley) for cripes sake! Representation matters, not just for what we seen on screen, but who is telling the stories behind the scenes. From my limited caucasian perspective, it seems like none of Bravestarr is meant as offensive, but it's also not doing the good work either. I would love for a First Nations or Native American creative team to revive this property with authenticity. I can imagine a Sterlin Harjo production would be pretty phenomenal. Maybe it's possible if the Masters of the Universe movie does well next year, creating a surge of toy property movies. 

---

Red Rooms (or Les chambres rouge in its native Quebecois tongue) opens on the face of a attractive woman sleeping. Her surroundings are grey, and she is somewhat bundled up. The colour saturation is almost non-existent, intoning the chill of her surroundings. After waking she bundles up her blanket and makeshift pillow, and determinedly walks down the street. Her full-length wool coat is tailored perfectly, she looks far too beautiful and put together to be unhoused...but we don't know. We next see her entering a building, being scanned, having her possessions checked at security, and once through she finds her destination...a smallish courtroom where she sits in the back of three aisles. 

We learn that a case is just beginning in this courtroom, with the prosecution and defence delivering their opening arguements. The case involves the kidnapping, assault, mutilation of three teenage girls, and the prosecution alerts the jury to the fact that there is video footage of two of the three murders that were filmed and sold on the dark web. It's a grisly story, and as the lawyers deliver their speeches, the camera floats around the courtroom, sometimes fixating on the attorney speaking, or the one who is not, or the accused sitting in a plexiglass box looking bored, or on the woman we met in the opening frame of the film.

This is Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariepy), she is ostensibly the film's protagonist, but for much of the film she is basically unknowable. Kelly-Anne is, we learn, not homeless, she just camps out each evening nearby the courthouse in order to keep her seat in the small viewers galley.  She is a model, she is also an avid (and successful) online poker player, and she is very web/computer savvy (she hacked her off-the-shelf AI assistant and operates it off a private server). 

Kelly-Anne, we see, fixates on the mother of one of the victims in court, more than she even leers at the accused, and she seems slightly paranoid when the crown's cybersecurity expert looks at her too long. We just never understand why. She is caught by press coming out of the courtroom, but she doesn't seem interested in speaking to them, unlike the other young woman, Clementine (Laurie Babin) who ventured in from Northern Quebec to watch the trial with an unhealthy fixation on the man on trial.

Clementine thinks she's found a kindred spirit in Kelly-Anne, but the model/hacker gives nothing away. She never confirms which side she's on, just that it seems very important to her to be in attendance at the trial.

The score to Red Rooms is exceptionally minimal, to the point that the soundtrack of the film, anytime we're in Kelly-Anne's high-rise apartment, is simply the whistling of the wind as it scrapes the side of the building. The possibilities of what Kelly-Anne's interest in the film are plenty... like, was she an early survivor of the accused, or is she like Clem just obsessed with him, or is she a true crime junkie, or was she an accomplice or somehow involved, or even the murderer. Whenever Gariepy supremely reserved performance threatens to tell on her, she does something else -- sometimes overt, sometimes nuanced -- that completely undermines prior assumptions. Her behaviour gets pretty whackadoo late in the film, and it's not entirely certain if it's performance, and if so, for whom.

Red Rooms quietly made some 2024 top ten lists of critics I follow, and from the capsule reviews I was expecting something more... conventionally thrilling, and was so happy to find that it got my heart racing because this curiosity that is Kelly-Anne is such an unknown quantity.

This is, as I like to say, a deliberately paced film, and definitely not for the impatient. It makes you squirm because of subject matter, and the time it spends contemplating it, and the time spent with these people who are perhaps too interested in it.  It is an unsettling film despite having no overtly grotesque visuals, just the insinuation of them, of knowing they exist, and sometimes hearing vague audio and seeing peoples' reactions to them. If it is a film commenting on anything, it is our society's fascination with murders and murderers, and how often, in the process of examining this fascination, victims and their stories are forgotten.

---

Julio Torres as a comedian, performer, writer, and artist is a very distinct voice. It's not just that he was born and raised in El Salvador, nor that he is a queer performer, although both are very much a part of his presence, whether on stage or screen. No, what makes Torres so distinct is he is an unapologetic weirdo whose sense of humour can best be described as obliquely surreal. His comedy special, My Favourite Shapes, in which he sits in the center of a conveyor belt that enters and exits off stage behind him, and dispenses oddball toys and abstractly shaped objects which he then discusses as he presents them to the audience by way of a projector...well, it's one of the most unique comedy routines I've seen in a long time. It was bizarre, strangely frivolous and yet seemed deeply personal and spoke much to Torres' voice and how he sees the world.  He's also the creator of Los Espookys, the hilarious Spanish language HBO show about Mexican hipsters who put their homegrown special effects makeup to work via a haunting-for-hire enterprise, and as a writer on SNL he wrote one of my all-time favourite sketches, "Wells for boys".

Problemista is Torres' first directorial effort which at once seems both personal and yet distant from connecting to real emotions. It can be a challenge for creators who excel in the surreal to ground their work with the relatable. They are capable in inviting you into their unique point of view, but have a much harder time with helping you understand them.

In Problemista, Torres plays Alejandro, a sensitive young man who finds himself in New York with the desire to work as a toy designer for Hasbro, but instead winds up, through happenstance, being the personal assistant to an artist's widow, Elizabeth, played by Tilda Swinton. What a get for a debut feature.

Alejandro, facing deportation, is left dangling on the end of a thread as Elizabeth yo-yos him around. He's desperate enough to work for this woman who is, at best, unhinged, at worse severely mentally unwell. She is loud and irrational and seems to get her way primarily because people will do what she wants just to get away from her (or get her away from them). She seems to live in another reality and definitely not interested in being part of the polite society we'll talk about in our next film.

Swinton delivers a tour-de-force performance, sweeping into every scene as Elizabeth, sucking all the air out of the room, and then telling everyone around her it's not enough and that they need to give her more. I've worked for a woman like this some time ago.  She was a person who lived in a world that only rotated around them, and considered other people infrequently, if at all, unless they could serve her agenda in some way. Elizabeth is a tad more extreme than this ex-boss of mine, but not by much. People like Elizabeth exist, and I've seen them. They're awful.

Torres' demure performance as Alejandro, complete with an affected shuffle-step walk, and a shrinking inside himself physicality, is one meant to be dominated by Swinton, and pretty much anyone else he encounters.  But unlike The Devil Wears Prada, where an assistant discovers their absolutely horrible boss is human human afterall, there's no such discovery for Alejandro. In fact, he seems to see Elizabeth in a light nobody else does, he seems to understand her and her motivations and her objectives, somehow...and he actually learns from her how to be more confident and assertive. 

It's not a hard film to like, but it's a difficult film to love, because Alejandro's demureness is so easily overshadowed. It's a fine line between playing a shrinking violet character and disappearing as a screen presence. Torres keeps the film, and Alejandro's life just weird enough to remain interesting. I was expecting this to be a much weirder film. The opening moments, taking us through young Alejandro's toy obsessed childhood with his artist/designer mother, is visually very vibrant and odd, but it's fleeting. Torres' New York (probably for budgetary reasons) isn't nearly as surreal. There are only glimmers of Torres' inventiveness, like his toy pitches to Hasbro, his visualization of the rigged system of American immigration, and a decidedly uncomfortable personification of Craigslist. 

I was hoping Torres would explode out of the gate as our next Michel Gondry, but it looks like we're just going to have to be patient.

---

My grandmother - my mom's mom - was a woman of propriety. Things had to be a certain way, like the way a table was set, or a bed was made, or a home was kept. We had to behave and speak a certain way in being part of a polite society. Many subjects were not to be discussed, and most definitely certain words were not to be said. I recall having my filthy mouth washed out with soap once or twice (the lesson being "don't swear around Grandma").

I considered this propriety to be a generational thing, but upon contemplating the message of Wicked Little Letters, it is much more the product of sexism and abuse. It's not generational, it's cultural. The expectation of women as subservient, of taking care of cooking and cleaning and otherwise staying out of the way. In this type of culture, women are barely permitted freedom of thought or expression, they certainly aren't permitted education or agency. There are seemingly more of these cultures around the world today than aren't.

Set in the southern coastal English town of Littlehampton post-World War I, Wicked Little Letters, is the true-ish story of decorum being scandalously broken by way of a series of wicked, nasty, filthy letters delivered to one Miss Edith Swan (Olivia Coleman, Secret Invasion), at this point a spinster still living at home in her mid-50's, still under the thumb of her controlling father (Timothy Spall, Chicken Run).

The most likely culprit is their next door neighbour Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley, Men), a widow and single mom, and also an Irish immigrant and a real liberated woman, whose no-holds-barred, profane way of speaking bemuse and shock in equal measure. As Rose states, though, she has no reservations about expressing herself, so why would she resort to writing anonymous letters to say what she would already say out loud?

The scandal hits national level, and Rose is an easy scapegoat. The film is very clear about the hypocrisy of this mass propriety, as the men expect women to behave a certain way, to be unsullied by any awareness of lewd or profane words or acts, and yet in closed quarters the men talk this way about such things with jovial frivolity, as "Woman Police Constable" Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan, We Are Lady Parts) witnesses. She is torn between "knowing her place" as the town's first woman officer, and actually serving justice, when her male counterpart is an idiot and her superior is lazy. ACAB, man.

It's difficult to talk about the film without revealing the writer of the letters, so we'll discuss more some of the subject matter after the Spoilers cut, but just to say that it's not actually a mystery that the film holds close to its chest and it reveals the answer to the audience (but not the characters in story) about the midway point.

Coleman and Buckley are both phenomenal actresses, and they're both excellent here.  I don't think I've ever seen Coleman deliver a bad performance, and she is has a lot to do here, as Edith is torn between the expectations of her from her father, her lapsed friendship with Rose, and the notoriety that she's received as a result of being a victim of the letters. Demeanour shifts are frequent, and Coleman has mastered her control of nuanced facial expressions. I don't know if I've seen Buckley in a role like this before, where she's sort of comic relief, but also an emotional lynchpin. She has a zeal, a liveliness, and an untamed natuer that flies in the face of the stiff-upper-lip/well-I-never crowd that is so delightfully appealing. She is the antidote to the buckled-down, boring existence of Littehampton.

The film utilizes colour-blind casting which is in equal measure admirable and distracting since nothing is ever mentioned about anyone's race or background. I know I was expecting the elder Swan, when ranting about his neighbour Rose, to bring up her Black boyfriend in a derogatory way, but he never does. The film holds squarely in its lane in examining sexism. Even its critique of the police, and their structures winds up rather toothless in the end.  It's a film that says much, and rewardingly, but had the potential to say even more.

[Toastypost]

**SPOILERS**

It's really to no one's surprise when we find out that the writer of the letters to Edith Swan is none other than Edith herself.  The letters seemed to be spurred by befriending Rose, and revealing in her liberation, but then having that friendship quashed by her father. So she, in secrets, begins to liberate herself by way of writing the most foulest things she can think of. That those thoughts are directed at herself is a product of a caged woman loathing her inability to escape the cage, and it's telling that when the letters extend beyond her, that they are directed at the other women of the town, she's admonishing them all for their upholding of the systems that keep them down. It's equally telling that she never writes a letter to the person she fears the most, her father.  Edith's greatest sin is not writing the letters, but letting Rose take the fall. In her admiration (and emulation) of Rose, she also cant escape her patriarchal thinking, that Rose's liberties as a woman are somehow criminal and deserve to be punished and reigned in. Afterall, why should Rose be allowed to curse and cavort so freely when Edith cannot?

It is a bittersweet ending when Edith is found out and sentenced and carted off to jail. She is a victim herself, afterall, and yet, being sent to prison allows her freedom from her father for the first time in her life. The downside is it is still jail, though, and whose to say she won't encounter a whole institution of men (and women) looking to subjugate her just like her Father?

I think back to my Grandmother, and it's distinctly possible she had a father who was somewhat like Edith's father, who demanded a certain discipline and propriety, and that her mother would have upheld such structures in the household [edit. not exactly a true assumption on my part, but generational trauma resonates in expectations and behavioural norms].  I know my Grandmother had husbands who were maybe less forcefully demanding, but expectant of such norms. My Grandmother also worked, she had a number of jobs throughout her life which began out of necessity, having fled an abusive relationship with two small children. Despite marrying again (and again) she retained a definite drive and work ethic, perhaps a desire to stand on her own two feet, to not need to rely upon a man financially. In her own ways, she broke free of the patriarchy despite being unable to let go of its legacy of teachings. She was a remarkable woman who led an impressively active life well into her late 80's before dementia robbed her of her resources, and I miss her.