The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Ranking the Coen Bros.

2018, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Netflix
[Reposted from my letterboxd, typos and all, originally written Nov 16, 2018]

Anthologies are always a challenge for me. Movies, books, comics... I'm never left satisfied. There's too many stories, usually of different length, sometimes connected by theme or genre, sometimes only tenuously connected, often not really connected at all. They usually vary in length and tone, often by different creatives, and invariably you have to compare one story against the rest, and even in the best cases there's always a dud, or one that overshadows all the others. It's never a satisfying experience.

I think the only place where the anthology can really work is television. We're talking The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Black Mirror, but also the idea of season-length anthologies like Fargo, True Detective, or American Horror Story. With the former, the episode by episode format of anthology gives separation, but also structure. Not every episode will be equal but the separation between stories (talking about old school weekly viewing, but also the separation provided by opening title and end credits sequences) provides a buffer to immediate juxtaposition. As individual episodes they're standalone, like short films, not treated as a necessary part of a whole package. The season length anthology is just more fulfilling, a mini-series that lives on it's own each year, all the benefits of regular television but with the satisfaction of both an intended story structure and closure.

Which brings us to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology feature from the Coen Brothers (Ethan Coen no stranger to anthology storytelling, having written more than a few collections of short stories). The early rumour was this exploration of the old West was intended as a tv anthology but it's six tales each run at wildly different lengths (from 10 to 40 minutes) which would make tv serialization impossible. [edit: the "series" rumour has been disproven]

The only real way to tackle reviewing an anthology is story by story, but that type of reviewing also exemplifies the fact that an anthology cannot really be viewed as a whole unit, rather only it's pieces.

The film takes its name from the opening story, following Tim Blake Nelson's singing gunslinger through a breif and violently whimsical journey (it makes me want a Shaolin Cowboy movie adaptation from the Wachowskis). I had incorrectly inferred that Buster Scruggs would be the film's Cryptkeeper, the connecting thread between stories, but no such luck. Just the turning of pages transitions us from one to the next.

James Franco robs a bank in the next story, but gets foiled by the teller played by Stephen Root. It's the shortest of the stories but tonally consistent with the previous, if a little less fantastical.

The third story follows a limbless orator as he travels the countryside with Liam Neeson as his caretaker making a meager living entertaining meager (and thrifty) crowds. Is this a friendship? A business partnership? Or an exploitative relationship? Ultimately, it's overlong, cast in such grey, and lacking the wit and charm of the previous entries, destroying the cohesiveness for the rest of the film.

The next story takes full advantage of Bruno Delbonnel's beautiful cinematography as Tom Waits panhandlers for gold. It's luscious color palette is in stark contrast to the four dankness of the previous story. It's just as deliberate a story as the last, really getting the sense of the time to spare on such endeavours people had way back when.

While the first two stories were rather pithy and energetic, these two slow things right down, peeling away the idealism of the old West, leading into the fifth story, a forty minute romantic tragedy on a wagon train to Oregon. Due to it's length it's easy to invest in the characters, and understanding the painstaking hardship of travel seems to be the point. The early romanticism of old West tropes have washed away, here there's bare practicality and excruciating nothingness, coupled with a gut blow of an ending.

The final story finds five heads in a carriage, talking, a spectre of darkness aptly surrounding them, but the Coen's see fit to return levity via the uncomfortable, forced interaction of strangers who would otherwise not associate with one another. It's an engaging dialogue but quite much to take after three tales of a more photographic quality and already nearly 2 hours deep. If anything, it serves as a reminder of how awesome Tyne Daly is, and she should be in more things.

As a whole, it's a Coen Brothers production so it's worth the time spent, but as a Coen Brothers production it's on the bottom end of their spectrum. I also wished the had better Native American representation than just as attacking war parties.

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I'm being lazy with Buster Scruggs i, not writing a brand new review because, well, I don't have a lot more to say about it, just as I didn't have much to say about it then. I did find it generally tedious to watch and frequently checked the timestamp to see how much was remaining. The Coens love a tight movie so whenever one goes over two hours, you feel it.

The Blank Check Podcast pointed out that the connecting thread of these stories is death, but it's tough for me to really think of it a theme of each of these stories. 

My ranking of the Buster Scruggs stories:

1. The Gal Who Got Rattled
2. All Gold Canyon
3. Near Algodones
4. The Mortal Remains
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
6. Meal Ticket

Now that I have rewatched all 18 of the Coens films together, here are my rankings, subject to change.

1. Fargo
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Hail, Caesar!
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. A Serious Man
6. No Country For Old Men
7. The Hudsucker Proxy
8. Blood Simple
9. Burn After Reading
10. Miller's Crossing
11. True Grit
12. Barton Fink
13. The Man Who Wasn't There
14. Intolerable Cruelty
15. Raising Arizona
16. O Brother, Where Art Thou
17. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
18. The Ladykillers

It's a difficult list to make because 60% of these films are flat out masterpieces, and most of the rest are troubled but still generally likeable. I mean, True Grit is an incredible, maybe even perfect film, and I have it out of the top 10, which is absurd.

My top 3 was my top 3 going into this rewatch and they remained relatively untested. LLewyn Davis and A Serious Man were both a lock for the top 5 and jockeyed back and forth, with Llewyn taking the edge because I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. The films in the 6-13 slots could probably be re-arranged any which way and I would still be happy with that ranking.

The only real surprise in making the list is that Raising Arizona jumped 3 spots from the bottom...and maybe that Burn After Reading made it into the top 10. It's probably the only non-masterpiece in the top ten, but it is so much fun. It's very possible that I may be finally warming to Raising Arizona but I just don't have the sentimentality towards it like so many others do. But sentimentality is why Fargo and Lebowski are my 1 and 2.

Of all these films, only the bottom three do I feel hesitant to watch again. In fact, I would probably watch The Ladykillers before O Brother or Buster Scruggs but it's pretty unanimous that The Ladykillers is absolutely their weakest film. For the record, if I were to add in Joel and Ethan's solo works, Honey, Don't would slot in between The Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable Cruelty while Drive Away Dolls would slot in just after Raising Arizona. I don't even know where to put The Tragedie of Macbeth because it's nothing like the rest of their oeuvre. It sits on its own outside of it all...or it's last, I guess even though it's clearly a better film than The Ladykillers at least.

But what an unbelievable delight it is to have all these films in the world, and to revisit them in succession. It was a real effort to watch them week-to-week and not gorge myself on them. But, next time there will be a gorging.

KWIF: sets and series

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. This week, the big view was Tron:Ares which I covered doing a whole Recognizer-sized post about the film series. So that leaves three other sets and series I've been lured into as of late.

This Week:
True Grit (2010, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - dvd)
Shadow of the Thin Man (1941, d. W.S. Van Dyke - dvd)
Final Destination 2 (2003, d. David R. Ellis - rental)

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Some might say that making a new True Grit was a gamble, while others might say that it was a no-risk, sure-fire hit. Both can be true.

Yes, True Grit was, and remains, the Coen Brothers' biggest box office success by quite a wide margin. Grossing over 250 million it was a legitimate blockbuster that went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations (and won none... Jeff Bridges would have been a shoe-in had the Academy not just given him Best Actor for Crazy Heart the year prior, a decision some say was more a "career achievement" Oscar rather than a reflection of the quality of film or his performance in it). It was a new adaptation of Charles Portis' novel that had been previously adapted in 1969, shortly after its publication, into a John Wayne-starring vehicle [Toasty's pandemic-era review] that was also a bit hit and won John Wayne his first and only Oscar, and is considered a classic in cinematic westerns.

In promoting the film, the filmmakers and cast were explicit about noting the film was an adaptation of the novel, not a remake of the movie. Remaking a classic means comparing one's film to the classic, and the risk is 9 times out of 10 that doesn't go very well. But there are always exceptions, and the Coen's True Grit proved to be one of those exceptions. 

It's a fairly straightforward premise, as most classically-styled westerns tend to be. A young woman, Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld in her first role), arrives in Fort Smith, Arkansas, looking to hire a Marshall to hunt down the man who killed her father. Mattie is hyper-intelligent, educated, well-read, brash, and can talk circles around pretty much anyone... and regularly does. She fixates on U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), because he's been described as a man with "true grit" (that's the name of the movie!), and has a history of being less than lenient on the subject he pursues.

In reality, Cogburn is a one-eyed alcoholic who sleeps on a cot in the back of a grocers store. He's kind of gross, but also, he's pretty damn good at his job. Likely because of his perpetually inebriated state, Mattie can't really get a leg up on him, at least verbally, but money talks and Cogburn takes the job. But in taking the job he's unfortunately (at least in his perspective) saddled with Matty who persistently accompanies him on the trek, because she wants to see the job gets done personally. 

Cogburn has also forged an uneasy partnership with Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who has been in pursuit of their prey, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) for many years now. LaBoeuf is cocky and dresses in clean leathers with fancy tassels and has the air of arrogance about him, which rubs Cogburn the wrong way (the gulf spreads further when the men realize they were on opposite sides during the Civil War).

The story is about how these three very different people interact with one another, how they want to let their differences divide them, but along the way find respect for each other. 

I have not read the book, not seen the original adaptation, so I don't know how much of this True Grit deviates from the past of either story. Compared to almost every other Coens film, there doesn't seem to be much Coen-isms in this, but I'd bet pretty heavily I would see them were I to actually compare. (The one standout Coen-ism is LaBoeuf pronouncing his last name LeBeef).

It's a film that would have succeeded without a doubt because its source material is solid and the directors are master craftsmen, but the casting elevates everything. Hailee Steinfeld has to carry the first act pretty much on her own, and she does so exceptionally well. Adopting a drawl at the same time as performing exceptionally twisty, fast-talking dialogue, while still retaining a twinkle of mischievous charm at 14-years-old...she's a once-in-a-lifetime find, able to punch her weight against the likes of Bridges, Damon and Brolin. She was exceptional on-screen from moment one, and she's only gotten better in the 15 years since. She's one of my favourite actors, and it's awe-inspiring seeing how good she's always been.

Bridges's post-The Big Lebowski career seemed to always be in the shadow of Lebowski. It's like his relaxed, Californian dude-ness was allowed to come front and center in that film, and he couldn't get it back in. Suddenly, on the press circuit, Bridges wasn't just "actor Jeff Bridges", he was actually the Dude. But on screen, when it called for it, Bridges could bottle that all up and pull out completely different personas, and Cogburn was definitely one of those other personas. Bridges does some incredible physical work based around Cogburn's eye patch alone, but he dances on pin heads stepping between hypercapable, soused boor, and endearing mentor to Matty. 

With Roger Deakins behind the lens, it of course looks fantastic. Carter Burwell's score leans heavily into conventional western territory with absolute purpose. It's a masterfully executed production by all parties involved. It's seems so breezy a production to watch and quick immerse one's self in, that it's easy to undermine how complicated it must have been to pull off. The Coen's films almost always tend to challenge the audience's expectations, to toy with genre and storytelling conventions, so it's True Grit's lack of these qualities, and only the absence of those "Coen-isms" that make this a lesser production in the portfolio...in almost other director's portfolio it would be their masterpiece.

[Poster talk... when did character posters become a thing. I remember two main posters for the film... the one above which was all about font, resembling an older timey parchment poster, and the one which features grizzled looking men with guns.  The "men with guns" one was to sell it to the guys who like men-with-guns movies. The parchment one is meant to sell it to the art house movie crowd who like to read, I guess. Look! Words! But I didn't realize that True Grit had a series of character posters, and now I'm wondering when the whole character poster trend started...a quick *something* search finds character posters for the original Oceans 11 though the individual character one-sheets are rare, but Batman Returns was maybe the first big one where it's really spotlighting individual characters, not just the actor...TBC]

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The fourth Thin Man movie takes the Charles family back to San Francisco. Nick (William Powell) and Nora (Myrna Loy) leave Nick Jr. and Asta behind for a day at the races when Nick's drunken speeding gets him pulled over... well, more the speeding than the drunkenness. The motorcycle cop writes Nick up a ticket, but then recognizes the famous detective, and decides to escort him to the track...very slowly, when they are suddenly swept up in a swarm of cop cars, all on their way to the same destination.

A jockey has been murdered at the track and now Nick has been roped into working on the case by the ever-annoyed Lieutenant Abrams (Sam Levene). There's been a task force afoot to root out the criminals who have been fixing the sporting events in the area, and they think the jockey's murder is a part of it. 

As is common with a Thin Man film, the story gets twisted and complex as more and more players filter in, additional murders happen, and Nick reluctantly investigates while Nora insinuates herself into the investigations with less and less resistance from Nick.  And there's plenty of drinking.

Shadow of the Thin Man leans the more heavily on the comedy than the last two films, and keeps Nick and Nora closer (acknowledging even in film how it's better when they're together). Also, the return of Levene as Abrams is more than welcome, although the script does make Abrams out to be much lest competent than he seemed last time (a lot of the comedy from Abrams is how he understands what's really going on but then asks Nick to explain it to him). The story, though gets way too convoluted in its plotting and when it reaches its endgame (the usual Thin Man end game, where Nick gets all potential suspects in a room and then figures out the killer on the fly), well, the stakes feel alarmingly low.

I probably shouldn't enjoy the comedy of the Charles' alcohol abuse as much as I do, but it's presented whimsically, without ever a hint of how it's an impediment to their lives, as if it was a magical joy elixir that makes everything better. It makes me miss being able to have a nip, as it seems it should be especially fun to pair up some cocktails and drink along with the film.

[Poster talk... while that kinda looks like Myrna Loy, it's really not doing her any favours.This poster is telling you nothing.]

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With the second of the Final Destination films, the filmmakers (including series creator Jeffrey Reddick) decided to do what so many horror franchises do in their initial sequel: build mythology.

The first film presented the idea that sometimes people get visions, and then they escape death, and maybe help others escape Death. That escape is only temporary and death will come calling again, and there's a "design" to Death's approach. However, there are also signs, that, if you're paying attention, can foretell Death's plan. ("Death" is not an actual character, but the way that Death is talked about in this film, it's as if it is an actual being).

Final Destination 2 both expands on the ideas of the first one, but also breaks the structure in a way that threatens to lessens the entertainment value.

The film opens with college student Kimberly Corman (A.J. Cook) heading out on a road trip with her pals to Daytona Beach, only to get on the highway and immediately become part of a horrifying sequence of events involving a logging truck. It's an absolutely spectacular and delightful sequence as it introduces us to Cook and her annoying friends who we look forward to watching die, as well as these super-funny quick-hit introduction to all these other drivers on the highway who, likewise, we look forward to watching die because they're all mostly awful.  And yeah, they all die real, real quick when the logging truck spills its load and chaos ensues.

Of course it's all Kimberly's vision as she's sitting on the on-ramp, and she freaks out, block the ramp and effectively saves the lives of many of the drivers immediately behind her when the accident triggers shortly thereafter.  I'm not sure how Kimberly and only the people she saw die in her vision all wound up at the police station together (I guess they wanted to see if any of them needed crisis counselling?) but they do and they all have varying levels of skepticism over Kimberly's prognostication.

This takes place in the same region as the last movie, and so everyone's familiar with Flight 180. After one of the survivors dies shortly after, Kimberly thinks what happened to the Flight 180 survivors is going to happen to the survivors of the crash. Not only does she think it, she knows it, because she keeps getting difficult-to-interpret visions (rather than the signs that the survivors of the past film would see).

Paired with overprotective Police Officer Thomas Burke (who's too old to have an obvious crush on this teenage college girl, played by one-time Jimmy Olson Michael Landes) they seek out the only remaining survivor of Flight 180, Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) who resides on her own volition at a mental health facility, paranoid that death will find her.  After more deaths, Clear takes Kimberly and Thomas to see the guy at the mortuary from the last film (Tony Todd)  who seems to have special insight on Death. He tells them the only way to interrupt Death's design is to bring new life into the world. The surviving Scooby gang recall a pregnant woman from the highway, and determine that they need to find her and ensure her baby is born in order to break the cycle.

Of course, Death finds them along the way in a series of gleeful and gruesome accidents, until only a few of them are left. But before they're all dead, they all learn that they are all alive anyway thanks to some knock-off effects from the survivors of the first film. So in a way Death is still trying to clean up the mess that happened in the last movie.

For what was a pretty simple premise in the first film, Final Destination 2 tends to overcomplicate things, but that actually works in its favour. The more ridiculous it gets, the more entertaining it is. The first Final Destination was literally life-or-death for its characters. It was a serious movie when a host of unfortunate events happened killing off a crew of very scared teenagers who already lived through a big traumatic incident. Here, it's so evident that the film just wants us to root for the invisible spectre of death to just take everyone out in as elaborate a fashion as possible.

The Rube-Goldberg-ian set-ups here leading to the kills are absolutely delicious, and director/stunt coordinator David R. Ellis revels in the fake out. Each kill presents many different ways that the target may die, whole sets are constructed with danger after danger such that the audience is constantly led astray as to what will actually be the victim's inevitable demise (a guy walks up the stairs only to reach the landing where all kinds of balls, marbles and wheeled toys lay to be stepped on sending him back down the stairs, only he makes it through that death trap completely unscathed. His actual death involves a dozen stages and an absurd level of confluence that makes the kill a comedic set piece rather than a horrific one).  

It's really Kimberly's visions, though, that weaken the film. The visions prognosticate the deaths, somewhat with oblique visuals that are intentionally difficult to interpret. The visions threaten to undercut the surprise of the deaths, and yet, the hints of what's to come actually wind up engaging the audience in a guessing game as to how the deaths are going to play out (and the film's defiance of those expectations most of the time is part of the fun). Yet, the visions feel like such a cheat for the film. The "signs" that were foretold by Clear (and also used in the last film) are only presented once here, and "signs" are much more creative and engaging than "visions". Kimberly's reliance upon her visions, and the surety upon which she believes she's interpreted her visions correctly, as well as the other characters so blindly following her visions...well, it makes the characters both dumb and unlikable. Kill them all! Kill them all!

Final Destination 2 really is so stupid, and yet it's exceptionally well-crafted stupidity. It's clear that while maybe not the greatest of attentions were paid to building its characters or writing dialogue, the level of detail work and care put into the deadly scenarios, and the execution of those scenarios are phenomenal. I always liked the first Final Destination, but Final Destination 2 may be one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen. 

[Poster talk... there was only one poster for the American release of Final Destination 2, and main part of that poster is presented in the rear-view mirror of the French poster for the film. There was this trend for horror movie posters post-Scream, I think, that put all the young cast's heads on the poster in a slightly stylized way with a slight indication of what was coming for them, all presented in heavy blacks with a monochromatic accent. The horror posters of the late-90s and 2000s were so annoyingly same-y same-y and dull dull dull. FD2 is such a lively movie that largely takes place in the daytime that this grimdark shadowy poster with headlights doesn't represent the film in the slightest.]

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): In the Lost Lands

2025, Paul WS Anderson (Resident Evil: Retribution) -- download

There's a lot to unpack in my head over this post-apocalyptic CGI fantasy movie from a director who apparently makes movies for his wife to star in. I rather enjoyed his previous romps with his wife, primarily his adaptations of the Resident Evil video games into ... something entirely different. They are terrible, but I find them terribly fun. They, at the very least, have somewhat of a focus to them. This one seems the opposite, unfocused and unsure of what it was doing beyond individual scenes, like trying to make a movie from someone's concept art portfolio.

This movie should be right down my alley. Its mythical, its fantastical, its post-apocalypse. It has monsters and magic, guns and swords, and even an Old West vibe. And noting my oft yelled complaint about lack of style, its has "style" in buckets.

The problem is that it was terrible, and not Fun Terrible, just plain terrible.

Earth, after an unnamed apocalypse, but harkening back to 80s scifi, very likely nuclear. Civilization is now boiled down to one city, a hell hole of a place dominated by an Overlord and a Church. Its people seem to spend all day digging in a strip mine for ... something; I don't remember, and its not any major part of the plot (plot???). If there are Churches, then there are witches, and this one is Gray Alys (Milla Jojovich, Monster Hunter), whose motif is to give a person whatever they ask of her, no matter the consequences. The movie opens with them failing to hang her.

And there is Boyce (Dave Bautista, Blade Runner 2049), a hunter (of what? not sure.) and anti-hero in a cowboy outfit with guns and a two-headed snake. When he's not fucking the Overlord's queen, he's wandering the Lost Lands. Gray Alys is approached by said queen with a request -- steal the power from a shapeshifter in the Lost Lands for her, so she can take control from her dying husband. Alys accepts, because she can refuse no one, and grabs Boyce from a bar on the way out of town.

There is a handy RPG style map of the path from the city to the lair with various points of interest along the way, all with cool po-ap names. They are pursued by members of the Church who steal a train and are lucky that Boyce's journey also happens to follow train tracks and that this po-ap world still has... a functioning rail system?!?! At any moment Boyce could have lost his pursuers by ... just taking another path, but implications of "epic adventures" are that there is "one safe path".

Like I already mentioned, the movie is not so much made of continuity but a vast series of visually stunning CGI backdrops connected by vibes. Unto themselves, they are lovely to look at and intricately built but as a movie... not so much. Dialogue is usually in three word bursts punctuated by grunts. Say something, cut to another CGI rendered scene, say something, move on, say something, burning skyline, say something, thundering train... you get the idea. The action scenes are commendable and impressive and probably the only contiguous thing in the whole movie.

If I was 14, I would have loved this movie. The riot of visuals would have overwhelmed much of my brain and just produced fodder for my D&D or Gamma World games, but Old Me is less impressed, and more easily annoyed.

If you are wondering what ended up happening plot-wise, it was supposed to be a twist that the shapeshifter was actually Boyce and everyone he leads into the Lost Lands, he ends up killing. We are supposed to get the idea that lots of people go into the Lost Lands to kill the werewolf, but the movie never says "why" -- it is a vibe of epic fantasy that heroes (there aren't any actual heroes in this movie, just anti-heroes) always seek out monsters to slay. Gray Alys does slay Boyce, does take his skin and then brings it to the Queen so she can depose her husband and the head of the Church but... well, it all just ends in a confused pseudo-epic muddle with Boyce alive again.

Meh.

I had to constantly tell me the movie was not called "Into the Lostlands", which is harkening back to a different po-ap TV series called "Into the Badlands", which I swore I would have written about, but the evidence is not to be found.

KWIF: Ash (+5)

 KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. 

This Week:
Ash (2025, d. Flying Lotus - AmazonPrime)
Kraven the Hunter (2024, d. J.C. Chandor - Crave)
Flow (2024, d. Gints Zilbalodis - Crave)
Dual (2023, d. Riley Stearns-  Tubi)
Where'd You Go, Bernadette? (2019, d. Richard Linklater - Hollywood Suite)
Tombstone (1993, d. Panos Cosmatos - Disney+)

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In making Ash, I suspect that Flying Lotus -- the moniker producer/writer/director/actor/composer Steven Ellis has been working under for nearly 20 years -- was attempting to channel David Lynch primarily, but also cribbing from the sci-fi horror films of Ridley Scott, John Carpenter and Paul W.S. Anderson, among others. These influences make a soup with identifiable chunks within but it has the feel of a first-time production from a director with something to prove.  

Flying Lotus has been a top notch music producer, beatmaker and composer for a long time and working within the entertainment industry for much of that, so he knows how to be in charge of a project, and he's familiar with executing a vision. It's likely how he was able to rope in the budget needed for this very not-cheap-looking film. The result with Ash a visually pretty production, grotesqueries and all, with a very even-tempered mood of simmering dread.

The plot finds Riya (Eiza González) regaining consciousness in a habitable station on an alien planet, her memory fuzzy, and members of the crew dead on the floor. The station is in a warning state, red and violet lights illuminating the space, the occasional voice of the station's systems providing updates and alerts. Riya has horrific flashes of people with melting skin, of vibrant halos, and of fleshy tunnels that she cannot make sense of. She's eventually joined on station by Brion (Aaron Paul) who had been in the orbiting satellite when things went down, and Brion's key objective seems to be getting Riya off-planet before the station completely collapsed. Riya, however, fluttering memories returning, cannot let go of needing to find out what happened, as well as search for a missing crew mate.

The progress of the story is the unfolding mystery of what happened via Riya's fractured flashbacks and some recordings of past events. It's not a convention that works well, as the violence has already happened and we've already seen the aftermath, so the tension of the conflicts in the flashbacks are effectively neutered. Though Flying Lotus' direction is strong, it's a film with misguided storytelling, believing that the mystery of what happened is more interesting in staggered hindsight rather that unfolding in a linear fashion.  It's the difference between, I think, doing a straightforward sci-fi horror and reaching for something more clever. 

Flying Lotus reaches, but doesn't fully succeed. While I mentioned the simmering dread, there's no escalating tension, and, honestly, no scares here, as if Flying Lotus did not want to make a horror movie out of this horror script. The score reflects this, with barely any punctuation in its shifting tones. 

The designs of the film are mostly pretty good. The space suits look incredible, the station itself is visually intriguing just enough to deliver the sense of sci-fi without calling too much attention to itself, and the Japanese portable robotic medical kit delivers a bit of cheeky kitsch into an otherwise sombre affair. The grotesque makeups are also pretty fun, but the "creature" designs very wildly between disturbing and incomprehensible cgi mess. The space ship, as well, is kind of uninspired.

At the end of the day, I've seen so many projects like this, so many sci-fi horror films that they all kind of blur together. Here, there was a "we got here first" angle that I wish had intoned a larger, maybe secret war between humanity and this other species, but there's not a lot of hints towards any larger context here, and the endgame of the aliens proves unclear. 

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In the realm of big studio filmmaking there are films made from good ideas, films made from bad ideas (but ones that are still expected to make money from an undiscerning public), and films of desperation, made out of some seeming necessity to keep up with other studios output, to nab their slice of some perceived pie. Kraven the Hunter is a real desperate movie, but then that's nothing new for Sony Pictures.

Sony has held a tight grip on the Spider-Man license for 25 years, and it's been fairly profitable for them, but their attempts at shared-universe building have been absolutely miserable for over 10 years now. With the ludicrous swing of "let's build a shared universe in one movie" in Amazing Spider-Man 2 back in 2014 it was a failure so epic Sony had to relinquish some control of the character back to Marvel Studios to ensure their Spider-Man license had a future. They built up on that joint venture with Marvel by trying desperately to expand beyond just Spider-Man, first with Venom (a big hit at first, with depreciating returns ever since) and then with some of Spider-Man's extended supporting cast, resulting in Morbius, Madame Web and now Kraven the Hunter.

These SPASMs (Sony Pictures' Adjacent to Spider-man Movies) were just brimming with overconfidence. The shared universes had already imploded by the time Morbius hit, and the willingness for the mass audience to tolerate a film for any comic book hero and/or villain had long since waned. Kraven was already deep in the works when Madame Web failed, and the trailer foretold that Sony had yet another bomb on their hands.

There was a whole "It's Morbin-time" attempt at an ironic re-release to appeal to the meme crowd, but Sony quickly learned that memes can't generate box office (tell that to The Minecraft Movie...), at least not by themselves. And yet the absurdity of everything in the heavily retooled and edited Madame Web turned it into a near instant cult classic (though, not enough to make a success at the box office). 

Kraven similarly went back to the editing bay after the abysmal trailer, but whatever ludicrous arch madness went into recutting Madame Web did not make it into Kraven. Stuff happens in Kraven, but we're never given a single impulse as to why we should care. The character has a prolonged flashback story that seemed to make little difference in establishing who this character was. The moment where a mauled Sergei Kravenoff lays wounded on the ground and the shot-up lion that mauled him drips his blood directly into Kravenoff's open wound (one in a billion shot) is about as close to Madame Web's lunacy as it gets. One would think a portly, thickly accented Russel Crowe would bring a heavy load of absurd flavour to the production (not unlike his portly, thickly accented Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder) but there's not a hint of irony in the performance. He wasn't asked to play it up, so he played it straight. The result is, frankly, pretty dull.

It's a dull movie overall. Kraven with his lion-infused blood and a special magical serum given to him by a young Calypso, has super powers...super sight, super agility, super strength, which lets him crawl up walls and trees and shit, as well as leap distances well beyond mortal levels. He finds himself attuned with animals and hunts poachers but also mobsters, and people who get on his list only get scratched off when they're dead. He grows into the world's foremost hunter, and a big meaty slab in the form of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, but then he needs a grown-up Calypso's (Ariana DeBose) help to track down some other bad guys? I though he was the world's foremost hunter?

There's bad guys upon bad guys in this film including an assassin called The Foreigner who can, I guess, hypnotize people for up to ten seconds and gives the appearance he's teleported or moving at super speed. It's actually a cool effect but to no real end.  There's also the Rhino, a crime boss who, if he disconnects his backpack full of serum from his liver plug, will grow super hard skin and...really... a rhino horn on the top of his head. It's absurd, but it's not fun absurd because they kind of refuse to have fun with it.

In the end, the worst of the worst guys is Kraven's dad, and so they have it out, but the stakes feel completely absent from the climax. The stakes feel pretty absent from the entire film. What's the point? Why are we even here? What's the story we're trying to tell? Why should anyone care...especially if we're not leading into Kraven hunting Spider-Man which is basically the only think he seems to do in the comics.

Just a waste of everyone's time. Hopefully this is the last nail in the SPASM universe.

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I had not even heard of Flow until it was announced as one of the finalist for the Academy Awards' Best Animated Film this year, and it seemed only after it actually won did I start seeing write-ups on it. It was the dark horse contender against the summertime juggernaut Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot and the latest Wallace and Gromit outing (I suppose the real dark horse contender would be Memoir of a Snail, which I've still not heard about and I just wrote it down right there!!), a Latvian/Belgian/French co-production from Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis.

It is a dialogue-free production where not a single human character is seen in the film. The premise is simple, a lone black cat must survive a devastating flood with the help of a cadre of other survivors.  There is an absence of humans but there are signs of them, including statutes, habitats, and things like bottles, boats, mirrors, and the like. Is it a post-apocalyptic scenario? Are all the humans dead? Or have they just abandoned this space because they were warned of the incoming disaster.

As Cat finds herself with travelling companions (the assembly of these traveling companions is one of many of the major joys of the film) they voyage through the flooded lands to the tall spires and gilded riverside domiciles that infer that this is not Earth as we know it, but some other reality.  I truly was not expecting this.

There is a heavy weight to Flow as it puts our adorably mewing cat into so, so many perilous situations. If you're a cat lover, or even just a cat liker, it is unbearably heartwrenching to see our protagonist in such peril... not helpless completely, but at times situations seem seemingly hopeless, and you want to look away. But if you were to look away, you would miss the magic, be it some twist of fate, or moment of ingenuity from Cat, or the intervention of others. They are gloriously triumphant moments.

The setting of this world is flat-out stunning. It is an incredibly lifelike reality that could pass for an Earth-like alien world in a James Cameron movie. The camera work is incredible as it stays down at cat's eye view (or lower) for the majority of the picture, and frequently dips above and below the surface of the water, just magical animation and directing. If anything in the animation didn't work for me it was the gradient highlights on the animals' fur. Often the animation of Cat and friends looked...incomplete... or at least lacking proper detail. But it's made up for by the incredibly naturalistic movements of the creatures. If you've ever owned a cat, or even just binged cat videos on Instagram, you will recognize all the behaviours.

A slight spoiler, the ending is restorative, full of hope and promise, but with the reminder that often for the benefit of some, others may suffer. I flat out loved this movie even though I cried so many times throughout it.  Sometimes because it was so beautiful and sometimes because it just made me miss my dearly departed black cat Isis.

My second favourite movie of 2024 (behind I Saw the TV Glow), and I think what I'd hoped The Wild Robot would be.

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Dual opens with a prologue in which a man kills another man in a premeditated duel on a high school football field in front of cameras and crowd, and is interviewed afterwards like in a televised sporting competition to assess his feelings of his victory. The other man looked exactly like him. The victor was his duplicate, but now, by rights of the competition, gets to take his name and live his life.

Minutes later we're introduced to Sarah (Karen Gillan). Her long-term boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koel) has been away from work for some time, and their remote conversations seem to indicate their affection towards each other is waning. At first I thought that the film was badly written, and that Gillen's performance was not great, that she was struggling with her American accent again, but quickly realized that this reality is very much an affected one, sort of like in a Wes Anderson film but cranked up a few notches. Everyone in this reality talks in a very frank and dispassionate manner, but even among all of them, Sarah still seems autistic/spectrum-coded. She misses a lot of social cues and her sense of appeasement or cordiality almost always misses the mark.  She is not a satirical character though, even in a heavily neurdivergent world she's still struggling, an outsider.

She wakes up one morning to find blood everywhere on her sheets and pillow. Her doctors tell her she is 100% terminal with a 2% margin of error. She is give no hope but is talked into the duplication process to leave behind a double of herself so that her loved ones won't be sad.  It's a terrible idea (with a hilariously bad sales pitch video online which even Sarah scrubs through). I think if she understood emotions better, this wouldn't have even been an option for her, but since she is who she is, this was presented as "the right thing to do" and so she did it.

Time passes and her double, legally named "Sarah's Double" has become a big part of her and Peter's life, to the point that Peter like this sponge of a person who seems so amenable and upbeat and vital in a way Sarah either can't be, or just hasn't been in a long time. Eventually Sarah learns she's not dying but her double has filed a suit to duel Sarah for her life, and the second half of the film is about Sarah training with Trent, to toughen up and take back what's hers (meanwhile Sarah's Double starts falling into Sarah's bad habits and attitudes).

This is satire, but of what, I can't rightly interpret, at least not yet. It's going to need another watch or two before I'm able to land on what this is really saying about our natures. Once I looked up the director, Riley Stearns, and realized it was the same creator of The Art of Self-Defense, it all really clicked for me. I really dug that film and its very weird vibe. Dual could very well be in that same reality.  Gillan's performance very quickly went from making me flinch into admiration, much the same way Stearns managed to harness Jesse Eisenberg's very specific energy and mold it in his own image for Self-Defense. She's so keyed into this role/these roles, but it's also quite clear the director is specific about what he wants. There's a humour and a pathos to Stearns' films, in that same abstract way Yorgos Lanthamos likes to present them, though with much less discomfort. I really dig Stearns' style overall and was rather elated to be in his unusual hands again.

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I have seen a pretty good sampling of Richard Linklater's repertoire, but I have by no means been avid or fanatical about keeping up. His movies are generally pleasant, and offer something of interest worth watching, but I'd hardly call any of them exciting, at least for me (maybe School of Rock?). I'm never displeased watching a Linklater joint, but I'm also never champing at the bit to watch one, certainly not to rewatch one.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette is a Linklater film that really fell off the radar, making nary a blip in the public consciousness. It's a light drama about an upper-class family in Seattle, focused primarily on Bernadette, an antisocial, near agoraphobic wunderkind designer/architect who retreated from the field to raise her daughter. Bernadette is the fairly typical Cate Blanchett role of affluent, entitled, difficult personality, but Linklater's whole business here is helping us, the audience, see past these traits and instead see the traumas she's hiding from that have made her this way. She is, absolutely, an eccentric, something, again, Blanchett excels at, but we see "normal" whenever Bernadette is with her daughter, Bee (a terrific performance from young Emma Nelson), and we understand that there is a lovable person who doesn't mean to be the way she is.

Bernadette has a strained relationship with her husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup), a bigwig at Microsoft, and an even more strained relationship with her neighbours, led by queen bee Audrey (Kristen Wiig), and perhaps an even more strained relationship with Seattle itself. Things eventually escalate with both Audrey and Elgie, especially when ... out of the blue, the FBI gets involved. 

The third act takes a wild turn from suburban drama into green screened Antarctic adventure that definitely flexes Bernadette's off-putting entitlement (both for characters on-screen and with the audience) but also leads to an appropriate breakthrough and catharsis for the character.

It's a wild swing that is hard to hate on but also hard to really like a lot. There are good performances, but I have to wonder how long can we stand to watch affluent people live "difficult" lives of their own making. This whole "misunderstood genius" of the rich narrative isn't going to float very far in what's left of the 2020s, and I realize this was made prior, but were Link later reading the room, he might have understood this was all a bit much.

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With Val Kilmer passing recently, I was seeing a lot of "must see" lists of Kilmer's performances. Tombstone was a mainstay on all those lists.  The 1993 western has been on the backburner of my "to see" list for a very long time, with Kurt Russell's Wyatt Earpp being the primary draw. I'm just not much one for westerns. The glorification of a very treacherous, uncivilized, and radically violent "might makes right" time never sits well with me. I need my westerns to be highly stylized and either feel like practically alien worlds, or get right down into the dirt of the human condition of living in such a free-for-all age. (I also realize that the glorification of the old west, particularly by Hollywood, has perhaps crafted an untrue image of the era, but an image that still informs the culture of the country quite prominently, and, methinks, negatively).

I didn't much care for this film. It meanders quite a bit as the character of Wyatt Earpp, having retired from law enforcement, waffles around whether he has any duty or responsibility for his new homestead of Tombstone, Arizona.  There a very large gang called the Cowboys have set up as home base, and for a time, at least, Earpp and his two brothers and their wives just try to roll with the general tenor of the place. But the Cowboys get out of hand, they push the Earpp boys too far, and if for justice, and not revenge, they take up arms against them.

It's not the story itself I object to, one which seems to be utilizing the legit framework of the Earpp brothers (Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton) and family's life, but the wildly uneven tone it progresses through as it sets up so many inevitabilities and foregone conclusions that we just wait to play out.  

The story is also routinely interrupted by a wholly unnecessary subplot where Earpp meets actress Josephine Marcus, a relatively liberated woman of the era who pursues Earpp flagrantly despite him being married, and Earpp seems transfixed by and can't help himself with.  This subplot goes nowhere and seems only included because, in the end Earpp did wind up with such a woman, or so the closing captions said. Each time Delaney is on screen, the momentum of the picture screeches to a halt, and they feel like tacked-in "we need a romantic subplot" decree from the purple suits.

Kilmer played Doc Holliday, a long-time friend of Earpps who joins him in Tombstone to find some last bit of excitement while his life ebbs away from tuberculosis. Kilmer's dewy performance is absolutely fantastic, easily stealing focus every scene he's in. He masticates the shit out of every moment he has on screen, and I see why people were praising it so much.  If only the film were built more around him, or the time we spend with Russell and Delaney were instead spent with Kilmer as the second lead.

If I don't try too hard to remember specifics, Tombstone would be a stand out western, but with the exception of Kilmer and some beautiful, luscious mustachios, it's decidedly mid.

KWEIF: Will & Harper (+the Bounty Hunter Trilogy)

KWEIF=Kent's Weekend in Film, because I did a Kent's Week in Film already this week (twice!). I took a couple days off work to decompress an watched a pile of movies, and that continued over the weekend.

This Weekend:
Will & Harper (2024, d. Josh Greenbaum - Netflix)

Killer's Mission (1969, d. Shigehiro Ozawa - bluray)

The Fort of Death (1969, d. Eiichi Kudo - bluray)

Eight Men to Kill (1972, d. Shigehiro Ozawa- bluray)

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Tactic number 1 of the conservative political playbook is to make the people afraid. Make them fearful, make them hate. Give them an enemy as the root cause of all their problems. Distract them from the real and exceeding complex issues of sustaining a democracy. Distract them from the glad-handing  deals, from the dissolving of social infrastructure, from the capitalism-run-wild that favours the few at the expense of the many. Keep them pointing fingers at anyone but the (primarily, but not exclusively) conservative political powers that are the true root of the problems.

Conservative politicians, and their public mouthpieces (from talk radio, to social media feeds, to 24 hour cable news channels) keep a large swath of populace under their sway through tactic number 1, and have been doing so for generations. They do so because it works. People want easy answers in a complex world. Explaining global economics or spelling out the complex chain of events that lead to a small town falling into ruin or understanding how a prosperous country slides into negative population growth and thus needs immigration to bolster it's economic infrastructure...well, the average person doesn't want to sit through that lecture. They just want to know who they should be angry at, and most conservative politicians have no moral compunction about pointing a finger. At any given time it's been Blacks or Mexicans or Asians or Muslims or gays or all of the above. It's only been recently that it's been trans people, and more specifically it seems to be pointing a finger at trans women.

The largely patriarchal world is a dangerous place for women. It always has been. Men have objectified and othered women as something less-than for centuries. Objects of desire, prizes, possessions, muses, tools, toys. When men don't see women as human, as equals they can do horrendous things. 

So imagine how scary it is when you've got politicians and political mouthpieces shouting to a massive and receptive population that you, as a trans woman are not even worthy of being an object of desire, a prize, possession, muse, tool or toy. That if you are not a man than you are nothing. It says a lot about how these men not only perceive trans women, but women in general.  But it's not that politicians and political mouthpieces are saying that trans women are nothing, they are actively saying trans women are predators, they are perverts, they are the root of leftist blabbetyblah (and these are the nicer things they say). They are making a populating dehumanize, hate and be angry towards a population that just want to be free, to have the liberty to live in a skin the is comfortable, to be who they feel they are inside on the outside rather than be trapped in a construct, in the confined definition that the patriarchal society has determined they should be.

Most trans people go through a period of deep depression and suicidal ideation before they come out. Most of us cannot truly understand this struggle, to feel so trapped by one's own skin by societal expectations that death seems like the most straightforward answer to it all.  And then imagine when a whole political segment is saying they would rather you kill yourself than wear the clothing of the opposite gender to what you were born with. It's frankly repulsive.

I have trans people in my life. I love, support and accept them unconditionally. Radical empathy should be mandatory teaching, not just in school but at work and throughout everyone's life. It's a health and safety issue. Not everyone has trans people in their life, or has encountered trans people socially, and so if you don't have exposure, it's easy to other, to give any credence to the inane ramblings of those political mouthpieces.  

Will Ferrell has made many movies which play well in conservative spaces. His comedies have rarely been political or exclusionary, they're usually pretty silly and play pretty broadly. He knows films like Step Brothers, Anchorman and Talladega Nights have earned him a wide audience of fans, and now he wants to attempt to engage that audience and introduce them to a trans woman, his dear friend Harper Steele.

Harper was, in her masculine disguise, a writer for Saturday Night Live when she met Will and they became fast friends, and remained very close over the decades. During the pandemic, Harper came out to everyone in her life as a trans woman, no longer able to tolerate living the lie she was living. Post-pandemic ("post"), the friends decided upon a road trip for the two of them to get reacquainted, for Will to meet Harper properly as the friend he's always known but now could truly know.

But the film is only half about Will meeting his friend in total, the other half is Harper coming to terms with being a trans woman in America, of exploring the spaces she used to freely engage with as a man...spaces that, by all accounts from news reports and political discourse, would be dangerous for her to enter.

With Will's celebrity presence acting as buffer, they set forth on a New York to L.A. trip that takes them to some of the most gorgeous vistas the world has to offer, and to some formative spaces in Harper's life, and to those rural red state places where she gets those leering looks that, if not for Will or the camera crew, could spell danger for her.

There are genuine moments of connections with people that Harper has that surprise her, but there are fresh wounds made by daring to even enter a space where she knows she's not wanted. I'm sure Will okayed it with Harper, but every time he announced her publicly as his friend who transitioned, I cringed. But it came from both a place of pride, and from of place of hope, that simply by stating he, Will Ferrell is an ally, he might get others to be so as well. It's bold, perhaps brave, but also naive. 

This is a funny, sweet, heartwarming film about friendship, but also intense, painful, and, at times, dispiriting film about Western society and its constructs, and the pain its very arbitrary and imaginary boundaries inflict upon much of the population.  

There were few times where I felt Harper was safe.  When she was among friends or family or alone with Will, I felt she felt at ease, and it was lovely to see. Every other public space felt extremely loaded, just bracing for someone to say something, to incite.  It makes me sad. I am worried for the trans people in my life, but also for those that I don't know. I'm most empathetic towards those who witness the discourse about them and decide not to come out, to stay trapped. I wish society wasn't so primitive, that it would evolve enough to see through patriarchal  rhetoric and conservative dogma, and see the spectrum of humanity for the beautiful thing it is.

I hope this film is effective, that cisgender people engage with it (I think it's much less vital for trans people, as it's not presenting them with much they don't already live or know), and learn and grow and become more open and empathetic. It's truly lovely.

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I had never heard of The Bounty Hunter Trilogy before, a trio of films in Japanese genres of jedaigeki and chambara from the late-60's early '70s starring Lone Wolf and Cub's Tomisaburo Wakayama.  (If you don't know these terms, that's okay, because I don't really either.  "Jedaigeki" are basically period dramas, where "chambara" are the subgenre of sword fighting films. Both are kind of used, maybe inaccurately (?) as a general term to reference samurai movies.) I'm not well versed in these genres largely because they weren't very accessible when I was younger. Outside of Kurosawa and Godzilla, there wasn't a lot of access to Japanese cinema until the double-boom of Power Rangers and Pokemon started a whole mass wave of interest in Japanese entertainment, primarily manga and anime.

The chambara I started with were the Kurosawa movies, mainly through the references to them in my readings about Star Wars (if you look at the genre terms above, you see where Lucas got "Jedi" from). Kurosawa's samurai films are gorgeous, intelligent, and masterful cinema. But what I glommed onto most immediately was the pulpier, more violent, more stripped-down Lone Wolf and Cub. I watched most of the films and some of the TV series in the early 2000s thanks to an incredible local video store when I moved to Toronto (no longer exists sadly).  I coveted the collection for years, and finally acquired the six-film series on blu-ray last year. I really need to review it. I got halfway through before I got distracted. 

Outside of Kurosawa and Lone Wolf and Cub I haven't explored the jedaigeki much, in part because there's just so much of it out there, and also because it's still not extremely accessible. Unlike Chinese martial arts films, the jedaigeki and chambara films haven't been Sunday afternoon cable classics, video store hallmarks, or Tubi essentials. If you want to watch them, you have to seek them out, and if you don't really know what you're looking for it can be difficult (and expensive) to traverse.

I only learned about The Bounty Hunter Trilogy by visiting one of my local video stores (we have a few in Toronto, thank the gods - Bay Street Video, Eyesore Cinema, and Vinegar Syndrome, to name three) and spying the boxed set on the shelf. Released by Radiance and limited to 3000 copies, it features a quarter-sleeve on the box that tells you what this is: "Tomisaburo Wakayama [stars] in this triptych of violent samurai spectacles inspired by James Bond and spaghetti westerns." 

Films blending the genres of samurai, British super spy and Italian westerns...plus Wakayama in the lead? I had to see these.

Killer's Mission most fully realizes this promise of genre-blending. Wakayama plays Shikoro Ichibei, a doctor who moonlights as a "bounty hunter" (we'll get to that), taking missions to help fund his medical practice. The premise of this first in the series seems to stem from the same historical incident as James Clavell's story for Shogun. A Dutch ship is possibly selling firearms to a rogue state that could give them the potential power to overthrow the Shogun.  Ichibei is hired to prevent the sale from happening by any means necessary.

Ichibei suits up, assembling his armory of transforming weapons and hidden gadgets like an 18th century Japanese super-spy. It could only have been better if there was actually a quartermaster there who were devised these gadgets and explained their use to him.  He sets out on his mission using disguises, lies, and trickery, as well as lightning fast reflexes, expert swordsmanship, and a butt load of super-spy testosterone to make his way to his destinations.

Much like Sean Connery's Bond, Ichibei is a lustful being who thinks he's god's gift to women. In this same movie he tricks one woman into sympathy fucking him by pretending to be a blind man, and fights a female ninja who he'd rather be kissing.  There's a lot of that "the lady doth protest too much" attitude here where Ichibei forcefully kisses someone but though they initially resist, they ultimately cannot resist his manly manliness (and what a man, as a clowning, Don Knotts-esque sidekick catches a look at Ichibei's dick in the lavatory and is beyond impressed and effusively complimentary). This film, and the series, is not the best at serving its female characters, though Ichibei is less handsy in the subsequent films. It's one of the unfortunate ways in which it's in fitting with the Bond-ian stereotype.

Also like Bond films, Killer's Mission gets pretty convoluted plot-wise, as the political side of things weaves its way through multiple double-crosses and some shifting of allegiances where the motivation isn't entirely clear.

What the film lacks in plot clarity and respect for women, it almost makes up for in style. It's score is so 60's espionage with emphatic, propulsive guitars and horns (with just a little bit of surf energy), that it sets the vibe. The character, the swagger, the "romance" and even the almost free-flowing nature of the mission all have that 60's super-spy tinge to it, but in the guise of Japanese samurai tropes.

It's the staging though that evokes Westerns. The fights all have a dusty showdown nature to them, the camera closing in on Wakayama's eyes like he's Clint Eastwood, he will quickdraw his sword and return it to his sheath like a sheriff will his six-shooter in a showdown shootout.  It's hard not to be charmed by the mishmash.

The subsequent films in the series, then, are that much more a disappointment in their abandoning or the spy genre. While the music cues remain very brassy, the second, and especially the third in the series lean more into to the samurai-meets-western.

Of the three, I think The Fort of Death is my least favourite, primarily because it is effectively a lower budget, more primitive riff on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. It's the knock-off version, like Orca to Jaws, or Battle Beyond the Stars to Star Wars. It seems cheaper, more exploitative, and yet it's also not without its excitement or charms. While it mostly abandons the super spy element it adopts the 50's/60's British-esque war movie into its repertoire.

A coalition of farmers is being taxed literally to death by its regional lordship. They've protested and pleaded but their lordship has his own political aspirations, and whatever he achieves will be on the backs of the working class. They either fall in line, or get shut down. Though it doesn't pay much, and Ichibei is not a man to interfere in politics, he cannot dismiss the suffering of others, nor can he abide bullies.

He gathers a team, including his ninja love interest from last film (though their relationship has seemingly gone largely platonic since then) and they descend upon the fortified wall. Ichibei takes command and organizes the people, their few fighters, and the unruly ronin who have gathered.  They would be overwhelmed by the lord's forces if not for the gatling gun Ichibei has brought with him (possibly recovered from those Dutch traders he defeated in the prior film?)

There's something about gunplay in a samurai film I really, really don't like. Obviously guns were a game changer after ages of swords and arrows, and this ugly progression naturally would hit Japan's shores, but there's something so much more elegant and tangible to swordplay and arrows that is lost when you have people falling over after being hit with invisible bullets. The special spray of arterial blood is lost as hammy extras overplay their falling-over-after-being-shot moments.

That said, it's still pretty exciting, and has kind of a first-person-shooter feel to it when the forces are just so overwhelming that they're pretty much flooding the frame of the camera and being shot by Ichibei's gun at point blank range.  It does feel effectively overwhelming.

In terms of Ichibei being the number-one-lover-man-in-Japan, the film turns the tables. A widow in the village assaults Ichibei, taking his pants off while he sleeps and tries to force herself upon him repeatedly as he attempts to flee. It's played semi-comedically, but assault is assault. It's not right when Ichibei was doing it in the prior film and it's not fair play to have the tables reversed.  Another widow, who has gone mad following the deaths of her husband and baby, also assails Ichibei, and literally throws him around, mirroring his first encounter with his ninja love in Killer's Mission.

The film ends with a field of dead and the ruins of a community. An inspector from the Shogunate finally arrives to assess the conflict, but obviously too late to do anything about it. It's a dark note, left with the little promise of the children of the village emerging and being embraced by the farmers of neighboring communities.

These films do not shy away from being critical of government, and the corruption that lies within. Ichibei is often an agent for the government but he is not of the government.

Eight Men to Kill opens with a gold heist, which makes its way to Ichibei doubly so. First the government implores his assistance in recovering the gold as it's crucial to staving off an economic collapse. Second, a witness to the heist found a gold piece and swallowed it, but it's causing severe intestinal issues and Ichibei needs to operate on him.  Operations on screen before sterile environments really wig me out.

So Ichibei suits up and heads out to discover the whereabouts of the gold. He meets and kills and helps many people along the way. Unlike the first film, which establishes Ichibei as a sort of solitary badass, and the second film where he's like a military general, here he's a man for the people. His mission to recover the gold is so he can get a cut of it to fund more medical outposts in the region, something he criticizes his government contacts for not doing.

Eight Men to Kill is framed almost entirely as a western. The score still retains its super-spy tenor, but mixes in a lot more Morricone influence than before. The visuals are exceptionally dusty, and even the Japanese villages seem to be staged more in a way like Western towns, ready for a showdown.

There's also a lot more gunplay. While The Fort of Death was wartime gunplay, along with swords and arrows, there's more gunplay than swordplay here, a lot of horse chases as well. It's more American/spaghetti western than jedaigeki. Even Ichibei's outfit looks more gunslinger than samurai (he actually looks more like the Friendly Giant, if I'm being honest.) The mustard coloured outfit and the shaggy near-afro screams early 1970's.

While the first film was complicated by its political intrigue, here's its complicated by the ever-shifting allegiances of the characters. Everyone's shifting who they are aiding and it's not like they're double-agents, they just keep shifting sides. In the end I really lost track of who was supporting whom and what individual motivations were.

On the women front, again, not great. Ichibei threatens a sex worker who has info about the gold. She refuses to give up her knowledge and offers herself to him basically as a distraction. About the only Bond-ian element remaining in this film is the fact he fucks the villainess so good she immediately falls in love with him and leads him to the man with the gold, and she starts acting irrationally out of her uncontrollable affection for Ichibei.

The end of the film is very dark, and once again reiterates this films seemingly connective tissue about governments needing to be for the people and not exist for power, wealth and control.

Despite being the most misogynistic of the three films, Killer's Mission was the most successful at what it promised on the box (and honestly the misogyny of the film is absolutely aping James Bond, in an almost child-like, they-don't-really-know-what-they're-doing fashion) and the one I liked the most. I wished they had stuck with the super-spy genre and leaned into its tropes more. Period-specific super-spies may not be all that accurate but it's pretty goddamn fun. 

Chambara films already have a western feel to them as is, so leaning more into the Sergio Leone of it all isn't really redefining the boundaries of samurai movies... or maybe it's that I just care less about westerns than I do about spy movies.

These three films aren't great cinema, they aren't giving Kurosawa any challenges. They're pulp, their entertainment, and much like Ichibei himself they get the job done pretty efficiently (all of them clocking in around 90 minutes).  Yet, I really would like there to be more of these. It's surprising there weren't more of these, or that they didn't go on to be a TV series like Lone WOlf and Cub or Zatoichi. 

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

1966, Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in America) -- Amazon

That's it, I'm done with the iconic trilogy. I knew I had seen this movie before, probably back in high school on VHS but I don't recall an iota of it.  

You know, I am not all that impressed by the trilogy as I thought I would be, but at the same time, I can see the immense amount of progress made between each? And if I am going to use the age-old excuse, the film making was probably incredible for its time. There are elements that impress me, but as a whole, I am hesitant in my respect. I am not going to claim admiration just because the rest of film critique feels so.

Or I am just not in the mood for it; my moods (which now come in years long swathes) do change how I feel about things I may have once adored, or at least respected more.

Anywayz.

If the first movie was about a small plot, setting two families against each other, with The Man with No Name (who always has a name) playing the focus, and the second movie having The Man with No Name (again, this time named Manco) pitted against a nemesis come ally, then the third movie expands to three main characters, the titular Good, Bad and Ugly. But, they are all Bad. 

You know, the whole Man with No Name was just a marketing scheme put on the trilogy by the distributors? Frickin' Purple Suits, man...

This movie is set during the Civil War. The Ugly is petty criminal Tuco (Eli Wallach, The Holiday), always on the run. The Bad is classic Black Hat gunfighter "Angel Eyes" (Lee Van Cleef, The Octagon) who starts as a bounty hunter but becomes more interested in chasing down some stolen Confederate gold. And the Good (debatable) is a con-artist, bounty hunter (Clint Eastwood, Magnum Force) who is running a bounty con with Tuco, wherein he captures Tuco, turns him, claims the money, but then frees Tuco just as he is about to hang. That is, until he betrays Tuco as well. Yeah, not so Good.

This is a big story, a sprawling story, with lots of extras and covering lots of geography. The opening acts are establishing the characters, the setting and the personalities involved but then kicks into full gear once Tuco and "Blondie" find out about the stolen gold. Tuco knows the graveyard in which it is hidden, Blondie knows in which grave. On their way there Tuco makes a strategic blunder and they are captured as Confederates by dusty Union soldiers.

In the prison is where Angel Eyes makes the connection and formulates a plan with Blondie's help. Tuco is dispensable but he is also a cockroach and follows the pair, as well as Angel Eyes new gang. In an abandoned town, being shelled by one side or the other, a scene more reminiscent of a WWII movie than a western, Angel Eyes and his gang have a traditional western confrontation with Tuco and Blondie, i.e. the pair walks up the middle of the road while the Bad Guys patiently wait to get shot. No matter, Angel Eyes has betrayed his own gang and escaped on his own after the gold.

Best buds again, Tuco and Blondie are once again interrupted on the route to the gold by the war, this time coming across a river crossing contested by both sides. This act is a massive set piece, trenches and cannons, and designated times of the day for both sides to rush each other on the bridge, slaughtering many, accomplishing little. The pair pretends they want to sign up and are taken before a drunken disillusioned captain who blurts out he really really wants someone to just blow the bridge up so this senseless death can end. The pair complies.

On the other side, after a wee bit more betrayal, we get the final confrontation. The graveyard is massive, and Tuco drives himself half made running from grave to grave trying to find the right one. Tuco thinks he is brilliant having conned the location out of Blondie but not quite. Angel Eyes appears, we get a proper Mexican Standoff (in Texas), and they put him in a grave. And they actually find the gold, with one last betrayal, where Tuco is forced to stand on a grave marker, his neck in a noose, while Blondie rides away with his share... just his own share. Tuco should have expected a reversal, and Blondie is The Good, and from a distance, he shoots the rope.

Ennio Morricone signing off.

Yah, not sure why it didn't grab me. I guess I just prefer my westerns stripped down. Admittedly another draw to westerns for me has always been the grandeur of the American Old West, when shot in actual America. Italy looks dusty enough and they did a good jobs building those fake old towns, but it was lacking a certain something for me. For me, that is, for I am well aware that the Spaghetti Western became such a staple that westerns following them, including video game depictions, movies and TV shows all ended up being more Italy dusty than border of Mexico dusty.

So much for my exploration of the Spaghetti Western, it might not be my thing.

An amusing side note, as I mentioned above, The Man with No Name is a marketing ploy. I guess it was popular enough that they even invented reasons to dress Eastwood in clothing familiar to the audiences, including a serape and his wool fringed vest.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts

2017, Mouly Surya (Trigger Warning) -- download

I said during my write-up of Trigger Warning that I wanted to reach back to Mouly Surya's groundbreaking and critically acclaimed (I need another way to say that catch phrase) film. I wanted to see if there was something the director brought from this movie to that Hollywood movie that was.... well, rather uninspired (another common film writing phrase I need to replace). But there were elements, as I mentioned, in the quiet moment where I suspected I saw the director at play, untampered. I think I was right for this movie, also about a woman wronged and taking matters into her own hands, is best during its quiet moments with the lead.

I need to write about this movie with less of the snark I usually use. This writeup needs to be a sobre, mature post considering the topic and the attention/intent used to make this movie. I harken back to Kent's commenting about intentionality in movie making, and I don't always agree this holds true, but in this movie EVERYTHING is done with intent, there is nothing added for the sake of a producer, this is a proper creator's vision movie, and for that at least, it deserves my respect.

I know nothing about the Indonesian film industry; I have probably only seen a handful of horror movies from there. I am saying this because I don't know whether this movie is courageous in their film world, but it definitely is from a general film making experience. Dealing head on with the cultural views of rape and a woman's status in one's own society has to be courageous. And at the same time Surya makes a movie with art and intent that resonates with the rest of the film viewing world.

A bit of the snark floats to the top with me thinking many of the critics gave it high marks just because of the subject matter, and not whether they "liked" the film or not. It did well at film festivals around the world, real well, but I still think most film critics would be... "it was fine."

Marlina (Marsha Timothy, The Raid 2) is a widow who lives in the dry hills of the island of Sumba. Her house is far from even the middle of nowhere, from our western perspective. Sumba has an interesting death ritual which plays a quiet part in the movie, as Marlina's husband sits in her house's main room, posed in a crouch, wrapped in many colourful blankets. People of Sumba often cannot afford "proper" burial rituals and will leave family members in the dry air, essentially mummifying them, until they can complete the funeral rites. In this movie, he is a prop, a reminder that Marlina is alone, entirely. She is now subject to whatever other men want to do with her.

Thieves come to her house, claiming her husband owed them money, and they will take everything, including her. More arrive, with a truck, and load all her livestock into the back. They demand her make them something to eat, they want chicken soup (waingapu) after which they will all ... take her, starting with leader Markus (Egy Fedly, Satan's Slaves). But not before he takes a nap.

She makes the soup with small green & red berries, and from they way she handles them, we know what they must do. Markus is oblivious as each of his fellow thieves die from the poison, and chooses rape over soup. In the act, Marlina grabs his golok, a sword or machete carried by all the men, and beheads him.

This was the first act, called The Robbery.

The next act is The Journey and has Marlina on her way to the police station with Markus's head. She is not hiding the fact she murdered him. Along the way, at the "bus stop", she meets "neighbour" Novi (Dea Panendra, Gundala) who is "10 months pregnant". She is heading to town to find her husband, who has run away because of her constant need for sex. Her mother tells her sex will encourage the baby to come, but the act, and her constant desire for it, disturbs him. Novi is blunt, talkative and... well, not really shocked at what Marlina has done.

Along the way, on the bus, a truck really, into which everyone piles, including two small horses and a family on their way to deliver a dowry, they are hijacked by a pair of surviving thieves. These two men had gone off in the truck with as much livestock as they could steal, and were returning for the rest when they discovered the bodies. They gave chase. But Marlina is able to escape on one of the horses, and she continues her journey, followed by the headless apparition of Markus, playing his small, roughly made wooden instrument, a jungaa.

In The Confession, Marlina arrives at the police station and is told a familiar story. She has no evidence, only her word, and they don't have the funding for rape kits, and they know she won't have funds to go to the hospital for such. It doesn't matter much to them, not even the robbery. Marlina doesn't seem surprised. But its been a long, hot journey and she is just tired. Back to her house.

In The Birth, one of the thieves has forced Novi to come back to Marlina's house, and coax Marlina to return, with Markus's head as well. Novi found her husband but he yelled at her and hit her, convinced she must be sleeping around and that is the reason the baby hasn't come yet. At Marlina's house, again the women are asked to cook for the men who are assaulting them. Novi makes food, while Franz, the youngest of the thieves retrieves the head from Marlina and poses Markus's body in much the same as Marlina's husband, resting his head upon its shoulders, and wrapping it in the blankets he steals from her husbands body. He has much more tenderness and caring for the body of his fellow criminal then for any of the women in the movie. When he attempts to rape Marlina, Novi comes rushing in with his golok and beheads him. In the wash of blood on the floor, the excitement and trauma, Marlina helps her deliver the baby, rather easily, a healthy baby boy.

The movie is a rather matter of fact presentation of what Surya must see women dealing with in Indonesia. Is it rural life? Is it all Indonesia? Its not a stretch to think it could happen everywhere, anywhere, for such things happen here in North America. The movie labels Marlina a murderer, without any doubt that is what she will be seen as in everyone's eyes. What the men did, or intended to do, doesn't matter. There are no "extenuating circumstances". But nothing in the movie is done with any pondering -- they have done what they had to do. It is life, and death.

It is said by many, including Surya herself, that the movie styles itself a Western. From the dry wide-shots of the landscape, to the ever present Sergio Leone style (actually Ennio Morricone but associating it with Leone and his movies makes more sense) music, she knew what she wanted it tone and look. But for me, it was the locked off shots of rooms, the geometry squared, that looked grand. We are left feeling like we are looking in on events, unable to intervene, silent collaborators with the abuse.

I still feel its kind of a shame her next movie would be the easily dismissed Hollywood/Netflix revenge flick Trigger Warning but its important she got the chance, the chance to work in the industry, be exposed to the morass of how things are "done over here". I am curious what she will do next.