KWIF(3): City Hunter (+2)

 KWIF=Kent's "Week" in Film. I realized this past weekend that I had watched almost a film a day this August, so the goal has become to cram the last bunch of films in on the final couple of days. These are numbers 29 through 31.

This Week:
City Hunter (2024, d. Yuichi Satoh - netflix)
Seven Psychopaths (2012, d. Martin McDonagh - tubi)
What's Up, Doc? (1972, d. Peter Bogdanovich - tubi)

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After watching Jackie Chan in City Hunter, I started to inquire into what other City Hunter adaptations were out there. I had no idea there was a Netflix-produced mid-budget feature released just two years ago... but then again, why would I? Anime/manga properties are not my wheelhouse by any means, so why would I be paying attention to adaptations of them? 

Anyway, here we have a modern take on the franchise which finds Ryohei Suzuki playing horny PI Ryo Saeba.  We're introduced to him via a hero shot of him standing on a rooftop..but with binoculars ogling girls in bikinis at the bath house across the way. Acting as a sort of origin point for the City Hunter story (as so many comic or cartoon adaptations like to do, rather than, you know, just present a new adventure of this already well-established character), Ryo's partner, Makimura is killed as fallout from a case they are working on together.  Makimura asks Ryo to look out for his sister, Kaori (Misato Morita).  Makimura's death relates not just to the missing persons case they were working on, but a larger story about an experimental drug that gives its users super strength and agility, but also extreme rage, temporarily, before killing them, and it's being tested on street kids. This is all the product of an international criminal cartel called The Union, and, the story relates, improbably, to Kaori origins as Makimura's adopted sister as well (this is really a nothing thread and did not need to exist).

The film jostles back and forth between being a goofy, horny comedy, with Suzuki ably letting his freak-flag-fly (this is after all the star of Hentai Kamen: The Forbidden Superhero, look it up...or better yet, don't?) and heavy melodrama, and the two do not mesh well together.  It feels so emulative of the the last 20 years of comic book cinema, all the hoary overused tropes are there...and it would be one thing if this adaptation of City Hunter were lampooning such tropes, maintaining a consistent comedic bent throughout, but it does not. So when a depressed and angry Kaori starts following Ryo around the darker edges of Tokyo society, he winds up bringing her into his world...which involves showing him performing a "Mokkari Dance" on stage, a hyper, horny male burlesque show of sorts. While the Chan version of City Hunter may have not been the purest adaptation either, it at least found a tone and stuck to it.

Suzuki is perhaps the ideal Ryo, a very, very good looking guy with charm to spare who can easily flip the switch to salivating pervert and flip it off again to look the dashing hero and very ably perform some really fun choreographed fight sequences (one sequence finds him fighting an assassin while also fending off tranq darts fired by a sniper, all taking place at a cosplay modelling show, while having a giant stuffed horse head mounted on his crotch... it's the right tone, loaded with inventiveness and humour that most of the other fairly well-done action set-pieces lack, instead making them too straight.)

Also unlike the Chan movie, the women of this adaptation are a little less capable, a little more damsels...maybe not in distress, but also not the ass kickers we saw in the Hong Kong adaptation. It is pretty funny though that the only women in this movie that seem legit charmed by Ryo are the many, many sex workers he obviously frequents (and who are paid to be charmed). Every other woman seems somewhat put off by him, if not immediately upon meeting him then soon thereafter.

The things that work here really work, and when they're working it's quite a lot of fun. But whenever it falls into the trap of trying to be "real" it just comes undone. A sequel has been greenlit, which I hope means that they get a second chance to try harder at making this a full-on action-comedy series about a horny detective and the women who tolerate him because he's so damn capable.

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Martin McDonagh is primarily a well-regarded Irish playwright. His turn to film -- which is almost like a hobby he's dabbled in over the past 18 years -- has been likewise pretty well-regarded.  His first short film, Six Shooter, won him an Oscar, which led to his first feature length film, In Bruges. It was a film I didn't respond to at the time but has a sizable cult following (plus I've heard at least a few film nerds cite as their favourite film, ever). His third film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was a major awards contender in 2017 and a massive success despite its dark subject matter (I didn't see it, but Toasty did) . The Banshees of Inishirin was a critical darling in 2023, and I liked it quite a bit. His second film, 2012's Seven Psychopaths is kind of the outlier, a bit pulpier and more divisive.

The setup here finds L.A.-based screenwriter Marty (Colin Farrell) who has literally nothing but a title for his overdue screenplay, "Seven Psychopaths". He's best friends with Billy (Sam Rockwell) whose current job is stealing dogs from parks, waiting for reward posters to go up, and his partner, Hans (Christopher Walken in prime form) returns them. Billy steals the wrong dog one day, taking the beloved shih-tzu of mobster Charlie (Woody Harrelson).

Of these characters I mentioned, only one of them is labelled as one of the seven psychopaths when we first meet them, but eventually a couple more will be a part of the seven. The remaining psychopaths are part of the stories told to Marty as he's trying to fill out his screenplay, with Billy providing a story or two and a stranger, Zachariah (Tom Waits), responding to an ad, tells his dark tale.

The script is, at times, very funny, quite punchy, but also at times too clever to the point of cutesy and annoying. I'm frankly tired of stories centred around script writers, because all too often stories about script writers start to get meta about talking about the actual scriptwriter, and get too lost in the idea that there's something laborious or glorious about the process of writing. Here, more than once, Marty talks about how he wants a certain type of pacifist psychopath protagonist or placid tone for his movie, while Billy desires much more a splashy, guns-blazing type of tale. So naturally we get both. *Wink*  

McDonagh also blurs the line between screenplay and screenplay-within-a-screenplay a few times, telling stories that are just tales that turn out to be true within the context of the film, or a story that just can't be cracked. As sharp as McDonagh can be, the agonies of a writer are not that exciting.

Farrell is sort of promoted as the lead but is a passive passenger in the film. A somewhat hapless guy with a drinking problem that he refuses to admit is a problem, he kind of lets things happen around him without intervening. Rockwell is more in charge, certainly spewing the most lines and having the most fingers in the plot pot. Walken is magnificent, and there's probably a better movie if he's just our central figure. 

It's definitely not neo-Tarantino, and we should be thankful for that. There's something more at the root of it that McDonagh is looking for with this story than just a off-brand Coen Brothers mobster picture, but I don't know that he ever finds it.

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I have only ever seen one other Peter Bogdanovich film. It was The Last Picture Show, a "new Hollywood" classic which I watched, and neither enjoyed nor appreciated much back in 2019. I don't think I've ever seen a Barbara Streisand movie before, but, growing up, Streisand was still an important pop culture figure even if you didn't listen to her music or see her films. You just knew who she was.

I have, however, seen quite a few works of screenwriter (and also actor and director) Buck Henry. Get Smart was fundamental to the development of my sense of humour. He's one of three screenwriters credited on the Bogdanovich-directed, Streisand-starring What's Up, Doc? (with story by Bogdanovich) but you can definitely tell what Henry contributed to the film.

The story finds Ryan O'Neal's handsome but drab musicologist Howard Bannister arriving in San Francisco with his drab and dour fiance, Eunice (Madeline Kahn) to attend a special dinner party where he will lobby for a research grant. Upon checking in he's spied by Judy Maxwell (Streisand) a creature of id, who cherchez l'homme right into a drugstore where she forces a meet-cute upon them and proceeds to both attempt to woo and grift him.  We were introduced to Judy mere moments before as she followed a man carrying pizzas perhaps through San Fran traffic causing many a scene...her stomach motivating her more than common sense.

Judy and Howard just so happen to have the same plaid duffel bag, and it also just so happens that another hotel guest also has the same bag.  He's just arrived from the airport where he's collected the bag, which is revealed to be full of top secret documents. He's been followed the whole time by a man who is very poor at being discreet and yet still doesn't blow his cover (we're not sure for some time who is the good spy and who is the bad spy in this scenario). Meanwhile a fourth guest at the hotel, a posh, upperclass elderly woman also has the same overnight bag, only this one's stuffed with jewels. The hotel clerk has shady colleague who he is colluding with the steal the jewels before they're locked up in the safe.

So the thrust of the film is two-fold, Judy is almost criminally forcing herself into Harold's dull, dull existence, shaking everything up and spraying it all over the walls, floor, ceiling and anything touching them. And then there's the game of bags being played like three-card monte, as people come in and out of the hotel rooms mixing up the bags that makes it almost impossible to keep track of which one's where at any given time.

The Buck Henry influence finds a tremendous amount of quick-talking characters who have the snappiest responses, taking them out of the sphere of normal and into something quite other. And then there's the situational comedy of it all, which together with the dialogue, feels so Get Smart adjacent to me. The film escalates into a chase sequence across San Francisco which doesn't get into Blues Brothers level of chaos (nothing else really does) but still is quite chaotic and features an extended sequence within playing with the gags of smashing a pane of glass and knocking a guy off a ladder.

Streisand as Judy is iconic. Her blue eyes have such a majestic twinkle, a little devilishness that is very flirty and sexy. She is a poster child for ADHD. There's not as much chemistry between her and O'Neal as one would hope, mainly because he's meant to be fighting his attraction for the entire picture (but mid-way, when a kiss just so happens to occur, well, it's an all-time cinematic kiss, as opposed to the one at the end pales direly in comparison). 

What's Up, Doc? is straight up a zany comedy that just so happens to have a little bit of romance. It's not a romantic comedy, which is truly unfortunate. We don't ever really see the moment where Harold falls in love with Judy, just the moment where he gives in to her, mostly because they're too busy dealing with the swapped bags and angry gangsters and other sub-plots that have nothing to do with the romance. 

There's a lot to like, little to dislike, just a desire for a little more of what we don't get.

So This Is Christmas Leftovers (2025) - part 1?

 

AD/BC: A Rock Opera - 2004, d Richard Ayoade - Tubi
La guerre des toques (aka The Dog Who Won The War) - 1984, d. André Melançon - Crave
Cup of Cheer - 2020, d. Jake Horowitz - Tubi
A Make or Break Christmas - 2025, d . Martin Wood  - Hallmark/W

Preamble:
Between Hallmark, Lifetime, Netflix, UpTV, GAF, and all the Canadian (and non-Canadian) independent production company's, I would conservatively estimate there have been over 500 original Hallmarkies produced and released in the past decade. Together Toasty and I cover, conservatively, 25 of them in any given season on this here blog and we only started in earnest in 2019. So we're at about 25% coverage rate at best, which means...well, we have a mental illness. 

To be fair (tooooo BEEEE faaaIIIIIRRRRrrr!) we're not even trying to cover them all, it was never the objective. We would have to devote pretty much all of our watching and TV viewing time for the next two or three years to catch up. Even the Deck the Hallmark crew who do year-round Hallmarkie viewing and reviewing multiple times a week are still probably only at about 70-80% completion rate.

The point I think I'm trying to make here is, there's a lot of damn Christmas movies, and more every year. Even outside of Hallmarkies there are upwards of a dozen actual non-romance-based non-TV Christmas movies released every year in all different genres. It's impossible to watch them all, and if you find some favourites, it's hard to rewatch them when you're writing a blog and dedicating yourself to watching at least a dozen new ones every year.

Each holiday season I see new movies that I would like to rewatch in subsequent year and rarely do (Holidate excluded). But the same goes for regular movie watching where I find films I absolutely love and would like to rewatch but rarely do because there's so much new stuff to consume.

I always start into Christmas movie season in November, and by December Christmas movies are pretty much all I want to watch. I'm glad Toasty and I switch off days on the Advent Calendar because while I could probably write up 24 days on my own, where would I find the energy? (I'm not sure how Toasty does 31 horror movies in October every year). And so... here's some more Xmassy things:

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Under the pretense of being a forgotten televisual special (tele-viss-you-Al spess-eee-Al) from 1978, the cleverly titled AD/BC: A Rock Opera tells the story of the nativity, but from the innkeeper's perspective...you know the one guy whose sole part is "There's no room at the inn!"

In this funk and psychedelia infused parody of hippie rock operas like Godspell and Hair, Matt Berry plays the writer and star of the rock opera (op-ear-aaahhh) Tim Wynde who introduces the special, as well as performs the lead role of "Inkeeper" (no first name).

Inkeeper is in competition with big hotel across the street run by Tony (Julian Barratt) but is also leasing the property for his in from Tony. Innkeeper is paid a visit from God (Matt Lucas) who tells him that he should expect a divine occurrence, a divine guest at his meagre in. So he cancels all reservations and kicks all the guests out (his mother-in-law included) in anticipation. His wife, Ruth (Julia Davis) is upset and decides to leave him but he throws her out an she turns to Tony for solace, which Tony is all in for.

Eventually Joseph (Richard Ayoade) turns up with (unseen, unnamed) pregnant wife, and Inkeeper tells him that he's expecting a special guest but offers up his meagre stables. A child is born, a bright star shines upon all, and they all feel the joy and rapture of the event. Tony encourages Inkeeper and Ruth to rekindle their love, offers his hand in friendship to Inkeeper, and the pair declare they will offer reasonable rates and exceptional service, not as competitors but as collaborators.

AD/BC is tremendously silly, and is completely keyed into the style of British comedy that Berry and Ayoade (co-writers of the piece) were really into at the time, which heavily, heavily relied upon pastiche and lampooning without going full parody (pair-oh-daaayy).

It is indeed a singing-and-dancing rock opera throughout, most of the dialogue is sung. Berry, whose comedic performance  I've been a fan of for a long time, always likes to infuse music into his projects (see also Snuff Box and Toast of London for example) and in his non-acting time he's a prolific (pro-liff-yick) songsmith. The only problem is I've never really attuned to his style of music, and I find it can get exceptionally same-y (he will often have the same or similar chord progressions or keep returning to specific sequences of notes) and his vocal range is quite limited. Here he once again taps into familiar tones of his own use, but also dipping into 70's era music like a little Creedence Clearwater Revival or... others (memory already failing).

But in a comedy special like this, it's less about whether I'm humming tunes afterwards than if I was laughing or chuckling throughout, and it's a sold half hour of gleefully silly, anachronistic comedy.

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Kids sometimes become obsessed or enamoured with the things that scare them or traumatize them (emphasis on the "sometimes", don't go seeking to scare or traumatize your kids) and one such scary thing for me as a youth in the 1980s was a Canadian oddity called The Peanut Butter Solution.  It's the story of a young boy who gets so scared upon entering an abandoned house that all his hair falls out. He finds the solution in a gross mixture of peanut butter, eggs and, I want to say frogs? This solution then causes his hair to grow rapidly and he's kidnapped by a weird artist who harvests his hair to make unique fine art brushes.  It's gonzo, and I've always loved it (I acquired it on blu-ray in 2017 and only wrote about it briefly in the year-end post).

What I didn't know until recently was that The Peanut Butter Solution was a part of a series of films produced by legendary Quebec producer Rock Demers under the banner "Tales for All". The series lasted some 30 years (up to 2014 before being acquired by another company which has since continued the series) Some of the titles in this are familiar to me in name only but were in as frequent rotation on the CBC as The Peanut Butter Solution, but none of them have had the same staying power... for me.

But arguably the most famous of all of these "Tales for All" is La guerre des toques (in English "The War of Toques" but popularly know as The Dog Who Stopped the War), the story of a gang of pre-teen friends and neighbours who decide on their winter break from school to pick sides and wage a snow war against one another.

On one side is take-it-too-far Luc, who calls himself the General because he has his grandfather's bugle. On the other side is the much meeker Marc (actually it's Pierre, but for some reason they changed it to Marc in the dub and even the English subtitles). Only three lads choose Marc/Pierre's side, and so they are greatly outnumbered. Luc gives his enemies a day to build their snow fort, and it turns into a thing of glory. But they are so outmanned they have no choice but to accept the assistance of the new girl in town, Sophie, and her younger sister Lucie.  

Turns out Sophie is tough as nails and also a bit of a tactical genius (well, for a 12-year-old). Luc sets his sights on her, and, she, in turn, sets her sights on him. It's clear they dig each other in that very confused pre-teen, don't know what to do kind of way. And they're so French about it.

La guerre des toques is an incredibly low-key film. We're reminded frequently that these kids are supposed to be friends and that there are rules they have to follow, but that sometimes kids can't help but get carried away in their actions. Things can get pretty rough, like when one kid drops an ice block on another kid's head, or Luc sets his troop on kidnapping Sophie in the dark, a clear violation of the rules. She runs like her life depends on it, and it's a pretty intense sequence for what is just supposed to be child's play.

If you haven't seen the film before, there's a big honking ***SPOILER*** I'm about to drop, so skip on down to the next post if you don't want to know....

There are about a dozen or so kids participating in the war (and little brothers or sisters who want in but aren't allowed) so there's a lot of little white French kids to keep track of, mainly distinguished by their unique winter garb).  But one of the major secondary characters, and sub plots, is around Marc/Pierre's dog, Cleo, a big loveable old Saint Bernard.

Cleo has been feeling depressed ever since Marc/Pierre's younger sibling came along. Cleo keeps getting scuttled outside and is lonely being away from her family so much. Eventually, because of shenanigans during the war, Cleo is forced to stay outside. Marc/Pierre builds her a dog house, but she stops eating and is just so sad. Marc/Pierre also stops taking her out with him to his wartime events.

So on the last day of winter break, the kids plan a big final battle at the castle, and Cleo breaks free of her restraints and finds her way into the mix of the battle... the tower to the castle collapses in the heat of war and ...well, it crushes Cleo, like, to death! Seriously, the kids playtime killed the dog. And then they do the admirable thing and bury it in their secret storage spot in the abandoned shed they play in. Like, what are Marc/Pierre's parents going to say (well, Marc/Pierre's dad, always off screen, probably doesn't care that much, he's the one who wanted it out of the house).

But yeah, brutal and even as an almost 50-year-old man, traumatic!  I noticed Crave had a newer version of "The Dog Who Stopped The War", a modern 2015 animated remake that uses the style of massive heads on wee bodies that seems to dominate cartoons these days. It's a decent overall production, but I didn't watch the whole thing, I scrubbed through to the end just to see if they would chicken out or not...and to my surprise they did not. It's clear they changed the nature of Luc's character in this remake, losing some of the subtler touches of the original, but still pretty brave.

I liked this movie tremendously, and I'm going to be diving heavily into "Tales For All" in 2026.

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I'm not sure what the first holiday romance parody was (probably a Saturday Night Live sketch or something) but by 2018, the year after I really started watching Hallmarkies in earnest, the "ironic watch" and drinking games had already started to crop up. It wouldn't be long after that actual movies were being made making fun of the formulae and tropes of Hallmarkies.

I've seen many of these, including A Christmas Movie Christmas, A Clüsterfünke Christmas, The Bitch Who Stole Christmas, A Hollywood Christmas, and Christmas With The Campbells (I watched the first half hour of The Christmas Classic starring Malin Akerman, Ryan Hansen and Amy Smart - three very recognizable faces from TV and movies - thinking it would be a gentle parody like Christmas with the Campbells, and it's not...it's just a very bad Hallmarkie probably directed by a guy whose dad had money to burn...but I digress). I had not even heard of Cup of Cheer.

It popped up in Tubi's list of recommended viewing after watching AD/BC (see above), and the preview that started autoplaying showed a scene where the film's heroine arrives in her childhood perfect small town, to be greeted by a friendly santa-like hobo who offers her cookies from his pocket, only for her to run into her future love interest who is carrying what can only be described as a vat of hot chocolate which he then spills on her.

It's not really that funny a sequence, but I'm always curious about Hallmarkie spoofs and parodies.  This one coming from 2020 was an early adopter, a beautiful animated "Indiecan Entertainment Inc." title card declares this is very much a Canadian production which usually would make me say "uh oh" but the sheer quality of the title card had me feeling ...pride? Weird.

Cup of Cheer is a parody and a spoof, leaning hard into the maximum jokes per minute (jpm) with very little in the way of ground rules. Unlike Clüsterfünke or Christmas Movie Christmas which still tried to retain the chaste and puritanical nature of olde style Hallmarkies, this falls somewhere in between the great Zucker-Abrams-Zucker style of parody and the horrible "Not Another X Movie" non-series.  The jokes are a mix of leaning hard into Hallmarkie tropes and pushing them even further, some dexterous wordplay, some real bawdy humour, surprise cursing, and even a (*ahem*) splash of gross-out humour. 

The jpm is so high in this thing, and, frankly, the hit rate is at best 40%, which is not necessarily a passing grade, but when you're still getting a good laugh or chuckle 40% of the time, that's not actually too bad. When it comes to comedy, so much of it has to do with performance, and the relatively novice cast here are all surprisingly adept. The average Canadian Hallmarkie often only has one strong lead (occasionally two) the the supporting players a steep step down and the bit players even further down the quality slope. Here, I really couldn't find fault with any of the players throughout. 

Storm Steenson plays Mary, the big city girl who gets assigned to cover a big cover story for the big city magazine from the big city, but her assignment is in the perfect small town of Snowy Heights(ville Fallstown) which just happens to be the perfect small town she grew up in and left for the big city. Oh and she has to file the story by Christmas Eve. There she meets cute with Chris Mass (Alexander Oliver) in the aforementioned hot chocolate collision. Turns out he runs a failing hot chocolate shoppe with his brother Keith (Liam Marshall) which was bequeathed to him from his Grandmother. It's failing primarily because Chris doesn't feel right about charging his customers.  And then the big citiot with sever gastrointestinal troubles and a toxic personality, Mai Ex (Shawn Vincent), who happens to be Mary's ex, arrives and announces that he's opening a big hot chocolate chain cafe in the very spot Chris' hot chocolate shop is in... on Christmas, unless Chris can raise enough money to save the shop... but he's not willing to take charity or even work for it.

The movie is so joke dense and so joke focussed that the story and the characters get lost. I never felt too invested in the characters or their journeys and their relationships with one another were really hard to really grasp hold of. I think Chris being such a negative Nancy and such an utterly terrible businessman deserving to fail was probably a bad choice. Oliver performs him well enough that he's still somewhat likeable, but it's hard to see what Mary might be falling for (the fact that the falling in love is sort of perfunctory is probably just another joke, it's just a barrier to liking these characters though).

Brother Keith works part-time at the mall as an elf, it's set up and reiterated a couple of times before the big payoff is finding out that Keith is actually a stripper, which is news to Chris who needs his brother's advice while he's working. This results in some hilarious wordplay and really entertaining physical comedy from Marshall and Oliver as one brother is forced to lap dance the other brother in order to have their conversation. If you're looking for a gentle spoof in the same tone as an actual Hallmarkie, this isn't it, but it leans much more towards playful than mean spirited.

It's a cartoon world so the film's best running joke, about Chris and Keith's niece who gets kidnapped and nobody notices, comes across as toothless fun rather than dangerous or dark.

I had a good time with Cup of Cheer, and I didn't even mention the side-plot of Authuh (Jacob Hogan) the time-traveling prince from centuries past who very much takes a romantic shining to Chris but is primarily focused on trying to find a way back to his own time. As noted, it's definitely not perfect and it's throwing so much at the wall to see what sticks, it could prove as exhausting (or off-putting) to some as it is entertaining to others.

Also, so much actual Canadian snow for the win!

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A Light Toast to HallmarKent: A Make or Break Holiday

The Draw: I find Hunter King sooo cute, but she's been almost only in terrible Hallmarkies and after last year's godawful football/KC Chiefs-themed Holiday Touchdown I was ready to swear off her for good. But then I found out that this season's Finding Mr. Christmas winner Craig was going to have a part in A Make or Break Holiday that made it mandatory follow-up viewing, for better or worse.

HERstory: Liv (King) and Daniel (Evan Roderick) meet at a Christmas Party held by a mutual friend (never to be seen again). They start talking about cookies and never stop talking about cookies (too much cookie talk to the point of annoyance). 

Montage for the next year showing photos of their first date and other events (who took those photos!?!). By the next Christmas they have bought a house together (seriously how the ffff* did they afford *that* house...their professions are never indicated). But all is not as perfect as the perfectly made up house of Christmas. To put it bluntly Liv has OCD and the need to appease while Daniel has ADHD and can't seem to get started on some tasks or finish other tasks (I wish this were a more literal OCD meets ADHD-coded relationship...the analogy is such Hallmarkie accidental). Daniel hasn't even gotten rid of his apartment in the city yet and they've had the house for 3 months (red flag, Liv, red flag!)  They get into a fight and the Ross-and-Rachael idea of "a break" comes up, and they're both too escalated to be rational, and they both agree to "the break" (of course Daniel still has that apartment so he's already ready for "a break" I'm sure). 

They try to call off their Christmas festivities with their respective families but Liv's afraid of disappointing her type-A parents and Daniel is guilt-tripped by his mom before he can even say anything. So they agree to put up a charade for the holidays. The whole family comes, their hotels are overbooked, so they're all staying in the house, including Daniel's grandma and sister, Kim, and Liv's parents and brother, Reid (Craig Mr. Christmas).  

Immediately Kim sniffs out that there's trouble in paradise, while Liv confesses to Reid who wants to hear none of it because he's bad at secrets. And then it's all shenanigans as the family all needles and annoy one another while Kim and Reid conspire, poorly to reunite the lovers who have clearly just made a mistake.

Oh and Daniel keeps trying to hide a gift box that is so obviously a box-within-a-box-within-a-box engagement ring. It's a literal Chechov's Box-Within-A-Box-Within-A-Box Engagement Ring...it's only a matter of when, not if it will go off. And when it does, well, that's the third-act complication I guess (even though this film starts with the complication).

The Formulae: The film opens with a Christmas baking montage as Liv makes a Nutella roll (we only see "Nutella" prominently displayed, like, a million times in that first 120 seconds. There are ugly Christmas sweaters. The house is decorated to the nines with no less than 3 Christmas trees, one of which is the catalyst to Liv and Daniel's arguement. There's a hot chocolate toast, and festive games leading to conflict (there's a bullshit Christmas obstacle course that no family ever has set up every year). Grams watches a Christmas baking show (intently). There's no less than three trips to the Christmas market. There's an outdoor christmas dinner(!?) which is interrupted by everyone getting up to dance (!?) before getting kicked out because they start taking the microphone and making speeches and Reid grabs the snow-maker-blower thing and cranks it to 10. Oh yeah, and so much goddamn cookie talk.

Unformulae: What no Christmas/Eve deadline? No caroling? No ice skating? No perfect small town? I mean they hit so many other tropes, can't fault them for the ones they missed. Oh and no red dress, just fetching silk blouses.

True Calling? "Make or break" is defined as "be the factor which decides whether (something) will succeed or fail" so yes, I guess this is a true calling. This Christmas will be the deciding factor in whether Liv and Daniel succeed or fail.

The Rewind: When Liv and Daniel split off to call their parents and tell them Christmas is off, the edit goes into a series of split screens cutting between the couple and their families in a surprisingly complicated fashion. It gets recalled later in the film as well. It's a surprising DiPalma-esque touch I really, really wasn't expecting and it's very well executed.

The Regulars: Hunter King is part of Hallmark's next wave of superstars, while Evan Roderick seems to be a desperate "we need a new, younger Andrew Walker-type". He acquits himself just fine (he's also been in a fair share of Hallmark stuff...as well as an Arrow veteran). Craig (Geoghan apparently is his last name) was obviously on Finding Mr. Christmas, and I have to say this role of the sort of put-upon younger brother who is a grown-up but still a bit immature was pretty much the perfect starter role for him. He was surprisingly enjoyable. I still can't imagine him as leading man, but he can work his way up to it I think (now). Sister Kim is played by Brittney Wilson was pretty great in this role as the pushy sister character (I was worried they were going to try and pair Maya off with Reid, but thankfully that didn't happen) and used to be in a lot more of these pre-pandemic. Daniel's flighty mom Maya is played by Jennifer Juniper-Angeli who has been in XMas Hallmarkies the past two seasons. Liv's dad is played by Days of Our Lives legend Roark Critchlow (see also this year's The Christmas Cup)...he seems to have been more of a Lifetime murder movie staple than holiday romance guy. Liv's mom, played by Marlee Walchuk is a regular on Hallmark's Chicken Sisters but otherwise doesn't have much history in Hallmarkies. And Grams, played by Linda Darlow has a few under her belt, like Hanukkah on Rye from 2022.

Oh and Jonathan Bennett makes a cameo as the restaurateur angry at Reid for grabbing the snow-maker-blower thing. He says "how'd you get that" to which Reid says "I won a contest". Zing!

How does it Hallmark? It's enjoyable enough and certainly watchable. The complication of Daniel and Liv being broken up seems almost completely unnecessary when the plot simply could have been trying to navigate dealing with each other's parents...or it could have been more poignant had they leaned into each character's neuro-atypical nature. A sharper comedic mind could have really made this just a full on "Meet The Parents"-style comedy but instead it just sits as a pretty average Hallmark movie.

How does it movie? Nope.

How Does It Snow? Rolls upon rolls of cotton batting topped off with shaved ice or soap flakes.

A Pan-tastic Journey: looking at various renderings of Peter Pan

Peter Pan - 1924, d. Herbert Brenon - youtube
Peter Pan - 1953, d. Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson - Disney+
Hook - 1991, d. Steven Spielberg - Netflix
Peter Pan and Wendy - 2023, d. David Lowery - Disney+

"I don't ever want to be a man. I always want to be a little boy and have fun!" - Peter Pan

I have been alive for just shy of 2550 weeks, and in the past week I have spent more time partaking in and thinking about Peter Pan then every week prior to that in total. I have never really cared much for Peter Pan as a character, nor the "boy who never grew up" mythos. Neverland has never enchanted me as an escapist fantasy. 

There are famous people who have obsessed over Peter Pan... Michael Jackson probably the most notable, himself a boy who never truly grew up. Stephen Spielberg was another, as for quite some long time in the first two decades of his career, he seemed to be targeted by his most severe critics as a director who never wanted to grow up. The Blank Check podcast has been picking at Spielbergs early career, especially framed in the light of his pseudo-biographical film The Fablemans, leading up to the trifecta that was the turning point in his career: Hook, Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.

But I'm here to talk about Peter Pan, not Stephen Spielberg, suffice it to say that I decided to watch Hook (perhaps for a second time?) before listening to the Blank Check episode on it, and knowing the pop-culture tourist tendencies that I have, I knew I would be sampling other Pan wares soon after. 

Hook is an "unofficial" (whatever that means) sequel that presupposes that one knows the tale of Peter Pan rather intimately, which, at the time of viewing, I did not. It posits Robin Williams as Peter Banning, a workaholic father of two who can't seem to break away from his career to spend time with his children. It's very Spielbergian in this regards, the regrets of fatherhood and the feeling that one's career means both abandoning one's own youthful enthusiasms and one's tolerance for youth. Many times Williams' Peter yells at his pre-teen son to grow up. 

In a 1992 interview (stealing from the research done by the team at Blank Check) Spielberg said about initially abandoning his intents for a faithful Pan adaptation following the birth of his son "...suddenly I couldn’t be Peter Pan any more. I had to be his father. That’s literally the reason I didn’t do the movie back then. And I had everything ready and Elliot Scott hired to do the sets in London. In a way, my son took my childhood away from me.”  This unlocks a lot of Hook for me, the fact that Peter has given up his childhood to be married, and to have children and to have a career...he's bitter and resentful for having let go of his eternal youth.

Hook is not a great film, but then again, I don't think Peter Pan in general is a great story. Hook at least has a...ahem... hook to it, a reason for existing, which is to remind adults that it's okay to still connect with your childhood.

It's a long, long half hour (plus!) of the film before we get any hint of real whimsy or magic, and in that time the film is exploring its theme intensely while also trying to catch us up on Peter's life following the fabled story. It's definitely too long and most of it wholly unnecessary (although there's a bittersweet sentiment to Wendy becoming the mother to lost boys for decades, and something unsettlingly weird about Peter, effectively, imprinting on Wendy's granddaughter...it's like when Steve Rogers kisses Sharon Carter in Captain America:Civil War...it's hard to explain exactly why it's wrong, we just sense that it is).

Peter's kids are kidnapped by Captain Hook (how Hook enters the real world and steals the kids, I don't rightly understand) and Peter is brought to Neverland by Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) to get them back. Peter, having forgotten all about his past youth, hasn't the skills, the magic, nor the playfulness to take on Cook.  Tinkerbell bargains with Cook to get Peter into fighting shape over three days so the pirates can have their epic war with the Lost Boys that they've been dreaming of (boys will be boys).  This leads Peter to the current spate of Lost Boys who have been living under the protection of Rufio. Where we see Lost Boys in other interpretations in animal costumes (like Max from Where the Wild Things Are), here they're like the lost children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, all feral looking.

The best part of Hook is the actual Hook of the film. Dustin Hoffman puts on a surprisingly game performance (I don't know why I'm surprised any time Hoffman puts on a game performance, I always just am...like I think he's a more annoyingly serious actor than he is) and his plot to woo the children, which leads to him effectively adopting Peter's son Jack, is the smartest and most resonant part of the film. Unfortunately, Hook isn't terribly interested in developing Captain Hook beyond his well-mannered, if anxiety-ridden pirate persona. It never truly establishes any desires, any objectives, any growth beyond Peter's destruction, and the film is the poorer for it.

Roberts is wasted as Tinkerbell, a real thankless role, given a sub-plot that intones that she has still been pining for Peter all this time, even for grown-up, hairy Robin Williams-looking Peter.

What the film really needed was a character Peter could introduce Neverland to, whether it be his wife (who just gets left behind for the whole adventure) or his kids. Instead it gives us an amnesiac Peter rediscovering Neverland which, for me, didn't work at all.

Of course the classic Disney animated feature would be the first stop after Hook, as it seems to be what Spielberg's film is most directly referencing. The cartoon is, point blank, gorgeous. It's is so vibrantly coloured and so lovingly illustrated that it's clear this was a labour of love for the folks at Disney at the time.

I noted in the opening credits that the film was based off a play, which was the first that I'd learned that Peter Pan was indeed first scripted as a play by J.M. Barrie in 1904 ("Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up") and only later adapted into a novel in 1911 ("Peter and Wendy"). The credits also held the tidbit that the right to Peter Pan were (and still are) held by the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (though it seems anyone can use Peter Pan without oversight, as if in Public Domain, royalties must be paid to the hospital by special concession).

The credits also play under a groan inducing choral crooning of the like that was surely outdated even by 1953's standards, and there's a few other sing-songs in the feature that don't quite hold up to the high standards of songs featured in Disney films.

As we saw in Hook, and we'll see again in Peter Pan and Wendy, here the Darling children, John and Michael are playing Peter Pan and pirates in their room. It's this weird part of these stories where Peter Pan is already a legend, and not something new to be discovered, and I don't quite care for it. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and adds nothing to the story.  In the cartoon though, it hints that Wendy has been having visits with Peter on a regular basis, and so it makes sense when her father is telling her it is time to grow up that Peter looks to remove her from that threat.

It seems like the story is meant to focus on Wendy's turmoil over growing up, with "the boy who never grew up" both her guide and her cautionary tale, but once taken to Neverland, the perspective of the tale shifts quite heavily to adventure centering around Peter, such that we lose most of the narrative thrust on what Wendy is going through.  

Tinkerbell is great in the film, Peter's faerie companion who gets immensely jealous of Wendy, as does every other young lady in Neverland, from the mermaids to Tiger Lily, the daughter of the (*cough*) "Indian Chief". (Ok, those are the only other female characters in the film, and they're all gaga for Peter who doesn't seem to have the time of day for girls or kisses. 

There's an aspect of this story where Peter's only relation to women is looking for a mother figure, for which he presents Wendy to the Lost Boys as. It's weird, and confusing and oedipal in so many ways that I'm sure there's many an essay written around it.

The use of indigenous people on Neverland basically intones that they are fantastical beings like elves and orcs, and not real people and culture. Peter and the boys like to appropriate that culture, and the godawful reductive stereotype that they're presented as here is really hard to stomach.

The Captain Hook of the joint is, again, a highlight. Hans Conreid (in a performance very much coopted by Hoffman for Hook) delivers a vocal performance that make Hook far more charming than insidious. He is a likeable guy, but can be totally callous when the time comes. The rivalry with the alligator leads to some intense Looney Tunes-inspired slapstick which is both delightful and somewhat out of step with the rest of the story.  It's a real mixed-bag of a production.   

But that bag only gets more mixed up in Peter Pan and Wendy, David Lowrey's follow-up to the assured and magical The Green Knight. Disney has been on a decade-long kick of turning their classic (and even not-so-classic) animated features into live action versions, with, at best middling results, and this is not a best-case scenario. In many respects, Lowrey seemed to be keen on re-imagining the Peter Pan story into something more Wendy-forward, but then seemed to have to compromise that with being beholden to scenes and sequences from its animated predecessor.

From the film's opening moments it shows this Wendy is much more free-spirited and action oriented as she gets in the mix of John and Michael's bedroom swordplay, taking a sword of her own, until a mirror is smashed (no talk of 7 years bad luck) and father (Alan Tudyk) comes down hard on her. In the animated version, Wendy is the great bedtime storyteller that Peter wants to bring back to the Lost Boys as mother, but in this version, Peter's been listening to Mary Darling (Molly Parker) tell bedtime stories. It's because Wendy is sad that she's getting sent off to a boarding school that she proactively asks Peter to take her with him to Neverland.

This Neverland, like all the Neverlands, is a small, unimpressive island in the middle of a great sea. As a fantasy retreat, I just don't get the appeal. Here, at least, the Lost Boys aren't all boys at all, which I liked tremendously... or would like if they had any distinctive personalities to speak of at all. At least in Hook there were a handful of the lost boys who had prominence and screen presence.  Here, they're basically crowd fill.

Jude Law plays Captain James T. Hook (ok, I added the "T") and... well.... Look, Law is a great actor, but he's a pretty serious one. He can be playful, and charming, but his playful charm is always filled with different levels of menace (see A.I. Artificial Intelligence or Star Wars: The Skeleton Crew), what he's not great at is giving over to anything overtly comedic or silly, and, in my very limited and recent experience with the Peter Pan mythos, that is absolutely what Hook needs.  As such, Law's Hook comes off as too intimidating, too scary.  Peter Pan and the Lost Boys shouldn't be frightened of what are essentially bumbling pirates (clearly the animated Hook and crew was part of the inspiration for Our Flag Means Death...like a total prototype) led by a Captain with a clock phobia.

In any of these adaptations the flying sequences have all been pretty ho-hum though each of them have a moment or two that comes close to grandeur (if never fully obtaining it). Here, the flying is perhaps overextended, basking too much in it, but I did like the visual of flying through Big Ben, the clock separating into component pieces intoning that they've left our reality and are traversing to another. But the effects of Peter Pan and Wendy vary drastically, from very impressive to utter ass. I have no issues at all casting a Black actress (Yara Shahidi) as Tinkerbell, but it's the way in which they shot her, the cut-tos, the center-of-frame framing, the clearly Volume soundstage backdrops...it's all really ugly and the effect is off putting. I appreciate that they kept her dialogue as a tinkling bell, but they took away Tink's swooning and territorial aggression towards Peter which was, I have to say, one of her charms in the animated feature, and in the 1924 silent film as well.  There's not a scene that I can think of in this production where Tinkerbell works well, and it's all a matter in how they decided to employ her visually (again, nothing to do with skin colour and all to do with cheap special effects that look more Disney Channel than Disney Motion Picture).

The biggest change of the Pan story (besides the total elimination of the "Indians" as residents of Neverland - Tiger Lily is instead another Lost Boy ... I think...) is in Hook's story. The reveal here is the Peter and Hook used to be mates, best friends, Lost Boys forever, until James decided he wanted to go seek out his mom, and Peter would not accept him back. James did not find his mom, and he lost his friend, and his youth. No wonder he's so bitter and angry. I actually liked this shift to the story, it really did add something, it's just a shame it's largely an ugly, muddled mess of a production that truly doesn't work.  If there's a signature style to COVID lockdown-era productions, this one hoists it in spades. Everything seems so sparse, and full of hesitation. I really would have liked to have seen Lowery's vision for Pan without meeting the needs of Disney.

Of the versions of Peter Pan I watched, the 1924 Paramount production, available in multiple forms on YouTube, was perhaps my favourite. Maybe it was because it was a silent picture and I could put it on double-speed and not lose anything at all about it, and for me, shorter Pan is better Pan... but also the practicality of it all, the hybrid between early studio cinema and stage production really gave it a feeling that I was watching something closest to its roots.

I'm not a lover of silent films, generally, but I was rather engaged by this, I feel moreso than I have been about any of the other Pan films. Weirdly, because of the title cards in the film, I had to pay more attention to it, rather than distract myself with IMDB deep dives or looking up trivia (or playing a game) on my phone while the film runs its course.

Nana, the Darling family's Saint Bernard which also doubles as the children's nanny, is played by a man in a dog suit. It's not convincingly real in the slightest, but for 1924 it's pretty great (except those eyes).  Nana performs all sorts of actions, like drawing and bath and giving the children their medicine, which are clearly tasks above and beyond what an real-world dog can do. I thought the ever-active Nana in the animated Disney version (the best character in the film) was purely a Disney creation for comedic purposes, but no, it's clear it was in Barrie's source material.  Lowery didn't bother with much Nana business at all in his movie and Hook, being sequel decades in the future meant Nana wasn't around anymore.

Though used sparingly, I think Tinkerbell is incredible in this film. For the few up-close scenes, they created maximized sets to look like she was interacting with giant drawer handles or window latches, and in other scenes the compositing is astonishing (any time I see compositing in a silent film I'm always astounded, first by just the sheer ingenuity in the face of limited technology, and second because it almost always looks fantastic). 

In this telling of the story, Wendy is once again running away from growing up, and Peter is her escape. As in most versions, its clear she likes Peter and, as always, wants to give him plenty of kisses. And just like in most versions Peter is curious about kissing, but where later films try to play it as youthful romance, here Peter seems to be confusing romantic versus maternal.  All throughout he debates with Wendy about whether she's a mother figure to him or something else...and he's always on the side Wendy being his mom (except when he's not).  The oedipal confusion is especially high in this version, as is Wendy's vexed feelings about Neverland. It is an escape from the growing up her father is charging her with, but if she's only going to become a mother to all the Lost Boys then isn't that just another form of growing up too soon?

Peter here is played by a woman, Elisabeth "Betty" Bronson, as was traditional for stage versions of Peter Pan. I really would like a version of Peter Pan that plays with the gender fluidity of Peter, and tells a more queer story of puppy love. It's subtext that should have been there this whole time but seems to have been cleared out of every major version of Peter Pan where a male lead stars.

This version also has "Indian" inhabitants of the island, but I dare say (besides my earlier comment of envisioning indigenous culture as something mythical) they're role is far less ugly than in the animated version, in no small part thanks to it being a silent movie. Their role is much more limited as well, but, unfortunately they're also brutally slaughtered by the pirates when watching over the Lost Boys encampment, so they're definitely not treated well.  In fact there's certainly more death and violence in this version than any of the others I saw (the Lost Boys, including young Michael get real busy stabbing pirates dead).

This silent version moves the story's framing base from London to...somewhere in America, and along the way makes young Michael into a rah-rah-America boy, who at times elicits yelps of pro-America patriotism that, somehow, remains quaint, I guess. At one point, the boys (all the Lost Boys included) start singing "My Country 'tis of Thee" (how do the Lost Boys know that song)a, and in another scene after the boys defeat the pirates, they lower the Jolly Roger and raise the Stars and Stripes (where'd it come from....? Magic?). 

"The Lost Boys are the children who fall out of their perambulators when their nurses aren't looking," Peter says, and to me, there's an aspect to Peter Pan that has me wondering if metaphorically Neverland is meant as some form of afterlife, that the Lost Boys are dead children.  It's a theory that doesn't hold water in the actual execution of these stories, but it is said that Peter Pan was based on Barrie's brother who died at 14 and his mother would say he was the boy who never grew up.

One of the aspects of Peter Pan that isn't always consistent is that the actor who plays Captain Cook *sometimes* also plays Wendy and the boys' father. I'm not really sure whether that's just casting simplification or, if there's supposed to be some thematic connection there, well I'm not seeing it, especially since Wendy barely interacts with Cook at all. This is true of 2003's Peter Pan from Australian director P.J. Hogan for Universal/Columbia where Jason Isaacs plays both roles.

I started watching this version of Peter Pan, and, honestly, think I was enjoying it more than any of the other retellings, since as a live action translation it was really effectively threading the line between live action and cartoon, and it was setting Wendy up in a way I found lacking in most other interpretations. But I only got maybe 20 minutes in before I was pulled away and I can't say I've found the urge to go back to it. My trip into Neverland is over and it's likely to be a while before I'm ready to go back.

[For the record, my favourite all-time Peter Pan adaptation is the legal musical Michael Bluth starred in as a child in Arrested Development.]

KsMIRT: Why you gotta go and make things so animated

 K'sMIRT is Kent's Month in Reviewing Television, where each month Kent steps through the TV series he completed watching each month in the 1 Great-1 Good-1 Bad format.  Although December was dominated by watching Hallmarkies, the work schedule winding down meant more time to catch up ...on cartoons? Superhero cartoons, to be explicit.

This Month:
Young Justice Season 4: Phantoms (2021/2022, Teletoon, 26/26 episodes)
What If Season 3 (2024, Disney+, 8/8 episodes)
The Venture Bros Season 7  (2018, Adult Swim, 10/10 episodes)
The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (2023, d. Jackson Publick - bluray)
Kite Man:Hell Yeah Season 1 (2018, Adult Swim, 5/10 episodes)
Creature Commandos Season 1 (2024, Adult Swim, 7/7 episodes)

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The What 100: Superboy and Miss Martian travel to Mars to get married and get embroiled in the contentious politics and race/class war that is consuming the planet. Superboy apparently dies in the conflict, traumatizing many of his teammates. Meanwhile as the Lords of Chaos accelerate their agenda against the Lords of Order, Orm has a new ploy to become king of Atlantis, and on New Genesis, Rocket attends a summit with the New Gods and Green Lanterns to petition for support against an unseen enemy. General Zod becomes Superboy's saviour in the Phantom Zone and plots his escape.

(1 Great) Of the various story arcs this season, my favourite by far was the Zatanna-led segment. Here she is acting as mentor to a trio of young mages, including Mary Bromfield (who, offscreen, has foregone being Mary Marvel due to being addicted to the power), Khalid Nassur (who in the comics is the current Doctor Fate, but not yet at the start of the show) and Traci Thirteen. They face agents of Chaos, first Klarion, and later face the far more powerful Flaw and Child. They are outmatched and need the help of The Demon and Doctor Fate. It's just rife with deep-cut characters from the DC pantheon, which is some of my favourite things.  I generally don't love magic and/or fantasy unless there are rules to apply and here YJ explores the concepts of the Lords of Order and Chaos in a manner that's both nebulous and still quite clear the way things work. 

(1 Good) I love the Milestone Universe. It was a BIPOC-created superhero universe published by DC in the 1990s, featuring characters of colour as heroes, villains, sidekicks, supporting characters...just generally elevating the prominence of people of colour in comics, as well as creators of colour. Once Milestone ceased publishing, it took over a decade for the characters to return, and when they did, they did so integrated into the DCU. So when Young Justice started expanding its roster in season 2, there was some low-key placement of Milestone heroes like Static, Icon and Rocket in the peripherals of the show. I've been waiting a long time for any Milestone character to get featured play, and Rocket gets a 5-episode arc as the Justice League's emissary to the New Genesis summit, except the arc starts weaving itself tightly into the Connors-in-the-Phantom-Zone story and Racquel gets a bit lost. I wish we had spent even more time with her and Orion, as he teaches her how to embrace her autistic son.

(1 Bad) I'll rant in the meta section, but my least favourite part of season 3 continued to be my least favourite part of season 4. I generally like Beast Boy as a character but the character as presented in this show is constantly aggravating. In the opening episodes on Mars, he was behaving like a totally ignorant Ugly American, and after Connor's "death" he spirals into a sleeping pill addiction and becomes a total asshole to everyone, which is very hard to watch (largely because I can't stand the vocal performance). I miss the happy-go-lucky Beast Boy of the Teen Titans animated series, and I can only hazard that since it's the same voice actor they really tried to push the character on a radically different path.

META: I was frustrated by season 3 because it hyperfocused on a singular storyline I didn't really care too much about, when we knew there was a larger story percolating underneath. I went into season 4 thinking that the larger story, that's been basically teased since season 1, would finally reveal itself and lead to an epic DC-style event story. 

But no, instead we are once again presented with 26(!) episodes that only hint at the major conflict to come while it treads water on a half dozen stories that themselves seem utterly decompressed and at times quite tedious. Four of these story arcs take place on other worlds - Mars, Atlantis, New Genesis, and the Phantom Zone - and the Weisman/Vietti tendency to wallow in the world building made for frustrating viewing. 

This is a show with a cast of dozens, maybe even exceeding 100 active characters, but, just like last season, it spends most of its time developing only a few of these characters. Superboy, Miss Martian, Aqualad, Halo, Forager, Rocket, Beast Boy, Zatanna... and it seems like they should be able to do so much more.  The fact that the end of the season reveals that Mary Marvel has now gone evil and is a new Female Fury should have happened on screen.

Knowing that YJ was cancelled (or "not renewed") I was hoping that we would have some closure. Alas....

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The What 100: Uatu, the Watcher (Jeffrey Wright, Westworld), is an ancient celestial being tasked with observing and recording the events of the Multiverse. He is our guide through the MCU Multiverse as we explore the weird and divergent worlds.

(1 Great) Where the comics version of "What If?" was generally focused on tweaking one plot, story or character element to manufacture an intriguing alternate reality for the Marvel Maniacs out there, this animated series has instead taken great delight in just creating bizarre scenarios that use existing (and newly created) MCU characters in different, darker, or outrageous scenarios. For me, my greatest delight of season 3 was the weird and wild pairings, such as Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) and Kingu (Kumail Nanjiani) as 1930's Hollywood icons,  or Howard the Duck (Seth Green) and Darcy (Kat Dennings) hooking up and the resulting baby egg being the most sought object in the universe.

(1 Good) The voice talent in this series is off the freaking charts. Each episode is a stacked cast of voice talent that's just one mind-blowing name after another.  Like in "What if... the Hulk fought the Mech Avengers", you've got Wright, Anthony Mackie, Mark Ruffalo, Teyonah Parris, Sebastian Stan, David Harbour, Simu Liu, and Oscar Isaac. Or in "What if...Howard the Duck got hitched", it's Wright, Dennigs, Green, Samuel L. Jackson, Christ Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Michael Rooker, Rachel House, and Josh Brolin. Insanity. You just kind of forget that all these people have played Marvel characters. 

(1 Bad) Like the comics version, what might appeal to one person may not appeal to the next. I wouldn't say any of these stories are bad, but some of them feel a bit under baked compared to others. I wish "What if...the Emergence destroyed the Earth" had more time to play in the very bizarre sci-fi reality it exists in, as I was less interested in the Riri Williams vs. Quentin Beck conflict than I was about the strange reality of life on an exploded planet.

META: What If...? was always a series for the die-hards, the fans. It's fun to play and explore other ideas with these characters, but ultimately it doesn't mean anything to the larger face of the MCU. It was the same with the comics....they're a lark. There is continuity in What If...? as each season has ended with a two-part wrap up that ties some of the previous episodes and characters into a story where Uatu himself gets involved. Here, Uatu's occasional interference in events in various stories puts him on trial, and it's up to Captain Carter and her allies (including Howard and Darcy's child, Byrdie, now grown up and voiced by Natasha Lyonne) to save him from being erased from existence.  Unlike the previous two seasons, where the climax was threatening reality, this climax brings it to very individual stakes of Uatu's life. It might not be the epic conclusion to this series that some were looking for, but Uatu's appeal to his fellow watcher The Emminence (Jason Isaacs) is kind of a really great moment.

I don't know if I'm sad that there's not going to be more What If...? or not.  They're kind of an amuse bouche, but hardly a meal. I enjoy them but they're not exceptionally memorable...and as I said, they're not really important to the canon of things. But that said, I really want to see Byrdie in live action (and Devery Jacobs' Kahhori too).

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The What 100: The Monarch takes his guise as the new Blue Morpho, scourge of the underworld, to the next level if only to stick it to the Guild of Calamitous Intent, now headed by his wife, Dr. Mrs. The Monarch (nee Dr. Girlfriend). Hank gets left behind as both Dean and his girlfriend head off to college, then gets a concussion in a snowstorm. The Venture building in Manhattan takes on a life of its own. Dr. Venture chairs a peace summit between the Guild and O.S.I. and later builds a teleporter which becomes the hottest contested object between factions. Billy Quizboy gets his first nemesis, and a hundred and one other things occur....

And then in the movie... a new villainous agency, ARCH, starts messing up the treaty between the Guild and O.S.I. The heroes and the villains are going to have to find a way to work together against this new mutual threat. Plus the secret connection between Rusty and the Monarch is finally revealed.

(1 Great) Every episode of The Venture Bros. has its own stand-alone arc and yet is also jam packed with world building, character expansion and jokes galore. The absolute commitment that creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer have to ever-propelling things forward means that nothing is stagnant. Publick and Hammer never get comfortable with a scenario or setting.  The early seasons of The Venture Bros. were far more episodic and self-contained, but as the duo got more comfortable with the idea of exploring the in-world reality of the show, and it's labyrinthine, near-incestuous history, it blossomed as one of the most consistently entertaining shows (despite its radically inconsistent schedule, of seven seasons and a movie over the past 20 years).  Each episode leaves me satiated by the resolution of the adventure-at-hand, and yet there's always a slice of "I need to know more" based on the nuggets of info or teases that were dropped. And I can only imagine, based on where the show (followed by the direct-to-video movie, Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart"), that we would actually see Hank and Dean grow as distinct individuals. I get the sense that Hammer and Publick could keep developing this forever, and they would never run out of ideas on how to fuck with the characters, nor run out of new characters to introduce.  

(1 Good) The animation, the voice acting, the swearing, the violence, the nudity, the pop culture references, the exploration of generational trauma and daddy issues, the exploration of relationships (lovers, family, friends, employee/employer etc), the general weirdness, the twisting of expectations, the striking visual designs, the toying with other Warner Brothers properties... pretty much all of it is good. I never go into watching The Venture Brothers with any expectations, and so everything delivered is always a surprise.

(1 Bad) Despite originally being picked up by HBO for a season 8, the show was prematurely cancelled. WB/HBO threw Venture Bros. fans a bone by letting Hammer and Publick take their in-development Season 8 plans and turn it into a direct-to-video movie.  The "movie" does play like a highly compressed season, and the only thing that separates it from a regular episode of VB is its length and the absolutely thumping updated Venture Bros. theme by the incredible J.G. Thurlwell.  The animation is the same great animation, and the story has the unfortunate task of wrapping up some (a mere few) loose threads while also really propelling things forward even more, and ultimately ending up at a place of familiarity which one might find satisfactory if there weren't so much more left to watch these characters do.  A much as I enjoyed the movie, I feel like we were cheated out of a season rather than gifted a movie.

META: The Venture Bros. has never been readily accessible in Canada. If it ever had a home on Canadian cable broadcast as a first-run show, I'm either not aware or I've forgotten (maybe the early seasons?). For me The Venture Bros. has been primarily consumed on physical media, and the DVD or Blu-Ray releases of the show have been erratic at best.  Availability for the later seasons - especially in the 2010s, when physical media was on the rapid decline and streaming was taking over - was sparse. I'm only just learning that there is in fact a season 7 physical media release in 2019, despite checking numerous times over the past few years.

My point is, I have, pretty much since the show's inception, always been behind the curve, which always meant there was more Venture Bros. for me to watch. There was a comfort in knowing that I always had more ahead of me, and now, having gotten to the end, there's only the emptiness of knowing there is no more to be had.  

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The What 100: The run-down hangout club where Kite Man and Golden Glider spend their "off hours" is going to be spitefully purchased and shut down by Lex Luthor, so the pair run a heist to raise the funds and buy the bar themselves. Bane becomes a regular and Darkseid's daughter Malice, in a desperate position becomes a server at the bar.

(1 Great) It's remarkable that Kite-Man, of all characters, has his own TV show. An also-ran of the also-rans, Kite-Man was always a deep, deep cut character that most comic readers had never actually seen in action. He would have probably been popularized on one of those early 2000s-style websites that would have "25 lame supervillains you've never heard of (for good reason)" following Doctor Bong and the Calculator. He was given a little spike of attention in a semi-recent Batman run by Tom King who seeded the character in as a point-of-view character of a lackey caught in the crossfire of the War of Jokes and Riddles. "Hell yeah" became Kite-Man's catchphrase in that storyline. So, really, what's great, is to see this ridiculous character get his flowers in what is surely a done-in-one season of animated television.

(1 Good) I have to be honest, when I had started writing this I had only seen up to episode 5. I had fallen asleep/sugar-crashed early in the second episode and went in and out of consciousness until the fourth episode, so I didn't really absorb all of what Kite-Man had to offer and I wasn't too enthused by what I had seen. But I returned to it and binged episodes 6-through-10 which, I have to say, built up on each other quite well, increasing the stakes for the characters and beyond. In episode 7 or 8, Darkseid turns up looking for the anti-life equation, which is the maguffin of the entire series, and, as voiced by Keith David, he is a freaking delightful dose of entitled surliness. There is a scene where it's David, the late Lance Reddick as Lex Luthor, and Judith Light as Helen Villigan which is just a joyful sequence of voice acting...not to mention Darkseid always has a Greek chorus following him wherever he goes punctuating everything he says, which is an comedic trope that just keeps on giving.

(1 Bad) It took me a while to get into the show, but, as I said, I zonked out for a few of the early episodes, so it's fair to say I didn't give it a fair shake on my first watch.  Coming out of "viewing" the first half,  I was hoping Noonans, the bar that Kite-Man and Golden Glider buy, would be a hotbed of DC's lowest-tier supervillains, and it's just not scratching that itch for me.  After watching the second half, I enjoyed it a lot more, especially when Kite-Man gets powers and becomes Beast Mode, whose superpower is all about being a conceited dickhead. What Beast Mode did, though, is accentuate Kite-Man's bro-energy, to the point that when he returned to being Kite-Man all I could think about was Alex Moffatt's Guy Who Just Bought A Boat (to the point where I thought Moffatt was Kite-Man all this time, not voice actor Matt Oberg). The amount of times Kite-Man and Golden Glider call each other "babe" drives me insane.

META: Reading the recaps I may have to give, at least episode 3 a (re?)watch.  Episodes 4 through 6 served as a connected story, exploring time travel shenanigans and elaborating on Golden Glider's dark history. I applaud the show for thread building and some really clever plotting to lead to some heavyweight character moments, but the show doesn't capitalize on that weight. With The Venture Bros. fresh in mind, I'm really reminded about how a comedy cartoon can both capture emotional moments while still retaining its offbeat tone. I don't think Kite-Man is successful in doing so (and for that matter, neither is Harley Quinn)... the emotionality tends to be undercut here by the comedy.  It's the kind of thing where I don't think the show cares about its characters as people, and that leads to these more sentimental moments falling flat.

I like it?

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The What 100: In the wake of the events of Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, Amanda Waller is no longer able to use human prisoners as an expendable task force. But they said nothing about inhuman prisoners. Led by Rick Flagg Sr., Waller assembles the Creature Commandos, consisting of The Bride (of Frankenstein), G.I. Robot, The Weasel, Nina Mazurski (a fish lady), and Dr. Phosphorous, tasked with stopping the witch Circe and her squadron of right-wing toxic masculinity from assassinating the royal family of the nation of Pokolistan...only to later be tasked with doing exactly the same thing. Meanwhile Eric Frankenstein (Frankenstein's monster) resumes stalking The Bride.

(1 Great) I watched the first five episodes in a binge, and the latter two week-to-week. The first episode is all setup and it's the usual crackerjack rapid fire comedy, hyperviolence and pathos that we come to expect from James Gunn. I was immediately getting those Venture Bros. vibes I was just mentioning I was missing. The subsequent episodes are sort of Lost-style, where the main plot progresses while diving into one character's backstory (origin stories actually).

(1 Good) The music, as to be expected from any Gunn production, is top notch. He crafts scenes to songs, and here he has chosen a soundtrack filled with the Dresden Dolls and Gogol Bordello, with Clint Mansell and Kevin Kiner returning from Peacemaker and The Doom Patrol to be the key orchestrators of sounds for this new television universe arm of DC.

(1 Bad) The show starts losing steam around episode 5, as it begins to feel like its stretching out the main story in order to provide enough episodes to cover each Commando's "flashback". The fact that episode 7 features both a flashback and concludes the story really does highlight how out of steam that main plot was.  By that point in the show the hyperviolence in both main and flashback story begins to get exhausting, especially as the heaviness of the main story increases (and it seems each flashback just gets progressively darker). Plus [spoiler] at some point G.I. Robot gets exploded and he was such a source of levity for the show, but his joke is pretty one-note, and Gunn probably wisely didn't run it into the ground. I'm also quite a fan of Frankenstein and The Bride in the comics, and I'm not sure how I feel about Gunn turning Frankenstein in to a stalker, and then trying to turn his abhorrent lack of self-awareness into comedy.

META: This was a very bold choice to be the very first product released under the Gunn-headed DC Studio's new DC Universe. Clearly his forthcoming Superman film is an all-ages affair, but this is a hard-R cartoon rife with violence, sex, and the foulest of foul mouthed swearing.  It's clearly right in line with Peacemaker, and not too far off from the R-rated The Suicide Squad (both Gunn-written before taking on the the head of the studio) but it does signal that Gunn is not looking to mirror what Marvel is doing (except that Marvel is now very much in the Deadpool game which is not far off from Gunn's sensibilities).

The voice cast is phenomenal, with recognizable names all throughout. Of course, Viola Davis is back as Amanda Waller, Sean Gunn does double duty as G.I. Robot and making the Weasel's weird squeaks, Indira Varma plays The Bride, David Harbour is Frankenstein, Alan Tudyk hops over from voice work as  the boisterous thespian Clayface on Harley Quinn to be the much more sinister Dr. Phosphorous her, Zoe Chao plays Nina Mazursky, and Frank Grillo rounds out the main cast as Rick Flag Sr.  Guest voice actors include Steve Agee, Stephanie Beatriz, Michael Rooker, Peter Serafinowicz, and Linda Cardellini.

 

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Watching: Time Bandits S1

2024, download

So, a re-imagining of something precious from my youth, Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits which cannot be all that precious because I haven't felt compelled to watch it in decades. But I remember the reaction I had back in  1981-ish (more than likely saw it on VHS first) when I was an adolescent. It was crazy, confusing, astounding and invigorating. That excitement still carries through as a tangible memory, but... unlike, say, Star Wars only a few years earlier, I did not scramble to rewatch constantly as I few older. Honestly, I felt that way about all the Python-esque films -- they were great in small doses and often not oft repeated.

But when I heard this was coming out, and by Taika Waititi (and his usual gang; wonder how they feel tha he is the name on the "brand") no less, I was excited. But also reserved. I can take Taika in small, controlled doses. I am not a huge fan of Our Flag Means Death but more so of What We Do In the Shadows; Marmy loves Wellington Paranormal but I can take it or leave it. And remember, I have never been able to effectively rewatch Thor: Love and Thunder. But again, back to excited -- I could do with some wacky, ensemble, time jumping hijinks. OK, they are not little people, that's fine. OK, Lisa Kudrow (?!?!?) as their leader, that's fine. I think.

I usually do the above paragraph or two as italics, where Kent does a Meta tail-end, but I only remember I usually do that AFTER I wrote it, with already so many italics. So... that's that.

What 100. Kevin is a nerd, basically me at that age, minus the talkative -- I was and will always be, very quiet except in certain circumstances. His parents love him but don't understand him; his sister tolerates him. And then his wardrobe rumbles and the Time Bandits tumble into his life. They have a Map to Space & Time, barely know how to use it, and are on the run from The Supreme Being (Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit). His nemesis, Pure Evil (Jemaine Clement, Avatar: The Way of Water), also wants the map and has sent demon Fianna (Rchael House, Foundation) after it. The Bandits want to jump around in time stealing its greatest treasures, proving themselves as more than just gardeners, and Kevin is begrudgingly dragged along.

1 Great. Really, just the imaginative, silly escapades. I loved loved loved the concept of what was going on, and obviously a lot of thought went into it. It looks "appropriately" good, as in not terribly high on the special effects scale, acceptable on the sets and costuming. Something about only a middling attention to detail fits with something silly like this show, because if it was much better, you would be expecting more from the show.

1 Good. The characters. I didn't expect to actually like Lisa Kudrow as Penelope, their erstwhile "leader" (they're a collective, no leaders) but she ... kind of worked? Much of this show works to some degree and fails in others. I hesitantly enjoyed pretty much every episode. Its not so much as comedic as it is silly. The mix of weirdoes as Time Bandits is great, but non-sensical, and the Waititi-Clement usuals are always spot on when brought together.

1 Bad. There is just something.... missing. Again, I wonder if its my tempered fondness for the Waititi-Clement model of comedy. Its not always my bag. I have to allow for my irritation with some characterization (the Bandits themselves are confusing, callous, incredibly stupid beings, but I have to remind myself, they aren't humans, despite appearances and affectations.... no, no idea what they really are) to be ignored so I can just enjoy the romp, but sometimes my irritation reigned.  Just ... something didn't always work for me. I wonder if that's what Kent noticed and ultimately dropped the show.