3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): They Will Kill You

2026,  Kirill Sokolov (Why Don't You Just Die!) -- download

Well, that was a bucket full of bloody fun.

Part of me is wondering whether there is something wrong with us when this is the definition of a "fun time".

Should I start a new tag for movies where women are led to the slaughter, but turn the tables? Ready or Not comes to mind, but there are definitely a few more examples. Its a sub-sub-genre I can get behind, and yes, there will be a watching of the sequel (referenced movie, not this movie), but in October, probably along with all the highly praised, recently released horror movies from 2026.

Asia and her little sister try to leave their abusive father but it only goes wrong, ending with Asia shooting, but not killing him, and her having to flee into the rainy night, leaving her sister behind. Because the world is a horrible place, Asia is caught and convicted while daddy dearest recovers and retains custody of his youngest daughter, so he can go on to further abuse her.

Ten Years Later, another rainy night and Asia has shown up at the door of a creepy high rise in NYC, creepy as in it has Satanic bas-reliefs and a pentacle on the roof. She is invited in by the building manager who explains the history of the building and the exclusive nature of its tenants (i.e. rich white people, poor black servants [!!!]). Asia has come for a job, under another name. She is welcomed, given a room, but while she is sleeping, someone finds his way into the room, a someone in cult-y robes and mask. In an incredibly stylish fight sequence, she fights him off, kills him, only for more cult-y robed figures to break their way into the room. She kills them all only.... it doesn't stick. Yup, an immortal Satanic Cult.

Asia (Zazie Beetz, Deadpool 2) is here to "rescue" her little sister, now all grown up, from this cult. But first she has to survive the night. She is helped by one of the cult members who has grown tired of immortality and Satan worship and human sacrifice, and probably the racism inherent to these assholes. Sure, they think they are "enlightened" by occasionally offering immortality in replacement of sacrifice, but that's only so they can have consistent servants / support staff. And that includes Asia's sister Maria (Myha'la, Bodies Bodies Bodies); she's been offered a "position" as long as she sacrifices someone, but her sister, who she is still pissed at for leaving her behind all those years ago, has fucked that by showing up in the sacrifice's place. 

People my age, when writing about movies, compare. This feels like a Hong Kong action movie meets Sam Raimi with exquisitely well choreographed fights scenes, laugh out loud horrible gorey stuff like an eyeball with independent thought chasing after Asia as she attempts escape. Its Raid: Redemption but reusing the same antagonists over and over, because they keep on coming back from the dead. 

The fight takes her to the top of the building, to face The Devil Himself.. in the form of a very big pig head tattooed with the names of all the immortals, so she gets to not only end them but also this little conduit he had to Earth. You have to think about what this cult was actually doing. Sure, immortality is nice, but what does The Devil get out of it, beyond the souls I mean. I can only assume this rich white assholes, who were doing very well for themselves were out there in the world making Evil every day, making lives of others worse, corrupting who they could, making things more terrible for everyone. You know, beyond the sacrificing a person every year.

A fun fun movie. Will need to see what else Sokolov has to offer.

Kent's -- we agreed.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Caught Stealing

2025, Darren Aronofsky (Pi) -- download

Tangential thoughts.

Was this the guy who did Pi? Yes, this is the guy who did Pi, but then why does it feel like he was known for so much else that wasn't Pi? Because he was, and it was/is so so much more. Black Swan, Mother!, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, The Whale, and more. All films that got a lot of buzz, both critically and audience-wise. And yes, my brain always goes, "The guy who did Pi."

But also, because of my current viewing habits, and late-to-writing habit, the mushed up "violence in film" has Hold the Dark and Normal ping-ponging around in my brain pan. I didn't consider Aronofsky in that company (Saulnier and Wheatley) but this movie feels at home with them.

And yet, I recall, as Kent did, the trailers depicting a violent, quirky romp of a movie involving crazy Russians, crazy Jews, a mohawk-ed punk and a baseball player with his bat. We got that, but with a darker, much darker mentality, adapted for the screen by Charlie Huston who wrote the original novel, a violent little page-turner. Huston authors his own mish-mash of work including Wolverine and Moon Knight comics, and a vampire noir.

OK.

Late 90s, Hank (Austin Butler, The Shannara Chronicles) is a bartender in a dive bar in NYC's Lower East Side, back when pop culture depictions were still grimy and not IG ready. He's a friendly popular sort with hot girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz, High Fidelity) and punk neighbour Russ (Matt Smith, Morbius). He's also haunted by a car accident from his past, and calls his mom at least once a day to talk about baseball, in particular the San Francisco Giants. Russ has to rush out of town and leaves Hank to take care of his cat, who likes to bite, but likes Hank.

That's the setup. How it starts is when two bald, but maybe not skinhead, Russian mobsters show up at Russ's door and end up beating Hank into the hospital, where he has lost a kidney. For a heavy drinker and bartender, that's devastating, as we skip right past the likelihood of Hank actually having health insurance that would have paid for that. He talks to the police, and is questioned extensively.

It only escalates in violence from that, and Hank just gets dragged from one horrible situation into the next, all connected to some money Russ stole from his employers. The movie is not a fun romp; its a gut-wrenching escapade, where Hank, charismatic and likeable, doesn't deserve what happens to him, and really doesn't want to be involved. EXCEPT after Yvonne gets killed (pissed off at that fridging, but Huston wrote that in heyday of fridging) Hank doesn't really have a way out, but to see it through... somehow. To say that things only get worse when Russ returns from England is... saying it lightly.

I am still not sure how I feel about the movie. After the killing of Yvonne I was just soured on the whole thing, but still engaged by the whole quirky Coens-not-Coens aspects of the movie. To be honest, I found the "fun and wacky" kind of jarring, but yet... it still worked? You can do fun and yet dark; Bad Monkey did it really well, and Huston and Carl Hiaasen are from the same paperback crime world, but really, none of this is fun. I guess the only "fun" I had was when I recognized the two Hasidic Jew criminal Drucker Brothers, Lipa (Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan) and Schmully (Vincent D'Onofrio, El Camino Christmas) but that was more a realization that the characters were played so well, so reserved, that I didn't see the faces behind the fake beards. 

Yes, like my mind, I flip-flop with my words on it.

This is the kind of movie I should probably watch again, to view the actual film making, but I probably won't. I have a feeling I would appreciate it more once the sour taste of the murder is out of my mouth; I probably won't be less pissed about it, but at least I know its coming. 

Kent's take - we agree. 

Credits rolling notes: glad Aronofsky gave some work to D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, and I was amused by the stunt-casting of Griffin Dunne as the owner of the bar Hank works at, considering all the After Hours comparisons in this movie. Kent wrote about the movie here; I probably saw it on VHS but got bored.

KWIF: Supergirl (+2)

KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.

This Week:
Supergirl (2026, d. Craig Gillespie - in theatre)
They Will Kill You (2026, d. Kirill Sokolov - crave)
We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021, d. Jane Schoenbrun - blu-ray)

When it comes to a superhero movie my longtime habit has been to go in feeling totally optimistic, hopeful, and rooting for its success. I want to be entertained, I want to see the comics characters I know brought to life, and I want other's to feel inspired.  I love comics. I love movies. I want this marriage to work.

I even felt this way going into the dregs of the 1990s like the Shaquille O'Neal-starring Steel and batnippled Batman and Robin all the way to modern lumps like Vin Diesel's Bloodshot or the Rock's superhero vanity project, Black Adam, and virtually everything in-between (and outside of)...  I just want the movie to do justice in bringing these things I like (or love, or even have no emotional connection to) to the cinema. Even if a comic book movie is not financially successful, then I'm happy to take the moral victory if it's a valiant adaptation of the character or story.

This is all to say that I went into Supergirl absolutely ready to champion it, to stand behind it and prop it up, even as critical feedback at large called it middling and muddy. I'm rooting for the James Gunn-led DC universe to succeed, and absolutely loved his Superman last year, so I was ready for another surprise triumph (especially having read the source material Supergirl was being adapted from...more on that later). 

It was once true that a nerd's tolerance for nerd shit tends to be much higher than your average film critic, but these days so many film critics have their nerd bona fides to back their opinions up that it's harder to just outright dismiss their commentary. Even without external critical voices, I have my own internal critical voice now, one that I have a hard time shutting off.

Supergirl opens with a montage of a girl and her dog. Kara Zor-El (Millie Alcock) and her pup Krypto are planet-hopping and bar-hopping for Kara's 23rd birthday. Getting wasted, making messes, just whooping it up to numb the traumatic memories that haunt her. Cousin Clark calls, wishing her the best, but can't hide his concern. Meanwhile Ruthye (Eve Ridley) witnesses the senseless death of her family at the hands of ruthless (no pun intended) brigands. Ruthye picks herself up, dusts herself off, and goes looking for someone who will help her avenge the death of her family. Kara's plastered in a bar on Ruthye's red-sun-baked planet (meaning her powers are waning), dancing to Wet Leg's "Catch These Fists" (piped into the space jukebox via a vintage ipod) when Ruthye announces herself and her intentions, only to be bowled over by some unsavoury dudes, and Kara needing to step in. Ruthye starts following Kara, imploring her to help her, but it's only after Krypto is poisoned by the Brigands as they steal Kara's ship (where did she get a spaceship from anyway?) that Kara and Ruthye's objectives align and adventure awaits them.

The first act of Supergirl, for the most part, is pretty solid. There are a fair amount of needledrops, some superb alien make-up work and special effects, and a largely agreeable and unique sequence aboard a space coach bus. There's life and vitality to this first act that ebbs slowly away as the film progresses past it. It's not a James Gunn film, so it doesn't have his sensibilities, but it almost feels like Craig Gillespie wanted the first act to parrot the James Gunn thing. It's moderately successful, but it's absolutely clear from the first two fight sequences that Gillespie is not comfortable or confident with such sequences and they are neither clean nor easy to follow, and both are quite poorly lit (it's also quite possible that the theatre I was in was dimming their projector, the whole film seemed overly dark). The quality of the action sequences only diminish from there.

The story in Supergirl comes from Tom King and Bilquis Evely's comic-book mini-series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which was King's sci-fi/superhero take on True Grit, but in a episodic format. This film, then, is a copy of a copy, translated from one medium to another and back again, and the degradation in fidelity is palpable. Having watched the Coen Bros. take on True Grit recently, it's a virtual masterpiece that even a dimmed copy should still wind up being somewhat good, possibly even great. While Supergirl isn't outright bad, I struggle to call it good. It's fine. It's a movie.

What last year's Superman had was spirit and humour -- as does True Grit -- but Supergirl lacks these, abandoning much of its humour quickly into the film and never quite finding its spirit. True Grit's tale, especially in the Coens' hands, relies completely on how the characters engage one another. Kara is Rooster Cogburn here, while Ruthye is Mattie, and even though Alcock does the work to make Kara seem like she's been through the wringer and having a tough time coming out the other side, the bond between these two characters doesn't ever get satisfactorily forged, at least not on screen. In True Grit the Coens got a lot of mileage out of Hailee Steinfeld's Mattie, for her primness and eloquence and impression of maturity, that is highlighted against Rooster's inebriated brusqueness ... something that is attempted here with Ridley's Ruthie against Alcock's Kara, but, it's not the focus of the script, so many meaningful things get lost along the way. The lightness of the contrast is lost.

The third member of the True Grit team dynamic was the virtuous lawman La Bouef, and I get the in-name-only joke of substituting bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa) in here, but those are two very different archetypes, and, frankly, Lobo feels kind of shoehorned in here. There's not really any meaningful engagement between Lobo and Kara, and the relationship between Lobo and Ruthye happens largely off screen. The need for set pieces (kind of ugly and muddy setpieces at that) takes the place of having these three characters sit and talk and drink and get to know each other around a (space) campfire. (Momoa's Lobo feels like Momoa doing a Beetlejuice impression... it's fine, but there's no character definition in the script).

The film also falls into repetitive patterns that become quite tiring by the third crest and fall. Kara tells Ruthye to stay behind and be safe only for her not to listen and for Kara (or someone) to have to help her as she gets in over her head.  Or Supergirl loses her powers (instantly) only to gain them back instantly, time and time again. I get it, the Supers are so over-powered that they need such mechanisms to make them vunlerable, but it's the abruptness and repetitiveness that both bother me. The powers should diminish slowly over time, a ticking clock mechanism, while a hail mary recharge may not bring them back full throttle it should always be enough. It's the writings of someone who hasn't spent enough time with the Super-family to understand this.

The main villain is head brigand Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts), and he's kind of what everyone's chasing, the maguffin of the comic book, but here they half-heartedly try to develop him into a vile killer who does so for pleasure, and Schoenaerts tries to inject life into the character, but this character, really, should be largely unseen. The less of him, the better. And then the script adds in the fact that the brigands are a men-only club, who kidnap young (it should be noted, human) women to bear them children. It's a play right out of Mad Max:Fury Road but without consulting someone like Eve Ensler to tell them whether they should or not.

As a result, the young girl slave trade casts a pretty bleak pall over an already strapped-for-joy movie. It wallows in the trauma of Kara having lost her family (conveyed in a series of flashbacks that grind the film to a dead halt -- flashbacks are in the comics but handled very differently) and Ruthye's same-but-not experience (in spite of them both having these traumas, the film still isn't able to bond them very well on screen...there's, like, one moment where Kara, silently, realizes this).  Had the film not sidelined Krypto, there would have a been a comic relief chaos agent to make this whole pill easier to swallow. I realize he's also sidelined in the comic and his sidelining is the impetus for Kara to go on this journey in the first place, but comic books have years of character history to draw on and an established universe to traverse, while this film needs to create it all from whole cloth. They could have found something else to trigger Kara and keep Krypto in the picture. 

I wanted to love Supergirl.  As is, I don't really even like it. I do really like this iteration of the character, the attitude that Alcock portrays very well, but the film doesn't serve her too well. I came out of Supergirl feeling like I barely understand this character after spending two hours with her. At the end of the film, Kara returns to Earth, to Metropolis, uncertain of her place in the universe, but ready to find out. Yeah, that's a starting point, not an ending.

---

[Warning: spoilers within]

They Will Kill You starts with Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) and her little sister fleeing from an abusive stepfather. He catches up to them quickly, and Asia shoots him. The cops arrive, Asia runs, leaving her sister behind. Conceptually it's a pretty heavy, if quite brief, opening sequence that doesn't make the audience wait long to get to the point.

Asia got caught and served 10 years in prison for the attempted murder of her father, but has felt nothing but guilt over leaving her sister behind. Asia's hired a private investigator to track her sister down, he points her to the Virgil, a New York 9-storey high rise for the wealthy, where her sister was hired as a cleaner, but it has a reputation as being a place where people disappear. There is definitely insinuations of class and race disparities, and the rich being raised up on the the backs of the poor, which all sounds rather heady as subject matter.

And yet, this is just the place setting. This film really doesn't waste its time. It's only about 15 minutes before the first fight sequence happens, and it doesn't let up from there. Whatever inference of social commentary the opening few minutes might have suggested, for the most part they are pushed aside so that we can have a rollicking good time as Asia navigates the Victor's many hallways, passageways, tunnels and shafts, fending off it's blood-hungry elites.

Asia take a job with a fake ID to get into the Virgil, and instantly meets some of the fake-smile bearing residents, the head of services Mrs. Woodhouse (Patricia Arquette), and getting a very short tour of the servants quarters on the first floor. She senses she's being watched, so she secures her door. A masked behemoth finds his way into her room regardless and attempts to attack her... only Asia is prepare to fight back. Four more assailants find their way in and Asia defends herself, armed with a sawed off shotgun and a sword. 

When Asia lops off Tom Felton's head, the arterial spray is like a lawn sprinkler, just all directions everywhere. The fight with the remaining assailants is heated and brutal and bloody and very creative. Asia's taking her lumps, but she's surprisingly a warrior, and ready to take everyone on.

There are definite shades of Kill Bill here, not just in the fighting, but in the style, the edits, the pastiche, the title cards and flashbacks. And yet, it's not Tarantino-esque, because this plays as an even greater ode to Sam Raimi. 

The elite of the Victor are immortal devil worshippers who can't truly be killed. They will resurrect and reform if even a flake of skin remains. In one of the film's many incredible sequences, Asia is crawling through a between-floor tunnel system and encounters Sharon (Heather Graham) whose head she lopped off earlier in the film. After a scuffle, Asia blows Sharon's head off, and, moments later the headless body starts charging towards her (just grasping, but unable to see, hear or properly sense Asia's whereabouts). Eventually Asia finds her way to an upward shaft, but doesn't notice Sharon's eyeball, using the optic nerve like a flagella to propel itself through the tunnels to track her. Somehow Sharon's headless body is still receiving the intel, and attempts to charades the information back to the other elites. It's absolutely ridiculous and obscenely delightful. Just as the whole film is.

Much like a Bruce Campbell in an Evil Dead, Zazie Beetz keeps taking her lumps, but also keeps fighting back. She fights for herself, and she fights for her sister, but mostly, she's fighting for our entertainment. The film culminates with Asia fighting Mrs. Woodhouse with a devil-possessed giant boar's head Voltron-ed her own. Just insane, but delirously entertaining.

There's not a tremendous amount of story or character development here, there's no need for it. This is just a wicked fight movie that's having a good time going to comedic extremes, and I'm here for it.

---

It would be easy to mistake We're All Going to the World's Fair, which was released in 2021, as a COVID-era production. It's a small film that follows its protagonist, 16-year-old Casey, as she lives her life online, participating in "the World's Fair Challenge".  It's a social media trend that, according to other (in-world, off-brand youtube) streamers, changes you in unexpected ways. Casey films herself strolling around her town, talking to the camera about the changes she's feeling, the disconnecting from herself, the violent and or self-harmful impulses she's feeling. We see Casey dancing alone, or playing baseball by herself. We see her exploring the barn late at night, looking at her father's gun (we're talking an assault weapon here, not a hunting rifle or handgun), and eventually settling on the barn couch, watching not-youtube on the big screen, when a video autoplays a message that is directly for her. It features a still of Casey's face, distorted and melty, alternating with a hastily scribble warning that she is in trouble, and she needs to reach out. 

Jane Shoenbrun's I Saw The TV Glow was my favourite film of 2024, an exploration of how media can impact one's sense of identity, and an powerful closeted trans-allegory disguised as a horror film. This, their first feature shows they definitely have a grasp, and maybe even a penchant for media-identity related storytelling (their third film, this year's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma looks to be yet another, different and provocative take on this dynamic).  We see Casey not just through her videos, but also as she's making her videos, and when she's not making her videos she's engaging with other "World's Fair" content.

Schenbrun has fun building out the online world of "the World's Fair Challenge", some disturbing content from creators describing (or showing) how the Challenge has changed them. It's almost like an infection, but the symptoms differ from person to person.

The aforementioned warning comes from "JLB", and Casey decides to Skype with this stranger. JLB expresses that they're concerned about them, and asks Casey to just keep making more videos. The film's greatest move comes following this call that ends the first act, switching us over to JLB's perspective for a period of time. He is a thin, bald middle-aged man with a very hang-dog expression, and we just don't know what his deal is. He lives in a very big house, so he's obviously successful at whatever he does, or did, but he primarily hangs out and sleeps in what looks like a teenager's bedroom. There are pictures in the house but we never clearly see them. We don't know if JLB lost a kid to this "Challenge" or if he's just an online creeper, or if he's just a lonely guy looking to platonically connect with someone who also appears lonely, or if he's a psycho who has murdered the family in this home and is now operating out of it. He does spend a lot of time disseminating Casey's content though.

Beyond Casey's video in which we see her wander through a crowd at a New Year's celebration, we never see her with people. Her father, we're only aware of him because he yelled at her once (for listening to something loudly at 3am), but there's a half insinuation that she's scared of him...or avoiding him...or both. But there's so much Schoenbrun doesn't show us here that everything is up for interpretation, right through to the finale where the rug isn't so much as pulled out from under us but the fog is lifted.  

The events of the movie are recontextualized, but the question is...does it make a difference? However we view Casey, isn't the end result that she's lonely, sad, and perhaps depressed? 

"The World's Fair Challenge" is Schoenbrun interpreting the Creepypasta realm of online horror storytelling through collaboration, the realm that bore such fruits as Backrooms and The Slender Man and Channel Zero, but through a very grounded, human, individualistic lens. It very much feels like Schoenbrun is asking "is this how I would be if this type of communal storytelling was available to me when I was a sad, awkward, lonely teenager", and I feel very much the same way, that the whole Creepypasta thing would have been totally for me had I grown up in a different time.

It's eerie how much ...World's Fair is in sync with what pandemic living felt like (according to Schonebrun, it finished filming March 1, 2020) but it's not an intentional pandemic allegory. It's message is not bound by time, as a result, it is a story of loneliness, and the horror here (if you can call it that...it's more just a slow, simmering dread), is equally grounded in sadness and the truly unknowable strangers of the internet.

T&K Go Loopty Loo: Before I Fall

 2017, d.  Ry Russo Young - amazonprime

Preamble
[Toasty] Yes, intentionally, I am editing Kent's existing post, to add in some typical rambling on my part. This Loopty Loo project started out as something we were hunting down, but as all of our "Projects" do, it ambled off into... squirrel !! But I have to say, I actually like being surprised by one popping up on the radar.

"You realize the reader did not see the draft of this, the moment in time when there wasn't a Preamble?"

And yes, I finally got around to seeing this Teen Drama rendition of a Loopty Loo, as Kent put in the stub many weeks ago.

Its a decent example of the trope while actually striving to be slightly different from the norm.

How did the Loop Begin?

[Kent] Sam (Zoey Deutch, The Threesome) wakes up to music playing on her phone at 6:52 AM. Apparently she's been sleeping in? (Why do American kids go to school so early?!?). Her adorable little sister is bouncing on her bed. Sam is annoyed. She gets ready for the day, skips breakfast, gets further frustrated at her little sister, then hops in her friend Lindsay's SUV (Halston Sage, The Orville) and they pick up their other friends Ally (Cynthy Wu, For All Mankind) and Elody (Medalion Rahimi, NCIS: Los Angeles). Today is apparently "Cupid's day" at school, when people (mainly guys) buy roses to signify their affection for someone. (This isn't the first time I've seen this tradition on screen, but is it a real thing? Never at my school).

[Toasty] Geez, these people have money. Usually, in these Pacific North West set movies, when we get "small Vancouver suburbia" setting we see those lovely Queen Anne's and other vintage houses, but this entire neighbourhood seems West Coast Modern all piled on immaculate terraces.

Tangent Note: For about 10 minutes, I thought Cynthy Wu was the actress who played Knives Chau, and then suddenly realized I was a decade off timeline. Also, "Cynthy" ???

[Kent] Today is also the day Sam has decided she's going to go all the way with her boyfriend, the hottest guy in school. He sends her a rose, but she also receives a decidedly different rose from Kent (no, not me; Logan Miller, Escape Room), a boy she's was friends with when they were kids, but hasn't really paid any attention to him in years. (Kent basically looks like Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber and doesn't give off good vibes, but he's, apparently. the true love interest of this teen fable...ick). At lunch, Lindsay leads the girls in a rousing spate of taunting unkempt Juliet (Elena Kampouris, Jupiter's Legacy) who, clearly, is not having a good time in high school. (I mean, I didn't have a good feeling about these girls from the car ride into school, but now I really, really despise them. They're Mean Girls.)

[Toasty] Yes, this is most definitely the clique of Popular Girls, with Sam filling the role of Most Likeable. But like all cliques, even if she has reservations about their behaviour, she piles on anyway. I imagine the setup of them as characters, as I don't watch many of this demographic of film, is that they are simultaneously the "I hate them" and the "I wanna be them" girls?

[Kent] Kent's having a party (still not me), so that's where everyone will be. The girls get dressed up and Sam's nervous about her first time with the hottest guy in school. When they arrive at (not me) Kent's, THGIS is drunk off his ass already and Sam is turned right off. Then Juliet turns up and Lindsay goes full on demon on her. They get into a pushing match before everyone starts ganging up on Juliet and tossing their drinks on her. The night is heated, and, frustrated, the girls leave, only to get into an accident at 12:39 AM. 

[Toasty] THGIS... ?? ohhhhh.... yeah. Juliet and Lindsay have some history; she seems to instantly know Lindsay's trigger points. But WHY did she even show up to the party?

[Kent] I had assumed at first that maybe Juliet was Kent's sister and lived there? But then that was quickly disproven. Given what we know about what Juliet is bound to do, she was going there to provoke the mean girls.

[Toasty] Did you hear the "bump" just before they crashed? I wondered if this was going to be a "I Know What You Did Last Summer" vibe, but the Peanut Gallery said a tired popped. Did angry Juliet sabotage their vehicle? 

[Kent] I did, and given how the second time loop winds up, I was wondering if, somehow, the loops all kinda looped back on each other, and the "bump" in the first instance was connected to the same "bump" in the second last instance.

[Toasty] I am assuming they all died.

[Kent] Let's hope!  Sam wakes up in bed, and today is yesterday again. What'd I miss?

[Toasty] OK, classic setup. Introduce the mains, add in a "pining for love" Nice Guy, and even have a few core "repeatable events": the origami bird on the bed, the bouncing sister, a pile of books fall from the locker, etc. I also love that it begins with an alarm going off and all new Loopty-Loo's will involve the time displayed on someone's phone (as opposed to a red digital clock on the night stand); at least until we get past that paradigm.

What was the main character's first reaction to the Loop?

[Kent] There's a voiceover at the start of the film and sometimes at the start of each loop. Here Sam opines that she's maybe dead already. She's not sure what's going on. The familiarity of the day as is, just waking up to the same song, the same texts, the same little sister jumping on her bed. She's moving slower. Lindsay doesn't meet her in the driveway, she comes to her room.  It's the same but it's not. Deja-fucking-vu much? But this time, seeing everything again, she's not participating, she's almost an outside observer, and as sort of freaked out by the same-sameness of it all, she's also kind of in disbelief. She wonders if she just dreamed the prior day, and all the similarities are just...eerie coincidences. But standing as an outside observer to one's own life, they perhaps see things one might not see when they are actively participating.

[Toasty] Was she hung over? She got mid-level drunk the night before. Is this one of the loops where they retain the physical effects of the previous loop? Even if not, she is emotionally spent over that whole party thing, Demon Lindsay, drunk-as-fuck THGIS, etc.

[Kent] Oooh, I like that reasoning. Either one of them, heehee.

WHY did the main character get put into the Loop? Can someone else be brought into the Loop?

[Kent] It's pretty evident that, from the onset, Sam is being a total b-hole and not a good person, but that she has the capacity for change. It's clear THGIS is a terrible boyfriend, and that this Kent kid (still not me, and not even jealous), I guess, is the guy she should be with (I guess?) as well as trying to figure out the Juliet situation. Of course in loop #3, Sam and friends avoid the party, they stay up past the time of the car crash the past two nights, and Sam relaxes. "I did everything right" she says. But the girls are all woken up by text bings at, like, 3am saying Juliet committed suicide. Everyone's upset, and Lindsay is putting up a wall, sloughing off any blame. She's kinda the worst. When Sam wakes up the next morning, back in the loop, we all know it's something to do with Juliet, but it takes Sam a few more tries to figure that out.

[Toasty] Isn't it fascinating that we grew up with Nice Guy fiction, in that we were supposed to identify with the awkward, nice kid who was "supposed to get" the female protagonist BUT that code has been flipped on its head so much so that we cannot HELP but expect him to turn out to be some sort of incel fuckhead? I mean, we weren't ALL incel fuckheads, were we? Not All Nice Guys?

[Kent] There's been some interesting reassessments of Xander from Buffy in this regard (especially as Joss' avatar in the show)...but I/we digress....

[Toasty] Of note, all  those wee hours of the morning bings. HOW did all these high school kids learn of Juliet's death so quickly, and if they were all partying, how did one get out to the highway to witness it? Talk about Doom Scrolling...

[Kent] The highway seemed to be an access point to Kent's house, so someone must have driven by and saw what's up....

[Toasty] And, assuming Juliet went to the party to confront her tormentors, primarily Lindsay, and they weren't at the party, what triggered Juliet this time?

[Kent] I really think she was already long triggered, and that going to the party was maybe the last gasp at trying to find some reason no to, to find someone or something to convince her not to (and even then, as we see, someone does try and she's still already got her mind made up).

[Toasty] But, to address the question. Was it as simple as the car crash and her subsequent death led the loop to begin? The usual "Groundhog Day" educational punishment but an unseen and unknown force? Or, was she dead. She died in the crash, and this is her Purgatory. Sam has to stay there, living that same fateful night over and over until.... she learns something? And this being her purgatory, nobody else can become involved. Buuut for the briefest of moments, I thought Juliet might actually be in her own loop, explaining the craziness. And the only way to get out of the loop was to pass it on.

[Kent] Ugh. Why this time loop actually happens... what forces are at play? Deus Ex Machina, plain and simple. It happens because it has to happen otherwise there's no story. There's no logical in-world explanation. Points for trying to concoct something tho *wink*

How long is this time Loop? What resets it? Can you force the reset?

[Kent] The loop starts at 6:52 am, and ends...whenever Sam dies or falls asleep...except that, breaking with the convention of the time loop genre, she does fall asleep about 1am and then is woken up a few hours later with the news of Juliet's death, and then falls asleep again waking up back in the loop. I don't know how that works! Sam never does try to force a reset though.

[Toasty] I liked to think the loop was exactly 24 hrs long. If she's dead, she doesn't experience the remaining hours. If she sleeps, she would sleep through to the next loop-back. If she stayed awake, she would just find herself in bed, in the blink of an eye.

[Kent] I like it. Change approved!

How long does the main character stay in the Loop? Does it have any affect on them, their personality, their outlook?

[Kent] I think I counted about 9 loops in total. There's the first loop which is most the same as the day before, the second loop where they avoid the "big thing" then a montage of loops where Sam just can't cope with being in a time loop,  and completely disconnects from everyone and everything, of which I count 3 unique loops intoned there. There's the loop where, per convention, Sam goes full "scorched earth" and dresses in her baddest bad-girl outfit, burns her friendships to the ground and has awful rage sex with THGIS and winds up having a nice(/creepy?) heart to heart with her old friend Kent (still not me) before falling asleep in his bed. The seventh loop she bunks off school for the day and spends the day with her little sister, and then has a dinner out with her family, reconnecting with them. The eight loop she starts to see that changes need to be made, that Juliet is in crisis and nobody else is noticing, but it doesn't end well. It's the ninth loop where she knows exactly what she needs to do, and how to make the perfect day.

There is a conversation Sam has with her mom, asking her mom if she think's Sam's a good person. Anyone who asks that usually wants to do good but are aware that they've been caught in a loop of selfishness but maybe don't know how to get out of it. They might be capable of being a good person, but they're not currently a good person. The time loop, yes, it changes her personality, and she becomes a "good person" (I guess, she still seems kind of selfish in this final loop, frankly, especially that mindfuck she pulls on Kent).

[Toasty] Based on all her voice overs, I liked to think there were countless (COUNTLESS !!) other loops we didn't get to experience, thus her commentary on thousands of hours. She talks about doing good for the sake of doing good, of doing it for others because that is what matters. This movie definitely did not want to nerd out over Time Loops, so it did not have her perfecting the loop -- no wiping up of the nail polish, no finding the exact amount of time to squeeze in a BDay dinner with her parents, no perfect amount of sister bonding... in fact, it kind of abandons all of that in the final loop. She just ... focuses on Juliet.

[Kent] I didn't catch that VO line of dialogue, but there is nothing in what happens in the subsequent loops that even remotely indicates that she's been through dozens or hundreds of loops. I only trust what I see with this one. Even the montage seems concretely like three distinct loops, as opposed to so many Loopty Loos which have montages that convey the fact that someone is stuck in their loop a very long time.

What about the other people in the Loop? Are they aware? Can they become aware?  Does anything happen if they become aware?

[Kent] Nobody ever learns that Sam is in a time loop, she never shares it with anyone. We also never really learn what causes the time loop. Kent makes a crack about some experiment gone wrong when he's late to class the first day, but it's not highlighted and there's no way a high school kid is doing that level of experiments to fracture space-time.

[Toasty] I guess it would have just been too cliche to have her share it with Kent and the nerding-out elements of other loopties are an aspect I don't think the demographic for this movie would appreciate. It would have been nice if she had confided with Anna (the "bull dyke"; Liv Hewson, "Dramaworld") about something more than boots. 

[Kent] Oh yeah, the Shannon Purser  Liv Hewson cameo. I thought it was a good moment in the film, actually, but also felt like a nothingburger in the grander scheme?

What does the main character think about the other people in the Loop? Are they real? Do they matter?

[Kent] It's a rollercoaster of a ride for Sam. She has one day where basically everyone can fuck right off but after that she realizes that she needs to connect with the people she loves more, rather than push them away. So inevitably they matter more, not less as the loop crescendos.

[Toasty] As there is no real "deep thought" about being caught in a time loop, there is no metaphysical thoughts in Sam's head about what is real and who is not real. This is all real to her, everyone is real, even when she is being a bitch to them. The "lashing out" loop was out of character for her.

Most memorable event in a Loop? Most surprising event during a Loop?

[Kent] This is a YA novel adaptation and, as such, its so utterly bogged down in heightened teen emotions, and everything largely revolves around these big feelings that, by the story's own admission, are just a blip and won't mean much to these people a year or two down the road.  High school is a Petri dish of hormones and selfishness, it's a wonder any of us survive it. The best parts of the loop are Sam connecting with her kid sister. Just a genuine, meaning, lasting sweetness.

The most surprising was the fact that Sam fell asleep and then was woken up by texts hours later and the loop hadn't reset yet.  Mindblowing deviation from convention. Were you as surprised by this as I was, Toasty?

[Toasty] I was surprised. But not overly so; it just had to reset my idea that the loop might have been contained to Juliet's final day in a more tangible way... i.e. it resets on her death. This showed otherwise. I guess the biggest surprise was that Sam sought out a way to end the loop by "saving someone else's life" so very early in the series. Of course, being a selfish teen, she didn't realize that the catalyst at the party was not the only reason Juliet would seek to take her own life. Can you have Main Character Syndrome even if you are the Main Character?

For me, the loop that stood out was when she told Kent she loved him. Yes, I realize this was the source material's attempt to show that after a long long long series of loops where she reconnects with Kent and begins to care for him, but for me, it still felt out of the blue. I get the "I just [re]met you but I love you" aspect of teenagers, but that confession seems... odd.

How does this stack up in the subgenre?

[Kent] One of my least favourites, because it's basically not interested in the time loop at all. Sam has zero curiosity about it, why it may be happening, what it means, what could have caused it. She inherently knows that there's a code to crack, a right answer to get out of this escape room, and it seems from the voiceover she provides that she knows it's only ever going to end one way.  And that ending is the biggest fart of the movie. Just that sort of a stinky poo-poo "ain't I so clever and important and meaningful" kind of finale that writers write because they think so highly of themselves and think their story that's nominally about teen suicide is going to matter.

The movie is a decent production, generally, but clearly meant for teenage girls, not 50-year-old men. A central message of learning kindness and empathy and connection is not a bad one. What'd you think Toasty?

[Toast] Yup. Wrong demographic fer shure. I liked and didn't like the ending. In my mind of "this being purgatory" it was fine and dandy -- after figgering things out, she gets to Move On. But in the loopty convention of "learn a bunch of stuff, live life as a better person" it diminishes everything done. This is only about Sam, not about the other people. Sam gets her reward, and sure Juliet lives, but no one else really is bettered for what Sam learned. Part of me likens this to the mind of a vacuous teenage girl, in that she doesn't have any inherent curiosity into her situation. She is only "oh woe is me, how do I get out of this?" which is not absent from "Groundhog Day" either -- only after the convention of loopties established itself, did people start wondering why. We never do understand why Phil is there, nor what or who created it. Maybe its time we (re)watched and wrote that one up, so we can explore how it, the originator, stacks up against its progeny.

And yes, its a very pretty movie with very pretty people, likening to "Twilight" but with time loop tropes instead of vampire tropes.

KWIF: Obsession (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. This week's batch of films is actually last week's batch of films. At least two days of this week were spent laid up on the couch with post-Gamma Knife-related side effects (migraines, earaches, discombobulation and fatigue). They've largely tapered off, but my ability to focus has still slipped, so I need to practice getting back at this review blog writing thing. This week's theme...toxic relationships apparently.

This Week:
Obsession (2026, d. Curry Barker - in theatre)
Over Your Dead Body (2026, d. Jorma Taccone - amazonprime)
Dead Again (1991, d. Kenneth Branagh - netflix)
Roommates (2026, d. Chandler Levack)

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When films are unexpectedly successful well beyond any executive or critical projections, it's usually because they're meeting a moment in the culture. They are films for their times. This is even more true of horror films, where often the film is a metaphor or moral fable disguised under more visceral gore and/or frights. Curry Barker's theatrical debut, Obsession, has now grossed over 200 million dollars domestically, and 300 million worldwide (and was made for a paltry 750,000) with no franchise or name recognition behind it, and it's done so by meeting a moment.

If you, like most people, are inundated with headlines every time you open your browser or social media, you've heard about the loneliness epidemic, or that young men are in crisis, or that young women would rather just not date these days.  Perhaps you've heard of the manosphere, or trad wives, or the various right wing movements trying (and succeeding far too much) in stripping away the rights of women, and trying to resurrect old ideas of gender roles where women are dutiful and subservient to men.  Obsessession is borne out of these trappings without explicitly addressing any of them head-on.

Bear (Michael Johnson) is not shown as being a message-board obsessed incel, but he is hopelessly pining over his friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarette). They are pals, doing trivia night after work, and going to parties, but Bear wants it to be more than what it is. Desperately. But he's too shy to make a move. Even when Nikki confronts him as he drops her off at her place, asking him bluntly if he likes her, he still can't admit it.

The thing men -- especially young men -- fear the most, is being emotionally vulnerable. There's the old Seinfeld joke about people being more scared of giving the eulogy than being in the casket, but I think men are more scared of admitting their romantic feelings to someone than they are of public speaking or dying. Cowards. We're pretty much all cowards. (More times than I can recall [mainly because I'm old and don't recollect well anymore], I have been told by someone they were interested in me, and I cannot recall there ever being a situation where, over the many crushes I've had in my life, having actually admitted that to said crush without them first having opened up to me. Not even to my wife [though she said it was pretty obvious, but that's besides the point]. That's pretty shameful, if I'm being honest. Shameful, and embarassing to realize that I was basically a romantic coward, afraid of opening up and afraid I couldn't handle the rejection.)

So, sitting in his car in shame over the missed opportunity, Bear tears open the novelty gift he bought for Nikki, the "One Wish Willow", a small twig that the colourful packaging says will grant the bearer one wish after snapping it. And so he wishes Nikki would love him more than anyone. *Snap* Seconds later she's tapping at his window and coming onto him. He can't believe it, but he's going to take it. Cue the montage to perky music of their new, happy life together... although moments within the sequence show Nikki helplessly unable to resist just staring at Josh.

In perhaps Barker's best directorial moment, Bear's buddy (and coworker at Andy Richter's music shop) Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) pulls Bear aside and just has to ask...how? How is this happening? How did this happen? He knows that Nikki told their friend Sarah that she only liked Bear as a friend just days before they started going out. Bear, you can tell, has a modicum of guilt, genuinely suspecting that the One Wish Willow was legit, but at the same time still can't get over his biggest want having come true. The whole time this conversation is going on, Nikki is in the background, quite out of focus, just staring at Bear, an intense, haunting, almost spectral presence.

Nikki's obsession with Bear, continues to ratchet up, getting more and more overbearing (no pun intended...or maybe it is?) and Bear's happiness starts to dwindle under Nikki's oppressive, destructive and harmful behaviour.

If we were to step back, maybe not even 10 years ago, this would be the story of a toxic relationship, about women who control their men through emotional manipulation and illnesses (feigned or real). The hallmarks of emotional abuse are there -- violent outbursts followed by extreme moments of contrition and tenderness and sexual advances. I've definitely heard about such stories, and to a lesser degree, been there myself. Yet, despite Bear being our point-of-view character, he's not the protagonist. He's the antagonist. Nikki is the victim of this story, having been stripped of her agency, and everything her body is doing is beyond her control, serving only Bear's whims with nearly no ability to advocate for herself.

In the film's funniest scene Bear calls the service line for the One Wish Willow, only for an apathetic voice on the other end to tell him the only way to reverse the wish is for someone else to wish it so...that, or Bear dies.  And in the most haunting scenes of the film, more than once, Bear hears Nikki's real voice while the "other her" is asleep, or distracted, and he knows, he's fully aware that the Nikki who is his girlfriend is not really the woman he though he was in love with. And yet, to even attempt to undo his wish, to free this woman he said he loves, takes him weeks to come to that decision, and begrudgingly so. Only when it's at its most extreme does he even truly try.

He may not be a Jordan Peterson-watching douche, but under the nice guy persona still lies a man who thinks that, maybe, it's best if a woman is his possession.

Barker's film is not scary so much as upsetting and disturbing. Barker's "monkey's paw" tale is not in any way original (I believe I saw a Twilight Zone episode recently with much the same plot), and Barker's direction is solid even if lacking much standout style. But it's the way in which the story is told, where the camera's sympathies lay that makes this different, and that is what meets this moment. This is Nikki's tale, moreso than Bear's, and Navarette is an immediate superstar in the role, having to switch moods at the snap of a finger, and go from extreme perkiness to extreme rage while still retaining that sense of helplessness in her eyes. It's an astonishing performance, frankly.

Much like when Zach Cregger's Barbarian became a phenomenon (though still paling in comparison to what this film has earned), all eyes will be on what Barker does next. Is he a one-hit wonder, or does he have the juice to make more films that audiences and critics will respond to. The insane success of this film almost suggests that whatever he does will have a lot of expectations and pressures put upon it, hopefully he can meet the moment with his sanity intact. 

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Based on the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, Over Your Dead Body is a nasty dark comedy about a married couple who have such severe communication issues that they'd rather just plan each other's murder than talk it through.

Unlike Obsession, there's no moral fable here, it's really a War of the Roses(/The Ref)-type story where the unhappy couple in question need to find themselves in the most extreme circumstances in order to open up and connect with each other again.

Dan (Jason Segel) is a failed film director stuck working in commercials. Lisa (Samara Weaving) is a wanna-be actress who has been unemployed for too long for Dan's liking (and is possibly cheating on Dan with her scene partner in acting class). They take a heated road trip out to Dan's father's lakeside cottage "upstate" (this was shot in Finland, and I had an impossible time ignoring that fact...the setting here doesn't look like anywhere in North America I've seen), where they've planned for each other's murder (having ham-handedly established with colleagues and neighbours the possibility of hiking or hunting excursions going wrong over this weekend).

While they had prepped for murdering each other, which is a pretty raw taste to accept as comedy, it is humorous the reactions they both have once they discover the other's plans. There is some comedic mileage to be had in the scenario.

What they hadn't planned on was a pair of escaped murderers Pete and Todd (Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine) and the prison guard, Allegra (Juliette Lewis) who helped them get free (according to Allegra, her and Pete are in love... Pete's less convinced). And so it becomes a fight for survival for Dan and Lisa against hardened criminals, and their only path forward is together.

This is not a gentle movie. The violence hits hard, real hard. It's not cartoonish, it's traumatic. This isn't Looney Tunes comedy, it's serious damage, bruising, cuts and far, far worse all shown in pretty graphic detail. It's far too extreme, and far too nasty to be funny, so it's all the more impressive when the funny can creep through it all.

Segel has become a master at emotive comedy, his malleable face can represent such despair, depression, resolve, joy, whatever the case may be, while his eyes can convey something completely different. He makes Dan into an impotent man who can't seem to stand up for himself or follow-through on his decisions, but you also start to buy into his stepping up. Segel can sell that every time, and he can undercut it just as easily. Weaving has become a top notch take-no-shit lead, while also having a wryness that lends itself quite well to comedy. She does sarcasm and snark as well as she can take a hit and project her rage (which she got a lot of experience with in the Ready or Not movies). The age gap between them is addressed, but they are a pretty evenly matched pairing.  It's just then so disappointing that I really didn't like either Dan or Lisa all that much... I was sort of rooting for them, but where they wind up in the end is more scary than heartwarming or delightful. 

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The opening credits to Kenneth Branagh's 1991 neo-noir Dead Again features a montage of old timey newspaper headlines that tells the story of German composer Roman Strauss' arrival in America, his whirlwind romance with Margaret, their marriage, her death, Roman being accused of murder, his conviction, and his death sentence. You'll be forgiven if it seems like you missed a predecessor story (called Dead maybe), and it is pretty crucial setup.

The film proper then starts, in black and white, where we meet Roman Strauss (Branagh) on death row. He's getting trimmed, given his last rights and last supper, and being interviewed by Gray Baker (Andy Garcia) who wrote some (all?) of the articles we saw in the intro. Roman's cell is lined with Baker's articles as well. Baker asks Strauss if he really killed Margaret. He smiles, whispers something in his ear, then pulls out a knife from his last supper and charges forward. Quick cut to present day,in full colour. A woman (Emma Thompson) wakes up screaming. There's a chair propped under the doorknob of her room. Eventually nuns and others find their way in. 

Apparently this woman arrived at this orphanage with amnesia and was given care and a room, but the cold hearted priest who rules the place seems to have little compassion for her situation (the nuns, on the other hand, worry for her safety...women taking care of women). The priest calls in a favour from former tenant of the orphanage, now a private investigator, Mike Church (Branagh again), to help figure out this woman's origins. When they meet, there's an immediate attraction, both ways.  She winds up staying at his place because the sanitarium is just chaos.

With the help of Pete, a colleague in the media (Wayne Night, as an affable creep), they get the woman's story out, and eventually Mike and "Grace" (he gives her the name just to call her something) meet Franklyn Madison (Derek Jacobi), an antiques dealer with a hypnosis side hustle. In unrestrained sessions with Grace, Franklyn starts to reveal that her nightmares are actually past-life traumas, which we experience in brilliant black and white, seeing more to the story of Roman and Margaret Strauss' life together, and possible motivations for her murder at, presumably, Roman's hands.

Twists and turns, drama and intrigue. It's all very pulpy and, if I'm honest, a little cheesy, but at the same time so aware of what it's trying to do and having fun doing it. It's a throwback story with a throwback style set in two different time periods that's trying to marry both Hitchcock's earlier style with his later period one, strapping in an additional layer of the fantastical, and mostly succeeding.

Branagh's American accent is pretty dicey but surprisingly his Mike Church is a decent and respectful guy, very careful not to take advantage of this traumatized woman (in contrast to Pete, who, while relatively harmless, seems unable to contain his many lascivious thoughts from coming out of his mouth). Branagh and Thompson were newly married at the time, so there was a palpable chemistry between them that comes across on screen, the innate attraction being essential to the past lives plot (for the record, they divorced in '97). But Thompson is the dominant player in the movie. Yes, everything revolves around her, but she's not a passive character... well, eventually.

When the story starts, "Grace" is mute, unable to speak, barely able to communicate, and seems bewildered by everything. I was truly worried she was just going to be in neophyte mote, a spin on the "born sexy yesterday" trope where her mental state and lack of communication skills are irresistibly attractive to the men around her. But once she does start speaking, she's a total Emma Thompson character, smart, sophisticated, and challenging. As discombobulated as her life has become, once she's able to display her personality she's exactly who you want Thompson to be playing. And in playing Margaret in the flashbacks, she has to be a character of the 1940's, where there was more deference from women to the men in her life, and yet she still has such agency. I can't help but feel that Thompson did a pass on the script (credited to Scott Frank, Out of Sight) to make these two characters more...her. And yeah, it really works. I know exactly what this film would look like with Grace and Margaret in less confident hands.

Dead Again doesn't get brought up much. It's not a lost classic, and it's not totally forgotten, but it's just a tiny little blip in both Branagh and Thompson's incredible careers. It's a bit of a wisp of a film, fun but not fun enough to obsess over. Rewatching it won't reveal hidden depths, it's all on the surface, but it's really not trying to be anything else other than what it is.

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Canadian music journalist-turned-writer/director Chandler Levack has become a must-see filmmaker for me, although I can't seem to put my finger on why.  Her first film, I Like Movies, I found compelling and anxiety-inducing, and her sophomore effort, Mile End Kicks, was a level-up, doling out a big bale of Canadiana that felt incredibly cool, and both modern and retro all at once.  The alluring Canadian-ness, I guess is the pull of Levack, but there's definitely a vibe to her first two films (despite being tonally different) that seems unique.

So with Levack being called up by Adam Sandler himself, requesting that she direct this script about warring roommates in a college dorm, a script written not by Levack but by SNL staff writers, and starring Sandler's daughter as well as going straight to Netflix...well, I worried that Levack would get swallowed up by this big American machine and there would be nothing visible of her in this film.

If I'm being totally honest, there mostly wasn't, and yet, in tiny little ways there was.

The film's framing device finds the Dean of Student Life (Sarah Sherman) relaying to two warring roommates (Storm Reid and Ivy Wolk) the tale of the most epic roommate war of all.  It starts with high school outcast Devon (Sadie Sandler) making her first real friend at college bootcamp in gives-no-shits Celeste (Chloe East). She asks Devon to be her roommate and Celeste agrees, but warns Sadie that she's not looking for a fairweather friend, but a ride-or-die bestie. She's been burned before, or so she says.

But spending a few afternoons with someone who is utterly carefree can be exhilarating, living with someone like that can be exhausting, and typically a one-way exchange. As much as Celeste is wildly inconsiderate, messy, taking up space, borrowing Devon's stuff and low-key manipulating her, Celeste also pulls Devon out of her shell by dragging her out place, pushing her out of her comfort zone and cheerleading her on to do more. So while Devon rather rapidly becomes tired of Celeste's behaviour (and for good reasons), she also finds moments to appreciate what Celeste brings into her life. 

Levack's prior films have centered around selfish characters who the director has had overwhelming empathy for. When we watch Lawrence be his worst self in I Love Movies or Grace do her own thing to the detriment of everyone else in Mile End Kicks we're still on board with their journies. Roommates is Devon's story, and Celeste is the antagonist, but Levack can't help but have empathy for Celeste, and that conflicts with her purpose as chaos agent in the story.

At a certain point it seems like Devon is the one who is being selfish... she only knows about Celeste what Celeste has told her and never probes deeper, basically too worried that asking more intimate questions will push Celeste away rather than bring them closer, but also getting too self-involved in her new college life (and too used to being in solitary mode) to know how to relate to being with someone so different from her.  And the advice given to her to, you know, talk to Celeste is just ignored. (This is all not too dissimilar to the confrontation between Grace and her Montreal roommate in Mile End Kicks, which may or may not explain why certain things do or don't happen the way they do in this film....Is Levack avoiding repeating herself?)

And so things fall apart, to extremes. And in the end Celeste is truly painted as the villain, the nightmare, the bad guy, and when she gets her comeuppance, the script wants us to laugh at her, but Levack can't seem to let go of her empathy.  

The cast, outside of its young leads, is low-key stacked with comedic talent, including Nick Kroll and Natasha Lyonne as Devon's parents, Carol Kane as her grandmother, Jeanine Garofolo as her architecture professor, as well as other nepo-babies like Please Don't Destroy's Martin Herlihy and Francesca Scorsese. It's easy to be dismissive, but everyone delivers in this film, a testament to Levack's direction.  It's amusing enough and entertaining enough, but it doesn't find its core, it doesn't know where its heart is. There a pull between a script that needs to be a big dumb broad comedy and a director who just wants to be grounded in what's real about the characters and the situation. 

This was good for Levack to cut her teeth on the Hollywood machine, to try something different, prove that she can handle bigger budgets and scale, but hopefully she can continue to do things her way on a larger scale from now on.

KWIF: I Love Boosters (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. Ol' Kent here celebrated the end of his 50th year with some epic boardgaming, epic toy and collectibles hunting, epic medical diagnostic imaging, and not so much epic movie watching (or reviewing)...just a little.

This Week:
I Love Boosters (2026, d. Boots Riley - in theatre)
Tuner (2025, d. Daniel Roher - in theatre)
Exit 8 (2025, d. Genki Kawamura - rental)
Made of Honor (2008, d. Paul Welland - hollywoodsuite)

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I think this will wind up being my
 favourite movie poster of the year.
I want this as a puzzle.

As the credits were rolling on our sparsely attended early Saturday matinee of I Love Boosters, one white male millennial audience member stood up and stretched, turned around and engaged the other millenial couple behind him. The part my wife overheard him say was "I mean, I liked it, but can you tell me why you thought it was funny?"

Humour is subjective. I get that. But I Love Boosters is undoubtedly a comedy. It's part farce, part Looney Tunes (by way of Stephen Chow), part social satire, part absurdism, and so many other little parts of things that congeal to make a wildly appealing, chaotic, inventive whole.

Kiki Palmer (Nope) - one of the most charismatic performers of her generation - leads this film as Corvette, a wanna-be fashion designer who just can't seem to find her way into the industry. She lives in an abandoned fried chicken restaurant and steals clothes for a living to resell at steep discounts on the black market to the less rich. She's aided in the "Velvet Gang" by her best friend Sade (Naomi Ackie, Mickey 17) who is obsessed with a multi-level marketing scheme, and Mariah (Taylour Paige, Zola) who thinks her boosting is a revolutionary act.

They don't steal from just anywhere, or just anyone, but instead focus on the chain of Metro Designers stores which are owned by fashion mogul and certified genius Christie Smith (Demi Moore, The Substance). Corvette is obsessed with Smith, idolizes her, and in her own way sees her boosting of Smith's clothes as a form of flattery, but Smith, who calls the Velvet Gang "low class, urban bitches" is increasingly perturbed by them.  Corvette learns of a delivery of $100,000 suits and sets her sights on that being the ultimate target (especially after discovering that Smith has stolen a design Corvette submitted to a fashion contest earlier in the year, it becomes about revenge). To make a boost this big, they need to work on the inside.

So they get a job working at Metro Designers under Grayson (Will Poulter, Warfare), who has totally drunk the Christie Smith corporate kool-aid, and meet Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez, Bloodshot) who is trying to organize a union within Metro Designers.  And then they are robbed..the entire store gone in seconds.  

I could go on for paragraphs breaking down the larger strokes of this film. It is very busy, but earns its busyness.  Boots Riley cut his teeth with the incredible satire Sorry To Bother You, and takes the social satire and ambition of that film to a whole other level here. The picture is vibrant, with bold monochromes at each of the Metro Designers sets, while the wardrobe is off the charts with all the leads looking ridiculous or stylish or ridiculously stylish. It'd be the most fashionable movie of the year, if not for The Devil Wears Prada 2. There are extended sequences involving stop motion animation (that recall John Carpenter's They Live) an extended chase sequence done in minature (some shades of Wes Anderson there), a building on a canted angle leaving a set sloped at 20 degrees which all but Christie Smith seem to have difficulty navigating, and a gigantic ball of stress made up of bills and all the other things haunting Corvette, stalking her at random times.

I Love Boosters is unfettered creativity from a director who doesn't see limits on what can be done in storytelling. It's the first mass-released film since Everything Everywhere All At Once that feels like there are no restrictions in how a story can be told. Even if I Love Boosters is only nominally less successful at coherently conveying its central message than that Oscar-winner, it's still an exceptionally entertaining and provocative ride.  [I haven't even mentioned the soul-eating demon/love interest played by Lakieth Stanfield (Atlanta), but he's an intriguing distraction for both the picture and Corvette that pops up at both the most opportune and inopportune times. He's a total aside, but a deliciously amusing one.]

While its employment of magical realism and surrealist fantasy is wickedly enjoyable and compliments its anti-capitalism message in unusual but agreeable ways, I Love Boosters' use of a science fiction technology alongside abstract concepts of "situational acceleration and deconstructionism", as well as teleportation is a tad less concrete. There is a device introduced in the second act which then becomes the inciting agent for the rest of the film, and the employment of these speculative conceits become the hardest part of the film to wrap one's head around, particularly at the accelerated pace the film moves at.  It leads to a lot of fun and clever sequences in the film, and effectively incites the film's ultimate, pro-union, power-in-numbers message, but it does so with an asterisk.

What I Love Boosters ultimate goal is to promote a character who realizes that sometimes there's a greater goal, a greater purpose to one's actions than fulfilling their own desires. That perhaps too many of us are concerned more with individual achievement than collective growth is the realization Corvette needs to have on her journey, even if it isn't the most personally satisfying, it does seem the most rewarding. 

[As an aside, as a person who is basically deaf in one ear, I had a very difficult time with the sound mix on this film. As a musician himself, Riley loves music, and there's always music playing in the background of any scene, whether it's diegetic or the fantastic score from TuneYards, along with layers of ambient noise or sometimes background dialogue and/or TV footage.  In person, I have a hard time in cacophonous situations picking out what people are saying, and turns out it's the same with on screen situations. I can't wait for Blu-Ray, which I will absolutely be getting, so I can watch this with the closed captioning on and pick up on so much of what I missed].

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Speaking of my hearing disorder, it was fascinating for me to watch a film about someone on the other end of the aural spectrum than I am. In Tuner, Niki (Leo Woodall, Cherry) has hyperacusis, an affliction in which he is exceptionally hypersensitive to sound to a debilitating degree. For the majority of the picture he is wearing custom ear plugs, and often with noise cancelling headset over that. Even then particularly sharp or loud noises can send him into disarray, even proving so painful as to render him unconscious.

Niki also has perfect pitch and starts the film working as protege piano tuner to family friend Harry Horowicz (Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie), a beloved figure in the music community. Harry is losing his hearing and starting to be a bit forgetful, but he's a delight to be around (I'm normally not a big Hoffman fan, but he is very likeable in the role). Niki is sweetly devoted to Harry and his wife Marla, like family. When Harry falls ill, Niki agrees to help out with the medical bills by buying Harry's truck and taking over his business. While on a job he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu, AfrAId), and over a few encounters their attraction becomes undeniable, but while on a different job, Niki meets Uri (Lior Raz, Gladiator II) and his boys as they attempt to drill into the safe of the house they are both working at. Niki learned his hearing disorder actually was a boon for safecracking and gets into the safe for the boys. Uri, who works in private security for elite individuals, offers Niki a job if he wants to make "real money". To pay Harry's bills, Niki has no choice, and he helps them steal from Uri's client's safes "things they wouldn't notice are missing".  Of course, getting involved with criminals is never going to end well for Niki and it threatens to destroy what comfort he has in life and maybe take everyone else he loves down with him.

Woodall is very unassuming as Niki, at first, with Hoffman dominating each scene they're in together early on. But eventually Woodall is handed control and Niki becomes quite captivating in his quiet temperament, and the reality of his affliction (handled with superb sound design) is clearly conveyed to the audience at all times. Canadian director Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar for his documentary on Alexei Navalni in 2022, proves he has an incredibly steady hand for directing a modestly budgeted dramatic thriller like this. In his debut narrative feature, Roher utilizes montages to perfect effect (time will tell if this is a signature move or just something stylistic for this feature, metering up with the film's soft jazzy piano score, and symphonic bits).

Tuner works very well as a character study but its crime element is unfortunately quite predictable, lacking a lot of real surprises. Thankfully Roher is more interested in the character than he is in the jobs Niki is assisting on, and so the segments of safecracking, for the most part, are pretty brisk and don't employ the tension of the risk of getting caught too heavily. There is one particular Chechov-ian item that presents itself early on, and the manner in which it goes off is such a deus ex machina that it borders on unforgivable...but just sits on that border.

Otherwise, this is an agreeable throwback to the kind of thriller we saw plenty of through the 70's, 80's and 90's, but have largely disappeared in the past two decades. We could do with more.

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I knew nothing about Exit 8 except the concept: a man gets lost in a maze of subway hallways searching for Exit 8, finding horrors along the way. I was in. I love subway tiles, and hallways and escape rooms, so this movie was beckoning me like a siren of the sea. 

In the film, our "lost man" is played by Kazunari Ninomiya, a seemingly hapless and perhaps depressed young man who doesn't seem ready for the world. We first meet him on a subway train during rush hour as he witnesses a man in a suit berate a young mother for bringing her crying baby on the train. Everyone's looking at their phones, and, after he puts his earbuds back in, so does he. When he gets off the train he receives a phone call from his ex. She's at the hospital and tells him she's pregnant. She doesn't know whether she wants to keep it or terminate the pregnancy, and is asking for his input. He doesn't know either. Not paying attention, he finds himself in an Z-shaped hallway that seems to repeat without end...the same man walking past him, the same adverts on the wall, the same lockers and photobooth....

And then he spies a sign, telling him that he needs to leave through Exit 8. If he spies an anomaly, turn back, and if there are no anomalies, keep going.

I didn't know Exit 8 was based off an indie video game sensation, but really it didn't take me long to discern such a thing, especially when the "rules" were introduced. What could have just been cheap horror, though, is so much more from director/writer Genki Kawamura (co-written with Kentaro Hirase). It's not just an endless maze of repeating tunnels, but a metaphor for repetitive cycles in life, of fearing change and indecision., alerting us to look for the differences, and that we need to embrace those differences to make it out the other end.

If it were just our "lost man" encountering terrifying anomalies, it would have been a fine movie, but it's not just that. There is a delicious surprise (SPOILER) in act 2, where the film completely pivots away from our "lost man" and instead follows the man he's passed dozens of times at this point, and we learn the "walking man's" story. Both men, however, encounter a young boy who they each think is a facet of this purgatory they're in, but come to learn (if not embrace) that the child is as trapped as they are and, maybe, has better instincts for getting out.

Though slight on story, and maybe light on horrors, I absolutely loved this movie. It was completely my thing.  The repetition encourages audience engagement, looking at the same hallway walls and wondering what's different...if anything, and knowing it could come down to something so easily overlooked as the fine text on one of the posters, or a tile placed askew (although, mercifully it's never that).

The sound design is as crucial as the visual design, and as integral to the repetition. It's obviously largely borrowed from the video game, but it's brought into "reality" so effectively. Ninomiya has such a soulful face that your empathy is immediately with him, and he conveys his emotions so blatantly and effectively. The "walking man" played by Yamato Kochi is intensely terrifying in his early scenes where the lost man turns around the find the walking man immediately in his face with a grin that'll make your skin crawl, but then it only takes Kochi seconds with the second act pivot to bring you over to sympathizing with his plight in the corridors.

The film creates a text that the video game never had, a reason for why our protagonist(s) are in this purgatory, and letting the audience know that they need to have a reason to get out. I feel like we can apply this to life somehow....

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I've made no secret out of enjoying cheesy romance movies and romantic comedies, but that's not universal approval of all of them. In fact, there are scant few romcoms I would consider good or worth watching again, and even fewer I actually want to watch in the first place. To some extent most romcoms I just tend to avoid because, in execution (if not conceptually), they're so cloying as to be repulsive.

In concept, Made of Honor should not be such a film. The story of a tomcat of a man who is best friends with a woman whom he learns after years and years that he's actually in love with her, only for her to turn up engaged before he can say anything...well, that sounds like a serviceable, if predictable romcom format, and not egregiously offensive. But show me that trailer, or even just the poster, and I'm steering clear like it's plague-bearing.

I never needed to see Made of Honor, there was nothing compelling me to watch it, but it was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and after I finished watching a film on dvd, it turned up on cable when the player shut off. I spied Patrick Dempsey and his basketball-playing bro-pals (including Kadeem Hardison and Chris Messina) attempting to help the man navigate his emotions over his best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan) being away on a work trip and missing her so much he couldn't enjoy his many many dates with hot women in her absence.  It's a particular turning point in pop culture when men were allowed to support other men emotionally but only if it was in a really really butch situation, with like sports and/or alcohol, but points for letting them get there. But it treats these scenes as if they were comedy, not as if there's real emotional stakes at play which gets to what's so wrong with this film.... 

Made of Honor makes the biggest cardinal sin of the romantic comedy genre: it's not funny. It tries to be funny and fails pretty much every time. There's two possible reasons, and it's an and/or situation: casting and/or the director. 

Dempsey is cute, handsome and charming, but he's not innately funny. Ditto for Monaghan. Hardison and Messina both have comedic acting experience, and Monaghan's coterie of bridesmaids includes Busy Philipps and Whitney Cummings, but none of them squeeze out any real guffaws despite trying. 

Monaghan returns from her trip engaged to rugged Scotsman Kevin McKidd, who threatens Dempsey's masculinity in every way. Any attempt to one-up him ends in failure. Just as any attempt for either to be funny falls entirely flat.

There is a scene where Dempsey is going to meet Monaghan for the first time since her return home, only to be surprised by her new beau, and he smashes into a waiter and they topple to the floor, his bouquet of flowers everywhere (which he lies were never his). It's close to being a good pratfall. Later in the scene, after an awkward dinner, Dempsey gets up from his chair at an awkward moment and tumbles into the same waiter again. The whole sequence should be full of humour around the discomfort, complete with the pratfall starter and capper, but it doesn't take, like, at all. And that's direction. Director Welland seems to be too lost in finding an emotional center to really let the humour of the scene play, and its stars aren't gifted enough comedically to innately play up the humour and the emotion. 

But boy do they look good not being funny. Dempsey is real fit, and kinda dashing, while Monaghan is just so effortlessly pretty (with a team of make-up and wardrobe people putting great effort into that effortlessness).

Without the humour, this movie feels tedious, rehashing the same points over and over again. I don't know that Dempsey and Monaghan ever found the "friendship" dynamic this film needed to sell that part of it. They're just too good looking together and they play into the attraction even when it's not fully supposed to be there yet. This needed two decent-to-good looking comedic performers to pull this off. (Like Jason Segel and Mila Kunis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall...a far superior film, and one which I would definitely not sacrifice to put those leads into Made of Honor. What's a pairing that didn't happen... maybe like, Paul Rudd and Isla Fisher?)

There's both a good romance and good comedy waiting to happen in this script. It's been 20 years, maybe a remake is in order with a director and starring pair that can get it right.

KsMIRT: all groaned up

 KsMIRT=Kent's month in reviewing television. I haven't reviewed television in a while. Truth be told, I find reviewing television frustrating, as I don't have the capacity to review episode by episode, nor do I have the capacity to really, really dive into a full season. So why bother with these half-assed reviews? I mean, how can I not? Can I not? 

This Month:
The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins Season 1 (2026, NBC - 10/10 episodes)
Deadloch Season 2 (2026, AmazonPrime - 6/6 episodes)
Last One Laughing UK Season 2 (2026, AmazonPrime - 6/6 episodes)
Star Wars: Maul: Shadow Lord (2026, Disney+ - 10/10 episodes)

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One of the things I hate the most about my brain is how deplorably poor it is at remembering clever one-liners or turns of phrases from the media I watch. I'm so direly envious of those who can, like, the next day after watching a new show or movie, perfectly use a quote or reference in correct situational context. I mean, I would rather be funny on my own, but part of being funny is remembering one's own bits and I have a real hard time remembering to commit to a bit. (Toasty has a running gag on this blog of citing an obscure or absurd reference point when bringing up an actor in his entries, and when I try to do it, I can commit about 12% to the bit, often forgetting mid-post about the bit.... We could really do with an editor ... if we were striving for any sense of professionalism... which I gave up on long ago).

I say this because shows from the Tina Fey and Robert Carlock school of situational comedianity (30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girls 5Eva) are so, so amazing at one liners and ridiculous turns of phrase that I want desperately to remember so, so many of them, but it's a futile want...my brain just ain't wired that way.  The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins is another Carlock production, co-created with Sam Means (who wrote on all three of the aforementioned Fey/Carlock specials) and serves as a spotlight piece for Tracey Morgan (Cop Out).

Morgan plays the titular Reggie Dinkins, an ex-NFL pro who was the hottest draft pick one year and an instant icon, until a gambling scandal drove him out of the sport and into a reclusive lifestyle for two decades. Daniel Radcliffe (Swiss Army Man) plays Arthur Tobin, a certain-award-winning documentary filmmaker who has convinced Reggie to let him film him as he prepares to mount a comeback into the public spotlight. Tobin himself is trying to mount a comeback after an epic (and viral) meltdown on the set of a Marvel movie he was hired for, and then fired from. 

Reggie's ex-wife Monica (Erica Alexander, Wu-Tang: An American Saga) is still his manager and they have a very friendly and familiar relationship, but whatever was between them romantically is long since dead. Monica is likewise venturing out into new terrain as she explores taking on other clients, but is constantly interfered with by a rival organization run by Barry Hu (Ronnie Chang, The Devil Wears Prada 2).

Reggie and Monica's son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall, Space Jam: A New Legacy) is kid of privilege but seems to really love and admire his dad, but harbours secrets that he fears would shame his father...really, geeky secrets. Reggie's much younger fiancee, Brina (Precious Way), is much more than a gold digger, for her social media influencer empire is on the rise and she's making her own serious money. She actually loves Reggie, and somehow the show makes it work.  And then there's Reggie's best friend and former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynahan,Hoppers), who lives in the basement but is utterly committed and loyal to Reggie.

The gags are, as should be expected, a rapid fire, just an incredible barrage of ridiculous things often said ridiculous ways. There's some fantastic physical comedy (the peak, for me, was Rusty chasing a hard boiled egg he left in a pocket of his laundry and dives into the top-loader washing machine only to get stuck in the machine, vertically upright...and then it starts agitating) and a strong roster of recurring characters such as Reggie's sports rival (Craig Robinson) and Arthur Tobin's hook-up with a postal worker played by Megan Thee Stallion (just seeing the two of them in the same frame is wild...and kinda hot, the size difference and sexual tension is palpable).

Of course the show lives only at the whims of Tracey Morgan who is quite in the pocket on this one. While it may be hard to imagine Morgan as a genuine physical threat on the football field, his physicality is one of the greatest gifts to comedy especially when they "age down" Morgan for flashback sequences that barely try at all. But Morgan also delivers his one-liners with his trademark inflection and gusto, and the writers sharply swivel back and forth between making Reggie surprisingly astute, educated and pop-culture savvy and ridiculously lacking self-awareness and being a goof. The treat is how these two sides of the character don't really contradict one another.

Even among all the riches of gags there's still a heart to this show, a desire to see these down-but-not-out characters actually succeed (although there's a definite Lucy Van Pelt to the whole thing where just as success seems to come, the football is pulled away). Excited to hear Season 2 is coming.

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I quite loved Deadloch's first season, so I was super bummed when Season 2 came out and I no longer had a subscription to AmazonPrime to watch it, and there were no viewing alternatives.  Eventually I would have to feed the Bezos machine my daily quarters to get access, but I wasn't going to like it. Would it sour my experience of watching things on the Amazon platform? Turns out, no, not so much.

Season 1 ended with a nice pat ending for the mystery/ies at hand but did as so many series do and attaches a coda to the end that teases where a second season might be heading. In this case it was having detectives Eddie Radcliffe (Madeline Sami) and her/their partner Dulcie Collins (Kate Box) investigate the death of Eddie's former partner, Bushy, with Dulcie's exhuberant wife Cath in tow.

It's kind of amusing then that within minutes of the first episode of season 2 we find Eddie's quest for justice being pretty decisively slammed down by the copious evidence that all but confirms Bushy's death was a suicide...a dated suicide note in his handwriting perhaps the most damning piece in a trove of them.

So if Bushy's death isn't going to be the thrust of this season, what is? Well, Eddie's gone completely mental about the verdict on Bushy's case that she's/they're reluctant to go along with Dulcie on the new case in which a dead crocodile near Barra Creek on the north shore of the continent was found with a severed arm in its mouth. Whose arm is it? Does it connect with the mystery of two missing Swedish backpackers? And what's with all the dead and missing crocs? 

It turns out Barra Creek is Eddie's hometown, and most of the people there know her/them, and with few positive associations. Eddie's father was recently released from prison and it turns out Eddie was the one that put him there, convicted of killing crocs, which are a protected species.

But there's so many other mysteries afoot that it's hard to connect them all, or to see if they're even all connected. Eddie is too close to the situation to see anything clearly and is even more unhinged than she/they were last season, while Dulcie is getting lost in process and procedure, being swallowed by the job, which starts interfering in her relationships with Eddie and Cath.

This season of Deadloch builds an insane community around Barra Creek that is only a pile of mysteries heavier than an Australian riff on Letterkenny. There's the animosity towards city folk, and all the cultural conflict between the indigenous population and the redneck hicks in town, as well as the competing croc tourism business which finds the small-potatoes Darrell family (whose patriarch may or may not be the owner of the dismembered arm) competing with the aggressively bro-polished attractions of Jason Wade's (Luke Hemsworth) croc park. It's a rich, and very specific world that's a bit of a romp to visit but, woof, would be so much rougher to experience for reals.

This season is densely packed with both mysteries to unravel (concurrently) and hilarious line readings, many of which I would never have caught without the subtitles on. So often characters are talking/yelling over each other or muttering under their breath that it's pretty astounding how absolutely razor sharp the dialogue and the portrayals are here.

Dulce and Eddie get a new assistant in Leo (Jean Tong), a low-level journalist who is so low-key people barely register that they're even in the room with them. Of course when perky, ultra-polite forensics expert Abby (Nina Oyama) happens on the scene - ecstatic to be reunited with her work moms - she's uncontrollably jealous of Leo, and acts out in hilariously rude (for her, yet still quite tame) ways.

As with last season, I found it amusing how much the showrunners/creators (Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan...no Kate McHarrison or Kate McStarr?) love to reveal that so many of the female characters in this show are lesbians (or queer-coded) and the jokes about lesbians (by lesbians for lesbians) as well as feminism (by feminists for feminists) are a salve for an entertainment reality that's starved for this kind of representation.

That Deadloch had two less episodes this season was a sure sign that the first season was strong enough for Amazon to give the series a second shot but that they didn't have much confidence in it growing its numbers the second time around. McCartney and McClennan close out the series in its final episode, and we find both Dulce and Eddie in quite different places by the end of this season from where they started, and the ending is a happy one, though sad if this is the last we'll ever see of these genuinely fantastic characters.

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If I write about a reality TV show or a competition show or a panel show, I will usually do one season but not usually any more than that. I feel they're the type of show that if I'm not talking about the format then I really only have what happens to discuss, and usually there's too much to remember and write through (or too much of nothing, so nothing much to write about). Plus, quality can warble dramatically, and it can all be too much.

 That said, I feel particularly inspired to write about the second series of Last One Laughing UK, the show that got me to subscribe to AmazonPrime again (dammit).  

I discussed LOL Canada and LOL Australia back when LOL first cropped up and Amazon proliferated the format across the globe. It's interesting that the only (English language) one to have a second season is LOL UK, and I think that has to do with the fact that the UK is sooooo panel show/game/reality show intensive in a way I don't think any other country is. There's something fundamentally British about comedians faffing about in a loosely structured format that hasn't really transferred to other countries in quite the same way. The UK is a densely populated island, but it's also pretty small, which results in the comedy scene being relatively close knit in a way we don't see in Canada (due to its vastness) or in the US (due to its size and capitalistic competitiveness).  

The format of the show hasn't really changed... 10 comedians get in a room and they can't laugh or even smile broadly... if they do they get a yellow card, and if they do it again they get a red card. Monitoring them are Jimmy Carr and Roisin Conaty, which Jimmy acting as the sort of ringleader/emcee/Jigsaw of the piece. Though the pretense is that Carr and Conaty are eagle-eyed watching and then triggering the alarm if there's a laugh or a smile, the facade is less strict this season and there's an awareness the producers are feeding them the possibilities.  I wish there was even more transparency actually.  We are only seeing about 3 hours of what is probably an 8-10 hour shoot (the clock is set at 6 hours for them to be in the room, but I suspect with stopping and starting and various set-ups that it last a lot longer) and even then it's only what we're seeing of the edit (and it's clear there's at least one camera for every couple of performers tracking their movements and face). At times we the audience are seeing things that it seems Jimmy and Roisin are not... but it's always hard to know in what order things actually happened as opposed to the edit.

This second series of contestants is a great bunch and the reason I wanted to write up this series is because I had thoughts on their performance and the way the show may or may not have favoured them:

[SPOILERS WITHIN]

The majority of the contestants this season I know from watching Taskmaster, with a few exceptions. It just goes to show how great a show Taskmaster is at exposing the world to the UK comedy talents. Each contestant had to prepare a "joker", or a one-person performance of approximately 5 minutes in length.

• Romesh Ranganathan - an exceptionally prominent competitor, like, probably the most involved in everything throughout the show. His standup persona is very snarly, so he seemed like he would be a tough act, but he was always on the verge of breaking. Ramesh's joker was hammering on his lazy eye and then having prepared bits for the crowd to read which, honestly, needed to be more discomforting in most cases...but he did get one person to break.
• Diane Morgan - I haven't spent much time with Morgan's Philomina Cunk character, but Morgan seemed like an early frontronner because she should be used to being funny with a straight face as she often does this with the public as Cunk. Her joker was reading Dylan Thomas with fart breaks. Incredible. While not the most vicious player, she was definitely in the mix in the room.
• Gbemisola Ikumelo - a 2 time BAFTA award winning comedy actor/writer/showrunner, but never been on Taskmaster, so I have no idea who she is. She will go down in infamy on this show for her attempt to not react to Morgan's farts. Ikumelo was holding in the laughs to the point of pain and tears, until finally letting out a gutteral wail of a sob laugh at the end of Morgan's performance. Once eliminated she didn't hang around the green room long, having fallen ill. If I had to guess, a migraine, because surely that would happen to me too.  She was a great presence but didn't go on the offensive much. We didn't get to see her joker.
• Maisie Adam - a delight on Taskmaster season 20 doesn't seem to get much room to stretch here, at least until she goes face to face with Ramesh and the two of them start to basically roast one another. We don't get to see Maisie's joker, which is a shame. She's pretty involved in the room, but not heavy on offense.
• Amy Gledhill - a contestant on the current season of Taskmaster, where she's a very lively, vibrant presence. She was pretty recessed in the room. I have to suspect being a younger comic in the mix and the other contestants not being as familiar with her, that she wasn't as comfortable inserting herself into the more seasoned group engagements and perhaps wasn't as included or targeted in them. I think she was taken out on a cheap call though (maybe as likely because she wasn't as active a participant)
• Bob Mortimer - a legend, apparently, in the UK comedy scene, and the winner of season 1 of LOL (meh, I think Richard Ayoade gave him the win out of some sort of reverential deference), as well as a former Taskmaster contestant. I don't find his schtick very funny, I don't vibe with it, but clearly a whole generation of comedians find his shit uncontrollably hysterical. I was ready to riot if he were to be crowned winner again. His songs are dumb and his jokes seem to amuse himself more than anyone (though for some reason they are very amused). He was very involved in the whole thing and seemed comfortable in the environment being the reigning champ. His joker was abysmal, but again, the crowd seemed to love it. I dunno.
• Alan Carr - another comedy legend whom I've maybe heard of... but don't remember. He was all over the place in this one, and generally pretty funny throughout, although his joker was a bit... vintage... being a somewhat hastily constructed game show. He was giggling throughout the introduction so I thought he was an easy goner, but he stuck through well into the second half of the show.
• Mel Giedroyc - the host of the Great British Bake Off and a former Taskmaster contestant. She seemed to be an easy get, a real laugher before the show started, but she figured out her "game face" early on (sticking her lower jaw out any time she was about to laugh) and she went deeeep in this one. She was probably the most aggressive player and the one who was looking for opportunity. Her joker was a really bold physical performance which... was... very... interesting (according to David Mitchell).
• David Mitchell - a big time sketch and comedy series performer and actor who I'm quite familiar with. He was as in the mix as Mel, Ramesh, Alan, and Bob, and was seemingly perplexed the whole time.  Did he want to be there, or was that the persona he was playing, of someone who didn't want to be there, to distract him from laughing? He seemed to be acting the whole time. His joker was a terrific really bad first-time stand-up comic routine which was very droll. The only problem is the show clearly shows him smiling a number of times (at least two) and doesn't call him on it.
• Sam Campbell - the odds on favourite for the win because Sam is unflappable. Whenever someone seems to have a comedic edge on him he can completely undercut their bit in surprising and hilarious ways that seem like absolutely no big deal to him ("that's a serious issue" he says to Mitchell during a particularly funny "edgy" run in his bad-stand-up bit). Sam's joker was patentedly absurd, but he let the comedic glory be not himself, but the Tim and Eric-quality community theatre performers he had tag along in his ridiculous set piece. Sam didn't attack enough, though whenever he did chime in it was usually quite sharp. I vibe with Sam Campbell in a way I don't Bob Mortimer.

The winner of the Series was David Mitchell, and almost well earned, except for the fact of the show letting him off the hook for his various smiles. Neither he nor Sam got a yellow card, and so the final tiebreaker came down to who made the most other people laugh, and David won 2-to-one.  I think one of those smiles/yellow cards would have been the tiebreaker otherwise.  

It was a fun series, but the one thing I noticed was how weak the attacking was. On other series we would see competitors smell blood, seeing a comedian on the verge and they would just hammer on them until they broke, and nobody did that here. Mel was the closest, as was Diane Morgan at times. I also noticed that, unlike other LOL series the prize here was just a trophy, and no big charitable donation or prize money.  Also, this series didn't have much in the way of guest interjections. A notable British TV interviewer stepped in with a pretty funny series of interviews with the contestants, and Natasha Demetriou (of What We Do In The Shadows) and Ellie White came out of a cubby as "intimacy coordinators" and made everyone hilariously uncomfortable. Put them both in the next series.

Fun show. 

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In the wake of The Mandalorian and Grogu's middling box office and middling critical reception, there's a lot of angsty blogging, youtubing, tiktokking and podcasting around the state of Star Wars today (present company not excluded), and what the future might bring under Dave Filoni's guiding hand as co-president of Lucasfilm. 

Filoni was brought aboard the Star Wars train by George Lucas himself, to assist Lucas in overseeing The Clone Wars, animation being Filoni's forte. The Clone Wars got off to a rocky start, with a middling theatrical release of the first four episodes as a film (that The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like four episodes of The Mandalorian is not lost on me), but by the second season of the series the kinks had sort of been ironed out, and the series wound up being the glue that holds the Prequel Trilogy together, rather than vice versa.

Filoni went on to create the animated series Star Wars: Rebels, definitely in my top 5 Star Wars projects ever, but that too was a series that took time to build, being enjoyable enough the first season but making itself epic and its characters involving in its second season, increasing in scope for its subsequent two seasons. 

Filoni's works since then have been more in the live action space but not ignoring animation. A revival seventh season of The Clone Wars was an epic capper to the series as well as dovetailing into Revenge of the Sith, while The Bad Batch explored the fallout of the Clone Wars through a new cast of characters and featured the trademark Filoni touch of being a bit rough around the edges the first season, but gelling quite firmly and endearingly the second. What Filoni brought to these projects were incredible character-building, expansive galaxy-building, and a commitment to not forgetting what came before.

While The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett and particularly Asoka had Filoni-esque highlights, there's a large contingent of the Star Wars fan base that want live action to be treated differently than the animation, as more accessible, less addled by Star Wars lore.  They're probably right. And the worry is that under his hand the future of Star Wars is going to be an ouroboros.

So when you get a nothingburger like The Mandalorian and Grogu, that worry is justified, but then you also get Maul: Shadow Lord, which expels the issues with previous Filoni-created series and manages to get up and running in a matter of a couple short episodes, rather than an entire season. 

Sure, Maul is a legacy character who has been seemingly killed on screen at least twice already, and it may be a little confusing for any casual fan to understand in what time the series takes place, but it's a show that doesn't get bogged down with the past, and it's also not overly concerned (at least with this first season) with extensively tying itself to everything else Star Wars.

Maul, here (played once again impeccably by Sam Witwer), is our anti-hero, a man who has been wronged by his former master, Darth Sidious, now the Emperor Palpatine, and also full of loathing towards the Jedi, who have gotten in his way more than once. He had, previously, attempted to create a criminal empire to take on his former dark lord, and was not just squashed like a bug, but his brother was killed in the process. He is a traumatized figure whose powers and abilities are both fueled and crippled by that trauma.

His goal, then, is to re-establish a criminal empire, as well as find himself an apprentice to help him take on his former master. The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive goals, but also focusing on both detracts from focus on the other.

On a remote planet, Janix, Maul operates in the shadows, but not deeply enough. His criminal doings have raised the attention of Brander Lawson, an inspector of the local police force played brilliantly by Wagner Maura. Lawson begins investigating Maul's operation and eventually confronts the villain, but is given a proposition, one which a good cop like him cannot accept.

Also entering the picture are Jedi master Eeko-Dio Daki (voiced by Dennis Haysbert) and his padewan Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon). They too are living in the shadows of Janix, scrounging for whatever they can get on the streets, when they confront the former Sith. 

But soon, enemies must be allies on all fronts, as the Empire becomes alerted to Maul's presence and a pair of Inquisitors begin hunting the Jedi and Sith down. As well there's a Star Destroyer full of Imperial troops and bureaucrats locking the planet down, and while it's not quite as invested in highlighting the grip of totalitarianism as Andor was, it's still unsettling and effective in showing how these types of agencies operate in tearing down existing structures of order and imposing their own.

Maul: Shadow Lord surprises at building a cast of characters worth caring about, investing us as equally in Lawson, his son, and his robot partner Two-Boots (Richard Ayoade) as we are with Master Daki and Devon as we are with Maul and his coterie.  We just know that at some point Maul has to turn on Daki and get Devon on his side. That could be a horribly clunky moment if done wrong, and at a certain point we wonder if it's going to happen at all, the show lulling us into a false sense of allyship between the parties. It's honestly surprisingly brilliant in how its story unfolds.

And then there's an epic clash that we thought would be reserved for a second season, but this show is wasting no time. It's not Filoni-pfaffing-about in its first season. It's kinetic and propulsive and easily consumable...too consumable. It is the Pringles of Star Wars, just salt, starch and grease making you crave more, and once it's over, the craving doesn't go away, only becoming stronger in its absence.

If the future isn't so bright for Star Wars live action, at least we know animation is going to be more than okay.