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Monday, October 5, 2026
31 Days of Halloween: Night Patrol
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Sunday, September 20, 2026
KWIF: tubi-ular bells
KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. An annoying end-of-summer cold as well as intense end-of-quarter workdays and TIFF wreaking havoc on showtimes downtown all conspired to keep me out of the theatre this week. Movies got watched, but maybe not what I would have seen otherwise.
This Week:
The Philadelphia Story (1940, d. George Cukor - tubi)
Starflight One aka Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land (1983, d. Jerry Jameson - tubi)
Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983, d. Kinji Fukasaku - blu-ray - also on tubi)
The Guest (2014, d. Adam Wingard - tubi)
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Let's be clear...assault is assault, and this constitutes assault. But it's also kind of funny because it's so unexpected. It shouldn't be funny, but I couldn't help but laugh. The jaunty, whimsical music is also telling us to not take it too seriously. It's a very weird note to start this movie on. Throughout the film, unfortunately, there are multiple snappy remarks about domestic abuse that are meant to be funny, as striking one's wife was just an accepted part of a domestic relationship back then apparently. Thankfully, there's no further physical violence upon women in the film.
After that very brief (and did I mention shocking?) opening scene, when we next cut to Tracy, she's getting married again. We learn that she's from an affluent family (as was Dex) and that she's marrying George Kittredge (John Howard) a man of new money who isn't as well versed in high society. Their marriage is to happen on the weekend. Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) is a writer assigned by his editor to cover the wedding, with his partner, photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) to accompany him. They both question how they will get access to the wedding, and the answer comes with Dex leading the way. Yes, Dex is going to crash the wedding (but also introduce Mac and Liz as friends of Tracy's brother who's away in South America...) The jig doesn't last long but there are reasons they go along with it.
Tracy is passive agressive in her welcoming of these people into her parent's home, and certainly isn't welcoming of Dex appearing back into her life, not at this time. Mac is a crusader and an artist, and has genuine disdain for the wealthy, and certainly has no real desire to pursue this assignment. But when Tracy finds Mac's book of short fiction (or was it poetry) at the library, she's kind of smitten by the deep thinking, soulful man she'd so easily dismissed, and Mac, meanwhile, sees she's not the vapid snoot he assumed she was.
And so here we have a strange love pentagon where Mac, who is with Liz, now finds himself falling for Tracy (and Liz keenly aware of it and really just kind of relaxed about it, as if this is something Mac does all the time), and Tracy, likewise, falling for him, while getting married in a day or two, and then Dex is lingering in the peripherals dropping hints (or giving gifts) about their past when times were really good and romantic.
Based on the stage play of the same name by Philip Barry, which also starred Hepburn and she also produced it. She was also the instigator for bringing the play to the big screen as a means of hopefully getting her out of movie jail after a string of bombs. It's a very sharp, twisty, unexpected story that doesn't follow traditional romance or romantic comedy beats. Most of the struggle of these characters and what they are feeling is internalized. For all the words they spew (it's a very punchy, fast-talking script) they aren't talking as much about what's really going on inside, merely hinting at it.
Hepburn here is fully in charge. This is Tracy's story, and she's not willing to fit the role that any man wants to put her in... not Dex, not her father, not George, and ultimately not Mac. Because Tracy is so fiercely independent, so frustrated with the patriarchy, she rebuffs it, and refuses to submit to it. As a result, these men who proclaim to love her have put her up on this pedestal, that she's a goddess or a queen, something other.
Dex spent his years of marriage treating her like she was a wild horse that needed to be broken, because that's the role women were expected to play, to be submissive to their husbands. What alternative examples were there? He called her goddess, but he refused to worship her...even worse, he just refused to respect her. Mac, meanwhile, sees her, sees the person she wants to be, but also still elevates her to royalty status, someone above him... they're not equals. He's drawn to that imbalance, but even though she's into it now, it's apparent she wouldn't put up with it long. And then George, the man she's supposed to marry, idolizes her, but also wants her to fit in a box, and play the role of kept woman, be at his side, and that definitely won't work for her.
And while the point of the movie is Dex -- still seething with contempt, jealousy and little boy hurt feelings -- sees Tracy with these other men, and how other men act around her, and how she responds to that, and realizes he played it all wrong, that she wasn't meant to be a possession or a god, that she was meant to be supported and loved and given the same respect and companionship that he himself wanted from her. At least I think that's the realization he comes to. As I said, this is Tracy's movie, and Dex disappears throughout much of the film a surprising amount. I really thought the possibility here was that Tracy learns to love herself and that she doesn't need a man in her life for any sense of fulfillment. But that's not how the films of the 1940's worked.
This is the most interesting I've ever found Jimmy Stewart playing bitter and spiteful and turning that around into a dashing romantic lead. Hepburn I've not had much experience with, but this gives her the opportunity to be hard and sometimes comically nasty, but also flirty and vivacious. It's amazing to watch her face transition from stern to soft. The Philadelphia Story is a tremendous romantic comedy, the wordplay razor sharp, the comic setpieces are small but uproarious, and everyone involved is completely on point. Maybe not a flawless story, as we're still dealing with the affairs of the wealthy as if they're all that matter (and this is a film that is warning us not to judge them so harshly, which, from a modern lens, I cannot agree with at all), but what entertainment!
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(Toasty covers a lot of the modern disaster flicks - check the "disaster" tag - which tend to just follow a single protagonist surrounded either by family or, like, a research team, and not the ensemble of disparate characters as per the 70's formulae.)
Hal Linden (Barney Miller) plays Josh Gilliam, the head designer of the Starflight, a cutting-edge rocket-fuelled plane that will climb to the upper atmosphere and move a 400mph, making a direct flight from L.A. to Sydney in two hours. While the simulation tests don't reveal any outright problems, Josh feels reluctant about the rocket system, and worries something will go wrong with the inaugural flight to Australia.
Pilot Cody Briggs (Lee Majors) is having domestic issues, his marriage is hanging on by a thread, and he's reluctant to commit to single mom Erica Hansen (Lauren Hutten), the press secretary for Starflight's parent company, Thornwell Aviation. She, and her daughter will be on the plane, as will dozens of press people, a wanna-be aeronautics mogul, a gold thief, and a contest winner chosen from the Thornwell employees who worked on the plane. As well, last minute, the plane is held to allow for the loading of the recently deceased ambassador from Australia in his coffin.
Despite the set-up of something being wrong with the plane, it's in fact, outside events which cause the tragedy to happen. A experimental satellite rocket launched too early explodes in the atmosphere which sends debris hurtling towards the Starflight. Their only option to avoid it is to climb higher using the rocket boosters. The only problem is the debris struck the ship and now they can't turn the rockets off. They rocket into space, into orbit of the earth, with a limited supply of food, power and oxygen. The plane is out of fuel, and they have no heat shields to even re-enter earth's atmosphere. How ever will any of them survive.
Space shuttle Columbia, that's how. Somehow, over less than a two-day span in this film, NASA manages to land the Columbia four times and launch it three. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for an nearly billion-dollar experimental rocket plan that only seats like 40 passengers (and you thought Fly Emirates was expensive...) but turning around launch times in two hours is not only improbable, but impossible.
Presented on Tubi in glorious 4:3 aspect ratio, I was wondering if Starflight One was a TV movie given that it has a run-time of nearly 2 hours and figuring most TV movies are, like, 90 minutes given that they have a 2 hour timeslot to fill and that they have to run commercials...but I forgot that back in those days that networks would block of 2 1/2 or 3 hours for "event" movies. It's most definitely a TV movie. I mean, look at the cast list. Even with John Dykstra on special effects, this is special effects on a TV budget. Once the Starflight reaches zero gravity, there's only a scene or two of people floating, and from then on it's painfully obvious that the actors are trying to mimic weightlessness by slowly bending and straightening their knees. It. looks. bad.
The far-fetched idea, the cliched formula, the bad cast of characters (I mean, the gold thief just got married and is going to Australia on a honeymoon with his unsuspecting bride, and they don't use that for anything other than to have gold bars in the cargo bay... at least the Australian ambassador's coffin is used as an air-tight transportation unit to shuttle a dude from Starflight to Columbia, but it's still a dully executed sequence)... Starflight One is a tired regurgitation of better ideas. The most interesting part of the film is the love triangle between Cody, his wife and Erica, but Majors seems to be taking a paycheck and can't be bothered to invest in caring about the emotional life of this character. The big "I love you" scene between Majors and Hutton is up there for one of the worst on-screen kisses I've ever seen, beaten only by a kiss that happens between them later in the movie when they're saying goodbye, perhaps forever (Majors doesn't even attempt to participate in the kiss, and you have to wonder what was going on behind the scenes for such a dispassionate effort).
That said, as badly executed as it sometimes is, and as poor an example of this genre as it is (and pretty much the end of the era for this kind of disaster movie), it's still so in the mould that it is kind of watchable (kind of), even if most of the entertainment value is laughing at its absurdity.
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I've seen many a samurai movie, and I genuinely love the genre, and I've seen many wuxia fantasy films which I also like. I'm less versed in Japanese fantasy which sort of bridge these two, or if that's even a common thing. Legend of the Eight Samurai plays out less like either of those two niches and instead feels very much like an homage to the made-in-Italy sword-and-sorcery movies of the 60's (which I guess also trickled out throughout the 70's and came roaring back in the 80's).
Princess Shizu (Hiroko Yakushimaru) is on the run. Her family has been murdered, and it's only Shizu which stops them from fulfilling the revenge curse of the Motofuji clan. The evil Hikita Gonnokami Motofuji (Yūki Meguro) and his lover/mother, the witch Tamazusa (Mari Natsuki) have discovered the secret to immortality (it involves taking a bath in a massive blood pool) and are on the path to ruling Japan and possibly the world so long as they vanquish their enemy completely.
But Shizu finds her own destiny is tied to eight samurai ("dog") warriors whom she collects along the way (these include actors like Sonny Chiba (The Street Fighter) and Etsuko Shihomi (Sister Street Fighter)). But continued run-ins with vainglorious outcast Shinbei (a young Hiroyuki Sanada) turn from disgust to admiration to love in pretty rapid succession, with a lot of contrivances and complications along the way.
Legend of the Eight Samurai is a loose adaptation of a classic Japanese serial from the 1800s ( Nansō Satomi Hakkenden by Kyokutei Bakin) that was definitely an attempt to Star Wars-ify such fantasy tales (there's even a Luke-and-Leia-rope-swing moment which is composed pretty much exactly the same). While there are moments that feel like Star Wars homages (including the sort of Stormtrooper-y samurai hordes), I couldn't escape the feeling of the many getting-the-band-together fantasy adventures I'd seen over the years. While visually the big sets and setpieces, the rotoscoped animated effects, and the use-what-we-got outdoor environments felt of the 60's era, the synth-heavy soundtrack from Nobody, and the oh-so-'80's power ballads from John O'Banion feel very much of their time. The style of fantasy and the tone of music don't mesh innately, but at the same time it makes for a very distinctive production.
It's not that I disliked Legend of the Eight Samurai, but I had a hard time settling into it. It's...different. It moves at an unfamiliar pace, and it often seems to lack focus. It's always hard to watch a film where the protagonist (Princess Shizu) is really so defenceless, and the heroic figure (Shinbei) is a real aggravating rascal for much of the film, but eventually comes around (young Sanada is so damn cute though) to being the inevitable eighth samurai (not really a spoiler, is it?). If I watch it again, it will have to be in dialogue with maybe other adaptations of the source material, or director Fukasaku's work... or maybe I just want to hear those cheesy ballads again, because they're so spot emulations of the hit songs of the era that it's astonishing that I've never heard them before.
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And it is sort of that, but also not.
Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) and her husband Spencer (Leland Orser) are still grieving the loss of their son, who died in combat overseas, when turning up at their door is David Collins, a veteran from their son's unit, and a friend with a message for them.
They invite David to stay with them, and he's so respectful and kind and courteous. He helps out around the house and starts mentoring their bullied son Luke (Brendan Meyer). Their daughter, 20 year old Anna (Maika Monroe) is wary of this stranger, something about his vibe puts her off, that is until she catches him in nothing but a towel coming out of the bathroom, and she's fully switched on. But the glamour spell doesn't last. Little things tweak her, and she's right to worry. What the family doesn't see, but we the audience, is the way David's face drops anytime someone turns their back to him or leaves a room, and the way he peers out windows in anticipation. David instigates a fight with Luke's bullies at a bar where he utterly demolishes them, he defends Anna's friend from a toxic ex-boyfriend at a party, he provides comfort and guidance for the family...it seems like David is the good guy, but the tone of the film, everything from scene composition, to the tone of the music to Dan Steven's steel blue eyes and wry, unnerving smile feel off. And then there's the cutaways to a shadowy government contractor led by Major Carver (the late, great Lance Reddick) which maybe intone David is a victim and on the run...?
The Guest comes from director Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire), whose latest film in theatres (at the time of writing), Onslaught, is not a sequel, but in the same world as this film. That most definitely looks like an action movie, and it was conversations in media around that film which alerted me to the fact that The Guest was not much at all what I was expecting. Rather than being tense and uncomfortably dramatic, this is more heightened intensity and pulpy, with shades of John Carpenter and James Cameron pumping through its celluloid veins. It's not a very surprising movie, but it seems to know exactly what its doing and how it wants to do it. It may not seem the most logical leap from this to giant apes and lizards, but Wingard proved he knew how to capture tone and create an movie that is fun and exciting that also thrills.
[Poster talk... there's not a single good poster for The Guest. Most of them feature either David or Emma in silhouette against vibrant neons that intone/imply nothing. There is a poster of Stevens with a ditty bag slung over his shoulder that implies just a little more but not enough. And then there's the follow-up posters, once again using the vibrant colours and shadowed figures just with big bold quotes from critics. They do not sell the movie at all. Paired with the trailer, which make it out as another sort of secret psychopath story this was a poorly promoted movie.]
Monday, September 14, 2026
Three Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Def-Con 4
1985, Digby Cook, Paul Donovan, Tony Randel -- Amazon
Wow, that was bad, but not as bad as I recall judging it way back in Ye Olden Days of VHS. Don't get me wrong, its terrible but terrible in the way most 80s post-apocalypse movies were. And the Canadian-isms of it all, sort of allow me to forgive it much. I also am amused that I recalled two very important details from my first viewing: when I saw the Alexander Keiths stubbie beer bottle being used as a candle holder I knew the movie was Canadian (ignoring the Maury Chaykin role), and I believed the whole movie having taken place in Nova Scotia, based on the map in the Bad Guy's lair.
So, this is Cold War hype at it hype-iest. A handful of astronauts in a satellite space station grumping about how long they have been up and looking to get back to Earth, when it happens -- someone pisses someone else off (oh, say... someone calls The Prime Minister his Governor) and the missiles start being lobbed. They are supposed to launch their own but they argue and, don't.
Minutes later, which I gather is supposed to be weeks, one of them gets a message from his wife. Radiation has caused a sickness, most people are dead, anyone ill is quarantined and his child is dead. The crew argue again and Howe (Tim Choate, Babylon 5) fiddles with the computer, sending them on a landing trajectory. I admit, I was washing the dishes so I didn't catch everything, but I believe they got a signal from Earth, which was weird cuz everything should be all blowed up. Oh, the other astronauts are Walker (John Walsch, absolutely nothing else) the commander, and Jordan (Kate Lynch, Lost Girl) the doctor.
Weird note. There were moments when I thought the movie was going to stray into sexytime. One, it had to be Walker as Howe is married, watches a "blue movie" and Jordan just rolls her eyes. Entirely inappropriate. There are a few other very terribly written sexual scenes, as if the script was done by a 14 year old boy whose only exposure to sex was a bunch of nudie mags in a plastic bag hidden under his bead.
They land. Not sure how, as their space station doesn't actually have a visible lander module. BUT not before they launch all their own nuclear payload. All but one, and it starts ticking down. Its a rough landing and Jordan is knocked unconscious and they are jammed weirdly on a sandy beach. As Walker tries to dig his way out, he is grabbed by unknowns and ... only his hand drops back into the hole. When Howe emerges with a flimsy stick as a weapon, he sees people sawing chunks of meat off Walker -- CANNIBALS !
He runs, but is caught by a random trap put out by Vinny (Canadian royalty Maury Chaykin, My Cousin Vinny) the redneck survivalist, in his best Canadian Tuxedo and kilt. While this movie never mentions its in Canada, and always seems to at least pretend its following American style politics & military structure, it also drops regular Canadianisms.
Weird note. Its been... what, a few months? They have been revolving up there for the few months and the planet has fallen into complete barbarism? They haven't even landed in an urban area but they have cannibals and bandage wrapped muties, but everything is "The Road Warrior" level PA. Why? Even with mass death and collapse of society, things would hang onto a near-normal for at least years. But, whatever, this wants to do the "Planet of the Apes" thing and have them arrive to a shocking change of affairs.
So yeah, Vinny. He has a pretty good setup with booby traps (I am sure he giggled when he set them up) and land mines and secret tunnels back to his slapped together shack. Again, he should at least have a fortified hunter's cabin, but nope, he's hidden inside hammered & glue sheets of wood and metal, pure PA ramshackle. He has a girl in his basement, and seems to have lost all eating utensils as he forces gruel upon Howe. He has nudie mags pasted all over the wall. How tries to convince him to help, offering half of his space station food supply (months!!) in exchange for some guns and information. Vinny says he will just kill Howe and take it all; fair point. But then he's distracted by an interloper blowing himself up outside, and Vinny heads outside to see what "the kids" are up to.
While Vinny is outside, the girl in the basement, named JJ (Lenore Zann, X-Men '97), crawls out, all dressed in a school uniform. Hmmm, so the kids must refer to a bunch of youngin's that she was part of ? Once again, Howe offers food if she will help, but before the two can escape, Vinny returns. He's taking the pair with him as he checks out the beach where the station crashed, in his Mad Max'd out tractor, complete with armoured cage. When they arrive, Vinny makes some comment about the "lunatics from Fort Blah Blah" and suddenly there is a beached blonde guy with a terrible moustache and a sloppy military uniform. And other guys with guns. Vinny boots it, back to his tractor, but they capture him with hooks and chains.
Back to Fort Blah Blah, I guess. Its just another example of slapped together ramshackle, but there are a LOT of civilians, some in cages, some in holes, most in weird favela box shacks but otherwise looking like filthy normal people. I was left wondering why. There is no world building in this movie; its not smart enough to have such. Sure, we can postulate that the disease, radiation sickness, cannibals and muties (I know they are not radiation mutants, just bandaged survivors, but they present as muties) run rampant in the surrounding landscape, so people have congregated here under the auspices of being protected by whatever military folks are in Fort Blah Blah, but really, they've just become slaves / fodder for his whims.
And who is him? The "kids" turn out to be, and we learn from an exposition scene from JJ, a handful of boarding school kids (college? highschool?) who were in a helicopter with the General Dad of one of them, and it crashed before they could get to safety. So, he, the preppy as Kent called him, is Gideon, a charismatic and ruthless son of the dead General, and he is not entirely stupid, so people follow him. JJ is his ex-girlfriend who doesn't appreciate his ruthlessness, and ran away, only to be captured by JJ.
The spacestation / lander thing / whatever has been carted back from the beach by slaves, and off camera, they got Jordan out of it. She, and the rest of the prisoners are tossed into cage holes, where they are subjected to the half-eaten Walker. Eww. Meanwhile Gideon and his henchmen are trying to get coordinates of a proper base of survivors, the usual mythical "safe zone" from all the PA movies. They will get that by hacking the computer module from the spacestation. Gideon has a tech guy with a broken back, who he taunts with freedom and food. Together they get the required coordinates, and plan to escape on a boat. Howe has also said he wants a boat, a sailing boat, which should allow him to get to South America where the radiation won't be as bad. Meanwhile, the one remaining nuclear warhead, stuck in its launch tube, is still ticking down, unbeknownst to everyone.
So, the prisoners are to be executed via lots of melodrama and eye rolling on my part. But just as the crowds scream for blood and the hangin' is about to happen, the broke back dude has dragged himself out, somehow got a gun, and opens up. Total Chaos! Gideon is shot! Jordan offers to help but only if they are all freed. When she medically assists him, she tries to convince him that the poison is a pain killer but he turns the tables and kills her instead! Drama! Tragedy! In all these PA movies, everyone but the lone Main Guy and the Cute Girl have to die. Meanwhile outside, Vinny has freed all the average-people slaves and prisoners and convinced them to fight back. In the ensuing chaos, Gideon escapes to the boat, with the coordinates, and JJ. The "fighting back" does not really go well.
Still doing dishes.
Howe and Vinny chase after the boat, only to see it sailing away. Howe jumps in the water, is tossed a rope by JJ, fights Gideon, and the boat is theirs! Gideon and his blonde henchmen Lacey escape back to Fort Blah Blah just as the clock countdown finishes.
Boom.
Credits roll.
The final victory has been won. Mankind can now rest in peace.
What? What final victory? A single boom that wipes some part of Nova Scotia off the map? Victory for who? And there are people in the boat, and at whatever Safe Zone they are sailing to, so no final rest for mankind. What does that even mean??
Speaking of not-making-sense, the tag line from the poster, "The last defense. The last hope. The battle for the future of the world has begun." Huh? They were not "battling for the future of the world", they were just ... well, fighting over food and a girl. These are just words on a poster; nothing to do with the movie. Gah.
As big messy productions go, this was all the mess, but in some, mostly MST3K kinds of way, it was kind of fun. Or maybe it was the kind of terrible that I like to write about. Either way, it distracted me.
Sunday, August 30, 2026
KWIF: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (+3)
KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I also saw The Odyssey in true IMAX. It's a big movie on the biggest screen. I don't know that the viewing experience was all that much different than the first, other than I could see a lot more sand and sky.
This Week:
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, d. Jane Schoenbrun - in theatre)
Illustrious Corpses (or Cadaveri Eccellenti - 1976, d. Fracesco Rosi - bluray)
Pavements (2024, d. Alex Ross Perry - bluray)
Synecdoche, New York (2008, d. Charlie Kaufman - dvd)
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The opening credits - set to Okay Kaya's cover of R.E.M.'s Nightswimming - takes us through all the pop culture hoopla and paraphernalia of the (fictional) "Camp Miasma" horror franchise and it's vent-headed killer "Little Death". News articles, posters, video games, toys, websites, all detailing the rise and fall of the Miasma series, much like the 80's heavyweights like Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's a series that had its day, and then it's corporate overlords kept trying to make it a thing, outstaying its welcome.
This credits sequence is so information dense and so evocative it's easy to get lost in. As a pop culture and paraphernalia junkie, I just wanted to watch this opening on a loop five times over just to take it all in (my favourite bit is that "Little Death" released a much derided rap album). This density serves as an intentional disconnecting break from the film's initial imagery (and sounds). It's there, in part, to make us forget what we initially saw, so that when we meet Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) we don't suspect what the film will eventually be telling us.
Kris stops in at a gas station convenience store, loads up on candy (so much candy, too much candy) and finds a random copy of "Camp Miasma VI" on DVD. When she checks in and asks the hotel clerk (Kevin McDonald) if there's a DVD player she could use, he lets her know he had a small part in the locally-shot film. We learn that Kris has been hired to be the director of the Camp Miasma reboot. The series has a problematic past in that its killer is problematically trans-coded and the studio execs want a queer director to reboot it for, well, optics.
Kris is in the Pacific Northwest to meet up with the original Miasma "final girl", played by Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, adopting a thick Tennessee drawl... which I mean to say is she's doing Dolly Parton's accent...and laugh... RIP Dolly). Presley's been a recluse since declining to return for the sequels, and is basically a non-commodity, but Kris is infatuated with her, in particular the sex scene in the first Miasma film which was both a sexual awakening as well as kink origin story for her.
Billy, who now owns and lives on the camp grounds the original Miasma was shot, is introduced walking in on an obviously titillated Kris watching this scene. Billy is presented stepping out of the shadows, hair a vibrant golden yellow, lipstick a stark blood red, and an obscenely big hat, all making her look like a femme fatale straight out of a noir film.
This is all still very early in teenage Sex and Death at Vamp Miasma, and it's hard to fully describe what the actual experience of watching it is like. There is obscene, face forward product placement that, if it takes you out of the movie, it's acting as intended. If Anderson's just-shy-of-over-the-top drawl is almost too much, it's as intended. If you are, like I was, made to feel in awe of Anderson, to be reminded of how hot and iconic Dana Scully was in the X-Files then that too is intentional. It's all intentional and it's all part of the layers of artifice that this film puts on.
Kris is not at Billy's home just to recruit her for her reboot of the series, she's there for a more personal and intimate reason. She saw in a still frame of Billy's eye in that original film a look - at the crossroads of pleasure and pain - little death and Little Death. She's been fixated on this imagery and this idea and cannot get past it. Billy gets it. Kris has a kink that she's too ashamed to admit to, and she's a willing participant in unlocking that for her. I don't think Anderson really cared for Scully being a sex symbol, but she certainly seems on board with making Billy Presley one. That there's a 30 year age gap between Billy and Kris hardly matters. There's no power imbalance, and nobody is taking advantage of the other. Consent is explicit.
The second act of the film finds Kris and Billy watching the original Miasma film, which Schoenbrun's spot-on riff on 80's slasher films (including making near-40-year-old Zach Cherry playin a teen sleepaway camp counsellor) is both entertainment and foreplay for them. The film-within-the-film (-within-the-film) explains the origins of Little Death, which dives into its own variation of the all-too-common transphobic origins of horror's cinematic murderers.
Schoenbrun examines the warping of young minds that comes with horror film's obsession with titillation and brutality, but from a feminine lens, not the masculine one in which most horror (particularly those of the 80's) were presented in. Schoenbrun doesn't cast judgement. That "Little Death" rises again and chases Kris (who intentionally doffs her clothes down to her underwear) all the way to Billy's rose-petal coated bed and skewers the both of them as they fornicate is all just part of the role play. It's not horror, it's leering and alluring. It's wrong, and yet, ok?
There's not a lot of direct horror in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, but there is a lot of flesh and fluids, as Billy says. It is a satirical examination of horror as a genre... both a loving and biting one. It's almost a sex comedy, but also... not really.
I am not well versed in 80's horror, nor do I have any first-hand familiarity with women's sexual awakenings (that I know of!), and though I've done some reading of trans media analysis, I too am not an expert in that to comment extensively in the context of this film (critic Willow Maclay's review is exceptional from that context), so ...Camp Miasma is, in some respects, not in any way meant for me, a straight, cisgender, horror-averse man. But at the same time, it's also not throwing a hand up to explicitly excluding me either.
Beyond the aforementioned themes of film and sex and transphobic media, it's also asking the audience, whomever you may be, to think about voyeurism, about what it can mean to be the watcher, or to be watched. How do these different perspectives impact us? What does it mean to look...is it leering? Is it desire? Is it judgement? And what does it mean to be looked at? Is it affirming? Is it off-putting? Is it exciting or upsetting? And where does context fit into all of that?
It's only once Kris reports back to the studio big wigs her progress on the film, kicking off the third act, that we start to understand the context which the film has actually been presented to us all along. Kris insists it's not "meta" but it very much is. The artifice is also the substance. I don't think a film has thrown me for a loop this befuddling and inspiring since Synecdoche, New York.
It's a fascinating picture, deep in thought, with multiple themes playing in concert together (including Schoenbrun taking some jabs at the Hollywood intellectual property machine), each that could be picked apart and analysed from an academic perspective, but at the same time being playful and having fun with it all, not taking itself too seriously.
...also, fyi...miasma: a heavy vaporous emanation...
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Illustrious Corpses was a recommendation on the relatively new-to-me (but not new overall) podcast The Big Picture from regular Chris Ryan... a recommendation that would test whether he was a trustworthy source or not. Turns out this film isn't a giallo at all, but the recommendation was still a good one... nay, a great one.
The film opens in the real Capuchin Catacombs, looking at real desiccated corpses. It's a stark visual but not one meant to scare or frighten. The character, an older man with a real lived-in face, looks deeply into the mummified faces, intrigued and ponderous. He leaves and is promptly assassinated. It turns out he was a prominent judge. Assigned to his murder case is Inspector Amerigo Rogas (Lino Ventura, another very lived in face, but with a little more mileage left to go). He monitors the big, stately funeral, and suspects, maybe, mafia connections were to blam. In the streets, youthful protesters decry the dead man as being connected to the mob.
As Rogas investigates, there's another murder, another judge. And then a third. Rogas starts piecing together that the three judges were connected by more than profession, there is perhaps a vengeful aspect to this string of killings. But as he digs into these men, he starts uncovering information that might not be directly relevant to the case, but certain powerful people want to keep buried.
Soon Rogas' hunt finds the tables flipped. There's potentially a conspiracy afoot, and not only isn't it something he cannot solve, he may not be able to get out from under.
I may have mentioned in my review of Dario Argento's The Five Days that my knowledge of Italian history is verrry slim, so the backdrop of Illustrious Corpses, the political tensions involving student protests, labour shutdowns, neo-fascism and a burgeoning communist undercurrent are all pretty new concepts to me, but director Rosi certainly captures the mood. The vociferous chants of protests are a common soundtrack to the picture tell of a country ready to explode, and more than once we catch wind of a government doing everything it can to keep such an explosion from happening, even if it means scuttling a murder investigation or three (and committing a few more of their own).
What starts out as a high profile murder investigation soon bursts into full-blown '70's conspiracy thriller, and it is pretty incredible. Ventura's Rogas starts out so cool and assured, so observant and above it all, and we slowly watch that confidence, that comfort, that sense of being untouchable erode away and, eventually, collapse into the sea.
Director Rosi and his cinematographer Pasqualino Del Santis frame everything in beautiful, massive, old spaces, as if Italy itself is constantly threatening to consume our primary characters. We often see Rome and Venice in film, but Rosi takes us to many different locals, each with their own charm, some decadent, some rugged. The camera's gaze, often, is snapshot worthy, even if the innate colour tone is almost always some shade of brown (with maybe a hint of blood red).
This was a total surprise, as I had settled in for a delightful picture about a crazed murderer and instead felt the wave of historical anxiety and tension Rosi so ably builds overtake. It's up there with the best of the subgenre, a real damn surprise.
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I have to say, watching director Alex Ross Perry's 128 minute avant garde "documentary" on the band was the most time I've committed to the band since first hearing "Cut Your Hair" back in the mid-'90s.
In Pavements we have:
- A behind-the-scenes document of the 2022 reunion tour;
- An archival footage retrospective;
- A making of the cliche-laden Hollywood biopic;
- A behind-the-scenes telling of Alex Ross Perry's attempt to launch an off-Broadway jukebox musical adaptation of the band's music; and
- The opening of a celebratory museum gallery tribute to the band and their history.
It's a lot to string together into anything approximating a cohesive narrative, but editor Robert Greene gets pretty close, and in the end, for all the fake productions attempting to mirror reality (the Hollywood biopic is completely fake, the musical is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek cheeky production, and the museum is not entirely fake but constructed for the purposes of the film), it winds up somewhere honest and tributory without being overly sentimental or fawningly admiring.
At once pretentious and silly, there perhaps too much facade to Pavements and not enough introspection/retrospective to function as a satisfying introduction for anyone not familiar with the band, or, for someone like me who only ever flirted with them, never committing.
It's pretty clear though, frontman Stephen Malkmus was never going to approve of anything remotely standard, nor was he going to sit for anything approximating a conventional interview, and had little interest in assessing his band's, history or his own.
As is, I think this one is for the fans.
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The impact of Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut never left me, although the majority of the details had long since faded. Was the comparison even apt between these two films? Am I just a fake critic who really doesn't know what he's talking about? A. Yes and yes.
Much like Miasma, Synecdoche... is a very personal journey through the working thoughts of a director's brain. I don't think if Kris in ...Miasma or Caden Cotard in Synecdoche... are fully meant to be stand-ins for the directors of their pictures, but both are certainly speaking for the director.
While the themes are somewhat different, I still see synergy in how they approach their stories, layers of surrealism to inform the viewer that what they're about to see, that the world the characters in the film inhabit is a skewed depiction of reality. Schoenbrun is more obvious about it in ...Miasma than Kaufman is (at first) but when Kaufman wants it to be known, he hits you with a literal house on fire.
The story of Synecdoche finds Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a successful theatre director, inhabiting a life that's falling apart, but he's kind of oblivious to it, a passive player in a way. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is an artist who leaves him to exhibit in Germany, taking their daughter with them. She had been pretty disconnected from any engagement with him (though as we learn more about Caden, the disconnect seems to have started on his end). Caden also has had a string of maladies plaguing him that seem to reiterate his view that death is waiting specifically for him. He flirts with Hazel (Samantha Morton) at the box office but he can't seem to take action even when Hazel couldn't be more direct about how she feels about him. His young actress from the play, Claire (Michelle Williams) is utterly infatuated with him, and at first he knows it's a line he cannot cross, but he crosses it when Hazel moves on from him.
Caden gets a sizable grant to produce the play of his dreams, a very personal work, a play about death coming for us all, but the only story he knows to tell is his own, and so the world around Caden is largely shaped by his own reality, a mirror within a mirror within a mirror, without any real sense of identity or direction. Soon the world within starts to bleed with the world without and the become intractable. The one area of his life he proactively controls, he loses control of, and he needs someone else to step in and take over as him... and it seems the most comfort he has ever had in his life is when someone else tells him exactly what to do.
Time, in Synecdoche, New York, is the main thematic element. Kaufman lets us know without any exposition that time is passing in Caden's life and he's missing all of it, stuck in routine, stuck in ruts, stuck in his own mind, stuck in his own obsessions. The opening scene takes place over the span of the month, but plays as if it were one continuous scene. It's not obvious, but it's there. When Adele leaves, Caden thinks she's been gone a week or two, but Hazel tells him it's been a year, and she's not coming back, and the fashion magazine moments later tells us it's been two years. Time in the film keeps moving like this, and Caden keeps losing track of it because he's so insular, so fixated on his own fixations. The film spans Caden's life as he begins middle age to his very old age², and it seems to go by so fast.
In creating a lasting work of art, Caden misses out on actually living his life. His work misses the larger patches of what's going on in the world (things are bad outside of the confines of the warehouse he's operating out of, as implied by the increased military presence on the street, with no context given because Caden can't be bothered to pay attention to it). I'm not certain if this is Kaufman's specific point, but there's a reading that only drawing on one's own life for the sake of art can lead to one's art consuming one's life (as well as an obsession with not dying might result in losing out on actually living).
This is both a deep and purposefully obtuse movie. Kaufman is a very intelligent writer who obsesses about his own mindset and his career and the immediate world around him, and perhaps this is a self-criticism, but also with the awareness that he can't see another path for himself. Death is the inevitable. The end is prescribed at the beginning.
I didn't really understand Synecdoche, New York when I first saw it. I understand it only a little better now, but I love the puzzle of it. A marvelous film.
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Tuesday, May 19, 2026
KWIF: The Sheep Detectives (+2)
KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. I originally had a snarky comment closing out last week's review of Mortal Kombat II where I was lamenting having seen the video game adaptation instead of seeing the one about investigative ewes. I deleted the comment because I had already heard that The Sheep Detectives was actually, surprisingly, a pretty decent film, and that neuters the joke a little bit. Plus, I was going to see The Sheep Detectives anyway, so there never really was an either/or decision in the first place.
This Week:
The Sheep Detectives (2026, d. Kyle Balda - in theatre)
Mile End Kicks (2025, d. Chandler Levack - in theatre)
Dark City (1998, d. Alexander Proyas - DVD)
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It is, without a doubt, an absurd concept, but absurdity doesn't innately make for a film bad, and often the very absurd nature of a story's conceit is what makes it stand out, what makes it good, different and exciting.
I've been hearing a lot of comparisons to Paddington bandied about, but The Sheep Detectives really takes a greater nod from Babe, in that it's set in the real world, but when the humans aren't around the animals are speaking to each other. Yes, there are plenty of jokes where we watch the sheep talk in English and then cut to a human POV just to see them bleating at each other...and it's never. not. funny! (Director Balda is kind of restrained in his use of this gag to be honest, maximizing it's efficacy.)
Based on a 2005 German novel, this is "cozy mystery" at its coziest... I mean, we're talking wool coats for days, right? But the real surprise is that the mystery is not the most captivating part of the film. The reason The Sheep Detectives works so well is it establishes characters and it establishes a community (mainly with the sheep, but also with the humans) and it establishes a tangible world for them to inhabit. In this world, sheep are intelligent creatures. They sit and listen to farmer George (Hugh Jackman, X-Men: Origins: Wolverine) read mystery novels in the evening, and Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jack the Bear), George's favourite sheep, always solves the mystery before the end. George has a reputation about town of being a prickly bastard, but he's a kind and gentle loner who adores his sheep above all. He opens our story by narrating the letter he's writing to, it turns out, his daughter whom he gave up for adoption three decades ago (Molly Gordon, The Bear).
The sheep, we quickly learn, have the ability to force themselves to forget, which they do as a collective. Only Mopple (Chris O'Dowd, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) can remember the past. The sheep believe that they don't die but turn into clouds. Mopple knows the truth, but lets them have their comforts. Otherwise their understanding of death is restricted only to the stories George tells them, so when George turns up dead, the sheep community is rocked.
So too is the human community of the English town of Denbrook. The kind of hapless town constable Officer Derry (Nicholas Braun, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) is completely incapable of handling any sort of death, nevermind a murder. A wayward aspiring reporter (Nicholas Galitzine, Handsome Devil) seems intent on helping him break the case for his own reasons. The suspects are all in George's will, including the town butcher, a rival shepherd, the lovelorn innkeeper, and George's estranged daughter who just happened into town the day of his death.
In a conventional story, there would be much mileage about the sheep working through each of the suspects and eliminating them as the possible murderer. Instead, The Sheep Detectives is far more interested in the sheep community, and expanding their horizons. There is the whole concept in this community of a "winter sheep". Most sheep, they say, are born in the spring, but the occasional sheep is born in the winter, and they are shunned by the herd. And so a tiny, unnamed lamb George loves dearly, but is rejected by all. Part of the story is the herd confronting their prejudices, but in a roundabout way. Even upon learning that their greatest ram, Sebastian (Bryan Cranston, Kung Fu Panda 3), is a winter sheep, it takes a lot before the herd truly understands the harm of their prejudice.
But that's just one facet of what these sheep need to learn. They have to leave the familiar safety of their farm and venture out into the world, where they are exposed to the realities they've otherwise chosen to forget. It's a potent moment when Lily realizes that Mopple has had to live with everything they've forgotten, but Mopple presents it as something beautiful, not horrible.
I'm not doing the best job of selling The Sheep Detectives but, to be blunt, I absolutely adored it. Funny, charming, sweet, sincere with a, yes, cozy mystery at its core to keep things moving, but just a delightful cast of characters and some of the most rewarding emotional stringpulls in some time... I cried at least three times and it earned every one of those tears. I never resented the film for them.
There is no reason The Sheep Detectives should be as good as it is, but we're so lucky that it is. A large contingent of my early-evening Wednesday screening applauded at the end of the film. I joined in. There was no one there to receive the applause, but it felt like the right way of mutually socially acknowledging that we all had a genuine emotional reaction to this film, and that we appreciated it. I do not recall the last time that happened.
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| Love the pseudo-American Apparel- style poster for this film. Perfection |
Despite the caption "2011", I am transported to 2005, to seeing Islands in their earliest incarnation, possibly at the Horseshoe, but maybe at the Rivoli or Lee's Palace or some other joint and perhaps during the North By Northeast festival. Anyway, I'm there. I'm in. It has me. It took the film all of 9 seconds to completely reel me in.
By 2011 I was out of regular "gigging", going to shows around town, and certainly out of the pretense that my photographing and reviewing of such shows (sometimes for online media outlets, most often just for personal blogging) was a career path. Grace (Barbie Ferreira, Euphoria) is 22 years old and already has a foothold in journalism. She has four hundred articles in the local newspaper she's been writing for, including investigative journalism, interviews, and writing a sex column, as well as music reviews. She ponders the idea of writing a "33 1/3" volume on Alanis Morissette's album "Jagged Little Pill". Her boss at the paper (Jay Baruchel) thinks it's a great idea, and hooks her up with the "33 1/3" publisher who likes her take and gives her a small advance to write the book, but it needs to be done quickly.
The next we see of Grace, she's on a bus to Montreal for the summer, giving the middle finger to T.dot on her way out. Her mom doesn't understand why she has this sudden impulse to move elsewhere, and her dad...well, just seems depressed. Grace has a top 5 list of what she wants her summer in Montreal to be: write her book on Alanis, have real sex, climb Mount Royal, learn French and fall in love, probably not in that order.
She's renting a room in Montreal's Mile End from Madeline (Juliette Gariépy, Red Rooms) a hot DJ whose boyfriend Hugo (Robert Naylor) plays in a rock band called Bone Patrol. Madeline is super friendly and wants to be pals, while Grace is a bit reserved and really wants to focus on her writing. But Madeline insists she come to a loft party where she is DJing and Bone Patrol is playing. At the party, unfamiliar with the Montreal scene, Grace retreats to an outdoor space where she meets Archie (Devon Bostick, Diary of a Wimpy Kid) the bassist for Bone Patrol, and they form an immediate kinship... but when the band finally plays, Grace has a rather visceral reaction to Chevy (Stanley Simons, The Iron Claw), Bone Patrol's frontman. She chats him up and he's the most up-his-own-ass pretentious, faux-ambivalent, self-involved shitheel, but Grace can't see past his stage mystique.
Mile End Kicks is about Grace's epic summer in Montreal, becoming part of it's 2010's hipster scene and getting waaay too invested in a guy who can only ever think about himself (and even then not that deeply). There's an obvious love triangle happening between Grace, Archie and Chevy, but the will-they/won't-they isn't really the thrust of the movie. It's more of a "what the fuck, Grace?" as her logic just cannot find a way to overrule her libido when it comes to Chevy, and Archie pre-emptively takes himself out of the equation.
Mile End Kicks is about Grace building up her life, but also feeling completely helpless as it starts to crash down around her. A lesser film would have spent more time and energy on making more direct connections between Grace's life and the songs of "Jagged Little Pill", but the film doesn't need to link them firmly at all. Grace's fall from grace happens for many, many reasons, (almost all her own) and her only way out of the pit she's fallen into is to find self respect and confidence, to engage the world on her own terms rather than feel like she has to be deferential to the men she finds in the circles she's in.
There's an excellent, fundamental moment early in the movie where some of the men of the paper she's working at are having a debate over a couple of bands. It's clear she's not invited to this conversation and when she interjects her own input, she is dismissed immediately and, to put a finer point on it, laughed at. Late it the film (when she's back on her upswing) she reads an insightful and incisive text at a poetry slam about not just this explicit experience but all the general outside-the-circle-of-men experiences women have everywhere. It's a terrific 1-2-3 execution (especially when Grace returns to the bullpen late in the film). I have witnessed these types of situations so many time (even well into adulthood) and have probably been a party to them more often than I've been cognizant of or care to admit. It's institutionalized sexism that often we (meaning men) are not even aware of. I mean I was aware of it before this film, but praise it for actually making it a part of the conversation.
The film contains three (or perhaps even four) of the most awkward make-out scenes I think I've ever seen on film. Given that Grace is our POV character, she's mostly not the one being awkward so our cringe isn't a sympathetic one but more of an "oh gods, what the eff" type of cringe. It's almost all Chevy and that boy, wow, is a fucking mess. Either Levack dated a guy just like this or knew someone who had. The hyper-specificity here is too crazy to be made up.
The film effectively uses its setting as a real "Montreal is a main character" film, and it definitely captures what the Canadian hipster "scene" was like at the time (Toronto, a few years earlier, wasn't that much different, nor likely was Vancouver a few years before that, or Halifax a few years before that...the "it" scene sort of cycles through the major Canadian centers in five-ish-year spans). It effectively seeds in the tension in Montreal's art scene that's so distinct to it (the outsiders that come in and the French-English divide between them, as well as the Toronto resentment)
Mile End Kicks is a film about being in your 20's and fucking up, but also about learning from your mistakes and growing as a person, and understanding that you'll continue to make mistakes (just hopefully new ones, and not repeating them). It's also about empowerment, and while not being so aggressively Alanis about it, it's still a pretty bold awakening.
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A friend recently brought up the film, noting that clips of it had been popping up in one of his feeds ... somewhere. I recall that I liked the film way back when, and it has maintained a decent if not stellar reputation in the meantime... but would it hold up? Would I still even like it? Does the disc even work or has it succumbed to disc rot?
Turns out, mostly, mostly and yes, the disc still works wonderfully.
The most unfortunate thing about Dark City is that it opens with a narration from Kiefer Sutherland's Dr. Daniel Schreiber. Schreiber exposits about an advanced alien civilization late in its decline looking for some hope of salvation, and that hope is human. Schreiber is helping them in their experiments on humanity, and this film, then, in theory, unpacks just what that experiment is.
The second most unfortunate thing about Dark City is the affectation that Sutherland imbues Schreiber with. He gives the character an out-of-breath speech pattern, speaking in short bursts (not unlike Malcolm's asthmatic friend Stevie on Malcolm in the Middle). It's really a hat-on-a-hat as Schreiber also has a scarred lazy eye and a severe limp as well. Sutherland was making choices.
A few minutes in the proper film starts as Rufus Sewell's John Murdock awakens in the bathtub of a grimy hotel, completely unaware of where or who he is. He receives a phone call from Schreiber warning him some men will be after him, and he needs to leave immediately...it's then that he notices the dead sex worker on the ground with spirals and other sigils carved into her skin. He moves with haste, just as a quartet of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers show up and check out his freshly abandoned place.
The streets of Dark City are just that, dark, dimly lit. Every light seems like a spotlight only illuminating in a cone shape exactly what it's pointing at. Also at midnight, the society of creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers use their psionic abilities (called "tuning") to cause the entire city to grind to a halt, and it's denizens to go inert and unconscious. They also reconfigure the entire city, buildings twist up out of the ground forcing other buildings to shrink or retreat without causing any true damage to speak of. Reality bends to their whims...almost. But these creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers need Dr. Schreiber to concoct new memories for the citizens of this dark city which most citizens have had done a few times over.
But it's John Murdock who has somehow repelled the new personality application and also developed the same tuning powers as the creepy overlords. He poses a genuine threat to the order of things.
As we learn all this, there's also a mystery... is John a murderer. His estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) can't conceive of it, and even John himself has to test whether indeed the impulses are there or if he's truly capable of being a psychopathic killer. The detective on the case, Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) can't see any other options, because to do so would be to admit that reality is not all that it seems. While Sewell's efforts as Murdock are genuinely quite good, there's a case to be made that this works better if Bumstead is it's main figure trying to solve a murder and unraveling the case of John Murdock, which then leads to the revelation of where they actually are and who is actually in charge and why.
Dark City is a really decent sci-fi neo-noir that doesn't always tease its mystery in an efficient or effective manner (especially since the opening voice over gives up so much of the surprise), but the exceptional special effects (for the most part) and shadow-laden atmosphere of the picture do so much of the heavy lifting to keep things engaging when the story may falter. Even 28 years later, on one of the oldest DVD pressings in my collection, the film still looks really good, the copious practical effects, sets and miniatures and the well-masked digital effects standing up very very well.
The third most unfortunate thing about Dark City then is the climax is such utter nonsense. Murdock goes tete-a-tete with "tuning" powers against the...leader? (of a hive mind?) I guess of the creepy, pale, bald motherfuckers... and there's nothing more boring that two characters trapped in a mental battle just leering at each other while crazy cgi bullshit swirls all around them. It's such a let down given some of the film's strengths prior to that point.
The fourth most unfortunate thing is how sleepy Jennifer Connelly is in the role of Emma Murdoch. I can hazard a guess that she's been told to play the character as if she's just had a lifetime of memories slammed into her brain only the night before, so she's effectively a new, but confused person...but for some reason that gets relayed as sedate, with most every line delivered in an unaffected monotone. She's a much better actress than this performance.
But a few unfortunates aside, Dark City holds up as a solid watch. Perhaps it's not the monumental sci-fi story of it's generation (hard to be when The Matrix comes along 13 months later) but it's got very little to be embarassed about, and despite not hiding what could have been some great surprises, still has a surprise or two under its belt.
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
KsMIRT: BLaw BLaw BLawrence
KsMIRT=Kent's Month in Reviewing Television. This week, the Bill Lawrence trifecta.
This time:
Shrinking Season 3 (2026, 10/11 episodes watched, AppleTV)
Scrubs Season 1 (2026, 7/10 episodes watched, Disney+?)
Rooster Season 1 (2026, 5/10 episodes watched, HBO)
Bill Lawrence has been making TV for over 30 years, starting out as a writer with scripts for Boy Meets World, The Nanny and Friends before getting his first shot at creating a show, and hitting right out the gate with Spin City. Co-created with Gary David Goldberg, Spin City ran for 6 seasons and starred Michael J. Fox in a situation comedy that followed him as the deputy mayor of New York and the mayoral staff dealing with the chaos the city never fails to provide.
I never watched a single episode of Spin City, but, I should really go back, as I've been a fan of almost every Bill Lawrence created/co-created production since. Clone High (co-created with Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller) and Scrubs were comedic game changers in the early aughts, bridging silliness and sentimentality in unexpected ways. Cougar Town quickly abandoned its premise of following a forty-something divorcee attempting to hook up with younger men and instead became one of the greatest hangout and drink wine sitcoms (perhaps the greatest?) ever, again where silliness was plentiful.
Skipping past whatever Ground Floor was and the forgotten Rush Hour tv remake, 20 years into his show-creating career Lawrence hit the stratosphere with the most essential watching of the COVID era, Ted Lasso, co-created with Jason Sudekis, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly. Ted Lasso, about an American football coach being brought to England to coach a British football team, with the intent on tanking the team, wound up being the feel-good show everyone needed in a crazy time. The show's positivity and emotional intelligence were front and center, and perhaps hinted at a world where sporting could host the opposite of toxic masculinity, and maybe be therapeudic as well as fun and exciting and dramatic. Also, not unlike Cougar Town, it basically evolved into a hangout show.
Ending Ted Lasso after three seasons was always part of the plan, but it certainly was not a well received ending by many fans (this fan thought it was time), but viewers wouldn't be devoid of Lawrence's particular style of gentle comedy for too long as he, along with Lasso co-star and co-writer Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Muppets) developed Shrinking and, with the Ted Lasso clout behind them managed to pull none other than Harrison fucking Ford as co-star on the show.
I've covered both Season 1 and Season 2 of the show, and in my first season write-up I talk about "the pivot" the show makes in the first season, starting out as a centerpiece for grieving widower fuck-up psychologist Jimmy (Segel) trying to find some balance to his life again (therapist, heal thyself), to, ultimately winding up as a hangout comedy. Cougar Town had 24 episodes in its first season to make such a pivot, that Shrinking managed to do it within 10 was pretty spectacular. By the end of the second season, the Shrinking team was in pretty complete control of what it wanted to be, and how it wanted to be it. It's a show about trauma and healing, the power of friendship and therapy. It's as if COVID did a real number on the mental health of its creators, and they wanted to bring to the world the idea that there's real health benefits in making connections with others.
By this third season, the core cast has settled in, their interpersonal dynamics firmly in place, and their nuances quite familiar. Lest things get too comfortable, it's time to shake things up. Alice (Lukita Maxwell) is graduating and going off to college, Brian (Michael Urie) is having a baby, and Sean's (Luke Tennie) food truck is going good but he gets a job offer he can't refuse. Jimmy may have found a real romantic connection for the first time since his wife's death with Sofie (Cobie Smulders). Liz's (Christa Miller) beautiful idiot not-quite-adult boys cause trouble, while Derek (Ted McGinley) has a cardiac issue. Gabby (Jessica Williams) takes on a challenging new client while also looking at the future of her career. Paul (Ford) deals with new complications of Parkinsons (fuck Parkinsons) and makes some big life decisions.
The third season is full of meaty half-hour episodes, finding the right balance of humour and emotion...which is to say mostly funny but able to support real weighty material. Last season introduced Brett Goldstein as the drunk driver who killed Tia (Jimmy's wife, Alice's mom) and Alice and Jimmy managed to find real connection with and ultimately forgiveness for him. This season continues that relationship for a short time but reasonably finds an ending, prompted by Gabby (Tia's best friend) who is short on forgiveness and not quiet about it. Jimmy's dad (Jeff Daniels) also turns up more than once and whatever progress Jimmy made in the past two years is somewhat undone by his father's presence. A fairweather father, Randy has always entered and disappeared from Jimmy's life at his own whim, and Jimmy's abandonment issues stemming from his father, the death of Tia, and now Alice and Paul's leaving all come to a pretty ugly head by the end of episode 10.
Mercifully it's not the final episode, with one more to go, but given the sweeping changes of this season, "will there be a Season 4" is the big question in my mind. It was always clear that having Harrison Ford was not going to be a long-term thing for the show. Getting thirty-one episodes out of the man was kind of a miracle, but it's also an incredible late-stage role for Ford. He gets a lot of mileage both comedically and dramatically out of his grizzled exterior, but where season 1 Paul was just a Harrison Ford-type role, by season 3 he's most definitely Paul, not the biggest movie star of all time. But he's also very much a co-star on this sitcom that feels like he's sharing equal space when in a scene with a sitcom vet like Miller or relative newcomers like Maxwell and Tennie (also we get to see Ford share scenes with guest stars like Jeff Daniels, Michael J. Fox as well a Candice Bergen which is beautiful to see these amazing veteran actors together). It's a Bill Lawrence special, finding chemistry between all the players in the cast, finding a reason to have even the two most disparate characters share the screen. There's no ego in Ford's performance, and in the closing episodes of the season, the amount of hugs the man begrudgingly gives out shows that there was meaning for him in the experience
The third season opener was a hefty 40-minute episode, and the real worry was that Shrinking would fall down the Ted Lasso rabbit hole of overlong episodes. Comedy needs tight timing, editing, and for sitcoms, they need a sense of consistency and familiarity in storytelling. While Shrinking isn't bound by specific sets, it also doesn't have the same go-anywhere liberty that Ted Lasso did, and so in keeping each episode in the rest of the season (save its opener and probably its finale) under a half hour was pretty key, and seemingly purposeful.
With all the shifts to the series this season, if it does come back for a fourth, the pieces are in place for other players to step up into larger roles, and there's no shortage of people who seem interested in stepping into a Bill Lawrence production, given the names and faces that work their way into the show.
In the relaunch, J.D. has been acting as a private physician for the Los Angeles elite, but he's not feeling fulfilled. When a patient winds up at Sacred Heart, he runs into Dr. Cox (McGinley) who is having trouble relating to the fresh batch of interns. Seeing J.D. interact with them inspires him to give up his seat as chief of medicine, and passes it on to J.D. This immediately makes a rival out of Dr. Park (Joel Kim Booster) who was vying for the role. In returning to the hospital he's reunited with his BFF Turk, now the head of surgery. It also reunites him with Elliot, his ex-wife... and he's now her boss.
The show, somehow, falls right into its old patterns and tone that feels like it hasn't missed a beat, that it hasn't been 15 years since it was last on the air. J.D. still daydreams (those quick-cutaways into J.D.'s fantasies are still there, though feel a little less silly and a little more sad coming from a 50-something, but they commit to the bits and they can still be pretty funny), and he and Turk still have their hetero life mate dynamic. J.D. and Elliot's dynamic is pretty much the same as we left it, full of tension, only the will-they/wont-they has long been resolved. There's mercifully not a lot of bitterness between them, and it really seems like they're still wanting to be friends, but a lot of history and feelings get in the way.
Since Reyes can't be in the show full-time, Carla's stand-ins are Pippa (X Mayo) and Francios (Michael James Scott) as the sassiest of sassy nurses who best be kept happy. They're comic relief from the peripherals at this time and not the most fleshed out characters, but they're delightful. Vanessa Bayer (Saturday Night Live) is the new head of HR as well as the hospital's wellness director and comes hard with Bayer's patented style of awkward energy. There are only hints so far, but her character is going to get real weird, for sure.
The quintet of interns are going to have a hard time evolving in a truncated ten episode season. They each are monotrope characters that are going to have a hard time escaping their one defining characteristic. Asher (Jacob Dudman) is a nebbish Brit, Sam (Ava Bunn) is a social media influencer, Blake (David Gridley) is handsome and egotistical, Amara (Layla Mohammadi) was homeschooled and is socially awkward, while Dashana (Amanda Morrow) is overconfident to a fault. The show has Asher crushing on Amara, and Amara maybe finding herself more into Blake, and then really seems to be leaning on the animosity Sam has for Blake for future will-they/wont-theys, but there's not been enough time to really invest in any of these characters to care all that much about them. Bunn is the standout performer of the five of them, but her character Sam has yet to reveal herself, while Blake has the most depth, since he seems to be the one hiding the most secrets. If this were old TV seasons of 20+ episodes, there would be no worry that these characters would expand and each would get at least one spotlight, but as it stands any spotlights must be shared between them.
The Bill Lawrence of today is not the Bill Lawrence of Scrubs season 1-9, which means that at some point I'm expecting the whole hospital setting, the characters doing the rounds and visiting patients, to really recede into the background (much like how the importance of the time with patients in Shrinking has, well, shrunk over 3 seasons) and the hang-out feels come to the fore. Once we start seeing unexpected pairings of characters, then you know it's happening. That said, this is the most situational of situation comedies where the situation will undoubtedly impede on any hanging out. I think the majority of the first season will be focused primarily on the series finding its core in Elliot, Turk and J.D. so that it's solid enough to let them lean back some and give way to the others in the future.
Where Shrinking has extended family and patients filling out its peripherals, and Scrubs has patients and student interns bolstering its roster, Lawrence's third concurrent series Rooster (co-created with Matt Tarsis), finds its collection assembled from students and teachers. There are no sessions or rounds, but there are classrooms, so the ingredients are not all that dissimilar. Nor are they unfamiliar.
Set on the New England campus of Ludlow College, the show is named for the main character in Greg Russo's (Carrell) series of dad-friendly action hero novels. Russo is visiting the campus to give a guest lecture, but it's just an excuse for him to check in on his daughter Katie (Charly Clive) who teaches there. Katie's just been involved in a campus scandal where her professor husband, Archie (Dunster), was outed as having an affair with a graduate student, Sunny (Lauren Tsai). Vibes are weird on campus.
Nobody is more excited to have Russo on campus than Dean Walter Mann (McGinley) who is hoping Russo will stay on as writer-in-resident at the college, and teaching the writing class for the semester. The position was supposed to go to a friend of Prof. Dylan Sheperd (Danielle Deadwyler), and so an early awkward romantic encounter between them becomes even more awkward now that he's sticking around.
Carrell has an energy that has served him well throughout his prolific career. His sense of discomfort mixed with a need to please make him unwittingly witty, likeably nonthreatening, and also sympathetic. Carrell has a gift for playing awkward characters without ever leaning into the cringe factor. Cringe comedy relies upon a character obliviously behaving in ways that will obviously provoke an uncomfortable situation, a Carrell character is all-too aware that he is behaving in an manner that makes situations uncomfortable and his effusive, conciliatory and apology-laden attempts to back out of it is what disarms any cringe. Also, a running joke already, only four episodes in, is Russo getting written up and standing before the board for his unintentional behaviour.
In the background, the show about a middle-aged progressives view of what it means to be liberal in modern times, when the modern kids have grown up with much more progressive and rigid standards around what its offensive and to whom and why. McGinley's Dean Mann is a liberal for sure, but is confounded by the kids that are in his school and what triggers them, but his kind of staunchness about not caring if he's offensive contrasts against Russo who never wants to offend but always does (and then there's Ruck's Dean Riggs who is definitely a conservative who Mann is further contrasted against).
I'm unfamiliar with Charly Clive as a performer, but she's getting a real spotlight role here. Clive manages to be one of the messiest people currently on television without being even close to becoming a nightmare to watch. She is very much Greg Russo's daughter. She brings warmth and sympathy to Katie, while also still being somewhat incapable of getting out of her own way. It's a funny dynamic she has with Dunster who should be an absolute villain, yet, Katie still loves him and we can see, if only a hint, as to why. Of course, he is also a monster, and the relationship he has with Sunny should be problematic, but Sunny is also a character here too, not a villain, and one who is much more an active participant in her relationship than a passive one (she's also somewhat spectrum coded, which will be interesting to see if the show actually explores).
There are numerous supporting players, including the local campus police officer (Rory Scoville) and Mann's assistant (Annie Mumolo) as well as over a half dozen familar student faces already populating the campus and classrooms. In true Lawrence fashion, we're seeing the mixing and matching of these characters only a few episodes in, so while there's a lot of entanglements to sort through, the "hangout" vibes are already in sight.
Rooster is a funny, warm, and hilariously melodramatic show ... like at the end of the first episode Katie burns down Archie's house by accident after he tells her that Sunny is pregnant. There are repercussions but nothing in this show is presented as end of the world for anyone. It's another Lawrence specialty being able to find both the comedic and emotional core, and to balance them just right.
Rooster is already an immediate favourite, and if Shrinking is coming to an end or going on hiatus, it is the perfect replacement. Scrubs I let go of midway through its original run, most probably because life was a bit tumultuous at the time (and I may not have had access to cable) rather than anything to do with the quality of the show in its later seasons, but at the same time despite being capably updated, it still feels like a show I watched 20 year ago and I'm not necessarily that committed to sticking with it.
If Shrinking ends with this third season, I'll be okay with it, but I really want to see what a Season 4 would look like given all the fluctuations we're seeing at this season's close. (But if we're talking about a Lawrence show I'm desperate to see return, well, where's Season 2 of Bad Monkey, Bill?) We're in another crazy time, surely the craziest in our lifetime and not getting brighter any time soon, so these are the feel-good shows we kind of need in theses.
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