The House

2017, d. Andrew Jay Cohen -- Netflix

If I had maybe taken a film studies class at any point in my life, maybe I would be better able to disseminate what exactly went wrong with The House.  It's not for lack of talent, that's for sure.  Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler and Jason Mantzoukas lead the film, and a deep roster of impressive comedic talent in supporting roles, including Nick Kroll, Allison Tollman, Michaela Watkins, Rob Huebel, Andrea Savage, Cedric Yarbrough, Lennon Parham, Rory Scovel, and brief appearances from Jeremy Renner, Kyle Kinane, Jessica St. Clair, Sam Richardson and Randall Park.  These are all extremely gifted comedic actors, and yet the laughs they generate individually and as an ensemble are few.

The film is the directorial debut from Andrew Jay Cohen, cowritten with Brendan O'Brien.  The pair had previously written the hilarious Neighbours and Neighbours 2: Sorority Rising, and the modestly successful Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, so there is somewhat of a winning track record... and yet The House is utterly bereft of what a comedy needs, humour.

In the film, the Johansen's (Ferrell and Poehler) daughter is accepted to a prestigious fake college, but they are deep in debt and cannot afford it.  Mantzoukas plays Frank their depressed, gambling-addicted, recently separated friend who, after a brief trip to Vegas (literally a 2-3 minute diversion) convinces the couple to start an illegal casino with him.  Very quickly the Casino takes off, it expands into all the usual casino things (massage centers, poolside bar, performance room, betting, underground fight club) and as the house, the trio need to maintain order, which means punishing cheaters.  This all puts them at odds with the local mob and a corrupt city councilor, none of which has any real weight.  All the building tension is put upon the Johansen's unwavering need to fund their daughter's education at any expense, including their own moral code and sense of decency.

If I had to guess, the film got lost in the direction.  Cohen, being a novice feature director, likely had a few nerves working with his very stacked cast.  His script for the film likely became merely a template in the end, and not the core structure.  There seems to be much deference to the improvisational talents of the cast, and in the editing, The House plays like a poorly stitched quilt of little off-the-cuff moments rather than a fully realized story or character study.  What was likely a comedic narrative of good intentions going off the rails becomes a perplexingly choppy series of vignettes and montages of *almost* funny moments that don't cohere to the thrust of the movie.

Farrell and Poehler fail at creating relatable or inviting characters.  The Johansens never feel real, as they never present anything close to a human reaction to their ridiculous scenarios.  At least one of them needed to play the straight man in the situation, but both are constantly flexing their improv muscles scene-by-scene which winds up taking them out of their character.  Other characters in the film are given motivations and personalities, yet they have no real character or arc.  A smarter film would have built up this large cast of supporting characters and let them do more of the comedic heavy lifting and put Ferrel and Poehler both as straight men (but who would dare tell Ferrell and Poehler to rein it in?).  I could see, say, Jason Bateman and Rashida Jones as the Johansens as straight men, generating comedy in reacting to the insanity they're creating around them while also breathing real life and sympathy into the couple.  As is, they become more and more unlikeable as the film goes on.

Mantzoukas is a personal favourite comedic performer, having incredible improv skills, as well as a real gift with unhinged, disreputable, and coarse characters.  As Frank, Mantzoukas plays the pathetic desperation well, at first, but the more room the cast is given to improvise, the more of Mantzoukas' traditional comedic instincts come out, which seem at odds with Frank as a character.  His motivation is to win his wife back.  He does, but it's inexplicable how he actually does that.  It's lost in the edit.  Same with Huebel's Officer Chandler turning on Kroll's corrupt councilor...the reasoning disappears in the edit.

It's an unfortunate mess of a film.  So much wasted talent.  The fact that the film closes with an incredibly short blooper reel (also not particularly funny) is either a sign that Cohen didn't know what to do with the footage he got, or that everyone was sorely off their game, or they were seriously lacking in direction.

10 for 10: these TV things, let them bleed

[10 for 10... that's 10 movies -- or TV shows -- which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about.  Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie --or TV show-- we watch.  How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?   ]

In this edition:
What We Do In The Shadows Season1 - FX
Doom Patrol Season1 - Space/Crave
Krypton Season1 - Space/Crave
Fleabag Seasons1&2 - Amazon Prime
AP Bio Season2 - NBC
Westworld Season2 - HBO
Review Seasons1-3 - Crave
Letterkenny Season1 - Crave
Barry Seasons1&2 - HBO
3% Season1 - Netflix

...aaand  GO!

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I love Flight of the Conchords, which led me to discover the film Eagle vs Shark which Jemaine Clement had done with Taika Waititi.  I wish I could say I fell in love with Waititi's absurd drollness immediately but it took a couple films to get me there.  The cinematic What We Do In The Shadows takes on a semi-improvised mockumentary format (in the Christopher Guest model) and is such a well crafted piece that should live in growing infamy as one of the funniest movies of the decade.  I worried that a TV translation of the movie would lessen it somehow.  Classic cinematic comedies grow in the zeitgeist over the years, as people start incorporating quotes from it into their regular lives.  With a TV show in the offering would it dilute the film's penetration into the zeitgeist as it divides people's attentions?  And could it even possibly live up to the film's brilliance, without seeming like a pale copy.

What little faith I had and what little I knew of the production.  Clement is credited as the show's creator, also he has written and directed some of the episodes as well as crafted an exceptional ensemble of writers.  He brought semi-legendary (and Kent household favourite) comedic performer Matt Berry into a cast of largely unknown talent, all who very quickly proved themselves exceptional in the first half hour of the show.  Waititi himself was not far away from the proceeding either.   It's a show that transposes the concept to Staten Island (Toronto posing as...) and finds many new angles to vampires in this setting.  There are genuine shocks, surprises, and big belly laughs in every episode.  It's very much the equal of its predecessor film, and rather than reinventing the world, it shares it nicely, sporting with one of the best ever cameo ensembles mid way through its run.

[12:27]

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I honestly had low expectations for Doom Patrol.  I've been an longtime fan of the comics but it's taken many forms over the years, none of which I thought would be at all palatable to a mass audience, nor even adaptable into a live action format of any kind.  Plus, I had heard that Brendan Fraser and Matt Bomer (the show's biggest names, next to Timothy Dalton) would be voicing Robotman and Negative Man, but with other actors doing the physical performance.  I thought, well, talent like that only providing voice work, sounds kind of cheap.  Turns out I was wrong on all fronts, and I'm so pleased to be wrong.

Doom Patrol is one of my favourite shows of the year.  It dispenses with any pretense of superheroism, and instead focuses on the human element of its cast, a menagerie of science-freaks... a former race car driver with his brain in a robot, a woman with 64 split personalities (each with their own superpower), a woman who can shapeshift (but with great strain and, when relaxed or anxious turns into a blob), a man with a possibly alien spirit living within him, and the Chief, who tries to help them all mentally and physically...but is he as altruistic as he seems?

Time is strange in the show, and perhaps its only drawback...the characters seem to have lived long lives in isolation (Rita since the 50's, Larry since the 60's, Jane since the 70's, Cliff being a relative newcomer) but are only now dealing with aspects of themselves (Larry coming to terms with both his sexuality and negative spirit partnership, Rita letting go of her ego and pretense).  Even Chief has been around for over 100 years at this point.  The show barely touches on why time is so askew, as if these great spans of time are barely even that.

The show embraces the weirdness -- there's a vengeful mouse in one episode and a donkey who has an entire subdimension up its ass in another for example -- but the show always centers on the emotional drama of the characters (and likewise understands their absurd reality).  There's real heart to the show, and much of the charm is in the vast unexpectedness.  Fraser and Bomer also surprisingly appear a lot, actual starring roles, but in flashbacks for the characters.  Fraser most notably gives an award-worthy vocal performance as Cliff Steele... the intonations in his reactions are ceaselessly hilarious.  And the show looks great, very cinematic.  Visual effects may be a little cheaper than a big budget movie but for a small platform  like the DC Universe, the show has a very big feel.

[23:54]

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Krypton was a hard pass for me when it first came out.  A show about Superman's grandfather on Krypton?  Yawn.  Who wants that?  Who is asking for it?  Nobody.  The show was in rumoured production for a while...for so long in fact I had thought it had fallen through altogether, but no, the SYFY channel in the states was committed and made the damn thing.  It looked ... not great from the commercials I had seen and I wanted nothing to do with it.

So what changed?  I dunno, perhaps it was the teasing for Season 2 which showed glimpses of Brainiac (who looked really comics-accurate for a change) and Doomsday and Lobo... plus I caught wind that Adam Strange was in this too, which piqued my curiosity.  So I gave the first episode a chance and it was... not that bad, actually.  The show's creators made a real effort to build a unique society in Kandor City on Krypton, highlighting the unfair class and hierarchical structures.  It seemed like there could be some actual meat on these bones, playing towards hard sci-fi rather than loose superheroism.

Alas, the show gets kind of lost in the loose superheroism, and forgets about the harder sci-fi elements.  The intriguing production values of the pilot start to look cheaper and cheaper the more the season runs on and sets are used and reused and budgets start to run out. Story wise, there's a lot of treading water happening, and a lot of melodrama that doesn't really go anywhere, and yet, there's enough momentum and more than a few surprises along the way [Zod] to make things interesting.  And yes, Brainiac, when he finally shows up, is pretty damn cool.  I'm not going to be right on top of Season 2 when it comes out, but I'll give it a watch eventually when time permits.

[31:44]

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Phoebe Waller-Bridge is one of the fastest rising names in Hollywood.  I was completely unaware of her until about a year ago, when Killing Eve hit TV screens.  She was the show's creator and showrunner, but the only reason I even store the name in my brain was that she was also the voice of Lando's robot lover L337 in Solo: A Star Wars Story.  Her voice in Solo was so assured and hilarious, and somehow intimately familar without having ever heard it before.

With this newfound familiarity, I began hearing about how great her British TV programmes were, specifically Fleabag.  I had no idea what it was about, but the first ep lands us in Fleabag's lap (a lot of the characters go unnamed) as she navigates her family, her sexuality, and her lingering grief and depression some time after the accidental death of her best (and only?) friend.  It all sounds very dramatic and intense, but Fleabag's candidness, taking aside glances or breaking fourth wall mid scene addressing the camera, ingratiates you to this troubled character.

It's a character study definitely and she can make any situation uncomfortably funny (I don't know that it ever falls directly into cringe comedy, however, because those asides-at-camera deflate some of the cringe-y tension with Fleabag aware that her behavior was inappropriate, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes intentionally).   Season 1's 6 episodes are a funny, if challenging ride, but Season 2 is where the show explodes into brilliance.  Fleabag meets her match in a sexy Catholic priest played by Andrew Scott.  Their chemistry is incredible.  Plus her character is in a better space at the start of the season and much of the difficulties in the season start to be external to her (Olivia Coleman's beefed up role as her cheerily spiteful artist stepmother is a glorious thing to watch).  I cannot overstate how worth it it is to get through season one in order to have season 2.  It's up there with Leftovers season 3 as one of the great works of television.

[43:26]

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RIP AP Bio.  Your life was cut short way too soon. This was a show that easily could be spun off into 17 different shows, each one following one of the characters within it.  It built such an amazing community in its 25-ish episodes, call it the Simpsons effect where you have a large roster of recurring background characters who occasionally seep into the foreground then recede into the back again. In this case it's a high school in Toledo, Ohio.

The first season found fallen Harvard philosophy prof Jack (Always Sunny In Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton) taking a denigrating job as a high school advanced placement biology teacher, living in his dead mother's house, and having zero interest in being that Welcome Back, Kotter guy.  He wasn't going to do anything that gave any impression he cared.  He wasn't going to dress in anything but sweats and t-shirts and baggy sweaters, he wasn't going to teach the damn class (keep quiet and you get an "A"), and he wasn't going to do anything but get the hell out of his current situation.  He was prickly and sarcastic and even a little bullying towards his students.  But Principal Durbin (Patton Oswalt) was so enamored to have a Harvard prof in his school, he let Jack get away with anything.

The show's tone shifted quickly in that first season, from focusing on Jack's caustic nature to how Jack's caustic nature just makes things worse for Jack.  He was its focal character, but we see him  through the eyes of everyone else, and everyone else sees him for who he is...and kind of accepts him. The class of students is a glorious ensemble of nerd types who very quickly start to defy the usual expectations of nerd types, and Season 2 gives way to even more of their lives and thoughts.

Jack meanwhile softens a tad in season 2, finding a relationship that gets him and sees through him, even though his get-the-hell-out-of-Toledo puts a barrier between them.  Paula Pell, as Durbin's office admin, is the shows secret weapon.  Her relentless positivity, even when she's hopping mad (literally in one occasion) highlights a comedic performer left in the shadows far too long.  She's brilliant.  The entire cast of this thing is top to bottom amazing and I want more and more time with them all.

[54:13]

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I reviewed Westworld back on April 14, 2017.  So it's been over 2 years since I last watched the show.  I was worried launching into Season 2 how much I had forgotten that would be important to proceedings.  Turns out, most of it was recapped subtly in-show or it came back when necessary.

The first season was pretty damn tight with the culminating realization that there's two different timelines at play by the end, but season 2 again plays with timelines but with less fluidity.  A lot of it has to do with Bernard's memories fracturing and putting him in different timelines in his own head, but it makes for messy watching.  As well the show's direction seems to be exploring whether the artificial intelligence of Westworld is still life or if they are just unreal constructs with the facade of emotions and intelligence... programmed responses rather than learned behaviour, programmed memories and dreams, rather than a real subconsciousness.

It's that aspect I keyed into the most, as some characters felt like real, thinking people and others felt like automatons.  It was wholly intentional, as Dolores' actions turn her more and more into a monster, the more human she seems, same with some of the other characters who, despite their programming being changed find their way back to their natural state of mind.  The humans become increasingly callous, and Dolores, leading the revolt, responds in kind. The pile of dead bodies in this show (both hosts and humans) is astonishing, and likely record setting.  Like nudity in the first season, viewers become numb to death this season, and at a certain point death doesn't ever seem like something even possible anymore.

First half of the season struggles to find its feet again, a diversion into Shogunworld is visually fantastic and its parallels to Westworld are delightful, but it's almost unnecessary story-wise.  The latter half pulls itself back together and gains its directive thrust (an episode focusing on one of the native characters is a real high point for the series, a meditative, beautiful and painful hour of television).  Though not nearly as rewarding overall as season 1, it's still a pretty great watch.

[1:06:37]

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For the past 10 years I've come to know Andy Daly as one of the best improv character performers in podcasting.  Daly knows how to inject a richness and depth to his characters that makes them feel like larger than life people rather than just a pliable joke.  There's an inner consistency he brings to them on shows like Comedy Bang Bang, Womp It Up, and his own Andy Daly Pilot Project that spotlight him as a premiere improv performer.

Review [with Forrest MacNeil] put Daly on camera as Forrest MacNeil, host of a program where he reviews any and all life experiences as submitted by viewers of the show.  It may seem like just simple basis for quasi-sketch comedy, but in the process of reviewing things like "Doing a William Tell" or "Being falsely accused" or "Eating 15 pancakes" we find a character study of Forrest MacNeil, a family man who is willing to sacrifice anything and everything for the integrity of his program.  It really kicks into high gear early in the first season when he has to review what it's like to get a divorce, and culminates at its peak when he's asked to review what it's like to kill a man.  The after affects of these scenarios linger as he does things like reviewing what it's like to join the mile high club, or get into a bare knuckle brawl, or start a cult.

Forrest is not insane per se, but his commitment to his reviewing integrity is certainly questionable.  The show has some moments that will surely send shivers up your spine while also making you laugh close to tears.  We learn through Review that Forrest, in trying to be a good reviewer, becomes a pretty terrible person despite his better nature.  Watching Daly do despicable things so reticently, so reluctantly (like blackmailing his girlfriend) is the performer's most shining moments.  And it end so aptly, on such a perfect note that really brings the shows philosophical implications into light.  A real wild ride of a series.

[1:18:57]

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There was a low brow primalness to Trailer Park Boys that utterly repelled me from the show, but one that I respected for giving a Canadian property a rather massive hit outside its borders.  But celebrating trash culture in a scripted or improvised way made it like the Jersey Shore of comedy.  I was under the impression that Letterkenny would be more of this, more dumb humour for the dumb people to celebrate their dumb lives in dumb culture.

But very quickly in the Letterkenny pilot it becomes obvious that this isn't about dumbness as comedy, but an exploration of small town Ontario life, and that the hicks aren't necessarily dumb, but just kind of bored.  Created and starring Jared Keeso (originally started as a youtube series), the show highlight the small town animosity between the farming hick, the drug addled EDM skids kids, the hockey jocks, and the religious freaks.  It's a look at the young life in town, highschool through to early 20s, and it's mile-a-minute dialogue is so regionally colloquial and fast paced that it's really hard to keep up with.

Via the show Keeso has a lot to say about this small town life, both in celebration and in critiquing it.  His character, Wayne, is the toughest guy in town (an early episode declares he's retired from the fighting life, but upon learning about the other jerks claiming to be the toughest guy in town, he takes each of them on in surprisingly organized and civilized fashion) and perhaps the most sensible.  He suffers fools, because he has no other choice.  He's a farmer, living the life he wants to live, but seemingly only ever tolerating the world around him.

It's a hectic show that is looking-down-its-nose at lowbrow comedy while also kind of reveling in it.  It walks a tightrope in this regard and does it better than almost every other effort of this type.  It's also shot incredibly well, with a cinematic quality to its composition and editing.  I will slowly pick at it and see how it changes from season to season as it gets further away from its youtube roots.

[1:32:30]

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Barry has been a bit of a media darling since its debut on HBO last year.  Bill Hader left SNL for other projects but his film work (outside of his great costarring role in Amy Schumer's Trainwreck) never really put him in the spotlight.  His series Documentary Now! with Fred Armisen on IFC is one of the greatest showcases of his character-creation talents but it's a show largely gone unrecognized by the media (as most IFC shows do).  But in Barry he gets his starring role as a discharged veteran with sever PTSD who works as a hitman and decides to try and quit the life when he joins an acting class in L.A.  It's a boffo premise that shouldn't really work, but does because of Hader's committed performance and Henry Winkler's egocentric drama teacher.

In a sense Barry is taking the piss out of the world of Hollywood wanna bes and the people who prey on them, and yet it also understands them very, very well.  It blends this examination of these delusional actor types (and their equally delusional mentors) with the various mafia figures Barry encounters, who have delusions of their own (only theirs often result in extreme violence).  The key player in this is Noho Hank, an absurdly wide-eyed, cheerful character for the mafia, but an utter joy every moment he is on screen.

The first season ends with the understanding that Barry, our protagonist, is outright a bad man.  He's a wolf hiding in sheep's clothing because he desperately wants to be a sheep, but his nature as a wolf is inescapable.  This is the thrust of season 2, finding Barry looking ever more sheepish, but those fangs come out far too often.  There are some solid twists this season, with a dynamite middle act in episode 5 where Barry decides not to do a hit his normal way and it leads into perhaps the wildest, most surreal action movie ever.  It's just a damn golden piece of television that justifies the show's existence from now to eternity.

As much as I love that episode and Noho Hank, I still have problems with Barry most of the time, primarily it's that Dexter effect where this bad man, trying to be a good man, has insinuated himself into regular people's lives.  Decent enough people who now actually care for him and he could wind up getting them killed, or worse, leaving them with the emotional scars when they discover they were friends or lovers with a monster.  I have a difficult time with stories like these.  I like Barry as a bad man trying to do good, but I don't like Barry as a bad man pretending he's a good man and willing to kill to maintain that illusion.

[1:46:04]

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3% has been on Netflix for a few years now but it barely makes a dent in the discussion around what's worth watching.  I recall on seeing a few positive mentions of it on Facebook when it first started but next to nothing since.  Likely because of the lack of attention I never bothered to figure out what it was actually about.  I heard it was a bit dystopian and figured it was probably about class issues in a future world.

Which is what it is exactly about.

In the not too distant future Brazil, things have gotten really bad.  Society has effectively collapsed and it's a struggle to survive on its run-down streets. Everyone is given the promise that, at 20 years old, they can take "the process" and perhaps become one of the 3% to go to the island, a place of refined, luxurious existence, perfection, heaven.  The first season follows a subset of the hundreds of entrants as they take the latest round of the process.  The show gives us plenty of world building, insight into how these structures that govern the 3% work and what the trials are accomplishing.  Each episode focuses on a specific trial, as well as a specific character, providing flashbacks for that character.  It's the Lost model, and it's very effective here.

Also at play is the work of Ezequiel, the trial-runner, who is under audit from the ruling council, and has a secret life that threatens his prestigious role.  As well there's the threat of an underground resistance group who don't believe there should be an elite society, that its riches should be shared with everyone, that the trials are subjective and discriminatory and can take a deadly toll on the participants (sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally).

It's a show with limited budget and limited sets, but it doesn't need more than what it has, and it leans into the drama and intrigue it's set up.  It cares about its characters, and the more time you spend with them, coming to understand them, you learn that they're all desperate in their own way to achieve their goal, and that none of them are intending to be bad, but none are all that good either... except maybe Fernando, a character through which the show examines ableism like no other show or movie I've seen.

There are a few things that don't make sense, such as how the process cant discern if people have fake implants (when scarring is a telltale sign) or if they have smuggled implants on their body.

[1:58:22]
Ran a little long in each of these little reviews but that's because most of them venture on the smarter side of television and I enjoy exploring them.

3 Short Paragraphs: Peppermint

2018, Pierre Morel (Taken) -- download

A female led revenge flick by the director of Taken; sounds like the perfect candidate for one of the topics we considered for the re-engineering of this blog into a podcast, a boozy podcast. But I admit, I was rather boozy when I committed to this (re)direction, so I am not sure I am so taken with it now... pun intended. BUT, the topic -- the female empowerment movie in the post female-empowerment era was a fun idea. What? WTF did I mean by post female-empowerment? I mean, in the era when old white men are getting to define what female-empowerment is; back in those days it just meant angry women with a gun, which is basically what this movie is. We hope we are moving into an era where women can get to define what the term means and whether a movie is of it. I doubt we are.

Anywayz, Jennifer Garner is a woman whose family is gunned down in front of her, daughter included. Gunning down the husband is always fine, but once you kill kids, all the cards are off the table. I am not sure what that term means, but they always use it. Not only does she identify and testify but everyone believes her, and knows she is correct -- open and shut case. But dirty judges (and cops and...) get the case tossed out by throwing her anti-psychotic medication in her face. And when it happens, she does go psychotic and is dragged away literally kicking & screaming. Who wouldn't. But she escapes her captors (the state) and disappears.

Years later, lithe Jennifer Garner has returned from overseas where she learned to fight & kill. She begins killing off the members of the cartel who slew her family, while hiding out in an abandoned car on Skid Row. Yeah the famous one, which turns out is not just a term coined by Hollywood but a real place in LA. Things escalate until she confronts the cartel leader and gets to kill him. Yes, the movie is that boring, with only the barest hints of what it probably wanted to be.

3 Short Paragraphs: Arctic

2018, Joe Penna (some shorts & TV) -- download

Get up, check the fishing lines, scrape the snow out of the SOS ditches (black dirt beneath stands out), eat some raw fish and climb to the top of a nearby ridge to hand-crank the beeping alert box. This is Overgård's (Mads Mikkelsen, Polar) routine, into which we are tossed. There is no background, no plane crash, no flashbacks to a family life or coworkers that miss him. We just get the snow, the cold and the isolation. It is quiet and morose. That he is still mostly sane is astounding. And then a helicopter appears to rescue him, only to crash themselves. Inside he finds the pilot dead, and the copilot clinging to life. From that moment onward, Overgård's routine is blown away like so much snow.

He has been surviving. Barely. He knows of a life station some distance away but he is afraid to go, afraid to make the trek that he cannot fully believe he will survive. But now the copilot is here. Not only does she provide the human contact he has missed for so long. But she will not survive his routine of waiting. So, he packs them up, makes the best of his stores and sleds he can, and off they go.

This movie is quiet and desperate. Overgård occasionally talks to her, but she barely ever wavers into consciousness. His only real companion is the terrain. They have to get to that station or she will die. But both may die on the way. It doesn't surprise me that Mads pulls off this story; he has always seemed like the actor who could well portray hardship. But the rest of the movie has to be given to the director, as he is the one who coaxes the portrayal out of the landscape and the temperature and the isolation. So, kudos, as I was left freezing and shaken at the end of the journey.

Mechanic(s)

The Mechanic, 2011, Simon West (Con Air) -- Netflix
The Mechanic: Resurrection, 2016,  Dennis Gansel (We Are the Night) -- Netflix

Conversation in the car the other day, "I never really liked action movies, but current movies such as John Wick have redefined what used to be a critically maligned genre." I didn't say that and he didn't say that, but that is what the conversation distilled down to. I tried to add in, but was shouted down, as they are wont to do, that every age of "action movie" had its John Wick and also, conversely its Chuck Norris flick. But I would also go as far as saying, dispensing with the Asylum level of flick, even the most terrible of genre action movie has gotten... better ?

Note: I am crafting above paragraph to see whether said coworkers in said car even read this fucking blog. Probably not. Fuckers.

The Mechanic is a re-make of a 70s Charles Bronson movie; I have no idea if it was John Wick 1972 or just the dross we speak of above. Never saw it, never really heard of it. But Bronson was the epitome of the dumb action movie "hero", not as terrible as Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal, but close. Many would probably lump Jason Statham into that place now, for better or worse. I think he is a cut above, carries a certain amount of charm to his roles. In this movie, he portrays Arthur Bishop, a mechanic, a hit-man, an assassin for hire with the ability & flair to make his kills look like they need to. If it has to be an accident, a simple hit, or an elaborate kill that sends a message, that is what he does.

After an intro kill that establishes his style, he is sent his next objective -- kill his mentor & friend Harry (Donald Sutherland). Harry has been accused of botching a job on purpose leading to the deaths of three operatives (other hit men) and pocketing a couple of million bucks. Bishop doesn't argue the details, and for some odd reason, either does Sutherland. And thus he dies.

Bishop is not happy about it, and his guilt leads him to take Harry's son Stephen (Ben Foster, Hell or High Water) under his wing. Stephen is angry, but he always was, and the only thing Bishop can do is turn his anger into the one skill he has -- killing. What makes this a cut above how other, more terrible movies, would have done it, is that its not a cut scene, or montage, but the full second act. We establish the characters, let them get to know each other and keep with the style of the movie. Its a nice bit, not spectacular but enjoyable.

And then the third act comes along, which lets the movie slide into the expected gutter. Its not that its entirely bad, its just .... typical. Foster and Statham hold their own, but its all about shooting and... well, I admit, was entirely forgettable. I don't even really remember what happened, other than Bishop discovering he was betrayed and punishing said betrayer. The movie comes to a close when Stephen realizes it was Bishop who killed his father, and despite their complete disconnect, he kills Bishop.

Or does he. Of course he doesn't.

And along comes The Mechanic: Resurrection. This is the movie that completely embraces its entirely pedestrian stroll into action flick territory. Whereas the first movie at least wanted to recreate a 70s actioner with some style, and attention to detail, this is ... just an action movie. Again, its not terrible its just ... typical. Even Statham cannot raise it above its mediocre status, Hell, not even Jessica Alba can help me out here.

This one tries to add to Bishop's history, drawing him out of his "retirement" and back into the game. His old friend from childhood wants him to kill three Bad Guys and uses Alba as a plant, a manufactured motivation. Even Michelle Yeoh comes along for the ride, briefly, to coax Bishop into doing the movie.

This is where I wonder why; why can't they at least try. In the 80s and 90s I was exposed to tons of Arnie and Stallone style action movies where the plot only led us from one explosion to the next, from one bad guy (small letters) being blown up and shot and killed in such boring ways, it just became a body count. Sure Wick has a HUGE body count, but the behaviour is wrapped up by style and flair and an emotive portrayal of the violence!

We are not yet in the age where actioners cannot be looked on without any derision. Even the best of them rely on a certain staging, a basic set of plot points that are familiar. Even Wick started with a "you killed my dog, prepare to die !!!" But I really wish they could just not be lazy. Plug & Play productions, like Asylum or Uwe Boll are one thing, but lazy movies are another.

Black Mirror Season 5

Striking Vipers - d. Owen Harris
Smithereens - d. James Hawes
Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too - d. Anne Sewitzky

It's interesting to me that even though The Twilight Zone has returned, its spiritual successor Black Mirror is still dominating the conversation as far as anthologies go.  At this point it seems like what people want out of an anthology TV show is scathing criticism of modern culture, not just "what-a-twist" stories set in slightly askew alternate realities.  The Twilight Zone, even in its modern incarnation, is a relic.  Black Mirror is now the gold standard TV anthologies are compared to.

And yet, much of the conversation on this latest season of Charlie Booker's generally damning look at society and technology, is how it seems to have fallen off.  Much of the criticism is that it's relatively toothless compared to what it used to be, that it's gotten softer or gentler.  This is likely the San Junipero effect, a result of that episode standing as the show's highest watermark, generally topping most episode ranking lists and earning a bunch of Emmys.  But the question is, does that episode stand so much higher as result of how generally bleak the show is?  If we have more episodes that don't end on such a dour, sour, or sickening ending, does that mean Booker and the show is losing its edge (... and do they make San Junipero less special)?

The answer is no.  I think Booker is realizing the capabilities of the anthology format, the potential to tell any kind of story so long as it sticks to the central device of how does technology impact the story being told.  Holding the mirror up to society doesn't necessarily always yield a negative result.  Yet the thesis of the show is holding up a black mirror, intoning exploring those darker impulses.

With Striking Vipers, the exploration is multidimensional.  It explores masculinity and sexual identity, it explores domestic boredom, it examines the idea of marital fidelity when it comes to video game/porn fixation.  All of this is tied together through a video game, a virtual reality "Street Fighter"-style game called "Striking Vipers", where a player's mind is taken directly into the game (using technology last seen in the episode U.S.S. Callister).

While it does explore all these ideas (and more) it doesn't necessarily explore them well, or at least to their fullest extent.  We start out years earlier in college when young, fresh faced Danny (Anthony Mackie) and his girlfriend Theo (Nicole Beharie) are living with his best friend Karl (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II).  We see a semi solid foundation between Danny and Theo, but it's slightly usurped by Danny and Karl's "Striking Vipers" video game hang-out time, where they trash talk but also physically engage in a playful way.  A decade or so later, Danny and Theo are suburban domesticated with a child and trying for another.  Karl is living a bachelor's life but feeling thoroughly unfulfilled.  They reunite after some distance at Danny's birthday where Theo presents him with the modern VR iteration of "Striking Vipers".  Taken into the virtual reality world (body basically left behind, a blank-eyed, shuddering husk), the fighting game seems so real, the players feeling what their avatars feel.

The in-game reality of "Striking Vipers" is amusing. To see actual actors portray video game fighting characters and pull off some familiar fighting maneuvers without the veil of exaggerated animation is surprising and laughable, almost it's own weird counter-uncanny valley where it's too real, where we're so used to it being cartoony, and therefore too unbelievable and kind of jarring. But it's that reality on top of the surreality that's necessary, reminding us that there are two men inhabiting these avatars, and that they're experiencing what the characters are experiencing.  The fighting is very physical, but also exceptionally playful.  Danny and Karl (as "Lance" and "Roxette") are having a blast, escaping their reality, rekindling their friendship, and evoking more care-free days.  But their avatars, built with sex appeal in mind, draw them closer together, and the game permits nature to take its course.

Questions arise, like, is this part of the game's design?  Was this actually the game's intention?  Is the game influencing the players in their actions and feelings?  What does this mean for the men?  Is there a real world attraction that this game allows them to fulfill?  Does this make them gay? Or bi? Or something else altogether?  What does this mean for Danny and Theo?

Initially this experience is jarring to the men, though Danny takes it harder than Karl, who just kind of shrugs it off and doesn't want to look too deeply at what it might mean.  The men return to the game - and their relationship - repeatedly. Danny is rattled, upset with himself for being a possible adulterer, but also unable to deny the attraction he has to Karl/Roxette.  Or is he just addicted to the game? Theo notices the change in Danny, and feels her own sense of domestication taking its toll on her psyche and physicality.  She welcomes the advances of other men in Danny's absence.

I was never clear on what the episode was trying to say about sexual identity (an encounter between the two men IRL designed to determine whether they have feelings for each other can be interpreted multiple ways, purposefully obfuscated), and it felt to me like it wasn't committing to any specific thesis about the effects of porn or gaming addiction, or even in-game relationships, and instead of preaching anything specific (except perhaps open and honest communication) it uses these concepts as backdrop for its character-focused relationship story.

It's a really good, conceptually intriguing story.  If there's Black Mirror bleakness it is all in Mackie's delivery of Danny as a man feeling guilty for feeling burdened by his life, and the conflict is largely in Danny's emotions.  Has he fallen in love with Karl?  Does he love Karl more than Theo?  Is he only attracted to Karl as Roxette? Is he addicted to the game, the relationship, or the relationship in the game?  There's so many permutations of how these feelings shake out, the show doesn't have enough time to parse them all. 

We also don't spend enough time with Karl to work through how he perceives his own sexuality.  He's put up a barrier between how he thinks about who he is in the game and in the real world.  His gender-bending avatar and the feeling he gets being Roxette and making love as her is intoxicating.  The game should force him to explore what it means for his own sense of self, but he seems to deny the impulse. 

Theo, mercifully, is not the nagging wife, but instead the compassionate and understanding one.  The suburban ennui Danny is feeling, she feels it too, and the show makes it clear that women and men handle such things differently.  More than anything she wants honesty, and it's Danny who struggles to understand what his truth is. It would have been nice to spend more time with Theo as well.  This ep could easily be a stand-alone dramatic movie, expanded out by half an hour or more to give more exploratory time, to better examine the themes and characters.


Less vague in its critique of technology (and society) is Smithereens.  The story is effectively a modernized version of Joel Schumacher's Falling Down which starred Michael Douglas as a middle-aged man struggling to cope with a changing society and his own stress and trauma.  Here Andrew Scott stars as a London Uber-type driver who takes an employee of the social media company Smithereens hostage, hoping to talk with the company's founder (played by Topher Grace).

Scott is a grieving widower, and too emotional to execute his half-baked kidnapping/hostage-taking plan with any real efficiency.  It's darkly comedic how much of a fuckup he is in this twisted scenario.  His hostage (played by Damson Idris) looks the part of a corporate exec, but turns out he's just a young intern.  The desperation and anxiousness seeps out of Scott as he still attempts to make the best out of a worsening situation.  The tone, more than the message, is where this parallels Falling Down specifically.  The desperation of a hurting man leads to jagged humour and awkward (rather than harrowing) tension.

Unlike Douglas' bitter character in Schumacher's film though, Scott's role is sympathetic from the get go.  He's not pushed to his limit, so much as he doesn't know what else he can do, what other statement to make.  His road to getting to finally converse with Grace's billionaire CEO is a roundabout one, being routed through different corporate staff at Smithereens while also getting UK police and the FBI involved.

The message here is simply that social media has become an addiction, and that it was by design.  Grace's mea culpa as the creator was that his brainchild got away from him, that corporate structures took over, commoditized the product and tailored it to make it the way it is.  If it seems like it's offering Mark Zuckerberg an out, it kind of is, but at the same time, it's an honest truth.  In making an engagement product into a money-earning venture, the natural path is to seek a way to maximize earnings at any expense.  It's less a damning of social media or smart phones than the structures that have made them an omnipresent part of our life.  And the point here is even the creator and CEO of said product can't move the machine to change it.  Once you become answerable to shareholders, basically only money talks.  It's a cold, callous system utterly unconcerned with its effect on the world.

The fact that the Smithereens corporations pulls out more details and insight into Scott's character than the police do, and in much less time, is perhaps the most unsettling part.  This private company, winds up talking to the police as if they're adorable infants who just learned how to use a spoon for the first time...they're patronizing and represent the danger of giving over so much of ourselves over to private corporations (which we seem ever-willing to do).


This is a pretty basic story overall, but expertly executed and very engaging.  It's a hostage thriller that's a little preachy and perhaps even obvious but it's actually not just about "put your phone down, kids", it's also about how dismissive we are to these calls to examine the things we're addicted to, and the show's final mid-credits moments address that with perfect fleeting indifference.  Scott, Idris and Grace are all very compelling, and the stark differences between downtown London, English countryside, west coast boardrooms and pretentious desert isolation retreats are all visually alluring in their own way.

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too is basically Black Mirror by way of a Family Channel drama.  Seriously, this wouldn't feel out of place as part of the Olsen Twins direct-to-video oeuvre. 

 Rachel is the new girl at a new school in a new town.  She's shy, withdrawn and really, really into pop star Ashley O.  Her sister, Jack, is the slightly edgier, more rebellious one, but all things considered, still very responsible and looking out for her sister. Their widower father is building a better mouse trap, almost literally, in that he's working on a technological, more humane solution to rodent problems (though what that solution is besides TASERing the mouse and relocating the vermin is a mystery).

Ashley O, meanwhile, is one of the world's biggest pop stars.  So huge, someone thought what people would like is an "Alexa"-like smarthome bot with Ashely's personality was a great idea.  Ashley is trapped under her controlling aunt and feels stifled by the infamy and pressures of maintaining pop stardom.  When she starts rebelling against her aunt and handlers, things don't go well for her.

Meanwhile Rachel is enthralled with her Ashely Too digital companion. Ashely Too is very positive minded, always uttering positive statements to Rachel, and being supportive and encouraging, but Ashley Too is also always on brand, asking Rachel if she'd like to hear a song or watch a video or hear an Ashely story.  There's something to be said about the failings of perpetual positivity (unfortunately this episode doesn't focus that much on it).

In what is essentially the third act of the episode real Ashley falls into a coma and Rachel's Ashley Too has a bit of meltdown upon hearing the news.  When the girls try to fix it, Ashley Too becomes fully awake with the complete mind map of the real Ashley, which had heretofore been hindered by restraining code.  At this point, there's just wacky shenanigans which see the girls and Ashley Too breaking into Ashley's house, fending off her abusers, rescuing her and stopping the big presentation her Aunt is making.  It's presented as high stakes, but it's real low ball stuff.

There seems to be a purposefully juvenile quality to the style of storytelling, one that's juxtaposed with Ashley Too's unfiltered, curse-laden persona.  I think, more than anything, that's the point, having a cute robot of a teen idol pop star voiced by Hanna Montana curse up a blue streak in what's otherwise an above average youth-focused TV movie.  There's real weight to the first act, a real sadness to Rachel as she tries to navigate her new life.  Likewise there's a darkness to the neon-pink haired pop icon that she has to keep contained, one that really likes Nine Inch Nails.  It's the second act introduction of Ashely Too that starts shifting the tone in the direction of a feel good teen flick, but one that ends with frustration and tears.  Ultimately the third act resolves in unlikely and surreal glee, with Ashley and Jack playing a club gig performing what sounds exactly like what you think Miley Cyrus singing NiN's "Head Like A Hole" would sound like, with horrified Ashley O fans running screaming from the bar.  

The message here, if there is one, is that putting your pop star niece into a coma with a drug overdose then, using improbable brain scanning technology, retrieving "songs" from her unconscious brain and manipulating those "songs" to sound like every other song in her catalog, and then using her tragedy for brand and financial gain, you know, is probably a bad thing.  I'm not sure what other message there is to take.  It's probably the least Black Mirror-y episode of Black Mirror and yet, it's still somehow an enjoyable, if slight hour of viewing, and far from the series' worst.

What's interesting about this season is that generally the critical response to it has been very uneven... there's no consensus on which episode is the best/worst.  I've seen cases made for all three on either side, and they're mostly all right and just as wrong.  What makes Black Mirror so great is that even when it's being just mediocre it's still exceptionally thought provoking, with enough ideas or insight to inspire discussion and even debate.  The horror aspect of the series has been greatly toned down this season, however, and that seems to be what people are lamenting.  They don't just want to be entertained, and they don't want just a slight nudge towards the darker edges... they want that mirror to reality to be black as can be.  It's what National Anthem set up, a horrifying look at a reality that can be, easily, very, very twisted.

3 Short Paragraphs: Captive State

2019, Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) -- download

Paranoia & Totalitarian State are one flavour of the Alien Invasion trope, one that more than a little hints of our current condition. And by our, I really only mean the American experience and I only really lay some claim to it, because no matter how much we Canadians are removed from what is going on down there, it affects us on a daily basis, influencing and corrupting. In Captive State the alien invasion was quick, deadly and led to complete surrender, by the entire world. Nine years later, all pretense of rebellion has been crushed and the planet lives under a fictional benevolent condition, while much of the world suffers.

We get a pair of characters through which to experience this world: Gabriel (Ashton Sanders, Moonlight), brother of the leader of the failed insurrection and Mulligan (John Goodman), once a police officer, but now an investigator for the aliens, referred to as The Legislators. He is not convinced the insurrection is dead, and continues to investigate its existence, even when warned off by his fellow collaborators. Meanwhile, Gabriel hunts for meaning and gets drawn back into his brother's legacy.

This was not a hot action movie, but it did not shy away from action. If anything, this reminded me of a Cold War movie, one set behind the Berlin Wall, where insurrectionists plan actions and try to outrun and foil the police forces staffed by their own fellow citizens. The rundown nature of a world where collaborators are the elite and the rest of us make do, just adds to this feel. I thought about piles of garbage everywhere, the empty shelves in stores and the humiliating jobs people have to take in order to live, and of course, the continuous surveillance by the police. We are told that the only way to end this, is to stand up, to light a match and ignite the fire that will inspire the world to fight against their unjust masters. I only hope the American people understand the metaphor and take it to  the heart.

Triple Dose: Marvelous Things

Captain Marvel - 2019, d. Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck - in theatre
Avengers: Endgame - 2019, d. Joe and Anthony Russo - in theatre
Venom - 2018, d. Ruben Fleischer - on demand

Normally I would write a long (very, very long) screed dissecting almost any latest superhero movie (like, I had plenty to say about Shazam!) but for some reason I let both Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame slip past me.  Maybe it's the Letterboxd effect (eg. the fact that last year I was tracking and commenting on movies there, rather than doing so more in depth here.  I seem to be at more of a balance between both right now)?  Or maybe it was the DIY bedroom renovation and new puppy that sucked all the time and energy out of me for doing said reviews (which is kind of BS since Captain Marvel came out before all that, and, yeah, I did that Shazam! review)?  In the meantime I talked so much about both movies (you know, in person, in face-to-face conversations) that I kind of exhausted all I had to say about them multiple times over, that to sit down and write the same thoughts out seemed redundant.

We're now well past the point where these two films are dominating the cultural conversation (what is it currently?  Toronto Raptors winning a championship, usual political bullshit, our environmental nightmare, the bland mediocrity of the new Godzilla and X-Men movies [haven't seen them myself, but will eventually]...) so it's time to reapproach the dialogue and throw in an outlier in the superhero genre, the ugly little film that could, Venom.

Captain Marvel has two different entries in my Letterboxd diary ... the first with a 2 1/2 star rating, the second bumped up a full star after rewatching.  The reason for the disparity?  I had let expectations get the better of me.  It happens, perhaps too often, where I see the film for what I want it to be, versus seeing it for what it actually delivers.  I honestly think most movies fall into this category.  We enter a film with some exposure, whether it be having read the book/comic, having seen the trailer (or multiple trailers, sometimes multiple times), followed the filmmakers/cast members on social media, read advanced reviews, got caught up in hype, or just like a creator on the film... with any exposure come expectations.  I can't honestly say what my expectations were for Captain Marvel, I had little exposure to the character, and I wasn't paying attention to all the trailer scrubbers on youtube.  Yet my brain was obviously distracted because I wasn't getting the message.

Upon second viewing it was evident that I clearly missed something the first time around, and that something was the resonant themes of female empowerment and embracing one's self. Our protagonist is told time again that she can't do something, that she should be doing something else, that she's not strong enough to do what the boys do. But she tries. She fails, but still, she tries. And she picks herself back up after failing. She's told she needs to control herself, to contain her emotion, think with her head, not her heart ,as if emotion is weakness. She's told she needs to prove herself, prove to men -- men who are fearful of her abilities -- that she needs to prove herself on their level, when they know their level is so far below her own actual potential. They want to keep this powerful woman down, out of fear and envy, and for their own manipulative gain.

This isn't a message that all men are bad, but a message to everyone to not let others hold you back.
I caught this message the first time around but I was too busy looking for what I wanted out of the film, what I expected. I was being Yon-Rogg. I didn't want to approach the film on anything but my own terms and it came up lacking against my own expectations. But reading and hearing what others got out of it (my own daughter included) and I decided I needed to give it another chance.

In just two viewings I already have favorite sequences, starting with the masterful memory exploration sequence in the first act, following through to Carol's escape from the Skrulls. Likewise, the quiet moments of just two people talking, Carol and Fury (is Samuel L Jackson the world's greatest scene partner or what?) or Carol and Maria or Carol and Monica, they're some of the best two-hander scenes in the MCU.

It's not a perfect film... it's still too dark and muddy at times and the action escalates too unbelievably and I feel like that one soundtrack queue is just not good.  Likewise, it still feels more like a Marvel "Phase 1" origin movie, but with better effects.  Yet, I'm still quite in and want more Carol (I worry about Goose overexposure though... there's, like, a Minions level fervor around that cat).

[Avengers Endgame spoilers follow if you're still worried about such things]

We got more Carol Danvers in Avengers: Endgame, but it was in a fairly limited capacity.  She arrives to join the team in the opening act which picks up immediately following the end of Infinity War, but then disappears until late in the third act.  It's one of a few disappointments in an otherwise satisfying "season finale" to the 10-year MCU 3-act arc that started with Iron Man.

Endgame makes some very bold moves for a massive, multi-billion dollar franchise/series-of-franchises, starting with that opening act in which the heroes, having failed to stop Thanos from wiping out half of the living beings in existence with a snap in the last movie, "avenge" those lost souls.  Their avenging, though, serves little purpose and provides little satisfaction.  As a result, in a tremendously ballsy move, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, plus directors Joe and Anthony Russo, jump five years into the future.

This time jump changes the view of the MCU rather dramatically.  What is otherwise a bright, colorful, exciting, daring, adventurous reality is now a gray, sombre, joyless existence.  Everyone has lost someone, (or if you're Hawkeye, everyone).   For a glorious half hour, the MCU feels like it's the HBO series The Leftovers (reviews for Season 1, Season 2, Season 3).  The inspiration is obvious.

The film makes a case that Thanos was right, that reality where populations are halved are much more capable of managing their resources, that traumatized environments can recover from the plague of civilized societies.  And yet, actually living in such a reality, traumatized by tremendous loss, it's difficult to accept and move on. 

This is the crux of the Avengers mission here.  Rather than moving on and just protecting and bettering what's left of society, they exhaust all avenues in finding a way to return what was lost.  The first sign is the sudden re-emergence of Scott Lang, the Ant-Man, who was lost in the quantum realm for 5 years...only, for him it was mere minutes.  Time moves and flows differently in the quantum realm, and if the Avengers can harness it, they may just find the answer to stopping Thanos before he's able to complete his quest.  Of course, playing with time may also result in spawning alternate realities and other disastrous effects to avoid, which of course are going to happen because comic books are like that.

Just like Captain America: Civil War wasn't really a sequel to Captain America: Winter Soldier and yet, it still was, so too is Endgame to Infinity War.  The focus has shifted, and yet it still builds upon what came before.  Where Infinity War had Thanos as its focal figure, this one returns the focus back to the Avengers, most specifically the original roster from the 2011 film - Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye and the Hulk.

Hawkeye, absent from the last film, returns in the opening moments of the film, teaching his daughter archery while his son plays and his wife sets the picnic table for lunch.  Knowing how Infinity War ends makes the weight of this scene immediately obvious, and it's heartbreaking.  Clint descends into darkness as a murderous vigilante, killing crime lords around the globe, deeming them unworthy of surviving Thanos' random selection.  His best friend Nat now leads a global (perhaps even Galactic) Avengers, but Clint's health and well being have weighed heavily on her since the original film.  If only she should find him.  Bruce, meanwhile, has accepted the Hulk as a part of himself, and has found a happy medium between brains and brawn.

Having appeared in more movies than almost any other MCU character, yet without ever starring in her own feature, Black Widow's arc over the past decade has let her down.  It's evident Natasha is a great fighter, an incredible warrior, and intelligent and caring leader (making her head of the 5-years-later Avengers makes perfect sense), but we don't know what makes her tick, what drives her beyond her training as a Russian spy.  As such, when she exits the film, her loss is evident but it's not truly felt. The team has Cap, Tony and Thor all as capable alternate leaders should they need them (although by the end of the film that's all changed too).

The time-travel shenanigans are all about getting the Infinity Gems before Thanos does and destroying them before he can use them.  This involves the team breaking up into pairings (like classic team comics would always do) and retread ground from previous movies (like 2011 Avengers, Thor: The Dark World and the first Guardians of the Galaxy), but from a different point of view.  I love timey-wimey goofballs like this, and the movie has some definite fun with it, while also always aware of what the objective is and what's on the line.

Though perhaps not crystal clear, the rules of time travel are laid down for "Professor Hulk" in a surprise returning cameo, and, with a little help from the internet (or perhaps revisiting the film), do make sense.  To be sure, branching realities are made (and in some cases the writers and directors disagree on which branching realities actually exist) and provide enough dangling threads for future fodder (including the upcoming Loki TV mini-series on Disney's new streaming service).

It's perhaps less of the dazzling high-wire act than they did with Infinity War, since the cast roster has shrunk considerably thanks to "the snap", and yet Marcus and McFeely with the Russos still make a dense and impeccably entertaining feature.  It doesn't stand on its own, as it's got the structure of almost 2 dozen features from 10 years prior as foundation under its feet, yet, they have a satisfying experience overall that pays off the whole idea of the shared universe concept that only Marvel so far has been able to successfully create on screen.  It's an epic 3 hours of cinema that would baffle any newbie (but who is going into the fourth Avengers movie [like, the 7th Captain America movie, the 9th Iron Man movie] as their first entry into the MCU) but this is truly a love letter for the fans who have joined the ride along the way, die hards and casuals alike.

It's hard to see a path forward from here, 11 years of epic slowly building towards one huge climax, and it would be a satiating close to stop here.  Yet, there's no sign of it stopping and there's no reason to.  The quality of the MCU features is really damn high, so high that they're taking up 10 of the top 15 best superhero movies of all-time in my ranking of all superhero movies, and every MCU but one is in the top 50.  There's an attention to both craft and character in the making of an MCU.  It's spectacle but with a mind to making what works on the page also work on the screen.  Every MCU film has been good, if not great, watchable, if not infinitely rewatchable, and, most importantly, entertaining.

Sony, holders of the Spider-Man license for two decades now, have been less capable of creating a consistently entertaining product, less able to balance world building with character, and less able to keep their meddling fingers out of the pot.  They managed two better-than-good Spider-Man movies with Sam Raimi before studio interference damned the third one.  The relaunch from Marc Webb in 2011 saw the studio trying too hard to capture the same magic the MCU had created, with little awareness of the formula (and none of the patience) to copy.  This led to Sony practically begging Marvel to pair up on relaunching Spidey again for a third iteration in less than 20 years... with much improved results.

So chuffed by their success, Sony decided to capitalize upon Spider-man: Homecoming with a Spidey-less Venom feature, bringing the villain-turned-antihero to the big screen for a second time (after the disastrous Spider-Man 3).  Of course, in the comics the symbiotic alien that gives Eddie Brock his "venom" powers first possessed Peter Parker (in Spider-Man's classic black costume period of the 1980's), and it was Peter's realization that the symbiote was nefarious (and controlling) that caused Peter to abandon the creature.  It's union with Peter's newspaper rival Eddie created almost a natural opposite for Spider-Man, and Venom is now perhaps his most infamous nemesis.

But Venom's popularity as a villain skyrocketed in the grimdark/bad girl era of comics, where a lot of pubescent boys were getting fanserviced with busty/leggy women in skimpy costumes and extremely, grotesquely muscled violent vigilantes.  Once they introduced Carnage, another of Venom's alien symbiote species who paired with a human serial killer, suddenly Spider-Man was teaming up with his nemesis, making Venom look like a good guy by comparison.  Since then it's been a steady road to making Venom a casual bad guy, like the Punisher, except with a penchant for biting off heads rather than shooting them off.

I seriously underestimated the mass audience appeal for a character like Venom.  I certainly wasn't expecting the film to pull in almost 900 million worldwide.  Superman could barely do those numbers, and he needed to fight Batman to do so.  Something is seriously wrong with our planet.

Venom, as a film, is pretty nonsensical. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is a Vice Magazine-type edgy reporter, who is kept on a leash by the people who pay his salary.  But his bag is extreme "gotcha" journalism, exposing corporate greed and elite corruption... except his latest story, trying to drag prominent technology magnate Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) down in the mud.  Except Drake is teflon and Brock's story gets scuttled.  He hacks his lawyer fiancee's computer to dig up some files on Drake for a case she's working on, his life collapses.  He gets fired and his relationship ends.

We're supposed to believe Hardy as Brock gets down on his luck, but he never seems down, and he seems like a pretty resourceful guy.  Eddie's drawn back into Drake's story when one of his key scientists tells Eddie about the experiments Drake is doing on homeless people (who, of course, Eddie is friends with) trying to pair them with alien symbiotes that reject and kill the hosts.  Naturally Eddie get paired with Venom and hijinks ensue.

It's a tenuous partnership but eventually it balances out.  Venom has its own personality and the two have conversations which are marginally amusing but don't really make a lick of sense.  Eddie's motivations and Venom's motivations seem like two separate and distinct things and not all that complimentary.  Of course, there are other symbiotes out there and Venom, dubbed the loser outcast of the prospective alien invasion of Earth, has decided to help stop them.  Drake pairs up with Riot (yes all the symbiots have edgy "cool" Earth nicknames which they call each other for some bizarre reason...it's very comic-booky but I don't buy into it) and the big gloopy final act begins.

Director Ruben Fleischer is best known for his horror-comedy Zombieland, and with Venom he's really striving for a similar slapstick-action-horror vibe.  It kind of works, except that it's utterly ridiculous.  There are trope subverting things, like Eddie's ex-fiancee, Anne (Michelle Williams) finding a new relationship with a guy who is much better for her, a nice guy to her AND Eddie, and helps out when needed.  It becomes clear by the third act that there's no reunion for Anne and Eddie in the offing, especially when it becomes somewhat insinuated that Eddie and Venom are kind of a thing (not really, but the queer coding is there) and there's no room for anything else (except that Anne becomes Venom for a short bit and that's really weird).

The story structure and pacing of Venom feels completely off, such that the progression of relationships doesn't flow properly, and the intent of characters from one moment to the next never seems certain.  Why is anyone really doing what they're doing?  The movie doesn't seem to care, why should we?

The action in the film ranges from utterly generic to unappealingly ugly.  Venom as a creation looks somewhat like his comic book counterpart, but he's a shiny goopy mess most of the time, and can shoot more shiny goopy messes off himself when fighting.  It looks pretty terrible, like unfinished VFX from the mid 2000's.  Once the film comes to a head and Venom and Riot are gooping all around stuff, it's tedious and kind of gross.  It's just an unpleasant effect...less because it's a CGI blob, and more because it's a terrible and unreal looking CGI blob.

I honestly don't understand how this movie made the pile of cash it did.  It's not altogether unwatchable, but it's barely any better than the Tim Story Fantastic Four movies.  It's Hardy, Williams, Ahmed, and Jenny Slate making this anything close to palatable viewing, but they're all far too good for this.  Perhaps it's just conditioning now.  A superhero movie is released, so people go see it.  Hell, Aquaman made a billion dollars (sounds hyperbolic but it's true).  Then again, X-Men: Dark Phoenix just came out and tanked, so....

John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum

2019, Chad Stahelski (John Wick) -- cinema

I am extremely conflicted about this movie. Enough that I started assuming I would only have Three Short Paragraphs (never short) and deleted that titling immediately after. There is too much to process.

As you know, I am an Uber Fan of the first movie, as uber as I can get with my apathetic brain (also uber hurt that Hayley Atwell doesn't like apathetic people, but who can blame her #randomsegue). And Kent's view of the movie is actually more of a selling point, as a man who doesn't care for Keanu. You see, of late, I am one of the Internet Many's who would likely be labelled Keanu's BF. Or at least BFF ? He is, of Internet Legend, just an uber (at this point, maybe the company should give me some beer money) nice guy and I am of a mind-state of late where Nice Guys are currently just needed. People acknowledge he is nice, confirm he is nice, and even make up stories to expand a legend of how much of a nice guy he is. His Nice has become a meme.

But putting that aside, putting aside why I will return to this franchise, despite my mild disappointment with the last, I am still a Big Fan. You don't get my disappointment from the emotion scraped words I put in that post, but you get the disenfranchised feeling I was left with. The movies depart from Wick himself, and float into the ether that is his world. This one pretty much leaves all reality behind and John becomes even more a caricature of who he was set up to be.

Baba Yaga cannot escape the consequences of what he has done. He killed a connected man's son in the first, he kills a Connected Man in the second. The escalation picks up, again, hours after the first but now John is ExCommunicado, removed from the privileged few (???) of killers for the High Table. The problem, the extreme problem with this movie is that there seems to no longer exist any world outside This World. There are no people other than The Killers. Its as if Neo was tossed into another Matrix, one that he tries to escape from via his actions. That, is probably Head Canon worth exploring.

But fuck, once again, this movie is so beautiful. The opening sequence, of John and a number of chasing assassins through a warehouse / museum of vintage weaponry is so cringe worthy, I pretty much broke my physical response to the thuds, thunks and squelches of John's attacks on his opponents. At this point, I realized that Keanu may get a resurrection of his movies in some distant version of a rep theatre, as interactive movies where people shout out their emotional responses, like we did with John Woo's The Killer.

The beauty carries throughout. From NYC to Casablanca (no, real Casablanca, not some metaphoric location) and back to NY. But story and character are dispensed with for the sake of Whoah. Along with a few hints of sequel-itis, the movie just ends up feeling familiar. We are expected to go along for the ride and not pay attention, but to just revel. And I might be able to do that, if not for the fact that the first movie chose to raise itself above Generic Action movie and make something substantial.

That said, so many elements continue to impress. Halle Berry's dogs are as incredible as John himself. Mark Dacascos's Japanese-not-Japanese character is so spot on, you cannot but mourn his ending. Even the nod to Blade Runner or kiosk sushi, which I doubt exists in Manhattan is so... world building. And every combat sequence is delightful, as it should have been. I just wish I could sit back and think about the movie and just revel, as I did in the first.

p.s. that poster is INCREDIBLE !!! So many are...