31 Days of Halloween: The Devil's Doorway

2018, Aislinn Clarke (Childer) -- download

Catholicism. Exorcism. Found Footage. Evil deeds being done behind locked doors. All of these have become solid tropes in the horror movie biz. Tired? Overused? Yes, of course they are. But that is where the idea of trope comes from -- a reusable / familiar idea that can draw the unwary in. If done well, you can feel you are experiencing a new idea, a skilled presentation of something that attracts you.

Clarke obviously went with this idea. She took a horrific moment of Irish history, the Magdalene Laundries where "fallen women" were sent to be hidden in these convents, where they worked primarily in laundries to pay for their own incarceration. Clarke, who gets the place of being Ireland's first woman to direct a horror movie, used this background to explore the evil that people can do on others. And she builds her horror movie around familiar ideas embedded in other horrors.

The problem is that while using this real life circumstance as a backdrop, she actually deflates the historical significance of the events by attaching Satanism and Witchcraft to the evils wrought, instead of it being a true & classic human evil. That takes away much, and it is very strange, for the movie begins with even the almost faithless Father Thomas with a distrust and suspicion of the Sisters behind the convent.

In the end its just a jump scare filled run of the mill horror movie with some good themes that are wasted behind forgettable superstition.

31 Days of Halloween: Rune of the Dead

2019, Rasmus Tirzitis (Vilsen) -- download

Or The Huntress: Rune of the Dead.

And then there is that movie that has, at its core something scary, but turns out to be just an atmospheric period fantasy story. In the game Skyrim one of the primary low level enemies are the Draugr, basically Undead Vikings. Draug is an actual Scandinavian word for the undead, so it's not surprising that a Scandinavian movie would take advantage of them to setup a scary antagonist.

Runa lives with her mother, younger sister and blind grandfather while father has gone off on a viking raid. Mother is depressed and Runa is bitter. She spends her days doing chores and hunting in the woods, showing off the skill with the bow that her father instilled in her. Their blind grandfather provides wisdom and a reminder that they shouldn't give up on his son.

One day Runa comes across a wounded soldier, a man who claims to know their father and assures her he is still alive. She drags the man back to their home and demands that they help him. When he recovers he tells the family of successful raiding, treasure gained but of an unintended curse, and how the survivors of the raid set upon each other to claim the gold for themselves. Soon after, father does arrive home, but beset with a deep worry; is it PTSD or something else?

I find that recaps, while needing to impart where the story is going, are often boring filler to any writing about a movie. They can be soulless and utilitarian. But for this movie, much felt the same way. While there was a definite style, a moody fearful theme, where Runa flows from anger at her mother and father (one for not being there, the other for not being entirely there) to calm repose in the forest, to the occasional prophetic waking dream filled with fear and an unknowable future horror, much of the movie felt more like a viewing of someone's decent LARPing event. It didn't have much life in it.

Finally the movie does swing around to where it was actually going, with the dead men seeking to reclaim the gold come looking for Runa's father and the other warrior. By this point, all scariness that was foreshadowed has been drained out of us. Think the final season of Game of Thrones where we accept the story has to go that way, but it ends up being more rushed and boring than a culmination of the built up story. There are draugr and there is tragedy, but.... yawn.

31 Days of Halloween: Us

2019, Jordan Peele (Get Out) -- download

Wandering through the dross, leaving the ones I know I will enjoy to be scattered amidst the rest, so I cannot just end up feeling apathetic about this whole yearly endeavour. Oh dear, even with that sentence I guess I can say that even a fan who enjoys even just the concept of horror movies can be weighed down by just the boredom of much of the genre.

*shake it off*

Jordan Peele comes almost with his follow-up to the pretty much perfect Get Out. While not in the calibre of his debut, it again shows off his fondness for horror and even the whole Twilight Zone affection, which, I guess, is why he is the new Rod Serling? This movie, is like an episode of said show expanded into a full run, with only a slight hint at having stretched too thin.

Typical Middle Class family (this time he dispenses with black social commentary and just gives us a family) made up of Winston Duke (Black Panther), Lupita Nyong'o and their two kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph & Evan Alex) are heading to the summer house for a deserved vacation. Something tense is going on, mom being nervous and depressed about something. Dad is just trying to make it OK.

Oh, noteworthy preamble about mom, as a kid, getting lost on a beach front boardwalk and running into her mirror doppelganger. Afterwards she is just not right.

Speaking of just not right. Lupita presents us with someone who is more than just depressed or introverted. You can see her trying, trying to interact, trying to connect with other people, but eventually giving up, preferring to just be her alone self instead of faking it. That is something to be said of many introverts, even if we don't have a dark trauma in our past.

And then they show up. The movie goes from tense to tense when a quartet of people dressed in red jumpsuits appear in the driveway and see entry to the house. Instantly we learn they are twisted versions of the family them-self. Agenda? Who knows, but escape is on the table. This is where we see Lupita come out of her malaise, to take control, to protect her family, to violently defend. The middle act of the movie is wonderfully tight and nerve-wracking

And then things get even weirder. This is where we enter the Twilight Zone. There are more than just THOSE doppelgangers. There seems to be an emergence of MANY, at least one for each person in this town, if not all America. And they are killing each and every one of their originals. While I can say that this might have an example of over-explaining a weird plot element, I like that Peele went from chilling to weird & absurd. This was right down my wheelhouse, to mix my metaphors as I am wont to do.

31 Days of Halloween: Slaughterhouse Rulez

2018, Crispian Mills (A Fantastic Fear of Everything) -- Crave

Simon Pegg, Margot Robbie, Nick Frost, Michael Sheen and Asa Butterfield -- a pretty damn good British cast for a comedy monster movie, wouldn't you say? Mills must have some friends in high British film society to gather this crowd for a mid-grade boarding school movie with monsters. And he pulls a decent performance out of everyone involved.

But... Try as I might to spin this in a positive direction, as I am trying to at least do something other than complain (in life, in posts), but this movie.

OK, we can at least be neutral in the re-cap. Middle class kid gets into posh boarding school where immediately he is tossed into the section reserved for outcasts, and assigned to being the roommate of class weirdo Willoughby Blake (Asa Butterfield). Michael Sheen is the oblivious Head Master funding the school via fracking, happening just on the other side of the border wood. Pegg is the oblivious teacher with Robbie playing his GF Skype-ing in her performance via Pegg's laptop. Frost is the oblivious eco-protester / drug dealer camped near the fracking site, with a tragic connection to the school's past. You get the idea of how the adults are cast?

Damn, failed at even that.

The first hour of the movie just blunders through the standard tropes of boarding schools. There are rich kids, "poor" kids, weird kids, rituals and feeble attempts at commentary on class structure. I kept on wondering when they were going to get to the actual monsters of the monster movie, but they spent most of the time setting the setting. Character development? No, not really. Expansive plot? No, not really.

When we finally get to the point of the movie, its pretty familiar fare. Monsters emerge, kids run, bad (aka rich) kids get eaten, adults get picked off one by one, until the rag tag bunch of main characters (including one rich girl the main character has a crush on) find a way to defeat the monsters and escape (barely, always barely) with their lives. Yawn.

Opportunity wasted.

31 Days of Halloween: The Revenant

2009, Kerry Prior (Roadkill) -- download

No, not Leonardo and the Bear, but a zombie buddie movie starring David Anders in a role as a mostly likable walking dead who teams up with his buddy to fight crime. David Anders, who we actually know from another undead series, iZombie, where he played the charismatic and, honestly, likable Bad Guy Blaine DeBeers, seems meant to play charismatic bad guys. He has that rock & roll, sleek aesthetic about him which appeals to me.

Here, a decade ago, he plays Bart, an American soldier killed in Iraq but who, for no reason ever explained, rises from the dead, not long after his funeral. There is a hint at the opening about Bart being one of these guys who just does the right thing, no matter how bad an idea it is. And then that thought is dispensed with for the rest of the movie, so we can just have a violent buddy zombie comedy.

Early in the movie, Bart struggles to understand what he is and WHY he is, but with the unwise help of his ultra-slacker best friend, they just end up becoming vigilantes, killing the Bad Guys of LA, which works out well for the people they save and Bart, who gets to suck the blood of said Bad Guys, rejuvenating him for a while. Is he a zombie? A vampire? A bit of both - a revenant !!

This movie struck me as one that started with one idea, but evolved when the creators just had too much fun doing the buddy comedy vigilante stuff. Eventually they ran out of hijinx to put on the screen and had to lead it somewhere, to some sort of climax. That climax, with Bart discovering almost all the people he killed are now back also as revenants, is ridiculous and out of character for the rest of the movie, especially when the US military gets involved. The movie is entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying.

31 Days of Halloween: In the Tall Grass

2019, Vincenzo Natali (The Cube) -- Netflix

Stephen King and his son Joe Hill (King) get together and write a creepy novella together. It takes a simple idea -- turn a field of tall grasses (bamboo?) into something menacing. As long as you don't over explain, as long as you don't dig too deep in the loamy soil. Once you explain too much, the fearful will fade; the fear lies in the unknown.

So then, why did Natali do just that? I recall his The Cube as being so enigmatic, so utterly bizarre and unreal there could be no real explanation. And I believe that mystery is what made it successful. Our head canon ends up doing all the work for us.

I have commented before on how there is a familiar visual trope of following a lone car down a wooded road, from far above above. You see the wide expanse, unbroken by human influence. The utter vastness of a woodland vista instills a sense of fear in us; something primal. Here there be monsters. The Kings switched that to grasslands, but the trope lives on as we see Cal and Becky driving through the Heartland, grass on all sides of them. Becky is pregnant, and her brother Cal is driving her away from her old life, to begin again, sans the coming baby's father. They pull over, so Becky can get sick, near an age-old church with a bunch of cars in its lot. And then they hear the child's voice from the field, beckoning them to come help him find his way out.

The first act is the core of the Kings' story -- once in the field, you are forever in the field. Voices shift location, the grass is just tall enough to obscure a good vantage point, and your sense of direction is obliterated. What ill intentioned force is doing this to our characters? Who is Tobin the child, and why do we immediately distrust his dirty face. What is the big rock, not quite a rock, at the "centre" of it all? How many people has the field "eaten" ?

If the movie had only kept with the mystery, kept the explanations and expansions at a minimum. Suddenly you can see the tale spinning off its axis, adding in phantasmagorphic visions and imagery of other things in the fields. It is trying to build a mythology around the goings on, but really it just muddies the ponding water.

Natali does not succeed with this movie, if but for the visuals. The swirling, swaying unnatural grass vista is enthralling. Its waves are not wind born. Its motions and sounds are not from insects and nature. If only he had kept to this minimal horror, this focus on the unknown, this reliance on fear, I would have loved this movie.

31 Days of Halloween: Satanic Panic

2019, Chelsea Stardust (Slay Per View) -- download

I dance around the edges of pop culture subcultures. I am not a Trekkie, I am not a cosplayer, hells, I don't even attend the Fan Expo. I am a lurker, not a participant. I have observed the Horror subculture, those goth & metal and counter-culture kids who love everything Horror related. We have been in line with them at Midnight Madness, attended the occasional rep movie viewing with them. I even know a few who could be labelled as such. But no, not me.

This subculture does more than dive into fandom, as many are active participants in perpetuating the genre -- they are part of the making of the movies. Based on her credits, I imagine Chelsea Stardust to be one. She's been on the crew of a lot of the recognizable movies of the genre, and a couple of interviews tell her to be a big fan of the genre. But the problem is, and this is where my preamble leads, is that sometimes these creators are ... too deep into it. While I appreciate making things for the love of it, as we well know I am not good at this blogging, but, damn, a lot of the movies made by this subculture are the worst of the lot. They seem to exist to just play on the tropes, to point out how much they love horror.

Satanic Panic pits a pizza girl against the ultra-wealthy who get their power & prestige from worshipping Hell. She blunders into their ritual seeking to shame them into a tip, and ends up being their token virgin sacrifice. They chase her around the massive mansions of the neighbourhood casting spells and sicking low-budget monsters after her. Eventually she is captured and they complete their ritual. And then there are bunnies.

There is decent acting, some fun characters, capable effects and a fun, quirky sensibility to the movie. But, for the love of Baphomet, do something interesting !!  This movie was just so fucking deep in Meh. And this is coming from me, someone who can at least enjoy the middle of the road of the genre! In the end it almost seemed to be a showcase piece for horror movie makers (see! decent gore practical effects! see! we know our Satanic lingo!) instead of a movie for the viewers.

31 Days of Halloween: Halloween

2018, David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) -- Crave

I am reading a lot about writing these days. Not writing a lot (this only peripherally counts) but reading about technique and style and method and the work required. One thing always mentioned is edit edit edit. Go back, remove unnecessary words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, sections. Remove. What is left behind is Your Story.

Halloween (not The Sequel, not Part Two, not any nomenclature) does just that; not just within itself but to also all previous attempts to follow up the franchise. It even shaves off the direct sequel Halloween II, eliminating the idea that Laurie Strode is Michael's sister. You can say that this movie, set exactly 40 years later, is the one and only sequel. And it's a perfect one.

You can tell the production team loved the original movie. It is present in the tone and the cinematography and in the music. But it updates and expands, while not straying into the lunacy the other sequels did; no cults, no supernatural elements, but enhancing the immense feeling of dread that comes with this character. This dread is almost tangible.

Michael has been in a sanitarium for the past 40 years. Laurie has become this franchise's Sarah Connor, remaking herself into a survivalist and tragically imposing that paranoia & fear onto her daughter, and granddaughter. Michael is being transported to another asylum, but not before some podcasters from England ask to interview him, and just end up taunting him with The Mask. The isometric layout of the sanitarium grounds where the dumbass holds out Michael's mask to him is like some evil, deadly game of chess. Of course, we know where all this will lead.

The movie is very very aware of what came before and what is going on now. The original was set in the era when America was a very safe America. Kids enjoyed Halloween, spree killers were campside tales of bogeymen. But now we get a spree killing almost every weekend and the idea that a crazy man stabbed five people to death 40 years ago holds absolutely no weight, and a side character pretty much says that. But we the viewers, and they the characters who experienced the first movie, know otherwise. Michael may not be supernatural but he is entirely unnatural.

Once Michael escapes the transfer bus, and begins killing in earnest, he again becomes The Shape (the name originally applied to the character) heading back to Haddonfield to ... to what? To kill is obvious, but to revisit his previous kill sites? To kill Laurie? We never really know, but we don't have to. It all culminates with the two confronting each other, and Laurie makes sure of it. This time Justice will be Served.

I cannot stress enough how tight this movie was. Sure, there was supporting plot, side stories of Laurie's family and their friends, but it does so well at focusing on (and I cannot use any other word) the dread that The Shape generates. There is no cat & mouse, no false starts and fake-outs. There is just a deadly path from escape to confrontation. And a satisfying, but ultimately (as no one can forget the tropes that these franchises created) open ending.

31 Days of Halloween: Crawl

Starting in 2011 we (Marmy and I, as Kent is not much of a horror fan) celebrated the Halloween season (when candies hit the stores) by watching too many horror / Halloween related movies, most of them bad.  2012 had a few flicks but not the full month. Un/Re-employment kill 2013. Apathy killed 2014. But we returned in 2015 with a full run. 2016 had a good start, but stalled in the last few days, likely due to work life. 2017 almost started with a fizzle, but then I remembered, "It's October 1st !"  It still fizzled out. Life abounds. And in 2018, almost the entire year was Halloween *ahem* as in the year of posting was mostly October.

This year I found myself looking forward to it. Oh, there will be interruptions and apathy and a trip to Las Vegas, but we held back from watching a number of lauded horror movies from the year, just so we could do THIS.

2019, Alexandre Aya (The Hills Have Eyes) -- download

Creature Feature. Monster movie. Pit some hapless main characters against something otherworldly or just something natural that acts with preternatural malice. We always attribute predators with malice. Sharks are evil. Wolves are stalkers. Piranha are alien eating machines. Cats sit on your chest at 5am and devour your soul. But they are just animals doing what animals do best -- eat another animal.

Alexandre Aja is mostly known for his remake of the Wes Craven classic The Hills Have Eyes but he also did the less-than-horror adaptation of the Joe Hill's (or Joe King if you prefer) dark fantasy novel Horns. He also did ... *ahem* ... Piranha 3D.  I am tempted to add his original French flick Haute Tension which garnered a lot of praise the year it played in TIFF Midnight Madness. An example of the so-called French Extremity Movement in film, it might just be outside our wheelhouse.

This is an example of how to do a solid horror/tension movie, if not that inventive. While I cannot say it was great, to any degree, it had a decent story, good scares and nicely structured acts. It mostly takes place in the titular crawlspace beneath a family home as a Florida hurricane comes barreling in. A prime example of something greenlit because of our current climate reality.

Haley (Kaya Scodelario; the Maze Runner movies) goes back to  the broken family home to find out where dad (Barry Pepper; Battlefield Earth) is. She is a competitive swimmer and he is the dad who drove her too hard. But... water, gators, SWIMMER ! After playing some cat & mouse with many many gators, and the horrid loss of some people who attempt to help the pair, the two escape to the roof of their house to await rescue. They leave behind most of the gators to eat anyone else who happens along.

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2019 Edition: Pt C

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Smells bad, bad.

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. But let's try with what's on right now, and stepping backwards in time until I get entirely lost. The bad smell should help me find my way back.

Pt A is here. Pt B is here.

Another Life and Stranger Things S3 and iZombie S5.

Binge watching is for those shows you just cannot get enough of, right? Those shows that are so good you chow down on them like a bag of your favourite carbohydrates

"Just one more..."

I don't actually generally binge; I pace out over a few nights at the least, sometimes up to a week if I want to savour. But Another Life had me pretty much racing from episode to episode until we hit the end. Was it that good? Oh good gawds no!! It was so terrible I was just racing from episode to episode to see what they would do next and whether they would start making something coherent from the mess.

Hint: They never do.

Take all the current space shows on Netflix. Add in all the popular space movies from the past fifteen years. Notice that The CW has a lot of shows with young beautiful people, and they do pretty well. Grab a figurehead of current scifi TV, Katee Sackhoff and give her the lead. Now grab your creative blender and pulse on HIGH. Alas, your blender sucks and chokes halfway through giving you a pulpy, runny mess that looks bad and smells worse. But the mixture has some booze in it so might as well finish. That metaphor makes about as much sense as this series.

Alien Spaceship lands in BC, cuz all current scifi is in BC. Its big and crystally and scary, so rather than focus on studying it, the world is going to sink a ton of cash (well, into the spaceship but not the hiring process) and send a spaceship to the origin planet, far far far away. Cuz that THAT'S how you investigate something happening right here on the planet Earth.

Neko (Sackhoff) is the captain but her second in command was passed over and is all cranky about it. Also, she did something in her past that got her crew killed, or something. We never really find out, despite there pretty much being an entire episode dedicated to it. Off into space they go with all their baggage and ineptitude and inexperience and emotional immaturity. We get Alien ripoffs and dream torture and randy sex and bugs and accidents with the equipment (fixed by unplugging hoses), lethal doses of melty radiation, an AI with Pinocchio syndrome, people constantly screaming at each other, faulty sleep chambers, mutinies, creatures exploding from bodies, etc etc ad infinitum. It just goes on and on jumping from one trope to the next at a break-neck pace, which is why I couldn't stop watching. WHAT WILL THEY DO NEXT !?! I won't even bother mentioning the Arrival back on Earth bit.

And we never actually find out why it's called Another Life.

Meanwhile, Stranger Things S3 comes along and blows all my expectations out of the water. After a milquetoast second season, which I liked better in re-watching (we didn't remember ANYTHING about it), this season was just spectacular. Not as ground-breaking as S1 but just as enthralling and even more dosed with character building and age appropriate genre fun.

I liked that this season let the characters grow up, including Lucas's fucking annoying little sister and even Will, still in recovery mode from season 1. Recovery. You would think there would be more trauma amongst the kids. They fought fucking monsters, afterall. But kids are resilient and they have hormones and kissing behind mostly closed doors to focus on.

This show is always about visiting the tropes and plot touch points of 80s (and peripherally late 70s, early 90s) related pop culture. So, this season we get some bodysnatching, focus on a mall, Russian bad guys, more dark experiments and gorey elements of horror. The Mind Flayer from last season had an aspect left behind when Eleven closed the rift. It wants revenge and it wants Will. Meanwhile Russians have a secret base underneath the town where they try to recreate the experiments that brought low Hawkins Power & Light (side note: I think it should have been Hawkins Power & Water considering the prevalence of energy vs water in the series). This plot allows Steve and his new co-worker (brief love interest) to shine in a side story that collides in a Boss Battle at The Mall. Some stories tie up, some open up and there is more tragedy since Season 1. All in all, I just like the way this season came together, even if they did somewhat overdose on the pop culture notes.

And then iZombie came to an end in a bittersweet, not entirely fulfilling but still incredibly enjoyable series end. Genre TV always has issues with coming to an end. Either they spin out for far too long and have to conclude with a bang or they are cut off far too soon and we are left hanging. I think I like that they chose to come to an end before they ran out of the fuel that made the show so charming.

In case you don't watch or recall, iZombie is based loosely on a comic by Mike Allred but has very little to do with that story beyond a white haired girl zombie as the main character. In this version of the walking dead, the virus / infection / chemical alterant effects Liv More (heh) while she is at a yacht party but she is able to hide the change by dumping her family & fiance (mega alpha Major Lillywhite) and going all goth, pale skin and white hair and mopey hide at home. She works at the morgue with ultra trendy nerd Ravi Chakrabarti which gives her easy access to her one food -- brains ! And with the ingestion of brains comes flashbacks of the deceased's life, which lends to Crime Solving with Detective Clive Babineaux.

The series expands from the Crime of the Week into an epic story about the emergence of Seattle's zombie minority, eventually culminating in the knowledge of the zombie "species" being released to the world. Seattle is walled off, the government wants to nuke them into oblivion and the peace is kept tentatively by a corporation called Fillmore Graves (groan) made up entirely of zombies.

Rob Thomas previously built his fame from Veronica Mars which we are currently re-watching. Condensed single episodes with adorable characters and a mix of ensemble quirky cast members is his forte so we were on board even if not for my fondness for brain eaters.

As the series comes to an end Major (now head of Fillmore Graves) is doing his best to hold the peace against extremist humans and extremist zombies. Liv's best friend, and Ravi's main squeeze, is deposed as mayor. Main Bad Guy Blaine is back along with his sidekick Don E, easily one of the best characters in the show. A lot of plot threads from previous seasons are artfully visited and tied up. Clive had a baby and had her smuggled out of Seattle. Major is dealing with coup d'etat and Blaine and Don E are discovering exactly how much they are not best buds. I love that we cannot deny that Don E is a bad guy but really just end up rooting for the guy. After seasons of wondering whether Blaine was actually trying to redeem himself he once again proves himself a complete, evil ass. But a charming, sexy ass. Ravi gets to be the Good Guy who gets the Girl. Liv continually deals with rock & a hard place situations but comes out on the moral high ground. Nothing really extremely revealing happens here but even after discovering a cure for being a zombie (which is weird unto itself -- the body is dead; how can you CURE it ?) the metaphor for being Not Normal is accepted and the zombies we have come to love stay as zombies and live happily ever after.

3 Short Paragraphs: Spider-man: Far From Home

2019, Jon Watts (The Onion News Network) - Cinema

Two things. This movie really needs to be billed as a comedy. And, fuck Disney and Sony for breaking up the band. OK three things. That THIS movie was dealt wonderfully with the post-Snappening aka "The Blip". When paired against the ultra morose, foggy and dim view of Manhattan in End Game, this was just icing on the healing cake. If I had one issue is that I don't believe the world could have recovered so quickly, considering the mess we saw in End Game.

The latest adventure of the Night Monkey finds him on another school trip where he has to don the suit and fight evil / protect his classmates; again. Considering that he's well known as a friendly neighbourhood superhero, it wouldn't take much to connect the dots about his two very public non-NYC encounters. Alas, few do. But the hijinx while he does his web swinging thing are played for great comedic effect, and well balanced against the great pathos of Peter dealing with his Iron Man legacy, which to be quite honest, I never really did buy into. He's a 16 year old boy; a genius, but still only a kid. There is no way he is going to don the mantle as The Next Iron Man, whatever that is even supposed to mean. It's not like he was leading the Avengers or anything. Still, the conversations he has with Quentin Beck are poignant, which confused the fuck out of me once the reveal came about.

Meanwhile, what I REALLY liked was the budding MJ v Peter shipping. They are just tooooo cute, but again, I didn't really buy into buff, smart pithy Peter Parker being shy around girls. But when MJ doffed her Daria mask for an endearing confession of affection, I was all in, ahh-shucks-they-are-so-cute!

Battle Of The Sexes

2017 - d. Valerie Faris, Jonathan Dayton -- crave

On Saturday, September 7, 2019 my wife and I sat down to watch 19-year-old Canadian Bianca Andreescu take on the legendary -and formidable- Serena Williams in the final of the U.S. Open.  Andreescu defeated Williams in a tough but very confident 1h40minute 2-set performance, becoming the first Canadian to win a Grand Slam title in singles competition (Daniel Nestor had won 8 Grand Slams in men's doubles and 4 in mixed doubles).  During the awards ceremony, Andreescu was presented with a cheque for US$3.85 Million, the same amount that Rafael Nadal would get the next day for a 4h50minute, 5-set win.  This type of payout for Andreescu would have been unfathomable in the early 1970s, not just because the prize purses weren't nearly that big at the time but also because the women's game wasn't seen as equal to the men's and as such weren't compensated.  The average disparity was around 2.5:1, but at its worst was 12:1 between male and female winners of the same tournament.

Billie Jean King never argued that the men's game wasn't faster, stronger, more dynamic than the women's game, but what she did argue that the women put just as many butts in seats as the men did, sold just as many tickets, so why shouldn't they be compensated the same?  When rebuffed, King and many other women players left the US Lawn Tennis Association and formed the Women's Tennis Association.  The WTA would organize their own tournaments, obtain their own sponsorships, establish their own TV deals, all benefiting the players.  In the cinematic version of these events, King and crew are presented almost as a travelling road show, going from city to city, sharing hotel rooms, managing press together.  It feels not unlike like GLOW only set in the 70's and with less spandex.

The film was sold as sort of a light drama-comedy, and as much as a movie dealing with incessant sexism can be funny, it is.  King, as played by Emma Stone, is the center of the film, not only combating systemic sexism, but also dealing with her homosexuality - something that could have been a career-killer at the time had it gone public.  The film's co-lead (but lesser so) finds Steve Carrell in the role of the affable Bobby Riggs, at the time a mid-50's retired tennis champion caught in a spiral of gambling addiction and questions of self-worth.  A consummate showman, he saw King's plight for equality not as a threat but an opportunity for him to exploit national sexism for his own financial and egotistical gain.  The film lays down the risks that King took in accepting Riggs' challenge but also highlights her intelligence and savvy both on and off the court.

The film negotiates the personal and the public exceptionally well and gives a sympathetic eye to both sides of the picture.  There are actually two villains in the piece, the first being Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) - a former tennis champ and now tournament organizer - who embodies the worst of male chauvinism in the film (where Riggs is the avatar of casual sexism) - and Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee), the Australian women's champion whose portrayal here is of a staunchly conservative, know-your-place type.

It's an exceptionally well-crafted film, which leads into the titular spectacle which serves as a legitimately exciting climax even if the tennis isn't shot (or played) particularly well.  I always thought of the Battle of the Sexes as an important moment in women's tennis, but it's so much larger than that.  The penetration the event had in the public consciousness at the time - with a viewership of estimated 50 million in the US and 90 million worldwide - made for an important moment in the women's liberation movement, showing that women can compete and even outcompete men.  It allowed for many men to confront their own prejudices (while others would remain in denial and call the event a sham).

Today, women's tennis is the only sport paid in parity with the men's profession.  They may not play the same style of game or the same length of match in a Grand Slam but they are still selling tickets just the same and creating headlines.  One has to wonder if women's sport was compensated the same, would that lend credibility and equality?  Today the WNBA players are calling attention to their pay gap, facing a similar struggle, but there is proof the gap can be closed.

[We Agree (I think)] 3+1 Short Paragraphs: Mortal Engines

2018 - d. Christian Rivers

The trailer for Mortal Engines seemed to tell everyone everything they needed to know about the world it inhabits: it's a post apocalyptic future, cities of the world have been thrust atop wheels and treads, and they're at war with each other, in some cases the larger cities literally consume the smaller ones.  It's fucking ridiculous, it makes no sense at all, the logistics of consolidating a city into a mobile platform is unfeasible, and yet that's this world.  Are you in?

Don't worry if you're not in, most people weren't.  This movie that turned cities into tanks tanked at the box office.  The first time I saw the trailer I outright dismissed it as yet another ludicrous YA setting... and it is.  But Mortal Engines kind of dispenses with the Young Adult parts of "YA fantasy" and tries more for a conventional 80's cinematic fantasy adventure, not out of line with your Ladyhawkes or Willows.  The teen angst or youth-in-drama aspect that is YA's bailiwick is cast aside for scenery chewing villains (Hugo Weaving doing his thing, as well as a CGI steampunk-robot-zombie who becomes a rather endearing force throughout the movie), intricate set pieces on the cities on wheels, in the mud in the tracks they left behind, and in the air where somehow advanced planes are a thing.

Honestly, I loved it.  Ok, love is a strong word, and perhaps a bit much, but I liked it quite a bit.  The WETA-supplied effects are incredible.  You shouldn't believe that a city can live on giant tank treads, nevermind move at the speed they're moving at and hold together in the slightest, but the effects are excellent, enough to give you incentive to suspend disbelief.  As well, the set details within the cities and other areas we see are phenominal, clever and eye-attracting easter eggs to the world we left behind for this po-ap future.

There's one small sub-thread of the film, following Weaving's daughter, that just doesn't play out with any real purpose or satisfaction in the film, but those scenes comprise at best 10 minutes total of the overall picture so easy enough to dismiss, and they never really linger.  It would be a stronger, tighter film without them.  If you know what you're in for -- an 80's throwback fantasy with a modern budget -- it's actually quite a treat.

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2019 Edition: Pt B

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Smells bad, bad.

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. But let's try with what's on right now, and stepping backwards in time until I get entirely lost. The bad smell should help me find my way back.

Pt A is here.

Jessica Jones S3 and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. S6

*delete delete delete*

It's easy to rant about movies that are terrible. I stop watching TV shows that are terrible (most of the time; just wait for my post on Another Life). It's less easy to talk about movies or TV I loved, as finding the exact reasons I love something is not not always easily put into words. It's very difficult to say something about something I was just OK with, or something I knew wasn't very good but I liked it fine.

I have a Love/Meh relationship with the Netflix Marvel series. While I relish their concept and applaud them for the bravado of it all (a connected thread leading to The Defenders) I can easily acknowledged that pretty much failed. And yet, I am still really fond of everything Jessica Jones. Primarily Jessica and her non-stop bourbon bottle, leather jacket and combat boots. The idea that they did a low-key powered story spoke to me.

This season follows after last season's combat boots with the consequences of Patsy shooting Jessica's mom (to save her) and Jessica not being able to forgive nor forget. I never really saw the weight in Jess's emotional attachment to her mostly forgotten mom. Considering how much she despised Patsy's mom for the physical and emotional abuse, being connected to a serial killer of an estranged mother, should have driven Jessica in the other direction. But no, she got her mother back and Patsy took her away -- drama and conflict. Jessica's messed up; we accept that.

The crux of this season is: a smart non-powered serial killer is discovered and they cannot seem to stop him, and Trish is working hard at becoming a (minorly) powered supe, not really successfully. On the side stories, we explored Hogarth dealing with her terminal illness via standard Jeri horrible tactics. Malcom is joining the dark side as he does more and more for Jeri, but he has been able to spruce up his apartment (but not move?) and has a hot girlfriend. And Jess meets a new fuck buddy who has the power to identify Bad Guys via a massive headache. Everything and everyone gets wrangled together, as is common to the series, along with the requisite tragic events.

I shifted from my fondness for Jess, to yelling at pretty much every other character for their choices and behaviour. I just couldn't bring myself to care for any of the side characters, and the underlying theme of how far are the powered people allowed to go in their fight for justice. While I know this is another Marvel earth, different from the one the MCU movies take place in, obviously The Avengers exist, so the people of NYC are quite aware powered people have saved the world a few times. So that plot fell flat to me. But I enjoyed watching the season, though I feel no pain that this was the last.

In yet another Marvel TV world, the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't even notice that the Snappening happened (the reserve the use of The Blip for people's return) while they were busy altering the future so that it wouldn't get destroyed for an entirely different Kree based reason. Yet, I still have to have a head-canon conversation with myself about the changes to the Kree Empire during Captain Marvel's onslaught against them, from the 90s onward, and how it affected their future behaviour.

The season picks up a year later with two incontrovertible ideas: Director Coulson is dead, really dead, and half of the lead team is in space trying to find the (un)frozen body of Fitz. Back on Earth we introduce some dimension hopping villains on the hunt for something/someone led by one very familiar face -- Coulson, who is called Sarge.  Oooo, is he an LMD ? Is he a clone? Was Coulson whisked away to another dimension / space and is not dead? Is there another much more convoluted reason? TL;DR -- yes.

The first half of the season, in space, is a lot of low key space opera fun. Once they actually kicked off the reason plot for the season (planet destroying alien species), I got less interested. Sarge and team were not from another dimension, just Space. Sarge definitely had a connection to Coulson but he couldn't remember, and really didn't care. He had an agenda and would not let ANYONE get in his way. The PoAp / Gritty Alien Hunter vibe was fun and Clark Gregg got to have a lot of fun with the character, so at least we had that.

I am not sure how this show is still on the air, but then again, when you look at the genre shows that stay around forever (hello Supernatural) I guess I can see a fan-base keeping something going long enough, especially on network TV. Its palatable, not entirely terrible and is built to generate fandom strong enough to watch each week. Meanwhile, we just entirely forgot about it, and once the season ended, grab a DL and binged through. I feel that was the only way I could enjoy it.

3 Short Paragraphs: Godzilla: King of the Monsters

2019, Michael Dougherty (Krampus) -- download

OK, this one just pissed me off. It just didn't have the right to be this bad. The first new Godzilla movie may have been divisive, but it had a vision that it carried through on. It was grim and vast and on the scale a Godzilla movie needed to be. They expanded the Monster Cinematic Universe with Kong: Skull Island, a movie that knew how to stylishly do a boom bash squash chomp monster movie. I am not sure why they skipped the fight between Kong and Godzilla to go into the Monster Free For All, but I guess they want to leave the climax for the two kings?

King of the Monsters was jumbled, confused and constantly diving from explosive scene to the next, a stumbling expositional mess. Sure, the original Toho movies were dumb, but in that acceptable low budget rubber suited monsters kind of way. No current big budget Hollywood movie with this much behind it has any excuse for being this stupid. They have writers, for gawd's sake!! You want to know how to do BIG and BOMBASTIC ? See Pacific Rim, and if the only thing this movie wanted to do was set this franchise apart from the palatable colour scheme of del Toro's movie, then they should have at least embraced the disaster movie horror of what having a dozen giant monsters sitting on the doorsteps of major world cities would imply.

The whole conceit of this movie is MO MUTO MO MONEY. Right off the bat, we have to introduce Mothra. Oh, and not MUTO anymore -- they are Titans. And there are dozens of them all over the place, monitored by Monarch but fear & desired by the governments of the world. Then we introduce an eco terrorist who releases Mothra, and then King Ghidora (Monster Zero) and then Rodan and Godzilla has to defend the planet from all the nasty beasties, who just happened to be driven into Rage Mode by an Electronic MacGuffin that sings back to them. And then Godzilla goes to Atlantis. And then the guy who hates Godzilla, but sees the errors of his ways, feeds Godzilla a nuclear bomb. And then Mothra shows up to sing her pretty song. And then... and then... Oh I give up.

Bonus Paragraph(s) of Why's.

Why would anyone stop running from a 1000 foot monster to fire their hand held weapon at it ?

Why would King Ghidora be concerned with singular human beings? Just stomp on the lot of them. Oh wait, there are main characters inside.

Why would the Monster Squad (US based military chasing around Godzilla) be highlighted as attempting to save island villages before Rodan burns them all? They are a SINGLE Vertibird -- they can rescue maybe a dozen.

Why would a man who knows wolves think he can apply that knowledge to a creature that is millions of years old AND is A MONSTER ?!?!

If all previous knowledge has said they can blow Godzilla up with nuclear bombs, why do they then decide it's a way to feed/heal him?

Why was this movie so badly done?

3+1 Ranty Paragraphs: Dark Phoenix

2019, Simon Kinberg (screenwriter for last few X-Men movies) -- download

**warning: spoilers, cuz I don't have the energy to hide stuff for this one**

WTF. Seriously, WTF. How do you adapt a beloved X-Men comics story (Uncanny X-Men #129-138) into something so... bland. Hell, even if X-Men: Days of Future Past wasn't great, at least I seemed to have enjoyed it. But this did... nothing for me. Again, it was not terrible in execution or craft, but.. oh, I don't know, its just so frustrating, I find myself wishing I had just disliked it, because then I would not just hate it for being so utterly workaday.

Following in the path of the other First Class movies, we are still in the the X-Men's past, pre-Wolverine, under the tutelage of a still young, pre-Jean-Luc Picard, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) and 10 years after the last movie (X-Men:Apocalypse) and we have the X-Men as the darlings of the US Govt. I guess having saved the world from a mutant wannabe god made them acceptable & likable enough to have an X-Phone (yep, direct line to POTUS) and being beckoned to save some astronauts. While in space, Jean Grey is dosed with The Phoenix Force, which I just saw as a colourful version of Galactus from the original Fantastic Four movies or maybe even Parallax from Green Lantern?? She survives.

Back on Earth, before you can finish a Dazzler bonfire party, Phoenix goes boom. Everyone is afraid! Everyone is worried! Jean is angry! Charles lied! Aliens arrive, and eat someone's dog and become an uncharacteristically alien looking Jessica Chastain -- seriously, she isn't alien looking because she's an alien, but because they made her look like an Emma Frost knock-off. Oh whatever, after confronting a not-dead Dad (Charles lied!), Jean runs to Magneto to help her, bats around some US Army (POTUS has decided the revoke the Bat.. er X-Phone because she made some holes in crappy houses and schmushed some cars) helicopters and then runs off again. Eventually everyone catches up with everyone, some zip bang slash crash pew pew pew, and the soldiers capture everyone but Alien Jessica Chastain.

About the only interesting segment of the entire movie is the train ride from Deadpool 2. The aliens attack and everyone gets to let loose because, you know aliens. Its a fun battle. But they didn't even do the sacrificial attack that climaxed the comics, they just had her pop like a fireworks display. There is a sub-plot about Charles being not-nice, so at the end of the movie he leaves the school in the hands of Beast and goes to Paris to play chess with Magneto. So, technically it all looked good and had some exciting bits (and Dazzler !!) but *yawn* oh-mi-gawd, it had no idea what it wanted to do with the franchise, just milk some rewards from another known X-Men comic story (if you are over 30) and ... move on? Oh, and Jennifer Lawrence definitely moved on, getting killed early in the movie, so I guess we now have to Google "how can Mystique be dead" to find out how the early version of the franchise even starts.

10 for 10: I Need a Catchy Title?

10 for 10... that's 10 movies 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 scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable?

[2019, May Update -- this was still in Drafts? Let's finish it off. Which should be interesting considering it was ... 2017 ?!?!]

[2019; August Update... jeebus, just finish already, format or not]

[2019; SEPTEMBER OMG !]

In This Edition:

The November Man, 2014, Roger Donaldson (Dante's Peak) -- Netflix
iBoy, 2017, Adam Randall (Level Up) -- Netflix
Volcano, 1997, Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard) -- Netflix
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, 2016, David Yates (The Legend of Tarzan) -- download
The Void, 2016, Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski (Father's Day, Manborg) -- download
Colossal, 2016, Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) -- download
Paradox, 2016, Michael Hurst (Room 6) -- Netflix
2:22, 2017, Paul Curie (One Perfect Day) -- download

aaaand Go.

Netflix still often feels like the corner video store, where there are a hand full of first run movies at the front, but most of the place is filled up with Straight To movies and delete items. The November Man is a Straight To flick for the Bourne crowd, or probably more precisely the fans of the British spy procedurals.

Pierce Brosnan is Devereaux, an ex-MI5 operative. Or is it CIA? Which is in vogue these days? I still get this flick mixed up in my head with the John Snow MI5 movie I previously rushed through a post. So yes, CIA. He was a hit man, but he's old now; ex-CIA black ops kind of guy in retirement. He is convinced by an old boss to help him extract a... what's the standard word... asset from Russia. The asset is about to get caught and she has good intel on a Russian general. Devereaux agrees but things go south, as they always do, and the asset (who turns out to be his old paramour) dies... at the hands of Deveareaux's once-protegee. But not before she gives him the Next Clue. So, now Devereaux is angry and upset at the CIA and his ex-protegee but still wants to help out the Next Clue, played by Olga Kurlenko.

Standard convoluted plot of espionage and revenge, which happens to be based on a popular adventure book series. Its not all that original and Donaldson spends far too much time recreating Bourne style scenes, but the acting is all committed and the locales are generously exotic. Brosnan is probably stuck with playing B-rate ex-spies of many sort and he does it deftly enough. This was definitely sitting on sofa checking Facebook fare, though. [9:36]

---

iBoy is a wonderful Netflix Original from Britain, not perfect but a lot of fun. It's your classic 80s inspired technology magic super-powered tale sourced from people who understand a bit about technology, but depending on you to not know a lot. In other words, much of what happens is not at all possible. But with some decent effects, it still makes for engaging fantasy.

Pretty much all technology based fiction.

Tom lives in a rough part of London, those classic towers you see in all the movies -- run down, cramped and ridden with gangs. He has a crush on Lucy and on the night when he was finally going to confess his feelings, he finds her gang raped. The movie almost lost me there; I am in the camp where I am tired of that being the impetus for most fiction heroic males. But at least it was able to move past it quickly enough. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Tom has to run from the gang members, and in turn shot in the head and (I forget exactly how) ends up with parts of his cell phone embedded in his brain. Boom! Magic technology powers, that makes him kinda of like Besson's Lucy (not the character in THIS movie) in that he can see and interact with technology "waves". And soon after, he realizes he can manipulate them, and control mobile devices and data.

From there it runs as a typical revenge / vigilante drama, but the play on technological powers is charming enough. Eventually he reveals himself as the iBoy, and discovers the core leadership of the gang that hurt Lucy. But at a cost. There is always a cost. The weird thing about the movie is that it keeps on dancing between the goofy scifi powers based stuff, and the darker plot elements around the rape and the balance of power of those who committed it versus those who manipulated them. It wants to be deeper than it is, but only succeeds half way.

Still, Maizie Williams is always worth watching. [9:36]

---

Volcano goes into my list of favoured disaster flicks, but not enough to be added to The Shelf. Like the movies about asteroids looming down on us, there were two volcano movies that season. This is the Tommy Lee Jones one, the one where a volcano grows in central LA and the emergency management guy has to pull out all the stops in order to reduce the loss of life. Anne Heche is along as the scientist who has to convince people of the Bad Stuff About to Happen.

Basically, IIRC, something is happening with the fault line (its always San Andreas' fault, ba dump bump) which is sending magma flowing under LA. Things are heating up and geologist Heche, and her trusty side-kick, are trying to figure out why. I remember being horrified the first time I saw the cute, bespectacled sidekick get devoured by an unexpected eruption of magma. Once this event happens, a proper volcano soon emerges and all hell breaks loose. Do you really expect me to NOT use cliches when it comes to remembering disaster flicks?

At the time, Jones was already (click click...) 51, at which point I should be saying "too old to break out as an action star" but remember Liam Neeson's kickoff with Taken ? But that seems what they were trying to do here -- make him the sexy, leading man with against Heche, saving LA from all the stupid people who didn't believe her. But remember, we didn't know Heche was leaning in the direction of women at that time. Still, Jones never  really did reach Action Man status.

And I still did get utterly chilled at the most heroic act in the entire movie, by some rather nameless subway worker, who jumps into flowing lava to save a woman, and dies as lava absorbs him -- but not before he tosses her into the arms of horrified workers. It wouldn't have gone that way in reality, but .... disaster flick. [10:24]

---

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the latest, or first, in the new Harry Potter cinematic universe. This is supposed to take us in two directions: to America and trundling along with Adult Wizards. Eddie Redmayne, the chameleon actor of our current age, plays bumbling, nerdy, stumbling and innocuous British wizard Newt Scamander who has come to America to... oh, I don't remember, but he has a bag (of holding) full of monsters. In his mind, they are not monsters, just misunderstood beasts from myth and magic. But really, dude some of these things are truly beastly, horrific things that would kill people given the chance. What I was disappointed in, in the representation of the monsters, were that so very few of them were mythological. They were basically just alien creatures that the wizards of the world either destroyed or manipulated reality to hide from us. That has to be it right? How else could such a plethora of creatures never have been heard of before?

Anywayz, when one of his creatures gets free he gets caught in a mystery about how muggles (non-mag in the US) interact with magicians, a notorious Bad Guy and some usual HP politics. But the best bits were actually between no-mag baker Jacob Kowalski and Newt, as Jacob gets drawn into a world he is really not supposed to know anything about. Think about it, these magicians never really any cook or bake anything, they just wave a wand and it appears or assembles or something. But Jacob knows, through instinct and skill, what those spells would have drawn upon for the first time. It made me wonder whether there are magicians out there creating new spells that would require non-mag's to provide the base ingredients. What a scandal that would cause.

But the movie never really caught me beyond the interaction of those two. The rest just seemed... forced. [9:31]

--

The Void is one of those Lovecraftian flicks that was probably adored by the horror movie film fest circuit. I wonder whether and how it would have played at FantAsia in Montreal. Remember though, this is a lowish budget movie I saw in 2017, something I saw running on the movie / specfic blogs that looked interesting enough. Basically anything Lovecraftian, cults and summoned monsters and transformation and tentacles, can attract my attention. I wonder what that says for me. I remember liking it, but not loving it.

A couple of people are on the run from ... someone. They end up at a mostly abandoned hospital, which recently suffered a fire, and is on a downturn in use. They drag in the survivor and almost immediately things begin to go wrong, with a nurse killing a patient, her face ripped off by ... something. The Good Guys kill her, but she comes back, all tentacly and gross. From there things get all the more convoluted and creepier, connecting the people on the run to a cult that is summoning something from the namesake.

In another era this would have been done by John Carpenter. The over-use of vomit inducing practical-effected monsters and devolving people & creatures was probably the only boon to this movie, for the ideas it was trying to depict just faded away in the over-troped, over-used, not very creative scene to scene "plot". [6:31 because I don't really have much more to say about it, with this faded lingering impression left]

--

[full disclosure; i just deleted Noroi as i don't recall a single thing about it]

--

Colossal is just a movie of the current era, a time when kaiju are not just coming back ironically or in homage, but also in tangentially referential ways. We have a movie whose sole premise is a presenting traumatized woman who channels a kaiju on the other side of the world. Or is it that he kaiju channels her? Well, whatever she does, the kaiju does as well. She swings her arm, its swings its arm. She walks, it walks and crushes Seoul. It only happens while she is in a certain point, and she cannot see through its eyes, but via the wonders of the Internet, can can see what's going on.

While this is a fantastical premise, this is not a genre movie. This is a classic indie emotion and interaction movie. Gloria (Anne Hathaway; The Intern) is a drunk of trainwreck. She has to escape to her hometown and is sleeping on the floor of the empty family house. Of course, she ends up at the local watering hole and connects with the bar owner Oscar (Jason Sudeikis; Horrible Bosses).

At first things are amiable between Gloria and Oscar, but as they explore this extraordinary phenomena, a really dark side comes out of him. I am not even sure of what is darker, that he seems to be so disconnected from the damage he can cause when he manifests his own kaiju (giant robot), or that there was a dark past situation that created this whole turn of events. Oscar is a horrible person and doesn't seem to be bothered by who is hurt, either lone Gloria who stands before him, or the countless nameless Koreans who he only sees on TV screens.

[kent's view]

[8:30]

--

[full disclosure; i just deleted Gambit (2012) & Paradox (2016); AGAIN I don't recall a single thing about them]

--

But I do remember this one, albeit slightly. Not quite time travel, more a romantic touch of synchronicity and a bit of time looping, this one was small budget and not thoroughly thought through (i love those three words together) but I rather liked it. I admit, I am rather charmed by Michael Huismann, who we first got to know on The Treme, but you might know better as the second Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones.  And I really like Teresa Palmer. So, I can at least enjoy watching two beautiful people fall in love. Add in some time hijinx and...

Dylan is experiencing something. He keeps on seeing innocuous events repeating: drops of water, flies, car horns, etc. Through chance, he gets connected with Sarah (he gets distracted at 2:22pm almost guiding her plane and another into collision; he's an air traffic controller).  Events and things out of time keep on colliding, focused around an event at 2:22pm and connecting the two new lovers.

Its not easy to explain where the movie goes, and how, and mainly/frankly because it doesn't entirely make sense. Suffice it to say, the lovers are connected through time and via the energy of a dying star from 30 years prior. I just rather liked the execution.

[7:41]

Wow. Cleaned out. And yet, I am not really sure WHY. I mean, I basically ignored the content of almost an entire year's worth of movies seen. Oh well, who I am to define my brain and that war going on in there.

Room for Rent

2017, d. Matthew Atkinson - crave

You've got the master of aggressively uncomfortable comedy, Brett Gelman, one of today's best absurdist sketch performers in Mark Little, one of yesterday's best absurdist sketch performers in Mark McKinney and consummate Apatow ringer Carla Gallo (and even Suits' Patrick J. Adams is in here).  So the cast is all great, but for the incredible comedic talent they bring to the table, there's not a lot of funny here. Put that on writer-director Atkinson who I think intended this to be more amusing, and likely also more insightful, than it winds up being.

There are frequent reports about big lottery winners who mismanage their money and are unsuccessful at maintaining their wealth. There's definite comedic potential in the premise of following up decade after a person won the lottery as a teen and spent it all foolishly. There are some mildly amusing aspects of this in the script but it's too concerned with Mitch's regret to punch it into full blown comedy.

Even as a character study, it's pretty lacking, at least for comedic purposes. Mitch isn't depressed, he's not really a huge asshole, he's not even that embarrassed or angry, he's just kind of numb. Some of that could be put on Little's otherwise affable performance, but more of it would have to do with the vision of the the writer-director, which plays things entirely too safe. Little can do broad comedy very well, and when you have a Bret Gelman playing a very suspicious new tenant in the family home, one expects some of that toothy, darkly comedic Gelman energy, which never quite materializes.

The score is so oppressively generic as to make itself known rather than recede into the background. It's ever-present and tries too hard to insinuate levity, like a Hallmark Channel "romantic comedy". There's the base of a good movie here, and it's entirely watchable, likeable even, but it's not memorable because it doesn't risk anything.

3+1 Short Paragraphs: The Dead Don't Die

2019, Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive) -- download

Jarmusch is one those directors from the times when I was That Film Guy. Night on Earth, Dead Man and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai were weird, stylish, unique flicks made from the gut and from the soul. Only Lovers Left Alive picked that sensibility back up years later saying He Still Has It. The were movies so far from Hollywood, I could pretend I was a film snob (while eagerly anticipating whatever disaster movie was coming out in the same year) yet enjoy the fact that he had so many watchable people in them. Things haven't changed much -- they are weird and quirky, and this movie was jam packed with recognizable faces, and yet ... wut?

This is a zombie movie, and for the genre, the best thing that can be said about it, is that the love of Night of the Living Dead is there. Sure, zombies are very very played out, but a little love of its origins, along with Jarmusch's odd sensibilities said simpatico to me. I was hoping he would for the walking dead what he did for vampires.

With the happenstance of a not very well explained natural phenomena (fracking knocks the Earth off its axis), the dead waken and begin groaning, moaning, gnawing and being drawn to the previous actions of their lives. They begin eating the residents of this small midwest village. Mixed into this are cops Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny. And Scottish undertaker / samurai Tilda Swinton. And "hipster" traveler Selena Gomez. And Wu-PS (groooooan) driver RZA. And surprisingly friendly Republican ("Make America White Again") Steve Buscemi. And local news reporter Rosie Perez ("Posie Juarez"; groooooan) Adam Driver predicts that this is all going end badly. I didn't think he meant the movie.

Jarmusch always embraced the weird in his characters, and that is present here, and if that was the way he went, while chasing a classic zombie movie plot, it would have been quite fine. But... fourth wall breaking scenes, UFOs (???) and Tom Waits giving an over-arching heavy handed monologue lamely connecting zombies to consumerism (probably the biggest laugh in the movie) just had me wondering what the point was. Would it be too... hypocritical to have requested a bit of Producer Meddling? The only thing I can think of is that Jarmusch knows zombie movies are boring & nonsensical these days, so he made one of similar ilk ?

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching: 2019 Edition: Pt A

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Smells bad, bad.

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me spending too much time in front of the TV. And despite what I said above, I have been avoiding telling you about what I have been watching. But let's try with what's on right now, and stepping backwards in time until I get entirely lost. The bad smell should help me find my way back.

Let's start with not-yet-completed Carnival Row, likely by the time I get around to finishing this, I will have completed the 8 episode Amazon series of Faeries in a pseudo-Victorian England but let's lead the paragraphs with initial impressions and see where they end up.

And this is NOT the "new Game of the Thrones", more "the new Penny Dreadful".

Let's just say this up front -- I've been looking forward to this one for a good while now. The trailers really caught me; I actually put something on my horizon that I knew I would love. The trailers were tight and emotive, highlighting the world and the leads and and all the wyrd darkness the show would have. Fairyland is real, and has been beset with war. Refugees end up in The Burgue, an analog for London (edit: whoah, NYC actually), to be mixed up in a Victorian-style murder-mystery where star-crossed lovers reunite amidst chaos and xenophobia.

Aaaand done. After only eight episodes, a very very VERY big world is barely scratched. This is one of those times where the New Order of TV got mixed in with the Old Worlde. By that I mean, that this new streaming service style of high budget, great looking, challenging but short-seasoned TV got stymied by a writing style that was meant for 13-21 episode season style.

Carnival Row introduces a world where the Land of Fairy, or Tirnanoc, is real. Its across the ocean from The Republic of the Burgue. A pair of other humanocentric countries (the Pact) invade Tirnanoc to conquer and loot. The Burgue sends soldiers under the auspices to protect the Fae, but its more about keeping them out of the hands of the Pact. The war is a failure and ends with Burguish soldiers abandoning the land, but not before soldier Rycroft Philostrate or "Philo" (Orlando Bloom; Lord of the Rings) and Faerie Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delavingne; Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) meet & fall in love. When The Burgue abandons northern Anoun to the Pact, Philo has to abandon Vignette, for her own good.

Years later finds them both in The Burgue, the capital city. Philo is a cop who works Carnival Row, the bad side of town full of Fae, and Vignette is a refugee who naturally falls in with this wrong side of the city. Not that they can help it. Despite Burgue's intervention in the war, its not like anyone there likes Fae (or Pix, or Puck, or Critch; choose your slur). And I mean nobody. Oh, some tolerate and work along side, or hire Fae as servants, but there doesn't seem to be a single person who actually is not racist, besides Philo, which doesn't ingratiate him with his peers. And when a series of horrific murders put Philo on a dangerous path with personal connections to his past, his situation only gets worse.

There's a lot going on in this show. But its wrapped up in a classic TV formula, with a broad cast of characters and unexciting tropes. Not being based on anything prior, its all TV. Given a full traditional season, I think we could have said so much more about the world and its people. But while I really enjoyed watching this show, I didn't come away seeing anything astounding, besides the incredible design. Everything from the sets to the flying faerie effects to the look & feel of the city had me enraptured.

Meanwhile, the OTHER big Amazon show re-imagines a world of superheroes being utter shite and who has to deal with them.

The Boys was also a short season, but utter binge worthy, based on comics by Garth Ennis (The Preacher), starring Karl Urban as Billy Butcher, a brutish British man who takes "wee" Hughie under his wing after the love of his life is killed before his eyes. Not just killed, but horrifically destroyed by a coked up speedster superhero who runs right through her. Right. Through. Her. Hughie is left holding only her hands.

Billy's proposal is that the supes have to be spanked (punished). Someone has to hold them accountable. They are untouchable celebrities in this world, backed and protected not only by their powers, but by the most powerful corporation on the planet, that covers up their indiscretions and worse. On the outside, The Seven in that  world's Justice League of America. Behind the scenes they are debaucherous, hedonistic and amoral, at best. Psychopathic at worst. How does Billy intend on doing this? Via some backing from the government, who is afraid the supes will be sanctioned for war actions, and lots of illegal activities to gather info hoping to reveal to the public some of the things they get onto.

Entering into this point in the game is a right proper superhero, utterly sweet and innocent Starlight. She is not aware of the true nature of The Seven, but learns quickly. But she still wants to do Good, so she stays, hoping to weather the storm and find a place. She and Hughie connect in ways that can only be about sharing their mutual disillusionment, and cannot end well. Which is exactly how the bitter, manipulative Billy would have it.

This show is diabolical, to quote Billy. It doesn't really hold back and powers through the plot at a break-neck pace. It takes the comic telling format, and tweaks it enough to generate TV format, but keeps enough of the source material to make this actually fresh viewing. That is what was lacking from Carnival Row in that nothing felt fresh, while this show kept on surprising and often just plain SHOCKING. I don't expect every show to be as daisy fresh as Legion but I like the attempt at least. The Boys more than succeed.