Three Thousand Years of Longing

 Now this... this is something special.

 George Miller has made a bunch of movies in the last thirty-odd years; from Mad Maxes to Happy Feetses to Witches of Eastwick... They're all heartfelt, idiosyncratic, and have more thought and care put into them than most other things out there. Other than that it's a pretty eclectic list, isn't it?

 All of his stuff is pretty personal. But with the success of the latest Mad Max so far he got the clout to finish a passion project of his. So if Fury Road was 'a movie for them', what does 'a movie for me' even mean?

 We're talking about the man who followed up one of the purest story-book movies ever with (the wonderful, but very strange) Babe: Pig in the City. So yes, his new movie is weird, personal and dense. And oh yes it's good; So, so good.

 Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is a narratologist* who's got a little more than her toes dipped in the realm of imagination. Despite being collected, completely logical-minded and pragmatic, hallucinations of fantastical and mythological characters often intrude into her life. She's learnt to ignore them.
 In light of this, Dr. Binnie isn't overtly surprised when, in an Istambul hotel room, she accidentally frees a Genie from a bottle. She is a bit concerned, though, when the Genie played by Idris Elba (always referred to by its more mythological name, Djinn - Ifrits make an appearance too!) won't politely go away.

 The Djinn, you see, needs Alithea to make three wishes - not just any wish, it needs to be something straight from the heart - before he can be set free from his curse, or back to the bottle he goes.

 Alithea refuses to ask for anything at first. For one, she claims she's perfectly content with her life and insists she wants for nothing. And besides, as a student of stories and mythology, she's perfectly aware that in stories about wishes, irony and poetic justice prevail: they'll always come back and bite you in the ass.

 So they get to talking, and then swapping stories. The Djinn tells of how he was imprisoned by Solomon himself: It seems Solomon went to see the queen of Sheba (not the other way around - take that, Bible!) and he did not take kindly to the Djinn competing (futilely) for his affections.

 Moved by the story, Alithea tells of how she had an imaginary friend as a child whom she inadvertently killed in a fit of doubt. In turn the Djinn tells of his other 'incarcerations', as he ironically calls the previous times he was freed from the bottle. They're lovely little stories full of unexpected turns and tangents that take us from the golden age of the Ottoman empire to Byzantium to the decline of the Ottomans in more modern times.

 Each story is lavishly and beautifully represented on the screen with an eye for detail and humorous moments and the sort of visual panache you'd expect from Miller.

 As they talk and exchange stories, Alithea (who has confessed she doesn't feel as others do - she only really feels emotions through stories) becomes lost in the Djinn's tales... and makes a wish.

 A pretty rotten one, as far as these things go, but it's granted by the genie with no protest. And I'll leave things there, because seeing how things progress is part of this movie's powerful spell.

 There is ugliness in its many stories, and it brings up that old chestnut that our modern world is hostile to magic. But at no point is there bitterness. Humanity and the fruits of science are celebrated to the end by one who stands metaphysically opposed to them. And despite everything, it's still an unapologetically romantic story.

 It's an incredible, beautiful, thorny movie that hides beneath its romantic exterior a tangle of themes and ideas that I'm still trying to unpick a few days later. It's the closest I've ever seen anything come to The Sandman - and I do not deploy this comparison lightly, since the full Sandman comic run is one of my favorite works of literature. It's easily the best and most original thing I've seen this year, which is high praise considering Everything Everywhere All the Time came out only a few months ago.

 I should mention the surfaces of this thing - bright primary colors, tightly composed images, well thought out camera moves and imaginative and cool visual effects... but also the music, the acting (both Idriss Elba and Tilda Swinton are superb) and the editing! Scene transitions are a marvel, smoothly progressing visually into each other, or linked by sounds that drift from one to the next. A thing of beauty.

 I should probably also warn that this is a movie that feels as if it was custom-made for me - from one of the segments being set in Byzantium to the focus on stories and mythology, I don't think I could be objective about it even if  I wanted to.

 Would I recommend this to anyone? I suspect a lot of people will find it too shapeless, too weird, or like some elements but not be engaged by others. And that's fine. But something this original and well put together deservers you at least give it a shot.

* - Surprisingly enough, it's a real field of study. Though I do wonder if they draw enough attention to run TED-talk-like seminars on the academic circuit...

Jabberwocky

 Sometime between Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Terry Gilliam decided he wanted to make his own movie, distanced from the troupe that he had helped make famous. Well, not too distanced - Michael Palin plays the main character, and Neil Iness and Terry Jones make an appearace... so, between them that's half of the Pythons (along with a load of '70s British comedians).

 But for good or ill, it's clear that this is Gilliam's show.
 It's clear in the production design, the framing of the shots, and the bleak, misanthropic worldview. As far as being, you know, good... well, that'd need to wait until the next movie.

 Palin plays Dennis Cooper, an apprentice cooper that is more interested in the business-side of coopering than on the actual barrel making. His father and employer loathes him for it, and disowns him on his deathbed.

 With no other means of sustenance, Dennis goes off to the big city to make his fortune so he can come back and ask for the hand of his grotesque childhood sweetheart. But the guilds have all the business sown up in town, to the point that a legendary cooper Dennis meets soon after sneaking into the city has resorted to cutting his own feet to make more money begging.
 No matter. Soon Dennis befriends a knight's page, who takes him under his wing, and they embark on a series of mildly funny adventures that will end up with Dennis going against the Jabberwock, a beast that's ravaging the land.

 Cooper is your quintessential Palin character, a good-natured goof with unending reserves of innocence and optimism who is then run through a wringer for comic effect. His bumbling attempts to help always backfire, and his modest aims in life (get a little business and return to his hometown sweetheart that clearly can't stand him) fail upwards tragically (he ends up getting the traditional happily ever after, except that it's at the expense of everything he actually wanted.)

 The filmmaking is great, if a bit unpolished - there's lots of imaginative shots and great use of darkness, and Gilliam's trademark lived-in clutter. The sets are a wonder (they were lucky enough to be able to reuse the run-down Oliver sets at Shepperton, just before they were demolished.) While their lines aren't always that great, the actors seem to be having a blast. Palin is likeable and annoying as ever - this is probably peak Palin as a role- and there's always something interesting going on somewhere in the frame.

 Unfortunately I just didn't find it very funny. Unlike Brazil or other later Gilliam films, the humor isn't subtle (or subtle-ish) or ironic or organic; Here it's wall to wall jokes and humorous situations. Except... that they're mostly pretty bland. Trying to distance itself away from the surrealistic humor of Monty Python, the script instead relies on standard farce, gross-out humour, very broad jokes and mugging hysterically to the cameras. Very of its time.
 The best jokes in the movie, like the way they end up deciding who wins a tournament, are very... well, Pythonesque. And the whole exaggeratedly dirty medieval look and casual violence, which might have carried some of the humor, was already familiar from Holy Grail.

 Even if there aren't a lot of laughs, it's amusing enough, in a very basic way. It's always interesting to look at as well, despite the low budget and rough edges, and the ideas it plays with are fun. I'd watched this before ages ago when I first became obsessed with Monty Python and didn't care for it at all. This time around, trying to let it be its own thing I liked it a bit better. I'd take Holy Grail or Time Bandits over this in a heartbeat, but I've watched way worse movies for the sake of completism.

Saloum

 Bangui's Hyenas are a trio of mercenaries operating throughout northern Africa. As the movie starts they're extracting a cartel dealer from a Guinean sting operation/massacre, but the plane they use to escape has been sabotaged. Before they run out of fuel they decide to set down in the Saloum region of Senegal, as one of them is familiar with the area.

 The mercenaries are a great bunch of characters: There's Chaka (Yann Gael), the leader of the outfit, young but always serious. Rafa (Roger Sallah) sports a mohawk and is the hot headed, impulsive one. and last but definitely not least is Minuit (Mentor ba) - the old hand, a white-haired grizzled shaman motherfucker who blows sleeping dust into people's faces. 

I'm team Minuit (the one on the left).

 Beyond looking badass and cool as all hell, they're all good actors with a loads of screen presence. Best of all, the dialog in the movie is really well written, with lots of room for their characters to be fleshed out. This becomes clear as the trio plus Felix the (mexican?) drug pusher (Renaud Farah) seek refuge on a weird compound/hostel ruled over by a charismatic old man who exchanges lodging for finishing chores.

 There's a great all-dialog scene where the new arrivals meet the other guests in the compound over dinner and a few complications are introduced. First, one of the guests, a deaf-mute woman named Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) recognizes them and demands they take her with them (with sign language, while the rest of the table remains clueless.) Then the chief of the local police arrives, and takes an interest in Felix.

 Soon it's revealed that Chaka had some ulterior motives for coming to this compound. As a result the old man that runs the place dies, all hell breaks loose, and the movie takes a turn towards supernatural horror.

 You see, the old man was dealing with a tribe of  deadly spirits, and with his death they break loose, turn the sky bone-white, and start hunting everyone down.

 The monsters are cool - an amorphous blob of locust-like specks of darkness, vaguely looking like horned humanoids. When they're killed (it turns out they're as vulnerable to bullets and knives to the face as your standard mook) they collapse into a heap of rags and bones. So the Hyenas (who, it's been revealed through the movie, aren't just honorable mercs but actual folk heroes) have to fight against the spirit infestation and try to protect the other survivors.

 We finally get some (low budget but well-made) action where the Hyenas face off against the spirits as they go look for fuel and  resin to repair their plane. But my favorite scenes all have to do with Chaka, Rafa and Minuit; in the best one Rafa stops everything to show his support for Chaka once he realizes the traumatic events he's been through, and Minuit joins in as well. There's a lot of empathy and true affection on display here, demonstrated to an extent that you wouldn't expect on a Hollywood movie.
 

 Once the surprise twists are out of the way, I was reminded more than anything else of From Dusk Till Dawn - not just the tonal shift, but the tone of the individual halves are an undeniable influence.
 The script is great when it comes to dialog, but unfortunately it isn't as good when it comes to telling its story. The back half is full of incidents and revelations, but things just run into each other without enough connective tissue to make it feel organic all the way to a finale that doesn't feel particularly satisfying given that it veers away from the action focus.

 The first few scenes had me a bit worried that the style would fall into that particular '90s thing - Tarantino by way of Guy Ritchie and all the other less talented hacks that did that; you know, lots of flashy cuts, freeze frames and subtitles, but thankfully it quickly calms down and goes for a more traditional look. There are a lot of lovely drone shots to introduce locations and some pretty striking imagery once the supernatural invades the movie.

 So yeah. It's got some issues but this is a good one and I'm glad I watched it; I would absolutely be down to see more adventures with the Hyenas, or Awa, or any combination of them.

See How They Run

 See How They Run is a fictional, jokey whodunnit built around the real West End theatrical run of Agatha Christie's Mousetrap back in the fifties.

 It's a very cute and pretty funny movie that falls flat in some respects (especially in its central mystery, and its attempts to either bring anything new or deconstruct the genre) but is saved by a game cast, a lot of mild but good gags, and a snappy pace.

 Detective Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and police constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are assigned to investigate the backstage murder of Hollywood director Leo Kopernick (Adrian Brody) during the celebration of the play's 100th performance. It quickly becomes clear that everyone wanted a piece of him, and they're soon awash in red herrings and complex motivations.

 The truth when it comes out of nowhere and is sure to disappoint anyone who was expecting a well-crafted mystery, but the modest joys in this movie are more related to the characters and their interactions. Detective Stoppard is experienced, easy-going, world-weary and often drunk, while PC Stalker is a young and bushy-tailed, diligent, highly excitable and will often just blurt out whatever comes to mind. Their dynamic together is a delight and scores some big laughs from tiny details like the way they greet each other by their titles. And as a bonus both get a bit of depth added to their characters, while everyone else is basically a caricature.

 I love Saoirse Ronan's work here. Like Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky, she takes a potentially annoying character and makes it impossible to hate.

<3 P. C. Stalker

 Where the movie is less successful is in trying to get clever with structure and conventions. "What, Flashbacks?" says the fictional playwright who's been tasked with creating the script for a movie adaptation of Mousetrap, after the movie has indulged in a ton of flashbacks. "Next you'll ask to include a  title card that says 'Three weeks later...'" And of course, immediate cut to a title card that says "Three weeks later..."

 This, and some other stuff like this is... cute, and kind of clever, but not nearly as much as it thinks it is. Not as executed, anyways.

 Also, this is not much of a complaint but if there's any reason for there being a very obvious reference to The Shining here I completely missed it.

 Agatha Christie buffs might be more satisfied by the film as there are a few decent in-jokes in there. The best of which is a real-life factoid that comes up in the movie as one of the possible motives: The reason there's never been a movie adaptation of Mousetrap is that there was a provision made in the contract when the rights were sold to British producer John Woolf (who's one of the suspects here, played by Reece Shearsmith) stating that the movie could not be made while the play was still running. And... well, it still is. It went on hiatus for COVID, but it's back on now.

 Lines and scenes from Mousetrap also have some significance, as well as its origins in a true case. 

 Even if it doesn't work that well, it still moves at a quick pace, looks pretty good and again, the acting and character humor is a huge amount of fun. It won't set the world on fire or anything, but there are way worse ways to spend one hundred minutes.

Hot Rod

Hot Rod is a bizarre little comedy from the Lonely Island comedy group made while they were still putting out music videos through Saturday Night Live. It's produced by Lorne Michaels but it's not the  usual SNL-to-the-cinema formula of taking a shtick, adding a formulaic story, and running a the bit to the ground. Fortunately Lonely Island didn't have a single well-known character or recurring bit, so instead of getting a skit stretched to movie length and forced into a three-act structure, they wrote an original story and characters for their movie.
 Well, no, not exactly. They took a script (written by South Park's Pam Brady) that was originally slated to star Will Ferrell and did some heavy rewrites to make it fit their style better.

 It's... not a great comedy, but it's weird and surrealist and reflects their sensibilities and where they were at the time. And most importantly, it is pretty funny a lot of the time.

 Andy Samberg plays Rod Kimble, a self-designated stuntman still living with his family in American suburbia. His little brother (troupemate Jorma Taccone - Akiva Schaffer's on the director's seat) idolizes him, and he has a combative relationship with his stepfather. As in, he has to win in ritual combat against his dad to earn his respect (so far he hasn't managed to land a single blow.)

 He struts around town like he owns the place, the same way Emperor Norton must have in LA, always in his stuntman jumpsuit with a little cape. And with a similar amount of delusions. Rod, despite having a team behind him (his little brother and two others played by Danny McBride and Bill Hader) is just no good at what he does - his little moped can barely gain enough speed to mount a ramp, never mind jump off it.

 He's a likeable doofus, though; all intensity, self-absorption and childlike focus.

 Soon two complications enter his life. One is a love interest played by Isla Fisher (who unfortunately is just there to look adorable and let others' zaniness bounce off her.) The other is that his stepdad has a terminal disease and needs $50000 for the operation. Rod of course vows to raise the money so he can save his stepfather, so he can later beat the shit out of him.

 He and his team (which Denise, his crush, soon joins) set out to scrounge enough money through independent stuntwork so they can set up a jump over fifteen school buses, a stunt they're sure will help them gather the money somehow.

 It goes pretty much as you'd expect. It's a (purposefully) very dumb movie with a weirdly deadpan tone that makes its non-sequiturs and digressions all the funnier. Like - when life gets to be too much, Rod goes to the mountains and spends a few minutes angry-dancing to Moving Picture's Never while drinking and smoking at the same time (and then spends a similar amount of time falling down the mountainside.) Or an inspirational scene set to John Farnham's You're The Voice, full of triumphant slow walking and crowds gathering to back our heroes until things somehow devolve into chaos and rioting.

 The plot is not important, is what I'm saying. It's all in the specifics, asides, and character moments. A lot of it doesn't work, but I suspect just what it is that doesn't work most of its defenders would disagree about.

 
 It looks a bit drab, but then again you wouldn't really expect much visually out of an SNL-adjacent production. The music is a fine selection of '80s cheese, with  emphasis on hair metal. I have to respect a movie that has a bunch of Europe songs but not The Final Countdown. I kind of think that might even be a minor joke, maybe. It's that sort of movie.

 And it's got a killer roster of talent: Besides Rod and his crew there's Ian McShane, Sissy Spacek, Will Arnett, Chris Parnell... a lot of funny people, left to do their thing. You just know scenes were being rewritten until the very last moment as people kept coming up with ideas for their characters. It's chaotic and very uneven, but well, that's kind of its charm.

Relic

  Relic (not to be confused with The Relic, a 90's horror movie that like a lot of '90s horror is pretty crap) tells the story of Kay (Emily Mortimer) returning to her old family home with her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) after she's informed her mother has gone missing.

 Grandma Edna (Robyn Nevin) lives alone in a large house in the woods and has a history of dementia. When Kay and Sam arrive at the house they find it recently abandoned and hunker down to either wait for Edna to return or to get some pretty grim news at night, and help with the police search during the day.
 Beyond all the mundane creepiness of an inhabited but slightly run down old house, there's also some hints of unnatural goings-on: strange sounds coming from behind the walls, shadows lurking along the edges of the frame... you know, subtle, haunting-style stuff.
 Kay also has a nasty nightmare about an old cabin with a withered corpse. This will become significant later.

I'm not a fan of the book, but after watching this I'd love to see Natalie James take on House of Leaves

 Edna returns after a few days, not much worse for wear, in a nightgown and sporting some new bruises. Sam and Kay decide to stay a couple of weeks with her to keep an eye on her. They also have some difficult choices ahead as to how best handle the situation.

 Cohabitation is difficult beyond the already fraught situation. Edna doesn't just forget things - she's sometimes difficult, even hostile towards her daughter and grandchild. But as these difficulties escalate, the strange incidents do as well, until the movie jumps the rails in the best way possible. What was a pretty low-key psychological horror film... well, remains a psychological horror film, but earns the batshit adjective. It includes impossible architecture and a monster chase; Way more fantastic than the slower, more buttoned-down first two acts would lead you to expect, is what I mean; Subtlety goes out the window.
 I adore it when movies surprise me like that. Even better when a) the movie was a good one to begin with, and b) it sticks the landing. Here, after some pretty cool mayhem, the script pulls a U-turn and ties everything together in a bittersweet and pretty affecting ending. Lovely stuff.

 While the horror elements seem a bit random at points, they are very effective at building up atmosphere and make thematical sense. And even without them, well, dementia is pretty fucking horrifying. Relic doesn't offer the most sensitive look at mental health issues, but it's very empathetic and uses them in a way that ultimately doesn't feel exploitative. Natalie Erika James' direction is top-notch, with lots of great suspense building and careful framing, and it gets a lot of mileage out of what must have been a fairly small budget.
 Honor compels me that this was helped reach production by the Russo brothers (along with Jake Gyllenhaal, of all people). Well done Russo Bros. You've still got a lot to make up for.

  This is a great movie - very well made, phenomenally acted, and with an excellent story in its black-mold-infested heart.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

 Amicus Productions is most famous for doing a run of horror anthology films in the sixties and seventies, and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors is probably the best known of them. It's a fun collection of cheesy, punchy horror stories that are told with humor but (mostly) no overt jokes. I have a lot of affection for it, having seen it a few times (usually in fragments) over the years, and it holds up really well.

 Five travellers sharing a train carriage are joined by a sixth passenger - And it's Peter Cushing! So you know things are going to get macabre. Well, that and that the title of the movie, and that it's an Amicus film.
 Cushing plays Dr Schreck (which as one of the other characters helpfully points out, means Terror in German) with his all usual melancholy, wit and gravitas - he's great, as always.
 When his bag tips over and the contents are scattered on the floor, a pack of tarot cards comes tumbling out. Questioned about it, he explains that every human being has two final fates - one mundane and one supernatural, and that the cards reveal people's supernatural fate.

To be fair, that is one cheap-ass-looking pack of tarot cards.

 You know the deal; each one of the passengers on the train gets a reading, which then turns into a separate horror short. and the whole thing ends with a shock to cap off the framing device. It's well-constructed, and actually answers some of the questions you assume are just going to be left dangling, so good on scriptwriter Milton Subotski, one of the Amicus founders.

 The story themselves vary in quality. The curse of the format.

 The first one is fun, and the creepiest one of the bunch. An architect is called back to his ancestral home by the enigmatic widow who now owns the house to make some modifications. There he discovers that an ancestral curse is real when a werewolf starts attacking from the shadows. If you don't figure out who the villain is as soon as the menace is laid out, you haven't watched enough of these type of films.

 Next comes a goofy science fiction tale of... a killer ivy plant. It's played completely straight while still indulging in a scene of a houseplant turning ominously towards the camera with the appropriate musical sting, or showing first a leafy shadow and then the vine itself approaching an unsuspecting victim - all filmed and framed as if it were an approaching gloved hand holding a knife.
 What makes it extra special is that the victim goes out to get some scientists to help out, and they then provide some running scientific-sounding commentary with utter solemnity. The tone reminds me of rival studio Hammer's Quatermass films, but not nearly as good.

 The third short is the story of a Jazz musician who, while on the West Indies, spies on a Voodoo ritual and decides to steal Damballa's sacred music to use in his compositions. It's got one of the best (and most overtly comedic) gags in the movie and three fun musical numbers.
 It's also pretty safe to say this was very cheesy even at the time it was released. It obviously hasn't aged very well, racism aside, but I don't think many would take offense at it anyhow: the white protagonist is an absolute dick throughout and clearly deserves his comeuppance. The problem is that when his just desert finally comes it's ridiculously underwhelming. Easily my least favorite out of these.

 But that's all right, because next we finally get to Christopher Lee's fate. He plays the caricature of a smug, snobbish art critic with maximum relish (here and in the framing device) and it's a blast to see him having so much fun with the character.
 After thoroughly insulting an artist played by Michael Gough (British horror icon, Tim Burton regular, but best known in this house as Dr Flammond from Top Secret!), the artist turns back the tables on the critic with a prank that exposes him as a sham.
 The artist is a less than gracious victor, and his constant barbs drive the critic to murder. But after death the artist's hand comes back from the grave, slowly clawing its way towards the critic. There's some great effects work here with a mechanical severed hand that can actually crawl, in addition to the creative framing you'd expect that allowed them to use a real hand.
 This is an excellent segment - just the acting alone, both from Lee and Gough, would make it great, but it's also a cool, fun (if derivative) little story that actually has themes and some depth. Great stuff.

 The last story features a very young Donald Sutherland as half of a newlywed couple who starts suspecting that his bride may be a vampire. It's a very plain, plodding tale that ends with a fun twist, but honestly it drags a bit even at fifteen minutes.

 And then the movie is done after a final catchup with the six train passengers. The twist (because of course there's a twist!) is predictable, but it makes sense and is effectively creepy.

 So there you go. Uneven, as usual, but the stories here all share a short running time and varied elements.
 The effects, with a couple of exceptions aren't great, and the cinematography, save again for a couple of neat shots (there's a rotating shot in the first story that I liked) doesn't really call attention to itself; That's a bit of a shame, as director Freddie Francis was also a cinematographer with a pretty stellar record (he shot The Elephant Man for David Lynch). As is usual for this timeframe, no gore - just bright red splatters of blood, used very sparingly.

 It's not particularly scary, but the intent here is more to have a good time than to go for the jugular - and in that, it succeeds. Now I need to re-watch The House that Dripped Blood.

Day Shift

 You could be excused if you completely discount Day Shift outright as a terrible-looking Netflix action movie. So many red flags: The red N, for a start, yet another modern urban fantasy mashup. Even worse, the tone of the trailer and the jokes... look pretty obnoxious. On the other hand it's directed by stuntman legend JJ Perry, who's been in the business since at least the first Mortal Kombat movie, and was a fight choreographer for Haywire and Undisputed 2; That's one hell of a resumé. And it's pretty safe to say stuntmen turned directors are doing pretty well these days.

 The movie starts well. Jamie Foxx, mid-pool cleaning gig, breaks out a hidden weapons cache, enters the house and picks a fight with the resident vampire. It's a great close-quarters gunplay and martial arts fight, full of cool reversals and great moves. The vampire moves a bit like Linda Blair when she crawled on the ceiling in the exorcist, but on speed, which makes for some nice bone-crunching shots - a cool and very original use of a contortionist in fight choreography.

 Once the fight is done and the scene moves out into mid-day LA, the camera pans up and we get a classic action movie title - it slams into the screen with a bang and there's flames and metal lettering and a stake for an I ... yeah, we're in good hands:

Now THIS is a title sequence.

The very next scene we're introduced to the movie's big bad - a pretty vampire realtor played by Karla Souza who, in the process of interring a vampire competitor, spews out that tired old "you know the definition of insanity?" quote, which quickly outs scriptwriters Tyler Tyce and Shay Hatten as either hacks or half-assing it. That's the sort of inane bullshit someone who's trying to sound smart would crowbar into a speech without saying anything intelligent*. And since this scene is working up a sweat to establish Karla as a credible threat... well, that's a pretty good indication of how bad the script for this is going to be.

 Oh, and it turns out that the vampire Bud Jablonski (Jamie Foxx's character) killed at the beginning was important to her. It's as good a plot kickoff as any other B-movie device.

 It turns out Jablonski uses pool cleaning as a cover for his real vampire hunting job - even after he's been kicked out of the vampire hunting union, he's able to scrape by selling fangs to the black market for a profit (why there's a black market for fangs, it's never explained.)  But in the sort of hacky contrivance that makes shit scripts like this tick, his ex-wife will be taking his child to Florida in a week unless he raises $5000. And to get the money, he needs better bounties.

 So off goes Jablonski to rejoin the Vampire Hunting union, from which he was fired for being a loose canon who played by his own rules etc. etc. He gets his old vampire hunter friend Snoop Dog (in cowboy getup and obviously having fun with the role) to pull some strings and get him back in.

 And it works... mostly. He's grudgingly admitted back into the Union, on probation, and he needs to take an overseer with him to make sure he doesn't break any regulations.

 And now it's a buddy action comedy. But, wait for it- his nanny is a straight-laced desk jockey (the normally dependable Dave Franco) who's never been in the field! He's got Photograph set as a ringtone, and his thing is to piss himself whenever he's in trouble! Hilarious, right?

 And so the stage is set for a series of vamp fights, with Karla as the boss at the end. Will the scriptwriters avoid the obvious cliché of  having her kidnap Jablonski's family and use them to get at our protagonist? Of course not, don't be stupid. Snoop Dog and a couple of vampire allies join the fray too for the final confrontation, including poor Natasha Liu Bordizzo, who gets a cool katana scene but also the worst and most underwritten and poorly set-up role in this whole sorry mess.

 The script for this movie is trash, and not good trash. At all. It's simultaneously overstuffed and half baked idiocy where the mythology is shit, no one acts like a human being, there's no interesting mystery (or... interesting anything) and none of the jokes land. People spout exposition at each other with information they both already know in the most inelegant way possible, and every. Single. Plot. Element is crap. There's nothing salvageable here, every element that's introduced is a shitshow.

 Wait, not every element! at one point Jablonski teams up with a douchy duo of fellow hunters (The Nazarian brothers, one of which is played by Scott Adkins), and they are actually funny! This was honestly a pretty big surprise, given the botched execution of every other single joke attempted in this film.

 But none of this can be laid at the director's feet - or indeed, any of the actors, other than the fact that they chose to run with the material. They do what they can with what they're given.

 The movie's considerable saving grace is that it's got a lot of great action sequences - not quite enough to fully redeem the script, because the pacing is off and it grinds to a screeching halt too often and for too long for some extremely unfunny business, but on the whole it makes it absolutely worthwhile. Doing justice to both genres in action comedies is hard (just ask Bullet Train, or so many Chinese martial arts movies); action this good deserves to be taken out of context and celebrated.

 The fights are fun, varied and inventive, and the one good thing I can say about the script is that it eventually facilitates them. As you'd expect from a stuntman director, there are a lot of acrobatics, tricky falls, and excellently choreographed mayhem.

Snoop Dog gets a Gatling gun, and gets to use it.

 I hope this does well and the talent involved gets chances to do more stuff - I'm eager to see what Mr. Perry does next. Lets hope he gets to do a decent script next time.

*You know who does the same thing expecting different results all the time? Scientists. Me, when rolling some dice. Stop using that glib piece of shit quote, and stop attributing it to Einstein.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

 Had you told me as a teen that I would skip watching a big budget Jurassic Park sequel that prominently featured dozens more species of dinosaurs than in the original and had a huge setpiece around a giant volcanic eruption, I'd have thought you were nuts.

 Yet the first Jurassic World movie came out and was such an appalling mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a complete fucking lack of cinematic moments, that I not only completely avoided its sequel in the theaters, I've sat on it for four years.

 And you know what, it's a shit movie, but taken in the right spirit it's a fun shit movie, more than capably directed by J.A. Bayona. Its not good, but it does manage to be beautiful and well paced and its individual, technical components are made with skill and care.

As well-made as the action is, it's just as poorly written and dumb as the rest of the movie.
 This little guy, for example, somehow tosses a dino twice as big as him through a high window.

 Unfortunately, Jurassic World mastermind Colin Trevorrow provided the script, and it's a wall-to-wall turdfest. Proceeds start out well enough with a short prelude where a group of shady contractor types  return to the ruins of the partially submerged Jurassic World park to retrieve DNA from the first film's genetically altered dinosaur baddie find out that -gasp- maybe dinosaurs are dangerous.

 This establishes a few important things about the movie, mainly: a) It looks beautiful and has a lot of fun setting up its dinosaur attacks, and b) this is going to be a very, very dumb movie. Also c) these contractor types are really bad at their jobs. How-the-fuck-haven't-they-shot-themselves-as-soon-as-they-were-handed-guns terrible.

 After this introduction we jump to the mainland, a few years past the Jurassic World massacre. It looks like a volcanic eruption is going to wipe isla Nublar and its captive dinosaur population; There's some fun speculation about the world's reaction to that, which ends up being a shrug.

 Bryce Dallas Howard, a dinosaur businesslady in the first film, now turned dinosaur activist (her character's name is Claire, had to look it up despite just watching the movie) is forced to watch in horror as the situation unfolds. Luckily a millionaire long-time associate of John Hammond's intervenes and offers to fund an operation to rescue them. The old man is played by the redoubtable James Cromwell, so you know he's on the level. His right-hand man, though, is played by Rafe Spall, so you know that betrayal is incoming. The whole setup is tired and obvious.

 Claire then gathers a team to go to Isla Nublar: two new completely forgettable characters I won't spend any more keystrokes on, and estranged love interest Chris Pratt the dinosaur whisperer. That character is a large part of why I put off this movie for so long.
 I like Pratt as a comedian - and he does get to show off his comic chops here, particularly in a very funny scene where he needs to get away from some lava while heavily sedated - but holy shit he makes for a terrible straight leading action hero in these movies. And the script just piles on the douche on his dialog; It's not just that I find him utterly unconvincing as a rugged outdoorsman badass, I fucking loathe this character.
 Anyhow! Once on the island they meet up with a small private army of obvious villains, and at least the film wastes very little time before they betray our heroes and leave them to die in the volcanic eruption.
 Meanwhile, the contractors abscond with a bunch of dinosaurs to... sell for profit at an auction. Yes, seriously. That is the villain's plot. I know they're establishing parallels to the original Jurassic Park sequel, but this is dumber in any way that counts.

 Inane plot aside, this island sequence is actually the high point of the movie - the protagonists need to flee the island, escaping the volcano and a horde of scared dinosaurs. I mean, stupid stuff keeps happening, but it's beautifully shot and expertly handled. It's exciting! Bayona, a good director who has made good movies, classes up the joint even while serving up nakedly, cynically manipulative moments such as when sad brontosaur is left behind to die in the island and wails piteously at the leaving boat.

 The quick pace continues as the dinosaurs are taken to the mainland - to a Resident-Evil-style secret facility built under the mansion belonging to the millionaire that funded the expedition. Sigh. Of course life finds a way during the auction, and people find out the hard way that attending an event with a bunch of live dinosaurs might be a bad idea. Special mention to just how fucking bad security is here; I mean, it's been terrible during the whole movie, but these guys really put some extra effort to earning their Darwin awards. A... lot of really fucking stupid stuff goes down, the good guys escape, the bad guys get their comeuppance. Yadda yadda.

 At one point a raptor jumps and runs away from an explosion like an action hero. This is where the dumb script and the talent behind the cameras line up and make the movie shine like... like a really, really dumb diamond.

 Of course another genetic hybrid dinosaur is introduced as the main menace, the equivalent to the first Jurassic World's souped up T-Rex.
 This carries forward Jurassic World's brilliant insight that dinosaurs are not enough to get viewers interested, what people are after are genetically mutated dinosaurs. FUCK THAT SHIT. I mean, if you're trying to make them sexier, at least have the balls to give them bikini armor, jetpacks and monofilament whips; why the hell introduce these uber dinosaurs if in the end they a) look less cool than regular dinosaurs, and b) fail to do anything regular dinosaurs don't do already? (And of course they're going to get their ass handed by regular dinos in the end, anyhow.)
 It's wrong-headed, self defeating and honestly, emblematic of how rotten these movies are at their core.

 I'm really surprised to say this, but despite everything this is a worthwhile movie. I would not have had a bad time at the theatre. It's a decent mixture of pure idiocy, bad characters and a lot of awesome cinematic moments.
 I'm happy Bayona got to play with such a big budget, and acquitted himself so well. But as always with this sort of thing I'd rather see him return to smaller, more personal stuff. Fun as this is, it's nowhere near as good as The Orphanage or Monster Calls.

The Long Walk (Bor Mi Vanh Chark)

 The Laos countryside fifty years in the future looks very much like the Laos countryside a hundred years in the past. A little future-tech intrudes into this impoverished pastoral every now and then - people have displays running on their arms, or pay for stuff by holding their wrists up to scanners - but other than that their houses are still rickety wood and wicker structures that might as well have been the same three (or thirteen) centuries earlier. They still struggle to eke out a living from subsistence farming, and sell their produce on a wooden stand on the roadside in the same way their ancestors have going many generations back.

 It's a shrewd, very real point in a movie full of very shrewd, very well observed moments.

 The Long Walk does have some science fiction elements, but they're used as a backdrop to a puzzle of a story that straddles the line between drama and horror (leaning heavily towards the drama side of things.)

 It's a quiet, smart movie that lets you figure out what's going on in your own time.

 An old man (Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy) lives on a small house on the outskirts of a village, making a meager living of selling bits and pieces he scavenges on the countryside. He's also able to see ghosts, one of which (Noutnapha Soydara) has accompanied him on the walk between his house to the village since he was a little kid.

 Saying more would edge into spoiler territory, as much of the joy in this film comes from putting all the pieces of the puzzle together yourself. Answers come slowly - ghosts don't talk, and the old man is pretty laconic - but they do come, and once assembled they resolve into an intricate, affecting character study that's spliced with a neat, thematically appropriate time travel story.

 Besides the ghosts you get a lot more blood than you'd expect, but as a horror movie it doesn't really go for scares. It's gorgeously shot with a lot of sun-drenched, verdant scenery, but when it goes dark it can be very effectively creepy. It's really hard to make a compelling film out of a script that holds back so much information for so long, so major props both to scriptwriter Christopher Larsen and director Mattie Do for pulling it off so beautifully.

 The acting is great. The Old Man oozes grief and resentment, making all the horrible decisions he makes a little more poignant and understandable, Ghost Girl does so much just with her eyes, and little kid is heartbreaking at points. (none of the characters are ever named.)

 I do have one problem with one of the plot developments, but guess it wouldn't be a proper time travel movie if it made sense.

 Saying that this is the best Laotian movie I've ever seen is not high praise, since I think it might be the only Laotian movie I've seen, but it's definitely one of the best movies I've seen this year. Absolutely recommended.

Firestarter

  I like Stephen King. The man has written a lot of crap over the years, but the quality of his good stuff more than makes up for any missteps; Hell, his first eight books alone are an incredible run of classics, lifetime pass material as far as I'm concerned. Included in those novels is 1980's Firestarter, a killer yarn about a prepubescent pyrokinetic and her telepath dad on the run from a shadowy government agency that is behind the experiments that caused their powers and considers them its property.

 It's not an easy story to adapt. What feels like the second half of a very long novel has the two main characters incarcerated and is mostly about psychological manipulation, which is never very cinematic. The infamous '80s adaptation is a snoozefest whenever there's no fire or George C. Scott on screen. But it's such a good novel, you'd think if they tried again with a proper budget and a smart scriptwriter this would work.
 Well, tough luck- this time around Firestarter was produced by Blumhouse with their usual shoestring budget, and it was shepherded to production and co-written by... Akiva fucking Goldman. Better luck next time. Maybe in another forty years.

 While the novel dropped you straight in the heat (ha!) of things, this adaptation starts things out with pre-teen Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and her parents (Zach Effron and Sydney Lemmon; They keep the mom alive for the first act here) living as a semi-normal family in the burbs.
 Charlie's fire powers are bubbling under the surface, though, and are getting harder and harder to control. It comes to head at an incident at school and The Shop is alerted to their presence.

 They choose to send agent Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) after them, who deserves special mention. He was memorably played in the '80s adaptation by George C. Scott in indianface with psychotic conviction and a serious hunger for scenery. Here he's... not as memorable. He's given his own telepathic powers this time around, and a history (he was kicked out of the organization, and before they call him in again he was working as a janitor. Umm... Badass?)
 We get treated to a pan through his loft-like digs, which... includes a drawing board full of childlike 'creepy' drawings - you know, the shitty horror trope they always use with possessed/demonic/haunted kids, but in this case drawn by an adult. It's original, I'll grant them that.

I think they're setting up his upcoming obsession with Charlie, but like everything
else in this movie it's undercooked to the point of being laughable.

 Also, how can he afford that apartment and all those boots on a janitor's salary? In this economy?

 Before The Shop sends rainbird after Charlie's family, though, we get a discussion on parenting a pyrokinetic child - should we have her bottle up her powers or, as mom says, teach her to use them? It's not exactly a riveting scene, and seems to maybe be setting up a running theme (parental fears of your kids doing things they'll regret or hurt them, maybe?)
 Except no, the mom was obviously right and after she's killed, dad starts showing little Firestarter how to start fires. Just the script wasting your time, again. Same with trying to teach her child responsibility: never kill people with flames, promise me, etc etc. You'd think that's important too, except nah. It's mentioned a couple of times later but isn't really important or anything and people are burned with abandon whenever the scripts needs it.

 So finally Firestarter and dad are on the run. We've caught up with the start of the novel!
 They crash on a poor farmer's house (they kept this bit in the previous adaptation, too), but the goon catches up, captures dad while Charlie hides out in the woods. Later, guided by visions Charlie finds The Shop headquarters and burns some fools, her dad dies, and she goes mental, burns everything and everyone.
 There's some head-scratchingly stupid business with Rainbird and then credits roll with the abruptness of an 80s movie.

 As a story, it's... bad. So fucking bad. It doesn't capture anything of what made the novel memorable, and the changes it makes are so inept and half-assed it's kind of embarrassing. The acting is all over the place, but honestly: much as I don't have a particularly high opinion of Zach Effron, I wouldn't blame him or any of the other actors. Not with the material they're working with.
 I mean, they have poor Charlie say "liar liar pants on fire" to someone before incinerating them. They even thought it was worth putting it in the trailer! Screw this noise.

 The music, provided by John Carpenter among others, is pretty good, but nothing special. Some of the fire effects are also cool, especially one scene where they're clearly using a flamethrower. Most of the other fire-heavy scenes are as underwhelming as the drama, due to obvious budget limitations. The filmmaking is indifferent, without any cool or memorable scenes.
 Respect is due to the makeup team, though: the burned flesh effects are effective and very painful-looking. The best scenes in the movie are easily the ones where lil' Firestarter has to deal with the aftermath of her firestarting of living things.
 As in The Innocents, there's a very cruel scene involving a cat. Dammit superpowered children, what do you have against cats? I hope they go all Sleepwalkers on your asses.)

 This never looked good, and yep, I can confirm that it fails to meet even the lowest of low expectations. Go watch The Innocents for your psychic kid fix instead. Or Carrie, or The Shining, or Midnight Special. Or even the 1984 version of Firestarter which at least has some really good pyrotechnics.
 Or, you know, just go read the damn book.

Bullet Train

 It's been a long time since I've seen a movie as desperate to be hip and funny as Bullet Train. It fails on both counts. But more disappointingly, it doesn't deliver a lot of great action, either.

 This is specially disappointing, as it's directed by David Leitch, who with co-director Chad Stahelski led the western action film renaissance with John Wick (Fury Road came a year later and stole their thunder(dome), but that's no slight on their impact).
 Leitch went on to do Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 -both excellent- but this is far closer to Hobbs and Shaw: unfunny, bloated, and so fucking full of itself.

 Brad Pitt plays an operative code-named Ladybug who is sent to board the titular bullet train in Tokyo to retrieve a McGuffin stored somewhere on board. Brad Pitt's schtick (and everyone has a schtick here, it's that sort of movie) is that he's a kind goofball motormouth with a metaphysical, chronical run of bad luck, and a hard-on for self-help.

 The briefcase, it turns out, contains a buttload of money in bills and bullion to pay for the ransom of your stereotypical badass yakuza overlord's son. As it turns out, there's a few assassins, mercenaries and assorted miscreants on board the train, and most of the movie's overlong second act consists of untangling all the parties' motivations as the fight and make alliances with each other.

 Once the plot is untangled, then the movie finally settles down a little bit. With clear(er) motivations and on-track to a final confrontation against the big bad, the movie gets a lot better and finally delivers on some cool action, but by that point it's too little, too late.

 Because to get there you need to get through a gauntlet of cutesy humor and running gags (that name is doubly deserved here- they are run into the fucking ground!) delivered with an obnoxious grin and wink by a script trying so hard to be cool and clever that you can taste the flopsweat.
 There are some good gags in the mix, and some others that I appreciate on paper, but the miss-to-hit ratio of the jokes is unacceptable. The tone of the movie is even worse - it feels like it's pointing out every little thing it does and singling it out for praise. The script itself is built around fate and luck, which is fine but means that the plot is built around little connections and coincidences that the movie will highlight and then get back to with quick flashbacks when it comes up again. Like an annoying, eager-to-please kid showing you his... fidget spinner collection or whatever kids are into these days. And of course, if you think about details beyond the ones that the plot specifically set up it all comes tumbling down, but hey.

 I personally didn't find the action very appealing; it's gruesome, fun and it's always clear what's happening to whom, but a lot of the connective tissue within the fights seems missing- mostly I assume to focus on funny (or "funny") beats and a quick rhythm. I appreciate they're trying something new a bit outside the 87North signature style, but until some bits close to the end I just didn't think it was memorable at all. 

 There's a lot to like in this movie, even while it's being kind of insufferable. Pitt and Bryan Tyree Henry (PaperBoiiii!) are excellent and often funny even when saddled some truly dire lines, which is a testament to their talent and charisma. Zazie Beetz barely registers. Poor Hiroyuki Sanada (TwilightSamuraiiii!) just gets to look cool with a cane/katana combo and provide exposition, but he hogs all the best action scenes.
 The rest of the cast don't fare so well - Aaron Taylor Johnson is kind of annoying in a kind of James MacAvoy type role, and I really disliked Joey King as a teen sociopath. Happy to chalk that down to the script rather than the actors, as even the conceit for King's character is pretty lame.
 Oh, and we also get surprise Michael Shannon! He proceeds to Shannon things up admirably, but he's been better deployed elsewhere. 

Surprise Michael Shannon! is the best surprise.

 It's a handsome-looking movie as well, overtly artificial looking at times but you can at least tell they were going for an aesthetic. As with Deadpool 2, I appreciate when expensive special effects scenes are used to sell goofy slapstick jokes like Pitt banging his head against random objects in an extended slow motion (and CGI-heavy) scene. 

There are also some genuine moments of cleverness buried in the script - even an extremely cutesy and tiresome schtick where Tyree Henry keeps classifying others as Thomas the Tank Engine characters makes for some surprisingly fun twists in the story, but only after it's been used as exasperatingly as possible. And as mentioned above I did like the final act. Movies that end well are easier to forgive, but all in all this was pretty damn disappointing.

The Innocents (De uskyldige)

  Kids can be the worst. I know two normal, mostly well-adjusted people who killed a bunch of baby chicks as kids - one with a hammer, the other by stomping on them with his new boots. Sometimes torture and murder seem like a good idea; Some kids don't know any better.

 The Innocents understands this. It should surprise no one that a Norwegian film with a premise that might sound a little like Stranger Things ends up being a deeply fucked up movie that, to put it mildly, does not shy away from some horrifying violence inflicted on animals, little children, and a couple of bystanders. But damn if it isn't a great movie.

 Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) is a... morally challenged little girl (I'd go with little piece of shit) that is introduced as she's painfully pinching her autistic sister (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad)'s leg just to see if she can get a reaction.
 Her family is relocating to an apartment block on what seems like the outskirts of the city, and everyone else seems to be on holiday. As Ida explores her new place and environs and makes new friends the film does an outstanding job at capturing the feel -the uncanniness- of being a kid in a strange place. The focus drifts from kid to kid, and sometimes to the adults in their life with an impressionistic bent that reminded me a little of The Tree of Life.

 Soon she meets and becomes fast friends with Ben (Sam Ashraf), who shows her a neat trick: with a little concentration, he can  change the direction of falling objects just by concentrating on them. On a darker note, little Ida's moved on to doing some really horrible shit to her sister - out of boredom, curiosity, resentment... it's not like she's thinking these things through. And with Ben, who's a tiny ball of grudges and sociopathy, they work their way up to some light cat torture and murder.

doesthedogdie.com confirms this cute lil' fella does indeed die, and that it's (sic) very grafic.

 Meanwhile her autistic sister Anna establishes a connection with Aisha (,Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim) another neighboring kid who has some empathic and telepathic abilities. When they all get together they seem to potentiate each other's powers. The rules for this. as befits a movie about kids playing around who don't see anything too strange with psychic abilities, are loose and ill-defined, but Anna is also revealed to have a mixture of telekinesis and other powers. She also starts to break out of her shell slightly, murmuring a few words and responding to the environment. Ben is the one most strengthened by all this, and he soon starts developing fun new powers like mind control... and using them in the sort of terrifying ways you'd expect from a budding little psychopath.

 The suspense here is outstanding. It's a violent movie, but its most effective, wince-inducing events either happen off-screen or as a quick flash of gore; they work particularly well because the movie carefully sets them up, either by piling on aggravating circumstances or by giving you all you need to do the math before it arrives at the result: You know this kid holds a grudge towards these football playing kids. You've been shown he can snap a thick stick in half with his mind. And now the camera following the football game is focusing on these kids' legs...
 And it's made even more unsettling by the film's willingness to linger on the physical and emotional aftershocks of its events. It's a cruel and unusual movie. Or, you know, cruel as usual for a Scandinavian movie.

  The movie -on paper- eventually resolves into a Stephen King-style showdown between the evil kid and the good kids, with Ida realizing maybe actions have consequences. But The Innocents remains steadfastly low-key, with an excellent subversion of a grand finale so subtle only kids notice that something's going on.

 Torture and murder can seem like a good idea to some kids, they don't know any better. That maybe some of them can learn and grow up... that's as good as it gets here.

Nope

 The prologue to Jordan Peele's third film is a flashback to a TV show set where a monkey's gone rogue and killed/maimed a bunch of people. The camera lingers on one woman's shoe, perfectly and improbably balanced upright on its heel in the middle of the carnage and chaos.

 I've tried to avoid reading up on the film before watching it, but I did see mentions of this shoe a few times; People suspect a deeper meaning, and have come up with different theories about it.

 I do think it's explained away in a line of dialog later, when a character asks something along the lines of 'what's the opposite of a miracle?' It also reminded me of that scene in Us where a frisbee lands in a blanket, perfectly and uncannily matching the towel's colorful circles pattern.

 Maybe (probably) I'm just missing something and it does have thematical heft, but my feeling after watching Nope is that the shoe is just a weird, jarring image to induce unease. It later shows up on an uncomfortable scene, but I don't think it's got a coherent theme or message.

  All this is a long way of saying I think Nope is mostly free of the deeper meaning that buoyed Get Out and Us; The director has gone on record saying that he wanted to do old school spectacle in the style of movies like Close Encounters or Jaws, and what do you know! Those are the two films I'd most likely compare this against. And while there are plenty of themes in display (the relationship between beasts and their trainers, the search for fame) they don't really cohere into any clear message.

 But even if it's not as good as its inspirations or the director's previous films, it's still a huge amount of fun, has great characters and dialogue, and is chock full of beautifully filmed, glorious weirdness. And it's creepy as all hell.

 The film's tone is tightly controlled and full of memorable imagery, even if the links between these images aren't as solid as they could be. It starts out a bit slow, but the characters are likeable and funny enough to carry it until the plot kicks into overdrive.

 Em and OJ (Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya, both excellent) run the Haywood ranch after their father (the legendary Keith David) is killed by a Fortean rain of coins, keys and other random objects. OJ is the dutiful son, laconic and responsible, trying to keep the ranch going, while Em is the unreliable motormouth pseudo-grifter who considers the ranch her side-gig. Soon they become convinced the ranch is being stalked by a UFO, and are joined by the electronic store employee that installs some high tech cameras for them as they try to get footage of it.

 Their neighbor, a former child star (and survivor to the TV set massacre from the prologue) will also be an important part of the story.

 To go much further would mean going into spoilers, but after a bit of a slow start it becomes clear that the aliens are definitely not friendly, and the Jaws parallels come to the fore. There are a lot of weird, wonderful scenes, a lot of good suspense and general creepiness. Honestly, some of the images are so bold that they're kind of ridiculous - but that's the best kind of ridiculous!

 Both Get Out and Us were heightened by the parallels Peele established to Racism or privilege - I mean, they worked on their own, but the fact that there's a literal and a symbolic level helps shrug off the fact that, well, a goofball secret society worked out how to do consciousness transplants, or the ridiculously fantastical premise behind Us's Tethered. Here there's no such safety net; Sometimes aliens are a parable for immigrants, discrimination or simply the other. And sometimes, they're just sky sharks.

Monk Comes Down the Mountain

  When the shifu of a small mountain monastery announces that due to economic troubles they will need to throw out one of the acolytes, the titular monk He Anxia (Baoqiang Wang) starts a fight with all the other monks to prove he should stay. The fight is a knockout - fun, funny, and full of great wirework and cool moves. Once it's over, the punchline is of course that it makes the shifu realize that He Anxia is ready for the outside world, so he promptly boots him out.

 So down the mountain comes the Monk, and ends up in a 1930's style large Chinese city. Having lived in a monastery all of his life, he has no idea how to live within society; when his unwitting acrobatics cause someone to throw him some coin, he returns it, asking 'what's that for?'

 As soon as he's hungry he decides to steal some chicken from an older man. A chase ensues, and by the end the man, a local doctor takes him in. He Anxia takes to the man as a surrogate father, and gets enmeshed in his life and business: there's a young, pretty wife, a ne'er-do-well younger brother she's having an affair with, cash problems and a secret stash of money. The movie threatens to turn into a noir for a bit, but the whole thing is resolved within half an hour.

 So that whole episode living with the doctor ends up with the Monk doing something he regrets, leaving him a bit untethered. His actions seemed a bit out of character for him, but then again, he was way out of his depth and being rash and quick to judge was an established character trait. So it kind of tracks. In any case, He repents but has no real way to make amends.
 I should probably say that up until now all this is perfectly entertaining, and surprisingly... subdued compared to other Chinese films. There's a lot of humor and melodrama, and it's definitely a lot more heightened and broad than what we're used to, but not as much as a lot of other wuxia films.

 The real plot of the movie kicks when the Monk witnesses a young man killed by his shifu in a private martial arts duel. This fight marks a shift in the style of the action, and thing get a little dragon-ball Z from here on. He Xia chances into an escalating series of feuds between the different students of a splintering kung-fu school; As the movie goes on the action gets even more fantastic, and soon escalates again from super-powered hand to hand combat to straight up superhero shit with people launching elemental barrages at each other. It's really good for what it is, still full of stunts, cool wire work and fun ideas, and obviously this style has its own long-standing tradition, but I much prefer the earlier, more grounded action.

The Harry Potter school of Kung Fu

 The effects... well, I'll just make the clichéd observation that Asian moviegoers sure seem more accepting of cheesy-looking CGI than we are. I mean, this seems to be a legit superproduction, and the effects are much better than usual for its genre (and leagues better than something like, say, Carter); but even a lot of the good stuff looks very artificial, and some of it is pretty bad. So if that sort of thing is a deal breaker for you, beware. The sets, cinematography, and physical effects are all great.

 The drama itself is where the movie really stumbles. It remains likeable for a while, and I think I was able to follow the plot throughout (which is not always the case for me with Wuxia/Xianxia movies). But it keeps changing the stakes and adding brand-new, important characters we're seemingly supposed to care about right up to the end. Poor He Anxia ends up being more and more of a bystander as other people take center  stage.
 There is at least a through line in that it's all about He Anxia's journey as a monk, going through a bunch of different masters, and there's a lot of Buddhist mystical lessons mixed in, but I didn't find it very compelling - I did make it to the end, and enjoyed it overall, mostly from the goodwill it accrued during its tighter first half.

 It's no surprise to learn it was based on a bestselling novel*. The movie reeks of an adaptation made for those who are familiar with the material, and seems terrified of making any cuts.
 It would benefit hugely from dropping a few developments or amalgamating some characters... but as it stands it's a bloated mess that's happy to  throw in completely extraneous scenes and subplots like some business with corrupt police or a standalone WW1 flashback that adds absolutely nothing to the plot (except some eye-popping explosions; this is definitely a big budget movie.)
 And there are some weird asides that don't fully work either, like a weird 'humorous' drug trip scene (that also deforms their faces for some reason). Or a romantic interlude that is.... very much not romantic.

This is your face, on drugs

 A shame it couldn't keep its scope reined in. It's unfair to  judge the movie for failing to be what I wanted it to be, but I don't think it really works on its own  terms either, except maybe as an attempt to map to images the contents of a book on as near a 1:1 basis as possible. I can't know if that's the case, or how successful it is in that respect, but as a stand alone story it starts out strong and then fizzles away in a number of ultimately unsatisfying directions.

 *The novel was written by Xu Haofeng, an author who's since made a few martial art movies of his own I intend to watch soon-ish; I've read good things about them.

Prey

 Prey is a pretty damn good entry in the Predator series - third best, by my reckoning: Not as good as one, not as fun as two, but way more entertaining than Predators. And it tells a coherent story, so it beats The Predator by default.

 Like the other entries, Prey doesn't feel the need to serialize - there's a few ties to the other films, but it's mainly another story of another thrill-seeking predator coming down to earth to have a go at the deadliest game. There's no flourishes or subversion like on any of the other sequels, it's a back to the basics retelling of the first movie with a comanche woman as the protagonist.

 It's set in the American great plains in the 1700s, which allows for some beautiful wilderness backdrops. Young Comanche Naru wants to be a hunter, but fails the ritual of passage to become one (hunting something that might hunt you back) partly because of some Predator-related shenanigans far in the horizon. This sets her on a path to prove herself against this alien asshole who uses much more advanced technology to brutally murderize a small village's worth of comanche hunters and french trappers.

 She's a likable character, and her underdog status throughout the movie is very effective at making us root for her. She gets hurt, fails a few times, runs away a couple more, but 'sees more than others do' as her more successful hunter brother puts it. That sets the stage for a final confrontation where she uses stuff she's learned throughout the movie to win the day.
 The script is pretty good a seeding little details that will later come back. I also enjoyed how... procedural it is at points, for lack of a better word; a surprising amount of time is dedicated to the building of a stretcher or a rope for a tethered throwing axe, for example, and there are lots of shots of gathering herb,s and checking out broken twigs or tracks on the ground. It's cool that it seems that not a lot of predator safaris have stopped on earth at this time, so the predator is working out the food chain.
 The photography is excellent and the action is well choreographed, fun, and well shot. This is a good, lean, old-fashioned action movie.

 Its main problem is that... while all the other predator sequels tried to bring their own ideas into the mix, but this really is Predator again with another setting/character. The first movie's big thing is the realization that being a soldier with all the firepower in the world means jack shit against a predator, and I didn't feel this one has anything comparable; Naru begins wanting to be a hunter, and ends the movie a hunter. The script is well constructed, with a lot of little parallels and reference to the predator/prey motif (it does get to be a bit too much by the end, with Naru explaining it out loud for anyone who wasn't paid attention) but that's not enough to compensate for this central lack of identity.

 It's a minor problem, as is the film's mid-level budget; the effects aren't up to the task of animating real-looking animals, which are always teetering right at the edge of uncanny valley, and the CGI gore is fun but a bit fake looking at times. I had some bigger problems accepting the God-of-War tethered axes, which felt at odds with the more realistic tone of the rest of the film, or a scene late in the movie where Naru outright John Wicks a bunch of people attacking her at the same time. It's a completely unnecessary scene that kind of punctured my understanding of the character. Then again, it is a fun fight scene, and it's triggered by the need to rescue a dog, so I really shouldn't complain.

Stray thoughts:

 This movie has a great scene where a bear almost revenants the predator. I kind of wish it would have, with the movie taking a weird turn there: Naru joins up with other predators to hunt the bear, who had swallowed the predator's shoulder launcher and can now shoot arrows out of its mouth. Or -even better- Naru joins up with the bear to kick the other predators' asses.
 In any case, that scene ends with the predator holding up the bear's carcass, and getting splattered with its blood, revealing its shape over its cloaking device. That's very similar to a scene at the beginning of The Predator, and I wonder if it will be a recurring thing from now on. I'd honestly like that.

 A bunch of years back a British celebrity caused a minor outrage and a lot of criticism by describing his elephant hunting antics, and even musing on how it would feel to kill a man. I wonder if that's how all the other Predators in Predator Prime or whatever feel about the Predators we get to see in these movies, as a bunch of yokels/and or overprivileged asshats, out on overcompensating little trips. Did the Predators from the second movie go back to their homeworld just to shuffle back into mundane little lives? That's my pitch for the next sequel.

Carter (Kateo)

  Carter is a new netflix-produced movie by Jung Byung-gil, his follow up to the awesome Villainess. That movie was made semi-famous for its initial scene, an extended first-person action sequence that followed the protagonist through a bunch of shootouts and hand-to-hand fights and smoothly transitioned to a huge brawl at a gym/dojo. (It's actual lasting claim to glory would actually be a motorcycle chase with katanas that was a referenced on the third John Wick.)

 This new one is what the Villainess would have been if it had put quantity of action at all times over its overall quality. It's an interesting experiment, and honestly, it works for me. Mostly. Almost wholly.
 The entire film is made to look as if it was one continuous shot, but without any pretense that that's what it's actually doing (1917, this ain't) - its trickery is quite transparent; but the camera moves are meticulously planned, constantly in motion and very dynamic (the focus depth changes often, as does even the texture, from GoPro style shots to hyper-clear CGI of varying quality to more professional-looking stuff.) A lot of the film's (clearly insufficient) budget clearly went to support this illusion of seamlessness, which leads to a lot of bad compositing and  pretty piss-poor effects work. So it goes for the action, which very often looks, well, cheap and pretty crappy. Quantity over quantity; why have a couple well realized, realistic looking scenes when you can have them in bulk, and cover most of your running time instead? The movie makes the conscious choice to take the hit and have some truly dire effects now and then, some unsatisfying bad physics to the stunts, some very... videogame-looking mayhem.

 I know this is an old chestnut, but seriously. this one really does look like a video game at times - right down to the transitions from when you're watching a cutscene to when you get to control your character, which I'd never seen replicated in a movie before. So many of the effects are very deep into uncanny valley. So why did I like it? Why would I ever give this a pass when I hated this sort of shit so much in, say, Uncharted, or the vehicle scenes in Train to Busan: Peninsula? (or, to be honest, many of the later Fast and Furious movies).

Kerrrr-Splat!

 For me at least it's energy and enthusiasm. It's like the filmmakers went all out, making these compromises with the full understanding that they would sometimes look like shit, and not caring about it. Or maybe they ran out of money as they began post-production. I'm perfectly fine with the end result, in any case.

 An example: early on during an action beat the camera pans up to the sky, focuses on an extremely shitty looking bird (it looks like someone drew it in with a black sharpie!) It's kinda laughable. But that bird serves as the focus as the scene transitions to a drone shot looking down as a bunch of mooks converge on a building, a literal bird's eye view of the situation. There's a sense of planning, that the movie is busting its ass overtime trying to show you cool shit.

 And there is so much cool shit here. The violence is inventive and gruesome, and often laugh-out-loud audacious; while the camera is rarely still for any amount of time, the blocking is good and it's always clear who is shooting/stabbing/body-slamming whom; it gives the film a lot of momentum, especially as the chases and action scenes fade into each other.

 Yes, there are a couple of times the movie stops dead for an exposition dump, or a couple of truly, truly bad sequences (there's a really terrible free-fall scene that of course Netflix shows as a preview of the movie, because Netflix is operated by idiots. And also a motorbike chase that mirrors the one in the Villainess except that it's shit, though at least its conclusion made me laugh.) And the plot doesn't really provide much of an excuse to care about anything that happens (it's a mixture of elements from the  Bourne films, plus Total Recall, plus rage-virus-zombies) until the last half hour or so.

  It's nuts, and I can perfectly understand why someone wouldn't like it; It made me think of Michael Bay several times (with a fraction of the budget but better technical chops.) It also reminded me of the camerawork at the end of I Robot, of all things. And Hardcore Henry. Which... well, would very understandably put some people off. Maybe the best way to think of this would be as more of a music video, something that's heavily stylized and shooting for something other than realism - balls out, impressionistic, constant action. Its energy is infectious.

 I mean, did I tell you about the first chase scene where a few vans try to box in the protagonist on a delivery bike in narrow Korean streets? Or a later one involving a truck full of pigs and a whole bunch of pursuit vehicles? There's a bit where someone is jumping between soldiers hanging from cords from helicopters while chasing a speeding train, and one where a guy uses a motorbike as a stepping stone while it's mid-wreck, sliding on the tarmac at high speed, to jump into a van. Two separate scenes with people jumping between moving vehicles and punching each other senseless.
 Awesome shit- the reason we watch these things in the first place, right?