"The Sandman," Year Two (Without Spoilers)

Here's the Neil Gaiman caveat up front.  Neil Gaiman has been accused of terrible things and cancelled and in all likelihood deserves it.  I am one of those people who doesn't have much trouble separating out a piece of art from the artist, so I'll be writing and reviewing "Sandman," treating Gaiman like he's dead.  Unfortunately, I've had a lot of practice at this over the years.  I respect anyone who decides not to watch this show on moral grounds.  However, film and television are inherently collaborative mediums, and I don't see the logic in discarding the work of hundreds of artists because one turned out to be a horrible person.  And here we go.

The first season of "The Sandman" covered roughly twenty issues of the comic in eleven episodes.    The second had to cover the remaining fifty-five issues in eleven episodes.  Even after removing whole story arcs and nearly all the side-stories, that still means that each episode is juggling at least twice as much material.  That's why this season feels so rushed and certain storytelling choices don't seem to add up.  I also found that the writing hewed way too close to the comic, with attempts to translate some concepts from page to screen that just didn't work.  And there were things that already didn't work in the comics, like the overlong, twisty "Kindly Ones" arc, that didn't get fixed in the adaptation.   

This season also had a lot of production troubles, and it's very noticeable at some points.  I found multiple instances of something from the comic being recreated because it looked cool, but without enough of a budget to actually do it right, and without the context to help it hit the way it should emotionally and thematically.  Several locations appear to be reused, and not well.  The cinematography is much darker and murkier.  There are inexplicable slow-motion shots, and generally the pacing is either too fast or too slow.  The writing is messier, and episodes are plagued with constant exposition overload and repetitive dialogue.  And while most of the performances are pretty strong, one returning actress does so poorly that she almost single-handedly derails a major plotline.  Fortunately, most of her storyline is greatly reduced.  

And yet, I'm so happy that showrunner Allan Heinberg and his collaborators tried anyway.  With the second season of "The Sandman," they've made something big and heartfelt and unapologetically fantastical.  We get to meet the entire Endless family, including the previously unseen Destiny (Adrian Lester), Delirium (Esme Creed-Miles), and eventually the Prodigal (Barry Sloan).  Dream has to confront Lucifer again, but more importantly he also has to confront the mistakes of his past.  Storylines involve his wrongly imprisoned former lover Nada (Umulisa Gahiga), and his tragic son Orpheus (Ruairi O'Connor), and Dream facing up to his own complicated relationship with being responsible for the Dreaming.  This year we spend a lot of time with characters from Faerie, including the lovely Nuala (Ann Skelly), and her dissolute brother Cluracan (Douglas Booth), who are subjects of the capricious Queen Titania (Ruta Gedmintas).  We also meet members of the Norse Pantheon, including Odin (Clive Russell) and Loki (Freddie Fox).  There are many returning characters and some new guest stars who I will not spoil.      

Newcomers to "The Sandman" might be taken aback at how the tone of the story has shifted from action adventure to much more self-serious melodrama.  After the first three episodes, dealing with Lucifer and Nada, Dream doesn't get to act much like a typical comic book superhero.   There are plenty of fantasy elements still in play, and "The Sandman" is constantly showing off fancy VFX left and right. However, most of the season is spent with Dream trying to mend bad relationships and deal with the fallout of some bad decisions.  This involves a lot of brooding and glowering, and at least two instances of angsting in inclement weather.  The comic always had a thing for monologues and anticlimaxes, and the show follows suit.    

And I expect existing "Sandman" fans who have read the comics will not be happy with how much was streamlined, excised, reordered, and toned down for television.  The entire last arc has been rejiggered to heavily telegraph the ending, and new romantic relationships have been added for some of the characters.  People have rightly pointed out that Wanda (Indya Moore), a beloved trans character who was moved into a different role in the show, absolutely needed more time and more attention.  The adaptation didn't do her justice.  And yet, I still loved what little we had of her.  

So, I expect that the second season of "Sandman" is going to make a lot of people very unhappy for a variety of reasons.  However, it didn't make me unhappy.  I enjoyed every minute, even the boring, mordant bits with the bad lighting.  The good parts, like Tom Sturridge's performance and the fabulous production design, and getting more of Gilbert and Merv and Joanna Constantine turned out to be worth all the trouble.  And I'll get into more of the details in my spoiler post next time.    

  

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A Matter of Life and "Chuck"

"The Life of Chuck" is one of those rare films that is trying very earnestly to say something profound about human existence.  It's a Mike Flanagan adaptation of a Stephen King novella of the same name, which has some supernatural elements but isn't particularly scary.  I read the novella in anticipation of the film, and it left me puzzled.  However, I think knowing how the story was going to play out helped with my processing of the film version, which is an extremely faithful adaptation.  I'll try to steer clear of too many spoilers, as a big part of the experience of watching the film is working out who Chuck is and how the three acts of the film relate to each other, so I'd recommend going in with as little information as possible.  I will say that I thought the film was pretty successful at what it was trying to do.  I understand why some viewers came away feeling misled or manipulated, but it worked for me. 

I think it might also be helpful to think of "The Life of Chuck" as an anthology film of three separate stories that happen to share a character in common.  The first is a story about a group of ordinary people including school teacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and nurse Felicia (Karen Gillan) facing an impending apocalypse.  The second story is about a busker (Taylor Gordon) and a pair of dancers (Tom Hiddleston, Annalise Basso), who share a moment of spontaneous joy together.  The last story is about a boy (Benjamin Pajak), who moves in with his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara) after the deaths of his parents.  The three stories happen in reverse order chronologically, with the apocalypse up first, labeled "Act Three."  All are narrated by Nick Offerman, and all are told in a sort of hyperreal, heightened style reminiscent of other Stephen King films like "The Green Mile."

It's very easy to fall into the trap of trying to analyze everything in the film for hidden symbolism, or to take things too literally and focus on the mechanisms for how the universe in "Chuck" works.  That sort of thing is fun, but completely beside the point.  This is first and foremost a film about feelings and yearnings, and the ineffable, unexplainable parts of being human.   There's not much traditional horror in the film, but a lot of it is concerned with fear and mortality and how to live with these parts of existence.  The second story is the shortest of the three, but also arguably the most important, because it gives us a beautiful example of human beings living in the moment and seizing the opportunity for joy where they can.    

Mike Flanagan breaks a lot of rules with "The Life of Chuck."  He's got a narrator going for a lot of the time, often reading directly from the Stephen King source material.  The film's tone changes completely from story to story, and so much of the film's effectiveness is dependent on that tone.  There are monologues everywhere, because it's Mike Flanagan, and every theme and idea and message is underlined multiple times in the cinematic equivalent of red ink.  Fortunately the cast is wonderful, with many of the players from Flanagan's regular troupe filling out the smaller roles.  I want to highlight the work of Mark Hamill in particular, playing the loving, complicated grandfather, who can still be intimidating when necessary.  

              

"The Life of Chuck" is a box office bomb, and it's a miracle that it exists at all.  It's a weird outlier of a film that feels like it should have been made twenty years ago, and plenty of viewers didn't like it, didn't get it, or found it too flawed and underbaked and sentimental and cheese-infused to fulfill its huge ambitions.  However, it also shows every sign of being one of those movies that's going to hit some people exactly the right way, that they'll watch at exactly the right time in their lives, and remember forever.  I don't know if "The Life of Chuck" is going to be an all-timer, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, and I know I need to watch it again soon.         

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What Happened to "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"?

So, "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning" is set up like a finale to the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, and is supposed to be paying off the storyline set up by "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One" from 2023.  I disliked "Dead Reckoning" whenever there wasn't an action scene going on, finding the AI-instigated doomsday scenario ridiculous, and the Esai Morales villain dull.  "The Final Reckoning" manages to be a significantly worse experience.  In fact, it's so much worse that I have to wonder how this movie made it to theaters in this sorry state.  It is easily the worst "Mission: Impossible" movie by a considerable amount, even worse than John Woo's "Mission: Impossible 2," which may have been silly, but at least it was still entertaining.

Let's start from the top.  "The Final Reckoning" does have two big, impressive action sequences.  In one, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) infiltrates a sunken submarine and has to escape it.  In the finale, he and the villain fight over the world-saving MacGuffin in biplanes, performing a variety of aerial stunts in the process.  These are everything you want "Mission: Impossible" to be, and I understand why viewers would watch the movie for them.  However, getting to the first major set piece requires sitting through almost a solid hour of incredibly tedious exposition and montages, setting up the plot and characters, reminding us of everything that happened in previous movies, and fawning over Ethan Hunt as the only one who can save the world from the evil AI, the Entity.  There are some brief fisticuffs here, and a quick sprint away from an explosion there to break things up, but nothing that lasts more than a minute or two.  This is a 170 minute movie, and you easily could have chopped the first forty.  

Trying to make a play for nostalgia, there are also a lot of callbacks to the first "Mission: Impossible" film from 1996, and more attempts are made to involve the rest of Hunt's team in the actual world-saving.  Old favorites Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), are joined by newbies Grace (Hayley Attwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Theo (Greg Tarzan Davis).  We also get a cavalcade of celebrities in bit parts including Tramell Tillman, Hannah Waddingham, Katy O'Brien, and Angela Bassett as the US President.  These are diverting enough if you actually recognize the actors, or remember enough about the prior "Mission: Impossible" movies to catch the references (remember the Rabbit's Foot from Mission: Impossible III"?), but I found most of it pretty tedious.  The only callback I liked involves a minor character played by Rolf Saxon getting the spotlight for a bit, which was nice.

However, the whole tone of the film is eye-rollingly self-serious, the script is drowning in technobabble, and everyone is trying much too hard to get us to get emotionally invested in characters who have always been cardboard thin.  It was a relief when we finally got to the submarine infiltration, and the extended underwater sequence, because that happens mostly in silence and I didn't have to hear any more of the tin-ear dialogue for a while.  While the stunt sequences were a lot of fun, I actually much preferred the parts of the film that focused on the other characters, who got to banter and act like actual members of a team when Ethan Hunt wasn't around.  If Tom Cruise quits the series, can we just keep going with Simon Pegg?  Frankly, I haven't liked the "Mission: Impossible" movies very much for a long time now, and "Final Reckoning" just cements for me that it's about time for a change.          

However, I expect that this is going to be the end of the road for the franchise for a while, at least on the big screen.  The box office returns have been shaky, and Tom Cruise has been pushing his luck for a little too long.  You can expect my personal ranking of the "Mission: Impossible" films shortly.  Because if Charlie Cale has a ranking, I should too.    

 

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Was I Too Hard on "Happy Gilmore"?

I wrote up a post long ago about my feelings towards Adam Sandler, who made a lot of hit movies I didn't like and a lot of smaller, weirder films that I did.  I had long resolved to stop watching his mainstream comedies and just focus on his more critically acclaimed projects like "Uncut Gems" and the upcoming "Jay Kelly."  However, upon hearing that "Happy Gilmore 2" was getting pretty decent critical notices, I decided to revisit the original "Happy Gilmore," and to my surprise I liked what I saw.

I don't have a clear recollection of when or in what circumstances I first watched "Happy Gilmore" and "Billy Madison," Sandler's first two major films.  I just remember that Sandler's screen persona was a lot cruder and more physically aggressive than the leads of most comedies at the time.  He seemed to fly into destructive rages a lot, and Roger Ebert famously wrote that he didn't have a "pleasing personality" when remarking on Sandler's performance in "Happy Madison."  When I was a kid, onscreen aggression of any kind came across to me as threatening and sinister, so I'm not surprised that I didn't find him funny.     

I still don't like Happy Gilmore much as a character, but I understand more of his appeal.  Specifically, Gilmore represents a now instantly recognizable type of underachieving blue collar young male living with a lot of frustration and not many opportunities.  Unlike some of the other, later Sandler leads, he's not especially mean-spirited or crass.  He just has a lot of impulse control issues, which he's eventually able to improve.  He works great as the hero of "Happy Gilmore," where an unpolished wannabe hockey player shows up snooty golf pros and disrupts the golfing establishment. Sandler is pretty sympathetic and easy to root for here, instead of puerile and overbearing the way he comes across his less successful comedies.

What really struck me with this watch was that the supporting cast does a lot of the heavy lifting. Christopher McDonald as Gilmore's rival Shooter McGavin, and Carl Weathers as Gilmore's intensely committed coach, provide big personalities for Gilmore to play off of.  I loved seeing Richard Kiel get to menace people again, and appreciated the pure absurdity of the Bob Barker fistfight.  The cameos from Kevin Nealon and Ben Stiller are brief, but just enough to be memorable.  This is also easily the best movie I've seen from director Dennis Dugan.  The comedy always comes first, but the sports competition tropes are executed well, so the golfing is actually fun to watch.  

However, I don't like the attempts at romance at all.  The moments of Gilmore's jackassery I can't forgive are the ones aimed at Virginia, played by Julie Bowen.  Adam Sandler also co-wrote the movie with Tim Herlihy, and It was very disappointing to realize that their idea of the right girl for Happy Madison is a pretty, bland woman whose most prominent characteristic is not showing any sign of being upset when men are being abhorrent to her.  There are a few scenes where it's like she suddenly stops being able to understand English when Gilmore says something particularly crass.

This is acknowledged and corrected in "Happy Gilmore 2," which picks up twenty-five years later.  I found it mildly enjoyable, though Sandler's persona has totally changed from anarchic outsider to aging dad, and Happy Gilmore follows suit.  In a total reversal, he's now trying to save "traditional golf" from being destroyed by an obnoxious Xtreme sports style "Maxi Golf" league backed by an evil energy drink CEO (Benny Safdie).  Pretty much every surviving cast member from the original film returns, and a lot of time is taken up with tributes to the departed ones.        

But more than anything, "Happy Gilmore 2" emphasized that I did have some affection for the original movie, even if my feelings remain mixed on Adam Sandler's performance in it.  And my relationship with Sandler as a performer remains very complicated.  If we get any more late sequels to the likes of "Billy Madison" or "The Waterboy," however, I might be convinced to give those titles a rewatch too, for old times' sake.

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"Wednesday," Year Two

There's a lot going on in Wednesday's life this year.  Her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) is joining her at Nevermore Academy, which means her parents are intent on sticking around in close proximity for most of the season.  There's a new Nevermore principal, a suspicious fellow named Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi).  There's a new music teacher, Isadora Capri (Billie Piper), also suspicious.  Wednesday attracts an obsessive fangirl, Agnes (Evie Templeton), with boundary issues.  Bodies start turning up, characters from last season are still lurking around (even the dead ones), and the only friend Pugsley is able to make is a zombie he accidentally creates and names Slurp (Owen Painter). Even worse, Wednesday has lost her psychic powers and Enid is under threat.

The first season of "Wednesday" was a smash hit for Netflix, and suddenly it feels like everyone wants to be on the show.  Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman, who only appeared previously as recurring characters, are now series regulars.  There are big names playing all the guest stars, no matter how minor the part.  Hey, it's Thandiwe Newton running a mental asylum!  Hey, it's Christopher Lloyd as a disembodied head!  Characters from the first season who really have no reason to be in the second show up anyway.  Sometimes this is great, like Gwendolyn Christie popping up as Wednesday's exasperated new spirit guide, and sometimes this is just a distraction.  It feels like there's also an obligation to repeat all the hits - an Uncle Fester episode, a dance sequence, more cello playing and more fencing.  However, this season rarely gives Wednesday enough breathing room to attempt any character growth or to even check in on the friendships that were central to the show the last time we saw it.

It takes much longer than it should for "Wednesday's" second season to find its footing.  Frankly, the first half is an unappealing jumble of too many characters with too many problems all vying for our attention.  Wednesday herself comes off as unnecessarily mean and antagonistic instead of a classic outcast, since most of her schoolmates are cool with her now.  The family drama feels forced and there aren't any decent villains for far too long.  Eventually the show gets back on track, in part because the focus shifts from Wednesday obsessing over her own agendas to Wednesday helping her friends -  Enid, Agnes, Bianca, Tyler and even Thing -  who give us more sympathetic protagonists to root for.  Eventually all those disparate stories do come together, if you have the patience to make it to the end.  However, it relies on an awful lot of coincidences and messy reveals - and there are loose ends left everywhere. 

Tim Burton is back to direct half of the episodes and Netflix's pockets are deep when it comes to their hits, so we get a lot of fancy set pieces, CGI creature transformations, and even a brief stop-motion animation sequence in the premiere.  However, the most fun comes from relatively simple character business like a body-switch scenario and Joanna Lumley's snootier take on the Addams' Grandmama.  "Wednesday" features an Addams family with very different dynamics than the previous ones we've seen in other Addams media, and I'm all for it.  The show's larger worldbuilding, however, where anyone with powers is some kind of "misfit," subject to all manner of arbitrary rules, had me rolling my eyes.  We just have to call mad scientists "Da Vincis," and there happens to be a special subclass of werewolves called "Alphas" that are both super strong and super vulnerable. 

Then again, I'm older and far more cynical than the intended audience for this show.  This is, after all, a YA horror fantasy set at a magic boarding school.  I don't think that the younger fans of "Wednesday" will have any problems with the new season.  As for me, I liked enough of it that I'll keep watching, with the hope that Burton and company will cut the cast list down to size next time.        

   

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Ready or Not It's "28 Years Later"

I originally intended to pair this review together with another horror film, but once I started writing it, I kept finding more that I wanted to say, so here we are.  

I was never a fan of Danny Boyle's zombie film "28 Days Later," or really that whole wave of zombie media that started in the early 2000s and never really went away.  However, the reteaming of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland for "28 Years Later" is an event worth paying attention to,  especially since this is their first collaboration since 2007's "Sunshine."  When "28 Days Later" came out, it was a departure from the zombie genre, with its fast-moving "Infected" and pointed political commentary.  It's only natural that "28 Years Later" should also be a departure, slowly introducing us to a vastly changed United Kingdom that is quarantined from the rest of the world. 

The tiny island community of Lindisfarne survives in isolation, because it is naturally protected from the English mainland by a causeway that is only accessible at low tide.  Twelve year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) makes his first trip over the causeway with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) for a coming-of-age ceremony, where he learns to fight and kill the Infected.  Learning that there's a doctor who might be living in the area, Spike decides to get help for his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who is afflicted by some unknown illness, and becoming more and more mentally unsound.  The story is told largely from Spike's POV as he learns more and more about the state of the overrun UK and the rest of the world, and becomes acclimated to living with the reality of death so close at hand.  

All the expected elements of a zombie film are present here, including several chase and kill sequences.  There are some particularly gnarly ones in "28 Years Later" involving splattery dismemberments and close quarters violence.  However, what Boyle and Garland are really after is depicting Spike's loss of innocence and subsequent spiritual awakening within this environment.  The depiction of the violence is often heightened, with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle using a lot of handheld camera, jump cuts, freeze-frames, and jarring editing.  Quieter sequences will incorporate fragmentary clips of unrelated prior Infected attacks and other existing media, showing where the characters' thoughts are, and invoking spectres of the Infected and the pre-Infected world long before Spike actually encounters them.  There's an especially chilling montage set to a recitation of Rudyard Kipling's "Boots" featuring clips of men at war, accompanying father and son as they set out into the unknown.  This makes for a zombie film that has one foot in arthouse and one foot in grindhouse, and it mostly works.  

What's especially interesting is the introduction of a strong spiritual element in this universe for the first time.  An allegory for the downfall of religion is presented in the opening sequence, a flashback to the original Infected attacks in 2002, where a young boy watches the invasion and destruction of a church.  Over the course of the film we see elements of its return, with a virgin birth analog, several potential Christ figures, and the invocation of memento mori as a central tenet.  There's also a very obvious Antichrist figure at the end of the film, setting up a forthcoming "28 Years Later" sequel. 

The worldbuilding is very good, with most of "28 Years Later" taking place in picturesque woodlands and largely deserted areas.  The Infected have changed along with their environment, and there are multiple encounters to show us their behavior and in different contexts.  Human beings, of course, have also changed, and one of the few humorous moments in the film involves Spike encountering a lost Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) who struggles to find common ground with someone who has never heard of the internet.  

Finally, I want to express my appreciation that Boyle and his collaborators have kept "28 Years Later" such a very UK film, drawing from a specific pool of influences and references from British history and pop culture.  There are nods to the Teletubbies, Jimmy Saville, and "Kes."  Sir Lawrence Olivier is now technically in a zombie movie, via one of the montages, and it feels oddly appropriate.  

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Checking in to "The Four Seasons"

Based on a 1981 Alan Alda comedy, "The Four Seasons" is about three married couples who make up a longstanding friend group.  They're all well-to-do Gen Xers who take turns planning trips together.  We see the four times that they all meet up during one eventful year, when one of the couples hits the skids.  Spoilers for the first two episodes ahead, as It's hard to talk about some of the best parts of the show without getting into how some of the relationships progress.

The main couples are Jack (Will Forte) and Kate (Tina Fey), Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and Nick (Steve Carrell), and Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani).  We find out that Anne and Nick are the ones with the marriage in trouble during the spring trip to their lake house, which results in new partners and much awkwardness on subsequent trips as their friends try to navigate the new dynamics.  A key player is Ginny (Erika Henningsen), who becomes a regular in the group when she starts dating Nick.  The series is eight episodes long, with two episodes spent on each trip.  Each episode runs roughly 30 minutes, so it's a quick and easy watch.     

Co-created by Tina Fey, this is a very character and performance-driven show.  So, whether you like it or not will come down to how much you like hanging around a bunch of fifty-somethings and listening in on their middle-aged problems.  Nick and Anne aren't the only ones who find themselves at odds.  Danny is navigating a health scare, and doesn't appreciate Claude's smotherly level of concern.  Friction also develops between Jack and Kate as they try to be supportive of Nick and Anne, which makes them more aware of their own issues.  All of the characters, including Ginny, are pleasant, generous, and very open with each other.  And even when they're being terrible they're still entertaining.  This isn't a "White Lotus" style dissection of the rich and privileged, but there is acknowledgement of privilege, and it does color some of the interactions.  

I watched the original 1981 film for background, which stars Alda, Carol Burnett, Rita Moreno, and Len Cariou among others.  The new series features totally new characters, but the structure and the sequence of events is almost the same.  The biggest change, which I appreciate, is that we get to spend much more time with each of the characters and get to know them more intimately.  We learn that Danny and Claude have an open marriage, but their hangups have nothing to do with their sex lives.  Jack and Kate are the most boring and basic of their friends, but also seem the best equipped to weather their own ups and downs.  There are also a couple of changes to the character dynamics because this version of the story adds more characters than it subtracts.    

Domingo and Calvani have the showiest and most fun performances, and Fey and Forte are as solid as always, and I love them all dearly, but I think Steve Carrell is far and away the MVP this time.  Carrell is playing the guy who is the most often in the wrong, while still being sympathetic and worth rooting for.  Runner up would be Kerri Kenney-Silver, who plays a different kind of oddball here than she did on "Reno 911."  I also appreciate how Ginny is treated, coming in as the outsider but eventually the show flips the dynamic and shows us the situation from her POV.  The last few episodes involve some big emotions and Erika Henningsen is fantastic at getting us to care.   

"The Four Seasons" will be best enjoyed by people of a certain age, as as I'm getting older I'm not turning my nose up at any media aimed at this demographic.  This isn't great television,  but it earns its laughs and its poignant moments.  It gently addresses relationships, getting old, and how to handle what life throws at you.  I'm very curious what a second season would look like, as the ending of "The Four Seasons" definitely leaves open the possibility for one.  However, I also won't be too disappointed if this is where Fey and her collaborators decide to leave these characters.   

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