"Violet Evergarden" and "Promised Neverland"

I made myself finish watching the anime series "Violet Evergarden," but it was pretty rough going.  I was curious about "Violet" because it was billed as a slower, more thoughtful show that looked very pretty and relaxing.  Unfortunately, the aesthetics of "Violet" don't appeal to me at all, and I had a lot of trouble with the premise.  Violet Evergarden (Yui Ishikawa) is a teenaged girl who lives in a steampunk-ish world with technology from roughly WWI.  A former soldier, she comes to the country of Leiden after losing limbs and her beloved Major Gilbert (Daisuke Namikawa).  She wants to learn to be an "auto memories doll," someone who ghostwrites letters.  And eventually, she pens many thoughtful letters for her various clients, and learns more about the human experience in the process.  

I had some major problems with the basic construction of Violet and her universe.  Violet is one of those curious anime creatures who is an almost total blank slate aside from somehow also being a perfect killing machine.  Because Major Gilbert rescued and cared about her, Violet loves him, but only knows how to behave like an automaton.  Her arc in the series is learning how to become a real girl with her own drives and wants.  However, there's so much contradictory information about who Violet is.  When she's found, she's clearly a child, but treated by those around her as a weapon, as though this is commonplace.  No attempt is made to explain or investigate her real origins.  I can see why the show's creators preferred to put more emphasis on who Violet is, as opposed to what Violet is, but the sketchy backstory just feels too tenuous and not thought through.

And I found myself constantly rolling my eyes at the show's other conceits.  The featured "dolls" are all flamboyantly designed and costumed like options in a dating simulator.  Several of the romantic relationships involve wildly inappropriate age gaps, including a fourteen year-old who commissions love letters to a 24 year-old fiancee.  Several of the stand-alone stories are decent enough, though heavy on the sentiment and melodrama.  I tried to be patient, but I couldn't get away from the feeling that the show was leaning way too hard into a bundle of bad character tropes and outdated, fetishy ideas that I had seen done better before.  Violet herself does eventually become an admirable heroine, but getting there was not worth the trip.

Now onward, to something better.  "Promised Neverland" is easily the most entertaining anime series I've watched in a long while.  It also features a very high concept premise, but does a lot of good things with it, and the execution is note perfect.  "Promised Neverland" is a twelve-episode horror/thriller series, about a group of orphan children who discover they're in danger and need to escape from their home and caretakers.  The oldest and sharpest of the group are a trio of eleven year-olds: Emma (Sumire Morohoshi), Ray (Mariya Ise), and Norman (Maaya Uchida), who serve as our leads.  The story is tightly serialized, with most episodes ending on cliffhangers.  Only the premiere has any disturbing images and gore, but there's plenty of child endangerment throughout to keep viewers on the edges of their seats.  

Most of "Promised Neverland" is a tense game of cat and mouse between the three children and the woman who looks after them, Isabella (Yuko Kaida), who is hiding a lot of secrets.  I expected the series to be very action-oriented, but the writers are more interested in mind games and interpersonal conflicts.  The kids don't agree on how the escape should be carried out, and there are all sorts of complications with scouting missions, getting supplies, shifting loyalties, and the interference of a second adult, Sister Krone (Nao Fujita).  The show ends up having more in common with something like "Death Note" than the usual shonen action fodder.  The fantasy worldbuilding is also very clever, giving solid reasons for why we have super-smart eleven year-olds in this universe who are capable of plotting out all these intricate machinations against their adult enemies.

The series boasts excellent production values with great character designs and impressively nuanced animation.  I'm also impressed that it's just the right length at twelve episodes, and ends exactly where it should.  "Promised Neverland" is based on the first few arcs of a much longer-running manga, and there is a second season that's just been released.  However, because the subsequent stories move beyond the original horror premise into broader genre fare, I don't know that it'll be able to keep up the same level of quality moving forward.  I mean, remember what happened with those later seasons of "Prison Break" after the prison break? 

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Trailers! Trailers! The Theaters Are Holding Their Breaths Edition!

Slowly but surely, the trailers have been piling up for incoming 2021 releases.  So, it's time for the first new "Trailers! Trailers!" post in a while.  I'm leaving off any trailers for films that have previously released material, like "No Time to Die" and "The Green Knight" and focusing on the more recent highlights and lowlights.   

Eternals - This is the most interesting MCU film on the slate for the foreseeable future, because it's so odd and so ambitious.  It was a canny move to tie the film directly to the MCU with the little gag in the end, because the rest of this eon-spanning, landscape showcasing, meditative teaser looks so, well, alien.  I have all faith in Chloe Zhao to deliver something beautiful, but I have no idea if it'll work as a superhero film. 

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings - The first Asian-American leading man in the MCU requires some commentary, but honestly I'm not expecting much out of this.  It's a weird coincidence that we have "Shang-Chi," "Mortal Kombat," and "Snake Eyes" coming all in such a short span.  I love that all the leads of these films are Asian, but I'm not so happy that it's all kung-fu fighting action scenes again.  Fingers crossed.

Annette - Marion Cotillard!  Adam Driver!  This is Leos Carax's long in the works musical love story.  It will be his English language debut, a collaboration with beloved cult band The Sparks, and seems to have something to do with Snow White.  There's a lot of anticipation in the air for this one.  It'll be Carax's first film since "Holy Motors," and is set to be the opening film for Cannes in July.  I have no idea what to expect, and that's delightful.

Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard - I think there's a pretty low probability that this film will be any good, but like the "Venom" sequel, it still offers enough pulpy, humorous pleasures that I'm looking forward to it.  I mean, it's a real movie star movie, where Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, and Selma Hayek will get to banter and be funny.  Sometimes that's really all you want out of a flick.  The big, long list of fun supporting actors doesn't hurt either. 

Hotel Transylvania: Transformania - I think the "Hotel Transylvania" franchise is inevitably running out of steam, with Genndy and Adam Sandler both sitting this installment out.  Still, they came up with a very good premise for a sequel.  Let's de-monsterfy all our familiar monsters for a bit and let wacky hijinks ensue!  I can't help noticing that the title may be a little jab at the next "Ant-man" movie too, which I totally approve of. 

West Side Story - The first thing that struck me was how similar this looks to the original 1961 film.  The color palette and the costuming in particular are a little eyebrow raising.  I have no idea how well this will be received, but it's going to be interesting to compare the new "West Side Story" to "In the Heights," which is coming in only a few weeks.  Because it's Spielberg this is a presumed Oscar contender, but does the musical hold up fifty years later?

Last Night in Soho - I'm always glad to find Edgar Wright still working, still turning out his original films mostly on his own terms.  "Last Night" looks to be  absolutely swimming in style, and makes good use of Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin Mackenzie.  This is a throwback to old school thrillers, clearly, but it's one that's more high octane than the norm.  I love the use of neon and the color palette in particular.  This is one of my most anticipated of the year.     

Dear Evan Hansen - Oh no.  Oh, this is the worst casting mistake I've seen in a long time, and it's probably going to sink the screen adaptation of what was already a really sketchy musical.  I know people love Ben Platt, but you can't pass him off as a high school student.  It looks ridiculous.  And what are Julianne Moore and Amy Adams doing here?  After this and "Woman in the Window," these poor women are in desperate need of new representation.   

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How Did They Remake "M"?

Fritz Lang's "M" is one of the undisputed film classics, a German crime drama released in 1931 that was a landmark of the genre.  It featured a slew of innovations, including long tracking shots, sound design figuring heavily into the storytelling, and the use of a musical leitmotif - the killer is identified because he habitually whistles Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."  "M" is full of grotesque figures, and is a great example of German Expressionism, and can be viewed as a proto- film noir and detective film.  Lang considered it his favorite of all the features he made, and was not happy when the film was remade by Columbia Pictures in 1951.

I knew about the existence of the Joseph Losey version of "M," but I only saw it very recently.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't something as strong as this.  Losey's "M" is not as good as Lang's "M" for a long list of reasons, but it is very good for a '50s film noir.  While it borrows many elements from the original "M," including a shot-for-shot recreation of the scenes with Elsie's mother (Karen Morley), it also has its own style and its own ideas.  Losey benefitted from filming much of "M" on location in Los Angeles, setting major sequences in recognizable locations, and updating certain elements to accommodate the story's transplantation from Berlin to Los Angeles.  He pointedly includes non-white actors in many scenes, including the opening montage of girls who are being stalked by the killer, Martin Harrow (David Wayne).  

The third act has a standout action sequence that involves a group of underworld figures invading the Bradbury Building to find the killer, who is trapped there.  It's like a mini heist movie within the movie, one that makes great use of the space and the building's unique architecture.  It also serves to help distinguish the actions of the criminals in the film from the police.  In Losey's version of "M," the underworld boss is a local kingpin named Charlie Marshall (Martin Gable), who uses his own organization to search for the "baby killer" and tries to manipulate the situation for his own benefit.  There's much more emphasis placed on him in the narrative, along with an alcoholic lawyer named Langley (Luther Adler) in Marshall's employ.  This shifts some of the emphasis away from the killer, characterized as a pitiful, mentally ill man who kills out of uncontrollable compulsion, and more on the forces of vice and addiction that have corrupted Marshall and Langley.

This change is easily the most regrettable, as it softens a lot of the satirical elements and social commentary that Lang was so fond of in the original.  Gone also is much of the psychological examination of the killer.  David Wayne is no Peter Lorre, far less threatening and more hapless.  He spends a long stretch of time accidentally locked in a room with a little girl (Janine Perreau), but the girl hardly seems to be in any danger from him.  The most sinister scenes of his insanity are the ones where he's entirely absent, and other people are uncovering the evidence of his crimes.  The 1951 "M" plays out more like a procedural, and less like the German Expressionist nightmare the original was.  Still, for a procedural, the Losey version is very watchable and enjoyable in its own right.  

Losey is an interesting director, and may be up for a "Great Directors" post in the future.  His best known work was later in his career, after he was blacklisted in Hollywood for being a Communist and moved to Europe.  "M" was one of his last American films, and reportedly boycotted in some places due to Losey's politics and the controversial subject matter.  Though any anti-McCarthyism themes are not overt, it's hard not to imagine Losey sympathizing with the poor, insane, Martin Harrow, who faces a mob ready to tear him to pieces in the film's final scenes.   

As for Fritz Lang, he would remark that the 1951 "M" gave him the best reviews of his career.

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"Staged," Part Two

I struggled a little with the title to this post, because it hasn't been a year since the first six episodes of "Staged," and it still doesn't feel right calling it a series or a season, or anything else related to a standard television show.  So, "Part Two."  Six months into the pandemic, David Tennant and Michael Sheen are still stuck in quarantine, still looking scruffy and anxious, and eager to get on with their work, travel, and the rest of their lives.  Alas, their plans keep being delayed or blocked.

The format of the show remains mostly the same, largely carried out over Zoom calls, with a lot of celebrity guests dropping in.  Many scenes were filmed by the actors themselves with smart phones and home electronics.  The second series is more focused than the first, built around preparations for an American adaptation of "Staged" that rile up the tensions between Tennant and Sheen, and sets them both against writer Simon Evans.  Joining the cast are Whoopi Goldberg and Ben Schwartz, playing a high-powered Hollywood agent and her assistant.  The interactions aren't as organic or as funny, having less room for improvisation, and spending less time with the leads simply living out their lives and trying to assuage their boredom.  Their partners, Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg, are still very present but we see less of them, and even less of their relationships.

The series is still an easy watch and very funny at times.  The two standout episodes both feature pairs of big guests - Edgar Wright and Nick Frost in one episode, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Cate Blanchett in another.  The show does a good job of making their appearances count, giving Wright and Frost a chance to demonstrate what "Staged" might have looked like if it starred the two of them, and creating a wonderfully uncomfortable conference call with Waller-Bridge and Blanchett where it comes out that Tennant and Waller-Bridge are mortal enemies.  The rest of the guests are very hit-or-miss, and their scenes often feel a little like crossovers with other pandemic era media.  The first episode has Tennant and Sheen appear on a talk programme with Romesh Ranganathan.  I recognized Josh Gad and Ken Jeong's houses from their Youtube shows.  There's nothing here as memorable as the appearance of Judi Denchi, but I still really enjoy watching Tennant and Sheen getting dressed down by the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Michael Palin.

The second series of "Staged" feels overall less engaging than the first, maybe because the novelty has worn off, or because the uneasiness of life during the pandemic is fading quickly.  The atmosphere is less oppressive, and the source of everyone's worries is largely internal this time, and less due to external circumstances.  What was so absorbing about the early episodes, and really about all of the earlier pandemic media, was that it felt so personal, and so haphazardly put together by people who were still struggling to make it all work.  Now, everything feels more polished and practiced, more calculated and less off the cuff.  It doesn't feel like we're seeing slices of life in the Tennant and Sheen households so much as scenes that are, well, staged.  And while I like that the creators pull back from the more obviously contrived events like the unseen neighbor's health scare, at the same time the pandemic gets backgrounded a little too much.  It's only in the last episode that we see anybody wearing a face mask.

What does continue to feel genuine is the friendship between Tennant and Sheen.  "Staged" is still at its best when it's the two of them bickering, bouncing off of each other, and commiserating.  And when they finally get to really share a scene together in the end, it's a heartwarming sight to see.   

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The Long Road Through the '50s

I've committed to getting through the 1950s for my Top Ten project.  However, this has easily been my most difficult phase of the project so far, and there's no way that I would have gotten this far if it weren't for the COVID pandemic and if it weren't for suddenly having all this free time (that isn't going to last much longer).  Over the past eighteen months, I've seen nearly two hundred films from the 1950s, and I have more than fifty to go.  Frankly, it's starting to wear on me, and I'm looking forward to taking a long break from this era once I'm finished.

I've tried to keep my viewing choices balanced between the popular films of the era, the prestige films, and the artsier fare that has been elevated over time.  Major genres of the '50s are very different from the present day, so there's been almost no science-fiction or fantasy, and far fewer musicals than I was expecting - and I've already seen most of the major ones.  Instead, there are more melodramas, more film noir, more romances, more biopics, more Bible epics, and more westerns.  I understand why westerns were so popular, because they're one of the only genres that regularly offer a lot of action and excitement.  I was also happy to stumble across the long-forgotten swashbuckler adventure genre, with films like "Scaramouche," "Fan-Fan the Tulip," and "The Crimson Pirate." 

  

Conversely, I've really been struggling with the film noir titles I've seen so far.  The wildly outdated gender politics and the crude morality applied to depictions of law and order are often difficult for me to take.  So many of the protagonists in these films are thoroughly despicable, and I don't feel remotely sympathetic towards them.  Marilyn Monroe starred in a couple of them early in her career, films like "Niagara," and "Don't Bother to Knock," where she plays emotionally disturbed, doomed women.  I appreciate that these films are able to spotlight some social ills not otherwise seen onscreen, but the handling of these themes is so heavy-handed and sensationalistic, it's always a little cringeworthy.  It has been fun, however, digging up the occasional standout like "Scandal Sheet" or "The Bigamist."  

Stars of the era I've been glad to get better acquainted with include Anna Magnani, Gloria Graeme, Dorothy McGuire, Howard Keel, Arthur Kennedy, and  Jose Ferrer.  I'm starting to suspect that Burt Lancaster is my favorite Hollywood actor, because he's both a larger than life action star and able to pull off dramas like "The Rose Tattoo" and "Come Back Little Sheba" with ease, though Jimmy Stewart is still in the lead.  Also, after watching so many of the lesser known Mikio Naruse and Yasujiro Ozu films from this time period, Setsuo Hara's filmography is far more expansive than I realized - and I've barely started.  She started working steadily in the '30s.  I've now seen my first Roy Rogers film, and my first Toto film.  The best surprise so far as been seeing a young, sinister Jack Palance in "Sudden Fear."  

I do feel that my goal of acquiring more context for the classics I've already seen has been the best served by this latest stretch of viewing.  Looking at my Letterboxd stats, the 1950s had previously had my highest concentration of highly scored films, because I had only seen the most famous and highly regarded films.  But now, after seeing so many of the mediocre and second-string titles, the scores have evened out considerably.  My admiration for some directors, like Otto Preminger, has been tempered a bit after seeing their less successful films.  Others, however, have proven to be far more consistent.  Early Frederico Fellini has been a thorough delight, and somehow there are still more Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman films I haven't seen.            

It's been especially sobering to realize that even though I feel like I've been watching these '50s films for ages, I'm really just scraping the surface.  There are so many, many '50s films that I wasn't even aware existed, and every time I watch one, a dozen more seem to pop up in my line of sight.  I don't feel like I've watched enough comedies.  I don't feel like I've watched enough family films.  There are directors and actors who I know were active during this era, but who I haven't managed to watch much of anything from. 

  

So, I'm glad I did this, and I can see where having had this experience is going to pay off for me in the long run.  However, it's going to be a long time before I venture into the '40s, if I decide to continue this project at all.  Seventy years of top ten lists feels like plenty.

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Why is This Live Action?

I've been bracing for the latest Disney live-action adaptation of one of their animated classics, this time "Cruella," which creates an origin story for Cruella DeVil from "101 Dalmatians."  However, there's been a burgeoning trend of live action adaptations of non-Disney animation lately, that's starting to get some attention.  

The CW has ordered a pilot for a live-action "Powerpuff Girls" reboot for the 2021-2022 television season.  The series has been described as a sequel, where the superpowered heroines Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercut are now disaffected twenty-somethings who are reuniting after a long separation.  "Powerpuff" has already been rebooted twice, once by Cartoon Network, and once for a Japanese anime.  Netflix has a more direct adaptation of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" in the works.   This is expected to be completely different from the last live-action adaptation of the material, the feature film "The Last Airbender," which the show's fanbase famously disliked.  "The Last Airbender" is primarily remembered as another black mark on the career of M. Night Shyamalan, and for a casting controversy where most of the Asian characters were played by white actors.  The Netflix project will hopefully do better, but the original animated series' creators left the project last August, and the latest news is that at least one of the characters, Katara, is being aged up into an older teenager.

However, the property that's been getting the most attention over the past few months has been Netflix's "Fate: The Winx Saga," based off of the "Winx Club" Nickelodeon cartoon.  The six-episode series premiered in January, and has been weathering derision from the fans because the "reimagining" apparently plays like a pretty generic teen drama, and the originally Asian and Latina main characters are now white.  The critics were not kind, but the show has done well enough for Netflix that it's been renewed for a second season.  Keep in mind that unlike the other shows, "Winx Club" only ended its production recently, and it's still being broadcast in several countries.  "Winx" creator Iginio Straffi had also been gunning for a live action series for several years.  So, "Fate: Winx Saga" was clearly designed to keep its franchise going, rather than to capitalize off of Millennials' warm, nostalgic, feelings toward an old cartoon they watched when they were kids.       

But whatever the reason these shows were created, I find myself asking the same question.  Why are all of these projects live-action?  The Millennials are supposed to be the generation that really embraced animation, that stayed up late to watch violent Japanese anime, and fueled the rise of darker American adult 'toons like "Archer" and "Rick and Morty."  Why shouldn't a meaner and edgier "Winx Club" and  "Powerpuff Girls" be produced as animated shows?    I get that there are still those viewers who won't watch anything animated, or assume all cartoons are aimed at kids, but doesn't it completely undercut the joke in "Powerpuff," if the girls are too far removed from the owl-eyed cartoon versions?  Animation, for all the cultural baggage it seems to have, is capable of doing things that live action can't.  Things that look ridiculous in three dimensions are perfectly okay when you're dealing with two.  And a lot of the appeal of "Winx," "Powerpuff," and "Airbender," disappear when they're converted into fleshy real world forms.  I don't understand why so many executives still can't get this through their thick skulls.

The only live action adaptation of an animated property that I've ever thought was a good idea, was the 1997 "George of the Jungle," and that was because they managed to make a film that behaved remarkably like a cartoon.  A couple of others like "Josie and the Pussycats" and the "Dora" movie made up entirely new stories and characters out of whole cloth that had little to do with the cartoons at all.  Clearly, the runaway success of the Disney live-action adaptations has had a lot of influence on the decisionmaking here, but the best of those films are mildly entertaining, inoffensive rehashes of much better animated originals.  The worst are reviled by everyone, but most of all by the original fans.  

     

At this point, the only reboot of an animated property I am looking forward to  is Kevin Smith's "Masters of the Universe" anime - and I don't even like He-man!

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Life Without Prime Time Television

It's been roughly a year since "The Good Place" ended, and I stopped watching any network programming regularly.  Well, let's be more specific here. I stopped watching their scripted programming regularly.  I still watch the late night monologues, and I've actually started watching the news more, since there's been easier access to the newscasts online.  Aside from a few brief attempts to get into shows like "Evil" and "Superstore," I've ignored pretty much every scripted show being broadcast, in favor of streaming options.  

And that feels like something significant.  Cord cutting might be accelerating, and 2020 was the year when the streaming wars really came to a head, but there are still millions and millions of people who still largely get their media from over-the-air television broadcasts.  I looked up the stats for the 2019-2020 season, and out of the top twenty scripted shows, I've only watched episodes of two of them - "NCIS" and "Hawaii Five-O."  That means there's a huge part of the current popular culture that I am totally out of touch with, right?  

Well… maybe and maybe not.  "NCIS" and "Hawaii Five-O" are in their eighteenth and tenth seasons respectively.  Lower down on the chart, "Grey's Anatomy" is on season seventeen, and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" is somehow still going after twenty-two seasons with Mariska Hargitay and Ice-T still hanging in there.  Almost all the top rated shows are some kind of familiar doctor ("New Amsterdam," "The Good Doctor,"), law enforcement ("FBI," "Chicago PD,"), or first responder ("Chicago Fire," "9-1-1") show, and none of them appear to be very highly regarded.  Amazingly, Dick Wolf managed to launch two new television franchises while I wasn't paying attention - the "FBI" shows on CBS, and the "Chicago" shows on NBC.  I remember "9-1-1" eliciting some very funny critical takes when it premiered back in 2018, because of how absurdly melodramatic it was, and now it's the highest rated drama on FOX and has a spinoff, "9-1-1: Lone Star," that is the second highest rated drama on FOX.

When I was originally spitballing ideas for this post, I considered watching an episode of each of the top ten scripted shows currently airing on network television, and then writing up the experience.  However, the prospect of having to watch so many of these procedurals immediately put me off.  Even when I was still watching network television regularly, these weren't the shows that I watched.  I was watching the sitcoms, the offbeat action shows, and the (almost always doomed) sci-fi and fantasy shows.  These are all television genres that are being steadily replaced by more and more reality programming like "LEGO Masters" and "The Masked Dancer."  The breakout hits that fit the bill, like "Ted Lasso" and "The Mandalorian" are all on streaming.          

There are a handful of the popular shows that I'm curious about.  The two highest rated non-procedurals are ABC's soap opera "This is Us," which still has its share of critical kudos and awards buzz, and CBS's "Young Sheldon," which is a spinoff of "The Big Bang Theory."  Those are the two, along with "Brooklyn 99," are the only series that are present enough in the wider popular culture that I feel like I'm missing anything by not watching them.  Otherwise, the pickings are slim.  Network programming has clearly become a lower priority to studios like Disney and Paramount.  I've seen almost no marketing for any current television shows, and frankly I didn't know many of the highly rated ones like "Chicago PD" even existed.    

What's to become of prime time?  At this point, nobody knows, but major changes are certainly due.  The remaining shows all feel like copies of each other, with a few exceptions.  The audience keeps shrinking and trending older, and the pandemic only seems to have accelerated the migration.  Watching traditional commercials is feeling weirdly nostalgic, and I can't imagine going back to appointment viewing.  Broadcast television will never die, probably, as radio never died, but I think it's clear that its days as the dominant form of media are done.      

  

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The Golden Globes Are Cancelled

It's been a few days, and the aftershocks are still being felt from the cancellation of the 2022 Golden Globes.  Many things are still unclear.  Will the Globes be back?  Will they be replaced with another awards ceremony like the SAG Awards or the Critics' Choice Awards?  What about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association?  They'll have to change or perish, but are they worth saving at this point?

So, let's start from the top.  The Golden Globes don't mean anything, but in the Hollywood marketing ecosystem they are important.  Way back in the 1960s, after losing the rights to broadcast the Academy Awards, NBC decided that they needed their own awards show, and began broadcasting the Golden Globes intermittently.  It didn't have technical categories, honored both film and television, and was generally a looser, and notoriously boozier affair.  The Hollywood Foreign Press Association that gives the awards out (hereafter the HFPA) is a group of eighty-odd foreign entertainment journalists with no transparency and a long history of shady dealing, but they put on a good show so nobody cared.  In the '90s, because the NBC broadcasts became a long-term commitment and the Globes got national attention, they gradually became an important part of the Oscar season, and sometimes a key part of the marketing for prestige films.  And it's no secret that the HFPA could be bought.  

I won't go into all the highly suspect Golden Globe nominations that have happened over the years, but everyone in Hollywood spent an awful lot of money over the years currying the favor of the HFPA, and the HFPA shamelessly took advantage.  This is far from the first time their members have been called out for bad behavior, and there's been a lot of resentment building up.  Frankly, as the ratings of the various award shows have been declining, the writing's been on the wall that the situation with the Golden Globes is untenable.  Remember, in Hollywood the optics are everything, and as long as the Golden Globes maintained the comfortable fiction that they were a legitimate organization that carried out their awards process in a fair and impartial way, everyone else was more or less inclined to play ball with them.  However, after the Los Angeles Times expose in February and the clumsy response of the HFPA, this became harder and harder, and finally the dam broke.

The straw that finally broke the camel's back was probably former HFPA president Phil Berk sending out an anti-BLM rant via E-mail in late April, plus the Times Up coalition calling out the weaknesses of the HFPA's proposed diversity and inclusion reforms.  Looking at how events played out, with a long list of PR firms, A-list movie stars, Netflix and Amazon, and multiple fixers washing their hands of the HFPA, it's pretty clear that everyone in town was just plain fed up with them.  The few distressed rebuttals that have emerged from HFPA members, pointing out that the deficiencies of the organization have been common knowledge for years, are amazingly tone deaf.  They don't seem to have noticed that the Hollywood status quo changed after Me Too and Times Up.  Then again, after decades of enjoying way too much unearned status and influence in Hollywood, why would we expect them to?    

I've heard some interesting proposals about how to fix the situation, like having the HFPA absorbed into a larger critics' or journalistic organization that could take over the awards, or maybe that the current leadership just needs to be flushed out, but at this point drastic action is needed.  However, I wouldn't count the Globes out just yet.  This isn't the first time NBC has dumped the Golden Globes or the first time the HFPA has been in hot water.  And even if nobody takes the Golden Globes seriously, we all know what the Globes are - and that's not true of the Independent Spirit Awards, the AFI awards, or the majority of the other alternatives.  

So the HFPA gravy train as we know it is probably toast, but I have no doubt that the Globes will be back in a year or two.  They might not be on NBC, and they might not be as high profile, but they'll be back.     

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My Top Ten Films of 1957

This is part of my continuing series looking back on films from the years before I began this blog. The ten films below are unranked and listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

Nights of Cabiria - My favorite Fellini film, the one that bridges two eras in his career.  The sympathetic examination of the life of a prostitute is certainly in keeping with the aims of the Neo-realist movement, and Fellini pokes fun at religion and the upper classes. Yet Cabiria herself is such a strong, distinct character, her sorrows and joys come across as fiercely personal, and are largely the product of her own determined will and innate weaknesses. Society may be responsible for making a victim of Cabiria, but she'd never let society claim the credit.

The Bridge on the River Kwai - One of the great war epics, that manages to simultaneously be a magnificent spectacle and a great character study of one individual, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholson.  I appreciate how even handed the film is, allowing the villain, Colonel Saito, to be sympathetic, where similar characters are often wildly problematic, even today.  However, the film really belongs to Alec Guinness, whose "madness" is the tragic result of his own misguided ideals and hubris as much as it is a survival response to being a prisoner of war.  

Paths of Glory - But  if you want to talk about the madness of war, nobody did it better than Stanley Kubrick.  The callous  injustice inflicted on the soldiers by the command hierarchy is wrought in the most visceral, unpleasant terms.  This has one of my favorite Kirk Douglas performances, as he channels so much impotent frustration and despair in the face of unassailable authority.  "Paths of Glory" is remembered for its scenes of ground level warfare, including the famous trench shots, but its touching, humane ending remains its best accomplishment.

Sweet Smell of Success - And here's Burt Lancaster, joining Douglas with another famously outstanding performance that the Oscars inexplicably snubbed that year.  Lancaster plays the monstrous J.J. Hunsecker, an unscrupuous newspaper columnist who is the equivalent of the loathsome FOX News hosts who subsist on gossip and insinuations.  The subject matter was lurid for its time, but there's barely any physical violence.  Instead the film is driven by its style, its percussive dialogue, its intense performances, and the fabulous jazz soundtrack.     

A Face in the Crowd - Another premonition of the modern media machine is this Elia Kazan film, that charts the rise and fall of a radio personality, Lonesome Rhodes, who is played by a pre-Mayberry Andy Griffith.  It's fascinating to see the folksy charisma of Griffiths weaponized to turn him into a celebrity, and put in stark contrast with the egomaniacal narcissist that Rhodes becomes behind the scenes.  The cycles of fame, scandal, and ruin are very familiar, but the cast gives it some real bite.  I especially appreciate Patricia Neal as Rhodes' unwitting Pygmalion.

Funny Face - A delightful Stanley Donen musical that pokes a little fun at the publishing industry, the fashion world, and '60s hepcat culture before getting down to the inevitable business of carrying on a romance between Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire.  The Gershwin songs are so much fun, and Astaire is as dependable as ever, but it's really Hepburn's movie.  Her wacky nightclub scene not only shows off her dancing skills, but her talent for physical comedy.  She's so magnetic onscreen that the utter mismatch between her and her leading men barely registers.  

Twelve Angry Men - Perhaps a little too idealistic and a little too pat in retrospect, this is a fantasy of the United States justice system as we all wish it was - discerning, intelligent, and able to deflate the biases of flawed individuals through collective wisdom.  Alas, Henry Fonda's principled juror is the exception rather than the rule, but he presents such an appealing hero figure, it's hard to resist his aura.  The film was the cinematic debut of Sidney Lumet, and is still one of the strongest debuts ever made.  All he had was twelve people in a room, but the film is as cinematic as anything.     

The Seventh Seal - The best known of Ingmar Bergman's films, for its iconic representation of Death, played by Bengt Ekerot.  The story is fairly rudimentary - a medieval fairy tale that allows Bergman to ruminate about the nature of man's mortality and existence.  However, this was one of the first films where Bergman grappled with the supernatural to such a degree, and got so thematically dark and fatalistic.  It feels like the film where Bergman really became Bergman, similar to how Fellini finally became Fellini with "Cabiria" the same year.    

Throne of Blood - I love that one of the best film versions of Shekespeare's "Macbeth" is an Akira Kurosawa period film set in Japan and starring Toshiro Mifune.  Patterned after a Noh drama, the story of the traitorous, ambitious commander, is reworked for the jidaigeki genre beautifully with the help of a fantastic production design.  The Scottish nobles become samurai, and the witches become a sinister forest spirit.  Kurosawa and Mifune, however, take some creative liberties to make the proceedings more entertaining, including the thrilling ending sequence.     

Kanal - My favorite Andrzej Wajda film is a WWII picture that often mixes genres, veering from war and action into psychological thriller and horror territory on occasion.  We follow several members of the Polish resistance who are on the run and hiding from the Nazis in the Warsaw sewers, a nightmare world of shadows and unseen dangers.  The film's nihilistic tone and grim outlook didn't go over well upon release, but "Kanal" has become a classic of Polish cinema, and remains a fascinating, disturbing watch.  

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"Star Trek: Discovery," Year Three

A few spoilers ahead.

The latest season of "Star Trek: Discovery" offers lots of interesting new characters and a big revamp of its premise.  Now the year is 3188, far beyond any era of "Star Trek" we've ever seen before.  Michael Burnham and the Discovery face a vastly different galaxy where all warp technology has failed, due to a mysterious event called "The Burn," and the Federation is a shadow of its former self.  Michael arrives in this future ahead of Discovery, and has to survive on her own - including getting herself a new love interest, a mercenary named Book (David Ajala), who helps her to adjust.   

I think this is in the running for the best season of "Discovery" yet.  The new setting and changed circumstances means there's lots to explore every week, from what Earth looks like in 3188, to how civilizations are functioning without warp technology.  Some things have regressed, but other technology has jumped forward considerably.  And what exactly caused the Burn?  What happened to the Federation?  The story remains serialized, but loose enough that individual episodes are able to be more distinct and memorable.  The dynamics of the crew change in a big way this year.  Saru becomes Captain and Burnham First Officer, but we also get a lot more time with bridge crew regulars like Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo), Rhys (Patrick Kwok-Choon), and Detmer (Emily Coutts).  Tilly gets a great arc, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  We also welcome the newest member of the crew, a nonbinary human teenager, Adira (Blu Del Barrio), who hosts a trill symbiote, and the consciousness of their deceased boyfriend Gray (Ian Alexander).  Oded Fehr, Janet Kidder, Noah Averbach-Katz, and David Goddamn Cronenberg show up in other roles that require too many spoilers to go into any detail about.  

Unlike the prior seasons of "Discovery," this one manages to maintain a fairly high level of quality all the way through.  There are no characters or storylines that outstay their welcome, and the pacing is pretty brisk.  While some of the ideas and execution could have been improved, like this season's big bad, the Emerald Chain, others are very successful.  I loved seeing all the updated ship designs and all the new tech, like programmable matter, personal transporters, and new virtual UI for the ship's systems.  I still have most of my issues with the characters' interpersonal dynamics, which are rife with the kind of melodrama I can't see Picard or Sisko ever putting up with.  One episode involving Saru trying to shore up the fragile mental health of the crew is pretty painful.

Still, three seasons into "Discovery," I'm very happy with what the show has evolved into.  All of the early criticisms of it are still true to some extent - the show is much more touchy-feely than its predecessors, Michael Burnham stays at the center of the action, like it or not, and boy is everyone invested in being as inclusive and progressive as possible.  And yet, it's also the closest in tone and in philosophy to the original "Star Trek."  Sure, it's an obvious product of its time, and some elements are going to age badly, but "Discovery" also has its own verve and personality that is different from any of the other "Trek" shows.  And it is just as nerdy as anything else in the wider franchise.  Now that we're so far into the series, some of the longer character arcs are paying off in satisfying ways, and there are a few bittersweet departures.  I also like the way that "Discovery" handles its callbacks and moments of nostalgia.  There's a really fantastic reveal, late in the season, that's sure to give the old school "Trek" fans a thrill.     

Looking ahead, we have "Strange New World" and potentially the Section 31 spinoff to look forward to.  I expect the former will be a much more traditional formal "Star Trek" show, and the latter will hopefully be something completely different.  However, I'm the most happy about "Discovery" getting a fourth season, as the series has fully proved worth diving back into this universe for.  

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Pronoun Trouble

I consider myself pretty progressive, but I'm getting older and less in touch with mainstream culture, so inevitably I've been slipping.  Having gotten used to the infuriatingly slow, incremental progress made in the depiction of racial minorities over the years by Hollywood, I was completely caught off guard by the recent surge in LGBT, transgender, and most recently nonbinary characters.  I'll be honest.  I haven't been paying as much attention as I should, and I'm still working on parsing what nonbinary means.

Yes, I've been well aware of the recent push to normalize new gender inclusive pronouns like the singular "They/Them,"  and "Zie/Zir."  I've started getting work e-mails with "she/her/hers" as part of the signature line.  I've only seen this brought up once in person - if a Zoom meeting counts as in person - as part of someone's introduction, but I expect it'll happen more often.  I was vaguely aware of more people identifying as nonbinary in Hollywood from various press announcements, but didn't connect the term to the older identifiers like "genderqueer," or "genderfluid," or "androgynous," (which have nothing to do with biological gender non-conformity terms like "intersex.")  I was not watching recent shows like "Good Trouble," "Carmilla," or "Deputy" that feature nonbinary characters.  I didn't know about Syd from "One Day at a Time."

I want to point out that there have been plenty of nonbinary characters in older media, but they weren't identified as such, and they didn't reflect the way that nonbinary people wanted to see themselves onscreen.  What we've been witnessing in the last four or five years has really been a solidifying of nonbinary as a genuine gender identifier, along with a much more respectful framing of the portrayal of nonbinary characters.  There's also been a clearer demarcation between someone who is transgender and someone who is nonbinary, though nonbinary is itself a pretty broad umbrella term that covers people who use he/him and she/her pronouns, peoply who consider themselves truly androgynous, and plenty more on the gender spectrum.  

The surge in representation finally caught up to me when I was catching up on the latest season of "Star Trek: Discovery," which has been all about showcasing diversity.  We were introduced to Adira Tal (Blu Del Barrio), the show's latest Trill/human symbiote character.  Del Barrio was identified as nonbinary by the trades when they were cast, and the character of Adira came out as nonbinary about halfway through the season, complete with a request to use they/their pronouns.  This episode was the first time I'd had an actual demonstration of how singular they/their pronouns work, and frankly it's going to take me a while to get used to this.  The grammar implications alone make my head hurt.  However, I will get used to this.  I promise.  

But, it's going to take some work on my part.  While I'm glad to see more inclusivity and more empowerment of the nonbinary community, ths one's going to be hard for me.  I know several LGBT folks, and two transgender people in real life.  Nonbinary individuals, however, are completely off my radar - to the extent that it took me until 2020 for it to sink in that this was a real, honest-to-goodness, community.  And the most prominent members are mostly younger, which makes sense, and belong to a cultural milieu very separate from my own.  Or maybe I do know someone nonbinary and never realized.  Can't make any assumptions these days.   

And this makes me feel very old and ignorant, suddenly, but also grateful that social justice marches on, whether or not I'm paying attention, and Hollywood has been more on the ball than I have.  So, if one day one of my kids decides he or she is now they, I won't be caught totally off guard and I'll have some examples to work with.  I may have to secretly pretend they're a symbiote for a while to get around the pronoun thing, but we'll make it work.     

 

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"Chaos Walking" Needs More Chaos

The story of the production of "Chaos Walking" is so much more interesting than the actual film.  This is the movie that had a first draft written by Charlie Kaufman, that was filmed in 2017 with an all-star cast and a big budget, and was subsequently delayed because Lionsgate executives deemed it "unreleasable."  I'm so curious about what some of the earlier versions of "Chaos Walking" looked like, because the version that Lionsgate did deem releasable after reshoots is a middling science-fiction YA film with some interesting ideas.  I would have much preferred the really ambitious disasterpiece that everyone was anticipating.

On a mysterious planet, dubbed the New World, teenager Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) lives in a small colony of all men, called Prentisstown, controlled by the mayor, David Prentiss (Mads Mikkelson) and a radical preacher, Aaron (David Oyelowo).  We learn that they are colonists from Earth, and that all the women of Prentisstown died long ago.  One day a scout ship from a newly arrived colony vessel crash lands on the planet, and the sole survivor is a teenage girl, Viola (Daisy Ridley).  Todd finds her first, and is immediately fascinated, since he's never seen anyone female before.  The mayor, however, has a very different reaction to Viola's arrival. 

The most interesting and inventive element of "Chaos Walking" is the concept of "Noise."  On New World, all the male characters unwillingly project their thoughts via visual and aural phenomena.  If Todd thinks about birds, hologram-like projections of birds circle his head.  If he thinks Viola looks pretty, his Noise will say so outright, often at embarrassing moments.  Though Noise can be controlled or suppressed to some degree, it makes privacy all but impossible.  It also makes for some really fun cinematic visuals, which is probably what drew filmmakers like director Doug Liman to this film in the first place.  Noise can be used to fill in exposition easily, to provide flashbacks to events we haven't seen, and connect disparate pieces of information, all without ever cutting away from the action.  The first hour or so of "Chaos Walking," where we're getting situated in this universe, and learning the rules of Noise and Prentisstown, is pretty strong.      

Unfortunately, it all falls apart pretty quickly.  Todd and Viola quickly uncover truths about Prentisstown and New World that Todd was never told, changing his worldview and setting him on a new path.  Their relationship and adventures are pretty generic survivalist stuff, and the film doggedly sticks to a rural aesthetic where there are no modes of transportation except horses and spaceships, without ever explaining why.  The worldbuilding is pretty poor overall, setting up elements like the New World native population, dubbed "the Spackles," that don't ever pay off.  "Chaos Walking" was based on a trilogy of books, and clearly the filmmakers were hoping to fill in some of the gaps in sequel films.

The performances are decent, but the characters are awfully thin.  Actors like David Oyelowo, Cynthia Erivo, and Nick Jonas are stuck in shallow supporting parts that I suspect may have been significantly larger in earlier drafts of the script.  Holland and Ridley are perfectly capable as the leads, but rarely given the material to be as memorable as they could be.  Pains were taken to make the film family friendly, because despite being able to see and hear everyone's thoughts, nothing inappropriate ever sneaks through.  Todd only has the most PG notions of romance, and the film focuses on his experience throughout, downplaying the horror that would be inherent in the situation from Viola's point of view.

"Chaos Walking" takes an interesting set of ideas and proceeds to be as boring as possible in the execution of them, in the name of being audience friendly.  The portrayal of the Noise does work onscreen, and the filmmakers find some interesting things to do with it, but the rest of the movie is an undercooked pile of tropes we've seen in too many of these YA action films.  And that's a terrible shame.               

 

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Checking in on the AMV World

I was a big anime fan for much of the aughts, and like every other anime fan, I had a collection of AMVs, the fan-made music videos that paired clips from anime to popular (and not-so popular) music and other audio.  Roughly around 2007, I put a big recommendation list of about sixty AMVs on the bookmarking list del.icio.us, which has since gone totally kaput.  My AMV collection was also lost about three computers ago, despite my taking pains to save the hard drive.  So, because I've been getting nostalgic about that period of my life lately, I decided to try and recreate that list and collection with a Youtube playlist.

After a couple of days of wracking my brains, looking up information on the fan-run indexing site AMV.org (thankfully still alive and well), and following breadcrumb trails, I managed to find about 90% of the videos I remember from my old collection.  The bulk of them are available on Youtube, mostly in terrible quality to get around the copyright bots.  No matter how often they get taken down, someone always re-uploads them, and at some point it looks like Youtube just gave up and let them stay.  Only a handful of my old favorites aren't there, the most prominent being one of the most notorious and beloved AMVs of all time - Kevin Caldwell's "Engel."  It uses the Rammstein song "Engel," set to clips of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" to profile the character of Asuka Langley Sohryu.  There are masses of dead links from fans who keep posting that video, only to be thwarted by Rammstein's label.  However, at the time of writing there are still at least three versions of the "Engel" video on Youtube, using different remixes and alternate language versions of the original song.  I find this very ironic, since the "Engel" video probably did more to popularize Rammstein's music globally in the late '90s than anything they ever did officially.

That was always the secret of AMVs.  They break all kinds of copyright laws, but it's not in the best interest of anybody to enforce them, because AMVs serve as very potent free advertising.  Over the years, so many fans found new musical artists or new anime because they stumbled upon a particularly impressive AMV.  They used to be appended to fansubs in the VHS age, and were all over conventions and screenings in my college days.  They also remain one of the best examples of the creativity of fan remix cultures.  I haven't been around for the Youtube era, when some AMVs achieved meme status and racked up millions of views - see "Anime 404" - but it's nice to see that AMVs are still going strong.  I've watched a couple of newer videos, and read up on the trends and technological advances that have happened (I never thought anybody would find a good use for motion-smoothing, but they did), and it warms my heart to see the anime nerds still nerding it up. 

Most of the prominent video editors from the early 2000s are retired, including my favorites, Hsien Lee and Kevin Caldwell.  However, I was delighted to find that there are a couple of the old guard that are still active, though they've mostly crossed over into the live action vidding community.  The AMV world seems to have decentralized in the last decade, revolving less around AMV.org and the big AMV competitions, and now buzzing on Instagram and TikTok.  And of course, there have always been editors like Kestrel Sempai who remain entirely self-hosted.  A great thing about the AMV community is that it's always been so wildly diverse with an international reach.  Scanning my own recreated video collection list, there are several that use songs in German or Japanese, two are in French, and one is in Swedish.  If you're at all familiar with "Princess Tutu," you know what the Swedish one is.  

So many of the older corners of the internet have been disappearing lately, it's nice to find one that's been in pretty good shape since I left it.  While many of my favorite AMVs are only available in awful quality, their creators long ago MIA, others have been lovingly preserved.  Veteran editor Zarxrax remastered all of Kevin Caldwell's videos last year, including "Engel."  And another of the old guard, Absolute Destiny, recently published a beautifully detailed article on the origins of the AMV scene in the Journal for Transformative Works and Cultures.  

As for me, after my trip down memory lane, I don't feel the need to resubscribe to AMV.og and reassemble my AMV collection.  My nostalgia has its limits.  However, this time I'm definitely backing up copies of my list, so I don't have to do so much work the next time I want to watch a couple of old "Revolutionary Girl Utena"/Evanescence  videos.  Speaking of which, does anyone know where to find a decent copy of "Deluge"? 

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"Saint Maud" and "The Wolf House"

It took a while, but some prestige horror titles from overseas are finally available Stateside.

First there's "Saint Maud," the directing debut of Rose Glass. It stars Morfydd Clark as Maud, a soft-spoken hospice care nurse who is a recent Catholic convert. She is given a new assignment to care for a dying woman named Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a dancer and choreographer of some renown, who is also an atheist and a lesbian. Maud becomes obsessed with her, and the idea that she's meant to save Amanda's soul. Maud appears to be very passive and quiet, but we hear her thoughts in voiceover, detailing her gradual slide into religious mania and madness.

"Saint Maud" has quite a few horror movie antecedents, but her often fanciful visions of signs from God and Catholic iconography feel like something out of a fantasy movie. Though there are a few jump scares here and there, the horror really comes from Maud struggling with the widening gap between reality and her increasingly grandiose delusions. She feels the presence of God when she prays, which escalates to him speaking to her directly. In a moment of revelation, she appears to levitate like Saint Teresa. It's fascinating to piece together Maud's past. Encounters with an old friend, Joy (Lily Knight), reveal that Maud's name used to be Katie, and she suffered a trauma when she lost a patient, which may have lead to her conversion. Amanda wonders aloud if Maud's attempts to chase away her lover, Carol (Lily Frazer), are born of bigotry or jealousy.

Morfydd Clark's performance is the reason the film has the power and the poignancy that it does. She does a fantastic job of contrasting a meek facade with inner resolve, of getting across Maud's inner turmoil and moments of doubt while hardly moving a muscle. Her attempts to reach out to Amanda and to Joy are terrifically tense, because Clark plays those scenes with so much going on under the surface. And her experience of religious ecstasy in the final moments of the film are entancing. And then, thanks to Rose Glass, utterly gutting.


Now, on to one of the most unique and fascinating animated films ever made, "The Wolf House." Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña lead a group of Chilean artists who put together the feature as an evolving exhibition in a series of museums and art institutions across the world. Taking inspiration from a real Chilean commune known as the Colonia Dignidad, formed by fanatical German expats, and lead by a notorious pedophile, the film is conceived as a piece of sinister propaganda, loosely retelling "The Three Little Pigs." It follows a disobedient girl named Maria (Amalia Kassai) who runs away from the commune to live in a strange house with two pigs.

The house of the title forms the canvas for all the animation that appears, painted directly on the walls and on the floor, and any objects that happen to be present. Characters first appear in 2D form, and then manifest as 3D creations of masking tape and paper-mache, which are animated via stop-motion. Maria, the Wolf (Rainer Krause), and the two pigs, Pedro and Ana, are recreated anew in each scene, constantly being constructed and deconstructed, their forms changing from location to location. This is the most apparent with the pigs, who first grow hands and feet, and then slowly change into children as the story goes on. Forms are crude, often monstrous and nightmarish, but it's impossible to take your eyes off the screen. The whole feature is designed to look like a single long shot, where the camera moves through the various rooms of the ever-changing house.

Not having any knowledge of the film's origins, history, or anything that it was referencing, I found the story too abstracted, and too buried under layers of symbolism to be properly horrific. Aside from the Fascist underpinnings, the film felt more driven by dream logic than anything. However, as a feat of pure creativity, "The Wolf House" is a tour-de-force. I love the way that it combines all these different kinds of animation, and the way it references and quotes the work of many other animators, including Jan Svankmajer and Jiri Trnka. I love the way it uses reverse photography, found objects, and leaves so many imperfections and signs of its making in the frame, including glimpses of guidewires and armatures. This is easily the most original piece of animation I've seen in ages.

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"Love and Monsters" and "You Cannot Kill David Arquette"

I've been wary of apocalypse films lately, with good reason, I think.  However, along came "Love and Monsters," a super optimistic, winning, YA adventure movie about a young man named Joel (Dylan O'Brien) living in the wake of a global disaster that transmogrified all the animals on earth into gargantuan monsters.  Once a regular teenager in Fairfield, California, Joel has been living in a bunker with a group of other survivors who have all paired off romantically.  He pines for his pre-Apocalypse ex, Aimee (Jessica Henwick), who also survived, but lives in a colony many, many monster-inhabited miles away.  However, Joel summons up the courage to make the long trip, eventually befriending a dog named Boy, a robot named Mav1s (Melanie Zanetti), and a pair of survivalists named Clyde (Michael Rooker) and Minnow (Ariana Greenblat).

This is one of those films that I didn't think existed anymore, a totally original concept (though very derivative of other monster and apocalypse films), with a decent budget, and no major stars.  Producer Shawn Levy seems to have provided most of the momentum to get this made, putting the newish director, Michael Matthews, together with a spec script from Brian Duffield.  The film is stuffed with B-movie charm.  The monsters, mostly giant mutant versions of backyard critters like frogs and centipedes, are properly impressive and weird.  Most of the film is a travelogue, where Joel encounters one deadly crisis after another, and gets away through luck, wits, or the intervention of his new friends.  Dylan O'Brien is pretty solid as our young hero, who starts out more naive and useless than he probably should be, but grows up in a hurry.  

I love the production design, full of overgrown abandoned houses, and comfortably cluttered bunkers.  "Love and Monsters" looks much more expensive than it actually is, due to great use of locations and practical effects work.  With its brighter, fanciful aesthetics, it's clearly angling to appeal to a younger audience, and provides a nice alternative to so many other apocalyptic films with unrelenting palettes of brown and gray.   I especially appreciate the film's outlook, which is so much more positive and uplifting than you'd expect.  Yes, the apocalypse has happened, and it's terrible, but its challenges can be overcome, and we can all learn to be better versions of ourselves.          

And on that note, let's talk about David Arquette who decides, in his mid-40s, to become a professional wrestler on the independent circuit.  "You Cannot Kill David Arquette" chronicles his journey to achieve this dream, filling in backstory about his jokey stint as a WCW World Heavyweight Championship in the year 2000, as part of a movie promotion, leading to his reputation as the most hated man in wrestling.  This has always been a sore sport for Arquette, because he loves wrestling.  He loves wrestling so much that despite his still fairly active acting career, and the concerns of his beautiful family, he embarks on this deeply ill-advised venture, in the hopes of finally redeeming himself in the ring.

I've never been a fan of wrestling shows, but Arquette's passion for it makes it much easier to appreciate the level of athleticism and skill involved in bringing these events to life.  As performance art, there's nothing else like it, and Arquette's exploration of the more modest, less glamorous side of wrestling, is very entertaining.  He makes a trip down to Mexico to train with luchadors, visits amateurs in backyards and tiny gyms, and finally gets himself in good enough shape to start participating in smaller bouts and matches.  Arquette's own journey back to the ring is fascinating, and it's clear at every step that it could not have happened if Arquette were not a rich celebrity with access to the best trainers, the best equipment, and the right connections to the industry.  How he does it, of course, is not nearly as important as why.

"You Cannot Kill David Arquette" is both a love letter to wrestling, and an absorbing quasi-auto-biopic that sees Arquette through this twisty, unlikely story of midlife crisis, self-discovery, self-destruction, and finally facing his own limits.  I'm reminded of Joaquin Phoenix's "I'm Still Here" experiment, except Arquette is in deadly earnest about this transformation, and at one point nearly gets himself killed.  Some of the narrative is exaggerated or outright fabricated - kayfabe - but a lot of it isn't, and I can't tell the difference between the one and the other.  I really can't.

 

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