About That Live Action "Cowboy Bebop"

Despite knowing better, I watched all ten episodes of Netflix's live action "Cowboy Bebop" series.  It's not very good, and I knew from the outset that it wasn't going to be very good.  However, the original anime is one of the foundation pieces of media that helped to define my path as a young animation nerd, so I felt obligated to take a look at this thing and see exactly how bad the damage was.  

From the first episode, the biggest issue is clear.  The creators of the live-action "Bebop" are way too enamored with the anime.  They spend considerable effort recreating whole scenes from the original show in live action, the way the recent "Ghost in the Shell" feature did, even reusing not-great dialogue and a ton of the old music.  The opening sequence and title screens are reproduced with remarkable faithfulness.  Key members of the original "Bebop" creative team like director Shinichiro Watanabe and musician Yoko Kanno are prominently credited.  However, we can place most of the blame on the 2021 series creators, Andre Nemec and Christopher Yost, who decided to make the show look and feel like the anime in every way that they could, from the production design to the cinematography to the actors that were cast.  Sometimes this works, and sometimes it really doesn't, especially when the copying is so direct that it feels like something akin to slipping into a reverse uncanny valley.

The main cast is the best thing that "Bebop" has going for it.  Space cowboy and bounty hunter Spike Spiegel (John Cho) and his partner Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) chase bounties all over the solar system in the beat-up starship Bebop.  Sometimes they team up with wild card Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) for various jobs.  The three of them have great rapport, and it's fun to watch them banter and compete, and eventually form a rough found family together.  The changes to their characters, like Jet having a young daughter, Kimmie (Molly Moriarty), and Faye's mother figure Whitney (Christine Dunford) are good ones, who help them come off as more well rounded.   When the show is about the Bebop gang having their day-to-day adventures, and tackling the new problem of the day, the show is watchable.  The bounties are a  greatest-hits collection of the most memorable characters from the anime, and include some memorable weirdos.

Unfortunately, the show also devotes considerable amounts of time to the story of two people from Spike's past as an assassin for the mob - his old partner and nemesis Vicious (Alex Hassell) and his old lover Julia (Elena Satine).  Vicious and Julia were minor characters from the anime, their relationships with Spike never really developed much.  The new show makes them main characters, a loveless husband and wife, who are trying to move up in the Mars-based Red Dragon Crime Syndicate, and destined to intersect with Spike again someday.  And they're absolutely terrible and boring whenever they're onscreen.  In trying to flesh out Vicious and Julia, the show's limitations really show.  No matter how much backstory they get, they're never more than bad copies of bad cliches.    

Despite "Bebop" being billed as an action series, the fight and chase sequences are fairly mediocre television quality.  They're very style over substance, and all the major set pieces constantly feel like they're stretching the budget to its limits.  Overall, the show's quality is wildly uneven, with some episodes looking very polished and expensive, while others are scraping the bottom of the barrel.  There'll be a great-looking effects shot followed by an especially garish use of greenscreen moments later.  Compared to other science-fiction shows, "Cowboy Bebop" too often underwhelms.  Many similar space cowboy concepts were executed a lot better twenty years ago with Joss Whedon's "Firefly." 

I don't think that a live-action "Cowboy Bebop" is a bad idea, inherently.  One of the impulses behind the original series was mashing up different genres, different musical styles, and different influences to create something new.  Remixing the show's elements again in a live action format yielded some good things - Cho, Shakir, and Pineda's performances as our heroes are fun and engaging.  I don't mind that minor characters like bar owner Ana (Tamara Tunie) were transmogrified into totally different new versions.  However, too much of the show is not remixing or reinventing, but straight up regurgitation, with very disappointing results.  

  

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Under "The Power of the Dog"

I watched "The Power of the Dog" and was initially stumped as to how to write about it.  This is a long, slow, contemplative melodrama from Jane Campion, featuring several good performances.  It's a western, set in Montana in 1925.  I've read some good critical takes on the film pointing out its treatment of Biblical themes, masculinity, and sexuality, but I think it's best to approach it initially as a collection of character studies of the four main characters.

We start with the Burbank brothers, sweet-natured George (Jesse Plemons) and the much smarter, much meaner Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch).  They're wealthy ranchers who manage a large cattle operation together, with Phil very much in charge.  During a cattle drive, they stay at the inn of a widow, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee).  Phil antagonizes Peter, who is bookish and physically awkward, but George is attracted to Rose.  The film is divided into multiple chapters, each focusing on the various relationships of these characters over time.  The film eventually becomes a slow burn thriller, one that doesn't end in any explosive confrontations, but certainly comes to a satisfying and well-earned resolution.   

"The Power of the Dog" falls very much into the category of revisionist western because it punctures the image of the hypermasculine, physically strong, rough-living cowboy in several different ways.  What's interesting here is that Phil is aware of and clearly enraptured with this ideal, embodied by his unseen mentor, Bronco Henry.  Phil is so obsessed that he despises everything that doesn't match up - anything feminine, anything too civilized or genteel, and anything he views as weak.  He bullies George for being soft and fat.  He mocks Peter for his effeminate behavior.  He goes to war against Rose more for what she represents than anything she actually does.  His downfall comes from his inability to recognize that strength doesn't always look like what he's come to expect.  

Cumberbatch's performance as Phil is at the center of the film, and the best thing I've seen him do in a long time.  It makes such good use of his physicality, and his American accent here is much better than his previous attempts.  At the outset, his behavior is so hostile and so aggressive that it threatens to become caricature, but Cumberbatch ensures that Phil always remains keenly intelligent and aware of just how far he can push, which makes him feel much more dangerous.  By contrast, we have Kodi Smit-McPhee, who has always been an interesting presence whenever he's popped up.  Here, he's playing a nebbish with a lisp, and turns out to be hiding a steelier interior.  And the movie works so well because we only get limited glimpses of that interior.  Plemmons and Dunst's supporting work is also very good here, and I was a little disappointed that their screen time was so limited.  

What's so fascinating about Campion's approach is that it doesn't spell things out and the viewer has to piece together many events.  We have a pretty good understanding of what drives Phil, and what his relationship to Bronco Henry was like, but there are tantalizing hints of what Phil was like as a younger man, before he became a rancher.  Peter tells us at one point that he worried that he wasn't kind enough as a child, and his ambitions as a  medical student may be hiding a more worrying side to his behavior.  Then there's the time jump that occurs midway through the film, where suddenly the balance of power between three of the characters has shifted.  This is one of those films that almost demands to be rewatched because certain revelations will make you rethink so much of the characters' intentions behind certain actions.

"The Power of the Dog" is a beautiful film, but one which reveals its beauty slowly.  The pacing is sure to be the biggest stumbling block for casual viewers, especially those who might be expecting a more traditional kind of thriller or crime story.  However, there's such a wonderful exactness to the storytelling, and such a careful control of the mood and tone.  Ari Wegner's cinematography is harsh and evocative.  Campion's characters might be unsubtle, but they're so alive and vital that I was immediately invested in their lives and their mysteries.  It's been such a long time since Campion's last film, I'd forgotten what she was capable of.  It's good to know she can still surprise. 

    

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The Unlikely "tick, tick... BOOM!"

Could it really be that after multiple disappointing musicals this year, the one that finally impressed me was about yet another self-obsessed white guy songwriter in existential crisis hung up on turning thirty?  I am so disappointed in myself.  However, I've always had a weakness for films about artists and the artistic process, and "tick, tick... BOOM!" is exactly that.  It's an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical musical theater piece created by Jonathan Larson a few years before "Rent," detailing his struggles to workshop a new musical in 1990.

I was under the mistaken impression that "tick, tick... BOOM!" was an original musical film written by Lin Manuel Miranda, who makes his directing debut here.  Instead, it's absolutely an adaptation of Larson's work, and to Miranda's credit it's a considerably better screen adaptation than either Larson or Miranda's musicals have gotten so far.  The direction is nothing spectacular, but it highlights the performances well, understands how to execute some of the trickier conceits, and most importantly it trusts the material.  For instance, there's a song number staged at a diner, meant to be a (sadly terribly timely) tribute to Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park With George."  Not only does Lin Manuel Miranda preserve the nerdy referentiality, he leans into it by populating the scene with beloved Broadway stars and playing up the artifice of the production design.  This is also one of those artist biopics that keeps dropping little nods to the artist's most famous work, in this case "Rent," suggesting where Larson's influences came from.  I usually find this sort of thing very obvious and pandering, but here it's done subtly and you actually have to know Larson's work to catch many of the little references.   

A large amount of the credit should go to the cast, especially Andrew Garfield, who plays Jonathan Larson.  He sings, he emotes, and he displays enough creative verve and energy to get viewers caught up in his pursuit of Broadway success.  Alexandra Shipp plays his girlfriend Susan, and Robin de Jesus plays his best friend Michael, both former creatives who have given up on their Broadway dreams, or are on the verge of doing so.  Judith Light plays theatrical agent Rosa, and Bradley Whitford plays Larson's idol, Stephen Sondheim.  And a vast array of Broadway talent, young and old, are on hand for cameos and bit parts.  The film feels very much like a community effort, and you can feel the affection for Larson and his work in every frame of the film.  And of course, since this is a period piece, the musical is also a nostalgic glimpse of the Broadway community that existed in the 1990s, weathering the AIDS crisis and a swiftly changing New York.     

It helps a lot that the musical stays very grounded in the real world, aside from a few brief dream sequences like the "Sunday" number.  The more theatrical numbers and staging are wisely limited to the framing device, where Larson performs "tick, tick... BOOM!" in its stage format with a few other musicians, acting as narrator and internal monologue for the dramatized version of his life.  And it's very much the life of a struggling artist, full of constant juggling of work and relationships, and trying to stretch limited resources.  The musical that Larson is working on, titled "Superbia," is a science-fiction satire that I could easily see being gussied up for the screen with flashy special effects and  fantastical costuming and sets, but this never happens.  Miranda keeps it simple and bare bones, letting the music and the performances stay at the forefront.  And it works beautifully.

And finally, to be frank I like the music in "tick, tick... BOOM!" so much more than anything I've heard from stage and screen musicals recently.  Yes, the style is old fashioned and earnest, but it works for me.  It works so much better than I was expecting.  When the inevitable "Hamilton" screen adaptation happens, I think Lin Manuel Miranda has proven that he's the best choice to direct it.  At the very least, they should let him take a stab at creating a better film version of "Rent."  

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"Masters of the Universe" Brings Out the Old Toys

Spoilers for the first episode ahead.

"Masters of the Universe: Revelations" is billed as a continuation of the '80s "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" cartoon, aimed at nostalgic adults.  With it, creator Kevin Smith has done what a lot of us have dreamed of doing with some of our beloved childhood media.  The original "He-man" was notoriously badly written, full of lazy contrivances and silly cliches that followed familiar Saturday morning cartoon templates.  Smith and his team confront this head-on, making the beloved characters break out of their child-friendly status quo and reckon with the weird character dynamics and odd choices that were inherent in the original "He-man" formula.  And though the execution isn't always great, it's a fun idea that brings something new to a franchise that was only ever intended to sell action figures.

The ten-episode series starts by immediately killing off both the villain, Skeletor (Mark Hamill) and the hero, Prince Adam (Chris Wood), and revealing the truth that Adam is He-man's secret identity to all of his stunned family and friends.  Among them is the warrior woman Teela (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who becomes our POV character.  After reacting negatively to being kept in the dark about He-man, she's  banished and goes off on her own to try and pick up the pieces in the wake of the final battle.  However, when the need arises, she joins up again with He-man's surviving companions - including her father Man-at-Arms (Liam Cunningham), the Sorceress (Susan Eisenberg), Cringer the Battle Cat (Stephen Root), and Orko the Imp (Griffin Newman), to save the day and the universe.

The original He-man fans are sure to get a kick out of this series, because it's full of cameos and callbacks and references, but this is definitely not the original "He-man."  Powerhouse Animation provides some fabulous visuals that are consistent design-wise with the first series, but the show isn't interested in telling the same old formulaic stories where He-man always wins.  Eventually, we do get to see him in his full action hero glory, because nobody ever really dies in this universe, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of false-starts before we get there.  Smith and company are more concerned with helping these characters grow up and interrogate their own shoddy construction.  Inevitably, this results in some tonal weirdness because the characters just weren't designed to be this deep.  

Still, it must have been so satisfying for the writers to be able to ask questions, like, doesn't Prince Adam keeping up this secret identity show a fundamental lack of trust in his friends?  And, doesn't Adam's family dynamic with his parents King Randor (Diederich Bader) and Queen Marlena (Alicia Silverstone) seem to be wildly dysfunction?  And, when is the sorceress Evil-Lyn (Lena Headey) going to realize that Skeletor ain't treating her right, and she doesn't have to put up with his nonsense?  While I don't think you need to have much familiarity with the old '80s cartoon to enjoy this new show - and I certainly didn't have much - it helps to have some knowledge of the old character relationships, and the tropes of kids' media from that era.  

Occasionally, I think the writers get way too wrapped up in the show's lore, and the snarky dialogue is more out of date than it thinks it is, but mostly all these transformations and subversions work.  And they work because you can tell the creators love this franchise and these characters, and are eager to give them new stories.  The inherent corniness of the fantasy premise, and having characters with names like Evil-Lyn and Man-at-Arms is carefully preserved, but I like that we're meant to come at them from a more adult perspective.  Orko, for instance, goes from comic relief to a more poignant figure, and Prince Adam is actually much more interesting and heroic when he isn't being He-man.   

My biggest quibble with the show is with its casting, which features an awful lot of celebrities who aren't a good fit for their characters.  They make the show feel like more of a vanity project than it should.  I mean, the series is super indulgent anyway, but it's executed well enough that this mostly doesn't matter.   I'd be up for more of this series in the future, especially if the creators can maybe tackle the Dolph Lundgren movie next.      

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"Arcane" is Full of Surprises

I've watched a lot of expensive, ambitious animated series over the years aimed at older audiences, and many of them fall victim to certain common issues.  The biggest one is that they're simply not very well written or conceived, often too reliant on their visuals or their adult content.  "Arcane," based on the "League of Legends" game franchise, is one of the best I've seen because it is absolutely rock-solid in its storytelling.  It's not just that the worldbuilding is strong, or the characters are unusually nuanced, but because it understands the strengths of animation, and what to do with them.

  

Set in the steampunk fantasy world of Runeterra, "Arcane" follows several characters who live in the city of Piltover, renowned for its scientists and inventors, and Zaun, the dangerous "undercity" below it.  Two orphaned sisters, Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Powder (Mia Sinclair Jenness) grow up in Zaun under the care of their foster father Vander (JB Blanc), while dodging crime lords like Silco (Jason Spisak) and Piltover's law enforcers.  One day, their gang steals "arcane" crystals from a promising young scientist, Jayce (Kevin Alejandro), who is at the center of another group of characters - an enforcer, Caitlyn (Katie Leung), a professor, Heimerdinger (Mick Wingert), his assistant Viktor (Harry Lloyd), and an ambitious member of Piltover's ruling council, Mel Medarda (Toks Olagundoye).  This sets off a chain of events with major consequences for both Piltover and Zaun.  

I spent a good amount of time reading up on the production details for this series, because "Arcane" feels like it came out of nowhere.  The unusually high quality animation was produced by Paris based Fortiche Production, which has previously only done animation for other "League of Legends" projects.  The style is similar to Sony's "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse" and SPA's "Klaus," using a combination of CGI and traditional animation.  This allows the characters to combine the expressiveness of hand-drawn animation and the polish of CGI, which is important because so much of the series is focused on character relationships and interactions.  The series being animated helps it to realize all sorts of impossible environments, weapons, and visuals.  The characters include wildly stylized humans, non-human creatures, and people who are magically enhanced.  Notably, it also allows the early episodes to put its young leads into dangerous situations, and portray violence as more brutal than genre shows are usually comfortable with.      

And this is the crucial thing that distinguishes "Arcane" from other animated projects I've seen in this vein.  It offers up plenty of action and spectacle, but always in service of its thoughtful, multi-faceted story.  All the characters rely on very familiar tropes often found in gaming and anime, but they change and grow and subvert stereotypes.  I love tough-girl Vi, cunning Mel Medarda, and the deeply twisted Silco.  This is a universe where everyone is trying to do the right thing according to their own systems of morality, but good intentions often bring about catastrophe.  I appreciate that every major conflict is driven by specific choices and their unintended consequences.  The writing does a nice job of giving every major player an arc, and showing us how the world works more often than telling us how it works.   There's only one major character I have reservations about, Jynx (Ella Purnell), a Harley Quinn-like agent of chaos, whose mental instability makes her a little too much of a psycho cutie cliche. And yet, she's so charismatic, it's hard to take your eyes off of her.    

"Arcane" has some rough edges and tonal problems.  Parts of the story are repetitive - Vi is kidnapped or carried off with alarming frequency - and there's no getting around its reliance on easy shocks.  However, I like that it takes its cues from darker, bleaker anime series like "Fullmetal Alchemist."  And it does right by its characters, never letting the audience write anyone off, even when they seem irredeemable.  I have no experience with Riot Games or "League of Legends" whatsoever, but the show got me completely invested in the fates of these characters and their world.  I can't wait to see what else this franchise has in store.  

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My Favorite Paul Verhoeven Film

I've learned to appreciate Paul Verhoeven's films though I've never much liked them.  I think of his style as characterized by an aggressive, harsh vulgarity.  People's behaviors are crude and animalistic.  Violence and gore are shown explicitly.  Human bodies are fetishized, and often so in-your-face that they're rendered alien and grotesque.  I still associate him with the 1980s because his boundary-pushing Hollywood efforts like "RoboCop" clearly left a mark on the filmmaking of that era - and not always for the better.  

Before Verhoeven came to Hollywood, however, he was a notorious Dutch provocateur, making very sexually frank, uninhibited films that often attracted controversy.  They were satirical, lurid, and frankly very culturally specific.  I had a rough time connecting to his characters, who felt very remote and driven by forces that I didn't understand.  The one exception was "The Fourth Man," the psychological thriller that Verhoeven made in 1983, which attracted wide acclaim, and would help to propel him toward larger, more ambitious films.  "The Fourth Man" stands out from the rest of Verhoeven's early work, because it follows the familiar template of a mystery film.  Verhoeven had to reign in some of his wilder impulses to get the plot to work, which also had the benefit of making the film more accessible.     

However, that plot still features many of Verhoeven's favorite themes, exploring homosexuality, sexual obsessions, and a healthy dose of frustrated Catholicism.  The hero becomes ensnared in the machinations of a black widow who murdered three of her former husbands.  He's constantly having dreams and visions of impending doom.  These dream sequences present the opportunity for Verhoeven to really indulge in stylized, surrealist imagery.  He plays with bright colors and iconography to great effect.  Memorably, there's the leading man's encounter with a life-size sexy Jesus on the crucifix, and a nightmare where the femme fatale cuts off his genetalia with a pair of scissors.   The sex - and there's a lot of sex in this movie - always comes with a sense of danger and foreboding.  

There's also a level of camp in the film that may or may not be intentional.  The performance of leading man Jeroen Krabbe, especially when his character is supposed to be overcome with religious fervor, is so over-the-top that it's difficult to take the third act seriously.  Verhoeven's images of death and gore are so obviously fake, the most violent moments are also the most silly.  I don't know if Verhoeven intended to undercut and satirize common mystery film tropes, but the obvious artificiality and deliriously heightened tone of the film helped a lot in making his usual stylistic choices more palatable for me.  "The Fourth Man" has a lot in common with Verhoeven's later sexual thriller "Basic Instinct," having a similar focus on trashy thrills and visceral sexuality.  The character of Christine, played by Renee Soutendijk, is an obvious precursor to Sharon Stone's voracious Catherine Tramell, with her striking looks and predatory demeanor.  

Verhoeven has said that the film is related to his "vision of religion," which is highly critical and skeptical.  The hero is ultimately saved and perhaps redeemed by visions from the Virgin Mary, but it also puts him in the hospital, considered mentally ill, with his fate unknown.  I think this is the reason why I managed to connect with this Verhoeven film, as wacky as it sometimes is.  He gets his point across in a way that doesn't get overwhelmed by what he's doing stylistically, unlike the anti-fascist messages in "Starship Troopers" or the showbiz allegory of "Showgirls."  Verhoeven's other explorations of religion, such as last year's "Benedetta," have been less successful.  

When it comes down to it, I respect Paul Verhoeven for constantly pushing boundaries and taking risks in his films, but most of them are clearly not made for me.  His aggressively masculine view of the world and prurient obsessions tend to leave me queasy.  However, the fact that he hasn't lost an ounce of his nasty verve over the years, never allowing himself to become compromised, signals to me that he absolutely deserves the label of great director.  And this post, to be honest, was long overdue.

What I've Seen - Paul Verhoeven

Turkish Delight (1973)

Soldier of Orange (1977)

The Fourth Man (1983)

Flesh+Blood (1985)

RoboCop (1987)

Total Recall (1990)

Basic Instinct (1992)

Showgirls (1995)

Starship Troopers (1997)

Hollow Man (2000)

Black Book (2006)

Elle (2016)

Benedetta (2021)

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"Midnight Mass" Outstays Its Welcome

This is the latest miniseries from Mike Flanagan, who you might remember was the man behind Netflix's "The Haunting of Hill House," and various recent Stephen King adaptations.  I was under the impression that "Midnight Mass" was an original feature, but instead it's a seven hour miniseries that presents a slow burn horror story.  It's a rewarding watch, but requires so much patience that I don't think it's going to land very well with the usual horror audiences.

Two men arrive on the remote fishing community of Crockett Island - Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), a recently released convict returning home, and Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater), filling in for the ailing Catholic Monsignor during Lent.  As the two men settle in, various supernatural events take place, and it becomes clear that they are connected to the church.  We meet other members of the community, including the Muslim sheriff, Hassan (Rahul Kohli), Riley's pregnant childhood friend Erin (Kate Siegel), Dr. Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish) and her dementia-stricken mother Mildred (Alex Essoe), town drunk Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet), and the self-righteous church lady, Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan).   

For the first chunk of "Midnight Mass," I was with the show.  I was perfectly happy to watch the slow escalation of the supernatural material, and get to know everybody on Crockett Island.  It's a small, insular community where many people have been touched by tragedy.  Riley struggles to get over his guilt and substance abuse issues.  Father Paul is carrying a secret that is deeply tied to his faith.  "Midnight Mass" takes the time to really examine Father Paul's struggles to bring the community together, and is meticulously detailed in its portrayal of all the ins and outs of Catholic liturgy.  The characters have the opportunity to talk at length about religion and belief in a way that you don't see very often these days.  And it's great, up until the point where it clashes with the show's other aims.

Because once the gore and the horror kick in, Flanagan can't quite seem to commit to the heightened, Grand Guignol level of carnage that he invokes.  Bev Keane is set up for the entire show to become a really despicable, power-mad villain, but she never gets to go as big or as ostentatious as she easily could have.  Father Paul's final fate struck me as anticlimactic, and not in a good way.  The finale is weirdly stop-and-go, with an especially egregious pause toward the end so that one of the heroines can have a long monologue about the nature of death.  And you might remember that Mike Flanagan has a bad habit of having his characters ramble on about existential matters to the point of absurdity.  It's fitting for a ghost story, but weirdly out of place in "Midnight Mass," which has jump scares and mass deaths and a familiar creature that nobody ever gives a name to - but we all know what it is.

I enjoyed a lot of this miniseries, but I desperately want to edit it down to something more manageable.  You could easily lose ten minutes out of every single episode, and condense whole chunks of the storyline.  There were so many events that felt like they were playing out at a glacial pace.  I like the way the show pulls off some of its big twists, but it's all so drawn out and lugubrious that it's not much fun.  To Flanagan's credit the characters are better fleshed out than most, and tragedy that some of them meet hits harder than expected.  The actors are very good, especially Hamish Linklater in one of the most showy roles he's ever had.  Flanagan does stick the landing, though it takes a while to get there.  However, I worry that he's becoming afflicted with the same tendency toward indulgent bloat that afflicts Stephen King.  

After this and the recent "Haunting of Bly Manor," I am convinced that Mike Flanagan is one of the most talented people working in the horror genre today.  However, giving him carte blanche with a passion project like this has led to very mixed results.

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"CODA" and "Swan Song"

This year's big winner at Sundance was Sian Heder's "CODA," a coming-of-age film about teenager Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member in a deaf family.  Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant) all depend on her to translate for them, and she expects to join the family fishing business after high school.  However, after joining the school choir, the music teacher Mr. V. (Eugenio Derbez), encourages her to develop her talent for singing and audition for the Berklee College of Music.  Inevitably, the pressures from her family and her desire to pursue her own dreams result in Ruby having to make some difficult choices.

"CODA," an acronym for "child of deaf adults," is an earnestly humane film that does the work of making its deaf characters much more well-rounded and emotionally complex than we see in most media.  The parts of the film featuring them, and their struggles to keep their fishing operations afloat, are so much more compelling than Ruby's fairly rote transformation from insecure ugly duckling to songbird, and her twee romance with a classmate, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo).  I so enjoy that the scenes of Ruby with her family have rough edges and real texture to them, which makes the flatter, more glossy scenes at high school immediately seem more tedious and incongruous with the rest of the film.    

Emilia Jones does a decent job of carrying "CODA," but the best performances come from the adults - Eugenio Derbez as the exuberant Mr. V., and Marlee Matlin delivering one of the best performances that I've ever seen from her as Ruby's loving mother.  The deaf characters are so earthy, so funny, and so lived-in - their personalities and foibles come across so clearly.  There are subtitles for the conversations that take place in sign language, but I think they're optional.  The characters perfectly communicate their feelings even if you can't understand a word they're signing.  "CODA" is very formulaic at times, and the filmmaking is too generic for my tastes, but there's no denying that this is a sweet little film that I hope finds its intended audience. 

"Swan Song" is the latest from Todd Stephens, who returns to Sandusky, Ohio to relay the tale of the aged "Mister Pat" Pitsenbarger, based on a real local hairdresser and fixture of the gay community.  Pat (Udo Kier) is gathering dust in a local senior home when he receives word that one of his old clients, the wealthy Rita Parker Sloan (Linda Evans) has died, and requested that he handle her hair for the funeral.  This sends Pat on an odyssey across Sandusky to rediscover himself and reconnect to figures from his past.  Along the way he meets his former protege Dee Dee (Jennifer Coolidge), Rita's grandson Dustin (Michael Urie), drag queen Miss Velma (Justin Lonesome), and his old friend Eunice (Ira Hawkins).

At first, "Swan Song" seems to be a small scale, comedic version of something like "Paris, Texas" or "Nebraska," where a man comes back to the remains of a life he abandoned long ago, to have an overdue reckoning with the ghosts of his past.  However, the deeper into the story he goes, and the more details are revealed about Mr. Pat, the more poignant the character is revealed to be.  It becomes apparent after a while that "Swan Song" isn't just paying homage to the figure of Mr. Pat, but the bygone era of LGBT culture that he represents.  Pat being a gay hairdresser, one of the stock types of the '80s, is so perfect, and having him played by camp icon Udo Kier feels terribly appropriate.  

Kier is wonderful as Mr. Pat, especially as he slowly regains the confidence to reconstruct the persona of the fabulous man he was in his youth.  Stephens plays with his screen image and that of the long absent Linda Evans, not afraid of making them a little ridiculous, and a little grotesque when necessary.  "Swan Song" feels like is occupies such a specific place, as a love letter to Sandusky and an attempt to acknowledge a certain type of friendship between gay men and straight women, and comes across as very honest and genuine in its aims.  This one surprised me, and I'm glad I took the trouble to track it down.     

  

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A Spooky "Last Night in Soho"

Edgar Wright almost pulls off a great film here, doing a fabulous job of creating a film that pays homage to 1960s London, and then stumbling when it comes to delivering on the thrills and horror.  It has a stellar cast, including two of the most promising young actresses currently working, and several British acting luminaries who were made famous by the '60s movies that Wright draws his inspiration from.  I'm awfully tempted to recommend the film on the strength of its aesthetic pleasures alone.

Thomasin McKenzie stars as Ellie, an aspiring fashion designer who has trouble adjusting when she comes to study in London, and decides to move into a bedsit owned by elderly Mrs. Collins (Diana Rigg).  This move seems to trigger Ellie having dreams and visions of an aspiring singer in the 1960s named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is lead astray by her manager, Jack (Matt Singer).  Ellie is haunted by Sandie to the point where it starts affecting her waking life, jeopardizing her new relationship with a fellow student, John (Michael Ajao).  Eventually, Ellie believes Sandie was murdered, and her murderer may still be on the loose.  

The first act setting up the premise is great, the second act trying to pivot from nostalgia to horror runs into some trouble, and the third act is frankly a little maddening.  I want to let the film's deficits slide just on the strength of its considerable aesthetic pleasures, but I've been doing that with way too many of Wright's films lately, and I'm getting worried about him.  As you might expect, when the film works, it's a marvel of beautifully reconstructed '60s glamour, a lovingly curated retro soundtrack, and McKenzie and Taylor-Joy effortlessly delivering fun performances.  When it doesn't work, it doesn't work in all-too familiar ways.  The film is poorly paced, Wright's ability to orchestrate his various conceits falls apart by the ends and is largely abandoned, and the denouement feels weirdly tacked on.  In short, these were the exact same problems that plagued "Baby Driver," and to a lesser extent, "The World's End."  It's especially frustrating this time, because Wright's got all the right pieces here.  The execution just doesn't quite work as intended.

I think a large part of the problem is that Wright is trying to juggle too many balls, as usual.  This absolutely should have been a more straightforward psychological thriller instead of a full-on horror film with too many too-clever twists.  While I liked the subversive ending, it also royally muddles up some of the messages about the dark side of nostalgia, and how misogynistic and terrible the '60s could be for women.  The film's male lead, John, is so woefully underwritten that I was sure that he must have been intended to be a twist villain at some point.  If you know the usual tropes of horror films, you can guess who the actual villain is pretty easily - Wright clearly spent a lot of time setting up little hints that make him look very clever upon a second viewing, but I was exasperated enough with his poor handling of his characters that I don't particular feel inclined to take in a second viewing. 

However, I still think the film is worth a watch.  The first act manages to evoke some real magic in its '60s sequences, and it's great to see Diana Rigg, Rita Tushingham, and Terrence Stamp getting some screentime.  Wright is still able to orchestrate some really inventive, stunning visuals, and his use of mirrors and filters and kaleidoscopic compositions is really lovely.  Sadly, blending this style with horror seems to be beyond his capabilities, and it doesn't help that there's another British director who has recently done very good work in this space - Peter Strickland.        

I wanted to love this movie, and instead I wound up appreciating it in bits and pieces.  It's a shame that this didn't do well at the box office, because I want Edgar Wright to keep making original films in the way that only he can.  At the same time, it's becoming clear that his films are exercises in style first and foremost.  And that would be fine if he weren't so committed to making the kinds of genre films that depend on better scripts than he's giving them.  Here's hoping he can course correct before he the audience's goodwill runs dry. 

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The Other "Casino Royale"

Some very silly spoilers ahead.

Since I'd watched all of the EON produced James Bond films, I figured I should watch the non-EON films too, because I'm a completionist.  This brought me to one of the most notorious runaway productions of all time, the 1967 adaptation of "Casino Royale" that was put together by Charles K. Feldman and distributed by Columbia.  Feldman had the rights to the original Ian Fleming novel, and after being turned down by EON, decided to make the film anyway as a spoof of the other Bond films of the 1960s.  The resulting "Casino Royale" is not a good film, but it is an absolutely fascinating film, and I'd argue that it's a must watch for die-hard Bond fans.

Originally, the film starred Peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble, a baccarat expert who is recruited by Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress) to challenge the evil Le Chiffre (Orson Welles).  He trains as an agent and impersonates James Bond for the job.  Sellers, unfortunately, quit the film before it was finished due to rumored behind-the-scenes tensions with Orson Welles.  So, bookend sequences featuring David Niven as the original James Bond - who hates what his successors have been doing to his previously squeaky-clean reputation - were created.  More Bonds were thrown into the mix - a new recruit, Coop (Terence Cooper), intended to take over the 007 mantle, Bond's weaselly nephew Jimmy Bond (Woody Allen), and Bond's daughter Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet).  Ultimately, the film had five different credited directors, a wildly chaotic storyline, and had to piece together scenes from unused footage of Peter Sellers.  The budget ballooned from $6 million to $12 million.  Somehow, it was a box office hit.  

Nobody talks about this movie anymore, and not just because MGM eventually got the rights to the film and happily buried it for ages.  The critics savaged it at the time of release, and despite a few brave defenders pushing for a reevaluation in recent years, it's still considered one of the worst, most inept big budget films ever made.  Watching "Casino Royale" now is a bizarre experience.  The POV character switches every ten minutes, from Niven to Cooper to Sellers to Pettet.  The film feels like a series of spy-themed sketches more than anything else, and some of them are pretty good.  Some are not.  Niven and Woody Allen are entertaining whenever they're onscreen, and Orson Welles is pleasantly odd - apparently he demanded that his character perform magic tricks and illusions throughout the film, including making a woman disappear at the baccarat table.  The film grows more and more chaotic as it goes along, finally culminating in a bonkers finale in the casino, where all the Bonds get into a fight, there are celebrity cameos everywhere, and Woody Allen finally blows it all up. 

Compared to the four Sean Connery films that had been produced by the time, "Casino Royale" is more fun in some respects.  A lot of this has to do with the film's Bond girls, who are shameless sex objects, but sex objects with more agency and active parts to play in the film.  The gimmick here is that Niven's Bond is a cold fish, Sellers' Bond is totally inexperienced, and Woody Allen is a geek, so the most sexually aggressive characters are the women.  In addition to Andress and Pettet, this includes agents played by Daliah Lavi, Deborah Kerr, and Jacqueline Bisset, and a bored Miss Moneypenny played by Barbara Bouchet.  You can see the influence of raucous sex '60s comedies like "What's New Pussycat?" which "Casino Royale" directly references multiple times.   

The production is also nothing to sneeze at.  The sets include some real gems of '60s psychedelia, including a spy school designed to look like the set of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," and the villain's eye-poppingly mod secret lair, which clearly had more influence on the look of the "Austin Powers" movies than any of the actual James Bond films.  The music and songs by Bruce Bacharach are top notch throughout, and do a lot to help everything feel like they're all part of the same universe.  Even if I completely lost track of the story, I was content just watching the film play out, introducing one wild setpiece or improbably dressed Bond girl  after another, and enjoying a lot of very good actors pretend that they have any idea what's going on.     

"Casino Royale" is a mess, but it's a beautiful mess, and I kinda dig it.

Your 2022 Oscar Nominees

Oh boy, this is a chaotic year.  We've got some good nominations.  We've got some questionable nominations.  We've got some very questionable nominations.  

Among the Best Picture nominees, our frontrunners are clear: "The Power of the Dog," with twelve nominations, is Netflix's best shot yet at a Best Picture Oscar.  "Belfast" and "West Side Story" represent the only real competition, with seven nominations apiece.  "Dune" has ten, mostly thanks to craft awards, though noticeably no Director nod.  Ditto "King Richard," with six nods.  "Don't Look Up" and "Licorice Pizza" are still in the race, but the lack of acting nominations is not a good sign.  On the other hand, "Nightmare Alley" did much better than expected, with five nods.  "CODA" and "Drive My Car" round out the list, though I'd much rather have "Tick, Tick… BOOM!" "The Lost Daughter," or "The Tragedy of Macbeth," which did get a few nominations in other categories.    

Let's take a look at the acting categories.  Best Actor was pretty well predetermined, and I can't really argue with any of the choices.  Nicholas Cage should be there instead of Javier Bardem, but as wacky as the Oscars are this year, that was never going to happen.  Best Actress delivered the biggest snub of the morning, which was Lady Gaga.  She's the only reason “House of Gucci” holds together at all.  Meanwhile, Chastain was pretty meh and Kidman and everyone else from "Being the Ricardos" seem to represent the worst of the Oscars' voting inertia, favoring familiar names over more deserving ones.  J.K. Simmons has no business being in Supporting Actor, and yet somehow Nina Arianda isn't in Supporting Actress?  And "Belfast" got nods for Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds, helping to crowd out anybody from "Mass" or "The French Dispatch" or "Don't Look Up."  I loved "The Power of the Dog," and Kirsten Dunst in general, but she shouldn't be here over Ruth Negga, and Ann Dowd.  Jessie Buckley was a nice surprise for "The Lost Daughter" though.  

  

Foreign films are doing very well this year.  "Drive My Car" got Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay nods.  "The Worst Person in the World" popped up in Best Original Screenplay, and Penelope Cruz got a Best Actress nom for "Parallel Mothers," an Almodovar film I haven't managed to watch yet.  Meanwhile, the animated foreign language refugee documentary "Flee" secured Best Animated, International, and Documentary nods.  I sincerely hope that it manages to win one of them.  "Drive My Car," unfortunately, is a film that didn't work for me at all, and I'd much rather have Denis Villeneauve in the Director category and "Tick, Tick… BOOM!" in Best Picture.  Best International Feature Film is always a mess because of individual countries' choices about what to submit.  "Titane" and "Memoria" were never in the running, but I'm surprised that Asghar Farhadi's "A Hero" didn't get a nomination.     

There are so many contenders this year that I can't help seeing an awful lot of snubs.  It saddens me that "The French Dispatch," "Passing," "C'mon C'mon," "The Green Knight," "Mass," "Pig," and "The Last Duel" came away with nothing.   I wasn't much of a fan of "Annette" or "The Harder They Fall," but they're both conspicuously missing from Best Song.  "The Rescue" feels oddly missing from Best Documentary Feature.  Meanwhile, there are a lot of films that got much less attention than they were hoping for.  Personally, I consider "Spider-man: No Way Home's" single nomination for Visual Effects a bullet dodged, considering that they were gunning so hard for Best Picture.  "Cyrano," "House of Gucci," and "Spencer" also walked away with a lone nomination each.  

Honestly, it's not a bad year.  I may want to roll my eyes at "Belfast" and "CODA," but "The Power of the Dog" is great, and there are a lot of unexpected choices and interesting little stories.  I'm oddly very proud of the Academy voters for not nominating Jared Leto for "House of Gucci," and for slipping a Best Makeup and Hairstyling nomination to "Coming 2 America."  I'll be rooting for Questlove and and Lin Manuel Miranda and Maggie Gyllenhaal.  And really, Diane Warren won't ever stop, will she?  

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Looking Ahead to the Next Bond Movie

Spoilers for "No Time to Die" ahead.

Before we talk about the future, I want to make it clear where I'm coming from.  I like the Daniel Craig films more than most Bond fans.  I like that they were serialized, that they were more serious in tone, and that they made significant changes to the characters.  "Quantum of Solace" was really the only installment I didn't like because it essentially had no script, and I was perfectly happy with the ending, messy and compromised as the execution was. 

So, after five films and fifteen years, we're definitely due for a new Bond actor and maybe a new approach to the Bond films.  I've now watched all the theatrically released ones, so I'm very familiar with all the different versions of James Bond over the years, and how the franchise has changed with the times.  The biggest new development going forward will be that 50% of the franchise will be owned by Amazon, via their acquisition of MGM.  The Broccoli family will still retain creative control, so we don't have to worry about a proliferation of spinoffs just yet, but they're probably coming in the not-too-distant future.  We nearly had one with Halle Berry's Jinx character from "Die Another Day," and there's been some chatter about Lashana Lynch and Ana de Armas's characters from "No Time to Die" too      

The Bond franchise seems to cycle between Bonds that are more serious and gritty, like Timothy Dalton and Daniel Craig, and films that are more irreverent and fanciful, like Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan.  As a response to the "Austin Powers" franchise, largely built around spoofing older Bond films, and following the lead of the more grounded Jason Bourne films, "Casino Royale" and its direct sequels embraced realism, though they slowly got more stylized and outlandish over time.  Most fans are predicting a shift to a more lighthearted Bond, since nearly all the big, current, action franchises like the "Fast" and "Mission: Impossible" series are goofier and less self-serious.  I'm not a fan of the sillier side of the franchise, but films like the first "Kingsman" have shown that you can do an updated version of the Roger Moore style Bond movies successfully.

There's a lot you could do with the Bond franchise outside of the rigid parameters that he's existed in so far.  You could backtrack the way "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." did, and do a tongue-in-cheek Bond set in the '60s.  You could put Bond in the near-future where his propensity for wild gadgets would make more sense.  You could double down on the Craig-era serialization and plan out a more intricately plotted  series over multiple films from the outset.  Maybe an alternate timeline where the Cold War never ended.  James Bond has been around long enough and proved resilient enough that the formula can handle some tinkering.  "No Time To Die" already went so far as to kill him off, so the franchise could absolutely lean into the absence and spend the next film with M, Q, and the rest searching for a replacement.       

The casting of James Bond always invites plenty  of speculation.  Daniel Craig got some pushback for being blond, of all things, so I doubt that we'll see anyone too different from the template of the straight, white cis-gender British male ideal that Bond has always embodied.  There's been enough progress with colorblind casting that we might have some wiggle room on ethnicity, but definitely not gender, sexuality, or especially nationality.  Bond has always been a very British operation, to the point where Cary Joji Fukunaga has the distinction of being the first non-British director of the Bond franchise (and only because Danny Boyle dropped out).  I don't have any specific candidates in mind for the new James Bond, but I'm afraid Idris Elba is too old for the part now.

And nobody has the balls to continue the series with the Agent 007 played by Lashana Lynch, but that's a rant for another day.

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My Top Ten Films of 1950

This is part of a series of top ten films for the years before I began this blog. And it's the last entry for the time being, until I watch enough films to continue into the 1940s.  Entries below are unranked.  Let's go.

Sunset Boulevard - I admit that I have a rough time with noir.  However, even I couldn't resist Norma Desmond, Billy Wilder's enduring symbol of every once-bright star cruelly forgotten by Hollywood.  Not only is the film a wonderfully executed examination of the dark side of the silver screen, but has all these wonderful little references and nods to Hollywood's past.  Erich von Stroheim, a real silent era director, appearing as Max, is one of my favorite performances of all time.

Born Yesterday - Yes, I'm aware I have both of the Best Actress winners of 1950 on this list, but can you blame me?  Judy Holliday is one of my favorite actresses of this era, and this is her best performance.  The transformation of her character, Billie, from uncultured bimbo into a gleefully empowered figure of feminine ambition - and patriotism! - is immensely entertaining.  The comedy is so well written, and the laughs build on each other so beautifully, I can never resist its ample charms.

Harvey - I've learned to appreciate this film over time.  The premise, where an eccentric man insists that his best friend is an invisible six-foot tall humanoid rabbit, is fundamentally silly.  However, Jimmy Stewart's performance as Elwood P. Dowd is so gentle and so winning.  All the sensible people around him go to pieces in the face of adversity, but Elwood's madness keeps him sane.  Eventually, I was won over the way so many others have been by this sweet, whimsical fantasy. 

Beauty and the Devil - Rene Clair's take on the Faust legend is an elegantly made piece of fantasy cinema, full of Clair's usual flourishes.  Michel Simone stars as a wonderfully watchable Mephistopheles, while Gerard Philipe plays Faust.  Clair manages to inject some social commentary into the story, mirroring the downfall of Faust's kingdom with the French revolution.  However, the film's best moments are its presentations of dream imagery and dream logic that you could only realize on film.

Orpheus - And on that note, absolutely no one was better at poetic dream imagery in French cinema than Jean Cocteau.  His modern retelling of the Orpheus myth depends greatly on its command of mood and tone, with a few inspired uses of special effects.  Jean Marais' poet must traverse Cocteau's underworld, a nocturnal dreamscape of mystery and magic, where the laws of nature don't apply.  And it's vision of Death as a lovely princess is one of French cinema's great triumphs.   

La Ronde - The individual love stories told in Max Ophuls' "La Ronde" are not especially compelling.  However, there's something about the format and the structure of the film that I find endlessly appealing.  I think a lot of it must be due to the presence of Anton Walbrook as the Master of Ceremonies, who sings us from story to story with such wit and such warmth.  And Ophuls has such a light touch, which keeps everyone's sexual misadventures from ever feeling tawdry.

Cinderella - I tried to resist, but it was useless.  "Cinderella" remains as lovely a piece of Disney animation as it ever was.  Historically, it's credited with jump-starting the studio's fortunes in the post-war era.  The real heroes of the picture are the mice, of course, part of an excellent ensemble of caricatured characters that may draw some attention away from Cinderella herself, but have also helped to distinguish this version from all the other Cinderella movies that came before, and have come since.  

Stromboli - My favorite collaboration between Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini is about a woman in a psychic battle with her environment and circumstances.  Bergman plays a struggling outsider, Karin, who comes to live in an isolated community on a volcanic island, to be met only with hostility and suspicion.  It's a very bleak film, full of discomfort and dark implications, and I'm not surprised that it wasn't well received at the time of its release.  Its harshness, however, also makes it unforgettable.

Stars in My Crown - This Jacques Torneau western starts out in typical fashion, with a new preacher played by Joel McCrea coming to a small town, and winning over the locals.  However, the rest of the film gradually turns to more personal matters of faith, and concludes with one of the most tense, exciting finales I've ever seen, where the preacher has to rediscover his faith and go up against the Ku Klux Klan.  The film is an odd sort of hybrid of different genres that stands out for being so singular and so sincere.

The Gunfighter - I like to think of this film as something of a precursor to "High Noon," and "The Shootist," since it shares many of the same themes of personal responsibility, and looks at the heavy costs of being a man with a gun.  Gregory Peck's bitter performance is one of his best, and the black and white cinematography is stunning.  And let's all be grateful to Darryl F. Zanuck, for insisting that the ending be rewritten so that the villain could get the real comeuppance due to him.   

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"The French Dispatch" is Joyous Cinema

Wes Anderson's "The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun" is an anthology film, and it seems odd that this is his first anthology film, as so many of his previous films have felt like anthologies, or catalogues of eccentric human behavior.  "The French Dispatch" is structured to be a visual representation of an issue of a fictional, little-read arts magazine - its stories taken from a French foreign bureau based in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blase.  We get a brief travel report, three features, and an obituary of the paper's editor, Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray).

"The French Dispatch" takes the familiar little aesthetic idiosyncrasies of the usual Wes Anderson feature, and lets them all run amok.  The individual stories being told are fairly simple comedic romps - homages and gentle sendups of French media - but the real fun is the style.  There is so much style here - all the different framing devices and production design to make the film feel like an issue of a print publication, the incredibly dense shot composition stuffed with graphic puns and jokes, the over-the-top characters played by Anderson's usual ensemble of sterling character actors and a few newbies, and of course the script, dripping with deadpan absurdity and a wide assortment of esoteric flourishes.  This may be the most Wes Anderson-y Wes Anderson film ever made, and I adore it to bits.

The amount of sheer indulgence onscreen is hard to overstate, but it's all done in the name of comedy, and it's executed with so much energy and verve and fun, that I couldn't resist.  Let's take "Revisions to a Manifesto," the segment where a reporter, Lucinda Krementz (Frances McDormand), becomes involved with the leader of a student revolutionary movement, Zeffirelli (Timothee Chalamet), helping him with his manifesto and his relationship with a fellow revolutionary, Juliette (Lyna Khoudri).  The whole thing is an homage to the French New Wave, especially the films about Leftist activism like Godard's "La Chinoise."  However, you don't need to know a thing about the French to follow along with the breathlessly told story, or to guffaw at Chalamet's ridiculous hair, or to enjoy the absurdity of the revolution being played out through a literal game of chess between the students and the stern authorities.        

If there's a running theme in this movie, it's about the loneliness and struggle of artists and writers.  The other two features are "The Concrete Masterpiece," about an imprisoned artist, Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro), his muse Simone (Lea Seydoux), and an art dealer, Cadazio (Adrien Brody), and "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner," about a food journalist, Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright) who joins the Commissaire (Mathieu Amalric) for a meal prepared by the famous chef Nescaffier (Stephen Park), only to be caught up in a kidnapping.  Then there's the obituary, which serves as a fond farewell to print journalism.  Several of the characters, like Roebuck Wright, are caricatures of real people, and there is a long list of beloved writers and journalists who are listed in a dedication at the end of the film.

Anderson's filmmaking here is more visually dense and fast-paced than ever.  There's really little difference between his live-action and animated films now, with the complexity of his camera work, incredibly detailed mise-en-scene, and the fast pace of his editing.  Notably, there's a chase sequence in the third story that is done in traditional animation, I assume because it would have cost too much in live-action.  Then there's this fantastic shot that tracks Roebuck Wright through a meticulously constructed police station, through multiple rooms and detailed tableaux.  It feels like watching a Roy Andresson or Peter Greenaway film, except constructed for the sake of silliness and amusement instead of grandeur.  

"The French Dispatch" will likely be considered too lacking in substance for some viewers.  It never lets us get to know any of the characters well enough to tug on the heartstrings the way that something like "The Grand Budapest Hotel" does, even though most of its individual stories end sadly or wistfully.  However, this is such a fabulously whimsical, joyously convoluted piece of filmmaking that has so much fun playing with the cinematic form and celebrating all of its myriad influences.  "The French Dispatch" is absolutely brilliant at being what it set out to be, and it's a joy to see it.

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