"Flow" and "Memoir of a Snail"

I'm usually pretty supportive of foreign and indie animated features, but the two that have gotten the most attention this awards season are just not my thing at all.  I debated with myself if it was worth writing these reviews, since smaller films like this face such an uphill battle getting audience attention, and putting forth any negativity feels kinda mean spirited.  However, just because I didn't like them doesn't mean that I can't write about them in a way that would highlight why other viewers might like them and want to seek them out.  Plenty of viewers have clearly enjoyed "Flow" and "Memoir of a Snail."  Maybe you will too.

First, let's talk about "Flow," which is a Latvian CGI film from Gints Zilbalodis and Dream Well Studio.  It stars a collection of animals, has no spoken dialogue, and seems to take place in a fantastical world that human beings have abandoned.  Our main POV character is a black cat who is caught in an unexpected flood, and must join several other animals - a dog, a capybara, a secretary bird, a lemur, and a whale - making a journey to a mysterious city.  The visuals are the main event here, creating an extremely immersive experience as we watch the cat travel through different environments, get swept away by the flood, and struggle to cooperate with the other animals to survive.  The animals behave like real animals for the most part, and are only minimally anthropomorphized.    

The CGI animation of the natural environments is lovely, and the critters are pretty cute.  Our hero cat looks almost exactly like the ones that often pop up in Studio Ghibli pictures, like Jiji from "Kiki's Delivery Service." The animators do a great job of keeping us invested in their journey, watching them work through one problem and obstacle after another.  If "Flow" had been created as a twenty minute short, I would have thought much better of it.  However, it's an 85 minute movie, and the premise just can't sustain the runtime.  Despite some standout sequences, I couldn't stop thinking of "Flow" as awfully reminiscent of a tech demo for a video game, designed to show off the impact of the gaming experience, and how cool the effects animation is.  I can understand the choice to use a non-traditional narrative, but as a result a lot of the movie feels very disconnected and arbitrary.  The character animation isn't expressive enough to suggest much actual intention in the animals' behavior, much less any motives, leaving their actions a mystery.  You don't see many animated films committed to so much realism, which is commendable, but it also negatively impacts the storytelling.  "Flow" left me intrigued, but unmoved, looking for a story to go with the lovely images.  

Now, on to "Memoir of a Snail," which is the latest film from Australian animator Adam Elliot, who made "Harvey Krumpet" and "Mary and Max."  Like his previous work, "Memoir of a Snail" is a biography of an oddball.  Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) is a snail enthusiast who endures a difficult childhood with her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) under the care of their disabled drunkard father Percy (Dominique Pinon).  Things become worse when Percy dies, and Grace and Gilbert are split up.  Grace ends up with nice, but mostly absent foster parents, and finds a friend in an elderly woman named Pinky (Jacki Weaver).  Gilbert ends up with a family of terrible religious fundamentalists, and is only able to communicate with Grace through occasional letters. 

I've enjoyed all of Adam Elliot's films and shorts, but I've never really liked them much as animated media.  The stories are certainly compelling, full of miserable personal histories, dark humor, and the celebration of imperfection and eccentricity.  Grace survives so much tragedy, you have to root for her, though the soap opera twists get to be a bit much by the end.  However, my biggest problem is with the visuals.  Adam Elliot's style is instantly recognizable.  His stop-motion animation characters are all ugly-cute caricatures of average people, often with lumpy bodies and huge bug-eyes, and rendered in drab colors.  The production design is full of subversive little details and nostalgic kitsch.  The animation itself, however, is crude stuff - characters rely mostly on voiceover instead of talking, and have a tendency to sit around, staring blankly out at the audience.  

Other animators with minimalist styles like Don Hertzfeld find ways to use the limitations to their advantage, and still come up with creative, memorable imagery.  "Memoir of a Snail" does manage a few good visual gags, but only seems to be animated when it absolutely has to be, which is a mark against it. I enjoyed the film, and do recommend it to discerning grown ups, but there are so many good animated films from 2024 that this places pretty far down in the list.    

          

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2015-2016

Below, find my top ten episodes for the 2015-2016 television season, in no particular order.  And spoilers ahead. 

Documentary Now! "Sandy Passage" - The very first episode of "Documentary Now!" is an irresistible spoof of the beloved cult documentary "Grey Gardens," with Bill Hader and Fred Armisen in drag.  I was initially not a fan of the ending, which struck me as tasteless, but it grew on me over time.  The subjects of the real documentary were portrayed as pitiable grotesques, and it seems only right that the fictional versions should enact their spiritual revenge on the filmmakers.  

Mr. Robot, "eps1.0 hellofriend.mov" - The pilot of "Mr. Robot" had enough intriguing elements to get me through two very rough seasons before I had to take a break.  I think Elliot is still Rami Malek's best role, a disassociating, alienated, cyberpunk renegade with serious mental health issues.  His rambling internal monologues reveal his paranoia, but also hit upon some uncomfortable truths of the first online generation.  And they set the tone for a show that still feels very of the now.   

Fargo, "Loplop" - This is not my favorite season of "Fargo," but this is my favorite episode.  Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Zahn McCarnon, and Jeffrey Donovan are all at their best negotiating a tricky, absurd hostage situation where the villainous Dodd Gerhardt meets his match in an actualized Peggy Blumquist.  The episode is a totally unpredictable high-wire act of nervous tension, hilarious role-reversals, sudden violence, and well-earned comeuppance for all parties involved.    

The Americans, "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" - Every plan and mission in this episode goes right, but at the same time everything is going wrong, with the Jennings family hitting their emotional limits and threatening to fall apart.  Juggling so many relationships and lies and obligations comes to a head at last, the tensions spill over into a full blown fight between Philp and Elizabeth that was a long time coming.  Goodbye Martha.  

The Leftovers, "International Assassin" - Dream episodes are tricky things, but "The Leftovers" has always been a show that deals in symbols and existential themes particularly well.  Justin Theroux's Kevin might be dead, but in this episode he's currently an assassin tasked with killing an old foe - except that foe in this world is a little girl.  Part vision quest, part "Dante's Inferno," part wrapping up unfinished business, and a whole lot of emotional catharsis, say goodbye to Patti for good this time.  

Better Call Saul, "Nailed" and "Klick" - I couldn't pick between them.  These two episodes from the show's second season should be watched together anyway, as Jimmy and Chuck's relationship hits a particularly bad patch when Jimmy sabotages Chuck's work.  And Chuck will not take the loss.  It's jawdropping to see how far Chuck is willing to go to prove he's right, and Michael McKean performance is a tour de force.  And the fact that Chuck actually is right makes it all the more painful.

Saturday Night Live, "Ryan Gosling/Leon Bridges" -  Ryan Gosling had never hosted SNL before, and of course not everything in the episode works, but two of the sketches turned out to be all-timers.  One is "Santa Baby," where Gosling and Vanessa Bayer believe in Santa way too hard.  The other is the very first "Close Encounter" sketch, where Kate McKinnon plays an abductee, makes everyone else in the room break, and cements herself as one of the SNL greats of this era.  

Game of Thrones, "Battle of the Bastards" - Arguably the best battle episode that "Game of Thrones" ever produced, both because of the excellent depiction of the warfare, and because of the immense satisfaction of finally seeing Ramsay Bolton go down.  The intensity of the hand-to-hand combat was unusual, setting the episode apart from the show's previous big action-heavy installments.  And I love that Sansa got to be the one to really stick it to Ramsay in the end. 

The Chris Gethard Show, "One Man's Trash" - Quite possibly the greatest unscripted episode of television of all time.  Chris Gethard and his crew simply want the audience to guess what's in a dumpster before the episode ends.  The twists and the turns and the switching of sides and the ratcheting tension make this very silly comedy show into a total nail-biter by the end.  Special kudos to the guest stars, Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas, who help to spur on the madness.  

The X-Files, "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster" - Finally, the best part of "The X-files" revival was definitely Darin Morgan getting to write and direct two more episodes.  In this monster-of-the-week spoof, the monster is a were-creature who is cursed to turn into a human.  Played by Rhys Darby, this tragic figure is both poignant and hilarious.  As for the episode, it's chock full of Easter Eggs, superfan Kumail Nanjiani gets a role, and Mulder gets his mojo back.  

Honorable Mention: "The Jinx" - While I'm on the side of those who question the tactics of the people who put this documentary together, that final admission at the end of the very last episode was undeniably a bombshell - one of the greatest gets I've ever seen in this kind of investigative piece.  

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"The Seed of the Sacred Fig" Stands Witness

This is a hard movie to watch, and as a result, a hard movie to write about.  "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" is an Iranian film, written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, who has run afoul of Iran's censorship laws multiple times, and had to flee the country to escape a lengthy prison sentence when this film was chosen for the 2024 Cannes film festival.  It takes place roughly in 2022, during the demonstrations and protests that came in the wake of the murder of Mahsa Amini.

A devout, honest man named Iman (Missagh Zareh) is promoted to be a judge in Iran's Revolutionary Court, which oversees major crimes including threats to the power of the state.  This means Iman enjoys better living conditions, but also tighter restrictions on his family, and he is issued a gun for protection.  His wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) does her best to keep their daughters in line - Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) who is attending college, and teenage Sana (Setareh Maleki) who lives at home.  Despite their mother's efforts, the daughters both support the protests and are affected by the social unrest.  Iman, faced with going against his principles as the protests escalate, becomes stressed and unstable.  And then the gun goes missing.

The family becomes Iran in miniature - a paranoid authoritarian father, an oppressive mother trying to placate him, an older daughter who speaks out against the injustice she sees, and a younger daughter who is surrounded by too much violence not to be affected.  Before the gun disappears or the social unrest erupts in Tehran, the tensions in the household are already high due to Iman's promotion.  Najmeh seems to be endlessly criticizing her daughters, and pressures them to stop associating with a friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) from a more permissive family. It's Najmeh who is the crux of the film, who starts experiencing doubts when the situation worsens.  She has to face the fact that she can do everything right and still be in danger.     

Mohammad Rasoulof is not a director I'm familiar with, but he's taking his cues from fellow Iranian filmmakers like Jafar Panahi, who are fiercely critical of the current regime, and not afraid of tackling major social issues head-on.  The making of this film was reportedly an ordeal - Rasoulof filmed it in secret while under a filmmaking ban, and was convicted on propaganda charges during its production.  He uses actual footage from the protests interspersed throughout "The Seed of the Sacred Fig," the aspect ratio changing so it looks like we're watching events unfold on phones along with the girls.  These images are also banned in Iran, of course.  They give the film an incredible immediacy and heighten the sense of danger and disruption.  

The strongest parts of the film are the first two thirds, where we watch the family react to multiple crises and reach their breaking points.  Najmeh starts out doing her best to play peacemaker, finding justifications for everyone's behavior, and ignoring what she can't fix. I find it fascinating the way that Rasoulof gets to the heart of the conflict, which is not about religion or moral values, but about living in a society built on fear and absolute control.  There's a bleak sequence where Najmeh and her daughters are questioned by a family friend who is also a government interrogator.  From the fear tactics and doublespeak, it's clear that mindless obedience is more important than actually finding out the truth.  Iman soon becomes so warped by his work as part of the unjust legal system that he views all dissent as rebellion.    

What's so brilliant about the storytelling is that we're seeing all of this largely in the terms of a present-day domestic drama, contained within a single, instantly familiar family unit.  The gradual breakdown of trust between Iman and his wife and daughters over the film's long running time is intense and upsetting.  The last third of the film turns very melodramatic, and moves the action out of the city, which I thought was a misstep - we're suddenly in a different kind of story where the threats shift from psychological to physical.  However, I understand why it was necessary thematically, because the film's critiques go beyond the current government.  Putting the family's conflict against the backdrop of an abandoned village is a reminder that the current instability in Iran is part of a much longer and more complex history. 

I doubt "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" will find much of an audience beyond the usual arthouse crowd, which is a shame.  This is very watchable and accessible for an Iranian film, and very relevant to political unrest happening all over the globe right now.  We don't get a lot of cinema this vital and this urgent, and it's absolutely remarkable that it was made at all.    

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"Zero Day" and "The Residence"

Quick thoughts on two Netflix limited series today.  Minor spoilers ahead.

"Zero Day" is a show that I had been anticipating for a while.  It features an unusually high profile cast, including Robert DeNiro as ex-president George Mullen, Joan Allen as his wife, Lizzy Caplan as his estranged daughter, and Jesse Plemmons as his personal aide.  Angela Bassett plays the sitting president.  Every episode is directed by Leslie Linka Glatter.  The showrunner is Eric Newman, best known for "Narcos."  In short, "Zero Day" has a pedigree that few other series could match.  And somehow, it's borderline unwatchable.

What "Zero Day" wants to be is a political thriller about the aftermath of a fictional cyberattack on the United States, which destabilizes the country.  Mullen is appointed to be the chairman of a special commission to find the perpetrators, and resorts to some very questionable means to do this.  As you'd expect, there's a lot of sensationalism, a lot of improbable political developments, and a lot of chances for Robert DeNiro to give impassioned speeches.  The trouble is that "Zero Day" had the misfortune to have been delayed by the recent strikes, and was released in early 2025.  "Zero Day" is patterned more or less on the US response to 9/11.  Thus, it is operating in a political reality that bears absolutely no resemblance to the present day.  The secret conspiracies look absolutely ridiculous when the people currently in office are doing much worse out in the open without real consequences.  The cyberattack and resulting transportation and telecommunications failures aren't examined in any real depth, despite featuring so heavily in the marketing.  Instead, they're just the impetus for generic civil unrest that never seems as threatening as it's made out to be.    

I think what really sinks the show is that we see everything play out mostly from Mullen's very limited POV, and somehow everything important ties back to him personally.  It's his daughter who happens to be the Representative tasked with monitoring the special commission's activities.  He has personal relationships with nearly every important figure involved in the story.  It feels like the creators don't trust the audience to be engaged by the political drama without piling so much personal drama on top of it.  There are some attempts to reflect the current political landscape, such as including influential tech moguls and a loudmouth conspiracy theorist as thorns in Mullen's side, but it just makes it all the more obvious how tone-deaf and out of date "Zero Day" is.  The answers are too easy and the problems are too quickly resolved, the result of a small group of bad actors who can be handily dispatched after Mullen makes a few tough decisions.  I don't mind DeNiro getting to flex a bit, and I enjoyed seeing everybody from Dan Stevens to Connie Britton popping up in supporting roles, but too much of "Zero Day" is indulgent political fantasy with no depth to speak of.  

And now, on to something completely different.  Shondaland's latest project is "The Residence," an eight episode murder mystery comedy that takes place in the White House.  Created by Paul William Davies, "The Residence" follows the efforts of consulting detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) as she tries to solve the murder of the White House's Head Usher, A.B. Wynter (Giancalo Esposito), during a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Australia (Julian McMahon).  There is a very long list of suspects, including an executive pastry chef played by Bronson Pinchot, Ken Marino as a scummy presidential advisor, Jason Lee as the president's even scummier brother, and Kylie Minogue, appearing as herself.  However, Cordelia Cupp doesn't believe in suspects.  She believes in keen observation, scrupulous journaling, and birding.  And she does all of these things constantly as she tries to piece together what happened to A.B.

"The Residence" is the most flat-out fun I've had with a murder mystery series in some time.  It's extremely well written and well edited, juggling lots of different characters and incidents and clues.  Each episode introduces more suspects - the engineer (Mel Rodriguez), the social secretary (Molly Griggs), the party crasher (Timothy Hornor), the ambitious underling (Susan Kelechi Watson), and the president's mother-in-law (Jane Curtin), just to name a few -  and shows us events from many different POVs.  It's immensely satisfying when everything pieces together in the end.  The show is very self-aware, with Detective Cupp and her Watson figure, Agent Park (Randall Park), calling out tropes when they come across them, all the episodes named after other famous mysteries, and a framing device with Al Franken running a Congressional hearing into the murder for more meta commentary.  I really like the way some of the exposition is done, using montages of different interviews and conversations so that many disparate characters appear to be relaying bits of the same story, responding to each other, and adding to each other's testimonies.  Brief clips of particularly pivotal moments come back multiple times over the course of the show, building on each other, and helping the audience to keep track of different theories.  The Wes Anderson-ian humor is also great, with sight gags and silly callbacks galore.       

Despite taking place in the White House, "The Residence" is apolitical, and a nice break from reality.  Well, the President (Paul Fitzgerald) has a First Gentleman (Barrett Foa) instead of a First Lady, and Senator Bix (Eliza Coupe) bears a resemblance to a certain Republican Congresswoman, but the specifics never match up.  Instead, the show is very concerned with the inner workings of the White House as its own institution.  A nonfiction book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, by Kate Anderson Brower, is credited as the main inspiration for the show, and a significant amount of time is spent spotlighting all the different employees and departments that keep the place running, from the Head Usher to the butlers, gardeners, housekeepers, kitchen staff, and security personnel.  In the course of trying to figure out whodunnit, we learn all the ins and outs of the fictional household, and it's fascinating stuff.  One of the show's best visuals is when it shows us dollhouse-like views of the White House, to highlight the different rooms in relation to each other.    

I want to give special kudos to Uzo Aduba, who puts her own stamp on the eccentric detective figure.  Cordelia Cupp is odd, stubborn, and brilliant, as many fictional detectives are, but also wonderfully patient, accepting, and self-aware of her own flaws.  It's a lot of fun to watch her work, and I hope to see her again in another mystery someday.     

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The Worst 2024 Movies I Bothered to Watch

This was a lot of fun to write last year, so I think it's going to be a regular feature.  All the usual caveats apply.  I'm not a professional critic and do my best to avoid seeing the movies that usually end up on "Worst of" lists, so I have not seen the real bottom-of-the-barrel dreck.  The list is in no way comprehensive, and mainly just a way for me to let off some steam as I'm working through the last few titles from last year.  It's a few months until I can finalize my "Best of" list for movies, but I'm pretty much done seeing all the mainstream releases I care about.   Minor spoilers ahead. 

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim - This movie was doomed the second the trailer was released.  I don't think that a new animated "Lord of the Rings" movie is a bad idea - the Bakshi version is a cult classic - but the anime style was the wrong way to go here.  I've read up on what was going on with the production, and all the great talent and all the technical wizardry involved, but the end result just looks disappointingly bland and generic.  It may not have been a film that was created just to keep the rights to the franchise with New Line, but it sure feels like one.    

Mother, Couch - Sometimes you see a terrible film from a first time director, that somehow has an A-list cast and resources that other directors would kill for, and you have to applaud everybody for taking a big risk that in no way paid off.   "Mother, Couch," was directed by a Swedish guy named Niclas Larsson, who made some award-winning short films and commercials.  From interviews, he seems to think he's made a horror film.  I think he's actually aiming for an absurdist existential comedy, but wandered off course.  There are some signs of talent, but Larsson's not ready for long form yet.

The Crow - Easily my biggest disappointment of the year, because I really loved the original "Crow" movie starring Brandon Lee, and I often like Bill Sarsgaard as a leading man.  This remake, directed by Rupert Sanders, occasionally has some good-looking visuals, but it's clear that Sanders still doesn't know how to do action, the writer doesn't understand the material, and the performers are all left adrift.  After decades of different versions in development limbo with so many actors and directors attached at various points in time, I can't believe this is what actually got made.

Cold Copy - A thriller about a young journalist who uncovers her mentor's unethical tactics isn't a bad premise.  It's just that everything about the portrayal of journalism in this film is decades out of date, and the unethical tactics are tame compared to what we know actually goes on in the industry.   Bel Powley and Tracee Ellis Ross are doing the best that they can, but they don't have much to work with.  "Cold Copy" is the brainchild of another European first-time director, Roxine Helberg, who made a lot of commercials.  I think it's better than "Mother, Couch," but not by very much.    

Bagman - Colm McCarthy is a very solid British director, whose last horror film was the excellent "The Girl With All the Gifts."  So what happened here?  The script is nonsense.  There's no atmosphere to speak of.  The bagman monster is kind of interesting at first, until you realize that it isn't actually going to do anything scary. Like the recent "Wolf Man," the parental anxiety themes are laid out well enough, but all the subsequent chills and thrills fall totally flat.  Also, was there a coherent ending to this film that was left on the cutting room floor somewhere?   

Reunion - I suspect the plan was to stick a bunch of talented actors and comedians in a by-the-numbers murder mystery together, and hope something watchable would result.  Well, it didn't. Lil Rel Howery, Billy Magnussen, Jillian Bell, and Jamie Chung all spend 94 minutes bumming around somebody's house, going through the motions as the plot slowly works itself out around them with zero thrills, laughs, or surprises.  The writers are the guys behind the "Edge of Sleep" series with Markiplier, so you can draw your own conclusions.   

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My Favorite Charles Laughton Film

Beloved stage and screen actor Charles Laughton only directed a single film, which was received so badly upon its release that he never made another.  However, it enjoyed a great critical reappraisal over the years, and "The Night of the Hunter" is now widely considered one of the best American films ever made.  It's a Southern Gothic chiller brought to life through German Expressionism, featuring one of Robert Mitchum's most iconic performances.  Its distinctive visuals are an homage to silent films - but unfortunately "The Night of the Hunter" was made in the 1950s, an era where nobody wanted anything to do with silent films.  

The story unfolds like a fairy tale, told largely from the perspective of two children who hold a dangerous secret.  The setting is a small town in West Virginia during the Great Depression.  The wolf at their door is the evil, murderous preacher Harry Powell, best remembered for the tattoos of "Love" and "Hate" across his knuckles.  Mitchum makes Powell calculating and intimidating and very, very charismatic.  His seduction tactics are rough and unpolished, but the traumatized and deeply religious widow played by Shelly Winters doesn't stand a chance.  All too soon they're married, and the evil preacher is now the evil stepfather as well.  The townsfolk fall for his oratory, and soon the children have no one left to protect them.  There was a lot of concern around Powell being perceived as too much of an anti-Christian presence onscreen, and at least one other major star turned down the role for being too villainous.  Mitchum, however, needed no convincing, and Harry Powell may still be the character he's best remembered for.       

There's a starkness and a simplicity to the film that is absolutely riveting.  Many of the suspense sequences have little to no dialogue, or are driven by Walter Schumann's score.  The child's eye view of the world and heavy use of religious and natural symbolism set the scene for a battle between good and evil in the most elemental terms.  As Powell puts it, it's the little story of right-hand/left-hand.  Laughton uses multiple silent film techniques and fills the screen with older cinematic devices and macabre Expressionistic imagery that had largely gone out of style in the sound era.   The black and white cinematography relays the story in light and shadows, and in some key scenes the characters are only visible as silhouettes.   So much of the storytelling is done through the shot compositions and set design, particularly the night sequences that can make the most idyllic settings seem eerie and threatening.  Huge portions of the screen are allowed to be totally dark, creating the opportunity for images with these dramatic, gorgeous contrasts.

One of the most famous scenes involves the reveal of a corpse seated in a car at the bottom of a flowing river, a surreal underwater shot created entirely in a studio by Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez.  Other shots feature exaggerated storybook images, achieved with experimental editing tricks and clever stagecraft.  At one point the silhouettes of a horse and rider arrive on an impossible horizon, clearly artificial and yet incredibly  unnerving.  Children's faces appear in the stars, animals watch over the escape on the river, and Harry Powell casts a looming shadow that dwarfs everything in its path.  Children's songs and games are a recurring motif, and a framing device shows an old woman telling a group of children a warning fable about the "wolf in sheep's clothing." 

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That old woman is Rachel, the only grown-up who sees Harry Powell for exactly what he does, and joins in the fight against him in the last act.  She's played by silent film veteran Lilian Gish, toting a rifle as she tells her foundlings Bible stories.  She's symbolic of a true Christian winning out over a vile pretender, of good triumphing over evil.  Faith is restored, the night ends, and everything is brought out into the daylight.  However, the legacy of Harry Powell has persisted through both horror and non-horror cinema, and Charles Laughton is now better known in some circles as a great director than a great actor.  

What I've Seen - Charles Laughton

Night of the Hunter (1955)

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"Squid Game" is Back

Minor spoilers ahead

Did we need another season of "Squid Game"?  Obviously not, but the new one is doing everything right.  Also, there were a few loose ends left from the first season that it's nice to see getting tied up, and I'm not going to begrudge creator Hwang Dong-hyuk for pursuing a pay bump.  If you liked the first season of "Squid Game," you'll probably like the second.  However, be warned that the seven episodes that Netflix released in December are only the first half of a longer season that was split in half for various reasons, and this batch ends on a cliffhanger.  

So, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is still searching for the people behind the mysterious games where hundreds of people battle to the death for the chance at a cash prize.  I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that he's not quite successful, accidentally putting himself back into the games while a team of his employees are trying to find him and the secret island where the games are held by the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun).  There's a rule change this year, and contestants are allowed to vote for the games to end by simple majority after every round, and keep whatever money has been accumulated.  Gi-hun spends a considerable amount of time trying to convince the other players to vote to quit.

The players this year are an interesting bunch.  Gi-hun quickly teams up with an old friend, Park Jung-bae (Lee Seo-hwan), a former Marine Dae-ho (Kang Ha-neul), and a transwoman Cho Hyun-ju (Park Sung-hoon).  Others include a mother-son duo, a pregnant girl and her ex, a crypto Youtuber, and a rapper named Thanos (Choi Seung-hyun).  In an interesting wrinkle, we also follow one of the guards, 011 (Park Gyu-young), whose motives are yet unclear.  There are a few new games this year, but with the shock value of all the deaths significantly reduced, the show spends more time on the psychology of the players between the games.  It quickly becomes clear that even with the promise of receiving some money for their efforts, and even with Gi-hun explaining what will happen to them, many of the players are incentivized to keep playing.  Some of this is because of the characters' personalities, but others are influenced by group dynamics, peer pressure, and the choices of others.    

It's hard to judge this season because it's clearly unfinished, with several of the subplots progressing pretty slowly.  The creators have made a promising start, but it's hard to say how well they're going to hit some of their intended targets.  There's a welcome refocusing of the satire and social commentary to look at the mechanisms for why people act against their own best interests, but none of this has paid off yet narratively.  The show is also moving at a slower pace this season, and most of the sympathetic characters are still alive, so it's nowhere near hitting the melodramatic peaks of the first season.  

However, I feel like this season of "Squid Game" is in many ways better than the first.  We have several different characters working at cross purposes with a variety of different agendas.  The formula set up by the first season is subverted and interrogated in various ways.  There's not as much exploration about what goes on behind the scenes of the games as I would like, but the new information we do get is intriguing.  For instance, most of the first episode of this season is spent with The Recruiter (Gong Yoo), who turns out to have a fascinating mindset.  Also, those cringey foreign VIPs in the animal masks do not make an appearance this year. 

Where the show has lost a step is with the games themselves.  So far no clever strategies or techniques have been employed during the gameplay.  No sudden twists or sacrifices have occurred.  None of the kills have been especially creative.  Gi-hun isn't there to win the game but to stop it and save as many people as possible, so the stakes are very different.   I'm not surprised that many of the gore junkies have gotten impatient, even with all the carnage in the format-breaking finale.

I, however, am not watching this show for the gore, and I'm looking forward to season three.  

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