The Karate Midlife Crisis

We’ve had cozy mysteries, that’s a tried and true genre.  We’ve even had cozy horror now, in a way, with Little Evil.  And now I’d like to share with you a 2020 indie film on Netflix that may well be a truly cozy martial arts movie.  So let’s get into writer-director Quoc Bao Tran’s feature film debut, The Paper Tigers.

We open on an older man stumbling into an alley as a mysterious assailant fights him.  Poor old guy doesn’t stand a chance; he never makes it out of that alleyway.  It’s at this point we flashback to when that old guy was younger.  He was Master Cheung, a Sifu (also called Shifu), a teacher of Chinese gung fu (also known as kung fu, depending on what Romanization of the word you use), and he has only ever taken on three students.  Jim, Hing, and the best student, Danny, aka Danny Eight Hands because he was so good, it seemed like he had eight hands.  Together they called themselves the Three Tigers and they fought to defend their clan’s honor against other schools.  Honor was a big part of their training, but being kids growing into teenagers who have never lost a fight, it’s hard not to let arrogance creep in.  Over the years, though, a rift has driven them apart and the realities of middle age have set in.

Danny, played by Alain Uy (Helstrom), is a divorced dad, running late to pick up his kid.  And when he does have him, he’s so busy that he has to cancel their fun day together to go get work done.  On the way home, though, he’s jumped in front of his house—not to worry, it’s more of a vibe check than anything else.  It’s his old friend Hing, played by Ron Yuan (Mulan, The Accountant), in town because of their Sifu’s death.  He’s the one who has to break the news to Danny.  At the funeral, still without Jim, they run into Danny’s old nemesis Carter, played by Matthew Page (Enter the Dojo, Odd Thomas), who is in charge of a different school now.  There’s a lot of banter here between the Tigers and Carter, some of it quite juvenile, with a lot of cultural appropriation on the part of Carter.  It’s played for laughs and it mostly works, but there’s a deeper story behind that which we’ll touch on later.  But it’s Carter who drops the penny—the police believe that Sifu Cheung died of a heart attack, but Carter doesn’t buy it.  He believes, as the audience knows, that the Sifu was murdered.  This sets the three distant disciples on a path to reunite and find Sifu Cheung’s murderer.

Danny is skeptical, but Hing starts to go full Poirot, trying to connect the dots.  But 25 years changes a lot of things.  Hing walks with a limp now, permanently in knee brace, after getting injured on the job.  Danny’s trying to prove he can do 50/50 custody and he has become a total pacifist now; after years of proving himself in fight after fight, he hasn’t thrown a punch or made a fist in two and a half decades.  He tells his son never to fight, not even when being bullied.  The better man walks away, he tells him.  The better man finds a solution that isn’t fighting.  Danny Eight Hands now works in insurance and drives a minivan.  It’s not even one of the fancy new ones with all the gadgets I secretly enjoy getting as an Uber (I admit, I’m still a child, and remotely operated sliding doors makes me feel like I’m on the Enterprise) or even a Honda Odyssey, it’s an aging Toyota Sienna.  The only one of them who has kept up with martial arts in any form is Jim, played by Mykel Shannon Jenkins (The Gods, Undisputed 3), who now has integrated other disciplines, such as Brazilian jujitsu, into his life.  Gung fu is no longer a big part of it.

Three men, separated by 25 years and a rift that split them apart seemingly irrevocably, are brought back together to find justice for the man who taught them everything they knew.  When they were old enough, Sifu Cheung had them take an oath to honor their Sifu, to be loyal to their brothers, and to defend the weak.  Because that was always the point of any sort of violence to Sifu Cheung.  Gung fu without honor is just fighting, he taught them; a lesson they didn’t always take to heart as much as they should have.  But now as they find themselves reunited because of that man’s death, the idea of honor and defending the weak comes to the forefront of their minds.

The Paper Tigers has a lot going for it.  I mentioned that some of the banter could be juvenile at times, especially between Carter and Hing, with Carter body shaming Hing and Hing making allusions to the side effects of the steroids he is certain Carter took.  But where the comedy in this movie really works is the physicality.  I have rarely seen a film that marries excellent fight choreography with great physical comedy in the way that The Paper Tigers does.  Seeing these middle aged men try to go toe to toe with younger gung fu practitioners is full of funny moments injected into the very convincing fight scenes.  It adds a layer of levity to the situation that is crucial to making this a cozy film.  While it deals with serious subjects, the film always keeps just enough humor for things not to get too heavy.  Well, most of the time.  There were definitely moments that left me feeling very emotional, especially as the film draws to a close and they have to face the totality of their lives.  They reminisce and trade regrets, each of them feeling still the weight of decisions they made when they were teenagers and now with the loss of Sifu Cheung, some doors are simply closed to them for reconciliation.  Memory lane is a bittersweet road to drive down when you’re there because of someone who is no longer around.  You may not have heard of many of these actors (I know I haven’t, despite the fact that I have seen some of them in other projects, including the awful live action Mulan), but they are able to convey so much emotion through just their facial expressions alone that you’d expect them all to be stars.  Alain Uy especially does a great job as Danny, the clear star character of the film and Sifu Cheung’s senior student.

It’s hard sometimes to discuss films like this that are supposed to exist in the real world (there are some fantastical elements here, though, with ancient Chinese medicine and mythical moves; fairly standard martial arts movie tropes, but pulled off lovingly and with care) and yet advocate violence at times.  A lot of the fighting in The Paper Tigers happens in a world of rules; when you fight, you fight with honor, and at the end of the fight, you walk away respecting the other party.  Kind of like the secret assassin underworld of John Wick, people don’t break the rules without consequence.  And the movie really stresses the need for honor when fighting and the need to stick up for those who are unable to defend themselves.  Might isn’t right without a guiding hand; otherwise it’s just bullying.  And The Paper Tigers is very clear about that.  We live in a world where the defenseless are more than bullied, with extreme violence being used against them, and there aren’t enough people who are able to stand up to protect them.  These bullies are in positions of power and acting without consequence.  So to see a film like this, a film where three normal guys who have problems and have walked away from a life of discipline and honor find a way to stand back up and do the right thing really got me.  The film has a lot to say about bullying, toxic masculinity, racism, and cultural appropriation and it does it all quite well.  When Danny’s son confronts him about gung fu after defending a friend who was being bullied at school for who he is, Danny is forced to reconcile a life of pacifism with the life he used to lead, where his training was meant to defend the defenseless.  He struggles with what the right thing to do is, both as a father and as a disciple of the slain master.  I know I’m on record as being pretty down on fathers and, frankly, the only way Danny is getting a Father of the Year mug is if he buys one himself from Spencer’s Gifts, but seeing him try to be a better father to his son was truly touching.

As fun as this movie is, there’s proper depth to it, thanks to the excellent characters.  While Danny is the main protagonist, Hing and Jim both have emotional weight and character journeys to go through as well.  It’s them, their experiences, their genuine affection for each other and their Sifu, though strained at the time, that makes this movie more than just a fun action-comedy romp.  It’s not trying to be Rush Hour, which is a fun movie in its own right, because it chooses to do more by telling personal stories that are very real.  Regret is real.  We live with the weight of our choices and once done, our actions can’t be reversed.  We can do our best to make up for them, to atone, but there’s nothing that can actually undo the things you’ve done.  Time may be a flat circle after all, but as we experience it, time only flows one way.  Everything done is done forever.  And these characters have to come to terms with their pasts if they’re going to have a future and make recompense for their choices.  So it’s one part action-comedy, one part character drama and it comes together in a film that is likely to make you laugh and cry in equal, satisfying measure.    

Sometimes the story of a movie’s production is almost as interesting as the movie itself.  When trying to secure funding for the film, Quoc Bao Tran was told by studios that they wanted Bruce Willis to star and a role to be written for Nicolas Cage.  As much as it might have been humorous to watch his nouveau shamanic acting in a film like this, it would have been a completely different movie and lost a lot of authenticity that makes it so special.  Carter insists on being called Sifu now, a request that none of the Tigers will comply with, and he speaks in ancient Chinese proverbs when the Tigers have wait for him to repeat what he said in English.  Carter’s cultural appropriation feels like a response to the pressures from Hollywood studios to whitewash a movie written and directed by an Asian-American who drew upon his experiences as a child growing up loving martial arts.  Tran insisted on a minority cast, with all three leads being Asian or Black.  And that goes so far to make this film not a corny, campy, inauthentic martial arts film where big Hollywood names dominate, but rather a love letter to martial arts films like The Karate Kid (with a very fun cameo from an actor from the film series and Cobra Kai) and Enter the Dragon that addresses real life problems.  Tran turned to Kickstarter and eventually private investors to deliver the film as he wanted it to be.  And not only is that admirable, he pulled it off with great success.

Even though it’s just 1 hour and 48 minutes, The Paper Tigers isn’t exactly breezy, because it does take its time to sit with the characters and slow the action down, but without the scenes where these three men reminisce and try to figure out what it means to be good men the movie just wouldn’t have worked.  One of the most successful things about this PG-13 film is that it’s the kind of film that has a moral and is written in a way to accessible to people of all ages.  It’s not often I get to watch a movie that is truly a family film.  I cover kids’ media quite a bit and I love when they are able to get adults in on the fun as well, but this feels like a movie written for adults, but with kids in mind.  You could gather the family around the television this coming Thanksgiving and watch this one with people of all ages and it will entertain them and more.  The Paper Tigers is exactly the kind of film that I love to feature on this blog because it needs and deserves a bigger audience.  It’s a textbook, Attack the Block level of hidden gem that I absolutely adore bringing to you.  It’s not just a fun film that’s cozy; it has weight, it has meaning, and it’s the kind of movie that makes your life enriched for having watched it.  That’s what art is supposed to do; enrich your lives, not just studio executives.  With a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% audience score, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by opening up Netflix and joining the audience.  I love this film and I think you will too.

The Contrast of Us

Chaos all around you.  Confusion everywhere you look.  Pandemonium at the laundromat.  Bedlam at the bar.  Panic at the disco. All around the world, something is spreading quickly from person to person, causing them to violently seize up and then attack everyone around them.  There is nowhere to run.  Nowhere to hide.  They will find you.  And there’s no way to stop them.  Welcome to Apple TV’s new series Pluribus, by Vince Gilligan.  What starts in a lab and gets out spreads violently across America and the world, causing millions upon millions of death.  And the ones who survive, well, they don’t come back the same.  Only a handful of people are immune.

I know this sounds like the plot to the next tired The Walking Dead spin-off, but it’s not.  While there are a lot of similarities to the common opening gambit of zombie apocalypse films, and the pilot episode will evoke those feelings of sudden, cataclysmic dread and confusion, Gilligan takes his show in a completely different direction.  After Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul showed us the depths of depravity and organized crime in Albuquerque, we’re going all the way back to Albuquerque again (hopefully this isn’t becoming his coastal Maine) with this unique end of the world show.  Pluribus also marks Gilligan’s return to his other roots, science fiction; he wrote 30 episodes and produced 127 of The X-Files.  So this isn’t a wild turn for him, he’s as pedigreed as they come.  He’s also an acclaimed VHS game actor.

I should say that at the time of writing this, only two episodes have aired so far, so this is going to be closer to a Lone Wolf and Stub installment than a full series analysis, I just don’t have a punny name for watching a TV show on my sofa that came out recently.  So I will be avoiding as many spoilers as possible, because if you don’t know the premise already, this show is a wild ride from jump.  For me, all I needed to hear was Rhea Seehorn and Vince Gilligan and I was in; I shut off the trailer midway through and went back to watching old episodes of Taskmaster.  And if Pluribus turns out to be as good as I think it’s going to be based on the promise that it shows in these first two episodes, it will most definitely warrant a follow-up once the season wraps.  Because I was that engrossed by the story we’ve seen so far and I cannot wait to see more.

Now it’s time to meet Carol Sturka, played by Better Call Saul alum Rhea Seehorn, an author in the middle of a reading and book signing at Barnes and Noble (glad to see that these things still exist).  Her audience is absolutely captivated and is almost entirely comprised of middle aged white women.  She writes that kind of romantasy novel that you see in airports and train stations; the ones that leave the author wealthy, but unfulfilled.  At least that’s the case for Carol, as she even refers to her work as mindless crap.  It also appears that because the key demographic of her novels is a particular kind of person, she seems to hide her sexuality; her manager Helen is also her romantic partner (I’ve seen some outlets refer to her as Carol’s wife, but that doesn’t make much sense if she’s hiding that information publicly and not using a pen name).  Seehorn continues to be the most underrated actress working in television today.  She deserved every Emmy for playing Kim Wexler and was completely snubbed.  And I mean every Emmy.  Lead Actress in a Drama Series, Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, Outstanding Reality Competition Program, I don’t care; if it’s an Emmy, she deserved it.  It doesn’t take long for her to show off those incredible acting skills either, with the pilot giving her very strong material to work with and showcase her range as an actress; levying both comedic timing and dramatic skill to portray a very real feeling person in an extraordinary situation.  A situation in which she carries the extreme weight of responsibility, struggles with grief and isolation, and has to figure out how to survive in a world where she is nearly a singular phenomenon.

This is one of the most striking shows of the year.  Vince Gillian’s visual style is plastered all over this show; the shot framing, the angles, the shot composition, and I’m sure as the series continues, I’ll develop a better understanding of the color theory here.  Because it’s Vince Gilligan and there’s always a color theory in his work, but without knowing where the season goes, it’s hard to comment on it.  But it’s something you feel instinctually as you watch the show.  Every color is there for a reason, I’m sure of it.  I’m also picking up on some religious imagery, but I’m not well-versed enough in Catholicism to pick up on all of it (Gilligan was raised Catholic), but the number 12 does come up a few times and I know what that means.  Even the name itself is charged with social commentary.  Pluribus, Latin for “of many”, adorns the back of every piece of American currency, which, in the real world is the endless pursuit of a few and the grudging necessity of most, but in Pluribus, it is suddenly utterly meaningless.  There are also a lot of interesting things being said here already; this show mirrors our world.  Without going into too much detail, I will say that is very much in conversation with the post-pandemic society we have now.  Gilligan touches on ego fragility, echo chambers, digital isolation, and themes of happiness, misery, and generative AI as well.

There are other concepts that I don’t even want to bring up because you should go into Pluribus as fresh as possible.  It’s a great thing, not having expectations for a piece of media and an even better thing when that media keeps surprising you at every turn.  Which is what Pluribus does; every time I think it’s going in one direction, it goes in another.  And not the complete opposite, often it’s an outcome I never even considered.  So refreshing.  And it asks a lot of questions about what our society is now and what it could become.  And more than that, more than anything else that really struck me about Pluribus’s commentary on today’s society, is the biggest question so far.  What are you supposed to do if the world is ending and the few people still remaining in it are fine with that?  Carol so desperately wants to save humanity—she doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know what to do, she doesn’t know anything—but she’s finding that help is hard to find because people are simply unwilling to even entertain that they should be doing anything.  Because who really cares if it’s an apocalypse as long as it’s a comfortable one?

The show is absolutely captivating.  Each episode so far has been about an hour long and it was the first two hour block in recent memory that I didn’t even think about picking up my phone.  I couldn’t look away.  Even through the 12 minute wordless sequence at the beginning of the second episode, I was glued to the screen in a way I haven’t been in a long time.  And as the events unfolded, I found myself being drawn deeper and deeper into the show.  It could well be Apple TV’s next big hit, along the lines of Severance, Slow Horses, Ted Lasso, and Shrinking, (although Apple also gave us Fountain of Youth) and with Vince Gilligan at the helm, I have a pretty high degree of confidence that he will stick the landing.  Now, it’s no secret that I found Breaking Bad to be overrated, but I thought Better Call Saul was one of the most brilliant pieces of television I’ve ever seen, from start to finish.  So many times when someone asks me about a show, I say things like “Oh yeah, those first few seasons were great” or “It had a lot of promise”, but Better Call Saul is one I can wholeheartedly say was fantastic from start to finish.  Even Breaking Bad, which, again, I did not like, had one of the best series wrap-ups out there; it was the kind of series finale JJ Abrams could never even dream of.  So I am pretty hopeful that Pluribus will continue to be as strong as it started.  Pluribus is streaming exclusively on Apple TV, releasing weekly on Fridays.

Chomp and Circumstance

I have a love/hate relationship with franchises.  Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they are middling, and sometimes they make you wonder what it takes to get studios to stop beating a dead horse, or at the very least, treat it with some respect.  Jurassic World Rebirth just hit Peacock, so let’s figure out which kind of franchise film it is.  You would note, though, that previous sequels, both pre-Jurassic World and beyond, have been largely misses, with only The Lost World being the fairly dim, but comparatively bright spot in this laundry list of sequels.

We start 17 years ago at a secret laboratory facility where scientists are working on highly dangerous mutant dinosaur hybrids and everyone is wearing clean suits and there are very strict safety protocols that everyone is adhering to.  Everyone except one guy who is eating a Snickers bar with the mask of his clean suit open.  Rushing to get through the high security door, he is a bit careless with his Snickers wrapper.  But I get it, you’re not you when you’re hungry.  So he drops the wrapper, which under normal circumstances is a bit rude and careless.  But in this highly sensitive facility, it’s, well, it shouldn’t be anything.  However, it most certainly is something—the security doors, for some reason, have a vent in them and for some reason, this is a very, very crucial vent and it’s placed just above the floor, at perfect carelessly discarded trash level.  It sucks the Snickers wrapper, formerly packed with peanuts that satisfy, into the vent which for this very crucial, very at-carelessly-discarded-trash-height design, causes a catastrophic failure for the entire containment system.  But in a lab with literal monsters that have had insane levels of bloodlust baked into their DNA, the security protocols are airtight and closely monitored.  Except they’re not and the system failure goes unnoticed for some time, allowing the mutated dinosaur to get loose.  So now there’s a designer kaiju Xenomorph on the rampage and as you can imagine, this doesn’t bode very well for the people working there.  All for the want of crunchy peanuts, gooey caramel, and chewy nougat draped in velvety chocolate.  But as much as the product placement here is the main focus of the scene, it’s not about the hunger-defeating, delicious, nigh decadent candy bar, it never is.  It’s about the Rancor getting loose and no Luke Skywalker to stop it.  And the Rube Goldberg machine of incompetency masquerading as chaos theory that sets all these things in motion.

Warm up for your favorite beating stick, because we’ve got a dead horse here and it’s apparent from the very first scene.

Fast forward to today, we are introduced to Shady Corporate Guy, who has a name, Martin Krebs, but it’s unimportant because Jurassic World is that kind of franchise now.  He’s played by Rupert Friend (The Death of Stalin, The Phoenician Scheme) who doesn’t have to work very hard to come off as the slimy archetype he’s meant to play, showing utter exasperation at the traffic jam being caused by North America’s oldest known dinosaur slowly dying in the street.  You see, despite the fact in the last movie, the dinosaurs were everywhere and threatening to Planet of the Apes-style take over, in the time between Jurassic World: Dominion and now, it turns out that dinosaurs really suck at living around humans and humans are very bored of dinosaurs, so the ones that haven’t died due to our climate being extremely different from the one their biology is designed for have retreated to the equatorial band, which prompts all the governments in the world to get together, have a few laughs, and ban all travel to the area over safety concerns.  How wonderfully cooperative and realistic of them.  But as it turns out, Krebs works for Big Pharma and he needs Zora Bennett, a former special operative, to go to this forbidden zone to get DNA from the three biggest dinosaurs in existence to cure heart disease.  Zora, played by Scarlet Johansson uncomfortably in the Chris Pratt role, is hesitant to agree, but thankfully, like all problems in this world, Krebs solves it by throwing money at her until she agrees.  She does get a bit nervy when she finds out that she needs to collect the DNA from living dinosaurs while they’re still alive.  Walking Dinosaur Fact Book, also named Dr. Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton, Wicked), explains exactly why they need it and that’s mostly his role in this movie.  There are some good moments of diegetic exposition, where informational videos play contextually in the background and make sense for the scene, but when they can’t do that, Loomis is able to jump in and give the audience everything they need to know without any characters ever needing to earn any knowledge. 

They meet up with Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, True Detective), playing Duncan Kincaid, aka Tragic Backstory Boat Guy, an old friend of (also Tragic Backstory) Chris Pratt ScarJo, and they gather some red shirts and head into the forbidden zone.  It’s then that we get a glimpse—and I say glimpse, but in reality it’s a long scene with a foregone conclusion—of the again, for some reason, Jurassic Park staple, the family going through a troubled time.  This time it’s Reuben Delgado, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer), his two daughters, one very young and the other almost off to college, and the older one’s lazy, annoying boyfriend.  The scene drives hard at how lazy he is and how much Reuben doesn’t like him and it takes forever to get to the point.  As happy as I was to see Garcia-Rulfo getting a prominent role in a major blockbuster franchise, my excitement was tempered by how excruciatingly and unnecessarily long this scene is.  Six or seven years into them arguing about how it’s boyfriend’s turn at the wheel, dinosaurs show up.  Their little SS Minnow puts up a good fight, but eventually they capsize and call for help.  Why it has been decided that every Jurassic Park movie needs to have divorced parents and their kids in it just because Lex and Tim’s parents were going through a divorce I’ll never know, but you have to know going in, if there’s a T-Rex skull in the logo of the movie, there’s going to be family drama in between the sharp teeth.

And then it goes pretty much in this fashion.  Zora and her team face some struggles, the red shirts fulfill their destiny as cannon fodder, Shady Corporate Guy turns out to be shady and corporate, and some dinosaurs do some stuff.  There are plenty of dinosaurs in this one and they’re mostly mutated hyper-predators. They eat some stuff, they show off their incredible stealth abilities, there’s a new Grogu in the form of baby aquilops Dolores, which is great for merchandising.  I’m very excited for their new merchandising opportunities.  Later rather than sooner, the series of fetch quests are more or less completed and the story starts in earnest; just in time for the credits to roll.  Jurassic World: Rebirth isn’t the worst movie in the storied franchise, but it is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with it and a lot of things that are wrong with the movie industry today.

I talk often about not just the length of movies, but also the justification of that length.  Movies don’t feel long because of the runtime; they feel long because the runtime isn’t justified by the story that movie is telling.  I have seen the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy at least half a dozen times from start to finish and have not made a single complaint about the lengths of those films because they are filled with story that makes the runtime worth it.  But the scene with the Delgado family really drives home how little story there is in this movie and how the film just doesn’t respect your time.  There is a long argument between Reuben and the boyfriend and the payoff for that is a callback after they’re shipwrecked when the boyfriend offers to take watch so Reuben can get a little extra rest.  Isn’t that wonderful?  The character whose name I wasn’t able to learn showed the tiniest bit of character growth.   That was worth the boredom from the earlier scene.  The scene where Zora and Kincaid trade their sad stories could have been interesting, but it comes at a time before you care about the characters (not that it ever really comes).  Zora has shown herself to be a cutthroat mercenary whose lines in the sand get blurred very easily by money.  Characters need to do more than have had something sad happen to them before the movie started to make audiences care about the sad stuff that happened before the movie.  At 2 hours and 13 minutes, by today’s blockbuster standards it’s actually not that long, but it’s boring, as even later action sequences start to fall flat.  It is both boring for long stretches of time and overstuffed, but with nothing to show for it.

Another big problem is the characters.  As you may have noticed, I’ve been mostly referring to characters rather cynically by the role they play in the film.  Because that is what these characters have been reduced to; they’re not even stock characters, they’re plot devices and cannon fodder to up the stakes by bloodying up the cast.  But if the characters don’t matter and the ones who die are made very obvious from the moment they grace the screen, it doesn’t actually raise the stakes; it creates predictability.  This is pretty standard fare for older action films and modern ones that aren’t concerned with storytelling.  And you may say that Jurassic World is a modern action film that isn’t much concerned with storytelling and that would be a fair assessment.  So it should be enough to go into the film and just enjoy watching the big lizards chomp down on some cocky guys in tactical gear and have a good time for two hours.  And it would be fine if it were entertaining enough for that to be something that you could really do, which it isn’t, and if Jurassic Park hadn’t already set such high standards for what these films are supposed to be.  Ian Malcolm wasn’t a stock character.  Robert Muldoon wasn’t a stock character.  Neither Nedry nor Arnold were either.  When those characters were in peril or something happened to them, it mattered because you cared (maybe a bit less with Nedry).  Another problem is the monumental level of stupidity these characters exhibit.  Many times after the shipwreck, the Delgado family happily traipses through the jungle talking and making jokes, never letting on that they have any idea that they’re in danger until its saliva is dripping on their shoulders.  And they should be wildly aware of the danger they face, having been attacked twice by dinosaurs just earlier that day. 

There’s putting on a brave face and there’s being so oblivious to the scenario in the film that you appear to be actors on a stage and not characters in a story.  The ability to suspend disbelief is tantamount to a movie like this working and when not even the characters seem to be into what’s going on, it’s hard to get invested in this silly dinosaur kaiju movie.  There’s also an outstanding level of incompetency here that is coming from people who are supposed to be at the top of their game.  As Zora and Tragic Backstory Boat Guy come in at a multimillion dollar booking fee for this job, you’d expect some amount of core competency designed at keeping people alive on this mission.  For example, when taking a boat to a forbidden zone to gather live DNA from a seafaring dinosaur that eclipses the size of an orca (and the Orca) in the form of a mosasaurus, I would ensure that mission critical equipment were stowed with some sort of flotation device.  And yet, when the inevitable shipwrecking occurs, Zora and Walking Dinosaur Fact Book scramble to tie life jackets to equipment so they are able to float.  So when they do find themselves on a deserted beach, they have lost much of that equipment, including any weapons they could use to defend themselves.  I guess $10,000,000 doesn’t buy much anymore these days, such is the plight the shrinking middle class.  Eggs are expensive, gas is expensive, and mercenaries under $25 million just aren’t what they used to be.

The moral dilemmas that are presented in this film are so black and white that anyone on the opposite side of them looks cartoonishly villainous.  You want them to get comeuppance and they do, because among the many things that the dinosaurs are in this movie, they are and have been for several installments in this franchise now, instant karma machines.  When you don’t like someone in one of these movies it’s because they are one dimensionally evil and you get megadoses of poetic justice; it was silly in The Lost World when the baby tyrannosaur gets revenge on Hammond’s nephew and it’s only spiraled out of control since then, with every villain getting nearly instantaneous death by the adjudicators in these films, the dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs started as a moral quandary about cloning and intellectual property and animal rights and then positioned the dinosaurs as antagonists to our heroes just trying to survive.  Now the dinosaurs are both mindless killing machines and deliverers of swift justice.  They get to be everything.

And that brings me to the next big problem in this movie, fidelity.  At any given moment, the dinosaurs are simply whatever the film needs them to be.  Remember the iconic moment in Jurassic Park when the water in the cup ripples from the tyrannosaur’s distant footsteps?  And how that motif was carried through several of the movies?  Well, turns out the older T-Rexes were just heavy footed, because there are several moments in this film where giant, multi-ton lizards sneak up silently on our protagonists like ninjas in the night.  One T-Rex even pulls a Jason Bourne, disappearing impossibly fast as he’s briefly obscured by traffic.  The quetzalcoatlus is the largest flying being to ever exist, described as the size of an F16 by the film itself, but it silently flies past someone multiple times who is none wiser.  I’m not an expert at being hunted by giant predators or fighter jets, but I would like to think that if in a situation where I’m expecting a fighter jet sized predator to fly up to my position and eat me that I would be enough on the lookout to maybe notice the giant creature cutting through the air. 

And the big bad, the D-Rex is simply the Alien Xenomorph mixed with Godzilla and is so big that it can’t ever be shown completely in shot and yet can silently move through a foggy night.  They also have incredible senses of smell except when someone is hiding just around the corner from them or their olfactory sense is being overwhelmed by the powerful and lasting freshness coming from Loomis’s mouth because of the number Altoids he eats (and he chomps down on them like a T-Rex on a mercenary, which is wild to me; do you all bite your mints?).  Although, it makes sense when you think about it.  After all, Altoids are the mints so strong they come in a metal box.  As much as some of the action can be genuinely exciting (the first sequence with the mosasaur especially), a lot of it is hampered by questionable CGI and green screening that made things look oddly out of perspective.  It’s not Legolas on the cave troll bad, but it is noticeable for a movie in 2025.

Like I said this isn’t the worst movie in the franchise; it actually might be one of the best.  Which is a scathing indictment of the Jurassic Park movies.  The worst part about all of this is that movies like this are why studios think they can drip feed us AI slop because it can’t be that much worse than this when Rebirth made $868 million worldwide and only cost a reported $180 million (a little more than half of Netflix’s Electric State).  Why put any effort into these films at all when they’re making this much money off them?  I know Gareth Edwards is capable of making better movies because he has.  In fact he made this movie better when he wrote and directed it himself and did the special effects on his bedroom floor with a laptop in 2010.  The movie is called Monsters and it’s about invading aliens surviving in an equatorial forbidden zone that no one is allowed to go and the man tasked with going in to get his boss’s daughter out of the quarantine zone safely.  Does that seem familiar to the plot of this movie?  The main difference being that Monsters was a $500,000 indie that was actually good and offered character development and emotional payoff.  This is that movie with dinosaurs instead of aliens, a Big Pharma subplot instead characters, and 360 times the budget. 

Jurassic Park is both possibly the best blockbuster film of all time and one of the best horror movies of all time.  Jurassic World doesn’t continue on in that tradition nor does it iterate on it, simply borrows bits and pieces from better movies and shoehorns them in and winks at the audience hoping that being slyly self aware about its lack creativity will excuse the lack of creativity.  It doesn’t.  It makes it feel worse because we’re getting a movie they know is bad and know will make money and we continue feed our dollars into the machine that pumps out subpar film after subpar film.  It struggles to clear the lowest bar of entertainment value and it’s shocking that it’s still better than at least half of the Jurassic Park movies.  I wish I could offer a better alternative to Rebirth other than watching Jurassic Park again, but since Monsters doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, I’m coming up empty here.  If you have Peacock and you still want to watch it, go for it.  I do sincerely hope you enjoy it better than I did.  Or you could watch Cocaine Bear, also on Peacock, which is a movie that is actually, you know, as fun as it is silly and as silly as Jurassic World has become.

The Neon Dreaming

[Content Warning: The following will contain discussions of sexual assault]

As we reach the end of spooky month with the big show tomorrow, I want to end my Halloween coverage with one of my favorite horror movies that is woefully underrated.  A small town girl goes to the big city to make her dreams come true.  It’s the romanticized Hollywood story, one we’ve seen a thousand times before.  But now we know better.  We know what that machine does to people, women in particular, and we know that romanticized times weren’t flawless, we just don’t remember the flaws or exhibit that willful blindness that makes us overlook the problems.  It’s still an easy trap to fall into (like how I think the 80s had the best music and the best TV shows, but that’s just because I watch Miami Vice a lot), but we know better.

Eloise Turner doesn’t.  When we first meet Ellie, played by Thomasin Mckenzie (Jojo Rabbit, The Power of the Dog), she’s listening to 60s music and dancing around in a homemade dress made of what looks like newspapers on the second floor of her grandmother’s house in Cornwall.  She bumps into something, knocking down a photo and causing the record to skip.  As she picks up the photo, a picture of her mother and grandmother, she looks up and sees her mother in mirror.  She asks if it’s good news and her mother just smiles.  It’s at that moment, her grandmother calls up to Ellie that she’s gotten a letter from the London College of Fashion.  She opens it and it’s an acceptance letter to the school; her dream is coming true.  It’s not London in the 60s, which is her dream place and moment in time, but it is London and it is her dream of becoming a fashion designer like her mom.  Close enough, right?  She’s absolutely thrilled and prepares for the train ride from Cornwall to London.

Did I mention that her mom is dead?  Welcome to Last Night in Soho.

The music here really does a lot to sell this naive ingenue thing Ellie has going on and it plays very well into her romanticized views of London.  Ellie very quickly realizes, though, that her idea of London in the 60s and what London is now are most definitely not the same when her cabbie turns out to be a major creep, to the point that she doesn’t want him to let her out in front of her building, so she gets out a couple blocks early and hides in a shop until he drives away.  What’s more, when she does get to her housing, she walks right into a pit of mean girl vipers led by her inconsiderate (to say the least) roommate Jocasta who gets right to that thing mean girls do where they insult someone right to their face, but say it in a way that if they don’t know better, they won’t realize they’re being insulted.  It doesn’t take Ellie too long to catch on, though, and she jumps at the opportunity to move into a bedsit near campus and get away from Jocasta and her gaggle of fiendish fashionistas.  It’s an old room, hardly changed in decades; a harsh contrast from the ultra modern dormitory she was staying in and much more like her grandmother’s house.  She feels at home in the ancient bedsit, bathed in the neon glow of Soho’s signage, and all is well.  Until, of course, she goes to sleep and finds herself in a London night club in the 1960s as she gets a glimpse into the life of Sandie, played by Anya Taylor-Joy (The Gorge, The Witch), an aspiring starlet ready to sing on the big stage and won’t accept anything else.  The glamour is intoxicating for Ellie and the only thing she can think of doing the next morning is going back to sleep so she can get back into Sandie’s world, even turning down invitations in the real world for her to socialize in order to do so (not that I can’t relate to turning down or even cancelling plans so I could stay home and go to sleep).

This first scene with Sandie is one of the most visually arresting things I’ve seen in film in a long time.  In fact, the whole movie is a wondrous to behold visually.  I hated looking down to take notes during this film because I didn’t want to take my eyes off a single frame of the movie.  It is stunning and stylish in a way that most movies just aren’t these days and this initial scene has some of the best direction and editing and choreography I’ve ever seen.  The use of mirrors to show Ellie and Sandie in the same place, the shot composition and the lighting; the movie just grabs your eyes and makes you want to hold them open so you don’t miss a thing.  The most skillful exhibition of this is the scene where Sandie and Jack, the charming but oh-so-sleazy manager of girls, dance with Ellie seamlessly cutting in.  It’s one of the most impressive scenes in a film I can remember watching and it left me with the sense of wide-eyed wonder that Ellie has before she leaves for London.  There are many times while watching this movie that I said out loud to myself “This looks so damn good” and you just don’t get that in movies that often.  And the majority of the film is made using practical effects and great editing, with minimal CGI.  It’s really very impressive and for that alone Last Night in Soho is worth watching.  But there’s so much more

We learn that Sandie is one of the girls who lived in Ellie’s bedsit, apparently ghosts are geolocked.  There’s something called the Stone Tape theory which states that materials, like houses and rocks and other tangible things can house the memories of traumatic events in a form of energy and it seems that the film’s rules for the ghosts are at least informed by that.  You know I’m not much for the paranormal, but I found that to be an interesting touch.  As Sandie’s whirlwind life starts to affect Ellie, she starts feeling Sandie’s influence in her own life.  She starts working on 60s-inspired clothing designs, using Sandie as her model in her drawings, she changes her hair to be closer to Sandie’s, she buys vintage clothes, she becomes more bold.  It’s all going great until she has a creepy encounter with an old man (the late Terence Stamp) who hangs around the pub where she works; it leaves her feeling shaken, but not nearly as shaken as the following nights do.

What started as a ghostly flight of fancy, beautiful dreams of a beautiful dream come true, starts to turn into a nightmare as Ellie quickly discovers that Sandie’s life on stage isn’t nearly as glamorous as it seemed to be at first.  Jack, played by Matt Smith (Doctor Who, Morbius, even though I’m sure he’d like it if we forgot that), wins over Sandie on the night they meet by defending her honor from a boorish degenerate and making promises of headlining at the Rialto right away instead of waiting for her shot at the Cafe De Paris by working as a coat check girl for years.  And as Sandie watches her new reality set in, she sees Jack with an old face that lays bare the betrayal.  Ellie finds herself sat in the audience of men—exclusively men—in sober suits, bathed in alcohol, dripping with lecherous energy.  And she witnesses it firsthand; not only is Sandie not singing, she’s not center stage, and it’s not the kind of show she had envisioned.  Tame by today’s standards, perhaps, but what happens next isn’t.  Her job doesn’t end when she exits the stage, no; Jack is exploiting her exactly in the way you thought he would, promising her great things in return for letting these rich and powerful men use her however they please.  Jack’s not a talent manager, he’s a pimp leveraging the hopes and dreams of young women to force them into sexual servitude.  The film here has so many little details that show you the toll this is taking on Sandie, and Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely at the top of her game here, which shouldn’t be a surprise because she’s one of the best actresses working today.  From the little glances and looks and the way her body language changes as she weathers the advances of depraved men who fancy themselves a Lothario and yet can only manage encounters with women whose agency has been ripped from them without their consent, to the bruises on her leg that she attempted to cover with makeup that are only exposed when she’s dancing; there is so much visual storytelling here that as the credits rolled, I immediately wanted to start it over and watch it again.

The dreams get more and more intense, more and more violent in nature, and less content to remain in the dream world for Ellie to just visit.  She is being haunted.  From a window into fantasy come to life, her ghostly dreams become a violent nightmare from which she can’t escape.  And through all this, there’s John, the nearly unbelievably sweet fellow fashion student who has a crush on Ellie and unfortunately gets caught up in the chaos.  But he’s up for it and so supportive, I’m really happy that he was a character in the film even if he is solidly tertiary.  John is played by Michael Ajao (Attack the Block) and is not only such a wholesome addition to the movie (but in a different way from Ellie, who is naive, John is a South London boy who managed to not become self-serving and cynical like Jocasta), he also provides some good comic relief as the tension mounts.  Just enough that it gives you a breather from the action, but not so much that it distracts from the stakes.  The movie cascades to a terrifying and dramatic finale with some big twists and turns along the way and even though I’d seen the movie before, I still found myself thoroughly gripped. 

As a film, it is really very well executed.  Edgar Wright’s direction and his whole crew put together such a wildly beautiful film to look at and his writing is truly cutting at times.  I mean, it is Edgar Wright, so my expectations are high because movies like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are favorites of mine and his other foray into more serious filmmaking, Baby Driver, despite starring two men I don’t want to talk about anymore, was a triumph of cinema.  And still, for his first true horror movie, he impressed me, sailing over the very high bar he’s already set.  And I cannot say nearly enough about the acting.  Thomasin Mckenzie was perfectly cast as Ellie, she is convincing through every moment of the film, her every emotion felt genuine, and she is so expressive and puts in such a strong performance, it’s worthy of a true superstar.  And that’s while being in a movie with Anya Taylor-Joy, who is already a superstar, and is positively magical in this role, especially in that aforementioned dancing scene with Jack and Ellie and when she sings a downbeat version of “Downtown”; her performance is absolutely magnetic.  They’re two more of the reasons I couldn’t look away, their performances were both so captivating.  And the movie offers some genuinely harrowing moments that are amplified by the strength of their acting.

I have heard some complaints that the movie isn’t scary enough, but I think some of those are missing the mark.  Perhaps the manifestations of the haunting could have been more frightening, but I think the terror of the situation here is the real horror.  Sandie and Ellie are living parallel terrors.  Sandie is living through true real life horror that takes a seriously brutal turn.  Time has shown that the entertainment industry preys on women, as recently as Harvey Weinstein and as far back as I can find.  There is something truly, truly horrifying about the commoditization of women’s bodies; seeing Sandie’s agency stripped from her and what she had to endure with no escape, sexual assault after sexual assault, kept under the thumb of someone who clearly physically harms her if she steps out of line left me slightly sick to my stomach and I think it’s an aspect of this film that wasn’t talked about enough in 2021 when it was first released.  Jack turned her from a human being into a product, from a person into a thing.  The slow loss of hope as Sandie descends further into a life so far from the one she imagined, so far from the one that she came to London to create is heartbreaking and even on repeat viewing, I can’t help but feel her pain. 

And Ellie is witnessing those horrors with an added layer of her own.  Because of her abilities, alignment, her shining, whatever you want to call it if you want to call it anything in particular, her life spirals out of control.  She develops an intense and justified fear of sleep because every time she closes her eyes she’s torn out of her world into one of depravity and broken dreams.  Talk about creating dread in a film, our characters here are going through it and like Ellie, all we can do is witness it powerlessly.  It’s true, the movie is approachable, even for a non-horror fan like me, but I don’t think that detracts from the movie at all.  It’s a serious film with a serious message that is delivered in a way that still gives you hope that the situation will change in the future.  At just under 2 hours, it’s not a short film, but it needed every minute of its length and not a single shot is wasted or overly long or unnecessary.  Last Night in Soho takes its time to tell a deeply realized story and I cannot recommend it enough.  It’s just so, so good and I get more out of it every time I watch it, which to me is a mark of a truly great movie.  As of now, this R-rated movie available for streaming on Prime Video and is a great addition to your Halloween festivities.

Since we’re reaching the end of spooky season I would like to thank all of you for being here and reading along through my increased coverage.  It has been a real joy, stepping outside of my comfort zone and focusing on a genre that I usually avoid and I hope that I was able to highlight the versatility and the heft of storytelling that come with the horror genre and its mechanics.  It feels like ever since Get Out, we’ve had an explosion of art house horror that aims to do more than just terrify or disgust.  And even though horror will likely never become a top genre for me, I’m here for it.  I’ve come to really appreciate what it can do and its role in cinema to tell allegorical stories or engage in social commentary in ways similar to science fiction.  And seeing more horror, I see how the genre’s mechanics can inform some truly great comedies and thrillers as well.  Ironically, I fear I’m becoming a fan.

October also just about marks a full year since I started consistently writing this blog on a weekly basis and I have found some lovely readers who have reached out to me and discussed film and TV shows and even video games and that is something I truly cherish.  And whether you’re one of them or an occasional reader, or someone who checks it out every week or even if this is your first time stumbling across this particular one man show, I value and appreciate each and every one of you.  Have a happy and safe Halloween and I’ll see you next week.