A Murder Most Growl

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

Content Warning: Contains depictions of self harm, sexual assault, and animal cruelty.

Meet Frank.  Frank’s having a rough day.  Rough couple of years, really.  You see his whole family was murdered by his best friend and a syndicate of crime families so he used his skills he learned as a Marine to hunt them down and kill them.  But now Frank has a problem.  No, not his rapidly decreasing mental health and the talking apparitions that plague him paired with his access to firearms.  It’s that there’s no one left to kill because he’s killed them all.  Let’s get into The Punisher: One Last Kill.  I’d say there will be spoilers ahead, but there isn’t much to spoil.

Grrrr….in a hoodie

Okay, so I’m sure you’ve caught on that I’m talking about Disney+’s new Punisher special, a continuation of The Punisher Netflix series, with Jon Bernthal (We Own This City, The Bear) returning as the titular vigilante.  The Punisher was underrated and I’ll get to why you were wrong to listen to people telling you that it was slow, but not just yet.  The stat sheet on this one is confusing.  Yes, it’s a one-off special like the excellent Werewolf by Night, but that was self-contained.  It was a story the MCU hadn’t touched before and haven’t touched since.  The Punisher is ongoing and there was a two season series about him and he’s spent plenty of time in the Netflix Daredevil series and Daredevil: Born Again.  So, what exactly is this special meant to be?

Grrr….with hallucinations

It seems the writers were as confused as I am.  It retreads Frank’s origin story enough to act as a standalone, giving newcomers a crash course on his tragically murdered family and the ghosts and demons that haunt him to this day.  I wouldn’t say he looked particularly well-adjusted in Born Again, but he’s spiraling and the ghosts seem to be winning.  Frank’s not in a good place right now and I don’t just mean the neighborhood that’s under siege from a criminal power vacuum that he caused with his revenge campaign.  Random violence abound, the streets are incredibly unsafe.  There’s no rhyme or reason to it either, which is demonstrated from the opening scene of the special.  It looks practically post-apocalyptic and most certainly dystopian (and unfortunately far too close to our reality for comfort).  And Frank, The Punisher, does nothing.  It’s truly upsetting to see a hero ignore innocent people getting seriously hurt right in front of his face.

Grr….with a hoodie again. What can I say? A lot of this is him walking around in a hoodie

But then again, Punisher isn’t a hero, really, is he?  At least that’s the push-pull of his treatment in the MCU era.  It’s been a hard balancing act. It’s not that Punisher kills that’s the problem.  I mean, Iron Man kills.  Captain America kills Nazis, like any good hero.  Squirrel Girl…I don’t really know what she does, to be honest, but she’s fun as heck in Marvel Rivals.  No, it’s the manner in which he kills.  Nearly indiscriminately, passing the same judgement on the smallest of infractions as the most unforgivable.  The Netflix series changed that.  He was still brutal, killing not with glee, but with single-minded purpose.  He never meant to be a hero, but he was still generally doing good, for the most part at least (and I think Born Again especially went into the ramifications of such exacting vigilantism).  This special doesn’t walk it back, but it puts him in a position where extreme violence is his only option and doesn’t have any room for questions of morality.  And this is where this special fails.  It’s the first act of a movie that’s trying to be a whole movie, and a series recap, a standalone special, and set up a sequel.  They jammed so much of so little into it that they forgot to leave room for a story.

Glad she checked the exact time on the clock of her Maybach otherwise she’d never be able to choose when to try to have Frank killed

Remember how I said there was no one left to kill?  Well, it turns out he missed one.  The Gnucci family’s matriarch, the elderly and disabled Ma Gnucci, played by Judith Light (Transparent, Who’s the Boss?).  She does the most comic book villain thing ever and shows up to Frank’s apartment, accounts in painstaking detail and slow motion flashback the killing of her family members by Frank and then tells him that he has until a time that evening before she calls a John Wick-style open season on him and lets everyone know where he is.  Instead of pulling the gun he had in his belt and killing her and her bodyguard right then and there he decides to go up to his apartment, hallucinate again, and then watch and wait as random thugs break down the door across the hall and assault a young mother.  He does nothing until one of them pours gasoline on his door and sets fire to it and him.  This finally gets him into the fight and he proceeds to kill his way through a combination of a reverse Dredd (instead of one protagonist going into an apartment building full of killers, it’s a bunch of killers descending on an apartment building with the protagonist in it) and a zombie movie.  I’m not exaggerating; the men who come after him run at him with reckless abandon and inhuman drive.  They have no fear, they attack everything in their way, and they don’t stop until they’re killed, generally by headshot.  They are mindless; they are essentially zombies.  They come in endless waves as if appearing out of thin air and they disappear for no discernible reason other than it was time for the special to end.   

You can never find enough bandages in this game. And it annoys me that the lead pipes break after like 3 hits. That doesn’t seem right

This is a 50 minute TV-MA special, with the credits rolling at 44 minutes and nothing really happening for the first 26 minutes.  The last 18 minutes or so are a video game mission where the player character has to survive waves of zombies until the timer runs out and it’s time for the MCU to move on to the next project.  And yes, there is a scene where he falls off a roof and the CGI makes him look exactly like Joel from The Last of Us (the game, not the series), but one instance of bad CG isn’t this special’s biggest problem.  Not even close.  If this is a feeler for a full Punisher series, as much as I would love to see that return because I was a big fan of the Netflix series, this does not leave me with much confidence for the direction they want to take him.  If all you wanted was to watch Jon Bernthal grunt, grumble, and growl his way through dozens of mindless enemies with no real story, no emotional connections to just about any of the characters, and no discernible direction or character development, then this is certainly for you.  Do your Wordle or your Duolingo or fold your laundry during the first 26 minutes and then watch the last 20 minutes.  It really does feel like you’re watching a video game instead of a movie/TV episode/TV special/pilot episode/whatever this is meant to be.  Which does an incredible disservice to the foundation laid by the Netflix series.

Grrr…..Frank politely asks for directions

The Punisher was a surprisingly contemplative series.  The first season wasn’t slow, it was deliberate.  It had a point to make.  The Punisher took its time to show you the effects of PTSD, not just on Frank but on other veterans who are struggling to return to life after being asked to do violence on behalf of the country.  It shows how these young men and women are sent overseas to take part in the worst thing that humanity does to each other and come home to a government that wants to forget them and a society that doesn’t feel safe for them anymore and doesn’t offer them a way forward.  The Punisher wanted us to look at how we treat our veterans; we can have parades, we can have holidays, but if we don’t take care of them when they come home, what are we even doing?  What’s the point of the lip service and the bumper magnets if no one cares when a veteran comes home to the country they were ostensibly sent to protect and they need help and can’t get it?  That’s what The Punisher asked you to think about.  The first season was a tale of two ghosts, each living half a life, both trying to find a way to make themselves whole.  And beyond that very personal, meaningful story, the series brought attention to these much bigger issues.  The second season gave Frank someone to protect, a surrogate for his own daughter.  And yes, I have a soft spot for stories about gruff men protecting innocent people who can’t protect themselves (The Mandalorian, Logan, the list goes on), but I think that’s when Frank is truly at his best.  Not roaming the streets with a skull painted on his t-shirt shooting everyone with a dime bag, but as a self-sacrificing guardian of those who desperately need it.

Grrr……Frank even yawns intensely. Also, he’s on fire

I wanted so badly for this to be good.  I know Punisher is finally making his big screen debut in the next Spider-Man movie, No Way Far from Brand New Homecoming, or whatever it’s going to called, so I was hoping this would be a way for those who might have missed The Punisher series the first time around to get a glimpse of what this version of the Punisher could be.  Smartly written, deeply emotional, with something to say about our society.  Instead, we got a 44 minute video game mission that doesn’t get going for 26 minutes.  I would say this special is all action and no story, but it’s not even half action.  And with characters with names like “Old Vet”, “Ma”, and “Isaiah’s Mother”, it doesn’t even take its downtime to give us something on an emotional level.  And as a side note, how is Punisher even on the run?  He goes to his family’s gravestones twice in 40 minutes.  If you really wanted to capture or kill the Punisher, stake out the cemetery for an hour, he’s bound to show up at least once.  How has he not been found yet?

What a waste of time, effort, and a great character redeemed by the Netflix era of the MCU and brought back in glorious fashion in Born Again.  Skip One Last Kill unless you really just want to see 18 minutes of Jon Bernthal shooting people in the face.  But if you want to watch the Punisher at his very best, stick to the Netflix series and Daredevil.  Disney committed to the violence, but ignored everything else.  The worst punishment of this special was watching what they did with this character.

Yeah, I kind of felt that way at the end of this

Beach Please

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

In recent weeks, we’ve tackled religion, misogyny, death, systemic racism, and more.  Keep it light, right?  So this week, I want to discuss ego death and the loss of self.  I’m kidding, let’s have a little fun.  With the summer months closing in, I’m sure if you’re like me, you’re dreading the extra daylight hours and intense heat that makes even thinking about going outside a dehydrating prospect and actually going outside leaving you feeling like a desiccated corpse.  But if you’re normal, then your head will probably fill with ideas of sun and the beach and vacation.  We’ve all been on vacation before, I hope, and sometimes you meet people.  We’ll talk about our vacation selves when I get to The One I Love, but right now I actually do want to keep it light.  So let’s get into the underrated comedy from 2021, Vacation Friends.

Uptight Marcus, played by Lil Rel Howery (Get Out, Free Guy), and his girlfriend Emily, played by Yvonne Orji (The Blackening, Insecure) arrive on holiday in Mexico.  Marcus is nervous; he’s planning to propose.  He’s set it all up ahead of time: rose petals, champagne, the works.  But when they get to their suite, they find that the Presidential Suite above them had a serious hot tub malfunction and flooded their room.  While trying to find alternate accommodations, they bump into the cause of the hot tub malfunction.  And that cause comes in the form of Ron and Kyla.  Ron is played by John Cena (Heads of State, Peacemaker), for whom I have expressed great admiration before.  He’s such a great actor in this kind of role, where he gets to play this insanely jacked, scary looking, but ultimately kind, open, empathetic, and slightly goofy guy.  He’s the king of this archetype and his charm is a big, big part of the appeal of this movie.  I don’t know why he got into acting so late in life.  I don’t know what he did before acting, but in doing some research, I was told that I wouldn’t be able to see him.  Kyla is played by Meredith Hagner and I continue to think that she is one of the most underrated comic actresses in the industry.  She blew me away in Search Party and was great in Bad Monkey and again has this archetype that she plays so well.  She’s got this lovable, somewhat ditzy, free-spirited character in the bag.  I’m sure she has range, judging by some more of the dramatic parts of Search Party, but when she’s this likable playing to type, I can’t be mad at it.  Even when she’s cheating on Andy Samberg in Palm Springs, you just can’t help but like her.

Now these two, Ron and Kyla, couldn’t be more different from Marcus and Emily.  In addition to being white, they’re completely free with themselves.  Wanderlusters.  Travelers.  Borderline vagabonds.  Absolute free spirits.  I’m talking to the point that I cannot, with all of what’s left of my inner child and all my mind combined, even begin to imagine what that feels like.  I have never been that free at all; to be completely honest, it’s aspirational.  But then again, I’m someone who doesn’t even wear shorts in public, so maybe being that free with myself isn’t in the cards.  I’m a lot more like Marcus, buttoned down, planning for every possibility, never leaping before I look (and usually not after looking either, if I’m being completely honest).  Emily comes from money, Marcus started and runs his own construction company (which his soon-to-be father-in-law looks down on, more on that later).  Marcus is a park ranger who spends his days finding people lost in caves and Kyla works for a doctor who has to change addresses often because the feds keep coming after him.  But that’s the beauty of vacation.  Sand in your shoes is the ultimate equalizer.  Despite initial (and understandable) apprehension, the four become fast friends, with Marcus and Emily trying their best to keep up; accidentally doing cocaine, getting obliterated at bar after bar, being chased by some very angry locals.  You know, normal vacation stuff that any of us do on any of our holiday trips.  Unrelated, I’m told they still have my photo up at Magic Kingdom.  But I say don’t make drinks look that fun if you don’t want 8-year-olds to drink them and then yell “I’m king of the world” on the Jungle Cruise.

From there, the vacation gets out of hand in the absolute best of ways.  They become not only inseparable, but also a montage filled with great visual comedy.  But all vacations must come to an end, and Marcus and Emily bury their Island Niles versions of themselves in the sand to return to normal life.  But Ron and Kyla do the dreaded thing of wanting to keep in touch.  Time passes and the vacation fades to memory, as they all do, and with a wedding on the horizon, they have more things to think about than a magical week in Mexico.  That is what the real world is really great at, isn’t it?  Sucking the magic out of life.  Until Ron and Kyla show up, causing all sorts of chaos.

I’ve watched Vacation Friends four or five times now and each time there’s a level of unease.  First of all, comedies are never as funny the second time around.  Comedy is an equation that relies on a subversion of expectations, so if you know the punchline, it’s hard to be surprised by it.  I also worry that, like I did with Palm Springs, it’s a movie that connected with me so much because it was a pandemic watch originally.  Who wouldn’t want to go to Mexico to party with John Cena and Meredith Hagner instead of sitting at home worrying about your friends and family?  But those worries were again unfounded and with each rewatch, I’m surprised at just how funny it remains to be.  Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the normal, pretentious comedy that I usually go for.  It’s crude at times, it’s stupid at times, it flirts with crossing a line here and there (which, thankfully, it never really does), but the delivery is so top notch, it sells the rapid fire jokes that keep coming at you.  The comic timing here is excellent.  No one misses a trick, no one delivers a punchline poorly, not even put upon Maurillio, who works the front desk at the hotel.  If all you’re looking for is a good time and great laughs, Vacation Friends and the cleverly named sequel, Vacation Friends 2 deliver that.  You can stop here if you want and go watch it and you’ll have a great time.  But you know me.  I’ve got to keep going.

Just like a vacation, a movie like this can be a real escape from everything going on.  Five minutes on Twitter or watching the news and I’m more than ready to deal with the Babadook instead.  The thing that follows you in It Follows is a breeze compared to the real world right now.  So being able to jump into a comedy is really a wonderful feeling.  But you know that’s not enough for me and luckily Vacation Friends isn’t just stupid comedy.  Oh, there’s plenty of that as well, but there’s also a lot of heart to this.  Ron and Kyla may be wacky, cocaine-smuggling wildcards, but they only ever approach people with kindness.  They don’t judge, but they are judged a lot.  And so are Marcus and Emily.  Like I said, Emily’s father looks down on Marcus for being a “just a construction worker”, as if that were something to be ashamed of in the first place, and is incredibly harsh on everything he does.  Put simply, he hates Marcus.  Never gave him a chance.  Just like the way Marcus and Emily judged Ron and Kyla initially.  So it’s not like this movie is all just empty calories, there is some substance to it.  Learning not to judge others until you get to know them, approaching people with kindness, treating people with dignity.  For a crude, silly comedy that has a lot of sex and drugs, it’s a shockingly wholesome movie.  Now, I wouldn’t pull it up on a family holiday and sit grandma and the kids in front of it; it is R-rated, after all.  It doesn’t smack you in the face with a message either; it doesn’t take this turn where it drops comedy for melodrama, rather it’s in stride.  The movie messages by example; the kind and empathetic people who take the time to bond with each other and get to know each other are the clear protagonists.  The ones who judge others by what they have or how cultured they seem to be are the clear antagonists.  Sure, there’s a little bit of debauchery along the way, but I say again, Mr. Disney, don’t put a castle in your park if you don’t want an 8-year-old to challenge the king to single combat for the crown.  Vacation Friends is kind of a feel good movie.  And not in that sappy, saccharine kind of way; it’s not a movie that takes aim at tugging on your heartrstings, but I nonetheless found myself in a better, more hopeful mood after watching it.  And it lasted all the way until the next time I opened up Twitter. I really need to stop doing that to myself.

Vacation Friends is a really, really fun comedy that is full of laughs, likable characters, and John Cena’s rippling, sinewy charisma that carries it through most of its faults, which are minor.  This isn’t a life-changing comedy by any means, but I think it’s far better than its 59% RT score would suggest.  It’s not ambitious, it’s not trying to change anything or do anything groundbreaking.  But it’s just such a genuinely pleasant film about a bunch of people who seem so different and in the end just aren’t.  Or at the very least, their differences don’t outweigh the things about them that bring them together.  The sequel is even worth a look too.  I’ve only seen it once and I remember it being quite a drop in quality from this one; but sequels are hard and comedy sequels are even harder.  It still has its moments, though far more over the top with needlessly higher stakes, but I had so much affection for these characters that I was mainly happy just to be spending time with them again.  If you’re looking for a good comedy that delivers on laughs this weekend, you could do worse than firing up Vacation Friends and spending 1 hour and 43 minutes just laughing, smiling, chuckling, and chortling.  Vacation Friends streams on Hulu.

Lock, Defrock, and a Few Broken Morals

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

Rian Johnson is back with Benoit Blanc and he’s here to ruin your childhood specifically

Going from talking about one hard genre to discuss with comedy a couple of weeks ago, I’m back with another hard one.  Mystery.  It’s not useful for me to tell you that the butler did it or that I was surprised that the butler did it.  For one, I’m rarely surprised at the end of a whodunnit, but that’s mostly my fault.  Obviously I pay attention to this sort of movie thing, if you haven’t noticed, so once you read narrative structure, a lot of things become predictable.  But growing up, mysteries were all I cared about.  I had at least 50 Hardy Boys books as a kid, as well as several of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew crossover books, which were some of my favorites because they were longer, and I read each of them at least five times.  I wanted to be a detective when I was a kid.  You got to wear a cool hat and talk like Humphrey Bogart and dames were always coming by your office in need of help before betraying you.  Surprise!  The kid who grew up to write this blog was a nerd.  So I love mysteries and always have and over the years, I’ve developed an eye for how these things play out.  And even if I’m surprised at the end, that’s not enough either.  A surprise has to be earned and too few mysteries earn their reveals, instead opting for a cheap twist that no one saw coming because it doesn’t make any sense.

But when there’s a good one, oh, I am thrilled.  I’ve talked about my love of whodunnits before, so for longtime readers, this isn’t news.  And much like Rian Johnson’s modern day Poirot, Benoit Blanc, I’ve given myself a problem to solve.  How do I talk about a mystery without talking about a mystery?  Let’s get into Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

I’m not as worried about getting older if looking this cool remains an option

In case you haven’t seen Knives Out or Glass Onion, Benoit Blanc, played by Daniel Craig (Logan Lucky, Star Wars: The Force Awakens), is one of those world famous detectives.  This is one of the things we accept in fiction, that there are world famous detectives.  I’ve been part of the world for a while now and I’ve never heard of even a locally famous detective.  But, like I said, he’s in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mold; a quirky, reclusive detective who is the very best at what he does, trading Poirot’s signature moustache for a charming Foghorn Leghorn southern drawl.  For being so blatantly a Poirot archetype, Blanc never manages to feel like a ripoff, even though it seems like Poirot was a huge influence; Craig’s charm and charisma paper over any concerns I could have with the character.  Blanc is instantly endearing.  But he’s not really in this one for the first 40 minutes or so.

KISS! Although they probably won’t

Instead we get to spend that time with Jud Duplenticy.  Father Jud Duplenticy.  Father Jud, played by Josh O’Connor (The Crown), is a young Catholic priest, new to the cloth, and after the red mist descended during a heated debate in which the recipient of his right cross was dropping some old school bigoted views, he’s being punished.  They’re sending him to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a one priest church in Chimney Rock, New York.  Normally I’d say something sarcastic about bigoted views in the Catholic Church, but this new guy from Chicago they have in charge seems pretty alright, so I’m going to let them slide on this one.  But just this one.  Jud, you see, was a boxer in his previous life, pre-cloth, and sometimes his fighting side comes through.  But in his heart, he’s an Anthony Norman-level good guy; all he wants to do is help to heal the world through the word of Christ.  Another priest tells him that they need fighters because the Church is under attack.  “A priest is a shepherd,” he says, and “the world is a wolf”.  The Church against the world.  Doesn’t leave a lot of room for the people, whom so often can forget that they’re a part of the world as well, same as the Church.  But Jud disagrees and expresses concern that treating those who disagree with them as a wolf would lead them to seeing everyone as a wolf.  He seeks unity instead of division, understanding instead of ostracizing.  Which to me seems like it’s something that should be pretty standard for someone in his profession, but the idea of helping people can be pretty foreign some of the more fire and brimstone types.

Wicks’s pulpit looks like the bow of a ship, but he never seems as jazzed as Luffy does when he’s at the front of the Going Merry

Those fundamentalists include Dr. Nat Sharp, played by Jeremy Renner (The Avengers, The Town), a doctor left reeling after his wife left him; Lee Ross, played by Andrew Scott (Fleabag, His Dark Materials), a science fiction writer who fled the “liberal hive mind” of New York City to write in small town America for right wing white men; lawyer Vera Draven, played by Kerry Washington (Scandal and the underrated Unprisoned) and her illegitimate brother/adopted son Cy, played by Daryl McCormack (Bad Sisters), a failed right wing politician and aspiring grifter social media star, whom she was forced to raise as her own from a young age by her father; and world class cellist Simone Vivane, played by Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus, Devs), a young woman in the grips of a debilitating, progressive disease that doctors don’t understand and that ruined her career.  Rounding out the church is Martha Delacroix, played by Glenn Close (The Shield, 102 Dalmatians), the religious zealot and Wicks-devotee who runs all the church admin; and recovering alcoholic groundskeeper Samson Holt, played by Thomas Haden Church (Wings, Sideways).  The cast is completed by Mila Kunis as Police Chief Geraldine Scott.  Hopefully she shows better judgment as a police officer than she does in the friends she chooses to support.

You can see why this is the flock.  Why these hardened few became Wicks’s army is easy to see.  They all have something that he can manipulate, that he can control.  Nat wants his wife back and blames everything but his own behavior for her leaving.  He’s not good looking enough, doesn’t make enough money, etc; all the excuses men love to make instead of looking internally.  Lee Ross wants to find inspiration again and perhaps his respectability, which he lost with his turn to extreme right wing views.  Vera wants her life back; it was completely hijacked by her father when he brought Cy home for to take care of.  She wanted to be a lawyer who makes a difference and then circumstances beyond her control forced her into this life instead of the one she was working towards (I know that feeling).  And now she’s stuck in a perpetual sunk cost fallacy of faith.  Cy is power hungry and lacks any level of self awareness or integrity.  And poor Simone, a world class talent struck down by a disease medical science can’t figure out.  Desperate and hopeless, she’s willing to throw her money and support behind anyone who will promise her a solution to her problem; or at the very least, enough false hope to stay on the line.  Easy prey for a wolf.

The most intense book club you’re ever likely to see

If you look at the names in the cast, you’ll know to expect great acting performances all around.  Glenn Close is great here, playing up the sort of Helen Lovejoy, pearl-clutching church lady stereotype with a more vindictive edge.  Nothing about how she’s written is subtle and that’s intentional.  Her last name is Delacroix; French for “of the cross”.  Cailee Spaeny adds another feather into the cap of her short and already impressive career with her smaller, but genuinely played role.  Josh Brolin leverages everything about his age, appearance, and manner of speech as the Monsignor to make him properly intimidating.  Frankly, Brolin is more imposing and threatening and, frankly, scary, than Thanos ever was.  Part of it is the source material; I’m not really worried that a giant purple alien will snap his fingers and erase half the world, but I do worry about religious fanaticism doing that (or worse).  And if I ever come across a performance by Daniel Craig that I didn’t think was good, I’ll let you know.  But it won’t be this one.  And yet, for all the notable names in the cast, it’s Josh O’Connor as Father Jud who really impressed me the most.  There isn’t a moment where his acting isn’t completely believable, where he isn’t sympathetic, where you don’t want to root for him.  His acting is subtle at times, headstrong at others, and impressive at every turn.  I’ve never seen him in anything else, but after this, I hope to see him a whole hell of a lot more.

“It’s a 3 hour science lesson that ends in a magical love closet, we need to be honest about it”

We’ve gotten this far into this murder mystery without talking about a murder yet, so this is where I tell you that a murder happens.  It’s an impossible murder.  Someone dies and someone else made it happen, and on the face of it, it couldn’t have happened.  And yet, it did.  And that’s why Blanc is there.  You don’t call Benoit Blanc for the kind of mystery any old tin star can solve, after all.  And that’s all you’re going to get on the murder.  Blanc is the detective, I’ll let him solve it.  He’s brilliant and unorthodox and funny, and I absolutely cannot get enough of Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc.  I can watch these movies over and over again.  This is a crafted mystery, and it comes together so amazingly, you really have to hop on Netflix and watch it for yourself.  Normally I advise to avoid trailers in general, but when it comes to a Rian Johnson mystery, it doesn’t really matter.  He’s that good at this.

And I thought my apartment was small

There are some observations that I made when watching this, though.  As much as this is a takedown of a certain kind of religious person who uses religion not as a faith and a guide of how to live their life, but as a means of judging others and forcing them to live by their standards, it’s also a strong defense of good people of faith.  This movie isn’t about Benoit Blanc coming in and dismantling religion and taking down the Catholic Church brick by brick, but rather it’s a tug-of-war between the two schools of thought within religious institutions.  It shows that some people are willing to look the other way when it comes to heinous acts that harm and harm again as long as the person doing the harm continues to benefit them in some way.  That any transgression is forgivable as long as it’s the right person is committing them because the benefit of the hypocrisy outweighs the shame being a hypocrite brings.  But it also shows the softer side of Catholicism.  It shows people who genuinely want to make the world a better place and to do it through kindness and empathy, albeit faith-based.  Dead Man doesn’t judge the religious; it judges harshly those who put on the veil of religiosity to hurt other people and impose their views.  And much like Glass Onion dismantled the cult of personality around so-called geniuses and Knives Out before it took on immigration, race, and the ownership of stolen land, Dead Man looks at the two faces of modern religion; taking down those who use it as a weapon and bolstering those whose faith is a sustaining force that isn’t used against others.  In an era where I of all people follow the Pope on Twitter, it’s an extremely relevant film for right now.

She takes the church fantasy football draft too seriously

I don’t know how Rian Johnson keeps doing it.  Crafting a film that’s both universally true and also right on the pulse of the moment.  Perhaps it’s a sad commentary on how little changes.  60 years on from the inciting incident, the original sin of Our Lady of Ceaseless Suffering, women are still being blamed for the ill deeds of men.  The original sin isn’t what the “harlot whore” did to the church, it’s what her father the priest did to her.  And yet she’s the one who’s been scorned and shamed and spoken ill of for six decades.  Women are still judged harshly and constantly while men are given pass after pass.  Religion is still being used as a weapon to divide while the heart of its message is drowned out by the volume of those who seek to twist it.  The truth still gets buried for a comforting or sensational story.  Lies told first are still hard to disprove with truths told later.  I love Knives Out and Glass Onion.  I think they’re two of the most brilliant mysteries made this century.  They showcase Johnson’s fantastic writing, casting, and directing.  Wake Up Dead Man might be his most brilliant one yet.

See what I was saying about the hat thing?

He does this thing, this magical thing where he never hides the ball.  Johnson can show a murder, put it right in front of your face, and it isn’t until Poirot—I mean Blanc—gathers suspects in the parlor to deliver his sermon on guilt that all the puzzle pieces fall into place and you say to yourself “How did I not see that?”  Which is the best feeling at the end of a whodunnit.  Being surprised is not enough; throwing a character on it who was barely in the entire thing and then hanging it on them as a shock reveal is cheap and it happens too often.  It’s a punchline to different joke.  That’s not what Rian Johnson does.  I admit to being closer to the mark on this one than the previous Blanc mysteries, but that takes nothing away from it.  If anything, it makes it even more engaging that I was so close to getting the whole picture.  He has this way of making you forget that the tangerine was never there (now, if you’ve never seen the movie Burning, that won’t make sense to you, but trust me when I say I’ve been wanting to use that reference for years). 

I think this cements him in the upper echelons of auteurs right now.  Of course, auteur theory is up for debate and no film is one person’s singular work, but I can’t think of a name other than Ryan Coogler that makes me so excited to see as a director credit.  Nolan’s disappointed me with both Oppenheimer and Interstellar; I know I’m in the minority about them, but I found them overly long and self indulgent.  Villeneuve is on his Dune detour, who knows how long it’ll be before he starts making serious movies again (yeah, I didn’t like Dune either).  Even the setup of Dead Man is riveting.  It’s told in such an engaging way that the 40 minutes in the first act go by with barely a blink when all it is just talking.  There are no car chases, no explosions, but it’s so captivating.  And a large part of that is the writing and acting.  O’Connor makes you forget for the better part of an hour that this is even a Benoit Blanc movie.  Smart, funny, and poignant, Wake Up Dead Man is 2 hours and 24 minutes well spent.  It’s rated PG-13 and streams exclusively on Netflix.

"Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”

#thelastjedidefensesquad

The Wolf of Gall Street

Link to the audio version of this post is HERE

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the very first Shrek film, putting the vaguely Scottish green ogre and his talking donkey friend Donkey seemingly permanently into our pop culture.  Lego is even releasing a set to commemorate this momentous occasion, but instead of diving into a movie that, if you either were a kid or had a kid (or, like me, watched I Am Legend) in the last 25 years, you’ve probably seen or had quoted to you the first Shrek ad nauseam for two and a half decades.  No, instead I want to talk about the best movie in the Shrek franchise, one that hasn’t been around nearly as long.

It’s confession time.  I neither was a kid nor had a kid in the last 25 years (I was a teenager), so I watched Shrek for the first time just a few years ago as an adult.  This was a bad idea.  I should have just continued enjoying the “I like that boulder” clip when it was played on my local radio morning show.  There’s nothing really wrong with the movies, but approaching them as an adult with no nostalgia for the films built up from a childhood watching them or watching through the eyes of a child, the humor was kind of gross (which is fine, kids love that), the references were incredibly dated at this point (are people still talking about The Matrix?), and I hated “All Star” by Smash Mouth the first time I heard in 1999.  So by the time Shrek came out in 2001, I was already beyond sick of it.  Well, the years start coming and they don’t stop coming; fast forward over 20 years from then, my affection for the song has done everything but grow.  I cannot stand its ear-bleeding infectiousness and inescapable ubiquity.  Shrek didn’t hold up for me; it didn’t feel like a movie written to be evergreen.  Not Shrek 2, not Shrek 4, not Shrek, and not even Puss in Boots, the reason I saw Shrek 2 in the first place and why I saw the others in that order.  I still haven’t seen Shrek the Third, but I’m not sure that’s the one that’ll turn me around on the franchise with its 41% RT score.  But when Antonio Banderas returned in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in 2022, as skeptical as I was, I sat down to watch it and it blew me away.  Pull up the cardboard box your cat bed came in and start making biscuits.  Let’s get into it.

At a celebration in his honor, Puss in Boots is really living it up.  He sings songs about how fearless he is, people heap praise on him, but it turns out they’re partying in the governor’s mansion.  Without permission.  And when he interrupts it in the middle of the festivities, there’s an even further interruption in the form of a giant who attacks.  As Boots defeats the governor’s men, boasting that he laughs in the face of death and that no blade has ever touched him, he faces down with the giant with aplomb.  He fights heroically and vanquishes his foes with some effort.  However, unfortunately, in his triumphant moment, he dies.  It’s a rough go and, to be fair, not a lot of franchises have the guts to kill their titular character in the first act of the second movie.  Can you imagine if in the second Fifty Shades of Grey movie, Annalise Fifty died in a car accident after being choked to completion?  I’ve never seen those movies, but I assume that doesn’t happen.  But this is Puss in Boots.  Puss in Boots laughs in the face of death, remember?

If I had nine lives, I’d probably have a chuckle myself, so when he wakes up in a doctor’s office and he reminds Boots that death comes for us all, Boots is understandably perturbed.  I mean, keep it light, Doc.  It’s a PG movie.  Boots has died eight times, though; he’s down to his last guy.  When drowning his sorrows alone with some frosty milk in a quiet bar, a whistle cuts through the night air.  The Whistling Wolf sits next to him and is very friendly at first, despite his menacing appearance.

Inevitably, violence breaks out.  The Whistling Stranger (Wagner Moura, aka Pablo Escobar in Narcos) wants Boots’s bounty and a fight ensues.  This is where I want to stop and talk about the animation because this is one of the things that makes this movie so breathtaking.  It’s right in the middle of the sort of modern animation trifecta we’ve seen recently where the movies are incredibly visually inventive.  I’m no animation expert, but it seems like this new era was ushered in by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which was unlike anything I’d ever seen before in the way that it told its story by using different animation styles.  The animation wasn’t just a look, it was diegetic, it was part of the storytelling.  Then recently we had the same sort of thing in the now-global phenomenon and fast food meal KPop Demon Hunters.  All due respect to The Bad Guys, another very good animated kids’ movie that engages in this mix of styles, it’s The Last Wish that bridges those two aforementioned films for me.  This is DreamWorks doing their best to go toe-to-toe with the leaders of modern animation, Sony, and they do an excellent job making this movie look and feel unique and not just like it’s copying Spider-Verse.  It learned from it, of course, but it’s doing its own thing.  The animation here is absolutely beautiful, taking influences from anime for the frenetic fight sequences and changing the animation style for different characters, even within the same scene.  There will be times where the Whistling Stranger looks like he’s from another movie altogether, which emphasizes what Boots is facing in the moment.  Here is an otherworldly foe who has cornered him in his most vulnerable moment, and, what’s more, he’s good.  He’s really good.  He’s better than Boots.

For the first time, a blade touches Puss in Boots.  Wolfie here draws blood and knowing that he can’t just shrug this one off if the unthinkable happens; if Puss in Boots actually were to fall, there’d be no getting back up.  What a horrible thing to only have one life to live, isn’t it?  The hairs on the back of his neck stand up.  The fur, I guess.  And elsewhere, too.  He’s a cat, he’s covered in fur, it’s going to stand up.  His pulse quickens.  The only sound that fills his ears is his heart pounding in his chest.  And the whistling.  The incessant, threatening whistling.  For the first time in all his lives, Boots feels fear.  In an act of incredible human reality, the once boastful, once brash, once brazen cat does something very much unlike him.  He does what any sane person would do in that moment.  He flees.  He has a panic attack.  For the first time in his life, he goes into fight or flight and chooses flight.  He goes to a cat sanctuary and sheds the boots that make his name.  More than that, the whole outfit goes into a grave and he gives himself a eulogy.  Death may not have claimed him, but there is a funeral after all.  As Dr. Hiriluk once said, “When does a man die?”  Boots may be a cat and alive and well, but Puss in Boots died before the last mound of dirt fell on his grave.  All that’s left is a cat-shaped husk who lives in anonymity, sharing a trough and litter box with dozens of other cats.  And one small dog.

There’s a legend in fairy tale land about a shooting star that fell to Earth and created a magical forest around it, a sort of pocket dimension called the Dark Forest.  It’s said that if you get to the star you will be granted a single wish.  So when Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears (Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman, Samson Kayo) show up to the cat sanctuary doing their best bull in a China shop impression and let it slip that they wanted Boots’s help stealing a map to the Wishing Star from Little Jack Horner (John Mulaney), Boots can’t help but figure that he can steal it for himself and use the wish to get his nine lives back.  Not a bad plan.  Along with him is that one small dog, Perrito (Harvey Guillén), and, boy it pains me to say this about a cartoon cat, his former lover Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault).  But all through this adventure, the whistling specter of finality follows behind, always nipping at the backs of his paws.

So by now, you and I and probably any other adult has realized what Boots and most kids probably haven’t, but the Whistling Stranger is no mere bounty hunter.  Carrying two handheld sickles, cloaked in black, with arcane knowledge, this big bad wolf isn’t the Big Bad Wolf.  He’s Death.  Capital D Death.  He’s the Green Knight and Boots is Sir Gawain.  And now we’re grazing the surface of why this movie is so brilliant.  It’s actually about something.

A lot of people have compared this movie to Logan, and while I see the similarities in vibe, I mention the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because, I’m almost certain coincidentally, The Last Wish came out just one year after David Lowery’s The Green Knight, which was also excellent.  Now, I know the production time in animation is very, very long so it’s not like one movie inspired the other, but I was struck by the similarities in theming.  They were so similar, it made me want to sit down and ask if the writers intended to adapt Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with this movie.  And that makes sense to me; there’s a reason 700 years later, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is still a relevant story.  Because we, as human beings, still die.  And it’s still something that’s in the back of our minds, especially as we get older.  It’s one of the reasons, in addition to it being Shrek’s 25th anniversary, that it’s been in my thoughts.  I had a milestone birthday recently, so now I’m the oldest I’ve ever been (which is kind of always true, because that’s how time works, but you get what I’m saying).  Living through the global fear of the COVID pandemic and perhaps still in its shadow in some ways, getting older; death comes to mind a lot.  There are multiple multi-billion dollar industries designed around combatting aging or at least the signs of aging, so I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.  When the opportunity arose to revisit this brilliant film, I had to take it, because I’ve been itching to share my thoughts on this movie with you all for a while.

Boots and his companions take on the classic hero’s quest, just like Sir Gawain.  Everything they experience is right out of classical mythology, right down to the journey to the underworld; in this case, in the form of the magically malleable Dark Forest in which the path to the star is determined by the character of the person holding the map.  He has to face his past lives.  And then he has to confront his own mortality; both conceptually and the personification of Death itself.  He has to fight Death, a wonderfully poetic and futile battle that we all fight.

Death cannot be defeated.  But we must fight against it.  Not to become some immortal legend, not for glory, but because all life is precious.  Death is supposed to wait until it’s “your time”, whatever that means, but here, Death wants Boots because through eight lives and eight deaths, Boots didn’t appreciate any of them.  Death isn’t holding a grudge because he was laughed at, he’s holding a grudge because life has value and Boots hasn’t valued any of his.  It’s not just Puss in Boots’s arrogance that bothers him, it’s the cavalier attitude with which he throws away his lives.  The time here is short and with whatever time we get, it’s up to us to make that time count.  To fill it with family and friends, to speak up for those who need it, to make some little difference for the better in the world while we’re still here.  I’m reminded what Isaac Asimov said in The Relativity of Wrong; “There’s no way I can single-handedly save the world or, perhaps, even make a perceptible difference.  But how ashamed I would be to let a day pass without making one more effort.”  And Boots has to come to this realization for himself.  The Last Wish is about Puss in Boots coming to terms with his own mortality and making peace with it.  As he faces down the ultimate enemy, Boots has to know and accept that he cannot win.  It is desperate, it is visceral, and it is one of the most human things I have ever seen on screen.  With each lunge and each slash, with each parry and each riposte, Boots fights more and more valiantly against inevitable defeat.  “I know I can never defeat you, Lobo, but I will never stop fighting for this life,” he says.  Like Gawain, Boots eventually stands tall.  But it’s not that he’s fearless once more, no; for the first time in his life, he’s being brave.  Because bravery is continuing on in the face of fear, not the absence of it.

I hope when my time comes that I don’t greet Death like an old friend, but like Puss in Boots; with sword drawn and something still to fight for.

There’s so much in this movie.  I could write this length again on its focus on found family, support structures, and appreciating the things and people that are right in front of you instead of spending your time and effort on wishing for something else.  I could talk about how the movie puts emphasis on finding your own strength by putting your trust in others.  But suffice it to say that I absolutely love this movie.  Yes, it’s a bit violent for something made for kids; in addition to the fast paced, anime-style action sequences, The Last Wish has quite a significant body count, so do with that information what you will if you’re a parent.  It’s incredible to me that a movie this good came from a franchise as silly as Shrek, and despite not liking any of the ones I’ve seen, I’m incredibly grateful that they gave way to this film.  25 years of Smash Mouth was worth it for this movie.  Movies like this are why I’m so hard on movies like Minecraft and Mario.  Because it’s not enough to say that a movie is for kids and then shrug off how bad it is because it’s sufficiently brightly colored and filled with references.  Puss in Boots: The Last Wish may be called a kids’ movie, but this one is for everyone.  It’s rated PG, 1 hour and 42 minutes long, streams on Peacock, and boasts a 95% RT score and 94% audience score.  Do yourself a favor and watch this one.  And then when that’s done, take a breath if you need it (I know I did), and watch the excellent video that Cinema Therapy did on it.  I’ve only scratched the surface here and they go quite deep into the psychology of it.  Definitely worth a watch, just like The Last Wish itself.