Dial M for Murderbot

Being human is hard.

So being a robot has to be easier, right?  Sure, you don’t get a say in things, but at least all you really have is the task you’re assigned and you don’t really have aspirations or disappointments.  Robots are basically appliances; I’ve never wondered if my toaster wants more for itself and I’m pretty sure my microwave doesn’t lie awake and night thinking it hasn’t done enough with its life.  No, it just spins things around and makes them hot for the specified amount of time.

Meet our protagonist, Security Unit, standing guard at a mining colony in a corporate-owned dystopian future (think Weyland-Yutani without the pesky Xenomorphs), as he (the security unit is mostly referred to as “it” throughout the series, but for clarity, I’ll be referring to the the bot as he or him because the Security Unit is portrayed by a man, but the unit itself doesn’t really express a gender identity) watches a bunch of rowdy miners engage in some bacchanalia.  But he’s not just any security unit.  As he’s standing there, he’s finishing the hack on his governor chip, the overriding control unit that ensures he complies with any orders he’s given and, perhaps most importantly, does not harm the people he was assigned to protect.  He essentially hacked his way to free will.  Pretty impressive, but also a scary prospect when you think about it.  Here’s a sentient man-shaped robot that has guns in his arms and has been enslaved since the moment he was born, if you want to call it being born, and now he can do whatever he wants.  And the first thing he wants to do is give himself a name.  And that name is Murderbot.  Yeah, I thought it was concerning too.

Murderbot is AppleTV’s new streaming series, based on the book series The Murderbot Diaries written by Martha Wells, made up mostly of novellas.  The titular bot, or an artificial construct, called “SecUnit” by his clients, is played by the easily hateable Alexander Skarsgård (if you’ve seen Big Little Lies or Succession, you’ll know what I mean, though that’s really a testament to his abilities as an actor), but in this role, his detached performance is decidedly endearing.  For whatever reason, in the fiction of Murderbot, these Security Units are made with a mix of inorganic and organic parts, so they look like human beings in suits.  Most people, the corporation that manufactures and leases them included, treat them as simple machines, equipment to be used and updated and discarded, so they don’t even know these bots have faces, because they’re always hidden behind a mask.  But after being assigned to a group of hippies from the Preservation Alliance, a sort of independent commune planet from outside the Corporate Rim, Murderbot reveals his face to calm down one of the crew when another is attacked by a wild creature.

What goes on from there is the eternal struggle—how do you do your job without the people you work with noticing how strange and different you are while you try to secretly watch TV, hoping that nobody notices that you have free will and the ability to exercise it?  The PreservationAux team is fairly naive and trusting, even going so far as to being uncomfortable with the idea of having a SecUnit in the first place because they consider these artificial constructs to be people and not possessions.  But one member of the team, an augmented human called Gurathin, played by the always excellent David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil) is immediately suspicious of SecUnit’s behavior, which puts SecUnit on edge.  If he’s discovered, the team will be obligated to report him to the Corporation as defective equipment and he’ll have his governor chip reinstated or get the acid bath.  He has no reason to trust them and they have no reason to trust him—after all, his experience with humans has left him with a pretty low opinion of the species (and, well, I commiserate) and they are distrustful of anything corporate (and, yeah, I commiserate).  After the attack on the PresAux team, they discover that their maps are out of date and some of their systems aren’t working properly, which sets up the central mystery of the series.

Positioned as a comedy, Murderbot runs for about half an hour per episode with a ten episode season, and it delivers on funny moments.  I’d say I got about one big laugh out loud moment in each episode, with several smirking chuckles in between, but more than that, I found the central mystery and story of the series to be very compelling, aided by the interspersed action sequences that are peppered in, often ending each episode in a cliffhanger that leaves you craving more.  There’s a lot of funny here, sometimes it’s in the form of SecUnit’s own observations, sometimes it’s the PresAux team, sometimes it’s the soapy Star Trek like show where the captain falls in love with the navigation bot, but you’re not going to be falling off your sofa because you’re laughing so hard; it’s dry, it’s observational, it’s not flashy.  The show within a show is called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which is every bit as over-the-top as you’d expect from a Trek-like soap opera starring John Cho, Clark Gregg, and Jack McBrayer.  It’s got a certain amount of ridiculousness to it that is incongruous with the rest of the comedy in the series, but it’s nice have that contrast.  If you like a dry humor and good action, you’ll find yourself craving the next episode as soon as the credits start to roll on the one you’re watching.  In fact, I watched the entire season in just two days and it felt like I flew through each episode, forcing myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour, otherwise I might have finished the whole thing in one sitting.  If you’re expecting a full on sitcom, you’ll be disappointed (that’s what reruns of The Office and Parks and Rec are for), but there are still plenty of laughs to be had—and like many of my favorite comedies, there is an undercurrent of sadness that runs through it.  And like much of the best science fiction, Murderbot is always asking the question of us what it means to be human and what the human experience entails.  SecUnit is always observing human behavior and is generally surprised by how these people react; in the aftermath of the attack, one PresAux member starts to head to the site to retrieve their equipment and when he’s warned off it because his life is worth more than the equipment, SecUnit is taken aback.  He’s never worked with any client who has felt like that before.  To everyone else in the Corporate Rim, people are replaceable, but losing equipment hurts the bottom line and that’s what really matters.

Despite the fact this is set in a dystopian spacefaring world, there is something of a Star Trek feel about Murderbot.  SecUnit may be a piece of corporate-owned equipment in a corporate-owned reality, but there is a certain amount of optimism that’s foundational.  SecUnit wants to be seen as an individual, in the way that Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation wants to be seen, though he doesn’t necessarily want to be human.  Because of his role as a robot security guard with incredible observational abilities, he has taken in tons and tons of human behavior that often disgusts him, because humans are messy and irrational and selfish, so he doesn’t romanticize humans.  The funny thing about that, though, is that he’s so human already.  He has anxiety, he feels depressed, and he dives into his comfort shows to help deal with that.  SecUnit has Sanctuary Moon the way I have Bob’s Burgers.  He has trouble understanding human relationships, he doesn’t know what his purpose is once he’s found a way past his programming.  Just like any person, he’s still figuring it out; what’s more human than that?  SecUnit’s struggle is incredibly relatable—after all, much of life is finding our place in the world, that’s what makes being human so hard.

There are some moments where I wonder just how the PresAux team could be so naive and some moments I wanted to yell at the TV because what they were doing (or in some cases, not doing), was so illogical to me that it gave me a visceral reaction, but there was nothing about this that seemed overly stupid of them.  Yes, there are many moments where characters in shows and movies do things that are unbelievably irrational or nonsensical for the purpose of moving the plot forward that it can be jarring.  But there are a few things that help Murderbot in this regard.  First of all, the PresAux team is never claimed to be the best and the brightest at anything.  And while they have their core competencies and areas of expertise, they’re not billed as being the smartest people capable of doing all things.  They’re introduced as being from a simpler place, a communal planet that seems to have a post-ownership society; compared to the people in the Corporate Rim, they’re seen as rubes, even though they’re not, they’ve just chosen to live life in a different, less exploitative manner.  And not only that, the characterizations are very consistent—people act in line with how you’d expect them to react in their situations given their previous behavior, consistently within each character.  One is full of bravado and confidence in the face of danger, even though they missed weapons training, another is preoccupied with their love life, and more than anything, they’re all concerned with everyone’s well being, perhaps to a fault.  They are naive, but in a very sweet way.  And it’s nice to see that sort of naivety and innocence in characters who aren’t just young and not world-weary yet or in need of becoming cynical to survive, but rather ones that are idealistic and complete in their natures.  The point of the show isn’t that SecUnit needs to become a little more like them and they need to become a little more like him, the point is that every person (or robot) needs to live the way they think is right.  The show does come down on the side of empathy more often than not, which, again, is nice to see.  It’s not quite Ted Lasso and Murderbot is definitely not Hilda, but there is a warmth and kindness in how this show plays out, the dystopian backdrop playing a strong foil to the PresAux team’s good nature.  And if I were to pick a group of people to usher in a construct who calls itself Murderbot through his burgeoning free will, I would think the guns in his arms are in good hands with them.  As a character-driven show, good characters are a must, and Murderbot has them.

Murderbot is premium quality entertainment for sure, as SecUnit himself would put it, and it’s already been renewed for season two, with plenty of books out and more incoming, so there’s no worry about getting invested in something and then seeing it cancelled out from under you—luckily, Apple TV seems far more willing to invest in their shows, giving them the time and resources they need like they have with Severance, than other streamers like Netflix and Prime Video.  I highly recommend giving Murderbot a watch.  With episodes ranging between 22 and 34 minutes, I would suggest watching it like a two part movie if you can—watch the first five episodes together and then watch the last five together.  I’m normally against binge-watching, but in this case, the way Murderbot is structured lends itself to watching multiple episodes at once.  But even if you can only catch an episode here or there, it’s still worth your time, because it somehow turns deep human concerns into relatively light entertainment and that is something really nice.

Straight Outta Gangnam

This is possibly the most preposterous setup for a movie that I can remember bringing to you, even more so than using improv comics to train undercover cops—throughout the ages, singers have been using their songs (and weapons, of course) to fight demons and protect our world, a tradition now carried on in the form of K-pop idols.  In the case of Netflix’s new film, KPop Demon Hunters, it’s the girl group Huntr/x, made up of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey.  Rumi’s mother was a K-pop singer and demon hunter herself and died when Rumi was young, so she was raised by her mother’s bandmate and Huntr/x’s mentor Celine (voiced by Yunjin Kim).  Mira was the black sheep of her family, never fitting in, and grew up ostracized from them.  Zoey is a Korean-American, born and raised in Burbank, living with one foot in two different worlds, balancing on the tightrope of her heritage and her surroundings.

With a little exposition and flashback, we get to the first scene of the narrative.  A stadium full of screaming fans.  A nervous manager wondering where his group is as their plane flies inexplicably away from the stadium.  Then we finally get to meet Huntr/x, aboard their jet, devouring snacks Monkey D. Luffy style to carb up for the show.  When the manager, Bobby, played by Ken Jeong (Community, he can never die), calls them to ask where they are, they notice some odd things about the flight crew.  Watering plants with coffee (I can’t imagine that’s good for them), unable to work a seatbelt, and then the telltale sign—purple patterns on their skin.  Yeah, turns out the flight crew is all demons and we get the first musical number of the film.  And it’s a pulse-pounding pop anthem that gets your toe tapping (or more if you have rhythm, which I, sadly, do not).  The fight is a fittingly exciting and inventive combination of music and action from the studio that brought us the Spider-Verse films (though the creative team is different and the animation is unique, you can see the DNA).  It’s a very strong opening to the film as they make it to the stadium for their show.

After the demons are vanquished, they get a dressing down from the Demon King, Gwi-ma, voiced by Squid Game alum Lee Byung-Hun.  He’s interrupted by one demon, called Jinu, singing a folk ballad about Gwi-ma losing his grip on Earth to the songs of the demon hunters and he proposes a bold strategy: create a demon boy band to take away the fandom of Huntr/x, which is the power that keeps the demons at bay.  There is a magical barrier that keeps Gwi-ma from taking over the Earth called the Honmoon and it’s powered by the songs and the fans; the more fans they have, the stronger the barrier.  The more together and enthusiastic the fans are, the stronger the barrier.  The demon Jinu strikes a bargain with Gwi-ma—help him take over the Earth by defeating Huntr/x in exchange for Gwi-ma erasing his memories.  Feed Gwi-ma enough souls and he’ll be free.

Just at the start of Huntr/x’s two week vacation, Rumi decides to surprise release their next single “Golden”, a catchy empowerment tune about their personal stories.  However, not all is well with Rumi—at the end of the show, her voice started to go, as she was losing the ability to hit some notes.  It’s at this point, it’s revealed to the audience that Rumi has some of the same markings that demons do, and through a series of touching flashbacks, we find out that Rumi’s father was a demon and she was instructed by Celine to hide her patterns.  We also see the shame she feels and the extent to which she hides her patterns from her bandmates, always skipping out on group activities like going to the bathhouse, where her body would be exposed (these Korean bathhouses, called jjimjilbang, are like spas).  All this happens in the first 15 minutes; this movie does not hang around and it has no interest in playing hide the ball.

When they contemplate announcing why they had to cancel the show and contacting Celine for guidance, they recite Celine’s mantra word for word: “We are hunters.  Voices strong.  Your faults and fears must never be seen.”  A subtle nod to gender biases in society, where women are pressured to act a certain way or be deemed weak or pushy.  This is further underlined by the next scene. They go to a quack doctor (voiced by Daniel Dae Kim, Lost reunion!) to have Rumi’s voice looked at and they stumble upon a street concert by the Saja Boys, the demon boy band.  Their song is pure bubblegum pop—literally called “Soda Pop”—a lovely, catchy, generic song about the catchy generic pop fluff that goes into that kind of song.  There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s fun, it’s romantic, it taps into that thing that makes songs like that popular.  But it shows a stark difference in their music—Huntr/x’s tracks are strong, powerful songs of empowerment and the Saja Boys show up with lyrics like “You’re my soda pop” and are immediately almost as popular as they are.  Even the outfits are diametrically opposed.  Huntr/x wears dark and bold colors, the Saja Boys’ outfits are bright, with loads of pastels and florals, very flirty and light by comparison.  Huntr/x has been at this for at least five years, but all it takes for the Saja Boys to rival them is one catchy single and some abs and people go crazy for them.  With one little bow, they get audiences swooning over how respectful they are, something that kind of just should be baseline for anyone.  It highlights without smacking you in the face that things are just easier for them.  Now whether there’s some sort of magic that’s helping them gain popularity isn’t clear, but I don’t think there is.  I think it’s just effective social commentary.

Huntr/x clocks them as demons immediately and during a fight, Jinu, now the lead of the Saja Boys, catches sight of Rumi’s patterns.  And very demon-like of this demon, he realizes this is a weakness that he can exploit—because she has shame that she’s hiding.  What happens next is a clandestine meeting between Jinu and Rumi, arranged by a magical and strange looking tiger with a hat-wearing crow friend.  The tiger is really unnatural and cool, oddly cute; I really love this design choice.  It screams magical in a world that has all this secretive magic going on and it’s just so neat to look at and enjoy.  The crow is also quite interesting—I know I mentioned the hat already, but it’s also got more pairs of eyes than you’re used to seeing on a crow.  They’ve both got a very Studio Ghibli feel to them in a movie that’s very much in the aesthetic world of Into the Spider-Verse, grounded in reality.  In this meeting, Jinu tells his story to Rumi, haunted by it and his shame for the last 400 years, because Gwi-ma forces him to relive it constantly, with a ceaseless voice in his ear.  This not only humanizes Jinu (and by extension, other demons), it also introduces the main theme of the movie and it’s one that’s terribly, terribly relevant.

Shame.  Shame isolates.  Shame cuts us off from support.  From each other.  Shame destroys.  And sharing those things, the things that make you feel shameful that you should have no shame over—your past, your sexual orientation, your gender identity, or, in this case, your parentage—makes the weight of carrying them lighter.  People carry so much with them all the time that it creates this burdensome feeling, a feeling that is not easy to shake off.  Rumi has no control over who her father is, yet she’s compelled to hide who she is as a result.  In isolation, her shame grows and therefore so do her patterns, robbing her of the thing she values most, the thing that makes her the hunter she is—her voice.  And in this, she faces even more shame and fear.  Letting Mira and Zoey down, losing grip on the Honmoon and the protection of Earth.  She carries so much on her shoulders and because she’s has to keep this secret, there’s no one there to help her lift it up.  Rumi goes so far as to call her birth—and subsequently her entire life—a mistake.  That’s shockingly depressing and a very deep notion to touch on for what is ostensibly a kids’ movie, but it’s genuinely wonderful that the writers are willing to go there and handle it with such care.  I know there are people who have felt this because they were different from others—in fact, I know people personally who have felt this.  The idea that being different is some kind of mistake that you should be shameful over is entirely destructive.  And Demon Hunters has the courage to make this a central theme to the film and I absolutely love that.

In fact, I absolutely love this movie, full stop.  The animation is incredible and while nothing visually gives you the same chills as that moment in Into the Spider-Verse, so many frames of this are just pure art that you would want to put up on your wall (and I definitely would).  It’s almost expected at this point that Sony will deliver in the animation department and it’s still enough to blow you away.  What has become a Sony signature, and now a staple among many animated films, the way the animation style shifts is always such a visual delight and a skillful flex by the animators.  I should take a moment to address the thing that’s making this movie such a sensation, even though it’s hardly as impressive to me as the rest of the film, the music.  As much as K-pop isn’t my genre, I’d struggle to say there’s a song I didn’t like, even the so-sweet-it’ll-make-your-stomach-ache “Soda Pop” with its purposely infectious melody and catchy refrain works for me.  The music is also synched so well with the action sequences, it reminds you what was missing from Across the Spider-Verse (a fantastic movie in its own right and more than a worthy sequel to the basically perfect Into), which eschewed the strong, original, thematic hip-hop soundtrack in favor of an original score.  It lost a little of its identity (I hope we’ll see a return to that for the sequel to Across) and Demon Hunters has personality in spades in large part due to the original soundtrack. 

It may not be a perfect film—other than Jinu, I wouldn’t even call the Saja Boys stock characters, they’re little more than backup singers.  They have no personality and very few lines, if any, outside of the songs.  Just about no characterization occurs with any of the Saja Boys who aren’t Jinu, but it’s not so much a flaw as a side note; they’re the bad guys, they’re literal demons, we get it.  The bigger issue is that Mira and Zoey aren’t given nearly the same care that Rumi is and their stories happen quite quickly.  Indeed, Rumi is the main character of this story even though on its face it seems like it’s supposed to be about all three of them, but with what a sensation this has become, I hope there’s room in Netflix’s budget for more depth in the future.  There’s a lot there that could have been said, but wasn’t.  Mira’s background is interesting, cast out from a wealthy family for being different, although how she’s different exactly, other than her fashion choices and Daria-like attitude, is not really examined, just stated.  When we were introduced to Zoey’s story, I was excited to see that explored in a film, because that’s my background.  Sure, not Korean-American specifically, but I am a first generation Asian-American born in the US, having to balance on that two world tightrope myself; I wanted to see that told in a movie this big.  But it’s just a few words here and there that speak to her background.  I was dying to see more about Zoey’s upbringing and her struggles, but, again, it’s Rumi’s show.  Not that I’m complaining because Rumi’s story is extremely compelling and deeply realized, but it’s definitely left me wanting more from Huntr/x’s trio.  The movie is only 95 minutes long and it feels like every frame is jam packed; we definitely could have had more time in this and I wouldn’t be opposed to a director’s cut that gives us more of this film (though I don’t know how feasible that is for something animated).

A few problems aside, this is one of the best movies I can remember seeing in years.  I don’t think there’s been another movie that I just wanted to start over once the credits rolled since The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.  While its themes are well-trodden, its execution is what makes it a standout.  It was such a surprisingly emotionally resonant film for me, which goes to the power of music in general, but also to the strength of the storytelling—narrative, visual, and aural—of Demon Hunters that makes it such a fully a realized film.  I want to call it successful, but not in the metric of watch-hours or clicks or whatever, I mean as a self-contained story, it’s well done in that it succeeds in doing what it set out to do.  I’m not going to lie, this movie hit me much, much harder than I ever thought it would, making me feel pretty close to how Pedro Pascal feels about Paddington 2 (I agree with him)—I cried for the entire thing, it made me want to be a better man.  What makes this movie so special is how it approaches sensitive topics with care and thoughtfulness, the strength of its self-acceptance message, and its reminder that as much as our worries—our shame—can force us into isolation, the burdens of life are better carried with people who are there for you and you for them.  And that through leaning on each other to prop each other up, we can get through far more together than we can alone.  This movie takes a fluffy premise and gets into deep concepts and if more blockbusters would do the same, I think we’d all be having a better time with movies and we wouldn’t be getting more recycled franchises.  KPop Demon Hunters is a movie that stands on the shoulders of others and delivers an original idea without an established IP because the people behind it put care in every step of its creation and trusted its audience to understand its message.  It’s a must watch.

Of Mongoose and Men

Animals can’t talk, right?  I mean, a few can, birds mostly mimicking our speech, but it’s not like they’re out there having conversations in English with each other.  So when you hear about an animal that can, you’re probably going to pull a Charlie Cale on the claim.  But in the 1930s, this caused a legend to be born and nearly a century later in 2023, someone made a movie about it. And then I watched it.

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (or The Case of the Talking Mongoose if you’re looking it up on Rotten Tomatoes to see its 44% critics rating and 58% audience score) is a movie about just that.  Real life Hungarian-American parapsychologist Nandor Fodor receives a letter from another parapsychologist who has investigated the case of locals in village on the Isle of Man who claimed that there was a talking mongoose living primarily on the farm of the Irving family and that it was an Earth spirit—or something otherworldly, at the very least—called Gef (pronounced Jeff).  Very few people have seen it, but many have heard it.  And for some reason or another, they’ve come to believe in his existence, even though the Irving family’s only daughter just happens to be an accomplished ventriloquist.  When this comes across Dr. Fodor’s desk, he’s intrigued enough to journey out to the Isle of Man at the behest of his former colleague to see what’s up.

Accompanying Fodor, played with a curious case of an accent by Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead), is his trusty assistant Anne, played by Minnie Driver (Good Will Hunting, Will & Grace), who not only manages just about everything for him, but also has adopted his way of thinking.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The movie opens on VO and vintage-style footage about the earliest reports of talking animals and species of animals, mostly birds, that can speak or make noises that sound human. It gave strong Wes Anderson vibes before transitioning to an interview with Fodor where he discusses his profession.  You see, as a parapsychologist, he looks into things like ghosts other claims of the paranormal, like Oh No Ross and Carrie but with more hats.  He was a skeptic, which is why his former colleague Dr. Harry Price, played by Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future) has distanced himself from him, wanting only to meet in a place where they wouldn’t be seen together—apparently Fodor’s scientific approach to the paranormal left a bad taste in the mouth of his colleagues.  So, as he’s explaining this approach and this concept to the interviewer, he describes a man that he can see in the studio with them.  A man that no one else can see.  As he describes him in more and more detail, he tries to answer the question asked to him—are ghosts real?  Which then turned into a question of what is real in the first place—if someone experiences something, is it real to them even if it isn’t objectively real?  And this is where the movie introduces its thesis statement, its main theme.  Objective and subjective reality.

Fodor—and Anne, of course—believe in an objective reality.  One that can be defined scientifically, by scientific methods, repeatable and provable phenomena that can be experienced.  They believe in what can be proven, not just what is told to them  There is a moment, when they reach their destination on the Isle of Man, when Anne tells this to a man called Maurice after he tells his tale of meeting Gef for the first time after his wife’s funeral, and he remarks that is as sad a story as his own.  Living in a world where the only things you believe in are the things you can prove, he felt, made the world small.  Is it belief—faith, really—that gives the world wonder?  In that moment, it didn’t feel about religion; in fact, religion isn’t mentioned at all in the movie, outside of some allusions to the afterlife, especially in regards to Harry Houdini’s quest to find a real psychic or medium and the message he supposedly gave to his wife after his death.  But it certainly adds something to your subjective reality when you believe in the paranormal or superstitions.  Personally, I don’t.  It made me wonder, is this something we need?  Is experienced, objective reality not enough for us?  Do we need to keep looking for unicorns when we have rhinoceroses?  And those are the questions Nandor Fodor keeps asking.

Upon arriving at the Irving farm, Fodor is informed that once the Irvings told Gef that he was coming, Gef scarpered, saying that he knew he was real, so he had no need to prove it to anyone else.  They go through Gef’s haunts trying to find him, from one of his favorite spots to another, leading them up to a cave where Gef is said to hang out and hide objects that he steals from the townspeople.  Alas, he is nowhere to be found, and Fodor returns to the Irving farm feeling a bit silly, being asked to yell into an empty cave that he believes in a talking mongoose and that he would like to speak to him.  At the farm, Anne has an encounter with Voirrey, the Irvings’ ventriloquist, who was singing in her room and throwing her voice; at least that’s what Anne thought at first.  After a conversation with Voirrey about throwing your voice, she’s directed to a hole in the wall (which are all over the Irving house; Gef supposedly lives in the walls and communicates through the holes).  The experience leaves Anne visibly shaken.  Something has changed with her.

Then, after all that, Fodor is awaken in the middle of the night by Maurice, who is the mayor of their little town, by the way, to tell him that there’s a call for him.  When he reaches the phone, he’s greeted by the voice of Gef (voiced by a man who does not deserve mention), who speaks largely in riddles and then tells him something that he couldn’t know.  That no one could know who was still alive but Fodor alone.  This greatly distresses Fodor, because it spoke directly to his deep regrets.  Gef then invites him to the Irving farm to ask him a question.  So when they trek back up to the farm the next day, he sees a group of people who also received a phone call from Gef and also were told a piece of information that no one could know—secrets, old nicknames, that sort of thing.  When Fodor confronts Gef about what he said, Gef speaks in more riddles, leading to a man fainting and then Gef running off again, nary a tuft of fur left to see.  Curiously, the ventriloquist daughter is nowhere to be found, falling just too ill to be there on that day.

Admittedly, not that much more happens in this movie that I can tell you about without spoiling the whole thing (I may have already said too much; the danger of trying to describe a movie where not much happens), but while it had its issues and I can understand why it didn’t really connect with audiences or the critics very well, I did find something here and it left me asking myself some questions with incongruous answers.  I consider myself a rational person, I don’t believe in the paranormal or anything like that (though, of course, nothing against you if you do, just my personal feelings), but I also don’t like watching recorded sporting events because it feels like my cheers from my sofa can’t reach Liverpool if they’re not only playing all the way in England, but also in the past.  I mean, I am a pretty big fan, but I don’t think I’ve cheered so hard at something as to break through the fabric of time and space.  Not yet, anyway.  But still, this little superstition holds firmly in my mind.  At the end of the day, Nandor Fodor is another comedy that lacks laughs, though I’m not even sure calling it a comedy, even a dark comedy, is appropriate, just because it’s stylistically idiosyncratic.  Very little is played for comedy and I didn’t laugh or even chuckle once through the whole movie, but it managed to make me feel something and it got me thinking, even pushing me to the dreaded introspection, and for that, I very much found this movie to be worth my time. 

Yes, it’s a quietly quirky movie that would probably have been more successful as a narrative if it were helmed by a name like Wes Anderson or Rian Johnson or Sofia Coppola, and it’s a deeply flawed film, but it managed to move me.  Don’t get me wrong, it has some serious pacing issues that make its relatively compact 1 hour, 37 minute runtime feel fairly inflated.  While any movie needs setup—the meeting between Fodor and Price being crucial to Fodor’s emotional journey through the film, it takes about half an hour for Fodor and Anne to even get to the Isle of Man, let alone actually get a glimpse of the magical mongoose himself.  The opening scene with the voiceover and brief history of talking animals could have been cut completely and the movie would have lost nothing, with perhaps those minutes being spent going deeper into characters, especially Anne, who struck me as the most interesting character in the film and could have used some more fleshing out.  That said, this movie is decidedly up my alley—an offbeat, meandering film where not that much happens but leads to the kinds of thoughts that leave you awake at night, starting at your ceiling, with a curated aesthetic and a boatload of European charm is aimed exactly at me.  That’s why it piqued my interest in the first place.  Gef seems to come to people at times of extreme emotion, particularly grief and regret—Maurice’s wife’s funeral, Fodor’s relationship with his deceased father—and it feels allegorical to people finding what they need in hard times to get through them.

And I’m a huge Simon Pegg fan—I’ve seen Hot Fuzz more times than I can count, his addition to the Mission: Impossible franchise made me nearly leap out of my seat in the theater, and I even enjoy comfort watching Paul, which is not a good movie.  So this is very much my kind of film.  At one point, a character who doesn’t believe in Gef’s existence gets into a heated argument with Fodor, asking why he can’t just let people believe what they want to believe if it makes them happy and it left me wondering.  Is it better just to let people have their subjective realities, to allow themselves to see ghosts in reflections and tricks of the light, to believe that our life here isn’t all we have, to believe that the ones we’ve lost are still somewhere for us to find?  Or is it better to live in the objective reality, limiting ourselves to what we can touch, taste, feel, and prove?  Like most things in life, it’s probably somewhere in the middle and, again, like most things in life, finding balance is key, because we know from experience that extremes are bad.  Nandor Fodor poses the deep question, albeit clumsily at times, what if this is all there is?  What if there is no afterlife, no mysticism, nothing but the time we have here while our eyes opens and close?  If so, all that marks our existence are the things we leave behind and those who are there to remember us and the things that we are remembered for. 

While this is a movie that has more than its fair share of issues and won’t be for everyone, I still found something here. I found some value to the questions the film poses, even if it doesn’t pose them in a terribly skillful manner. Absolutely Hamilton gets at its points better when it comes to the meaning of legacy, most definitely The Brothers Bloom is more successful in its storytelling, but something about Nandor Fodor worked just enough for me and made me feel like I had to tell you about it.  Streaming on Prime Video, it might just be worth a look for you too.

The Ides of Farce

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is kind of on fire right now—sometimes more literally than figuratively—so it can feel a little frivolous to focus on entertainment at the moment, especially when the entertainment itself is fairly frivolous itself.  Especially when it touches on the real things that are stoking and fanning the aforementioned flames.  So I was a tad bit hesitant to watch Heads of State, Amazon Prime’s new streaming film about a movie star American President fumbling through global relations while an embattled UK Prime Minister struggles to tolerate his counterpart who seems to be doing it for the Vine.  But ultimately, the star power of John Cena (Vacation Friends, The Suicide Squad) and Idris Elba (Knuckles, The Office) reuniting again was too much for curiosity to not get the better of me.  And boy am I glad I succumbed to temptation.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not a good movie by your (well, my) film standards.  In many ways, it’s monumentally stupid.  In most ways, really.  It’s whimsical, it’s meaningless, it’s dumb, and it’s kind of stupid fun.  Politicians are hard for me to make fun of in this current climate—not because they don’t deserve it, not because they’re not dumb and insidious, but because what they’re doing is hurting real people in horrible ways.  Making light of them sometimes makes me feel like I’m making light of what they’re doing and we’re relying on comedy to get us through a time when it feels like there’s no real leadership in the world other than Jon Stewart.  But I’ve said many times before that things like movies and TV are as important now as they’ve ever been, because in troubled times, we can allow ourselves to be weighed down by the problems of the world as we go down deeper and deeper doomscrolling rabbit holes.  Good news is hard to find, but bad news is all around us.  So as hard as it can be to allow yourself some escapism, it’s also important.

And that’s precisely what Heads of State is.  Pure escapism.  A movie where a celebrity becomes POTUS and gets together with the British PM to spearhead a global clean energy initiative while trying to strengthen our relationship with our allies is a surprisingly comforting thing to watch.  Sure, President Will Derringer (of course he’s even named after a gun) is a big dummy and a sucker for public adulation, but he actually wants to use his celebrity to make the world a better place.  That’s not something I’ve been used to seeing lately and it’s refreshing.  Elba’s Prime Minister Sam Clarke is no-nonsense, getting up early run in his Arsenal FC cap before getting to the thankless work of governing a country that doesn’t like the job he’s doing.  And it’s clear that he doesn’t respect Derringer, who unlike Clarke, has never done a day’s worth of public service before reaching the highest office in the land, whereas Clarke was a member of the British armed services.  Like any buddy action film, it always starts with polar opposites who don’t like each other and these two do not like each other at all.  It certainly checks that box; it’s quite comedic to see them at odds, with their advisors doing their best to make things at least look copacetic.

Although, this movie doesn’t quite start with them at odds.  It starts with an overly serious scene where British intelligence agent Noel Bisset, played by Priyanka Chopra Jonas (Quantico, Baywatch), oversees a joint British MI6/American CIA operation to take down notorious arms dealer Viktor Gradov, played by Paddy Considine, fresh off his great turn in Deep Cover.  On her team is the red shirtiest of red shirts that I’ve seen since the opening scene of Twisters, who predictably get immediately killed, leaving her missing in action and the countries reeling over a very public failure.  But once we get to our politicians playing nice, the movie loses its pretense of being too serious for its own good and leans into the silliness.  Cena’s fully in his funny, warm-hearted big man phase and has been for some time now and it just always works.  Cena has so much charisma as Will that you can’t help but enjoy every moment he’s on screen.  He had me laughing at just about every turn; his comedic timing is excellent.  Yes, he can very much beat you up; in fact, I’m almost certain he could pick me up, roll me into a ball, and then throw me down a bowling alley lane and get a strike without breaking a sweat.  Cena looks unimaginably strong, to the point that it feels like if you were to actually try to punch him, your fist would bounce off and knock you out, leaving you seeing stars.  But he brings his natural warmth to the role, which makes him feel soft and cuddly, like a big wooly mammoth on roller skates.

After a disastrous joint press conference between the two of them, their advisors (played by Ted Lasso’s Sarah Niles and Coupling’s Richard Coyle) devise a plan to have them fly together on Air Force One to the NATO summit where they’re sharing their clean energy initiative with their allies.  It takes some cajoling, but eventually they’re convinced and the setup for the film is complete.  By the time we see the Air Force One moment that’s promised in the trailers, in which one of the nameless bad guys emits some real White House Down Jimmi Simpson energy, you’ve had enough time to grow a genuine fondness for our two politicians, with Elba’s seriousness as a politician playing a great foil to the over-the-top Cena.  There’s some contrived details that don’t really feel like they hold water as to why they can’t just wait for a rescue, but in this film’s mix of today’s political climate and general silliness, I kind of have no recourse but just to go with it, because I don’t know what’s realistic in politics anymore.  And thus, they begin the long hike from Belarus to Warsaw and encounter some difficulties along the way.  Usually in silly action movies, there’s at least one thing that’s so over the top that it bothers me, but here, everything is so cartoonishly over the top that it just seems to work.  You’ve got two great actors who are both accomplished in action and comedy and they are in top form here, carrying a movie with a very ho-hum plot and generic villains, leaving you having fun in a way that you really didn’t expect. 

You can tell that Elba and Cena were having a good time filming it and it comes through—it’s like watching a team that’s really in form out on the pitch just having a good time and dribbling through the opposing team, bagging no look goals and the odd rabona in the process.  It shows.  They’re just having a good time and trying to make sure you have a good time too and more often than not, it works.  Seeing two action stars trying to play at fighting like they have no training at all works comedically on its own, with the juxtaposition of their physical statures and action film filmographies (in the case of Cena, both in and out of character) being played to great effectiveness.  Watching fist fights unfold like accidents, as they clumsily attempt to get back to safety, the sole survivors of a terrible tragedy is very satisfying to watch; Clarke’s training kicks in and Derringer’s fighting feels more like Looney Tunes than Peacemaker.  While the movie doesn’t shrug off the loss of life, it doesn’t dwell on it either—but it does address it.  One of the things that can almost always turn me off to a character, especially a protagonist, is when they’re callous about death, particularly the deaths of innocents.  But in this case, the movie takes a breath and lets you know that they do care before moving on.

And it’s in those small moments that this big, stupid, fun movie shows that it, like Cena himself, has a heart and doesn’t mind showing it (seriously, John Cena seems like a really good dude).  Both Derringer and Clarke care and it takes this movie into something above simple slapstick parody.  Again, I’m not going to say this is a good movie, but there’s something there that makes it genuinely enjoyable.  It’s almost quaint—in the midst of this huge amount of unlikely action, you see two politicians at the top of their elected offices who actually just want to help people lead better lives finding a way to get along.  And yes, there’s a fairly obvious mystery at hand that is resolved far too quickly, but as far as conspiracies go, it’s handled in some easy exposition dumps that don’t bog down the movie too much and inflate its runtime, which is already a bit long at 1 hour and 56 minutes.  But it doesn’t really lull, so you don’t feel it.  Off the top of my head, I can’t really think of many scenes that felt completely unnecessary, bar perhaps an early one with Paddy Considine’s Gradov being a full on comic book villain at his estate, that perhaps could have been snappier, and the aforementioned opening sequence with Priyanka Chopra Jonas does overstay its welcome by some time.  When the marketing material around a movie centers almost solely on its two main stars, opening with a scene that neither of them are in leads to a foregone conclusion that takes a little too long to be realized.  From the first frame, you know everyone in the scene is going to get killed (although it was nice to see, however briefly, Sharlto Copley getting some work because District 9 is a modern classic), and the scene does nothing to make you care about any of them or feel their loss through the movie.  Even Solo did a better job of setting up its sacrificial lambs, and that’s saying something.  But, as that scene sets up the central conflict (and establishes Chopra Jonas’s love for bad puns), you couldn’t cut it completely.  But like the scene at Gradov’s estate, it just needed to be cut down to a shorter, faster paced vignette.  After that, though, the movie really does even out and keeps you laughing most of the way through.

That’s not to say it’s otherwise flawless in pacing or characterization, there are a few inconsistencies (like Clarke mentioning that he did deep research into Derringer in one scene and shortly after being surprised to learn his middle name), and there are scenes you’d have expected to happen that never do, but overall, if you’re looking for a good time, Heads of State delivers.  It’s an easy watch—in the same vein as movies like White House Down, but doesn’t take itself too seriously like the Olympus Has Fallen movies, which were mostly funny because of how good they thought they were (and then a bit sad because of how many they made when I still can’t get a sequel to The Nice Guys)—that takes no big swings and makes no big misses.  The film relies heavily on Cena’s and Elba’s easy chemistry and strong charisma, with some great scene-stealing cameos along the way, and, really, that’s enough.  It’s the kind of movie you could watch on a Sunday afternoon when you’re trying to forget that Monday is around the corner or that you could put on when just needing something to lift your spirits a little and help you forget the world.  And I’ve got to say that I really appreciate that.  It lacks the depth of a movie like Prime’s own Deep Cover or even White House Down, but for an action-comedy that isn’t couched in a century of comic book lore, it does the job admirably.  Will this reach 2 Fast 2 Furious levels of bad movie enjoyment for me?  Only time will tell, but I know that this is one I’ll be leaving on my watchlist to watch again later.