Category Archives: Movies

Twin Peaks: The Entire Shebang

A year ago, Mike Muncer, podcaster behind the excellent Evolution of Horror series launched a new show The Detective & The Log Lady, a Twin Peaks rewatch podcast. I decided to rewatch the series along with episodes of the podcast and my sweetie-wife came along for the ride as well.

This past Sunday we completed the voyage watching part 18 of the Twin Peaks‘ third season, also known as Twin Peaks: The Return which aired on the Showtime premium cable channel in 2017.

ABC Television

It has been quite a ride. I have not rewatched the original series in decades, watched the prequel film Fire Walk With Me only once in the theaters and retained very little of it, and did not even know of the existence of Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces, a feature film length collection of deleted scenes from the prequel film. Watching it all week in, week out for a year, keeping the characters and story elements fresh in my mind as I experience the 27-year journey was an entertainment journey unlike anything I had experienced.

Twin Peaks when it aired in 1990 on ABC became a national and cultural phenomenon but the second season, adrift after the creators stepped back because the networked forced them to reveal the solution to mysteries they preferred not to, lost that grip on the nation’s imagination and the series ended on a cliffhanger that would not be resolved until 2017.

Freed from network constraints and interference the series’ third and final season presented almost nothing that the fan base demanded, instead diving deep into the abstract dream-logic that so defines the work of director and co-writer David Lynch. The entire series defies easy explanation or interpretation. Is it about the evil and corruption that lies just under the surface of American life? Is it about trans-dimension beings waging a war for humanity with entities such as ‘Bob’ and ‘The Fireman’? It is merely a strange dream held by television characters where some of them are actually aware of their nature as fictional constructs?

Arguments can be made for any and all of these premises, often with all of them playing a part in interpreting the program.

What is undeniable is that Twin Peaks had a massive impact on television going forward from the 1990s. Not only did programming become more experimental in their plots and conceptions but Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost showed that it was possible to bring feature film cinema quality to television, paving the way for today’s prestige TV.

I may not understand it all, but I admire it all just the same.

Movie Review: Fountain of Youth

In 1981 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas released the box-office-busting adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark earning $354 million dollars and setting off a wave of copycat movies hoping to reproduce that lightning in a bottle financial effect.

Most of the copycat productions were of limited budgets, lacking major stars, and frankly poor-quality scripts. As with Alien before it, Raiders of the Lost Ark is singular and stands out well ahead of any imitators.

Now, 44 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, comes another imitator trying to capture that sense of adventure and fun that so marked the original film, Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth.

Siblings Luke and Charlotte Purdue (John Krasinski and Natalie Portman) the children of an

Apple TV+

adventure-loving archeologist are estranged because Luke continues their father’s adventuring ways while Charlotte has settled into a routine mundane existence as a museum curator. Luke pulls Charlotte out of her dull life and onto a globe-spanning hunt for clues hidden in historical artifacts for the location of the fabled Fountain of Youth. They are being bankrolled by billionaire Owen Carter seeking to avoid an untimely death due to liver cancer. Along the way they are pursued by both Interpol for the crimes they are committing and a shadowy secret society.

With Guy Ritchie directing and Apple producing Fountain of Youth is no cheap, hastily thrown-together production of a movie. It boasts an impressive list of talent, shooting locations around the world, well-crafted action and chase scenes, but still fails to be engaging.

The characters are reflections of archetypes seen over and over again. Attempts to give them rich inner lives that might elevate them from flat to people with depth utterly fail and no chemistry exists either on the screen or the page for the enemy to lovers subplot between Luke and the woman representing the secret society determined to stop him.

At no point was I ever really caring about the characters or events on the screen, which is not how I always feel about Guy Ritchie’s work. He has directed some very entertaining and engrossing films, but this is not one of them. It does strike me that anytime Ritchie strays from modern criminal London his odds of producing a movie I really like drops considerably.

Fountain of Youth is streaming on Apple TV+.

Overtures: Vanishing Cultural Knowledge

One of my brain-resting pastimes is watching ‘reactors’ on YouTube. These are generally millennials viewing classic films, which depressingly are often from the 80s & 70s, for the first time. As a boomer born in the early 60s these are movies I have seen many that are close to my heart and among my favorites. It is surprising just how successful some of these channels have become. One Canadian lady now in the US, who until she started this project described herself as a rom-com and comedy gal, had her channel, Popcorn in Bed, become so large that Tom Cruise’s production company invited her to the premiere of a Mission Impossible film.

One of the fascinating aspects of watching these channels is seeing how some things that were once common knowledge slip away into obscurity. It makes me feel like Galadriel’s narration at the start of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: “…some things were lost because none now live who remember it.”

I have written before about how these younger people have no context for the little white nitroglycerin tablets Father Merrin takes for his heart disease in The Exorcist but another larger thing on my mind this morning: overtures.

Taken from ballet and opera, an overture in film is a piece of music played before the start of a movie used to set a mood. They were never common, but overtures were once employed much more often, usually of grand elaborate productions such as Gone with the Wind (1939) or Ben-Hur (1959). I can’t recall when I learned about overtures in feature films, but it was long ago, so much so that it is just part of what I know about movies. I think the first overture I experienced before a film was for the original release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

So many of these millennials, coming to adulthood in a world so unlike mine own, have never encountered an overture nor have they learned what they were from some text or book. When these people, who are not dumb or stupid, encounter an overture it is a period of confusion as they sit through several minutes of sometimes a black screen, neither Star Trek: The Motion Picture nor 2001: A Space Odyssey employed a title card with their overtures, with only a score playing. Aside from people who manage to see live Broadway-style productions, and the rare film that still employs them, the overture seems to be slipping out of all knowledge.

M3GAN 2.0

I cannot recall ever being this uninterested in the sequel to a film I enjoyed as I am with M3GAN 2.0.

2022’s M3GAN was not in any way a classic of cinema. The premise was quite simple, Gemma ( Allison Williams) a designer of advanced robotic toys following a tragic accident, becomes the guardian of her niece. Unsuited to the sudden role of substitute mother Gemma effectively turns the task over to her newly created and quite untested android M3GAN, which, taking its instructions far too literally, ends up becoming a murderous machine.

M3GAN leaned heavily into camp with occasional forays into violence that for the theatrical cut were toned down and not explicitly graphic. The resulting movie was one that was fun, did not take itself too seriously, and provided a brief, in not predictable, period of escape from the dreary world of 2022. The fact that the movie grossed more than 10 times its modest budget, and that the script deliberately left this door open, doomed the cinema landscape to a sequel.

Now, three years later, that sequel has arrived and the lackluster, paint by the numbers approach devoid of camp nature makes it one of the least interesting trailers I have seen in quite a while.

As has happened with previous horror franchises, M3GAN the character has developed a fanbase not unlike Michael from Halloween, Jason from Friday the 13th, and Freddy, from A Nightmare on Elm Street. The monsters have become the heroes and M3GAN now follows that dull and trite path as a new evil artificial intelligence arrives and, in one of the least surprising concepts, only M3GAN can counter it. Of course, if she is to be more of a protagonist then M3GAN required an upgrade that transformed her from a little girl to something with a disturbing amount of sexuality.

This is a horror movie that not only will I miss its theatrical run, I shall also miss its video on demand release, and its streaming debut.

Movie Review: The Phoenician Scheme

Full disclosure, I cannot count myself among those who adore writer/director Wes Anderson, but neither am I repelled by his unique content. Including this film, I have seen four of his thirteen feature films with 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel my favorite.

The Phoenician Scheme, like Asteroid City, is set in a fictional version of the mid-twentieth century.

Focus Features

The story centers on Zsa Zsa Korda (Benicio de Toro) a ruthless capitalist engaged in the final phases of funding a massive infrastructure project while dodging assassination attempts and sabotage operations from a shadowy collective. With his funding now facing a shortfall due to the collective, Korda crisscrosses the globe with his estranged daughter and nun Sister Liesel (Mia Threapleton) and his administrative assistant and entomology tutor Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera) in hopes of convincing his backers to cover the financial deficit. Along the way, Korda deals with continuing assassination attempts, communist rebels, life after death mysteries, and the source of his daughter’s estrangement.

The plot, thin as it is, serves as a framework allowing Anderson to essentially present half a dozen or so vignettes centered on each financial backer with each segment preceded by a title card indicating the remaining outstanding percentages that Korda must cover if the project is to be saved. This film is not concerned with the mechanics of plot but is wholly a vehicle to Anderson’s unique style and voice. If you are familiar with Anderson’s films, the center-heavy composition, the horizontally sliding camera movements, the artificial dialog, then you are already familiar with this film. For better or for worse, depending upon your tastes, The Phoenician Scheme lives in the same artistic environment as Asteroid City.

The Phoenician Scheme is primarily a comedy and as such it succeeds at that objective. While I laughed out loud a few times, snickered much more often, and smiled quite a bit, it is not a riot of a comedy. Comedy, like horror, is a genre heavily dependent on the idiosyncratic response of the viewer. If you have enjoyed Anderson’s previous work then you are likely to enjoy this film, if his previous movies did not work for you then it is perhaps best if you find another film to watch.

Screw Canon

Canon, a rule, regulation, or dogma decreed by a church, is often used in fiction to declare which elements of backstory and non-depicted events are part of the fiction’s reality. These days, particularly with the Star Wars franchise I see the term lore used much more often but in the same manner, those events or concepts that are considered part of the franchise’s universe versus theories generated by fandom without any official standing.

Debates about events that are perceived as ‘canon’ can generate intense, personal, and often bitter arguments, particularly online. Personally, I care very little for when canon is violated if it is done in the service of a better story, if it is done because that institutional knowledge is lost from the creative team and the story simply stumbled into something that conflicts with earlier narrative for no real reason, that’s sloppy writing but it generates no anger in me.

Star Trek V forgetting that Jim Kirk had an actual brother, Sam, is such a case, but Star Trek: Strange New Worlds exploring Spock, T’pring, and Christine while shattering ‘canon’ is such interesting character work that I am perfectly happy with it. I can still watch the episode of the original series Amok Time and the seasons of Strange New Worlds with equal enjoyment.

Canon as backstory is good and nice but it should not serve as a straitjacket and when something better comes along it should not prohibit its utilization.

Why did John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ fail at the Box Office?

June 25th, 1982, witnessed the release of The Thing a remake by horror icon John Carpenter of the classic Sci-Fi film The Thing from Another World, both inspired and adapted from the short story Who Goes There by famed writer and editor John W. Campbell Jr. Despite Carpenter’s successful track record of feature films such as Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Fog this movie crashed at the box office, making less than 20 million on a 15 million estimated budget, considering prints and advertising that a movie that lost money. Reportedly Carpenter for decades felt bitter about the movie terrible run even after the film became a classic beloved by millions and considered a masterpiece of modern horror.

1982 was far from a year of depressed box office receipts. Many films scored enormous financial successes that year including such genre fare as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, Poltergeist, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial but along with The Thing another movie that is now considered extraordinary died at with audiences in 1982 Blade Runner.

Blade Runner, I believe, suffered from both studio interference and audience expectations causing its failure to find the success it would eventually discover once alternate edits became widely available, but The Thing is a different story. That film has not been re-tooled, edited, or significantly altered from its original theatrical release. The version hailed as a masterpiece is the same one I watched in 1982.

The film did not change, the culture around it did. The decade prior to The Thing’s release was one of deep cynicism and anti-heroes. The 1970s brought forth films about failure, systems crushing heroes and the futility of trying. Even when heroes won victory it often came at great costs or produced pyric wins. By 1982 this cultural mood had been swept away with ‘morning in America’ and a renewed sense of manifest destinty. Following that massive success of Star Wars and its first sequel The Empire Strikes Back the cultural zeitgeist was one that demanded happy endings, clearly defined heroes and villains, and unbounded optimism. The Thing stood not only in contrast but stark opposition to all of that. It’s heroes were deeply flawed the mood darkly cynical and the ending so ambiguous as to provide no sense of closure for any audience.

We can never know for sure, but I believe if The Thing had been released in 1976 it would have found an audience on that release but for 1982 it simply marched to a beat so different that few could actually hear it.

Movie Review: Thunderbolts*

After never quite finding the time or frankly the motivation to get out to the theaters to see Captain America: Brave New World I returned to my MCU in-theater franchise experience yesterday with Thunderbolts* I can say that skipping the last entry in the series made no discernable difference in the Thunderbolts* experience.

Marvel Studios

While this is team story, featuring Red Guardian (David Harbour) The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), John Walker (Wyatt Russel), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) the story and the film really belong to Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) and her deep nearly debilitating depression.

Our heroes, following a betrayal that was intended to leave them all dead in order to provide a ‘clean record’ for their employer, unite as a fractious collective in order to bring the truth out into the open but along the way encounter an enhanced individual with powers of a magnitude as to make them physically unstoppable. In order to save humanity from an existence of never-ending darkness and depression the team must each face their own deep and persistent psychological traumas.

Directed competently by Jake Schreier from a script by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo with unflashy cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo, Thunderbolts* is very much a return to form for Marvel feature films. It moves fast, uses a mix of humor and pathos to make each scene compelling and emotionally weighty and does not bite off more than it can chew in a feature film’s runtime. The film continues the Marvel Studio’s tradition of both a mid-credit and post-credit scene, but I would have flipped the order of their presentation. If you actually read the credit crawl just before the post-credit scene plays a clue revealing its nature slides across the screen, one that for me acted as a spoiler.

All in all, I enjoyed Thunderbolts* though there are bits and bobs that did not quite sit right for me, and I do believe that some of the characters were treated with less respect than their cinematic history required.

Movie Review: Sinners

It took me a little while to find the time and the energy to get out to the cinema to see Sinnersa film that had my interest from the first time I watched a trailer. It is worth it.

Warner Brothers Studios

Sinners is a horror film so amid the racism, and the twins’ troubled romantic history, the opening night of the joint is marred by Irish vampires drawn to the establishment by the power of Sammy’s voice and music.

Cinema over the decades has presented all manner of vampires, aristocratic European nobility, tragic lovers trapped by the enormity of endless time, farcical flat mates in contemporary Wellington, and countless forgettable bloodsuckers that inspires no terror. Sinners, while not wholly reinventing the monster, much of what people accept as traditional vampiric lore remains, does present them as monsters to be feared and destroyed not an enjoyable method for dodging the grim fact that all things die. These vampires are seductive but decidedly not sexy. The script also artfully sidesteps the tangle created by crosses and crucifixes.

In addition to its tremendous power to frighten, Sinners is also a celebration of survival over centuries of trauma and oppression a celebration experienced in music. It is a horror film, and it is also a musical leaning on the ancient human tradition of oral history in song. More than once Coogler’s movie reminded me of one of my favorite films, The Wicker Man. Both movies deal with isolated communities that live in opposition to the larger culture surrounding them and for whom music is both reverential and festive.

Sinners is well worth the trip out to the cinema.

That Scene in Andor

There are fandom fights fiercer that than those found among the fans of Star Wars and Episode 3, Harvest, of Season 2 Andor provoked a fine one.

Bix (Adria Arjona) and a couple of compatriots, on the lam from Imperial Security, are hiding out on a distant agricultural planet. She comes to the lecherous attention of Imperial Lieutenant Krole (Alex Waldmann). Bix rebuffs his advances and when his attempt to coerce her under the color of authority also fails, Krole attacks Bix with intent to sexually assault her.

The story element ignited furious arguments among fans.

One faction defends the plot point with the clear and undisputed historical truth that this is precisely what takes place in fascist regimes. Petty evil people abuse their positions of power and control for their own selfish satisfactions including sexual assault becoming quite common.

The counter argument raised is that in the universe of noble Jedi Knights, mystical magical forces, and valiant rebellions against tyranny such real-world ugliness has no place. Star Wars is a vehicle for escape from reality’s nasty brutishness and need not reflect it back at the escapees.

As with the best disagreements, truth, in some form, lies on both sides of the discussion. Fascistic systems attract and generate the bullies, the thugs, and the rapists to them for the opportunity to wield unchecked power and authority free from social or legal accountability. Traditionally, Star Wars is a fantasy beyond its reality of transcendent forces with clear moral codes that translate into ‘light’ and ‘dark’ sides but well into the realm of social political forces. The rebellion against the galactic empire is presented as unblemished by ethical compromises. They do not prey upon a population to steal resources, they do not commit acts of terrorism to drain away imperial support, nor do they engage in revenge driven bloodbaths after their victory. The rebellion in how it operates in the field and after overthrowing the government acts in a matter as fantastic as a Jedi’s telekinetic powers. All this makes the attempted sexual assault far too ‘real’ for how traditional Star Wars presented itself.

There is another factor why that scene rubbed so many traditional Star Wars fans the wrong way.

Star Wars, traditionally, is quite chaste.

While romance imbued throughout the originally trilogy including the charged triangle of Luke, Leia, and Han. What those first films did not have was potent real sexuality. Star Wars, though produced in the late 70s, has more in common with a pre-code feature in terms of sexuality than its cinematic compatriots. Nearly a decade earlier broadcast television was more sexually charged that Star Wars. When Captain Kirk, sitting on a bed is slipping his boots back on and Deela is fixing her hair in a mirror everyone understood that the couple had just completed sexual relations. Not only is there no such scene in the first trilogy of Star Wars movies, but it is also clear that any scene even approaching that is wildly out of tone with the ‘fairy tale’ nature of the productions. The Empire Strikes Back would never introduce a scene where Lando walks into a room where Han and Leia were together under the covers of a beautiful bed. Sex, in traditional Star Wars, is an abstract existing only in a conceptual form.

Andor is not traditional Star Wars.

Tony Gilroy’s conception with this series is something much more informed by our actual reality than our sanitized fairy tales of nobles knight and virginal princesses. His creation of emotionally complex and competent agents of the Empire, his depiction of a rebellion riven with factions and not above assassination shows that this is not the pristine and unmuddied forces of good that Lucas showed us in the 70s and 80s.

From Luthen’s willingness to use and abandon his own people as a means towards a victory he expects he will never see to season 2’s quite explicit echo of the Nazi’s Wannsee conference where the eradication of Europe’s Jewish population was decided Gilroy is reflecting our real world back at us through the distorted mirror of a Star Wars story. In that respect Krole’s assault on Bix is very much in keeping with the tone and the intention of the production as much as it conflicts and is at odds with the films released by Lucas.

Both camps are right in their reactions to the scene. As I have often said in my writers’ group, ‘no honest critique can be wrong.’ That said if the more real world inspired tone of Andor is not to your taste, then Andor is not for you and perhaps the more traditionally aligned products are where you need to find your enjoyment.

Personally? I adore Andor.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur