Danger Kids

I have a tendency to overestimate people. I think this was my primary barrier to completely enjoying 2025's Weapons. I did like premise and I thought the performances were good but the screenplay bothered me too much, particularly when it came to how Zach Creegor thinks people think and act. But, again, I overestimate people. It's possible most people are the kind of dim witted assholes we see in this movie.

So the movie starts out and we learn that all but one student in the elementary school classroom of Mrs. Gandry (Julia Garner) got out of bed one night and ran into the darkness, never to be seen again (at least that's what the narration says). I do appreciate the poster calls her "Mrs" instead of pretending people actually say "Miz".

It's weird, right? Naturally angry parents suspect the teacher. I say "angry" because none of them seem distraught. The attitude, particularly shown by Josh Brolin's character, father of a child called Mike, is more of the kind of indignation seen in passengers of an airline told their flight is going to be delayed five hours than the kind of soul wrenching grief of parents whose children have been kidnapped. This may have been social commentary.

Mrs. Gandry, Justine, is just bewildered and wants to get answers but she's also not grief stricken. As a teacher myself, I would be heartbroken and morose and spending every waking moment trying to find the missing kids. Justine goes home to her improbably massive and beautiful home for someone living on an elementary school teacher's salary in 2025 and has some vodka and loosens up. People are leaving threatening calls on her phone and someone writes "witch" on her car.

There are a lot of questions people don't ask that would seem natural to me. The most obvious being, was Justine indoctrinating the students on some kind of wacko ideology? Something that would make the kids all behave in exactly the same strange way. Wouldn't police be asking her questions about her religion and political affiliations? What about the one kid who didn't disappear? They question him and he says he doesn't know anything but the movie spends a very long time addressing whether or not the police spoke to his parents. When it is addressed, the police blatantly ignore a number of red flags. Somehow, also, the school principal (Benedict Wong) has never met the child's parents.

Archer, Brolin's character, does his own investigating and discovers that security cameras show the kids running in the same direction to converge at a significant location. Why didn't the police notice this?

There's a pointless subplot about a beat cop played by Alden Ehrenreich that seems to have been inspired by John C Reilly's character in Magnolia, except a lot less realistic. I was reminded of Robert Zemekis' adaptation of Beowulf when Grendel pauses for dramatic effect outside the mead hall for no apparent reason when Ehrenreich's character pauses outside the tent of a junkie he's chasing so he can slowly and silently unzip the tent instead of, like a normal cop, saying, "Sir, please exit the tent" or something.

This is also a movie where people variously have supernatural strength in some scenes and don't in others, depending on what's convenient for the plot. It is an intriguing setup. Maybe director Zach Creegor is like George Lucas, more of an idea guy, a world builder, but he needs someone else to write his dialogue.

Weapons is available on Amazon Prime.

A Dream is the Girl You Make It

A disturbed young man falls in love with his captive sea monster in 2026's Mermaid. I'm so glad we live in a world where a movie like this can get made. While its tonal experiment doesn't always connect, I really respect it for hitching up its own tightrope and walking it wearing fins.

But, okay, what is love? It seems like moviegoers have been interested in that question this year since Obsession. Mermaid, despite not being nearly as successful, actually has a somewhat similar premise. A young, sexually frustrated young man, possibly an incel, is so desperate to have a relationship with his dream woman, he tries to make it work even when it turns out she may be an inhuman monster. Unlike in Obsession, though, the monstrousness of the title creature is never in doubt. The mermaid is played by the talented Avery Potemri whom imdb doesn't even call an actress but instead a "movement artist who specializes in creature work." In addition to Obsession, I also thought of Chappell Roan's "Casual" music video in which Roan is the young woman who takes a sexy murderous sea monster home. But the relationship depicted in Roan's video is far more consensual.

Comedian Johnny Pemberton plays the male lead, Doug, a perpetually dazed and confused young man with a percocet habit, living alone in the large Florida home he inherited from his father. We meet him just as he's losing his job taking care of a fish tank at a strip club, where the owner, in the process of firing him, takes a moment to tell him that he's creeped out one of the girls with the poems his been writing for her.

When he gets home, a couple gangsters played by Robert Patrick and Tyler Rice beat him up for failing to pay up the 30 grand he owes them and they kill Doug's beloved tank full of fish. As Doug later explains to the mermaid, whom he names Destiny, when he has her in a drugged stupor in his bathtub, he knows a lot about fish but not a lot about women. This is comically plain from the fact that he's speaking English words to a being who clearly doesn't know much beyond the instinctive need to consume animal flesh with her rows of gruesome, razor sharp teeth. But Doug found her when he was in the midst of a suicide attempt and the prospect of having a mermaid lover is seemingly the only thing that pulls him back from the brink. It's as though the protagonist of a Creature from the Black Lagoon movie has convinced himself he's really in Splash. Variety's review contrasts the film to The Shape of Water.

Fascinatingly, a couple of reviews can't help but infer some level of mutual attraction between Doug and Destiny. There is a slight hint near the end that maybe Destiny deliberately refrains from tearing his face off but as far as I can see the attraction's all in Doug's head.

The film is a mixture of horror and comedy. The film's weakest points are when it thinks it's a comedy with horror elements. It works far better as a horror movie with comedy elements. Potemri's makeup and costume are excellent and you can get a good look at them on her instagram.

Mermaid is available on Amazon Prime.

These Old Bones Have Life in Them

Three exiled bones find adventure in a fantastic valley in Jeff Smith's Bone, a comic series that ran from 1991 to 2004. People had been recommending this one to me for decades but it was over the course of this summer that I finally got around to reading it. I'm sure glad I did, it's amazing. And I can see why so many people recommended it to me specifically, though many of those people were in social circles that have evaporated over the years for one reason or another. The only person I'm still in contact with whom I remember recommending it confessed to me that she'd never actually read it herself. It's kind of too bad I have no-one I can tell, "Wow, thanks for the recommendation!" Unless one of you still reads this blog.

Anyway, it's funny how well it aligns with the research paper I'm writing on H. Rider Haggard's She and film adaptations of it. One of the reasons I've pinpointed for the continual failure of the film adaptations to capture the magic of the original novel is none of them understand how important the narrator's--not just ugly--but bizarre physical features are. They provide an important contrast to the titular character's supernatural beauty and this is a dichotomy that recurs in fiction. She directly references Beauty and the Beast and in the 20th century you have Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies, virtually every family sitcom with a fat, Falstaffian patriarch paired with a beautiful wife, and Bone.

The three bone characters--Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone--are based on characters Jeff Smith created as a child but the influence of Disney characters, particularly Carl Bark's Uncle Scrooge comics, is unmistakable. You could look at the three characters as versions of Mickey, Goofy, and Scrooge. They could also be Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes, I suppose. For most of the comic it seemed like Fone Bone was good, Smiley Bone was neutral, and Phoney Bone was evil.

We learn the three bone cousins were run out of their hometown of Boneville after Phoney's disastrous mayoral campaign. So they wander into "The Valley", a place with more of a high fantasy vibe. The bones themselves fit a more cartoonish aesthetic and comedic sensibility. Fone meets a beautiful, relatively realistically drawn girl named Thorn and develops a crush on her. I doubt I'm the first one to get a Roger and Jessica vibe from the two.

The series has been compared to Lord of the Rings because a mythology about the foundation of the valley and dragons and various other magical creatures gradually takes over. The climax involves an all out war with elaborate battle scenes. Also like Tolkien, Smith contrives many smaller, effectively charming vignettes, woven into the larger tale. There's an adventure in which Fone and Smiley have to take a baby rat creature back to its homeland--rat creatures are basically the Valley's version of the orc. There's a gigantic mountain lion called Roque Ja (or Rock Jaw) they must escape with the help of a dozen baby animals. There's Thorn's recurring dreams and her gradual realisation that she has an unexpectedly grand destiny. Through all this, Smith manages to maintain a fidelity to the two contrasting tones. One of my favourite interplays is between Phoney Bone and the world of the Valley. Phoney is constantly contriving petty, cartoon size schemes in this big beautiful fantasy world. He tricks the people of a town called Barrelhaven into following him by calling himself a dragonslayer, knowing full well that the dragons are absolutely no threat to the villagers. When the team are engaged in a desperate, treacherous journey through "Ghost Circles", Phoney is driven on by dreams of riches in the capital city of Atheia, where he eventually enlists Smiley's aid in stamping currency with his own likeness.

All along, the question of how Fone Bone's attraction to Thorn is going to resolve is a constant source of tension. If there is one flaw in the series, it's that Smith ultimately chooses a resolution that satisfies a certain thematic concept while neglecting the logic of the story itself. But maybe he bit off more than he could chew. In any case, the story as a whole is still lovely.

Sonnet 2010

An olive sea was black across the crust
The River Cheese was one that flowed through Gaul
One time, a treasure brought a sword to rust
Some silent shadows wait along the mall
Acrylic night describes a lonesome scene
The moon's a frozen skull above the blur
A fella's nose is like a friendly bean
And down the alley rings an iron spur
His steed was left beside the rotten inn
Inside you'll find a dozen girls and cats
And six or seven scraggly, drunken men
With cards and bullets hid beneath their hats
Before the stroke of twelve, he steps inside
Now here's a town where many ghosts abide

Killers and Detectives Doing Their Thing, '90s Style

Robert De Niro plays a cop who reluctantly comes out of retirement to track down a copycat killer in 2026's The Whisper Man. I say 2026 but this feels remarkably like an average 1996 movie. Not a great De Niro movie like Heat or Jackie Brown, though The Whisper Man does reunite De Niro with his Jackie Brown co-star Michael Keaton. It's more like Secret Window or any number of mid tier Ashley Judd or Michael Douglas movies from the period. It was a fairly enjoyable throwback, though.

Adam Scott's also in the film, playing De Niro's son named Tom. Tom and his little boy have just moved into a massive, gorgeous house with lots of bookcases that I would very much like to have. Then, one day, Tom's son is kidnapped and it looks like the MO of the so-called "Whisper Man". The trouble is, Tom's father, Peter (De Niro), put the real Whisper Man away decades ago. Michael Keaton plays the original killer and in interrogation scenes between him and De Niro, Keaton really hams it up as the psychotic paedophile. De Niro's performance is far more restrained. I assume it's a choice, or maybe he's just profoundly tired, but he's a long way from Raging Bull. All the rage is with Adam Scott in this one.

Michelle Monaghan plays the younger detective working with De Niro's character and it's all a basic, unremarkable procedural except it feels like something that would've been churned out thirty years ago.

The Whisper Man is available on Netflix.

An Ideal Lady

There are two recent news stories the algorithm has been repeatedly feeding to me lately that have become connected in my mind: the manufactured controversy around Sydney Sweeney's nude Novig ad and the Australian woman who had runner's diarrhea during an athletic competition in China. Mostly because the articles about Sweeney's ad tend to collect quotes from actual female athletes about how they disapprove of the false impression Sweeney supposedly creates of female athletes. Surely footage of a real female athlete soldiering on through physical discomfort and public embarrassment is exactly the counterpoint Sweeney's detractors would want to exhibit. But the psychology behind the clickbait of both stories highlights the current state of Puritanism and how it's being exploited.

The Sydney Sweeney controversy wouldn't make much sense in Brazil or Italy or any number of other Catholic countries in which physical human beauty isn't seen as a problem. But it was only twenty years ago here in the US that advertisements featuring naked women with their bits covered strategically, selling all manner of things, were so ubiquitous as to barely rate notice. Even so, the Puritanism was always a part of American psychology, lying dormant, perhaps. But it could still spring up, as in the 2004 halftime show when Justin Timberlake removed a piece of Janet Jackson's costume onstage, revealing her breast. The term "wardrobe malfunction" was born as commentators and representatives tried to explain something as an accident that was clearly deliberate. Despite the pervasive sexualisation in media, this was somehow a bridge too far, and the psychological mechanisms nested deep in media and gossip went to work rationalising how something could have happened between two popular pop stars in public. To contemplate it as anything other than an accident was too close to the nerve, perhaps. It was like Norman Bates having to become his mother to explain his own murders to himself. The rationalisation must be arrived at, however irrationally.

A lot of writers have been having fun finding different ways to joke about the idea that Sydney Sweeney was sincerely trying to present herself as a professional athlete. The conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan amusingly wrote, "I don’t think there’s a single person who saw Sweeney obscure her large breasts who thought, She must play professional football." Sweeney herself posted a series of links to athletes who have posed nude in rebuttal. Yet Flanagan also points to the hypocrisy of feminism for shaming a woman for using her sexuality while also advocating for the right of a woman to "walk through the Mall of America in a pair of pasties and a G-string." This strawman doesn't last a brief perusal of liberal commentaries, like this one at The Guardian, and yet The Guardian also has this one that concurs with the ad's detractors. Conservatives have identified prudishness as a weakness on the left which they can exploit. It's something else that makes the liberals look like creepy zealots. This is a somewhat awkward position, though, as the comments sections on the conservative articles naturally have a number of conservatives saying they're also uncomfortable with the presentation of woman's bare flesh as something beautiful. Yes, even conservatives can be Puritans.

But who is really to blame for the Joanna Wietrzyk problem, the woman who defaecated while competing--and winning--the Hyrox? The Hyrox, by the way is a relatively new sport competition that involves running and various workout stations. It was during a burpee session, after pausing in her 8km run, that Wietrzyk soiled herself and apparently some of the equipment. Who is to blame? Is it the organisers? A number have people have apparently complained to the officials who say they didn't step in right away because, while the rules forbid leaving snot or spit on the equipment or the floor, no-one thought to include any rules about faeces. This is, of course, bullshit, no pun intended. Watching the video of the woman running and her suit bottom changing colour, it's absurd to imagine oneself in the shoes of an organiser spotting this and rushing into the fray in order to tell Wietrzyk to please stop pooping and seclude herself immediately. For one thing, runners soiling themselves in the midst of a marathon is not an uncommon occurrence, it's called runner's diarrhea. Nor is it unheard of for a runner to complete a race while defaecating. Wietrzyk found herself in the unusual position of being in an arena in which she also had to use communal equipment. To expect Wietrzyk or the officials to make snap policy decisions in the midst of the competition is unrealistic. Yet, the morality must rationalise, the morality must have its comprehensible narrative. And so Wietrzyk had to make a public apology which I frankly consider an embarrassment more genuine than her uncontrollable bowel movement.

"I know my actions had an impact beyond myself, and I am genuinely sorry to everyone who was affected. I am learning from this experience and will carry those lessons with me, including remembering that there is more to life than racing and knowing when it is right to step away. On reflection, I have decided to retroactively withdraw from the race and forfeit the points I earned."

I'm compelled to wonder if the outcome would have been different had the competition occurred in, say, Mexico instead of China. Obviously China was never a Protestant country but it has its own form of Puritanism.

What connects the Sydney Sweeney story and the Joanna Wietrzyk story for me is the evident trouble many people have in being able to simultaneously enjoy a fantasy (or allow others to enjoy a fantasy) while having the maturity to realise that reality isn't always pretty, and that it doesn't have to be. The same attitude that shames Sydney Sweeney shames Joanna Wietrzyk--not for soiling equipment but for being unattractively human in public. So often when people insist on more realism in public what they're really insisting on is their own fantasy, and when people are pushing a fantasy they can't consciously acknowledge as a fantasy, it tends to be uglier than any reality and certainly an intentionally crafted fantasy.

Your Average Ironically Average Title

I kept seeing Bob Odenkirk's face in the thumbnail for 2026's Normal on Amazon Prime and I kept wondering, "Why is it showing me this? Didn't I already see it a couple years ago?" But the movie I was thinking of was Nobody, another action movie starring Bob Odenkirk and written by Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise. With Normal, Kolstad tries to channel a little Fargo energy but it ultimately dissolves into action that feels even less substantial than Nobody and the later John Wick movies.

Odenkirk plays Ulysses, who's separated from his wife, Penny, presumably short for Penelope, because, yes, this is an Odyssey reference. He comes to the small town of Normal, Minnesota to be an interim sheriff after the town's previous sheriff mysteriously died ice fishing in his underwear. He meets a series of quirky characters and establishes himself as a friendly, easy going guy who leaves a ticket on a local bartender's car parked in a red zone--a ticket that turns out to merely contain a note; "Park better." The bartender is played by Lena Headey whose role in this film is sadly smaller than her billing suggests.

Then there's a bank robbery perpetrated by a nice young couple Ulysses had met earlier in the film and, one thing leads to another, and he's sided with them in a gun fight against all the deputies and seemingly the entire rest of the town's population. All because there's a vault in the bank containing yakuza gold.

Yes, the yakuza. The film begins with a prologue in Osaka in which a yakuza boss sends a subordinate, played by Peter Shinkoda, who also played the yakuza guy on Daredevil, to run things in Normal, which is apparently a stateside location for the outfit's money laundering. The rest of the movie is a long action sequence.

Kolstad and Odenkirk came up with the concept together. I like the concept but it's a shame Odenkirk didn't write the screenplay because, goddamn, Kolstad cannot write dialogue. Ulysses has a voice over narration in the form of voice mails he leaves for Penny in which he explains that Normal is so boring that he spends a lot of time saying, "Nothing to see here." Someone should have explained to Kolstad that police generally don't have to say that unless there is something to see. But I won't spoil the dumbest moment, which is an extremely awkward exchange of dialogue that ushers Lena Headey out of the movie.

The attempts to inject the story with local colour never feel more than derivative at best. There's a moose wandering around town that mostly just made think, "Oh, they saw Northern Exposure." I like seeing Bob Odenkirk, though.

Whew. I got through the whole review without mentioning Twin Peaks.

Normal is available on Amazon Prime.

Digitally Fortified Magic

In all my analyses and contemplations of popular media, I have to admit the appeal of Sandra Bullock eludes me. But I can't deny the amazing longevity of her career and it's her continued popularity that has made 2026's Practical Magic 2 a sort of success. I mean, the 30 million dollars the movie made in its opening weekend fell short of the low end of expectations and it's not at all clear that the movie will recoup its budget. But for a movie like this, it's doing pretty well.

I find it ironic that this movie eschews practical effects in favour of copious cgi. Tonally, this sequel is so different from its predecessor, it's basically a different genre. While the first film, directed by Griffith Dunne with a screenplay by Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, and Adam Brooks from a book by Alice Hoffman, was essentially magically realism, the sequel, directed by Susanne Bier with a screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel, based on another Alice Hoffman book, is all out fantasy. You'll notice only Akiva Goldsman carried over from the first film's screenwriters. Goldsman's most prominent recent work has been writing for Star Trek series and this new Practical Magic movie has a very TV sized feel. In addition to all the cgi, most of it was clearly shot on soundstages, a stark departure from the first film's reliance on location. And while the first film focused primarily on magic as a metaphor for relationships, the second film's focus on the family curse is used as a pretext for a fantasy quest to England which makes this film's introduction of sparkly, swirly sorcery remind one vividly of Harry Potter.

So confident were the filmmakers in Sandra Bullock's popular appeal that they wrote her as the drag in this one. After the death of her husband--presumably the first film's love interest, played by Aidan Quinn--she decides to live without magic and even has her daughters' memories wiped. So there are several scenes where she stands in stern disapproval of her sister and aunts insisting on being whimsical and magical.

The daughters have been recast with younger actresses, Maisie Williams and Joey King, so that they can be used to appeal to a younger audience. It's Joey King's character who primarily drives the action, going to England in an attempt to dispel the family curse that causes all men they love to die young. So Bullock and her sister, played by Nicole Kidman, have to follow her to England where they meet a professor played by Lee Pace, who played the elven king in the Hobbit movies. There's intrigue and Kidman, playing an American character, mocks her own inability to do an English accent, a joke that really doesn't land for any of us who remember her playing Virginia Woolf.

There are some good songs in the movie, though I see now almost none of them are included on the film's official soundtrack. I was surprised to hear "Fade Into You" covered by a male singer and it was the second movie I've seen this year to feature an Olivia Rodrigo song, in this case "The Cure", the lyrics of which kind of run counter to the scene for which it's played, in which Joey King's character attempts to acquire a cure for her dying boyfriend. It's a good thing the characters in the movie couldn't actually hear Rodrigo singing, "You will never be the cure." In any case, Rodrigo continues to be the young artist that older people are overjoyed (and more than a little surprised) to be able to enjoy.

So, while it'll never be Harry Potter, this movie may satisfy those looking for some snack sized epic fantasy.

Listen to the Sounds

Things start to get bad, demoniac, even, for a young woman alone with her comatose mother in 2026's Undertone. Whether or not you like this movie depends entirely on what kind of viewer you are. If you're an entirely passive viewer who expects a film to fill in every blank, you may be bored by this film. But if you're an active, observant viewer, who interrogates the shadows and the partially open doors and everything that just might be a clue, this movie's a hell of a ride.

Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying at her mother's house to care for her. In the big two storey place, her mother stays in bed upstairs, seemingly unconscious. Downstairs, in the dining room, Evy co-hosts a podcast with Justin (Adam DiMarco), who broadcasts from another location. The sound design in this movie is crucial to everything that happens. When Evy puts on her noise cancelling headphones, we're aware of the sense it strips her of even as the sounds and narratives it supplies take on eerie connexions to her physical environment. The camera often frames her on one side of the screen and places the darkened hallway behind her or a mirrored cabinet showing a reflection of the distant kitchen. Every shot casually introduces a space from which an unlooked for threat might spring.

On the podcast, Justin introduces Evy to some sound files he received in an anonymous e-mail. They're recordings of a young couple undergoing a sinister, supernatural experience.

A lot of people have compared this movie to Paranormal Activity so it's no surprise that the director has been hired to write and direct the next film in the Paranormal Activity franchise. I suppose if anyone can recapture the magic of the first Paranormal Activity film it's this guy. I suspect that multimillion dollar film will not be quite as good as this 500,000 dollar one, though. But he'll always have Undertone. This lovely little creepy treat.

Kill 'em with Kink

Madonna's body is a dangerous, sexual weapon in 1993's Body of Evidence. An amazing cast headed by Madonna and Willem Dafoe brings this once tawdry tale to life, though now it's strangely innocent and adorable.

Madonna plays Rebecca, a young woman into S&M, whose latest sexual partner was an old man who died of a heart attack while she was straddling him. Since he left everything to her in the will, people think she did it on purpose, that she used her sexy body as nothing less than an instrument of murder.

Enter Willem Dafoe as Frank, her lawyer, who seeks to, you know. Get her off. This is in spite of the fact that he's married to a character played by Julianne Moore who, according to Wikipedia, disliked her nude scene, her first ever, in this movie. I watched it last week and I honestly can't remember her nude scene, if it's any comfort to her. Though maybe that's what she meant when she called it "extraneous". She had plenty of memorable nude scenes in movies after this.

But it's hard to compete with Madonna on that score, though all the sex scenes in this film feel kind of mechanical and starchy. Sure, there's lots of nudity (though no genitalia) and bondage gear and hot wax. But every shot feels like the director of photography said, "Okay, I need you two to stay within exactly this area and try not to move your limbs too much out of the initial pose." I actually found myself looking forward more to the courtroom scenes, which are ridiculous. Joe Mantegna as opposing council somehow brings the thing to trial on the claim that Madonna's sexiness is deadly. Frank Langella shows up to testify against her and the movie also has Anne Archer and Jurgen Prochnow. That's quite a cast for such a lightweight piece of fluff.

Body of Evidence is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection of Madonna movies.

Green Heat

A son derails his father's moral reeducation in 2026's The Super Mario Galaxy. Diminished and humiliated in his minuscule prison, Bowser's pride has been broken by the Mario Brothers. To reclaim his sense of self-worth he must again embrace the fires of hell in this almost entirely humourless, accidental noir.

This is a sequel to The Super Mario Brothers Movie, a poorly written film, the best part of which was Jack Black's Bowser, aka King Koopa, whose "Peaches" musical number made everyone root for the big bad turtle, though many are unwilling to admit it. So the filmmakers this time sought to reorient audience sympathy to where it ought to have been all along, with Mario (Chris Pratt). They try to make up for lost time and establish that Mario, too, has a secret love for Peach (Anna Taylor Joy) who, of course, cannot be shown to bear anything as emotionally weak as romantic affection for man or turtle.

Neither can her long lost sister, Rosalina (Brie Larson), who primarily exhibits maternal care as the mother of a group of star creatures. Bowser Jr. (Benny Safdie) manages to kidnap her, forcing Peach and her servants, the Mario Brothers, to spring into action.

Bowser, physically reduced after being forced to ingest a poison mushroom, is kept imprisoned in a miniature castle where he paints portraits of Peach and vents his impotent fury. He's seen the error of his ways and selflessly presents himself for punishment when a gigantic queen bee wishes to sentence the brothers to hard labour for their crimes. In the course of serving his sentence, he's transported against his will to his son's spacecraft, where he does all in his power to prevent his son from killing Peach and her allies. But they don't see his good will and interpret his actions as only villainous. Meanwhile, his son reminds him of their bond and shared ambitions.

So, manipulated by the forces around him, Bowser, who was never a clever or imaginative turtle, accepts the hand dealt to him and in a scene that mimics the bridge battle from the original Super Mario Brothers, he is punished for fulfilling his destined role with unimaginable physical pain and permanent, total disfigurement.

I laughed one time during the movie, when Toad told Starfox to "Do a barrel roll," a reference to the old internet meme. I didn't know why I found it so funny decades ago, nor can I explain why I find it so funny now.

Sonnet 2009

A street of spinning knives prepared the plane
On ev'ry block, an eye would watch the ink
A paper plate conveyed a senseless brain
Above the jet, a god creates a brink
Between the sky and space, it choked and stalled
A rusted gear rebounds against its wing
A trail of fuel described its spiralled fall
Remorseless earth collects the broken thing
It happened late, a little after nine
In darkness, figures rose about the bird
Some whispered words renounce the false divine
A metal angel burns beneath the word
As dawn arose, it saw no meagre trace
The man's attempt was gone, and all erased

Don't Blow It

A group of teenagers find a very useful Aztec whistle that kills you when you blow it in 2026's Whistle. What will those Aztecs think of next. I guess this movie isn't the worst I've ever seen but there's something really lazy about it.

If you've been following my blog this year, you've probably noticed I've been watching a lot of new movies lately. With all the bleak, grim stories in the news about current times and the not too distant future, it's been a comfort to find that there's some really vital filmmaking going on. There are movies like Hokum or Undertone that are amazing and movies that, even if they're not absolutely stunning, are at least trying bold new ideas and going out on a creative limb, movies like Touch Me or Pretty Lethal. So it's a real drag to see something like Whistle that feels so stale and half-assed.

The cast is fine. Among the group of teens, the film focuses on Daphne Keen as Chrys, a shy girl who's just moved to town and is staying with her cousin, Rel (Sky Yang). Rounding out the group of friends who find the whistle are Ellie (Sophie Nelisse), Chrys' love interest, a jock named Dean (Jhaleil Swaby), and his girlfriend, Grace (Ali Skovbye), a prom queen type. Nick Frost has a small role as their teacher.

Aztec death whistles actually exist but no-one knows what they were actually used for. This movie decides that, when you blow one, everyone in earshot is stalked by an apparition of themselves on the moment of their inevitable death. When this apparition grabs you, you die immediately, ahead of your fated time. So when Grace, for example, is killed, it's by an old lady version of herself.

Although Chrys and Ellie and their budding romance is centrally framed, the filmmakers are clearly more interested in Rel. He's obsessed with a comic book character called The Revenger, clearly based on The Crow. When it looks like he's fated just to be randomly killed off by a magic whistle, he struggles to fit this into his conception of a world that turns on justice and retribution. This eventually leads him to a moral quandary that feels like it ought to have been the film's centrepiece.

I don't think male, heterosexual filmmakers can't make stories about lesbians. Mulholland Drive will always be a shining example to the contrary but I think straight guys often get a little too dazzled by the fundamental appeal of pretty young lesbians to give the characters much complexity and that's certainly the case here.

The film has a villain who comes across as both lazy and interesting. He's a youth pastor named Noah (Percy Hynes White) who's a true zealot yet he's also an ornery drug pusher. I'm used to Hollywood movies dunking on Christians but this guy is such an extreme strawman it's kind of impressive.

Nick Frost's role would've also made for a more interesting protagonist. When he realises what the whistle is, he immediately takes it and tries to sell it in an online auction. A whole movie could've been made about his morally dubious character, caught in a supernatural trap.

Whistle is available on Shudder. By the way, if you watch this movie through Amazon Prime, which is where I have my Shudder subscription, make sure to disable the mechanism that forces the player to switch to another video once the credits start to role. This movie has a crucial plot twist after the first few credits, which I wasn't able to see until I disabled that thing.

Justice for Toons

So is 2026's Coyote vs. Acme actually as good as people say it is or do people just really want to stick it to Warner Brothers? It's a little overrated but I'd say it's actually a good movie. It's not, as I heard a few reviews say "Peacemaker meets Roger Rabbit," it's more like, as other reviews say, "Better Call Saul meets Roger Rabbit." It's not adult in the sense of violent or sexual humour but adult in the sense of complicated legal drama that kids would have trouble following. But there is still a lot of slapstick gags kids might be able to appreciate.

There's a certain madcap surrealism in the old Tex Avery and Chuck Jones cartoons that no-one's really been able to capture since the '60s. As much as I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even that 1988 movie is too new to really capture that spirit, it's more of an ode to noir than it is to old cartoons, and Coyote vs. Acme is more of a postmodern legal drama than it is a Loony Tunes resurrection. You can see it when clips are used from those old cartoons to illustrate how many injuries the Coyote's suffered from defective Acme merchandise. Like the clip of the Coyote pulling the cord on his parachute only for silverware to fly out of his pack. It's almost dreamlike. The modern gags in the movie rely much more on an exaggerated logic. Daffy Duck's madness is explained by having gone through years of torture as a test subject for Acme, his lines consisting of a series of clever wordplay gags like, "You've got Acme all over your face!" It's funny but not quite in the way of the old masters.

You may be aware of the history of this movie's production, how Warner Brothers decided not to release it, to write it off for tax purposes, and how this provoked such outrage from fans and people in the industry the studio finally allowed another studio to release it. This is has led a lot of people to seeing parallels in the plot of the film to the real life situation, of the little guy being oppressed by the big corporation. I think that's valid but what Acme actually does is something much darker than anything Warner Brothers has (probably) done. The idea of the company considering a certain class of people to be fair game for experimentation in the interest of technological development reminded me of Japan's Unit 731, where prisoners of war in north eastern China were experimented on for scientific research during World War II. Even to-day, as I know from experience, there are many people in Japan who consider foreigners to be subhuman and undeserving of basic human rights. Just recently one of my favourite voice actresses, Hayashibara Megumi, described new foreign residents in Japan as an "invasive species." The nature of the outcry in response to her opinion is the kind that only happens when everyone knows that it's a belief espoused less openly by a lot more people. So the ideas explored in Coyote vs. Acme have some surprisingly dark and relevant real world analogues.

In addition, the relationship between Coyote and the lawyer played by Will Forte is surprisingly effective, as is the Coyote's relationship with the Roadrunner.

This is the third movie with Lana Condor I've seen this year and she's played a very different character in each one. She's good in this though her role is kind of regressive--it's an old type of role women used to be put in often. She plays an assistant to Forte's character despite the fact that she's obviously better qualified and more motivated than he is. Instead she puts all of those assets to work helping him. On a less offensive note, the filmmakers also use that old trick of having her in frumpy, casual clothes at the beginning of the movie and gradually transition her to sexier outfits with better hairstyles.

Most of the animation in the film, disappointingly, is cgi, but I wasn't surprised by this. A lot of people don't know what an expensive, herculean effort the animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit was. Effectively combining live action footage with animation requires the animation to be more fluid and dynamically shaded than is typical in a 2D animated film. The cost of doing so now, with cgi available, is just not something a studio would, or could, realistically entertain. That's why we'll never really see another movie like Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

But Coyote vs. Acme is a good movie, probably best for kids ages 15 and up. Even better for 18 and up.

Alternative Witch Medicine

A girl with cancer and her father go out to the woods to seek a cure from a witch in 2026's Mother of Flies. It's shot like a horror movie but the plot runs counter to it. The witch is kind of creepy sometimes but I never had the impression she was trying to do anything but help the kid. I found the movie to be pleasant viewing with lovely scenery.

Mother of Flies is the latest film from the Adams Family (one d), a family of indie filmmakers who live and operate entirely in the Catskill Mountains. The Catskills are also where Rip Van Winkle had his encounter with supernatural little men playing nine pins, by the way. Maybe they're right around the corner from Solveig, the witch who's able to "trick death." The father and daughter, Jake and Mickey, played by real life father and daughter, John Adams and Zelda Adams, head into the woods after Mickey encounters Solveig in a dream. Solveig's played by Toby Poser, Zelda's real life mother and John's wife. I guess she was too attached to the Poser name to go along with the Adams Family moniker.

Mickey seems a little naive but mostly just like a bright young woman with a positive attitude. Jake is sceptical but mostly supportive.

We get some backstory for Solveig which I won't spoil for you. But she has a beautiful, gigantic tree house where she invites Mickey and Jake to stay. She's really not creepy looking at all, in fact she looks surprisingly clean for a woman living alone in the woods, cut off from society. She does things like feed her guests suspicious mushrooms and venison. There are quick shots of her doing things impossible. It's fun and kind of sweet.

Mother of Flies is available on Shudder.

Artificial Thoughts

I was watching Star Trek: The Next Generation this morning, the third season episode, "Booby Trap", from 1989. This is the one where Geordi falls in love with an AI woman who's helping him find a way to foil an alien tractor beam holding the Enterprise in a debris field by draining energy from the ship. It's obviously a story relevant to-day and I got a chill when Picard was compelled to ruminate on the advice from Geordi that they ought to turn the ship's controls over to the computer. He says to Commander Riker,

You know, Number One, you missed something not playing with model ships. They were the source of imaginary voyages, each holding a treasure of adventures. Manning the earliest spacecraft, flying an aeroplane, with only one propeller to keep you in the sky. Can you imagine that? Now the machines are flying us.

This is the episode in which Geordi falls in love with a holographic simulation of one of the engineers who designed the Enterprise, Lea Brahms. He does so accidentally. Geordi was always awkward with women throughout the series and this episode begins with him failing at another date with a young woman. Guinan advises him not to try so hard, to be more natural, instead of contriving scenarios with violinists on the beach, as he does in this episode. So when he's trying to solve the engineering problem in this episode, he inadvertantly follows Guinan's advice by developing a natural relationship with a coworker, who happens to be totally artificial. Life is what happens when you're making other plans.

Except she's not totally artificial, she's based on a real woman, who's none too happy with Geordi when she turns up in the flesh several episodes later. The simulation is based on her psychological profile with a "9.7% margin of error". That doesn't sound remotely far fetched to-day. It's not even certain that the difference between the real woman and the simulation is what causes the failure between Geordi and the real Lea to connect. Context is important, as is Geordi's awkwardness with women and the strange situation of having to restart an acquaintence with someone he feels he already knows.

I miss the days when Sci-Fi series deliberately challenged the viewer. Forty-five years before this became a real problem, this episode of Star Trek was asking questions like, is it only hubris that provokes the human insistence on the species' superiority to artificial beings, on the greater capacity for creativity in the human mind? Is the human mind truly more valuable or does the human mind just need to feel valuable?

The Mandalorian and Robert Denby

What can I say about 2026's The Mandalorian and Grogu? What can I say about the depressing experience of watching the least popular Star Wars movie of all time and finding it deserves that status?

It feels, as many have said, like two episodes stitched together to make a movie, two episodes of a show that was long past its prime. The revelation of Grogu's cuteness has long passed, its remnants now coupled awkwardly with attempts to make him a more cognisant participant in his adventures with the Mandalorian, whose name everyone in the movie seems to have forgotten. Jon Favreau's initial idea to mine the mystery and coolness of the original Boba Fett concept was bungled long ago by his decision to come up with an explanation for the man's choice to always wear a helmet. Now we have two characters whose intriguing qualities have faded and been replaced by more information than the audience wanted.

There were a couple moments I liked. I liked the big white snake monster. Grogu meditating in the woods was kind of peaceful.

Sigourney Weaver's small role is almost fascinatingly lifeless. They really got Sigourney Weaver just to show up and give instructions to the heroes.

You know, she kind of reminded me of William Sylvester in the two episodes of Gemini Man stitched together to make Riding with Death, a TV movie from the '70s featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Sylvester became famous from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Weaver became famous from Alien, a movie that borrowed a lot from 2001. Perhaps one day MST3k will feature The Mandalorian and Grogu and the loop will be closed. If only we could find Robert Denby, whose name was immortalised by an awkward piece of ADR designed to connect the two episodes that made up Riding with Death.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you The Mandalorian and Grogu is available on Disney+.

Insane Solutions in a Sane World

In February, 1977, a man walked into an office and kidnapped his mortgage broker, took him back to his apartment, rigged with explosives, and held him at the point of a shotgun for days. Gus Van Sant dramatised the events in 2026's Dead Man's Wire. It's a movie filled with tension and suspense with a good performance from Bill Skarsgard as the kidnapper, Tony Kiritsis.

Tony wants to kidnap the owner of the company, M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), but the big man's on vacation, so he takes Hall's son, Richard (Dacre Montgomery) out into the street. He puts the "dead man's wire" around his own neck and Richard's, so if anyone tries to stop them as they walk from the office to Tony's apartment, the shotgun will go off, killing Richard. They're confronted by a cop, Mike Grable, played by Cary Elwes with a gruff, conspicuous affect. It turns out he's an acquaintance of Tony's and can't believe the man would do such a thing.

Tony had bought a 17 acre property through the mortgage company with the idea of turning it into a shopping centre. After Tony was unable to attract investors and developers, he was unable to keep up mortgage payments and the company took the land back. He decided it was all due to a conspiracy on the company's part to flip the land, which had become more valuable, and turn a profit.

Despite Skarsgard being best known for playing movie monsters at this point, he and Van Sant frame Tony sympathetically. Perhaps there is some moral greyness to Tony's situation but it looks pretty cut and dried to me. A lot of guys have Tony's kind of luck who don't threaten to murder anyone over it. It's insane, so I guess it makes sense he was found not-guilty by reason of insanity. I wonder if the trial would've gone differently if he'd accidentally blown Richard's head off. The movie leaves you with questions, which I appreciated.

Dead Man's Wire is available on Netflix.

You Want to Buy Stuff

Have you ever wanted to buy something from me but you just didn't know how, or what? Well, how about I sell you a car? I have a 1964½ Ford Mustang on auction (click here to see it and bid). It belonged to my grandfather, who bought it in the '70s. When my father passed away this year, the Mustang had been in his garage in Tennessee for 10 years. I got it repaired and in working order and it can be yours. I honestly wish I could keep it, especially given how long it's been in the family. And it's just a beautiful car apart from that. Why do cars have to be so ugly now? We all kind of recognise this. That's why people are usually driving vintage cars in movies nowadays. I was just watching Honey Don't again, which is currently on Netflix, and realised there's no logical reason for her to be driving a beautiful, pristine vintage car. But no-one's complaining about that. Is there anyone who ever said, "These movie detectives and crooks are always driving beautiful vintage cars, it's just too unrealistic!"

But maybe you don't want to buy a car from me, maybe you want to buy comics. You can do that, too, for a much lower price. Currently you can buy The Adventures of Boschen and Nesuko and/or Venia's Travels on Amazon. Read them on your kindle app, settle in a cushy chair with your tablet, and indulge in hundreds of pages of full colour comics scrawled by some nutcase. It'll be a memory you'll treasure always.

Sonnet 2008

A sack of grass was left beside the hall
The garden team dispatched delaying chaff
Like fighting dogs, the planes relayed a call
A missile lock destroyed the golden calf
In pepper time, the salt expired fast
A growing beard reveals a shorter man
A club of cats devotes themselves to Bast
A pail of pens reserved themselves for Pan
No language found the toothless man at large
Reduction built inversion underground
At night, we hear the ghost of driven Marge
Some years ago, the tape was not rewound
A pastry brain constructs a head of food
Those kinds of carbs will sure affect your mood