A Quick Attack

Let's return, once again, to that fabled convenience store. 2022's Clerks III is nowhere near as good as the original, though it's more interesting than Clerks II. Writer/director Kevin Smith seems at first as though he's going for a straightforward nostalgia trip but then he does something interesting at the end of the second act. The fact that something really works about the film mostly makes me wish all the more that several other things about it had been different.

We catch up with Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) living their lives as normal, managing the Quick Stop and playing hockey on the roof. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) have taken over the video store to run it as a legal marijuana dispensary but also hang out in front as they always used to. One day, when Randal is arguing about religion with his hardcore Christian employee Elias (Trevor Fehrman), he suffers a heart attack.

Amy Sedaris makes an amusing appearance as Randal's doctor and, against steep odds, he pulls through. Realising his life has amounted to nothing, he decides to make a movie. That movie turns out to be the original Clerks.

The influence of Kevin Smith's own life is obvious. A couple years ago, Smith himself had a heart attack. The most interesting aspect of the film is ultimately how this experience affects both Randal and Dante and we can see in it Smith's contemplation of just how close he was to death. It's interesting enough that I wish he'd done a few other things.

I would have encouraged him to re-cast Dante. Brian O'Halloran simply can't act and he has several emotional scenes in the film that come off particularly odd because he's working with Rosario Dawson, who's a great actress. Smith ought to have recast the role in Clerks II.

I also wish he'd gone for slower pacing in the emotional scenes and not been so busy with camera tricks. The constant comparison to the original Clerks shows that some of the minimalism that was forced on Smith due to a lower budget happened to have been what made that movie work.

I would have also recommended either spending a year working at a convenience store again or changing Dante and Randall's jobs to entertainment journalists. Another thing that made the original Clerks work is its feeling of authenticity, of coming from someone who was actually living that life. This new film talks compulsively about movie production and the inside of the entertainment industry because that's what Smith deals with now in his life. The veneer of it being about a couple of convenience store managers feels empty and pointless.

Jay and Silent Bob are still good characters. Jason Mewes has really fake teeth now that make him look slightly like George Hamilton, but that kind of fits for an aging pothead.

All in all, not a great movie but not a waste of time if you've been following Smith's films so far.

Damned Life Under the Sea

Beyond dark, rocky shores, his face awash in the glow of an active volcano, there dwells Vincent Price in 1965's City Under the Sea (aka War-Gods of the Deep). The final feature film of director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past), it's far more beautiful than most of Price's Edgar Allan Poe movies of the period. Loosely inspired by Poe's "The City in the Sea" (very loosely), the writing isn't top notch, but atmosphere and performances just about make up for it.

Two Americans find each other living in Cornwall, a young engineer called Ben (Tab Hunter) and a heiress called Jill (Susan Hart). After finding a body on the beach, Ben goes up to the big manor house to talk over the matter. He finds Jill with a silly old painter played by David Tomlinson.

Someone thought it was a good idea to introduce Tomlinson with a low angle shot of him sitting on an armoire wearing a kilt. It was actually a bad idea.

This movie came out a year after Mary Poppins. Having Tomlinson onboard evidently made someone think the comic relief needed to be punched up and he's saddled with a lot of dopey lines. Even so, he's less annoying than Ben who tonally shifts all over the place. But once they find themselves trapped under the sea, Tomlinson's character thankfully shows a little mettle.

Jill is pretty and a nice enough subject for Price's mad obsession this time. He plays Sir Hugh, a sea captain who became stranded in the underwater city more than a hundred years earlier. The chemicals in the atmosphere have prevented him and his crew from aging.

The visuals in this film are really good and it's a delight just to hide behind a pillar of rock with Tomlinson and Hunter while a pirate crew talk killing amid strange horned statues.

City Under the Sea is available under the title War-Gods of the Deep on Amazon Prime.

Opaka Lives

A few days ago I watched "Battle Lines", a first season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's not a great episode and it gets sillier the more I think about it.

The spiritual leader of the Bajorans, basically the pope, Kai Opaka (Camille Saviola), has a vision. She has to go through the wormhole to the gamma quadrant. So Sisko (Avery Brooks) takes her in a runabout along with Kira (Nana Visitor) and Bashir (Alexander Siddig).

I used to really love the runabouts when I was a kid. I'm not sure why. They're basically really big shuttlecrafts. "Battle Lines" particularly stands out in my memory as one of the few times (if not the only time?) we see a significant portion of a runabout exterior built to scale for a set. And watching again a few days ago, I realised they got the warp nacelle wrong.

The tip should have the glowing red bussard ramscoop. They clearly reused a nacelle from a TNG shuttle.

Yeah, I was a Trekker.

So as you can see, they crash land on a moon. They discover two warring humanoid factions, one of them led by none other than Mike Ehrmantraut himself, Jonathan Banks, in a rock star wig.

He really doesn't distinguish himself in this episode, sadly. It turns out (spoilers) the warring factions can never die because of some nanotechnology in the air. They can't die but can't leave the planet, either, or the nanobots cease functioning. It might've been more interesting if their characters had been more developed.

The Kai gets killed so she gets stuck on the planet. But that's okay with her because apparently mediating between these two groups is her destiny. What's weird is that, after this, the show basically treats the character as dead. A particularly odd point considering there's a lot of drama over the replacement Kai later on.

Everyone knows the first season of DS9 is pretty rough. I'm fighting the urge to skip ahead, though.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix in Japan.

Twitter Sonnet #1664

With omnipresent hair the maiden stuns.
The horde suspends assaults against the town.
With movement slowed by massive golden buns.
The plaited beauties craft an army frown.
With vermilion dresses hunters take the hill.
The nervous woman clutched a frightened fox.
With kindness proffered, dinner crashed the bill.
The flooded streets conclude with rainy docks.
With gracious fighters, hills were taken down.
The sample phone was filled with pleading tongues.
With righteous will, the sky deserved a clown.
The ladder squeezed the life from all its rungs.
With rubber hats, the masks were shuttled home.
The time of space concludes with land to roam.

Marnie Remains Marnie

The Criterion Channel has a collection of 1960s Alfred Hitchcock movies this month so I decided to revisit 1964's Marnie. I'd last watched it eleven years ago and I find my opinion really hasn't changed much.

I'm a little more receptive to the idea now that, in a relationship, one partner having the psychological upperhand might be beneficial. Marnie (Tippi Hedren) really does need help and it's hard to imagine a scenario in which she'd end up getting qualified professional help on her own. She's a thief living under assumed identities, she's pathologically afraid of men, and she has so little control over herself that she's sometimes immobilised by the sight of the colour red.

Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) doesn't render proper assistance, though. Well, he's not all bad. Most of the time he's kind and gentle and at least he does guide her on the path of self-analysis. His decision to rape her, however, doesn't seem helpful any way you look at it. I don't think her subsequent suicide attempt was well dealt with either. I suppose you could say that this was relatively new territory for Hitchcock and American cinema in general so covering these topics was bound to be awkward. This was also an era when Hitchcock came into the unfortunate habit of burdening his films with needless exposition and Mark's amateur psychoanalysing is all flat and dull.

Bernard Herrmann's score is great, though, and the visuals are sometimes lovely. And it's just nice to be in that world of Hitchcock for a little while.

Rickcelled

I'd just gotten a few episodes into season four--the 2019 season--of Rick and Morty when the news broke about co-creator Justin Roiland's public scandal. He's been charged with "felony domestic battery and false imprisonment". The latter charge is vague but suggestive. Was he keeping someone in his basement? Anyway, he's been fired from Rick and Morty and everything else he was working on. Since he was the voice of both Rick and Morty, the show will never be the same. Though his writing credits on the show are few and far between. He did at least co-write one episode per season until season four. Almost the entire writing staff seems to have changed for the fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, in fact, and just a few episodes into the fourth season I can already see the difference in quality.

The funny thing is, it's only now I'm getting to the writers Keven Feige hired to work on Marvel projects, with the exception of Jessica Gao (She-Hulk) who wrote the third season episode "Pickle Rick". Michael Waldron (Loki, Doctor Strange 2) didn't join the series until the second episode of season four, a lame episode about defecation called "The Old Man and the Seat". Last night I watched the first Jeff Loveness episode, "Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim's Morty" from December 8, 2019, a lazy deconstruction of heist movies. Loveness wrote the upcoming Ant-Man in Quantumania and is working on one of the upcoming Avengers movies. Can't you read, Kevin Feige? If you like Rick and Morty so much, why didn't you hire writers from the show's heyday? It's like being a big Beatles fan so you hire The Monkees. All the best writers can't be up on domestic battery charges. Can they?

Along with news of the charges, a series of tweets and DMs have magically appeared, attending the scandal as they seem often to do. In this case, apparently Roiland had some inappropriate conversations with a 16 year old fan. And if you read them, and you're not a tool, you'll see they are inappropriate, not predatory. He's using the same kind of ironic humour the show uses and maybe he figured an avowed Rick and Morty fan would be hip to it. But he should have known better. You can never talk to a kid like that, no matter how dirty their sense of humour is. The poor thing is probably vengeful now because she built up all kinds of castles in the clouds around her famous friend. She should count herself lucky he didn't beat her up or something. Or whatever it is he's allegedly done.

I don't know why studios haven't learned by now to hold off firing someone until the courts have finished doing their jobs. Obviously this is more serious than a James Gunn situation but, even so. It seems like we should have learned the "innocent until proven guilty" lesson by now.

Contemplating the possibility of his guilt has made me think back on the series differently. It's not like Bill Cosby, where the guy had a wholesome public persona. Rick Sanchez is an unapologetically amoral and abusive character. I went back and watched the one episode on which Roiland has sole writing credit, season one's "Rick Potion #9" from January 2014. Morty asks Rick to make a love potion to make his crush, Jessica, fall in love with him. The episode was praised as a "deconstruction of the creepiness of the love potion trope", which seems potentially ironic now. I mean, the episode's humour is ironic already, so I guess this is ironically ironic . . . Actually, one of the appealing things about the first couple seasons of Rick and Morty is that it has some genuine creative thought instead of just endlessly complaining about other media.

In the first seasons, Rick isn't just another lousy dad figure. He really is a pig and sometimes, watching him with Morty, a relatively innocent kid, it's like watching a baby locked in a cage with a rabid dog. You can tell Roiland made the conscious decision to make nearly all of Rick's lines compulsively narcissistic, and the way he manages to make every dialogue exchange about how he's a victim and Morty needs to be punished is genuinely clever and funny. Moreso because it's genuinely worrying. In the climax of the episode, when one thing has led to another and the entire population of Earth has been turned into genetic monstrosities, Rick and Morty hover safely overhead in their spaceship. Rick gloats about how he was right and Morty was wrong about the wisdom of using a love potion. When his attempt to cure Earth's populace has failed, he berates Morty for wanting to gloat about his failure. The episode has a pretty impressively dark ending set to Mazzy Star's "Look on Down from the Bridge" (the episode was directed by Stephen Sandoval, I don't know if he's any relation to Hope Sandoval, lead singer of Mazzy Star).

I come away from the episode feeling like the writer really understands something about the psychology of abuse. I wouldn't say that necessarily means he would become abusive himself, nor would I say it would make him less likely to be abusive.

I'm glad I watched those first three seasons, I feel considerably better informed on modern pop culture now. I also got to thinking, the show feels very much like the next step in evolution from Russell T Davies' run on Doctor Who, which was often about how the Doctor could be amoral and dangerous. Rick and Morty began as a Back to the Future parody and, since Back to the Future was one of the many American projects that "paid homage" to Doctor Who in the '80s, it makes sense. I wonder if Russell T Davies has it in him still to add another knot to this mouse's tail.

Outlaws in All Directions

A deadly situation in the hostile winter of Wyoming is ambushed by another deadly situation in 1959's Day of the Outlaw. It's an engrossing film that deftly layers one source of tension on top of another and another.

At the centre of this storm is Robert Ryan playing a rancher called Blaise Starrett. The movie gets into it right from the opening credits in which an impressive wide shot of snowy wilderness is inhabited by two horsemen talking about murder.

Blaise is angry about barbed wire fences that local farmer Hal Crane (Alan Marshal) plans to put up. After arguing with Hal for some time, he's now concluded that murdering the man is the only solution. And he can get away with it, too, out here in the wild frontier. He might have to make his case with the few townspeople, though.

On top of this, he's also in love with Hal's wife, Helen (Tina Louise). She pleads with him to spare her husband, offering herself in exchange. But it's all about to lead to a gunfight anyway when Burl Ives walks in with a desperate gang of hoodlums.

Ives plays Jack Bruhn, a former military officer. It's only his command which is restraining his rowdy men from raping the women and razing the town.

Director Andre De Toth skillfully blends all these sources of tension until the last twenty minutes or so of the film when, according to Wikipedia, he ran out of money. The plot suddenly becomes simpler, there are some obvious pickup shots filmed in front of rear projection, and a lot of the subplots are just forgotten about. Still, it's a hell of ride up until that point and Robert Ryan is terrific. It's still a nice rumination on the meaning of murder and heroism in a relative moral vacuum, as Westerns often are.

Day of the Outlaw is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1663

With measured heat the snow amounts to fluff.
A vagrant flake was cold beneath the fur.
Upon the beach, an arm was little buff.
And ev'ry candy grain commits to her.
A roaming mouth removed its eyes to run.
A lightless pit remained an empty box.
The gentle snow could never kill the sun.
The heavens beg the elves for heavy socks.
The dogs await the end of fire threats.
Forgotten fights became a wisp of smoke.
A whiskey bottle clutched a sheet of bets.
At dusk, the sickly captain first awoke.
Another flake of frost was like the last.
An island girl returned to build the past.

Raiders of the Lost Brick

Last night's Bad Batch started from a premise with a lot of potential but it never quite got off the ground. Written by Christopher Yost and directed by Nathaniel Villanueva, it also seemed like it had an especially low budget.

It's basically an Indiana Jones homage (some younger viewers might say it was an Avatar: The Last Airbender homage) and I really appreciated the attempt to have a score that at least tried to emulate the grandeur of John Williams. Of course, I wouldn't expect it to equal any of the great moments from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I found myself thinking about some more tips the makers of The Bad Batch could've taken from that other Lucasfilm franchise.

Why does the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark work so well? It's hard to think back at this point, for many people, to seeing it for the first time. Even most people who haven't have probably at least heard something about the character. But a big part of the first sequence is being introduced to Indiana Jones. Who is this guy? What is he doing? Is he dangerous? What motivates him? In place of Dr. Jones, "Entombed", last night's Bad Batch, gives us Phee Genoa, voiced by Wanda Sykes.

She's not served well by the animation. Last night's episode reminded me of Tales of the Jedi with its slow, stiffly moving characters. Sykes is a funny comedienne, and she comes off as very natural when doing her stand-up, but she's one of those stand-ups whose talents somehow didn't lend themselves to making her a good actress. She sounds very wooden. Coupled with the stiff animation, altogether she's a pretty lifeless character, and placed at the centre, she sucks a lot of life out of the story.

There's not much mystery to her character, either. She's clearly established as a kind of generic tomb raider. The target of her tomb raiding in the episode, the "Heart of the Mountain", doesn't have a lot of lustre, literally and figuratively. We know it's something from before the time of the Republic, we know it's on a planet in an uncharted system. But why is it legendary? We find out it serves a function, but what do people believe it does? A legendary artefact ought to have legendary powers. The idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark was clearly a religious symbol, representative of a god. The sort of Incan trappings of the Idol and temple carry associations for the audience, mixing the known and the unknown.

"Entombed" mainly gives us a lot of simple geometric shapes.

Overall, this episode needed more.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

Breaking the Pillows

To a child, the world may seem like a playground, a charming perspective adults seem determined to beat out of them. But not all adults, as seen in 1933's Zero de conduite (Zero for Conduct). A film that feels as little urgency for plot as the students it depicts feel for their lessons, it presents several, barely connected scenes of a French boarding school gone to anarchy when the administration accidentally hires a new instructor who shares with his students a happy compulsion for trouble. It's a charming film with good compositions.

We meet a couple of the boys on the train, heading home from their holiday. One of them sticks a little trumpet in his nose and the other shows his friend the old "severed thumb" illusion. Suddenly they realise that the man in the compartment with them is a corpse.

But he's not, really. He's their new teacher, Huguet (Jean Daste). The film proceeds to give us various scenes of the boys rioting at school, angering the brass, and Huguet joining in with the boys.

Daste gives a subtle performance with broad physicality reminiscent of Keaton or Chaplin, the latter of whom he imitates in one scene.

The film was written and directed by Jean Vigo, who would die the following year at the age of 29. He was already poor health when he was making the film and, with that in mind, it becomes an even more poignant statement on living in the moment.

Zero de conduite is available on The Criterion Channel.

Houses Have Them

A man saves a woman from some creep on a boat in the English Channel. Then he tries to riffle through her purse only for her to throw it overboard. This intriguing beginning belongs to 1936's House of Secrets, a pleasingly weird little b-movie.

It has some snappy dialogue, too. After Barry (Leslie Fenton) knocks out the molester, Julie (Muriel Evans) tries to say something. Barry says, "Shh. I just put him down. Soon he'll want his bottle."

He marvels at how he always wanted an opportunity to be a saviour for a damsel in distress and, without a trace of shame, leans into her to claim his reward. She rebuffs him and won't even tell him her name. Of course, this is not the end.

In England, American Barry finds he's inherited an old house. After signing a mouldering old contract, he strolls over to the place only to find it inhabited by strange men and angry dogs. And, of course, the damsel.

The movie continually presents surprising, weird little scenes that make it a satisfying experience. House of Secrets is public domain and available from various sources on YouTube. This one has the smallest watermark:

Twitter Sonnet #1662

Reversed beyond the point of right she came.
Around the mountain means a moment's day.
She's gone to bed to make the cactus tame.
Asleep, the movie shows were glowing clay.
The blinding wall diverts the travel man.
Descending suns were rain for distant things.
Corrosive trees were tightly packed in can.
Acceptance prompts predict when Duchess sings.
The treasure secret froze for reasons blank.
Redoubled arms could shame the spider sack.
A chopper option scratched the ordered tank.
An hour later's twenty minutes back.
Replacing panes reduced the portal's worth.
A sooty snow adorns the ailing Earth.

Siren Party

Last night I read "Build Your Houses With Their Backs to the Sea", the Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the new Sirenia Digest. It's a particularly nice one.

An art journalist takes an assignment to attend an exhibition of some kind. The story is told in first person and the journalist is established with a credible, down-to-earth, tone that makes the weird stuff effective for the contrast. It's another especially Lovecraftian story and yet also not. There are suggestions of a blurring between human and sealife but there's something more ethereal about it than typical for Lovecraft. It's a Sirenia Digest story that possibly references an actual siren. Caitlin even mentions This Mortal Coil's famous cover of "Song to the Siren", which happens to have been much on my mind lately. It's a nice, haunting little story.

When the Accordion Ruled

I was still laughing at jokes from 2022's Weird: The Al Yankovic Story this morning. As you probably guessed, it's 100% gags, not in any way an attempt at a real biopic. Which was the right decision.

There are some parallels to the life of the real "Weird Al" Yankovic, though. He really was mentored by Doctor Demento, played here by Rainn Wilson in a case of perfect casting. He was friends with Madonna, played by Evan Rachel Wood in the film, but whether they actually had a torrid affair filled with booze and marathon sex is a secret kept by the two of them to this day (my guess is, no, they didn't).

Daniel Radcliffe is great as Yankovic himself. He wisely chooses to play the role completely straight. He still has the quality of a remarkably guileless little boy that appealed to audiences in the Harry Potter movies. That sincerity pairs nicely with the absolute absurdity when he storms Pablo Escobar's compound with a machine gun to rescue Madonna.

There are many cameos throughout the film, the highest concentration of them appearing in a pool party scene in which various celebrity comedians (Conan O'Brian, Dmitri Martin, Paul F. Tompkins, Jack Black) play various '80s celebrities (Andy Warhol, Tiny Tim, Gallagher, Wolfman Jack).

Directed by Eric Appel, who co-wrote the screenplay with Yankovic, it's a funny movie. Not quite as strong as UHF but a pleasing parody of modern biopics.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is available on Roku--for free, which I didn't even know until last night or I'd have watched it a lot sooner.

Energetically Violent Hijinks

Cary Grant and Joan Bennett team up for thwarting jewel thieves and snappy dialogue in 1936's Big Brown Eyes. Directed and co-written by Raoul Walsh, it's surprisingly violent for its screwball comedy tone. And it's never so silly that it undermines its violence.

Danny Barr (Grant) is a cop and his girlfriend, Eve Fallon (Bennett), is a manicurist. She quickly gets a job on a newspaper during the film, though, and she wastes little time abusing her position to print bogus headlines.

Walter Pidgeon is also in the film as a rich and crooked private detective. He tries to seduce Eve in one scene by buying a whole counter of candy and perfume for her. Through all the machinations and killings, though, he always sounds cool and calm.

One of his henchmen accidentally shoots a baby dead in the park. Yeah, really. That's part of this romp, I'm not kidding.

This puts the spurs on the police department to finally nab these gangsters once and for all. Eve manages to put together more of the clues and lay more effective traps than Danny, even stealing his gun to shoot it in the street in order to scare a gangster.

It's interesting where the movie goes with the gangster who shot the baby. He feels no remorse but later he's presented as almost sympathetic when he prattles on about flowers while two of his buddies get ready to double-cross him.

Bennett is adorable and Grant is in excellent form. He has a really nice bit of action when he's held hostage by one of the robbers. He pulls a trick and then moves really fast to disarm the man. Cary Grant had some great reflexes, I must say.

Big Brown Eyes is available on The Criterion Channel as part of a collection of Joan Bennett movies this month.

Twitter Sonnet #1662

The ghost of bread reminds the bell to ring.
A forest sound succumbed beneath the can.
Replacement phones were like a hornet's sting.
The chopper blades forbade the girl to tan.
A choc'late circle ends with something dead.
An acid time corrodes the space for breath.
Diminished bears were songs they mangled red.
Regressing beasts could scarce remember death.
Clandestine fish negate the cordless phone.
The skinny found itself but chewing fat.
The other skin was closer yet to bone.
The song was seen beside the earless hat.
A taller dream bemoaned the temple name.
Across a toilet night, the day was blamed.

The Racing Batch

Wednesday brought another good episode of The Bad Batch, this one written by script editor Matt Michnovetz, the best writer from the first season.

A variant on pod racing called "riot racing" is the focus of the episode. With the various aliens among the spectators and the paraphernalia around the stands, it's one of those things that helps the Star Wars universe feel complex. The characters race through tunnels instead of through open environments, though, which I suspect was due to budget constraints.

Ernie Hudson guest stars as Millegi, a gang boss and rival for Cid (Rhea Perlman). Both have pilots in the race.

This was a really good role for Hudson and he makes the character menacing and intriguing. I really hope we see him again. Comedian Ben Schwartz also guest stars as a droid, Cid's pilot, TAY-O. He's funny.

I also really liked how Disney Star Wars has loosened up on showing people dying. Someone even gets killed in the crowd and everyone just carries on, just like the patrons at the cantina bar in A New Hope.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

Cowboy Afloat

I wanted to like Copenhagen Cowboy more than I did. In this golden age of television, in which series are said to be becoming more like cinema, generally that means dialogue and/or action. They're like a kind of film, very rarely do they show the sensuality film is capable of. Copenhagen Cowboy is a very sensual show. Unfortunately, it also feels like a show where the writers ran out of ideas early on,

After Miu's (Angela Bundalovic) experiences at the brothel in the first couple episodes, she ends up at a Chinese restaurant where she helps the proprietor, Mother Hulda (Li li Zhang). She uses her more overt supernatural powers, first to heal an infant, and then to heal the gang boss, Chiang (Jason Hendil-Forssell), who's keeping Mother Hulda's daughter prisoner.

She's also still trying to hunt down the vampire, Nicklas (Andreas Lykke Jørgensen). At one point, Miu shows herself to be a martial arts expert, easily able to dispatch anyone who tries to take her down. This leads to an effective showdown with Nicklas at a slaughterhouse.

We also learn she's able to kill practically just by looking at someone. Indeed, in one scene she seems to kill a guy with a needle. Which all begs the question, why did she let the people at the brothel push her around? It seems like Nicolas Winding Refn and his writers initially planned for her to be a character of more passive abilities but lost enthusiasm for it. So they decided to make her a more action oriented protagonist, more typical of Winding Refn's work.

She gets involved with a gang war that never quite manages to build up real tension. The vagueness about the extent of Miu's powers is a big part of the problem. But the visuals continue to be stunning. Zlatko Burić, the star of Winding Refn's famous Pusher series, joins the show as a major character halfway through and he gives a great performance. There are a lot of good parts here, I only wish there'd been a more solid idea behind everything.

Copenhagen Cowboy is available on Netflix.