"Accomplishments"
In theaters: While I give it a mostly positive review, there's no denying that Moana 2 is a huge step down from the original. This "Vacation Sequel" has all the characters from the previous effort and the beats feel pretty much the same (just replace the monsters and the exact quest - this time, Moana must unite the people of the Pacific by finding a lost island that connects their maps), so as pretty as everything is, the world has lost its novelty. That was going to happen anyway. The twist is that now that Moana is a big hero, she can assemble a crew to help her out. Some interesting characters there, and each gets a spotlight moment, though perhaps not always in line with the reason they were recruited. The humor feels like it trends younger, with more slapstick and (very mild) gross-out moments. The songs are all B-sides, like someone trying to imitate Lin-Manuel Miranda's style. None of it is bad, but it certainly didn't give me the same rise as the first film did. Mid-credit sequel bait warning - Moana has her own version of Thanos now. And yeah, this does feel a lot like a Marvel movie in terms of plot and tone. Whether you think that's a plus or a minus at this point is up to you.
At home: Do you think Jaume Collet-Serra sees Carry-On as part of a vehicle trilogy with The Commuter and Non-Stop? With its airport on Christmas Eve setting, the movie definitely takes its cues from Die Hard 2, but it's better than a simple retread thanks to a change of genre and a redirected focus. When it does action, it does it well, but for the most part, this is a tight, tense thriller in which a TSA agent is forced by a criminal mastermind to let a piece of luggage get on a plan without inspection. But Taron Egerton can't leave well enough alone, and despite his loved ones being under threat, he finds all sorts of ways to stymie the villains. If you can avoid looking at a cast list, by the way, the villain reveal will be a good surprise (it was for me), but regardless, they seem so well prepared, you can't imagine how Egerton will get out of this with his life intact. These dilemmas result in a lot of tension, real edge of your seat-type stuff, and for once, it feels you care for characters who would be canon fodder extras in lesser films. It's a LOT better than any of the director's Liam Neeson actioners...
Can we believe the bank robbery stats given for Los Angeles in the start of Den of Thieves? Seems a bit extreme. In any case, I don't think there's any real call for the movie to be 140 minutes. Yes, yes, if you're going to focus as much on the perpetrators of a heist as on the cops trying to stop them, it's going to take some time, but Den doesn't need to show information that's delivered in dialog clearly, nor is Gerard Bulter's divorce important enough to the story to get so much play. It gives his clownish, rule-breaking copper some depth, but I don't think we need it. To my surprise, this is a pretty good heist picture, with O'Shea Jackson Jr. as a man caught between the two groups - he's the best character here, but Butler is having so much fun, he almost runs away with it. Despite the length, I was never bored, and there are some good twists coming. While there's gunplay and action via the police thread (which nevertheless has strong procedural vibes), no one would argue that the heist element is the stronger. I will admit that I watched this to convince myself not to see the sequel, but it didn't work.
How does a cheap Filipino exploitation flick like Blind Rage get to shoot footage in so many countries? It's a heist picture with a neat twist - the robbers are all blind so no one would ever trace the crime back to them - but the buck really stops there. It's not like the cops don't figure it out almost immediately, so what was the point? This is all plot mechanics and barely any character work, essentially a universe where if you're told to do something, you do it, no motivation required. Sure, there's the money, but everyone is so underwritten that they just acquiesce to the criminals or police in service of the plot, even (or especially) the one interesting character here, the teacher for the blind roped into showing them how to do it. The dialog is horrendous, and certainly not helped by the English dub in very laboured English. The voice talent there is... oof. Terrible ending, with the production agreeing with me and flying off to L.A. to make it end again in a different film, this one a blaxploitation movie starring Fred Williamson, who is much too represented on the poster for the few minutes he puts in. The action is okay, but this is a wreck that deserves to be remade by people who know what they're doing.
You wake up in a Westworld rip-off - Welcome to Blood City - with no memory and a card that claims you are a killer, but is it a punishment, an experiment, entertainment? Finding out the truth keeps you hooked (very true, because the film sags once you know it). A set-up like this needs a dangerously defiant hero (2001's Keir Dullea) and a black hat styled like Yul Brynner (Jack Palance having a grand old time and one of the film's major reasons for watching), plus someone on the other side of this reality (Samantha Eggar, the other major reason). Throw in Space: 1999's Barry Morse for good measure, and a weird-ass ending to keep things interesting. NOW all this needs is a clean print. Unfortunately, the only accessible versions of this flick are ugly, zoomed-in, pan-and-scans that certainly don't help matters. Because while, objectively, Blood City is a little messy, there's definitely something too it. Alas.
With 1984's Red Dawn, I was expecting an action flick akin to Invasion U.S.A. with a bigger budget, but no, it quickly turns into a gritty war film (albeit one made in the 80s, with lots of shoot-outs, explosions and underdogs somehow defeating whole armies, kind of). At first, John Milius seems to be presenting an NRA wet dream, but the film progresses, the pro-gun messaging is undercut by the fact that these high schoolers aren't the U.S. Constitution's well-regulated militia, and in any case, there's no way for them to stop World War III. The film is too long, and it feels like a string of guerrilla warfare vignettes rather than a tangible throughline. At the very least, it's worth it just to watch Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey as badass revolutionaries, the latter working with Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze before pairing up with them in Ferris Bueller and Dirty Dancing, respectively. I suppose you're supposed to get a frisson from seeing war-torn Midwestern America, but I dunno. Not enough forward momentum for me to stay invested.
We definitely don't see enough of the typhoon that's looming over Hong Kong in Firestorm, but I guess it's meant more as a threat, or the promise of a cleansing, as a crew of armored car thieves armed with enough firepower to defeat an army are tracked by the dependable Andy Lau through his various moles. It's not a new story, but Firestorm does have a couple of tweaks of its own. One is that we get to know the families of the moles, making us care for their well-being as the bad guys get closer to uncovering their betrayal. You get that when the mole is the protagonist, but more rarely when you're following cops who have some informant or other on the line. The other notable difference is how percussive the assault-weapon action is. Action movies have gotten progressively more militarized, but these firefights in the streets with full-on tracers are more spectacular than the usual. Strong action beats throughout, though the CG enhancements are sometimes noticeable. Ultimately, this has to be about the characters, and our watching Andy Lau crack under pressure, going from the straightest of arrows to a kind of vigilante corruption. So there's plenty of sin here for the rains to wash away... if they ever come.
Love and hope in the age of climate change, Weathering with You has Makoto Shinkai doing a more straightforward fantasy story than his past films, which is to say it doesn't have that sense memory montage he had usually affected (this would carry over into Suzume three years later). In this one, a teenage "sunshine girl" discovers her gift to control the weather during a peculiarly wet summer in Tokyo, though our POV character is the boy who takes an interest in her, a runaway who has just as much to gain from their partnership. It's a very sweet teenage romance, in fact, with lots of strong characters supporting the couple, and of course, beautiful artwork (some cool action, too). What makes the film a particular joy is that you really don't know where it's heading. That moment where, in your head, things feel like they're going to wrap-up arrives with way too much time left on the clock. And even once THAT'S done, we have to deal with an eye-popping epilogue. My only complaint is that pop songs with relevant lyrics go off too often, but that shouldn't be a detraction. Let it rain!
Coming out of 1933, Deluge is one of the very first disaster films, but we're talking very prototypical in terms of what we understand of the genre from the 1970s onward. A confluence of disastrous events - a perfect storm, an astronomical convergence, earthquakes - lays waste to the planet before the movie gets down to showing how the survivors are doing. It's really a thing of parts. We're very quick to get into the disaster, and the model effects of New York crumbling under weather pressure are pretty amazing (and were consequently reused in other films even when Deluge was thought lost). There's some wonky rear projection involved, but even that's pretty cool and sort of visceral. One we're out of there though... eeech. The acting is not strong in post-apocalyptic America, and the film turns into trite melodrama. It's mostly about a champion swimmer who men battle over (in a pre-Code kind of way, if you catch my drift) until she ends up in a romantic triangle that seems to point towards a need for polygamy, but then runs away from it screaming. Only the effects people really knew what they were doing with this one, but it's an interesting cinematic artifact.
Space travel in the age of Elon Musk, Long Distance (AKA Distant) has Anthony Ramos struggle not just with harsh terrain after the company ship he was cryo-sleeping on crashes, but with a "personal assistant" app with shitty A.I. and cheap cost-cutting as well. This gives the movie a black comedy streak that's pretty pleasant, though it never really rises above the level of most sci-fi flicks made for streaming platforms (I was mostly reminded of Netflix's Lost in Space series). Ramos mostly plays against disembodied voices through the first half of the film as he strives to get to Naomi Scott's escape pod with the dubious help of Zachary Quinto's dumb app (it redeems itself, and I'm not sure I like it). Starting as a tense survival film, it turns into a creature feature by the mid-point, but it's really the story of a man about who has a date with destiny. But not really. Karmic forces are tangible in this world until they aren't anymore. Pretty watchable, in terms of both actors and effects, but it's a little undercooked for my tastes.
An oddball Christmas movie, 1955's We're No Angels is a rather delightful black comedy about a trio of convicts on Devil's Island who, having escaped, kind of fall in love with a well-meaning family they were planning to rob and perhaps even kill. Look, when the spirit of Christmas takes you... You very rarely see Humphrey Bogart in an outright comedy, but his dry delivery is perfect for it, and his reunion with Michael Curtiz here shows where his career could have gone instead. Peter Ustinov nevertheless steals the show every time he's on screen, but the relative no-name of the trio, Aldo Ray, is a lot of fun too. Leo G. Carroll is quite funny as the hapless store manager who's being robbed blind by a community of convicts, and though there are a lot of references to horrendous crimes perpetrated by our anti-heroes (in a gallows humor kind of way), the real villains are a pair of greedy businessmen, chief among them Basil Rathbone. It was 1955 and we were already eager to eat the rich. We're No Angels is very funny - the sparkling dialog seems to borrow from absurdist theater - and has a lot of heart, even a sense of whimsy. Perhaps it's expectations for a 1950s Christmas movie talking, but the twists and turns really hit. Quite delightful.
Books: It's been said that The Space Museum should be taken as a spoof at the script level, even if the production obviously didn't get the joke. Glyn Jones had the chance to set the record straight in his Target adaptation of the serial, and it DOES work better with more overt comedy. The Doctor is quite funny, and there's some humor at the expense of the Museum's fascistic governor. There's an acidic tone that doesn't quite work, however, and it often comes across as if Jones were taking revenge on script editor Dennis Spooner in the way he attacks the show's tropes and clichés. Ian is as impatient as he is anti-science, which is out-of-character, and Barbara is a blubbering mess, which is too. Both of them are always snarling at the Doctor or snapping at Vicki, as if possessed by Jones' mean streak. So this is a thing of parts. You get a bigger cast of rebels, which is a plus. The cheapness of the production isn't a problem, and this early (not to say prototypical) example of timey-wimey story-telling is better explained in the book, but more poorly resolved. Justice for Matt the Robot!
Before John Peel would try to resolve Dalek continuity in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, he was the go-to guy for adapting Terry Nation's picaresques in the Target range. The first of these, Doctor Who (and) The Chase probably works better as a book than it does as a television serial because the saggy middle flies by faster. Peel attacks the material with some wit and gives us a bit of background on such characters as Morton Dill and the crew of the Mary Celeste, and expands the vistas of Aridius and Mechanus, planets that were constrained by the production means. According to Peel, he mostly based the book on Nation's script rather than the episodes as aired, but few deviations are felt. At least Steven doesn't have that stupid teddy bear, nor does that stupid Dalek from the early episodes appear). In my opinion, the one section that's less engaging than what I consider one of the worst Dalek stories put to tape, is the companion departure. It's just too well done on TV. But the rest benefits from Peel's prose and the theater of the mind.
Another winning First Doctor adaptation for Nigel Robinson, The Time Meddler is the most canonically important story he's tackled, and it's perhaps consequently the book that hinges closest to the events of the television show. He cleans up some loose ends and fixes the bit where the characters call 1066 AD the 10th Century, but otherwise, it feels like a pretty straight adaptation of the Doctor's first meeting with an opponent of his own race. The show would never be the same again, less because of the Monk than the Doctor's new-found agency post-Ian and Barbara. The other reason the serial is famous (or perhaps infamous, in this case) is that it quite clearly features a sexual assault, albeit in a way that should go over the children's heads. I wondered how the book would do this, and Robinson finds a way to toe the same line. It's there, it's clear, but it's subtle and not overly focused on. For my money, Robinson is the best of the 1st Doctor's adapters (I also include Big Finish's Lost Stories audios in this corpus) exactly because he gets both the characters and tone of the era.
Sara Varon's Robot Dreams is a sweet tale of friendship found, lost and pined for, telling its story of a dog and a robot with cute artwork, no dialog, and a subtle emotionalism that will speak more directly to adults even if young kids should enjoy it on a pure art level. My adult eyes do make me wonder if there's something wrong with the dog that he can only really be friends with creatures he builds himself (other relationships seem to be a bust), but I don't think it's meant to be remarked on. The artificial friends are rather built that way as a metaphor for the time one spends building a friendship, and their fragility a way to split the characters up within the story's four seasons. The robot, per force abandoned on the beach, dreams of his buddy, but though there's the fear of loss, there's happily no resentment. And similar, the dog spends a lot of time trying to replace his friend, but you can't pick up where someone else left off. The final note offers a tender resolution that's more figurative than literal, and exactly what I mean when I say the story has an adult subtlety. Beautiful work.
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