Mandy (2018)

 

Near the Shadow Mountains, recovering alcoholic Red Miller lives a solitary life with his girlfriend, artist and author Mandy Bloom. He works as a logger, while she has a day job as a gas station cashier. In their cabin by a lake, Mandy creates elaborate fantasy art, which Red admires greatly.

On her way to work one day, Mandy walks past a van carrying the Children of the New Dawn, a religious cult led by Jeremiah Sand. Sand is struck by Mandy's beauty and orders his disciples to kidnap Mandy with the help of the Black Skulls, a cannibalistic, drug-addled gang of demonic bikers.

As you have probably already guessed:

• This ends very badly for Mandy;
• This makes Red very, very angry;
• It is not wise to make Red very, very angry.

I think that "female loved one gets killed and man goes on revenge rampage" is a vastly overplayed scenario, but Mandy proves an enjoyably bonkers film despite its very familiar premise and structure.

A bit part of its entertainment value comes from the visual design.  This is exemplified in the costume design of the Black Skulls, who look great, and also in the inventive, rather trippy imagery used in scenes where characters are affected by drugs or other things that interfere with cognitive functioning, or that depict dreams.  For the latter in particular, the film uses animated segments that prove a fun (and presumably comparatively inexpensive) way depict wild and implausible things.  Using animated sequences is also thematically on brand given that the dreams are about Mandy, who was herself an artist.

I do think the first half of the film, before Red's rampage, are the film's best part. The movie takes some time to set its scene, giving us a nice insight into Red and Mandy's life together before it is all torn apart.  That gives Red's fury important emotional weight.  Which is definitely a good thing, given the intensity of molten rage projected by Nicholas Cage, in the role.  It's a good performance within the context of the movie, but without the proper grounding it could easily have seemed farcical and over the top.  Which, for better or worse, is something people have come to associate with Cage.

The rampage itself has its interesting elements, but it is a bit uneven.   For instance, I like that the film sometimes surprises you with how tough or easy to kill some of the antagonists are.  That helps it feel unpredictable.  On the other hand, sometimes the script seems to do misdirection for no good reason, or perhaps just to change its mind about things.  For instance, considerable time is dedicated to a special crossbow that Red owns, but has left with a friend of his. There's an extended scene where he goes to collect it, and much is made of the fact.  But then the weapon contributes absolutely nothing toward his success. Similarly, there is a scene were Red hand forges an admittedly cool-looking axe, but said axe also doesn't really play a big role.

Mandy makes some mistakes, but overall if you're in the mood for a slightly surreal revenge rampage, it'll probably scratch that itch quite nicely.

The Fosters. Season 1 (2013)

 

Police officer Stef Foster and her life partner Lena Adams have a blended family with three children.  The eldest of the kids is Brandon, Stef’s biological son from her previous marriage, before she came to understand her own sexuality.  The others are twins Jesus and Mariana, who they adopted as young children.

When the couple agree to foster two further kids, Callie and Jude, they do so on the basis that this is a purely temporary arrangement.  Five kids is too many, right?

Well as it turns out of course, for all that Callie and Jude's arrival brings a whole host of new challenges and problems for the family, they're likeable kids who just need a supportive environment to really grow into their potential.  They quickly win the affection of their foster parents and siblings, leading to the arrangement becoming more permanent.

In fact, the affection that Callie in particular wins among the family soon proves to be one of the challenges and problems the family must face: she and Brandon are soon sharing all kinds of yearning glances, and the state of California has very firm views about the suitability of romantic relationships between foster siblings.  To sum those views up: "Nope".

The will-they-won't-they-should-they-shouldn't-they dance between Callie and Brandon is of course only one of the dramas the family will face.  This is angsty family DRAMA in the style of Party of Five and other such "nothing can ever be simple" TV shows.  People get shot, sent to juvie, have pregnancy scares, are accused of drug-dealing, actually are dealing drugs, steal money, lie to their bosses, and all sorts of other often deeply foolish shenanigans.  For supposedly smart people, the characters do a lot of really dumb stuff.

Some people love this 'crisis of the week' style TV, but over a season of 22 episodes I found it got rather heavy-going.  Which is a shame, because I think the cast are all very likeable and I really appreciate the show's overt and deliberate policy of diversity: Stef and Lena are a mixed race lesbian couple, they have two Hispanic kids, and one of their children appears to be gay or not gender-conforming (it's not made explicit which, in this season).  The show seems earnest in its engagement with these characters and their lives, spending time on the various issues of sexuality and race that they face.  It's nice to see diversity that is more than just a couple of minority characters popping up just score 'representation points'.

If this kind of show is your thing, you'll probably enjoy The Fosters; it's not really to my tastes, but I don't think that's because it is a bad show.  It's just not the kind of thing I like.

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

 

When a fellow pilot faces engine troubles and makes an emergency landing on Iwato Island, Shoichi Tsukioka is sent to rescue him.  The mission seems routine enough, until the pair encounter two giant creatures locked in a titanic battle.  One is an hereto unknown quadruped monster, but the other is none other than the mighty - and supposedly destroyed - Godzilla! 

Fortunately, the monsters are fully occupied by their battle, allowing the two men to escape unscathed.  On their return to the mainland, they are sent to Osaka to help the authorities investigate the encounter.  The new monster is identified as a (massively enlarged) ankylosaurus and named Anguirus.  This Godzilla, meanwhile, is a new monster identical to the one that previously rampaged through Tokyo.  This is an alarming development, as the weapon used against that creature is no longer available, and humanity has no proven countermeasures to such a fearsome foe.  Is there any hope of survival when Godzilla Raids Again?

Well, nearly seventy years and close to forty movies later, the answer to that question is "Obviously, duh." but I'll give credit to this film: it genuinely sells that the question is real for the characters.  They scramble desperately for options to contain the destruction wreaked by Godzilla, but for much of the movie the idea that they can stop him appears completely implausible.  It grants weight to the film's narrative, something that would soon wither away in later releases in the franchise.

This is, after all, only the second Godzilla film, and Big G is still a huge and terrifying event to its characters.  Godzilla Raids Again has long been a gap in my own viewing of the franchise, as the film was absent from the DVD boxed sets I own.  I'm pleased to say that more recent collections do include the film, as it's definitely one of the better offerings.  Not only does it give the title star the gravity he deserves, and introduce likeable but perennial whipping boy Angirus, but it succeeds in something that few Godzilla movies achieve: an engaging and enjoyable human-level narrative, with characters whose individual fate actually mattered to me!

Now this is not to say the film is flawless, of course.  Some of the subsidiary human-level narratives definitely smack of "here's a clumsy device to push the narrative where we want it to go", for instance, such as the group of convicts who inadvertently trigger Godzilla's biggest "rampage scene" in the movie.

The film-makers also appear to have used camera trickery to speed up the footage of Big G's fights with Anguirus.  This might have worked back in the 1950s, but by modern lights it looks very fake and lacking in the 'weight' that the first movie captured so well.

Overall, Godzilla Raids Again is not as good as the smash hit original film, but it is definitely one of the stronger offerings of the franchise, and well worth your time if you're a kaiju movie fan.

High School, Season 1 (2022)

 

Canada, the mid-1990s.  Teenagers Tegan and Sara are identical twins who live in suburbia with their mom and her boyfriend.  Formerly very close, the sisters are going through a rocky period in their relationship.  They've just moved to a new school where they don't know anyone, and Tegan feels like Sara is deliberately pushing her away.  This has been going on all summer, in fact, with Sara monopolising all the available time with their mutual friend, Phoebe.

Sara, for her part, is struggling with the complex feelings arising from the fact that she and Phoebe are secretly in the throes of a typically intense first love.  Sara is happy to have found love, of course, but this is lower middle class suburbia in the 1990s: far from a welcoming environment for same sex romance.  She's terrified about the reaction of her own family, or of Phoebe's family, if their relationship were to become known.

Of course, if Sara ever shared her secret with Tegan, she might find her sister understands her sexuality much better than she realises!

As both of the sisters struggle to find and express their identities, they forge new friendships, act out in unproductive ways, make plenty of mistakes ... and inadvertently stumble into a new passion when they discover a guitar that belongs to their mother's boyfriend.

High School is a coming of age story of identical twin queer teens in 1990s Canada.  It follows a fictionalised narrative, but takes as its starting point the real life memoir of pop duo Tegan & Sara, who are perhaps best known for "Everything is Awesome" from the Lego Movie.

The show got off to a slowish start, with the first episode leaving me on the fence as to how much I was enjoying it, but by the end of the second episode I was fully on board.  I've now got my fingers crossed that they get another season.

High School makes an audacious choice with its lead actors.  Real life identical twins Railey and Seazynn Gilliland had no formal training as either actors or singers, winning consideration for the role on the strength of their personalities and camaraderie on Railey's TikTok channel.  Both young women give very credible performances. They're better actors than singers, right now, but I think that's entirely reasonable for this season given that the episodes cover their first explorations of music.

The show's supporting cast is also very good.  Cobie Smulders is by far the most recognisable face on the show, but there is plenty of talent among the younger, lesser known performers.  I'm sure we will see some of them become much more high profile as their careers develop.

All these good performances would of course mean little if the show failed to develop an engaging narrative.  Fortunately, there's nothing to worry about on that front.  The writing carefully balances the need to make the leads both flawed but likeable, handling that difficult task with skill and humour.  Both Tegan and Sara come across as basically decent young people who on the whole have good intentions, even if they sometimes express themselves in selfish or counter-productive ways.  Their teenage angst and spikiness is understandable and empathetic, explaining but not excusing the poor decisions they sometimes make.

Well-written, well performed, well worth your time.

Monster Party (2018)

 

Casper, Iris and Dodge are three friends who perform highly coordinated burglaries. After pulling off some literal daylight robbery, they discuss another possible burglary at a ritzy mansion near the coast. Worried about the sophisticated security system at the house, they decide against it.

But then Casper discovers that his father, has been kidnapped by local loan shark, who gives Casper an ultimatum: repay his father's debts, or pay for dad's funeral.

So despite the risks, the mansion job is back on, using the cover of a dinner party to get all three members of the team onto the premises as 'catering staff'.

Unfortunately for Casper, Iris and Dodge, while they're right to be worried about the security system, there are dangers to this job that they never could have anticipated.  This dinner party, you see, is the annual gathering of a very exclusive club.  So exclusive that you might even say it's murder to get into ...

Also known as Killer Party, which is perhaps a little too blatant a nod to the plotline, Monster Party is a blackly comedic horror-thriller that, if it doesn't quite fire on all cylinders, does at least offer some entertainment along the ride.

It's helped immensely by a talented cast who know their stuff and who generally seem to be having fun with the exaggerated characters and over the top gory action-horror hijinks.  Despite the movie's relatively small budget and limited shooting time (it was filmed in less than three weeks), the on-screen talent deliver solid performances.

The decision to keep the run-time lean - the film squeezes in just under 90 minutes, including credits - also works to its advantage.  The concept of 'crooks discover their intended victims are much, much worse people than they are' makes for a good mid-movie gear change, but it's not an especially complex or nuanced scenario.  The decision to keep the pace rapid and not over-play their hand by sticking around too long was a smart one.

Not every choice made by the film-makers is quite as smart, however.  There is some unnecessarily quirky and outré direction, photography and editing.  If the titular 'party' had been something like a rave, with loud music and lots of attendees milling around, then I think that this might have worked better.  It would at least have felt like it aligned to the atmosphere of the scene.  Lathered on top of what (initially, at least) is a genteel dinner party, it just feels a bit gimmicky for the sake of gimmickry.

Then there is the film's violence.  As you might imagine from the premise, there is quite a lot of this.  The tone of such scenes is generally quite slapstick and implausible.  I'm fine with this as a stylistic choice; they're making a black comedy, after all; but there's a balancing act a film needs to maintain when taking this approach.  The violence can be stylised and slapstick, but it still needs to feel convincing and plausible within the fiction itself.  Unfortunately, I think that Monster Party doesn't quite manage to thread the needle of this challenge.  In fact I think it stumbles at the worst possible time: the film's finale.  For my tastes, the last ten minutes or so ring hollow and unconvincing.

Despite some missteps, though, I overall had a pretty good time with this movie, and certainly don't regret seeing it.  If the concept sounds like your sort of thing, it's probably worth your time to check it out.

Hanna, Season 1 (2019)

 

Erik Heller helps a young mother escape a covert facility with her baby daughter, Hanna.  The extraction is not a smooth one: the mother dies.

For fifteen years, deep in the forests of Poland, Erik raises Hanna as his own daughter.  It is not, however, a typical childhood: Erik rigorously trains Hanna in weapons use, martial arts, hunting technique and covert operations, and drives her to hone her body with punishing strength and endurance exercises.

For all her life, Hanna has followed the instructions of her 'father', learning the skills he has to impart and obeying his rule to never travel too far from their home.  But she is a teenager now, and the limits of her world have begun to chafe.  Secretly, she ventures beyond them ... a decision that will totally overturn her life.

Because Hanna is no ordinary child, and the organisation that killed her mother cannot afford to let her roam free ...

This series was inspired by the 2011 film of the same name, but soon diverges from the plot of the movie in order to pursue its own path.  There's considerably more complexity to the situation in which Hanna finds herself, and it is much more challenging for her to be sure who her friends and enemies are.  I think that adding extra complexity is certainly necessary; this first season alone already has quadruple the film's runtime.  I do however have mixed feelings about the specific choices made in terms of plot progression.  Some elements work well, in my opinion, but some do not.

For instance, I like the show's recognition that, having been raised in complete isolation by her 'father', Hanna has become a skilled tracker, fighter and survivor, but she's also socially a bit awkward.  She does not fully understand social cues and interactions, because she has no experience of them.  This isn't always that consistently applied, though.  Or at least, Hanna seems to abruptly become much more comfortable with physical and emotional intimacy the moment she meets a boy she likes.

Related to this, I also in principle like the show's attempt to balance the espionage and action with slice-of-life, coming-of-age learning to be a 'real person' growth that Hanna has to go through.  Again however, I think the pacing of this is a bit wonky.  The show's momentum definitely sags a lot in episode 5, for instance, and after recovering in episode 6, it accelerates to warp speed for the final two: the show is trying to get such a lot done in those episodes that the pace is almost breakneck and I don't feel like everything gets a full chance to breathe.

The show does have a couple of unalloyed positives.  The action choreography is generally solid, for instance, and the cast is uniformly good.  In particular, Esme Creed-Miles does a great job in the title role.  Hanna is on screen a lot, so there's considerably pressure put on her then 18-year-old shoulders, and she definitely rises to the challenge.

Overall, I am interested to see where they go from here with Hanna, but I am not convinced I will like what they do.  Possibly at least in part because some of the evolving premise just reminds me a bit too much of the ultimately disappointing Nikita TV series.

Lightyear (2022)

 

A Star Command exploration vessel investigates signs of life on an unexplored world. The crew includes the skilled but pedantic and over-confident Space Ranger, Buzz Lightyear, as well as his commanding officer and best friend Alisha Hawthorne.

Discovering the planet to be crawling with hostile lifeforms, they attempt to take off, but the ship's escape trajectory is compromised by Buzz's refusal to listen to others, and it is damaged in the resulting crash. Blaming himself for failing their escape and stranding the crew, Buzz volunteers as the test pilot for the hyperspace fuel crystal they will need to develop to return home. 

The thing about hyperspace flight tests, it turns out, is that failed efforts have a significant time dilation effect.  Each time he makes another attempt, Buzz sees Alisha grow older.  She falls in love, marries, and has a child in what seems like only days to him.

Buzz's determination to 'fix his mistake' leaves him more and more detached from the priorities and lives of the other crew and their descendants.  But when a robot army suddenly appears to threaten all their lives, the only way he can save them will be by rebuilding those connections and forming the one thing he's always avoided: a team.

The Toy Story franchise previously spawned an animated Buzz Lightyear cartoon which ran for over 60 episodes.  This CGI movie is however the first cinematic release based solely on the character, and set within the fictional universe of his interstellar adventures.  An introductory text scrawl, in fact, specifies that this is the movie that made Andy want a Buzz toy in the first place.

I'm not convinced this framing was a necessary or even productive move, to be honest.  It reinforces to the audience that they're watching a movie that is fictional even in its own reality.  Better, I think, to have omitted that scrawl and just presented it as an adventure the 'real' Buzz experienced, which was how the original cartoon did things.

That text scrawl is pretty easy to ignore, though. And once you've done so, the movie offers the quality animation, likeable characters, and amusing gags we've all come to expect of Pixar films.

So it's a good 'un, then?  Well ... not entirely.  The story is a bit pedestrian, I think.  And also a bit over-packed; it felt at times they were rushing things. For example, when the villain asks Buzz to join him, I think Buzz should have shown more temptation to accept, given his behaviour to that point, but the film didn't have time for him to do so.

Speaking of the villain, I was entertained by them in the moment, but on later reflection I am surprised by how much of a re-tread of Lego Movie 2 this whole aspect of the film ended up being.  There are some variations in details, but at heart it's basically exactly the same plot dynamic.

Finally, this was the film that really hammered home for me that as an actor, Taika Waititi really does just do the same schtick over and over again.  His performance here is funny enough in isolation, but having seen him do exactly the same schtick last year in Thor: Love & Thunder, the gimmick is wearing thin.

Ultimately, Lightyear is an adequate time-filler, but I'd say it is recommended only if you're a Buzz fiend or a Pixar completist.

I Kill Giants (2017)

 

Barbara Thorson is a fiercely independent teenager who spends most of her free time alone in the woods around her home.

This is not mere idly wandering, however: Barbara knows that her hometown is threatened by giants, violent supernatural beasts that are the true causes of many 'natural disasters' such as floods and earthquakes.  She has developed a number of traps and other defences to protect the town and its inhabitants from these dangers.

Barbara has no intention of sharing this with anyone else, however.  She knows they would not understand or accept it.  But then English exchange student Sophia joins her school, and resolutely refuses to accept Barbara's efforts to rebuff her friendship.

But letting people in is dangerous.  That's why Barbara was so reluctant to do it.  While accepting Sophia's friendship put the town in greater risk from the giants?  And what about the terrifying presence that lurks on the upstairs floor of Barbara's own home?

The elevator pitch for this film might be something like "Come for the giant-fighting action, stay for the thoughtful examination of grief and how we process it".  Because if you come just for the giant-fighting, you may be disappointed.  There is some of that, but - without spoiling too much - I think it is safe to say that the greatest dangers within Barbara's life are not necessarily the supernatural beasts she has dedicated so much time to thwarting.

I Kill Giants profits from a smart and thoughtful script that does a good job of keeping the question of 'how much of what Barbara believes is true?' open throughout the film.  I also loved the lushness of Barbara's mythological/zoological study of the giants. It's great, evocative, moody-setting stuff.  Excellent dark fantasy.

The film also profits from fine casting.  Madison Wolfe is very good in the main role, portraying Barbara with both fierceness and vulnerability.  It is easy to identify with her feelings of isolation and frustration as she wages a one-person fight to protect the town, despite being treated as something of a social outcast.  And Wolfe is ably supported by the best of the cast, who are also very good.

I wasn't quite sure what kind of movie I was going to see when I sat down to watch this; and I won't spoil the exact genre of film it is.  The most important thing, though, is that it's a good one.