I Think We're Alone Now (2018)

 

Del lives alone.  Not 'alone' in the sense that he's the only one in his household - though he is.  'Alone' in the sense that as far as he knows, he is the only living human left on the planet.

Everyone else in Del's home town died, in an unspecified manner, "on a Tuesday afternoon", and there have been no radio communications or broadcasts.  Believing he is the last man on Earth, Del has set about leading a peaceful existence in his hometown, living in the library where he used to work and spending the day clearing out people's homes and burying the dead. 

And then one night, he sees fireworks.

The person responsible for this turns out to be a young woman named Grace.  Although Grace is noisy, and somewhat erratic in her behaviour, Del can't quite bring himself to force her to leave.  Instead, he slowly becomes used to her presence, and when he teaches her his methods for clearing the homes of the dead, it provides am opportunity for her to help him, and for the pair of them to bond.

Which of course means that things are about to get complicated ...

This post-apocalyptic drama relies very heavily on its two main cast members, particularly Peter Dinklage, who plays Del.  Much of the first act is just him; while the second act is entirely about how Grace's arrival turns his very structured life upside down and how the two of them must learn to live together.

Fortunately, in Dinklage and Elle Fanning you have the actors to meet this kind of challenge.  Dinklage in particular is great, especially at the non-verbal aspects of acting.  For instance, there's a sequence where only his eyes are visible, and you can see the emotional pain.  It's really great work.

I think the script also does a good job of balancing the two characters.  There's a hood dynamic, as Grace is feasibly both the kind of person who would drive Del crazy, but also the kind who can thaw his icy exterior.

Unfortunately, after all this solid establishing work, the script lacks a bit on the follow-through.  For instance, there's a sub-plot involving a disagreement about a stray dog - Grace wants to adopt it, while Del wants it gone (possibly because he thinks Grace will also go, if it does).  Del gets his way, and then the sub-plot just kind of stops; there is never a real acknowledgement of Del's actions, and he and Grace never mention the animal again.

Also, while it has been obvious all along that Grace has not been completely honest about her background, and there is another shoe to drop, the dropping of that shoe is a bit ... fumbled.

As you might have expected, there are more survivors, and they come looking for Grace.  But little about this sequence makes much sense.  How did they find her? Why did they go to the immense effort it must have taken to do so? The film doesn't present any convincing need or motivation.

On the plus side, I did like that the newcomers' sinister scheme of sinisterness is, in their minds, benevolent.  They're wrong, of course: what they are doing us deeply misguided and quite frightening. But they're not the usual 'evil for the sake of it' monsters that we often see in post-apocalyptic stories.  This does result in a rather more low-key denouement than might be expected.  Some people may find it a little underwhelming, in fact.  Still, I appreciate the effort to try to do something a little more nuanced than normal, in this regard.

I Think We're Alone Now definitely has its flaws, but it has enough strengths that I don't regret seeing it.

Ice Cage (2017)

 

A group of people wake up naked in a snowy wilderness, with no clear idea of how they got there.  They stumble their way to an isolated log cabin.  Inside, they find underwear, a dead woman, and a note.

According to this note, one of them killed the woman.  They have until 5pm to work out which of them it was, and punish that person with death.

Is one of them really a killer? Can they find a way out of this predicament? Who brought them here?  These are all questions that seem  impossible to answer, but they are going to have to try.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that each of the people in the cabin attended an erotic party the previous night.  Their reasons for being at the party vary wildly, as do their responses to their current situation.

Naturally, as time elapses and stress mounts, their differences of opinion on what to do grow starker and more embittered.  They've already been told that one of them must die ... but will it end up being more?

This film can also be found under the title Snowbound, which is how it is listed on IMDB.  It's a low budget, high concept thriller-style 'horror' film.  

Like a lot of such films, I think it struggles to deliver on the promise of the premise.  As I have noted before, writing good endings is a lot harder than coming up with an intriguing initial hook.  The basic scenario is an interesting one, but I was less convinced by the resolution. I can see that they were going for psychological horror, "what would you do if your life were on the line?" but the actual scenario presented seems implausible, and the ending lacked clarity.

An area for which I have seen the film criticised is the acting.  I think this is a little unfair.  It is evident that English is not the native language of many of the cast members, which is a significant impediment.  Given that significant disadvantage I think they do a solid job.  They emote reasonably effectively, if sometimes in ways that feel a bit "stagey".  Probably a bigger issue for me is that the majority of the characters they are playing are not very likeable people.  It's difficult to care much about the fate of most of these folk.

Production-wise, it's clear that the film-makers have worked hard to minimise costs where they can.  Some of the methods used are obvious techniques, such as limiting the cast and sets. The film has only a quite small number of speaking roles and almost all the action happens either in the cabin, in the woods directly outside, or in the mansion where the sex party took place - basically just three locations.  There are some more sophisticated and clever cost-cutting strategies, though,  I particularly liked the use of a model of the cabin, owned by the 'mastermind', to stand in for the cabin itself at times.  This allowed them to tell us what was happening in the cabin without avoid the need for expensive effects.

The cinematography - by Halayna Hutchins, who would be tragically killed in 2021 in an on-set accident on the film Rust -  is a strong point.  It's well thought out and executed.

As an example, as noted in the synopsis, the entire cast starts nude.  But if you came for the titillation, you will be likely disappointed by the opening sequence.  The cinematography here eschews ogling the actors' bodies, while also nimbly and cleverly averting overly blatant contrivance to avoid incidental skin.  There's little sense of artificiality, which shows care, attention and judgement.

There is more overt nudity later, in the flashbacks to the sex party.  This may be a positive or a negative, depending on your perspective. Also, while I have no first hand experience of sex parties, I doubt that anyone would be allowed to wander about with a mobile phone so obviously!

Ultimately, this is probably one to watch more for the potential of the ideas than the actual execution of them.

Inception (2010)

 

Cobb and Arthur are "extractors"; they perform corporate espionage using experimental dream-sharing technology to infiltrate their targets' subconscious and extract information. Their latest target, Saito, is impressed with Cobb's ability to layer multiple dreams within each other. He offers to hire Cobb for the supposedly impossible job of implanting an idea into a person's subconscious; performing "inception" on Robert, the son of Saito's competitor Maurice Fischer, with the idea to dissolve his father's company. In return, Saito promises to clear Cobb's criminal status, allowing him to return home to his children.

Cobb accepts the offer and assembles his team: a forger named Eames, a chemist named Yusuf, and a college student named Ariadne. Ariadne is tasked with designing the dream's architecture, something Cobb himself can no longer do: his previous experiments with "inception" have had dangerous side effects that would almost certainly sabotage the mission.

Though of course, even with someone else designing the dream, I doubt it will surprise you to learn that Cobb's past will play a major role in complicating the job ...

Inception is essentially a heist movie with the added complication that the heist is occurring across multiple layers of a dream. The multiple dreamscape setting has a couple of interesting impacts.  As you might expect, events in the real world can affect the top-level dream, but so too events in the top-level dream can impact the one below it, and so on.  This creates some interesting opportunities for unusual environments and memorable action sequences.  The "hotel hallway fight" is a prime example of this, as the events of one dream cause the appearance of rapidly shifting gravity in the layer below.

Another side-effect of the multiple layers of dream is that time moves at escalating rates within each dream; a hour in dream 3 might be only a minute in dream 2, and a single second in dream 1, for instance.  This time dilation is a useful mechanism for the script to build tension, as events in lower level dreams are impacted by those above.  While I do think there are definitely times where the film stretched this time dilation on a little too long, it's overall a clever and effective mechanism.

The film is directed by Christopher Nolan.  I must confess to having seen only a little of this work: his first 2 Batman films, which I didn't much rate, and Memento, which I liked.  I'm pleased to say that my reaction to Inception much more in the vein of Momento.  And the two movies seem to have more in common than that.  Inception sees Nolan exploring with some similar themes to those he explored in the earlier film: firstly that you can't always trust what your eyes tell you; and secondly in playing with non-standard passage of time within the movie.  Memento more or less happened backwards, while as mentioned above, this film has multiple simultaneous sequences where time passes at different rates.

Overall, I think Inception is a pretty effective and entertaining film.  It's definitely helped in that regard by a fine cast who all do good work, though I would single out Tom Hardy in particular as he manages to stand-out even in this crowded field of talent.

I had a good time with this film, but if I had to offer one word of caution, it would be to note that Inception does feature a deliberately ambiguous ending.  I was okay with it as it didn't really damp the experience for me; but it may annoy some viewers.

Intergalactic (2021)

 

It is 2143.  After climate change wracked the Earth and endangered our species, a new government - the "Commonworld" - arose to govern the planet.  The resulting society has strict laws and severe economic disparity, but under its aegis, Earth does appear to be slowly recovering.

Ash Harper is the daughter of a deceased hero, and a dedicated police officer in her own right.  She is also a firm believer in the Commonworld's mission.  Her life is thrown into chaos, however, when she is framed for the theft of aurum (the Commonworld's energy source) and sentenced to life on an off-planet prison.

The other inmates on her ship have no intention of making it to the prison planet, however.  They have a plan to seize control of the vessel and escape to the secret headquarters of the resistance; and they need Ash's skills as a pilot to do it.

Still loyal to the Commonworld, Ash resolves to play along and stay alive long enough to ensure the prisoners' recapture.  But the more time she spends 'on the run', the more she begins to wonder if the Commonworld's idea of justice is fatally flawed ...

Intergalactic is an eight-episode British science fiction show that was clearly intended as the first season of a multi-year story.  It failed to find an audience, however, and was not renewed for a second series.

Honestly, I can see why.  As much as I appreciate the show's emphasis on casting a racially diverse group of women in the major roles, its decision to make the central characters such as an aggressively dysfunctional and adversarial group did make it hard for me to engage with them or care about their fates.  Most of the characters did slowly become more likeable over time, but right to the end of the season the show fails to answer the question "why are any of these people still tolerating Tula?".

Also, despite the admirable overall diversity of the casting, I'm not convinced by their choice for Ash Harper.  I never quite believed Savannah Steyn in the more action-oriented sequences, which is a problem given she's playing someone who is supposedly tough and capable.  Ash's slow burn relationship with one of the other prisoners is more effective and convincing, at least.

Slow burn is perhaps something of an over-used motif in the show, for that matter.  Even at only eight episodes, it feels slower and more meandering than it needs to be.  The plot simply isn't that complex or innovative.  Tightening the show down to six episodes would would probably have done it a considerable favour.

I wanted to like Intergalactic much more than I actually did.

I Am Not Okay With This (2020)

 

Sydney Novak is a 17-year-old living with her mother and younger brother, a year after her father's suicide. Sydney is deeply unhappy and frustrated.  She misses her father deeply.  There's never enough money at home.  She's largely socially isolated at school.  She and her mother never talk about her father's death.  Her best - almost only - friend Dana just started dating an obnoxious jerk.

Oh, and she may be developing super-powers over which she has little to no control.  So, you know, all the normal teen stuff.

Sydney's efforts to cope with everything in her life, understand what's happening to her, her entry into an awkward romance/friendship with her neighbour Stan and her increasing worry that someone knows about her powers form the basis of this seven episode series.

Based on the comic book of the same name, I Am Not Okay With This is a dark comedy comedy of age story.  Despite the super-powers element providing a novel element, it is very much centred on the awkwardness of the teenage experience.  Sydney's often uncomfortable life is relatable even if the specific events are not ones we would have had ourselves.  The fine young cast definitely helps on this front.

Events in the series culminate - as they are wont to do in high school coming of age stories - at the homecoming dance, where Sydney will have to face the truth about herself on several different fonts.

This all culminates in a final scene that was obviously setting up for season two.  Alas, these seven episodes is all we will get, as - after originally being given the green light - any further seasons were cancelled due to production delays caused by the COVID pandemic.

Which is a shame, because I definitely would have checked out a season two, given the opportunity.

I Am Mother (2019)

 

After a catastrophe wipes out mankind, an automated bunker activates. This is facility is stocked with embryos, and staffed by a single robot named 'Mother'.

Mother grows one of the embryos in an artificial womb and begins to raise the resulting child.

Some time later, teenager 'Daughter' is growing restless with her life in the bunker.  She is tired of the complex moral and ethical lessons that Mother insists she undertake, in preparation for an upcoming exam.  She is also curious about the outside world.  Mother warns her that surface contamination makes contact with anything from outside the bunker potentially lethal.

Which presents rather a conundrum for 'Daughter' when a strange woman suddenly appears at the airlock of the bunker, begging for help ...

This Australian SF film was produced on a low budget, but like Pitch Black, which was also filmed here, it is one of those low budget productions that spends its money wisely.  The full body robot suit is by the skilled team at Weta Workshop and the small cast - which includes Oscar winner Hilary Swank - are all excellent.  It never looks or sounds cheap.

Of course, that's only going to help if the script is solid, and I'm happy to say that it is.  While I don't think the story really delivers any huge surprises - certainly the overall arc followed the basic trajectory I expected it would, when I saw the premise - it's certainly well-executed.  I'll take execution over innovation if I have to pick.  Having both is best, of course, but that's no easy task.

Well acted, well directed, well structured.  This is a solid and engaging science fiction drama.  If you find the basic scenario interesting at all, check it out.

The Inglorious Bastards (1974)

France, 1944.  A group of American soldiers are being shipped to prison for the various crimes they have committed.  Among them is an officer, Lieutenant Yeager, who is not a thief or deserter like the others with him: his crime was to refuse an order to kill women and children.  Principles are a dangerous thing to have on the battlefield.

Principled or not, Yeager doesn't fancy his fate in prison.  When a Luftwaffe fighter strafes the convoy he's in, he leads some of the other prisoners in an impromptu insurrection.  Seizing control of some weapons and a still functional truck, the men make for the Swiss border, and freedom from the war.

Of course, the journey to the border isn't going to be a simple or easy one.  There are plenty of German troops around who won't take kindly to American troops, even if they are effectively deserters.  And ... well, maybe something will happen that'll give Yeager another case of those nasty principles, eh?

So first of all, I should be clear that this is not Inglourious Basterds.  Instead, this is the 1974 Italian film from which Tarantino got the name for his movie.  It can also be found under the moniker G.I. Bro, which was a re-release to capitalise on the blaxploitation craze.  That version was re-cut to make Fred Williamson's character (the only African American in the cast) into the lead role rather than Bo Svenson's Yeager.

The Inglorious Bastards is not technically a very good film, with some ropey acting and effects.  Also, and the debt the script owes to The Dirty Dozen is clear.  Despite all that, though, it is blessed with an air of enthusiastic bombast that for me did much to excuse its flaws.  I found it to have an awkward charm and it kept me well entertained.  It might turn out the same for you.

The IT Crowd, Season 2 (2007)

Content warning: real world transphobia

The much put-upon IT department of Reynholm Industries are back for another series of misadventures involving thwarted relationships, corporate takeovers, lecherous bosses, malfunctioning inventions and German cannibals.  

Pretty much everything I said about the first season of The IT Crowd continues to hold true here.  The cast are still great, and it remains frequently amusing in its absurd hijinks, but writer Graham Linehan does have a tendency to take the cheap and easy route on his jokes.  Homosexuality is not intrinsically hilarious, despite what Mr Lineham seems to believe.

Which brings me to the reason that this season gets a 'Not Recommended' from me.  You see, in writing this review I looked up Mr Lineham on wikipedia and learned that 'being gay is funny' is far from the most harmful belief he espouses.  He is a notorious exponent of anti-transgender bigotry, to the extent that he actually got banned from Twitter.  The apparent catalyst for his crusade of hate?  A season 3 episode of this show being criticised for including transphobic elements.

I know some people will say 'you can enjoy someone's work without endorsing their views'.  My answer to that is that there are a huge number of TV shows out there that aren't run by people running a public hate campaign against transgendered people.  I suggest you go watch one of those instead of this one.  That's what I will be doing from here on.

The IT Crowd, Season 1 (2006)

Note: I originally wrote this review several weeks before it was scheduled to post.  Shortly before reaching the scheduled posting date, I learned that the show's writer and director is a notorious transphobic activist.  I've kept the original text of the review below, but changed my rating to 'Not Recommended'.  Don't watch shows by bigots, folks.

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The IT department of Reynholm Industries consists of just two socially awkward young men: Maurice, who is intelligent but painfully shy and impractical; and Roy, whose brash exterior is a front for his own feeling of inadequacy.  Labelled losers by the rest of the company, they lurk in a basement workplace that is as shabby and neglected as are they themselves.

But then the IT department gets a new manager.  Jen knows nothing about computers and has bluffed the equally tech-ignorant CEO of the company into giving her the job.  But she considers herself a 'people person', and persuades Roy and Maurice that she can use those skills to improve their standing with the rest of the company.  Hijinks ensue.

'Hijinks ensue' is pretty much the basic premise of this show.  Each episode presents a particular workplace situation - such as an unsuccessful date with a colleague, the completion of a project, or the problems of shared kitchen space - and develops them in kooky and over-the-top, exaggerated ways.

The IT Crowd is frequently quite amusing, helped immensely by a talented and charismatic cast.  It does however fall a little too often into the easy 'nerds are socially inept and don't know about anything except computers' punch-down kind of humour.  Yes, we are supposed to sympathise with them in their struggles, but we're also supposed to laugh at them, instead of with them, a little too often for my tastes.

Invasion U.S.A. (1985)

I remember, in my very early teens, seeing video store posters for Invasion U.S.A and being really keen to see it. I mean, look at that image above. Pitched battles outside the US Capitol! Chuck Norris with Uzis akimbo! I looks like some kind of deliriously terrible-but-entertaining mashup of Red Dawn (which I had seen and loved) and Megaforce (which I had not, but dearly wanted to). However, due to its R-rating in Australia, I wasn't old enough to rent it myself and there was no way my parents were going to rent schlock like this for me.

By the time I was old enough to rent it, Invasion U.S.A was not exactly common stock in your local Blockbuster and it is only now, in the modern age of streaming, that I can finally sit down to watch this cinematic white whale of mine.

They do say you should never meet your heroes, and alas, the reality of Invasion U.S.A is not in any way the movie I had in my head.  Instead, it's a resolutely po-faced "thriller" that's determined to lecture the audience on how dangerous it is for us to go on allowing our citizens to have freedom of movement and assembly.  Why, in doing so we are basically inviting Cuban-based Soviet insurgents to stream ashore in a mass amphibious landing!

These insurgents immediately begin a coordinated series of attacks designed to trigger disorder and confusion: random murder sprees in suburban towns, dressing up as police officers to gun down urban teenagers (I guess 35 years ago people were not aware of how often real police officers do this) and so on.  For reasons that I ascribe to the basic puerility of the script, the leader of this campaign is a Russian agent with a particular penchant for shooting other men in the penis.

Apparently the only man who can stop all this is Matt Hunter (Norris), a retired and disgruntled former CIA agent who has a person beef with old penis-shooter.  Lots of not terribly interesting shooty shooty ensues, before Hunter's inevitable and equally uninteresting victory.

Witless nonsense, and not the so-bad-it's-good Hard Ticket to Hawaii kind of nonsense.

iZombie, Season 3 (2017)

Ever since she became a zombie, forced to eat human brains to stay sapient, Liv Moore has done her best to keep the secret not just of her own nature, but indeed the very existence of the undead.  So far, she seems to have managed it.  But as a functional cure continues to elude her and her friends, and the numbers of zombies in the world continue to inch upward, it becomes ever harder to keep a lid on the truth.

Forestalling the inevitable public exposure of zombies, and preparing for the day when those efforts fail, is a major theme of season three of iZombie.  I rather like how this whole effort plays out, personally.  The players aren't always who they claim to be, of course, but they also aren't necessarily who you might expect them to be, given typical story beats.  It can be hard to pull off subversions of common plot beats - those beats are common for a reason - but I feel like the show does a good job of it here.

Overall, if you have enjoyed seasons one and two of iZombie, I don't see any reason not to continue to follow the adventures of Liv & Co.  The cast remains engaging and likeable, the plot takes some unexpected but not illogical turns, and there's plenty of nerdy humour for those of us in the geekosphere.  This latter element can occasionally be somewhat problematic in that it sometimes drifts into punching down, but on the whole it is entertaining stuff.

iZombie, Season 2 (2016)

Liv Moore is still a zombie, still eating brains to maintain her human intelligence, still helping to solve crimes with the visions said brain-eating provides, and still living with the twin fears of either (a) being outed as one of the undead or (b) a Romero-esque zombie apocalypse unfolding.

So no real changes, then?  Well, not entirely.  Her former fiance and her best friend both now know that zombies are real, and that Liv is one. Neither of them seem to be coping with this very well.  Oh, and there's the question of what happened to her nemesis Blaine; and what socipathic businessman (and inadvertent cause of zombiesd) Vaughn du Clark is up to; and who the guy going around murdering zombies is; and ... well, it's safe to say that Liv has even more worry balls to juggle than she did when she first woke up with an overwhelming hunger for brains.

Season two of iZombie builds on the first in satisfying ways, introducing several fun new characters and relationship dynamics and throwing a bunch of curveballs at the cast.  It remains darkly funny and enjoyable.  I'm not 100% convinced by the direction it seems to be setting up for season 3, but the show has definitely entertained me enough so far that I will be back to check it out.

Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Season 1 (2209)

Sixteen year-old Tony Stark is already a brilliant inventor, engaging in a friendly rivalry with his father Howard, a billionaire industrialist, over who can create the more impressive technological marvel.

But when Howard Stark is killed in a plane accident, and Tony finds himself locked out of his own company (at least until he turns 18), the boy genius's latest invention becomes about a lot more than just bragging rights.  The "Iron Man" suit will be his main tool to find those responsible for his father's death, and to reclaim the company he sees as his birthright.

And no doubt he'll also find himself fighting a lot of supervillains in the process!

So this animated series is essentially "Teen Iron Man", with Tony Stark facing the challenges of school and homework and having a social life.  It has solid character designs, solid CGI, and fun writing.  Its versions of Obadiah Stane, Whitney Stane, Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan are favourite of any Marvel Comic-related media I have seen so far, including the big budget films.  I'm also quite pleased with the antagonist/foil.

Good stuff here, with fun individual episodes that also build on each other into a coherent longer-term narrative.  Recommended for anyone who is a supers fan who isn't also the kind of stick-in-the-mud that's outraged by the very premise of making Tony Stark a teenager instead of a grown man.

iZombie, Season 1 (2015)

Liv Moore is a high-flying medical resident with a practically perfect fiance. She seems to have it all ... right up until she attends the wrong party and gets turned into a zombie.

Now the only way to avoid becoming a shambling undead monster is a regular diet of human brains, so Liv ditches the doctor fast track to join the medical examiner's team, dumps the fiance (so he won't get infected) and resigns herself to a miserable and lonely existence.

But there are two things Liv hasn't taken into account: the insatiable scientific curiosity of her new boss, and the fact that eating the brains of murder victims gives her visions of their deaths (also some of their personality traits, but that is less useful for Fighting Crime).  Because yeah, the apparently 'pyschic' Ms Moore is about to find herself helping Seattle's finest solve crimes ... while all the time worrying about whether there are other zombies out there and what they might be doing (spoiler: nothing good).

iZombie is a fun and quirky police procedural with a twist.  It has a great cast who play the off-the-wall concept straight (while still recognising that it is off the wall).  Good stuff!

Iron Man 3 (2013)

Tony Stark is world-renowned superhero Iron Man, not to mention an obscenely wealthy technological genius who has recently worked things out with the love of his life.  He should be on top of the world.  And he probably would be, if he wasn't suffering from crippling anxiety attacks and an inability to sleep as a result of nearly getting trapped on the other side of the galaxy (in Avengers).

These problems mean that Tony isn't exactly operating at peak capacity when he finds himself tangling with the international terrorist who calls himself "The Mandarin", despite being a Caucasian who appears to be riffing more on Middle Eastern motifs than those of China.  I'm not sure whether white-washing this role is better or worse than the wince-inducing "yellow peril" stylings of the original comic book villain.  Probably it would have been better just not to pick a character with quite such a loaded background?

In any case, there's more to the Mandarin than meets the eye, and Tony will need every trick in his admittedly very large arsenal of tricks in order to survive when he finds himself in extremis.

Omitting the problematic Mandarin angle, Iron Man 3 is a fine superhero film of the Marvel kind, with a charismatic lead (Robert Downey Jr knocking it out of the park once again), and plenty of spectacle to tide us over between the generally well-executed character beats.  I would have liked more to have been done with the supporting cast, perhaps, but RDJ is so good that it's hard to quibble too much with the film focusing so much on him.

Into the Badlands, Season 2 (2017)

Sonny's attempt to rescue his family has failed.  He's been shipped out of the Badlands and sold as a slave, while they've disappeared.  Also vanished is his friend MK, who was dragged off by strange, super-powered monks and is now undergoing training in their secret temple.  Sonny must find his way home in the company of the cheerfully amoral Bajie (Nick Frost, basically playing himself but with mad martial arts skills), all the while hoping that the escalating war between the Barons of the Badlands won't kill everyone he cares about before he gets there.

The post-apocalyptic wuxia western antics of Into the Badlands continue in season 2, and despite how much I should love a show that blends those genres, I remain pretty ambivalent about the actual execution here.  The show desperately lacks a charismatic lead, for one thing.  The most engaging person on screen is easily Nick Frost, and as much as I enjoy seeing him cast as a ninja badass, he's not one of the ostensible leads.  Unfortunately, neither Sonny or MK is an interesting enough character for their capable, but not exceptional, actors to make them compelling, and the other good guys generally don't get enough screen time to really make a mark.

I also feel like the show also lacks a strong villain.  I mean, it has a whole lot of bad guys, many of whom will temporarily join forces with one or another of the heroes, but none of them are particularly memorable or interesting.  I shouldn't want to see your villains defeated because I'm bored of them.

For some people, the wuxia action and cool visual style of this show will more than make up for its limitations.  But I'm not one of those people.

In Time (2011)

In the future, time is money, quite literally.  Genetic engineering has allowed us to arrest the aging process at the age of 25 - guaranteeing a world of beautiful people - but there's obviously not room for everyone to live forever, so when you hit 25 you're allotted one year of time.  You can work to earn more, of course, but everything you buy will erode your balance.  A bus trip?  Two hours.  A cup of coffee?  Four hours.  A car?  59 years.

Will Salas has spent most of the three years since he turned 25 living day to day, quite literally, with little more than 24 hours left on his clock.  When he helps out a stranger, though, he suddenly finds himself in possession of a century's worth of future ... assuming he can live long enough to enjoy it.

Of course, Will Salas is not the kind of guy who easily gives up ...

So for all the science fiction element of the time-as-currency thing, In Time feels like a film that is very much about the concerns of movements like "Occupy": the concentration of wealth into a smaller and smaller elite, the erosion of the living standards of a growing part of the population, the creation of barriers and walls to separate the haves and have-nots, and the need to take some kind of action to rectify things.

Of course you're free to ignore all that political and economic element and just enjoy it as a relatively entertaining SF action flick full of attractive people, but I'm guessing that the film will resonate most effectively with those who agree with its basic themes and don't mind that it's more than a bit heavy-handed and didactic in its presentation.

Into the Badlands, Season 1 (2015)

Does "post-apocalyptic wuxia western" sound like the kind of thing you'd be into?  Because it sure as heck does mine!  And yet I find myself only lukewarm on Into the Badlands, at least so far.

Following an unspecified catastrophe, a section of the world has come under the control of a group of "Barons": men and women who hold power through personal strength and charisma, and who rule over a society of free citizens and indentured servants known as "cogs".  Each Baron controls certain resources, and is served by an army of trained killers known as "Clippers", who are led by whichever one of them is the most deadly.  Oh, and the Barons have banned guns, so all killing is done up close and personal, with swords and axes and fists and suchlike.

Into the Badlands charts, in parallel, the power struggles among the Barons, and also the efforts of some of their subjects who are trying to escape the messed up society of which they are a part.  There's lots of skulduggery, secrets, and shifting alliances, all of which are liberally punctuated with lashings of over the top martial arts action.

As I said above, it's a show filled with ingredients I like, and yet when they're all put together this particular dish doesn't quite come together for me.  I think it's mostly the characters that are the issue.  They all feel a bit archetypal - terse bad-ass, conniving heir, whiny guy with powers, leather clad vixen, etc - and I haven't really warmed to any of them over the six episodes of season one.

I'll give season two a shot at some point and see if it warms me up to the show, but right now I wouldn't really recommend it until that "post-apocalyptic wuxia western" pitch is something you just can't stay away from.

Them (2006)

As you can probably tell from the image above, this is not the wonderful 1954 film about giant ants.  Instead it is Ils, a French-Romanian film about a young couple terrorised in their isolated home by a mostly-unseen group of attackers.

Because the film's premise requires that there be only two characters for much of its run time, we begin with a largely unrelated sequence where a mother and daughter are forced off the road late at night, and then killed.  This five minutes or so relates to the main plot only in that one of the main characters sees the dead women's car the next day, and the perpetrators of the attack are presumably the same group.  The sequence does however establish the main basic shot of the film, which is to have the camera linger on the face of a terrified person as they glance wildly around, nervously reacting to every slightly-too-loud bit of background noise.

That probably sounds dismissive, and on some level it is.  Them/Ils is fundamentally a very slight film, content-wise.  In that regard, it is something of a triumph of style and technique over substance, as it does genuinely build and maintain tension through much of its relatively short run time.  On the other hand, the actual specifics of the plot are more than a little shaky, and its sympathetic characters are drawn in only the sketchiest of manner.  In the latter case, I'm reminded of James Herbert's The Rats, where he would repeatedly introduce a character, give you a page of backstory on them, then have them savagely killed and eaten by mutant rodents.

Of course, sometimes less is more.  The lack of information we have about the attackers is part of what makes them scary, and frankly the more the film reveals about them the less effective they become as a source of menace.  I suspect the movie would be even more effective if we never learned anything about them at all.

At the end of the day, if you just want a scary movie and you are willing to switch your higher cognitive functions off to get that animal brain chill thrill, then Them delivers.

The Immortal One (1963)

Alain Robbe-Grillet's debut feature is elegantly shot - quite an accomplishment given that members of his crew were actively working to undermine his direction - and features some interesting use of sound.  There's deliberately intrusive aural interjections on several occasions, for instance, and equally deliberate repetition of dialogue.  It's very stylish.

On the other hand, it's also narratively opaque, with events depicted out of order, characters lying without explanation of their motives, and frequent snippets of dialogue about the unreality of the city in which the events take place - clearly a none to subtle reminder that just because a scene appears in the film doesn't mean it actually happened to the characters shown in it.

Now sure, all this obfuscation of the basic plot - man meets woman, has probable sexual relationship with her, then searches for her when she disappears, with tragic consequences - is just as deliberate as the discordant soundtrack.  But obfuscating narrative doesn't impress me very much.  It doesn't require much skill to write a story that's hard to follow, after all.  Plenty of people do it entirely by accident.

If you're the kind of person who can set aside the film's deliberately obtuse story-telling and just savour the dreamy atmosphere, you'll probably enjoy The Immortal One.  But for me personally the film's strengths were not enough to overcome its weaknesses.