MiBI, Maybe?

Possibly because we weren’t expecting the moon, we enjoyed Men in Black: International (2019). I would say that it was exactly good enough.

We start with the backstory of the protagonists, Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth (yes, Thor and Valkyrie). Hemsworth and his mentor Liam Neeson first take on an interdimensional alien swarm at the Eiffel Tower. Then we see Tessa Thompson as a little kid watching her parents being neuralyzed when they see an alien. She helps the cute little alien escape and remembers everything.

That’s the start of her journey. She spends the rest of her life studying and researching, trying to find the Men in Black organization. When she does, she convinces them not to neuralyze her because she is very smart - she found them, right - and she has no other life. And so she is sent as a probationary MiB to the London office.

Hemsworth, on the other hand, has been letting things slide - sloppy MiB work, getting by on charm and luck, and by the way, being a total man-slut - sleeping with the aliens if that’s what they like. This sort of reminds me of how he was a just a bimbo in Ghostbusters. When he gets the assignment to show Vungus the Ugly (Kayvan Novak) a good time while he’s on Earth, Thompson talks her way onto the assignment. And of course it goes very badly.

Hemsworth’ s character is pretty fun - like I say, man-slut party boy who Is one of the best agents, but pissing it all away. Thompson’s is a little more of a problem. She has to be a big nerd - no life outside her desire to be an agent. She has to be naive and idealistic, and she does it well. But she also has to be sassy and street when called on, because (I guess) she’s black? I guess it isn’t too bad.

A lot of this movie is very predictable, and it tilts pretty strongly to cute. Take Kumail Nanjiani’s “Pawny”, a tiny alien chess pawn. Very cuddly. But Hemsworth and Thompson are just so charismatic and lovely that you can forgive a lot. At least we could, and did. There was no need for this movie, but it was good enough for us.

In conclusion, remember Zed’s funeral in MiB3? It was pretty much “He never told me a single thing about himself”? Now everybody knows everything about any agent. It’s a damn shame.

Wicked Cool

We’re finally getting a some of the big 2019 movies delivered, and John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019) was one of the ones we were most excited about. No need to say - it delivered.

It starts right after the end of JW2. John Wick and his pit bull puppy are one the run on a crowded New York street in the rain. They are about to become the target for every assassin in a world of assassins. John looks determined, but the dog looks like it doesn’t like getting wet. So he sends the dog back to the Continental and heads out on his own.

I’m goin to skip all the plot and stuff, and just mention a few things. Like how cool Anjelica Huston is as his mother figure - a Belarus Roma who runs a school for ballerinas and assassins. Laurence Fishburne is the king of the bums, and one of his subjects is Jason Mantzoukas. A new addition to the mythos is the Adjudicator, played by nonbinary Asia Kate Dillon. They act to enforce the rules of the High Table, who rule this assassins’ world.

Wick also gets some assistance from Halle Berry, an assassin who works with dogs, a pair of black mallinoises. This is one of Ms. Spenser’s favorite parts, because doggies. Of course, Wick also uses a horse to kick and kill several opponents in another scene, and rides them against a team on motorcycles. So, yeah, I guess he likes animals.

The big boss fight in the end is against Mark Dacascos, a fighting sushi chef (because I guess people know him from Iron Chef). His henchmen are Cecep Arif Rahman and Yayan Ruhian, from The Raid.  They act like the chance to fight him is a big honor, and there seems to be something going on in the fight - like maybe Reeves has trained with these guys, and they are buddies in real life. In fact, many of the fights show more than the choreography. They seem to show some of the personalities of not just the characters, but of the actors. Maybe even the personality of the fight itself.

Like the pit bull puppy - it looks tough but it acts kind of spoiled. It spends most of the final fight in a bunker on a couch with Ian McShane.

Something to Avenge

Because of a stupid mistake I made, we finally got to see Avengers: Endgame (2019). On Weds night, I realized that I had forgotten to send back two of the Netflix DVDs, and I wasn’t sure they would get to Netflix in time for them to send our next movies. And indeed, they didn’t. But Netflix kindly sent us two DVDs from the top of our queue anyway. And Endgame has been at the top of the queue since Netflix moved it up from the Saved queue. But they’ve been listed as Short Wait. This next part is just a theory - if you send your DVDs back on Sat or Mon, like everyone else, you will never get the Long or Short Wait movies. They only ship later in the week. So we got lucky. Oh so lucky!

It starts just after the Snap. The Avengers are in shock, defeated. Tony Stark is stuck in a spaceship with Nebula, running out of oxygen. Then, a bright light - it’s Captain Marvel! She brings them back to Earth, and declares that it’s time to go after Thanos. They failed last time, but now they have her to back them up. They find him alone on a garden planet, and find out that he destroyed the Infinity Stones. So Thor kills him.

Wow, movie over? I thought this was going to be 3 hours long. Maybe just a long credits sequence? Cut to Five Years Later. The world is devastated. Cap is running a therapy group. Natasha is trying to run the Avengers, but nobody has their heart in it. Hawkeye is in Japan killing bad guys for his therapy. Tony has retired to a cabin with Pepper and their daughter - actually, he’s doing pretty all right. Everyone keeps telling themselves to accept it and move on. Then Ant-Man shows up, released from the Quantum Realm. For him, only five hours have passed. Maybe they can build a time machine.

So they get the team back together. Thor has been hiding out, drinking beer and playing video games and looks like the Dude Lebowski. Banner has figured out how to take Hulk form and stay smart - and he wears shirts now! Clint is brought back from Japan. Tony refuses to abandon his family, until he figures out how to build the time machine. And so the Time Heist is on. Steal the Infinity Stones before Thanos gets them and undo the Snap.

The cool thing about this movie is the tone. It’s depressed and desperate, what with half of all life gone. But it’s also quite silly, with Fat Thor, Smart Hulk, and goofy Ant-Man. When discussing the Time Machine, everyone asks if it is going to be like that movie - and starts listing the hundreds of time travel movies. But even when it’s goofy, it often has great heart, like when Fat Thor meets his mother just before her death. He’s drunk and out of shape, but at least he gets a chance to say goodbye.

And of course, everyone gets unSnapped (you knew they would because of the sequels). But there are also real stakes. Not everyone comes out of this movie (you might have known that because of actors who want to move on...).

There are a ton of great set pieces (The Ancient One meets Hulk! All the women heroes assemble! The Asgardians call Rocket a rabbit!) and fights - one on one and melee style. It’s three hours long, and that’s about right.

In conclusion, this sort of closes a chapter in this 20+ series of films. Can’t wait to see what’s next.

Nine Lives, Give or Take

The Man with Nine Lives (1940) is sort of a hold-over from Spooktober - a black and white Boris Karloff movie. It’s also kind of a fluke - it was about 9 down on our Netflix queue. But we didn’t mind when it got sent.

It starts with Dr. Roger Pryor and his fiancée Nurse Jo Ann Sayers demonstrating an advanced medical procedure to the faculty and press: they have frozen a patient and resuscitated her after 5 days. But the world isn’t ready for this, and the dean makes him take a vacation to get him out of the limelight. So they go to look for the man who developed these techniques, Dr. Boris Karloff, who disappeared from his home by the Canadian border 10 years ago.

After the obligatory warning-off by the locals, they find his house on an island. It’s deserted and run down. But they discover there is a hidden basement when they fall through the floor. Under that, there is a deeper basement, and that’s where the hidden laboratory is. And behind a door they find an icy room, with Karloff frozen on the floor.

They revive him (OK, that’s 2 lives) and he tells of how he was treating a rich man for cancer by freezing him, when his greedy nephew tried to get him declared dead. The court ordered him to show them the uncle, so he took the judge, sheriff, nephew, and lawyer into his underground lab. Then he threatened them with a foaming poison and everyone got locked in the deep freeze.

When they thawed everyone out, Karloff was very excited that his experiment worked. It just needs a few test subjects, and he has 7 right there (judge, sheriff, lawyer, nephew, uncle, doctor and nurse). So he plans to start trying out different formulas on them one by one until someone lives.

The cool thing about this movie is that Karloff is so sympathetic. Pryor and Sayers are on his side almost all the way, against the bumbling, ignorant and greedy nephew and crowd. Even when he shoots the nephew for burning his notes, they kind of see his point. But when he starts to run out of subjects, and it’s either Pryor or Sayers...

It’s amazing how good Karloff can be. I’m beginning to think that we have to watch some of the Dr. Wong movies.

In conclusion, if you count all the lives, the math kind of works out.

Ghosts of Old Japan

As Spooktober draws to a close, we finish with a trio of Japanese art-house ghost or horror films.

Onibaba (1964) starts with images of long waving grass. We are introduced to a hole in this sea of grass, then two figures struggling through the grass, that reached above their heads. These two, wounded samurai from a nearby battle, sink down to rest, and are killed by two women hiding in the grass. These women strip the samurai of their arms and armor and dump the bodies in the hole. This is a striking scene - the women, clearly peasants, work at stripping the men like hunters skinning a deer, or butchers skinning a pig. They are strong and desperate.

They go back to the hut they share in the grass, gobble a handful of millet porridge and collapse in sleep. The older woman is played by Nobuko Otawa, the younger by Jitsuko Yoshimura. They are the mother and wife of a man who has gone to the wars.

Later, a man (Kei Satō) shows up, a friend of the son.  He is sure glad to make it back, it was crazy. It takes a while, but he gets around to mention that the son is dead. After some time, the wife, or widow, starts sneaking out at night to see Sato. The mother-in-law tries to discourage it by talking about the Buddhist hell awaiting women who aren’t faithful, but it doesn’t seem to be working. When she steals a demon mask, she uses that to scare her daughter-in-law - with bad consequences. Hint: Onibaba could be translated “demon mother-in-law”.

This was an amazing movie. First, the scenes of grass, almost as abstract as a Stan Brakhage piece. Then the women, living primitive lives, so that the samurai seem almost like aliens. The women are simply dressed, sometimes stripped to the waist in the heat, with rough hair, completely unglamorous - but with exaggerated eye makeup. Their bodies are strong and very lean, which is hard to fake. This movie seems more like an ordinary drama (or maybe Woman in the Dunes), about what it takes to survive in wartime. Then, the supernatural intervenes, almost at the end.

Kwaidan (1964) came out the same year, but is a little more modern seeming. It was in color, rather than black and white like Onibaba. Also, the costumes are more likely to be colorful silks than the rough clothes of the peasants in Onibaba. Also, it’s an anthology movie, with five stories from Lefcadio Hearn’s book of the same title. I won’t go into all the stories, except to mention “Black Hair”, which is about a poor samurai who leaves his wife to marry a rich man’s daughter and take a post far away. When this works out unhappily, he returns after many years to find his first wife still loves him and forgives him. Until he wakes up in the morning...

“Hoichi the Earless” is probably the longest story. It’s about a blind biwa player, Hoichi, who sings the tale of the battle of Dan-no-Ura. When the priests (including Takashi Shimura from Seven Samurai) at the temple discover that he’s going out every night, they follow him. They discover that he is performing for an audience of the ghosts of the dead from Dan-no-Ura. To make him invisible to spirits, they write the Lotus Sutra all over his body. However, they forget to cover his ears, and that’s all the ghost who summons him can see. Guess how he got his name?

Ugetsu (1954) came out 10 years before the other movies, but has a very similar feel. Like Onibaba, it is about regular people and what happens in war. It is about a potter, his neighbor, and their wives. The potter sells his wares in a nearby town, and due to the war makes a fine profit. His neighbor helps him with the next batch - he wants to get enough money to buy armor and become a soldier.

When they are firing this load, the army comes through, raiding and stealing food. If the fire goes out before the kiln load is baked, they will lose everything. Against his wife’s wishes, the potter sneaks past the army to check - and it’s good! The pots are baked, and they can sell them at a town across the lake. The wives try to come, but they leave them on the far shore and go into town.

While very bad things are happening to the wives, and the neighbor is able to go to war, our potter meets a noble lady and her companion. They take him to a mansion, seduce him and marry him. She loves him for his artistry. And so he is happy for a time, until he finds out the truth. They are ghosts - the lady died without ever knowing love, and so stole him from his wife. Like in Kwaidan, he returns home to find his wife awaiting him, loving and forgiving. But, like his noble wife, she too is a ghost - she died while he was away with the spirits.

These movies had a very similar feel to them. They can be slow and contemplative, with lovely camera work that dwells on the natural world (or the soundstage version). Onibaba and Ugetsu both concentrate on peasants, rather than the nobility as in most costume dramas, but all three are at least partly about the tragedy of war. And they all have austere soundtracks, dominated by taiko drumming. They may be too similar to work really well as a triple bill, but seeing them that way made it easy to compare and contrast. And very enjoyable too.