Cuddly Monster

I watched Nimona (2023) as a sort of throw-away. Ms. Spenser was busy, I was at loose ends, this looked cute enough, animated, streaming on Netflix, why not?

It starts with some history: The origin story of this magical but high-tech city-state. Way back when, the kingdom was threatened by a fire-breathing monster. the heroine Gloreth defeated it. Her champions have been defending against monsters ever since. Note: The movie says "Gloreth" too much. 

In present day, a commoner, voiced by Riz Ahmed, is being elevated to knighthood, the first commoner to be so honored. His boyfriend, the nobly born and super cute Eugene Lee Yang, is there to support him, while the douchey knight bros like Beck Bennett jeer. As the queen hands him his sword, a ray zaps out of the handle, killing her. Yang cuts off his arm to end the attack, and Ahmed must go underground (and build a prosthetic arm).

A demonic little girl, the titular Nimona (Chloe Grace Moretz) decides that Ahmed is a great villain, and decides to be his sidekick. Her powers include shapeshifting, destructivity and super cuteness. She likes plans that go, "We break a lot of stuff, something, something, we win." Ahmed tries to be the voice of reason, but actually, the break stuff method seems to work better.

So, theme-wise, we have the classic evil/but not kid, the friendly monster, Lilo's pal Stitch. I have to love this trope, even while recognizing how overused it is. When we find out the trauma behind her spunk, the life of fear and hatred as a monster, well, I can't say it was a shock. Can you believe it? The message is to try to accept those who are different. 

The gay romance between Ahmed and Yang, on the other hand, is just accepted. Nobody blinks an eye at it. At worst, Yang is kidded for being in love with a dirty commoner. So you can't say they were beating us over the head with that one.

And the animation style was good - a simple, geometrical style for the character designs, some high-tech cityscapes for the backgrounds, all pink for the shapes Nimona changes into. Sometimes, the #D animation for, say, body armor contrasted with the flat simplified faces, but this was rare, and not even that bad. 

So, I enjoyed this. I wasn't knocked out, but it was - I guess. cute or charming. It's not really my thing, but I could watch more. 

Dark and Stormy Night

A Haunting in Venice (2023) is Kenneth Branagh's latest, and possibly last, Hercule Poirot mystery. I think it is the first one that gets it right. 

It is set, obviously, in Venice. Poirot (Branagh) is retired. He has a bodyguard to protect him from the people who want him to solve their cases. But he lets through an old friend, Tina Fey, the mystery author whose best sellers are loosely based on Poirot. She wants him to join her for a Halloween party and seance. The medium, she feels, is either authentic or good enough to fool even Poirot.

The party, thrown for the city's orphans, is held in a decrepit palazzo, owned by Kelly Reilly, a retired opera singer. Her daughter died several years ago by suicide, haunted by the ghosts of the children who died in the palazzo in an earlier plague. It is her she seeks to contact via the seance.

When the medium arrives, she is played by Michelle Yeoh. She feels the presence of much misery, and in the seance, contacts the beyond through a magic typewriter. Of course, Poirot quickly debunks this, but Yeoh tells him she can truly contact the dead, and he should lighten up. She gives him her mask and cloak, and he is promptly attacked. He survives, but doesn't have any time to figure it out, because Yeoh shortly falls from a great height and is impaled in a staute.

There is a good deal more going on - a man broken by the war and his precocious son. The housekeeper. Yeoh's Romani assistants. And so on. There are more murders. And even Poirot starts to see things he can't explain.

The first Poirot, Murder on the Orient Express, was campy, almost satirical. The next, Death on the Nile, seemed to me to be a bit meandering, centerless. This one seemed tight, unified around the gloomy atmosphere of an ancient palazzo in a storm. The presence of ghosts seemed palpable, and there were even a few apparitions - it may even be that the mystery is solved by the ghost herself. 

Of course, Poirot solves everything, and sees that justice is done. In the end, he is so refreshed by this that he un-retires. I wonder if Branagh will reitre him here or not.

Slingshot

 I have always said that the heart of the Singapore Sling is the Benedictine and the cherry brandy. But what if you don't have any Benedictine (honestly, I use B&B, but close enough)? Or what if you have Benedictine, but it's across the room and you're too lazy to go get it? But you do have something else close at hand?

You make a Singapore Sling variation. I happened to have the Licor 43 out, so I used it in place of the Benedictine. 

1/2 oz. Licor 43

1/2 oz. cherry infusion

1 oz. triple sec

1 oz. lime juice

2 oz. gin

It was pretty good actually. Recognizably different, but also recognizable as a Singapore sling variant. A family resemblance, say. 

Then I tried it with Galliano, instead of the Benedictine/Licor 43,  because I wanted to see what would happen. It was fine - a little further off the mark due to the licorice, but still tasty. 

Maybe it's just me, but I think it's easy to make delicious cocktails. There's a wide range of liquors, liqueurs, juices, etc. that go together well. No need to get precious, just try it and enjoy!

El Conde Pasa

Hey, I forgot to blog one: I saw El Conde (2023) at my sister's. It's a black and white Chilean horror comedy where Augusto Pinochet turns out to be a vampire.

It starts with a plummy English voice giving the back story: A French soldier with blood sucking tendencies sees his queen Marie Antoinette guillotined. He vows to protect the aristocracy in any way her can. Over time, he has to get out of France, so he moves to Chile, joins the Army, and becomes the military dictator that we know as Pinochet, but his friends call el Conde, the Count. 

After a time, he fakes his death and retires to a distant deserted mining town. He takes his mistress, who he refuses to turn, and his butler, who he does turn. He lays low for a while, but now his grown children here of girls going missing, drained of blood, and they come to visit.

He tells them he has decided to die, and his offspring start to quarrel over the his ill-gotten treasures. They bring in an outside auditor to help them find these assets. They don't know (or do they) that she is a nun, with a mission to take down the monster. Or is that her mission? Because the count has no trouble seducing and turning her to vampirism. 

The heart of the film seems to be the nun's interviews with the grown children, asking for details of their father's and their crimes, financial and otherwise. As far as I know, these accounts are historically accurate, and appalling. The perpetrators either insist that it was just business as usual, or wiping out communists. I wonder how this played in Chile. Were the funny parts "too soon"? Were the serious parts shocking, or old news? 

Well. the black and white photography of the misty coast, the ruined mansion and so forth was lovely enough, and the nun was very cute, especially when, as a vampire, she learned that she could fly.

And I'll spoil the ending. The plummy narrator turns out to be Pinochet's mother, the vampire... Margaret Thatcher.

White Noise, White Light

Here are a couple of new movies that we watched as a weekend double bill. The first was White Noise (2022). Ms. Spenser and I have read a few Don DeLillo novels, including White Noise. I've seen it called un-filmable, but I think it is one of his more accessible books. Noah Baumbach wrote and directed this attempt.

It stars Adam Driver as a small-time celebrity college professor, the founder of the Hitler studies program. His dirty secret is that he speaks no German - his private lesson show him as more than a beginner. His wife is Greta Gerwig, a beautiful bouncy mother of a brood that includes a teen boy and girl from one of Driver's previous marriages, a daughter from one of hers, and a toddler who is theirs.

The first act shows them in their happy life together - and how thoughts of death torment both of them. But Driver also needs to help out his co-worker Don Cheadle, head of the Elvis studies group. When he is lecturing on Evis, Driver comes in and starts delivering a contrapuntal lecture on Hitler: how each reacted to his mother's death, their love of animals, and so forth. This scene includes Driver swooping around in his academic robes like a great crow - very theatrical. 

Meanwhile, outside town, a truckload of gas hits a train full of industrial something, leading to a fire, a feathery plume of smoke, then a black cloud, and finally an airborne toxic event. Driver and Gerwig try to avoid scaring the kids, or themselves, until it's time to panic and evacuate. They make it to the camp they are assigned to, manned by volunteers from SimulVac, who are using the real evacuation as a trial run for a simulation. And it's working well.

But Driver is exposed to the toxic event, and now fears death more than ever. When they get home, Gerwig is acting distant and distracted as well. Her daughter figures out that she's taking some kind of pills. I'll skip over how that all works out, but it is the most comic and absurdist section of the movie. Except, I guess, for the credits, which shows everyone at the supermarket, shopping in choreographed synchronicity.

After this piece of stylized silliness, I knew we had to watch Asteroid City (2023), Wes Anderson's latest. It's set as a series of framing devices: A 1950s TV show made of a play, about a playwright writing (and producing? or is that just in his imagination?) a play about Asteroid City.

Asteroid City is a small New Mexico town, with a diner, a gas station, an unfinished overpass and a meteor impact crater. The main character (maybe?) is Jason Schwartman, a war photographer, who's stationwagon breaks down leaving him and his three young daughters and teen son in Asteroid City. His father-in-law, Tom Hanks, is disgusted by Schwartzmann, largely because he hasn't told his children that their mother died several weeks ago. 

But his son, Jake Ryan, is the reason for the trip. He is a Stargazer honoree for his invention. (I can't remember if it's a rocket belt, disintegrator or something else...). His nickname is Brainiac. The other honorees include Grace Edwards, daugher of filmstar Scarlett Johansson. Schwartzman and Johansson will form a bond, as will Ryan and Edwards, and sundry other visitors to town. 

This all plays out in front of an obvious painted backdrop, in desert pastels, washed out in imitation of old color photography. Anderson managed to make many scenes look like live action versions of 50s illustrations, like Norman Rockwell. Just so that you remember that this is a play being written by a playwright in a play being shown on television in the 50s. Every now and then, we drop back to the frame play, so that you don't get too comfortable. And of course, there is an alien who lands to steal the asteroid.

So both of these movies are extremely stylized, high concept, and rather drily funny. I think Driver should do more straight-ahead comedy, because he's good at it (although he sometimes seemed to be channeling Jeff Goldblum.) Both movies have quarantines, which I guess is just zeitgeist. Both are interested in the children, more than a lot of movies with families. Baumbach and Wes Anderson seem to run in the same circles, so I guess it makes sense we'd see some similarities.

We really enjoyed both of these, and they worked really well as a double bill. 

Out with the Old, In with ...

Happy New Year of the Dragon all. I feel recovered enough from the holidays that I am ready to sum up 2023. Or maybe I don't, because I just want to say that it sucked. 

Partly recency bias, because Ms. Spenser caught COVID on Christmas, and is still suffering - mildly, because vaccinated and all,  but still. Also, when we returned from the vacation, we realized how old and unwell our dog actually was. And so we had to call the vet and let her go. So, maybe I'm in a grumpy mood.

As for our movie watching, losing Netflix kind of messed everything up. My habit, my ritual was disrupted. I no longer have a specific, curated set of DVDs for each weekend. I need to fish around on whatever streaming service we are subscribing to this week, pick something up at the library, look through my home discs, etc. It shouldn't be that different, but it is, somehow. We'll see if I get used to it, and if I change this blog's tagline.

It looks like I watched fewer movies from 2023 in 2023 - 13 or 14, depending on whether you count Meg 2, which I slept through. Lots of stupid action movies. The best of the batch was probably John Wick 4, or maybe Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Anything that wasn't a sequel? How about The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster? Perhaps not the greatest movie, but it was original, and showed a lot of heart. See also Slash/Back, the Inuit girls hunting monsters movie. 

Best movie we watched this year? Best movie ever: Bringing Up Baby. We actually watched it this year - borrowed it from Netflix and didn't send it back, mwahaha! Just as good as ever. 

Some notable movies from 2022 saw in 2023 we: Nope and Three Thousand Years of Longing. Both were by directors we love, but showed an advance in the use of the cinematic medium. Nope used realistic images of the wide-open fields and skies of California to instill uneasy dread. Three Thousand Years had a maximalist, baroque vision of beauty attached to a somewhat cold and intellectual story. 

Oddball movie of the year: Dave Made a Maze. Low budget fun. And recyclable!

Best movie first seen in 2023: I'm going to say Spies, the Fritz Lang silent. Just for the incredible visuals.

Trends: we watched a few more rom-coms than usual (usual is 0) in 2023. Most were only so-so, but I did like Down with Love, both for the way it referred back to the classics, and for the fine execution.

I feel like I watched a lot of movies that I should have already seen, but none were big revelations. Some I enjoyed, but I never felt like I'd been missing out.

As usual, I watched too many stupid action pictures (not Ms. Spenser, though. She has standards). Most were forgettable, but I did enjoy Dungeons and Dragons. 

Not much new on the cocktail front. I've been making some Singapore Sling variations. We got a Ninja blender, so I even made a few frozen Slings. Around this time of year, I tend to drink a lot of sparkling wine, and usually mix it into French 75s, etc. This time, I just enjoyed it straight.

And what to expect in 2024? I hope I'll get my viewing habits stabilized. I hope I watch some good movies but I'll be happy with a lot of stupid action movies that aren't as bad as, say, Red Notice. I blame streaming. 

Oh, and I haven't blogged it, but I've been watching a few Carry On movies (I have bootleg copies of the entire run). They are both worse (jokes, sexism) and better (some sweet romantic touches) than I expected. I'll probably watch more as the year goes on.

OK, I'll close out dregs of 2023 by wishing all a happy, healthy 2024 - and good viewing!

Just Plane Movies

So, over the holidays, I stayed at my sister's and saw some stupid (and one good) movies. That's the end of it, right? Oh, no, there' still the flight home. For an airplane movie, I want something that I don't plan to watch on the big (TV) screen, but not something so bad I'll turn it off. On the way over, I watched The Bruce Springsteen No Nukes Concert film. Seeing thge Big Man with Bruce again sort of made me tear up. So that was fine. On the way back:

Knights of the Zodiac (2023) is a dumb SF fantasy martial arts movie. You see, Athena, goddess of war, is coming back to free mankind or destroy the earth, something. Mackenyu is a young cage fighter who discovers that he has some kind of powers, which makes a bunch of guys in mech suits start chasing him. He is rescued by Mark Dacascos, who flies him to the secret island lair of the good guys. Their leader is Sean Bean, and his daughter, Madison Iseman (from the Jumanji movies) is the incarnation of Athena. The bad guys are lead by Bean's ex, Famke Janssen. 

There you have it, the reason I watched was Dacascos, Bean and Janssen. They were all great, although Dacascos was underused with only one or two fights. Janssen looks great - where have they been hiding her? This movie is based on the Saint Seiyu series, but I haven't read any, so that didn't mean much to me. There were some nice visuals, I guess. 

The Creator (2023) is.a much less dumb movie. It is set in the near future. AI and humanoid robots are perfected, but they go wild and nuke LA. America goes to war with the AIs, but the rest of the world, New Asia in particular, lives with them in peace. John David Washington is sent by the US Army to New Asia to go undercover and find the Creator, the guy who created the AIs. But he falls in love with, and marries a New Asian woman, Gemma Chan, who becomes pregnant. Then there's a premature raid, and his wife is killed. So he retires.

But the Army pulls him back in when they learn of a new weapon that will neutralize their mega-weapon, an immense flying bombing platform. Also, maybe his wife isn't dead. So he goes back to New Asia. It turns out that the weapon is a cute little kid who can control machines with his mind. And guess who her parents are?

Again, this has some great visuals, lots of future Asian peasant villages with ox-drawn levitating carts, robot Buddhists, simulants who look human but have holes through their heads, etc. The plot may have a ton of holes, but the action was mostly cool. I wonder if I would have loved this movie if I didn't see it on a plane, or have been more critical.

That's it for the plane. We got home and decided to watch Meg 2: The Trench (2023) that night. Since we got up at 3:00 AM Eastern, and started watching around 5:00 PM Pacific, I fell asleep pretty hard. Can't tell you much about this. I think it had big sharks in. 

Gray Night

I have a ritual for watching movies - settling in, turning off lights as needed, giving the movie my attention. I don't usually like to just have something on in the background while I socialize or do some work. But my sister and brother-in-law take a more casual attitude. My BiL, in particular, likes to find something stupid and put it on. Others can watch or cook or whatever. I usually skip these, but this year I actually tuned into a couple.

Violent Night (2022) is about as stupid as it gets. It's set on Christmas eve at the compound of the absurdly rich Beverly D'Angelo and her horrible children and mostly horrible grandchildren - one of them is a sweet little girl Leah Brady. They are home-invaded by a heavily armed gang led by John Leguizamo. But right at that moment, Santa, played by David Harbour (Eleven's dad) has arrived. 

Little Leah Brady escapes from the invaders and hides, and Santa answers her Christmas wis=h (because she's Nice). He's not a fighter, and his magic is limited to presents and stuff, so he gets his ass kicked a lot. But Brady helps him remember his roots as a violent Norse raider, and it's, "You better watch out..."

Most of the quips here you can see a mile away. I don't think there was a "Ho Ho Ho, now I've got a gun," but everything else is. There is a great scene where Brady sets some traps, like in Home Alone. (Santa says, "Sure, whatever Home Alone is"). They don't work that well, but manage to be gorily lethal. 

Weirdly, after making the rich bastards as unlikable as possible, it kills a few and lets the rest live and continue to prosper while staying terrible. No redemption arc for anyone but Santa and his reindeers. I actually kind of liked this, except for those guys. 

The Gray Man (2022) is somewhat less silly, but only a little. It starts with Ryan Gosling in prison being recruited by a de-aged Billy Bob Thornton to act as an off-the-books deniable CIA assassin, to be known only as Six. Thirteen years later we see him in Shanghai on a mission to hit a guy trading info. Thornton has retired and the new leader Rege-Jean Page, seems pretty ruthless - telling him to "go loud" when a child is in the line of fire.

When he does make the kill, the target hands over the info in an encrypted memory card, saying it implicate Page in seriious crimes. So Gosling goes underground, and Page sends another killer after him, the evil psychopath Chris Evans. But Gosling's handler, the by-the-books Ana de Armas, decides to find him and see what is up. 

So, there's a bunch of globe trotting action, including a ridiculous CIA army vs. Gosling vs. Prague SWAT scene, with trolley fights and rocket launchers. You get the idea. There is also a hostage, Thornton's niece with a weak heart, Julia Butters. 

The fights are over the top and about par for modern high-budget action. Evans is delightfully evil, with a bad haircut, high-water pants and a "trash 'stache". Gosling is the usual bad ass quip machine - Chris Evans even drawls, "We get it, you're quippy." And it ends with a setup for a sequel. 

This is all well and good, but breaks absolutely no ground. The Russo Brothers are quite good at this kind of thing, but there isn't much to distinguish it from the pack. In particular, it is part of the latest generation of not-good/not-bad Netflix action films. Maybe I could have set my expectations low enough to really like this, but instead, I just didn't hate it. Like I said about The Killer, I might actually prefer The Hitman's Bodyguard.

Strawberry Letter

Welcome to 2024! I'll have a recap of 2023 in a few days, but first I've got to catch up on the last few movies we saw. We visited with my sister over the holiday, and watched a number of ridiculous movies. I'll give them a few words, also in a few days. But we also saw a ridiculous, awesome movie that I want to give a whole post to: Strawberry Mansion (2021).

It starts with a man (director Kentucker Audley) in an all pink kitchen. He seems to be dying - possibly from heart problems (clutching pink pill bottles) or hunger (searching in his pink empty refrigerator). Then a friendly looking guy comes in to save the day with a bucket of fried chicken and a liter of Red Rocket soda. Then Audley wakes up. He pays his dream tax on a tablet and sets about his day.

His first stop is to get a bucket of chicken, and he even tries their Chicken Shake, chicken and gravy in a blender. He drives a Corvair and wears a hat. The whole movie has a retro vibe like that. He also sees a man in the parking lot covered in grass and plants, like a bipedal piece of meadow. But that disappears, so it was probably a hallucination. 

He is going to a large pink mansion, to do a dream audit on an eccentric old woman, Penny Fuller (who played Mrs. Drysdale on Beverly Hillbillies, among other roles). Her mansion is decorated wildly, and is full of dream tapes, that look like VHS tapes (Audley does say that this style is obsolete). Audley notes that the audit is going to take longer than he expected so she insists that he stay with her, in her pet turtle's room.

When he audits her dreams, he is shown as a faint video image, with his hat and a notepad. The system circles some items and displays the tax on them ("hawk: $0.30"). But the dream shows Fuller as a young woman (Grace Glowicki) playing a violin in the graveyard, while her father plays a post horn, and reaches into a dead buffalo to pull out a flower, telling her "Nothing dies". In fact, she's the young Glowicki in all her dreams. He also sees the plant man, and many men covered in dream tape, like ghillie suits made of mag tape. 

I will stop with the exposition, and just let you know the movie is full of dreams, both hers and his. There is an odd romance, and a dastardly plot - to put ads into dreams. OK, you figured that out. The part about taxing dreams seems not to be a problem. 

It's all done with a charming, low budget, lo-fi retro feel. The dream tapes are VHS tapes, and they are played on old VHS machine. The user views them by putting on a helmet that is probably a plastic wastebasket with cans, tupperware, and some hoses glued on and all painted black. You get the idea. 

This didn't seem to be all that deep - the conspiracies and crimes, the dream logic, the chicken, the weird suits, I don't think you'll find much under the surface. But that's fine. It's fun and beautiful (in a lo-fi way). 

I'm sure I've heard about Kentcker Audley somewhere - can't forget a name like that. Don't know where I heard it - maybe I read a review of this once, and that's all I got. 

Pointless note: The other movie my brother-in-law was thinking of watching was The Adjustment Bureau. These two movies might have made a good double bill, because of the hats.