Slackers

 Speaking of very dark comedies, we watched Slack Bay (2017). It's a French period piece set between the wars (?) in the picturesque seaside town of Mont St. Michel. With cannibals.

It starts with a family of rustic mussel picker coming home from the beach. A roadster filled with vacationers drives by, commenting on their picturesque-ness. while the pickers grumble about tourists. The tourists consist of an artistic man with a hunchback and odd, spastic gestures, his wife and two daughters and their cousin. Also along are his flamboyant aunt (Juliette Binoche) and his wife's clueless brother.

Down by in the dunes, an extremely fat detective is looking for clues about the recent disappearances in the area. He has a tendency to lie or fall down on the ground and get stuck there, requiring his assistants to prop him back up.

And the family of mussel pickers? The patriarch is known as the Eternal, because he operates the lifeboat that has saved hundreds. Their older son is a somewhat goofy guy named Ma Loute, and the younger three sons are hellions. Oh, and the mother seems to spend most of her time cooking and serving up the corpses of the tourists that they kill.

The Eternal and his son help tourists cross the Bay to the island (I think?). We meet them resting on a boat, but when it comes time to cross, they scoop the tourists up in their arms and wade across. Cousin Billy seems to enjoy getting carried across by Ma Loute - he or she claims to be a girl in boy's disguise. She even crosses over dressed as a girl. It seems that Ma Loute is falling in love with her, until he puts his hand under her one crossing and discovers that she or he has balls, and gets disgusted. Looks like he's for the cooking pot.

This isn't a hilarious comedy (although knowing French might have helped), but it's very silly - except for the cannibalism. Absent that, it's more or less a simple comedy of manners, with some absurdist touches. SPOILER - the detective gets gas, inflates even more, and sails away like a balloon. Or maybe it's a tragic love story of a big eared cannibal and an upper-class teen transvestite. Or maybe it just is what it is. 

High School Confidential

I think it was Brandi Brown who I first heard about The Kid Detective (2020) from. The premise sounds great: an Encyclopedia Brown style kid detective grows up, but can't move on from kid-detectiving. Then he has a real case. It was supposed to be funny, then get dark. All true.

Adam Brody plays the grown-up kid. We meet him hungover, getting woken up by a call from work - he thought it was Sunday, but it isn't. We get a flashback of his childhood cases, solving the case of who robbed a locker (the bully who is allergic to peanuts, because he didn't steal the Reeses) and so forth. He even finds a hit and run driver. That prompts the town to give him an office to work out of. He charged two quarters a case. Then a girl, a close friend, vanishes. He tries to track her down, but can't. Even though he's only 12 he feels responsible. He never does solve that case. Maybe that's where it all went wrong.

But when he gets to his office, his no-fucks-given secretary. tells him he has a customer. It's high-school student Sophie Nellise, who wants him to find out who killed her boyfriend. He was a top-of-his-class boy scout, with no known enemies, but Brodie warns her that she might not like what he finds out. But she asks him to go ahead. Even though she can't pay (and he is desperately broke), he feels like he has to go ahead.

So begins the investigation. This is similar to Brick - high school noir, but without the snappy patter. They find a picture of a nude girl in a tiger mask in one of his books and find out that he was having an affair with a slightly older high-school semi-hooker ("His girlfriend is cute, but I'm complicated"). He was also dealing drugs - a confidence-building ego enhancer - which Brodie tests, giving him a enough courage to interrogate the local teen bad kids, and almost enough to talk to the local biker gang, including the one with the peanut allergy. who has a grudge against him. He also breaks into a kids house and gets trapped in the closet of his 9 year old sister - then getting discovered. It's mostly very humiliating. 

In fact, he spends most of the movie bowed down under the weight of failure and self-loathing. His parents are still supporting him, but just barely. The local merchants look at him with disgust. The police and high-school principal tolerate him for his past glories, but just barely.

And then he solves the case. I won't give it away, but it is probably a lot worse than you guess. He even manages to solve the case of the missing girl. He is once more beloved. His parents now respect him. He cleans up his apartment. And in the final shot, he breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably. 

I'm not sure I can explain that last shot. But I imagine that it has something to do with the choice between being a drunken loser, and seeing the world for all its naked depravity. Some comedy, huh?

Body Rock

As I have mentioned more than once. Ms. Spenser likes horror movies. Particularly, horror without a lot of gore (no slashers), preferably with a supernatural element. Since I am the queue curator, it is my duty to pick something like this every week or so. Since this is not really my element, I make a lot of blind choices (I almost said, stabs in the dark). Body Cam (2020) is one example.

It starts on a rainy night in a deserted industrial part of town. A police car has stopped a van without license plates. The driver, a shadowy figure wearing a coat with a hood. The dash cam shows the cop trying to get it to show a license or just talk, but all it does is gesture, and the cop goes flying up out of the frame.

Then there's that dreaded "X hours/days earlier..." card. We seepolice officer Mary J. Blige coming back to work after a long suspension for punching a civilian. She is paired with a rookie, Nat Wolff. One of their first call is to find out what happened to the cop in the first scene. The car is there, but not the cop. Blige checks the dash cam, and finds it full of interference. But she does see the office go flying, and land on the hood of the car, before flying off again. They find him high up on a fence, impaled. When backup arrives, the dash cam footage is unusable, and nobody really believes her when Blige tells them what she has seen. In fact, they tell her she shouldn't have messed with the evidence.

But Blige got a clue about the person in the van - she's wearing hospital scrubs, and there's a nurse who left suddenly a little while ago, Anika Noni Rose.

We see the van stop at a convenience store, where some gangbangers are harassing the owner and filming themselves. The police see the van and head in, causing the gangbangers to freak and grab Rose. Then a hulking shadow grabs him from behind, causing him to start shooting. By the time Blige and Wolff show up, everyone is dead and Rose has slipped away. But she surreptitiously grabs one of the phones. She goes to the morgue and uses the dead guys thumb to unlock it. Once again, the footage has a lot of interference, but it shows the shadow monster.

When this started, I was afraid it was going to be about honest cops who body cams showed them doing horrible things, because demons or ghosts or something. That would have been pretty tasteless. Instead, the body cam footage was almost always unusable, except that Blige gets to see it. I don't know why she never waited to watch this stuff with a witness who could corroborate, but it's just as well. You can't really trust anyone, especially in the police. 

This was really only fair - a decent plot, some good scares and action, but nothing too exciting. M.J. Blige had some real charisma, and was very believable as a working cop, not corrupt or too idealistic. Any way, Ms. Spenser was satisfied.  

Tomorrow Never Thinks

Like a dope, I had to go and watch The Tomorrow War (2021). I'd heard some off-the-cuff comments about it ("It wasn't as bad as Tomorrow War, was it?"), but I figured, what the heck, how bad could it be?

Chris Pratt is an ex-Green Beret, high-school science teacher, husband and father. His ordinary life is interrupted when visitors from the future appear all over the world. The message: In the future, the earth will be invaded by monsters from outer space. Humanity is being creamed. They need soldiers to help prevent the extinction of humanity. The world comes together and sends a thousand soldiers into the future for a one-week tour. Not many come back. The world institutes a universal draft.

Of course, Pratt gets drafted. His wife, Betty Gilpin, convinces him to try to run, and get his estranged father's help. His father is J.K. Simmons, with a buffed bod and bushy beard, an underground conspiracy nut. He could get Pratt out of the draft, but antagonizes Pratt so much that he just leaves to go to the future.

There's a basic training section, where Pratt meets Sam Richardson, a soft genius type. Between them they realize that everyone drafted has a death date (known to the futurians) before their target date, and all the futurians are young enough so that they weren't born here in the present/past. This is the first and last intelligent point in the movie. They also note that they aren't being told anything about the monsters or how to fight them. It seems nobody really cares. 

They get sent to the future and it's an immediate cluster. The monsters are everywhere and can take a lot of machine gun fire. Which made me wonder right off - why are they sending soldiers with machine guns against them? They barely work, and soldiers are not expendable in this world. Human population is rapidly approaching zero. Have they considered different weapons and tactics? Here's an idea - they have a time machine! Could they use that in any way?

Anyhow, Pratt meets up with his superior officer, who turns out to be his grown-up daughter, Yvonne Strahovski. They have a bunch of bang-bang adventures together, trying to get a toxin that will kill the female monsters. They achieve this goal, but Strahovski dies sending Pratt back to the present with the toxin.

He is one of the last ones to return. The time machine is fried. The world is ready to give up. They have the toxin, but nobody knows where the aliens come from or how to get at them when they arrive. Then Gilpin does the incredible: She thinks things over for a minute. Something no one else seems to have done. 

So they realize that the aliens are here now, they just haven't come out. They need to get to Siberia to kill them in their cradles. Fortunately, Simmons is a pilot. Oh, you thought they would go to the  governments of the world with this? Why would they do that, when they can attack this world-ending menace with 5 or 6 randos and an old guy?

They find the alien ship and surprise, it looks like a Giger knock-off. Also, the monsters, like the xenomorphs, are weapons for clearing out populated planets. Or maybe pets, who knows? The monsters are in embryo sacs (not eggs, so it isn't a total Alien rip off) so they start administering the toxin. They get one or two, but they start waking up. So they just blow them all up. I guess they didn't need that toxin after all. And we all live happily ever after, including in the future, where Strahovski presumably doesn't die. Oh, but Simmons does, but he was old.

I understand that time rravel is hard, but I've rarely seem it done so stupidly. The idea that the world wouldn't exploit future knowledge but just throw cannon fodder at the enemy is - ok, pretty believable. But not at all satisfying. 

All that aside, we enjoyed it when things were asploding and Pratt was yelling, "Move move!" But even there, while Pratt was clearly a super competent soldier, he never figures out that spray-and-pray was not working. Oh well, he can't think if the writers won't.

This seems like a perfect example of a streaming blockbuster. Big, loud, stupid and released without a thought to whether it's good or not. People will stream it when it comes out and forget it immediately I guess I should too.

High Plains Driftless

The Driftless Area (2016) is on of those Anton-Yelchin-has-a-dead-girlfriend movies, like Odd Thomas and Burying the Ex. It was sort of a thing with him. 

It starts with Yelchin hitchhiking carrying a small rosebush. A creepy looking drifter (John Hawke) picks him up. He demands $20 for gas money, then kicks him out of the truck outside of town, and steals his rosebush. Yelchin chucks a rock at him, causing the truck to crash. Then Yelchin wakes up. That was a dream.

He is a small-town bartender in the Drifless Area, an area of the midwest that the glaciers missed, and therefore has no good soil. Hi parents died when he was young, and he's kind of drifting himself. 

Going back a while. we see an arsonist set a house on fire (it's John Hawke). Then we see a naked Zooey Deschanel walking through the smoldering ashes. She finds something to wear and wanders over to Frank Langella's house - he has been waiting for her. To spoil this whole thing - she's a ghost, and Langella helps ghosts find peace. She will need someone to get revenge for her. Guess who it's going to be.

Yelchin falls in a well, and after a night in the water, is finally rescued by Deschanel, who takes in to a place Langella has set up for her. They start falling in love, and somewhere in here, Yelchin realizes that she is a ghost (although material enough to get him out of a well), and he wants to get her killer.

He figures that the dream was a premonition, buys a rosebush and starts hitchhiking. He gets picked up by Hawke, etc, and this time pulls a bag of money out of the truck. But Hawke isn't dead. We have been following him and some of his criminal cronies, and now he's coming for Yelchin.

This was an interesting mood piece. It was director/co-writer Zachary Sluser's first feature, and the presence of Deschanel hints at twee mumblecore. I don't think it was quite that. It was more like a quirky Coen Bros. movie - Fargo with the small midwest towns and hapless but scary criminals. The ideas of destiny and the hereafter were interesting, but I'd say the actors carried it. Yelchin's numbed by sorrow affect was maybe a little over-the-top. At some point i realized that he never lifted his head. Deschanel's ghost was only somewhat fetching, but she's not some Manic Pixie Ghost Girl. She is as solemn as he is, being dead and all.

Yelchin's death colored my feelings about his performance, I guess. It wasn't his best role, not the greatest movie, but sweet and entertaining nonetheless. 

High Security

Crimewave (1986) was an easy sell - a noir-ish comedy written by the Coen Bros. and directed by Sam Raimi, early in their careers. In fact, it was made right after their first movies. If only Bruce Campbell was in it - wait, he's the romantic conflict? Sold.

It starts with a carload of nuns screaming through the darkened streets. In prison, a weedy looking man is going to the electric chair. This guy, Reed Birney, is protesting his innocence, and as they walk him through the prison, explains in flashback:

He worked for a security company - one of the owners found out that the other owner was going to sell the company out from under him. So he hires some "exterminators" to kill him. When it looks like Birney is going to go to the office when the killers will be there, the owner tells him to take the day off, find a cute girl. That girl turns out to be Sheree J. Wilson. 

He tries to chat her up and invites her out for drinks, but isn't too suave. She blows him off, but he later finds her in a supper club, waiting for her boyfriend - Bruce Campbell, who calls himself a heel. Oh, and he's the one buying the security company. 

Meanwhile, the exterminators are running amok, killing whoever they run across. One is a giant bruiser, the other a skinny rat0faced giggling psycho. It's going to take a lot to stop them, and Birney really isn't up to the job, no matter how much he wants to prove himself to Wilson.

This is a very silly, slap-sticky movie. It reminded me at times of the Police Squad movies. It also reminded me Coen movies like Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There. And the Three Stooges, of course. The look is very retro - the guys at the club are all wearing tuxes, even Birney, who is pretty blue-collar. 

We were expecting something much more gonzo - We'd seen mention of animation, so I was thinking wacky special effects. No animation. A pretty conventional silly movie. I don't think it got very good (any) reviews. But we had fun.

Buckle Up for Safety

Gringo (2018) was three or four selections down in my queue, but Netflix sometimes skips over movies, even if they aren't in Wait status. I didn't mind in this case. I'd been planning to watch this, just never got around to it.

It starts with two high-powered executives, Joel Edgerton and Charlize Theron, having office sex, when they get a phone call. It's from Mexico - their employee, Daniel Oyelowo, is screaming. He's been kidnapped. We then jump to Three Days Earlier...

We meet Daniel, a nerdy Nigerian immigrant to Chicago. He lives with wife Thandie Newton, who maybe henpecks him. He works for Edgerton and Theron's pharmaceutical company, largely because he's Edgerton's buddy (although Edgerton is a bit of a swine). He's planning to go to the company's Mexico office in the next day to straighten out an inventory problem. When he finds out that Edgerton and Theron are going too, he worries that the rumors of a buyout are true, and that they are tagging along to figure out how to replace him. 

He is partly right. They are selling the company, but they are going down to Mexico because they know the plant manager is selling their product, a cannabis derivative, to a crime boss. They want to stop it so as not to screw up the sale. At dinner in Mexico, he leaves his phone on the table and records them talking about their plans. The next day, when they go back to the US, Oyelowo checks into a cheap hotel and convinces the dim clerks to help him stage a phony kidnapping. He figures the company's anti-kidnapping insurance will pay out and he'll take the money. But Edgerton (the slime) let that insurance lapse. So Edgerton calls his brother, Sharlto Copley, an ex-mercenary, now international aid worker, to go rescue Oyelowo.

I'm leaving out Amanda Seyfried, a nice girl who has been brought to Mexico by her dirtbag boyfriend. Harry Treadaway, as camouflage. He's really there to bring back a sample of the cannabis drug. Also left out are the Mexican gangsters who really do kidnap Oyelowo, and the tracking device that Copley has injected into Oyelowo. 

I'm leaving out a lot in fact. It almost doesn't matter, because it's mostly about how sweet, trusting, and sincere Oyelowo's character is. He isn't the kind of underdog that everyone steps on, although he tends in that direction. He's too smart for that. But you do want him to succeed all the way. And he does - partly because he's good, partly because he's lucky. And partly because he buckles his seatbelt, when the gangsters don't. 

The Seyfried/Treadaway subplot is kind of undercooked, and could have been dropped - but at least they don't have a romance. Newton gets done dirty by the plot, and I wish she hadn't been set up as a villain, but she does all right with it. I think the movie could have been kinder to the dopey Mexican hotel clerks, too. But that's mostly because this is a sweet, kind-hearted movie with an amazing cast. It was fun to watch.

In conclusion, this is one of the first "Amazon originals" - I could have watched it for free on streaing any time. But I still kind of prefer physical media.

Scary Monsters, Super Freaks

Freaks of Nature (2015) is the sort of thing we've seen a few times, so it doesn't exactly come across as original. But we kind of like it, so we keep queuing them up: teen horror comedies. John Hughes with a body count.

It starts with our three main characters on the run through suburban streets, chased by a mob of zombies and vampires. Then, in the distant downtown, we see the flying saucer. Then, we do a "how did we get here."

We find out that this little town is famous for two things: the "riblet", an industrial meat-like product, and the fact that humans, zombies and vampires all live together in loose harmony. Our main protagonist is Nicholas Braun, a normal guy. His claim to fame is his fastball, so he plays on the team managed by the owner of the riblet factory, Denis Leary, a kind of Elon Musk of meat products. Braun has had a crush on his sexy next-door neighbor since childhood (Vanessa Hudgens). He holds her stash, and she comes over to his bedroom to get high and cock-tease him. Braun's parents are embarrassing hippies Bob Odenkirk and Joan Cusack.

His old best friend is Josh Fadem, a nerdy genius who's brother and father are total jock meatheads who never miss a chance to remind him that he is a loser. When a zombie girl is kind to him, he begins to think it might be nice to have nothing to worry about but "brains".

Then there's Mackenzie Davis, an ordinary nice girl who is being courted by the hottest vampire in school. When she tells him she's ready, she thinks they are going to have sex. Instead, he drinks her blood and turns her.

Then the aliens show up and start disintegrating people. The humans, vampires, and zombies do what you'd expect - they turn on each other. 

And that's about it. The kids spend the last half/third of the movie rnnning away from the various menaces, before they come up with a plan and emerge victorious. There are funny little touches of Leary, Cusack, and Odenkirk, plus Keegan-Michael Key, Patton Oswald, and werner Herzog. But I have to say, not enough. 

The working title for this was Kitchen Sink, and I can see why. Not just the zombie/vampire/aliens (why no werewolves? Just wait). There are a lot of characters and incidents, a lot of arcs, just a lot of stuff. I feel like it could have either been less cluttered or more crazy. Instead, it's weirdly grounded. In a town of humans, vampires, and zombies, the baseball team is the source of a lot of the drama (and the resolution of the plot). 

Still, it was kind of cute, and definitely overstuffed with talent. I hope they had fun making it. We had fun watching. 

Nothing 2 Conjure With

Ms. Spenser was looking for a reliable horror movie, and picked James Wan's The Conjuring 2 (2016). We hadn't really been won over by the first one, but hope springs.

We started with a little reprise of the Amityville story to introduce the psychic investigation team of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson. Then we meet the next haunted contestants - a family in England is being haunted. One of the daughters is having visions and dreams about the gross old man who lived in their house before they did. It eventually gets pretty wild, and the church calls in Farmiga and Wilson - because the church can't get in involved if it's a hoax.

Now, this family is pretty broke - the dad left them for another family, the place is kind of a dump, and maybe they are looking for publicity, a little money, or at least a nicer place to live. But we, the audience see too much to make that seem likely. Still, Farmiga doesn't detect any ghosts, and she's usually very sensitive. But she has also been having dreams - of seeing Wilson impaled. So she would rather that they didn't get involved. 

The Farmiga/Wilson team are sort of growing on me. I especially like Wilson's mid-70's look. The English family is a bit of a downer - squalid house, troubled kids, son who stutters, and so on. Some of the fun of these movies is the business with the family while they're not being haunted, and I just didn't take to these. 

Ms. Spenser was pretty disappointed too. Besides, it gets dark so late these days, it's hardly worth watching a scary movie. 

Taran Wanderer

When I was a kid, say 9-14 years old, I was very into high fantasy. It started with Tolkien of course, but I also loved the Lloyd Alexander Tales of Prydain stories. This was a five-book "trilogy", loosely based on the Welsh legends collected as the Mabinogion (which is quite fun to say, by the way). Like The Once and Future King, they are both great examples of, and subversions of high fantasy. Although I knew Disney had made an animated movie based on the books, it was only recently that I thought to watch The Black Cauldron (1985).

The "hero" is named Taran, assistant pig-keeper to a wizard (voiced by Freddie Jones). He wants to be a warrior, but feels he is stuck looking after a pig, Henwen (a very cute little porker). But Henwen is no ordinary pig - she is an oracle, and the wizard uses her to make sure that the Black Cauldron is safe. The Horned King (John Hurt) wants to find it, because it can turn a corpse into an undying warrior. When the pig foretells danger, he sends Taran off to guard the pig at a cottage by the forest. And of course, he loses the pig right away, when gryphons swoop down and carry her off. 

Following her, he runs into Gurgi. a creature who talks a lot like Gollum (voiced by John Byner). Gurgi wants to be friendly, but isn't very trustworthy, so Taran gives him the slip.

He makes it to the cavernous halls of the Horned King, and is immediately captured and thrown into the dungeon. But a lovely (if somewhat ditsy) princess names Eilonwy shows up. She is also imprisoned, but has found the many underground passageways, letting her wander at will. They also release a bard named Fflewddur Fflamm, who has a harp whose strings break when he lies - and they break a lot.

Somewhere in the catacombs, Taran finds the tomb of an ancient king and takes his magic sword. So now they have that working for them. So this crew must get back Henwen and protect the cauldron. It turns out that the cauldron is in the keeping of three witches, who will only trade it - for the sword.

And so on. This is pretty action-packed, and even a little scary (if you are a young child). The Horned King has a skull for a face, which seems to use actual film of a skull superimposed on the animation. Overall, the look is very Disney - see Sword in the Stone - and so are the characters. Fflewddur Fflamm is pretty much your average Disney comedy blowhard, for instance. At least Eilonwy isn't much of a damsel in distress - she can usually hold her own.

The main thing I missed was the oddness of Welsh legend. As we know from, for ex, Robert Graves' White Goddess, pigs were considered to be creatures of great magical power in those days, and we don't really get that here. The Bard doesn't seem to have any bardic wisdom or powers, and so forth.

But I remember just enough of the books so that I felt these resonances. Also, it's basically a pretty good Disney. Ms. Spenser, who hasn't read the stories it's based on, liked it too. And that's good enough for me.