This has been a very busy week, including three straight days of seeing a film in a theatre. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The common thread among all of them is that they were sequels. Some original movie I have seen, others I haven’t. Early September in Toronto has been the Toronto International Film Festival since 1976 when it was the Festival of Festivals. I am always excited to walk down these days at King Street where the main theatres are located (Roy Thompson, Royal Alex and Princess of Wales). There is just a buzz and energy in the streets. Actors and actresses are in the city. People who love movies gather and line up to see the over 240 movies over the roughly ten days. Covid put a pause on the activities, but it is fully back. On Thursday I had the opportunity to see a film, which ended up being a total shot in the dark. I had been looking for tickets and the gala prices were on resale were over $350, which is silly for a movie like Andrew Garfield’s We Live in Time, which will be released in a few weeks.
I, The Executioner: With no background, I found a reasonably priced ticket to see the South Korean film, I, The Exectioner. I knew that this movie had been shown at Cannes earlier in the year. Still the director Ryoo Seung-wan and his producer buddy were there with an interpreter. They also mentioned that they added a new vignette post the credits that was never seen before.
The film is a sequel to his 2015 film Veteran, and has the same cast returning. To cateogirize this movie broadly it is a high energy cop/team film where this team, lead by the very good Hwang Jung-min, as a veteran cop and his team try to solve a series of revenge killings. A number of perpetrators of murders who have been perceived publicly as been given too light sentences from the justice system, are then being hunted down and killed (presumably) by a killer who kills them in the same manner as they killed their victims. Social media is well engaged, with an influencer/broadcaster talking about the injustices and egging on someone to do something about it. All the while our team of police investigators have a new boss who wants to make a splash with a high profile case. In the opening sequence, it is like a Bond opening with a set up and then a sting going sideways with chases and fights. It engages the audience straight away.
As the plot unfolds, and the intrigue increases with tracking down potential suspects, there continues to be fights, car chases and mixed martial arts. All the scenes are well done, and with backdrops that would make for challenging filming (like a stone bridge in the middle of a city with a festival going on). The stakes rise for the team as they grapple with more high profile murders and attempted murders. I liked this because it kept my attention from beginning to end. There was some good laughs, some moments where injuries clearly would have occured and would have hurt. Still those involved show tremendous skills in combat and other physical acts. They are also people, notably our main character, who is not a rookie, and he has a wife, a teenage son and young daughters. His demanding job can take time away from all of them.
This movie that I never would have seen anywhere else was a very pleasant surprise. I see that it was picked up for distribution at Cannes which is very good. It deserves an audience. I also now am interested in tracking down the original Veteran from this same group. Well worth tracking down and checking out.
Alien Romulus: I saw this movie on Thursday night with a sparse crowd in the theatre. I have seen all of the Alien movies. I have liked them to varying degrees. There have been nine Alien related films, but I am going to discount the Alien vs Predator films, which means seven films. I will include Prometheus and Alien Covenant in this series though. The first Alien (1979) with Tom Skerritt and Sigourney Weaver and the crew battling the alien remains a sci-fi classic with scenes that were unique for their day. State of the art effects and film effects were used to raise the level of anxiety in the crew and the audience. It was such a success that the sequel in 1986 with the studio choosing James Cameron as opposed to Ridley Scott to direct. Aliens was a smashing success, building on the original premise and ratcheting up the number of alien creatures, but also the personal relationships, notably with Sigorney Weaver (playing Ripley) and a little girl and the humanoid robots (synthetics) who are in both films. We learn more, and we see the arc of Ripley’s character as she takes a more grey vision of those around her, and avoids painting all people and synthetics with the same brush. But that’s background. So what happening with this latest installment? Where did it go wrong? For me, this is the first Alien movie that I left and I was bored.
This film is NOT a continuation of Alien Covenant and the Prometheus direction. Think of it as another unrelated story in the Alien world, where Weyland Industries is the dominant name in space exploration, mining, terra-forming and building worlds. Remember that in Alien the ship Nostromo was a mining space craft returning back to Earth, before being sidetracked in a rescue mission for a distress signal on an unknown planet. Here we have a much younger group of miners in a dreary planet that gets no sunshine at all. These seemingly twenty-somethings don’t like their lot in life, and one has this idea to leave the planet and explore a nearby space ship which has been decommissioned and presumably abandoned and empty. Inside there are some cryogenic pods that would allow these young people to head off to a new and more exciting planet. Early on we see our main protagonist Cailee Spaeny (Rain) and her brotherly companion and we learn that he is a synthetic named Andy (played by David Johnson). He is constantly being picked on.
The group of friends embark on their journey to the hobbled space station, not a ship, and it has predictable results. The challenge with this movie is that it offers nothing new to an already vibrant Alien universe. The creatures don’t talk. There is no interaction. They are just very difficult to kill, and once they get a hold of a human host, then really bad things happen. We already know about the babies spawning and extricating themselves from inside a human body from the chest cavity. I was surprised with the quickness by which it takes place here, versus the original when John Hurt’s character had the creature on his face for some time, then it disappeared and he seemed fine, until he wasn’t. The timeline has been enhanced greatly. This young crew doesn’t gain from having space experience, nor a science officer or a crew who knows the ins and outs of the ship. It is the youngest crew in the series, which was likely the goal. Alien has always had strong female characters. Ripley is, and has always been, one of the best of these women. Rain reminds me more of the new Star Wars Rey than Ripley. So young, without the training for taking on a substantive monster creature. Rain is no Ripley. They are lines from earlier Alien movies scattered in this version, but they fall flat. It feels like a movie trying too hard to live up to a movie series with impressive and intimidating pedigree. I wasn’t engaged with this young crew and cast. I knew what would happen with the creature. I learned nothing new. It seemed pointless to send these young people to die in this way. I also wasn’t convinced on the need to deal with the synthetic story as it happened. Those who saw and love the original I suspect will know exactly what I am referring to. It seems the ongoing underlying message is that humans always seem to find a way to mess with an unnatural engineered creature. Apparently there is no effective communication for people to be documenting the horrors of this creature that the Weyland company wishes to bring back to civilization. In short, the connection and story that engages you with the crew and hopes that they can find a way to survive, we just don’t know how, is missing in this latest version. It feels like a money grab, with the hope of introducing the series to a younger audience. I wish that they had surrounded the younger group with a better story, and a means to have a few new aspects of this complex creature. Sadly it was lacking.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: The original Beetlejuice from 1988 was directed by Tim Burton. It featured a young couple, played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin, who lived in this old house on a hill. They die trangically but retain their overall kind disposition and life attitude despite being dead. They are the focal point and when a new family purchases their beloved house. The new family is husband and second-wife (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara) with a young goth teenage daughter played by Winona Ryder. The new ghosts struggle with scaring away the step-mother O’Hara who is looking to change everything about this house. Beetlejuice is an underworld smart-ass character who offers his services of the supernatural and human real person exorcism. In the original, Ryder manages to thwart an effort by Beetlejuice to extract a marriage out of her in exchange of assisting with helping the Davis and Baldwin characters. Honestly I have to admit before seeing the sequel that I wasn’t entirely sure that I had seen the original. In the end it didn’t really matter. I think it helps to know the original but not fatal.
In the sequel, Charles Deets has passed on. A wise choice given the real-life complicated life of the actor Jeffrey Jones who played him, given the fact that he was on the Sex Offender list and was sentenced to five years probation back in 2002. The sequel cleverly tells the story of Charles Deets’ death and how Catherine O’Hara will movie forward with the house that she is in. Meanwhile, grown up Winona Ryder (Lydia Deetz) has a daughter of her own and is using her abilities to talk to ghosts. Just not the ghost of her departed husband, and the father of her daughter. Daughter doesn’t believe any aspect of what Mom does on TV and online. They don’t speak very often.
Meanwhile we learn that Beetlejuice in his prior life was married to the beautiful Monica Bellucci. He tells that backstory with the knowledge that she has returned to his world, in an unusual fashion and wants to kill him. She has some unique abilities. Meanwhile, moody daughter hears about her grandfather’s untimely death, as well as engagement of her Mom, Lydia, to her new boyfriend. It is all too much for her, and she bikes off into town, having a meet-cute with a local boy sitting in his treehouse. Ultimately Ryder needs to re-engage with Beetlejuice and his shenanigans in order to address a pressing problem. Michael Keaton clearly enjoys this role. This is a movie for pure entertainment sake. Did I laugh? Yes there were some laughs. I take this as some campy retro fun, much like Stranger Things which ressurected Winona Ryder’s career, and made 1980s music (like Kate Bush) become so popular again. Does this need to be seen in a theatre as opposed to at home? Not really. For those who loves the original, then this is fun to see. I actually don’t feel that the source material is all that strong, and they made the most of this plot. I think that Catherine O’Hara continues to show her genius, and turns what was a villian role in the original into a more sympathetic role in the sequel. Monica Bellucci plays a role that is thankless, with no redeeming character and used as a plot device to give something else for Beetlejuice to deal with. At a time when there hasn’t been much to watch in the theatre, at least Beetlejuice can provide some relief. For Toronto residents of course there is TIFF to enjoy for another week. Enjoy!!
Mondays With Robbie 