Idiot Boxing: Aggretsuko, season 1 (2018); GLOW, season 2 (2018)

The usually demure, cute red panda Retsuko, screaming out
her work frustrations at her favorite karaoke parlor. The
lyrics can be hilariously straightforward.

Aggretsuko, season 1 (2018)

A delightfully playful, satirical take on single working life in Japan, with a hilarious dash of cathartic rage.

Aggretsuko's first season is comprised of ten 15-minute episodes. They follow Retsuko, red panda in a Japan populated by anthropomorphic animals of all varieties: gorillas, dogs, cats, lizards, and dozens of others. Retsuko herself is a low-level accountant in a typically hierarchical large Japanese company. As a 25-year old woman in the still rigidly-structured Japanese corporate culture, the quite and cute little accountant has to deal with her bosses foisting unfair workloads on her, as well as the typical under-estimations of her skills and value to the company. Though the cultural pressures prevent Retsuko from speaking up and complaining, she finds release in frequently going alone to karaoke bars and belting out loud, obnoxious death metal songs. Here, she can scream her lungs out to exorcise the demons which she can't release in public.

The show is not much of a commitment, and my wife and I found it consistently hilarious. I actually lived and worked in Japan for two years, though not in a large city and not for a large company like Retsuko. Still, one only needs a passing knowledge of traditional Japanese business culture and gender roles to see the humor in the show. Retsuko's quest for professional satisfaction and a boyfriend are fairly universal desires. And the show creator and writer - known only by the mononym "Rarecho" - has an excellent sense of balancing certain characters' restrained anger with the more eruptive moments of fury. On its surface, this animated show has the kawaii (cute) exterior one would expect from anime (the show is produced by the Sanryo company, which is responsible for the ultra-cute Hello Kitty line of products). This seemingly harmless veneer covers up the very real angst felt by Retsuko and several of her friends and coworkers.

I'm looking forward to the second season, set to release sometime in 2019.

The "Gorgeous Ladies" will have to face more than a few new
challenges as they try to build momentum for their fledging
show. And garish costumes can only help so much.

GLOW, season 2 (2018)

Season two of GLOW - the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling - continues and even improves upon many of the strengths of the initial one.

At the end of season one, the GLOW wrestlers have shown just enough success to justify getting their own set, a season's worth of shows, and a prime TV slot. Of course, scripting and performing a wrestling show can be much easier than it seems. While the ladies had gotten their wrestling and acting skills up to a respectable level, they now find themselves having to ratchet up the intensity. Show runner and director Sam Silva (Marc Maron) is just as on edge and irritable as ever, and he goes on a power trip to ensure that he maintains control over the show. He also limits how many matches will be on each episode, forcing the women to up their creativity and boldness with their wrestling moves. On top of that, several of the women are dealing with personal issues outside of the ring, including divorce, overly zealous fandom, and losing the respect of family members due to their negatively-stereotyped wrestling characters.

This second season went right to the places that I was hoping at the end of the first. With all of the primary players now know, the new season is able to dig deeper into several of the women's personal lives. Of course, we see more of the tense dynamic between Ruth (Alison Brie) and Debbie (Betty Gilpin), which is paced and told very well. In addition, we have a very thoughtful episode focused on Tamee (Kia Stevens) as she reckons with her controversial wrestling character "Welfare Queen." There is also a solid story arc with Sam and his newly-discovered daughter, Justine (Britt Baron), who had been a hopeful wrestler in the previous season. All of these stories are balanced and work together extremely well, with just the right balance of drama and humor. Through the season, I didn't feel that there was a single moment or storyline that didn't serve either a comedic or narrative purpose - a flaw than plenty of other Netflix shows haven't been able to avoid (I'm looking at you, Marvel Netflix shows).

Anyone not familiar with the show is of course best served to watch from the very beginning. With a very manageable twenty episodes of roughly 25 minutes each, it's no great commitment to get the full story. And it's a story that's worth it. 

New-ish Releases (no spoilers): Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017); Ready Player One (2018)

*both reviews are spoiler-free - read away!! 

Brawl in Cell Block 99

Director: S. Craig Zahler

It speaks well for a movie when you put it on late at night, only intending to watch about 30 minutes of it, only to find yourself still up at nearly 2:00 AM, having been gripped for two full hours. Such was the case with Brawl in Cell Block 99.

Vince Vaughan plays against type here, as Bradley Thomas, a hard-working blue collar guy who has a run of some bad luck. He's already having some marital problems, and then he loses his job. He and his wife decide to regroup and try to have a baby, but in order to have the money, they also agree that Bradley will return to his old job of running drugs. When one particularly risky job goes very wrong, Bradley ends up in prison. On top of this, his now-pregnant wife is taken hostage and Bradley is told that the lives of his wife and unborn baby depend on his getting into a different, maximum security prison, and killing another inmate there, all at the behest of some supremely vicious gangsters.

This movie is gritty, brutal, and it uses the slow-burn approach to near-perfection. But where this approach is often used to describe the pacing and rhythm of the plot unfolding, in Brawl in Cell Block 99, it's more about the shift in tone and setting. The first 20 or so minutes of the movie take place in the middle of several bright, sunny days. But as things start to go south, actions take place more at night. Once Bradley is in prison, things continue to darken and constrict, until he is in virtual hell, with the visuals to match this descent every step of the way. The sense of Bradley being a man being slowly and horribly boxed in is palpable, thanks to strong performances and a cohesive visual style.

And the violence? Oh boy. What is only revealed in infrequent, relatively tame moments early in the picture devolve into full-on B-movie, grind-house gore by movie's end. Bradley is a supremely tough human being - a former boxer who knows how to handle himself, as well as keep his considerable anger in check. In an early scene, when he has very good reason to be enraged, he uses his bare hands to do a few thousand dollars' worth of damage to an innocent Dodge in his driveway. As situations grow more dire and intense around him, though, blood starts to spill and bones start to break. And the camera does not flinch in these moments. The final few sequences become an all-out, revenge fantasy gore-fest that would be much more disturbing if it weren't so completely over the top.

As brutal as it is, I was riveted by this movie. Vince Vaughan is actually quite good as this ultra-dark version of Cool Hand Luke. Sure, this southern accent slips a bit here and there, but he has Bradley's attitude down pat. And all the villains, who are pure evil, are played to perfection by faces both unknown and known, including Don Johnson and Udo Kier. Often, one-dimensional villains can be boring, but Zahler knows that they can work in a very straightforward, violent fantasy story such as this.

I now plan to go back and see some of Zahler's earlier work, especially Bone Tomahawk, which I'm told is arguably better and just as gory as Brawl in Cell Block 99. Fans who don't flinch from dark themes and violence that crescendos to cartoon-like levels by film's end should give this one a shot.

Ready Player One (2018)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Really disappointing. If it weren't drawing a few worthy elements from its source material, this would have even been a bad movie.

After recommendations from several fellow video game nerd friends, I finally read Ernest Cline's popular 2011 pop sci-fi novel Ready Player One. It's a fun read, despite not being particularly deep or intellectually engaging. Rather, it's a genuine love letter novel by a Generation X devotee to the popular video games, fantasy, and science-fiction entertainment that he grew up with in the 1980s. The premise is clever and intelligent enough to carry the heavily plot-driven story and make for a real page-turner. Though not a particularly fast reader, I plowed through the 370-page book in a few days, thanks to a compelling tale and the endless pop culture references. I know never to expect a movie adaptation to be as good as a decent novel, but this film fell woefully short of its potential.

The story takes place in the early 2040s, when the world is fully immersed in a decades-long degradation into the overpopulated, ever-more dystopian future that we in the 2010s are currently fearing. One of the few universally-shared pleasures of humanity in this future is the open-access virtual online world, The OASIS, which was created by a genius game designer in the 2030s and quickly became an escape for a stunning percentage of humanity. The designer, the reclusive James Halliday, left a tantalizing contest embedded within the OASIS upon his death in the late 2030s - an "Easter egg," or hidden prize - which will grant its finder complete ownership of the OASIS, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. One young egg hunter, or "gunter" as they're called, is Wade Watts, an 18-year old kid stuck in a particularly impoverished area in Ohio. Wade and a few fellow dedicated gunters begin to find a few of Halliday's well-hidden clues and beat some of his tremendously difficult challenges to get closer to The Egg. Unfortunately, The Egg is also being hotly pursued by the corporation IOI and its CEO, Nolan Sorrento. The ever-expanding and profit-oriented IOI wants to take over the OASIS and monetize every last scrap of it.

The film itself, in short, was too fast and way too much flash over substance. Let me be very clear here - I love video games. I think that Ernest Cline, who also helped co-write the adapted screenplay, along with Zak Penn, and I would have plenty of common interests to geek out over. It's part of the reason I enjoyed the novel. But the novel is paced very well, allowing the story to breathe a bit between the more thrilling segments. It allows the hunt for the keys and eggs to take on great significance, as Wade, the other gunters, and IOI's brain trust wrack their brains trying to puzzle out Halliday's riddles over the course of weeks and sometimes months. In the film, though, the keys and eggs are all found within a matter of a couple of days. There's barely enough time to see the importance of anything before you're being whipped around a bunch of hyper-kinetic, pure CGI landscapes crammed with dozens and sometimes hundreds of characters. Even the handful of "main" characters - Wade and four other top gunters - get almost no time to make much of an impression. We learn only so much about their backgrounds or motivations, and even these are glossed over so quickly that they have little to no time to inspire much sympathy. While Cline's novel isn't overly adept at creating deep and genuine characters, they were at least fleshed out enough that I cared about their relationships with each other a bit.

The CGI is about a s good as it gets, which only serves to
illustrate how even the best computer effects can't compensate
for a story that lacks proper rhythm and depth.

This is yet another in an ever-growing list of movies that I feel would have been better done as a multi-film series or a longer-form TV mini-series. I can only guess at why the movie studio didn't opt for this, despite having the rights to an immensely popular novel that geeks like me will gladly pay to see adapted well over multiple films, as well as Steven Spielberg's immense clout and vast financial resources. Maybe they were afraid to commit? Maybe Cline and his co-writer Zak Penn (whose stories I find to be much better than his scripts) thought they could effectively cram it all into one movie? Whatever the reason, the film suffers greatly for it, while it is very easy to imagine a 3-film trilogy or 8- to 10-episode TV series being able to tell Cline's story extremely well. I will concede that a few of Cline and Penn's ideas to streamline certain plot points work just fine, but these are vastly overwhelmed by the lack of the measured pace the tale demanded.

I was actually even more surprised that Steven Spielberg was in the director's chair for what I found to be a clumsy effort. Yes, the visuals are stunning, as you would expect from a director with his eye and cutting-edge visual film techniques at his command. But I expect far better story-telling from Spielberg. Even beyond how incredibly rushed everything is, there are so many hackneyed and cheesy elements that I was rolling my eyes and wincing by the third act.

This is ultimately a movie that I think is a missed opportunity. Many tantalizing ingredients were there, but the chefs rushed it and ended up with a dish that felt under-cooked and unsatisfying. 

Before I Die #622: Limite (1931)

This was the 622nd film I've seen out of the 1,199 movies on the "Before you Die" list that I'm gradually working my way through.

Translated English Title: Limit

Director: Mario Peixoto

An experimental, poetic film offering, I don't mind admitting that this one was a bit of a chore.

The "story" (a term which I use loosely) is that of three people - two women and one man - stuck on a small boat together, drifting on an unnamed body of water. The three are bedraggled and recollecting past moments in their lives. One woman is an escapee from a prison; the man's lover has died; and the third woman seems to have abandoned her husband. These stories are all told almost exclusively through slow, measured visuals, with very minimal dialogue. The characters have no names (they are credited only as "Man 1," Woman 1" and "Woman 2"), and no specific details as to time or place are offered. While the backstories of the characters are presented in what seems to be chronological order, even this is not completely clear, as several elements of the film are rather fluid.

Watching Limite was not unlike watching a couple of films from a little earlier in this era: the Bunuel and Dali collaborations Un Chien Andelous and L'Age d'Or. While Limite does not use anywhere near the amount of surrealism as either of those hallucinatory films, there is a dreamlike quality to it. There are plenty of long, slow shots of each of the three main characters as they stare into the distance and ponder their circumstances - circumstances which I could only assume are meant to represent more universal feelings of loss, longing, and desire. At times, I found the movie so measured in its pace that I was mentally drifting. Perhaps this is simply my late-20th/early 21st-century viewer's attention span at work, but I found that I wasn't being given quite enough narrative meat into which I could sink my teeth. The result was drifting attention.

There are plenty of scenes such as this - a lone figure, gazing
at the horizon, dwelling on some sort of existential crisis.

When things were in motion in the tale, however, there could be interesting aspects in terms of visual storytelling. I always appreciate any movie director who can tell stories without dialogue, and Limite shows this frequently. Granted, there's not exactly much of a "story," in the traditional sense. This isn't Sergio Leone brilliantly revealing characters' true natures through masterfully orchestrated, elaborate visual sequences. Rather, director Peixoto offers more subtle cues. A shared glance between people. A ring on a finger. A forlorn look at a tombstone. These moments are poignant and effective, even if less impactful because the characters are archetypes rather than "real" people.

For its time and place, it's easy to see why Limite made its mark. Like the aforementioned contemporary films by Bunuel and Dali, this was clearly meant as a work of art, rather than a mainstream story. It experimented with and pushed the boundaries of what the visual medium of film could do. For that, it is noteworthy, if not exactly enjoyable to watch for fans of more straightforward narratives.

That's 622 movies down. Only 577 to go before I can die. 

New Release! Missions Impossible: Fallout (2018) [No Spoilers]

No Spoilers! Read Away!!

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

The sixth movie in the Mission Impossible franchise, Mission Impossible: Fallout, does what it sets out to reasonably well. The only problem for me is that I wasn't overly interested in what it set out to do.

About a 18 months ago, I pulled a Mission Impossible marathon, watching all five of the previous films within the span of a few days. I found the series rather uneven, with only two of the five films being to my liking (the third and fifth, MI:3 and Rogue Nation, to be precise). Since this sixth entry was written and directed by the man who did the same for the previous entry, Rogue Nation, I was hopeful that it would be at least as good as that excellent spy action thriller. Those hopes rose a bit when I saw the overwhelmingly positive reviews pour in during the week leading up to the film's release.

I now have to say that, although the movie shows mastery of many of the important elements of action movies, the aspects beyond the pulse-pounding visual dynamics were lacking.

As with the other films in the series, Fallout keeps up with Ethan Hunt's Impossible Mission force in "real" time. We are now a little over two years after the events of the previous film, in which Hunt and his team stopped the nefarious Solomon Lane. Lane was a former British Secret Service operative who went rogue and started an entire organization - "The Syndicate" - of former spooks-turned-global-zealot/terrorists. Though Hunt captured Lane, the remnants of the Syndicate have coalesced into The Apostles, who are attempting to get their hands on three nuclear warheads with which they plan nothing good. Hunt and his team must try to track down the bombs while navigating the treacherous waters of various duplicitous agencies, including the C.I.A. and the U.K.'s MI6.

Cliffhangers? Check. Literally?! Check!! By the time this one
rolls around towards the end of the movie, I was mentally
checked out.

Where Rogue Nation stayed just on the right side of a plot being overly complex to the point of being shallow and meaningless, I found Fallout to cross that line. With various melding, merging, and overlapping double- and triple-crosses, what I believe was meant to be a sophisticated plot really just ends up being unnecessarily complicated. And like many such movies, this seems to have been used to cover up a complete lack of any well-developed emotional depth. Yes, the movie tries to offer some sort of emotional stakes for super-spy Ethan Hunt, but these are nothing that ever feel terribly genuine. Instead, the overwhelming majority of the film is given over to motorcycle chases, car chases, helicopter chases, and hand-to-hand combat scenes. These are all done extremely well, to be sure, but by the movie's end, I honestly didn't care much about anyone involved.

I will say that the acting is just fine. Rebecca Ferguson is once again very easy to like (as well as being easy on the eyes) as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, and Henry Cavill cuts an imposing figure as CIA sledgehammer August Walker. All the other mainstays continue to be steady, with Simon Pegg standing out, as usual.

Fans of pure action movies will likely really enjoy this one. For my part, I need a little more substance to go with my flash. While I may go back and watch Rogue Nation at some point again in the future, I doubt I'll ever bother with a second viewing of Fallout. One time was plenty.

New Release! Sorry to Bother You (2018) [No Spoilers]

Director: Boots Riley

A wild ride of social satire, and one of the most unique films I've seen in a while.

Sorry to Bother You follows Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) in Oakland set within a near-dystopian alternate version of our modern world. Cassius is a smart enough guy, but he's down on his luck and desperate for a job. Desperate enough to take a gig at a telemarketing agency and do cold calls to sell customers all sorts of useless products that they don't need. When Cassius, an African-American, is given the suggestion to "talk white," he adopts a stereotypical "nerdy" white guy voice (by David Cross), and his sales go through the roof. Before long, Cassius is offered the highly-coveted job as a "power caller" - a mysteriously powerful position granted only to the best of the best ground-level telemarketers. Though he has to break a picket line formed by his exploited co-workers, Cassius is initially elated at the immense salary increase. However, what he is selling gives him some serious pangs of conscience. Cassius climbs the corporate ladder, things become ever stranger and more terrifying.

The relatively simple summary above gives a reader no actual idea of what this movie does. Sorry to Bother You is a satire that punches you in the face with all sorts of criticisms about modern culture. Some of them are biting. Many of them are funny. And nearly every one of them is about as subtle as a set of brass knuckles to the teeth. But this is OK. The primary targets of writer/director Boots Riley deserve no quarter: rampant capitalism; creeping cultural homogeneity; commodification of the bodies and souls of everyone on the planet by the ultra-rich. These are what Riley is bringing our attention to, and it is quite a trip.

Cassius celebrates his massive successes as a "power caller."
Only later do his full realizations about his action hit him,
along with the horrors connected to them all.

While unlike nearly anything I've seen before, Sorry to Bother You does show clear elements of several other great satires and counter-culture films of cinema's past. The vision of consumerism run wild bring to mind John Carpenter's low-budget They Live. The commentary on both office culture and the dumbing down of mass populations is not unlike Mike Judge's Office Space and Idiocracy. But none of these can quite prepare you for just how gonzo things get in the third act of the movie. It threw me off for a moment, but it quickly becomes clear that Riley has a cogent point, although one that is using a really far-out story device.

The acting is great here. Lakeith Stanfield, whom I only know from the excellent TV show Atlanta plays a great protagonist. Cassius is, while intelligent, not the strongest-willed guy, and his journey of getting buffeted around by forces far stronger than him is portrayed with the right blend of confusion and humor. The supporting cast, from Tessa Thompson to Armie Hammer to a smaller role by A-lister and longtime Boots Riley family friend Danny Glover, all bring just the right tone to this uniquely strange picture.

You have to be in the right state of mind for this one. If you enjoy satire, then this one is well worth checking out. It's a form of cinema that isn't attempted much, but Riley gets it right.