What have you watched recently? 3D!

The Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart (2023)

Nobody could accuse this show of being prolific: a mere 7 seasons across 20 (twenty!) years of existence while having always skirted under the radar of the broader pop-culture collective. This never pushed past "niche", but was always a rewarding watch, having grown from superficial parody into something more nuanced, complex - and sadder. An antidote to the prevalence of glib nihilism beloved of the Rick & Morty generation of self-aware animated comedy. The cast were both outsized, but also human-sized as well.

Born at first as a pretty straightforward mockery of everything from Johnny Quest to the Hardy Boys to superheroes en masse - just on the cusp of that genre's absorption into the mainstream - Venture Bros. slowly pivoted towards a deeper focus on the idea of failure endemic in its broad spectrum broken people: failure as a hero, a villain, a father; failure to live in the shadow of one's parents or lineage. Even reputations and iconographies would prove failures and little more than paper thin facades. And if that all reads depressing, it wasn't! This show rarely wallowed in the misery of underachieving at every turn. We laughed with these people, not at.

And as those seasons were drip fed, the characters grew and were given space to find small victories and glory within their own limitations; to even grow beyond the shadows imposed on them (or sometimes imposed by themselves). These people were often their own worst enemy - they would just "dig in", as the Monarch lamented here - but they tried their best. Meanwhile, the parody of pop-culture clichés still remained, evolving from oddly prescient in 2003 to another part of the zeitgeist in 2023; a line of dialogue in this lamp-shading that acknowledgement. But across the 2 decades it all became as much a dramady as it was simple comedy, the characters growing older and wiser as time passed. It stands to reason really: Jackson Publick & Doc Hammer remained in charge throughout the years, ageing into middle-age themselves, and all the anxiety that follows along.

As to this series send-off? By all accounts, this was not a newbie friendly movie - heck given how rarely a new season of Venture Bros. appeared in the wild, it was debatably friendly to veterans like myself; some callbacks and character references took more than a few moments to recall. It also wasn't a definitive finale either, not of the type we recently saw with (say) Picard: Season 3: anyone who expected each major character to get a narrative full-stop on their respective arcs and direction will be disappointed - but it did tie up some loose ends pertaining to the last major mystery revolving around Dr. Venture & the Monarch's origins - as well as the titular brothers' own. Otherwise it did feel like a highly compressed Season 8, and I'm not sure how I felt about that ending: it was vaguely appropriate to maintain a sense of "plus ça change" mixed within an acknowledgement this was a highly unconventional but still loving pseudo-family; but as this was the end of things I'd have loved just a little more closure for these people than what Publick & Hammer wrote for them.

Alien Resurrection (1997)

What can I say: I was curious. After the pleasant surprise of Alien 3's "Assembly Cut" (insofar as that movie's nihilistic tone can be called pleasant) , I decided F It - let's revisit Alien Resurrection and see what happens. I hated it with a passion at the time, never to return to the thing - yet there was a proper Director's Cut to sample this time around. So perhaps like with the third film, an alternative take might have revealed hidden qualities of a previously maligned entry. That was the hope.

Hahaha, oh god no. If anything this cut was somehow worse than the theatrical one. Or more accurately, the absurdist tone and smart-áss dialogue of the theatrical version was even louder, more overt. The alarm bells sounded from the very first scene: an inexplicable and interminable comedy number with a bored worker fussing with insect goop caught on his finger - this is not an exaggeration or reduction; as the credits rolled, the music portentous and dramatic, I watched a man blow snot through a straw right at me. For comparison, the original credits were an abstract, indistinct montage of something fleshy and writhing; much more horrific and appropriate to the franchise - but apparently not to Jeunet's taste.

It didn't get better from there, and my own recollection of this being the nadir of the Alien franchise remained intact. As said, the Director's Cut became even goofier than before, absurd to the extent it defied my suspension of disbelief. It was always just too much: everyone acting with cartoon energy; the breath-powered door locks alone excessively stupid; Weyland Yutani bought by WalMart? How droll; or maybe Dan Heyda's borderline Looney Tunes death; just constant little wacky moments undercutting the franchise's genetics. Or just the basic distraction at how the horrific was constantly undercut by quips and comedic reaction ... wait, waitaminute. Who wrote this thing anyway? Ahhhhhh.

Case in point to the last item being probably the most arresting, tragic & personal moment of Franken-Ripley's arc, when she met the prior 7 attempts at cloning the long dead Ellen Ripley: a scene where Ripley's existential confusion - Sigourney Weaver the only bright spot with a very eccentric and physical performance - was all brought into focus by the still-living & horrific results of prior attempts to resurrect a version of her that was already carrying the xenomorph; so a powerful scene by all accounts... immediately undercut by a stupid quip penned by Joss Whedon of the "women, amirite?" variety. How were we duped by this guy for so long?

However bad you thought the theatrical version was - the Director's Cut is actually worse. you should YouTube this cut's opening credits scene; it's horrendous. They didn't even change the musical score so you had this DUN-DUN-DUN music playing over a guy squishing a bug.

Uhhhh, not really. Covenant was a very handsome movie, but it's Ridley Scott so that was to be expected. Somehow the characters made even stupider decisions than in Prometheus, robbing all the horror of its punch by dint of the morons that made the problem for themselves; while the movie completely overexplained what the xenos were and where they came from.

The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

(Apparnetly the Japanese title literally translates as "The worse the villain, the better they sleep", which IMO reads much better)

God damn, the framing and blocking in this was unreal: I can understand why Kurosawa became such a mainstay of film schools; the camera-work here always effortless, never called attention to itself but there all the same, often using a compelling and imaginative bit of visual structure to make even a simple scene of dialogue more alive (and more instructive about the current power dynamic at that point).

This was a surprisingly cynical and downbeat feature, one whose borderline anticlimactic final scene only underpinned a sense of hopelessness that a single figure might better the monolith of omnipotent corporate greed; forget it Nishi, it's Dairyu-town. The subject and execution of the White Collar Crime as pertinent now as it was 60 odd years ago - but with an added eccentricity of how the industrial-age corruption was merged with all that honour-based culture more often seen in Kurosawa's Feudal Japan era films. A culture where corporate executives would throw themselves to their deaths rather than betray their lords & masters. Maybe that's how it was back then, I can't say, but it was a singular anachronism to what was an otherwise modern genre story. And within all this plotted Nishi, played with silent intensity by Kurosawa's bestie Toshiro Mifune; this time not sporting a top-knot and manic warrior energy, but a snazzy suit and a quiet, constant simmering rage as he navigated his way into the interior lives of those he might revenge upon.

I loved how artful and confident the structure of this was: all of it starting deeply in media res during a wedding, with a convenient Greek chorus of reporters to catch the viewer up to speed about as neatly as an info-dump could hope to. The point of that approach perhaps simply that this was a corporation already corrupted, malfeasance already endemic by the time we joined the story; we were only here to watch it all unravel, the guilty attempt to manage the crisis as a mystery-man schemed to uncover the murder masked as suicide, and the millions of Yen justifying it. But as with all these sorts of stories of revenge, those emboldened by a righteous purpose risk becoming changed by the corruption they fight - or find themselves altered in getting too close to your enemy; so it was here with Mifune's Nishi. That as his rage began to consume his sanity, what started as performative love became something less shallow than he had planned.

Blade (1998)

Ah, remember that old trope of yesterday when nameless goons would run around in identical shades & bomber jacket combos?

If you want a good compare and contrast, within the same film, of two actors taking the same deeply cheesy material & achieving wildly different results - this film had a good example of this in action. On the one hand, Wesley Snipes: magnetic, charismatic and glowered through his lines with an intensity that never once dipped into self-parody, never let a glimmer in his eye spoil the mood. This was a movie star at the height of his powers. Then there was Donal Logue: an actor whose entire single speed was pure, glazed ham - and every time his regrettably omnipresent henchman character turned up it threatened to upend that otherwise balanced tone achieved by Snipes. The rolling gag of Blade lopping off the hands of Logue's character was a nice rejoinder to the irritation mind you. Or indeed the ease with which he was finally dispatched, an unearned sense of rivals clashing quickly corrected with a flash of Blade's sword.

The efficiency of this film was something to behold though: a visceral & thrilling first scene; the universe entered proper via an audience surrogate; we learned the rules, established the stakes; then crisis, finale; the end. Mic dropped in 2 hours, no post-credits scene, no bloated ensemble cast hinting at spin-offs. Some of the fight choreography was a little frenetic for its own sake, while sure the CGI FX has only aged like spoiled milk (but except in a few cases it never called attention to itself either), but those were quibbles around an otherwise very solid, very rewatchable curio from an era when comic-books remained a slightly unknowable entity; one where producers weren't quite sure what to do with them so didn't feel like they were adapting sacred texts either.