Seen in September

Regina and Valerio consider their options in Carnival is Over

A warm and welcoming beginning to the fall season led to more TV and more movies. I wonder if an earlier sunset, which of course means a longer night, gave me the impression of having more time to watch something? Fall may be the season for fashion, football and hockey, but it's a start to many longer nights and even more TV and movies.

Carnival is Over
TIFF
This was the only film we were able to catch at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. Seated near us was someone planning on seeing roughly 40 films more. One of the best parts of seeing films at TIFF is the audience and they didn't disappoint (before each film a warning about "piracy" is greeted by the audience with a pirate chorus of "Aaarrrr"). The theatre was packed for this little-known Brazilian crime drama, which also was followed by a Q and A session with the film's director, producers and one of its stars. The film is about a couple, Regina and Valerio, who have returned to Rio to help run Valerio's father's business. That business is a shady part of an organized crime syndicate that operates gambling terminals throughout the city. It's assumed that Valerio's uncle, his father's twin brother, killed Valerio's father to take over his sibling's share of the business. The couple would rather be out of it entirely and return to their life in Europe. Regina eggs Valerio to "get rid" of his uncle to clear a path to his inheritance, but in a sort of Coen brothers twist, a poorly planned act of murder becomes far messier and only draws the couple down further into the sordid business they wanted to get out of. The film is full of Coens-esque dark violence and occasional absurd humour along with Shakespearean references from Lady Macbeth, Hamlet and Titus Andronicus. You know, all the fun stuff.

Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) is the hero of his own movie.

The King of Comedy
Crave
Martin Scorsese's prescient 1982 comedy about a psychopathic comedian, Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), who decides the only way to get his big shot is to take the most popular late-night talk show host, Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), hostage unless his demands of appearing on the show are met. While the last act is where most of the action takes place, it's in the epilogue where the film's prognostications appear. It's a film about the comically high aspirations of someone with a medium-level talent. Celebrity isn't an American invention, yet they seem to have a near monopoly on the business of undeserved fame. Themes of celebrity and fame and our fascination with it are the real heart of this film. It was a nice touch in Todd Phillips' 2019 Joker that De Niro played the ill-fated talk show host to Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck (a name equally feckless sounding as Rupert Pupkin).

In Gen V, the kids are definitely not all right.

Gen V
Prime Video
A spin-off series from The Boys, gives us a glimpse into the school for gifted recipients of Vaught's super-hero injections. It's here we see ominous experiments conducted on students and just how kids injected with the super serum become like the heroes depicted in The Boys. The characters here are university-aged teens and their powers are, at times, a little too on-the-nose. Primarily there is a girl who can control blood but only by cutting herself, another who can shrink but can only do so by purging, and another who is non-binary and can switch gender (though they have other powers as well). Other characters include a black teen with atomic-level control of metal, a jock with temper issues who can ignite, a sexual deviant who is invisible and a sexual predator with mind-control abilities. Both series are fine conductors of ideas around corporate greed and how it affects media influence, education, security, policing, incarceration, online intimidation, systemic classism, racism, white supremacy and politics.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power makes production design look easy.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Prime Video
Rotten Tomatoes score 85%, audience score of 59%
This show is nowhere near as bad as LOTR fans are making it out to be. Does it have problems? Yes. Is it slow? Definitely. Are there too many storylines to follow? Of course. Are some characters being taken out of their original context to give some exposition to accelerate some more vague plot points? Unknown to me. I've read the series more than once but never got through the first chapter or two of The Silmarillion, the show's primary source material. How was a devoted fan unable to read the most important part of the canon? Why, because it is simply duller than even the dullest part of watching paint dry. I would also add it is often vague and open to interpretation, which of course, is not permitted by devotees. I will still say this show is entertaining in its own right and deserves to be considered a serial television adaption of what is to some, nothing more than a well-crafted D&D Adventure. At its worst, The Rings of Power is a beautifully filmed screen saver and advert for New Zealand tourism. At its best, it's the best bit of pure fantasy you're likely to find.

Hit Man
Netflix
Rotten Tomatoes score of 95%, audience score 91%
There's something wrong in the world of film criticism that gives this middling, yet entertaining and light fare, a better score than The Rings of Power. This goes back to my theory that in general, we examine diamonds through microscopes but simply bite gold. What does that mean? That means we give such deep examination to art that aims high but doesn't reach its aspirations than average stuff that only aims to be average. I haven't got anything bad to say about this movie - though its premise that a college philosophy professor, who dabbles in electronics, just happened to find himself taking the role of a hired assassin to entrap/entice would-be murderers into confession is, to put it politely, a stretch felt like a stretch. Yet once you've bought the premise, you can be on board with what follows. While based on a real person, the film never makes a convincing argument on how the New Orleans Police Department would place a citizen contractor in such danger. In any event, it is a bit of fun and while it attempts to interject some arcane philosophical conjecture into the proceedings, you can ignore that and just enjoy Glen Powell becoming a newly minted star into the American celebrity machine.

Will Ferrell and Harper Steele.

Will & Harper
Netflix
A humorous and emotional road trip documentary about Harper Steele’s journey from Andrew, a dad and Saturday Night Live writer to her new identity as a trans woman, Harper Steele. Steele, as a man, loved epic road trips into America's heartland and enjoyed truck stops and dive bars and all the characters he met there. As a trans woman in her 60s, Harper didn't feel safe doing that anymore. Yet, with beloved film and TV comedy star Will Ferrell at your side, an aging trans individual can go almost anywhere. I was struck by just how accepted Steele was with Ferrell in tow, and not surprised that the most devastating attacks were not in person, but online. The bond these two shared is the sweet syrup that serves the more emotionally raw story of Steele's personal struggles on her transition to her female identity, Harper Steele. Making major life changes in your late 50s isn't easy for anyone but this kind of change can be seismic.

All the marvelous Marvels.

The Marvels
Disney+
Big screen budget. Small screen outcome. This film was a way for Marvel to recognize three different Captain Marvels; Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and teen Kamala Khan (Toronto's Iman Vellani), in one adventure. Some interstellar anomaly (or whatever) somehow connects the three superheroes as their powers use the same energy (or some nonsense). This intertwines the characters and their worlds. Unfortunately, it feels like the writers from the Captain Marvel films, and the Disney+ TV shows wrote their parts separately and then they were all taped together by an AI-driven editing suite. Not for nothing, but it's worth noting that all the protagonists and the antagonists in this film about empowered females are, in fact, female. The actual plot device that some kind of quantum entanglement is connecting three characters from two TV shows and several films is a clever trick and perhaps a very meta inside joke. Of course, solving this problem is linked to fighting the primary villain. Of course, this villain isn't all that she appears and is just a good person doing a bad thing. Of course, this bad thing could spell the end of the Universe! I mean… he sighed heavily, can't you just fight a bad guy or whatever without someone's Universe disappearing? I apologize, not "the" Universe but, "A Universe" because obviously, this is the Multi-verse. I feel like Marvel is trying to course-correct their Multi-verse of Madness storylines and this may have been a neat way to do it. They could have tied together different threads, then closed it off and said, "Let's just leave this alone for a bit." I doubt that will happen, but maybe in a different universe.