We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Thrills, madness, and karate fights.
BREAKING SURFACE (2020)
Writer/director Joachim Heden pulled off something impressive with his survival thriller Breaking Surface, managing to keep me invested in seeing the full story play out even though the characters aren't particularly likeable and the lead makes one dumb, frustrating decision after the other. This is the sort of movie where the viewer will be imagining what they would do if they were stuck in this situation themselves, and chances are they'll imagine themselves handling it much better than Ida (Moa Gammel Ginsburg) does.
However, it was kind of difficult to imagine myself in this situation, because Ida and her sister Tuva (Madeleine Martin) run into trouble while doing something I would never do - going scuba diving in icy waters while snow falls above them. That sounds very unpleasant to me, but it's something Ida and Tuva have decided to do while visiting their mother in Norway. It seems like a bad idea from the start, and sure enough their dive turns into a disaster when there's a rockslide on the mountain they're diving beside. Not only do their supplies on shore get buried in rocks, but Tuva also gets hit by a large rock that drags her to the bottom of the water - thirty-three meters down - and traps her there. Now Ida has to figure out how to save her sister before her oxygen runs out, and she has to overcome all sorts of hurdles in her effort to do so, some of them caused by her own dimwittedness.
Ida is never all that likeable to begin with, and becomes less likeable as the film goes on and we see what kind of nonsense she brings to the screen due to desperation and stupidity. Tuva, on the other hand, starts out looking like she's going to be pretty cool, being introduced in a well-shot diving sequence where she's nearly killed in the engine of a large ship she's working around. She then storms the bridge of the ship, ready to kick the ass of whoever was responsible for that almost-fatal accident. Then she lost me early on when it's revealed that she feeds her cigarette butts to her mom's dog so her mom won't find out she smokes. Like there's no better way to dispose of them.
Breaking Surface isn't a good movie for dogs in general, because Ida and Tuva decide to take that cigarette-eating dog with them when they go diving, leaving him to sit on the shore and get snowed on while they're in the water. Ida crosses paths with another dog later on, and that scene is just terrible. If you're a dog lover, this is going to leave you with some bad feelings, and you might just start rooting against Ida and Tuva. I have to say, I didn't care very much if they were going to live or die by the end of the movie, but I was still interested in seeing how it was going to go.
Ida is annoying, but Gammel Ginsburg handles the emotion of the role well, and Heden gives the character plenty of problems to deal with. Best of all, the movie has a running time of just 78 minutes, so it tells the story at a quick pace and doesn't ask you to spend too much of your time on it. It's here to deliver some thrills and probably make you yell some expletives at the screen, and then it lets you get on with your day. I enjoyed watching the movie, and even though I was left thinking I might have enjoyed it more if the characters were smarter and treated dogs better, it still works despite their failings.
The review of Breaking Surface originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
INTO THE DARK: TENTACLES (2021)
The second season of the Hulu / Blumhouse anthology series Into the Dark was supposed to run from October 2019 through September 2020, but the pandemic brought the season to a halt ten installments into the twelve month run. After a seven month wait, Into the Dark finally resumed just in time for Valentine's Day.
The idea behind this show and is that each season consists of twelve feature films released on a monthly basis, each one having something to do with a holiday or notable date in its month of release. Since this new entry - titled Tentacles - was released in February, of course it tells a horrific love story. Directed by Clara Aranovich from a script by Alexandra Pechman, who crafted the story with Nick Antosca, Tentacles stars Casey Deidrick and Dana Drori as Sam and Tara, a young couple that embarks on a passionate, sex-fueled relationship pretty much from the first moment they meet each other. Things move quickly with them, they're living together almost immediately and are engaged soon after, but something is not right here... and Sam develops some health issues that are very concerning...
Tentacles moves along at a good pace, and it was interesting to the story unfold and find out just how strange the situation was going to get. This was so well put together and intriguing, I would count it as one of the best entries in the Into the Dark franchise. Blog contributor Priscilla wasn't too thrilled with the ending, but it works well enough that it doesn't detract from the overall film.
MY FRIEND DAHMER (2017)
I was only seven years old when serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and details of his crimes started to become public knowledge, as did the fact that he had grown up in my home state of Ohio. For me - and for at least one of my friends - this news basically turned Dahmer into the Ohio Boogeyman as far as we were concerned. I remember being afraid that Dahmer was going to escape from police custody and somehow come get me some dark night.
But Dahmer wasn't quite the homicidal maniac he would become when he was living in Ohio. He did murder his first victim there, but for most of the time he was living in the state he was just a very troubled kid. One person who knew him in school was John "Derf" Backderf, an artist who would eventually tell the story of his youthful friendship with Dahmer through a graphic novel titled My Friend Dahmer, a book that went on to serve as the basis for this film written and directed by Marc Meyers.
I'm not generally a fan of films that dramatize the lives of serial killers, but I found My Friend Dahmer to be a fascinating viewing experience because it doesn't delve into the period of Dahmer's life when he was murdering and dismembering young men. It's entirely focused on the time when Derf knew him, before the killings began, so it allows a glimpse into the life of a serial killer to be. Perfectly played by Ross Lynch, Dahmer is portrayed as a very awkward, withdrawn, odd kid with an unusual interest in dissolving the corpses of roadkill animals in jars of acid so he can collect their bones. When Dahmer starts making a spectacle of himself by having "spazz attacks" around school, some of his fellow students, including Derf (Alex Wolff) decide to befriend him and form a Dahmer Fan Club. But while Derf and the guys are being entertained by Dahmer's increasingly strange behavior, the viewer knows that he is actually spiraling out of control, and the tumultuous home life he's provided by his unhelpful parents (Anne Heche and Dallas Roberts) isn't doing him any favors.
I was engrossed by this movie for the duration, and really wish someone had given Dahmer the help he needed before he took his interest in seeing what the insides of living beings looked like too far, before it was too late for the people he killed. Is there any way he could have been diverted from the path he went down? There's no way to know, but it was interesting to see My Friend Dahmer's version of what he was like before the atrocities.
COBRA KAI: SEASON THREE (2021)
Cobra Kai season 2 ended with a huge cliffhanger, as Miguel (Xolo Maridueña) sustained a serious injury in an over-the-top karate brawl that broke out between students of the Cobra Kai and Miyagi-do dojos in the halls of their high school. Not only that, but Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) missed the fact that his ex-girlfriend Ali, who was played by Elisabeth Shue in the original The Karate Kid, had sent him a Facebook friend request! Fans were left wanting to see the continuation of the story as soon as that episode ended, but we had an extended wait to endure. Between seasons 2 and 3, Cobra Kai's streaming home YouTube decided to move away from scripted programming, so the show had to find a new streamer to call home. Although season 3 had already been filmed, the pandemic slowed down the post-production process, and the move to a new streaming service - Netflix ended up taking Cobra Kai in - slowed things down even further, so the season arrived months later than it should have. Thankfully, it was worth the wait.
Cobra Kai season 3 sounds like it would be a bummer to sit through, because most of the characters spend the majority of its ten episodes at their lowest point. Miguel starts out in a coma, and when he wakes up he has to spend a lot of time regaining the ability to walk. Johnny has given up on the Cobra Kai dojo, which is now under the control of his villainous former sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove), and he's two weeks into a bender when he catch up to him. Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) has closed his Miyagi-do dojo, and his daughter Samantha (Mary Mouser) has been traumatized by that high school brawl. Cobra Kai students like Hawk (Jacob Bertrand) and Tory (Peyton List) are constantly bullying and hurting people, and Kreese recruits more bullies - like season 1's Kyler (Joe Seo) - to train at his dojo. Johnny's son / Daniel's former student Robby (Tanner Buchanan) even has to do jail time for his part in the high school fight. Daniel's auto sales business is hurting, and his wife Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) starts to realize just how much of threat Kreese is to their community... Everyone is in a dark place. And yet the show doesn't feel dark. Through it all, there's a feeling of hope that everything's going to turn out the right way, and there's also the show's sense of humor bringing a steady flow of laughs.
A big highlight of the season comes early on, when Daniel and Johnny decide to join forces to search for Robby, who went on the run after hurting Miguel. This search takes them into some rough areas, karate fights ensue, and Amanda even compares them to Tango & Cash - and I would absolutely watch a buddy cop (except they're not cops) show about Daniel and Johnny busting crimes together. This is what I want to see from this show, Daniel and Johnny putting their rivalry behind them, being friends and working together. Unfortunately, they can never stand being around each other for too long, they always find a way to piss each other off.
Kreese's villainy is off the charts in this season, which really makes you wonder what his ultimate goal here is, because he's chewing the scenery like a person seeking global domination and there at times where he appears quite willing to murder people... just so he can run a karate dojo. That's all this story is about at the end of the day, whether or not it's right for a karate dojo to teach kids to be bullies, but these characters treat it like the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Kreese feels that society has gotten weak and kids are too coddled these days, but is it really worth killing someone to teach a couple dozen kids to be hoodlums who show no mercy? The show tries to give us some insight into Kreese by presenting flashbacks that tell us that Kreese had a bad life, including his time serving in the Vietnam War, before he started Cobra Kai, but his evil is still over-the-top even when you know the reason for it, and those flashbacks certainly didn't make me feel any sympathy for the guy.
As with the previous seasons, there are some fun callbacks to the events of the Karate Kid movies in this one. Ron Thomas reprised his film role of Bobby Brown in season 2, and he returns in this season, where it's revealed that Bobby is now a pastor. That seems like a fitting way for that character to turn out, since he was the one Cobra Kai student who tried to show Daniel mercy, and apologized when he hurt him, back in the '80s. While the first and third movies have gotten a heavy focus, which makes sense since they were the ones that had the Cobra Kai folks as the antagonists, this season also works in a fantastic follow-up to The Karate Kid Part II, as Daniel travels back to Okinawa and encounters both his Part II love interest Kumiko (Tamlyn Tomita) and the villain Chozen (Yuji Okumoto). The time spent with them helps Daniel move forward and do his best to fix things when he returns to the states... and there's even a moment with Kumiko that helps Daniel reconnect with his late sensei Mr. Miyagi, and it's one that makes me tear up when I watch it.
This season also pulls off something that I did not expect to see so soon. The return of Elisabeth Shue as her Karate Kid character Ali Mills, the girl who was the reason for Daniel and Johnny's rivalry in the first place. For some reason, I thought Shue was going to be harder to get - in fact, I even speculated that we'd see Hilary Swank show up as her Next Karate Kid character before we'd see Shue as Ali. But here she was, and it was great to see her again. She has terrific scenes with both Daniel and Johnny, and seems to have a positive impact on them. Shue was also given the chance to right a wrong from thirty-five years ago. The Karate Kid Part II quickly wrote Ali out in a very cold-blooded way that did not make her look good. Here we finally get to hear Ali's side of the story.
The one nitpick I have is the way approached subverting expectations concerning character reveals. This happened a few times, and it got on my nerves. Since Ali was said to be a pediatric surgeon, fans speculated that she would be called in to operate on Miguel. Miguel does need surgery, and his surgeon is first shown from behind, so we can see that it's a blonde female. But when she turns around, it's not Ali. Okay, doing it once is fine. But the first person we see in the Kreese flashbacks is a douche jock who acts and looks just like Kreese (and he looks so much like Kreese because he's played by Martin Kove's son Jesse Kove), who is then revealed to not be Kreese, Kreese is the guy he bullies. Going so far as to cast Kove's son just to pull a fast one on the audience, it's a bit much. Then we see Kreese in Vietnam, serving alongside a soldier who has a ponytail. Clearly this is his buddy Terry Silver, who we saw sporting a ponytail in The Karate Kid Part III. But no, "Ponytail" is not Silver, one of the other soldiers is Silver, and now this has just gotten annoying. And are we left to believe that Silver went on to grow a ponytail in tribute to the fallen Ponytail? Did we just get an origin story for Silver's ponytail?
That minor irritation aside, Cobra Kai season 3 is an awesome season that builds up to one of the most emotionally involving climactic confrontations I've ever seen, and a final scene that warmed my heart. I can't wait to see where this leads in season 4.
No comments:
Post a Comment