Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Joel Crawford, Januel Mercado, 2023) In a recent podcast I was participating in, one of the other folks mentioned that she'd seen Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. "Trust me," she said "You'll want to see this." I remember being a bit skeptical, but made a note that I should see it at an early opportunity.

I didn't—although even at this late date (it having been released to streaming and on DVD, Blu-Ray and 4K) it is still possible. And I regretted it, after I watched it. It is good. It's hilarious in places, even.

But, I didn't know—until I started pulling screen-shots for this post—that what Dreamworks Animation, and directors Joel Crawford, Mercado and crew were doing with this film was something quite extraordinary. I doubt most people will notice it (or even care) and instead concentrate on the laughs and entertainment value, which is indeed considerable. But, what I noticed is a bit revolutionary while simultaneously not. I'll explain after a plot summary.

Puss (voiced, again, delightfully, by Antonio Banderas) is in the city of Del Mar being feted by the townspeople, when the song and dance and ego are interrupted by the presence of a large giant who starts menacing the town. Utilizing one of the musicians' bass strings, the "Stabby Tabby" launches himself at the creature and proceeds to do battle with it in a proximity that the thing just can't handle. Ultimately, Puss escapes death a dozen times and dispatches the horrid beast...only to be crushed by a large brass bell that the cat (who might have resented being belled in the past) used to subdue it.

(Well, that was a short movie, kids!)

 

But, no, Puss wakes up in a doctor's office, a little shaken but defying the cartoon-logic that he's a flat as a pancake or has a bell-shaped divot in his body. Although he has trouble remembering, the doc asks how many of his traditional nine lives Puss has gone through. A quick montage of Puss dying in stupid and Darwin Award qualifying ways...eight times. It seems Puss is living his last life now, and the doctor advises he give up...well, everything he's doing...and go retire with an old cat lady and attempt to die of old age.

He decides against that until he sits in a kitty-bar—lapping milk, of course—when a tall, dark stranger appears sitting next to him. It's a bounty hunter, Lobo (Wagner Moura) and as wolves go, he's a "Big Bad" right down to the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin, dressed much like The Grim Reaper—right down to the scythe accessories he sports. He's a bounty hunter, but a particularly chatty one, full of complimentary talk about reputations and that sort of thing, but it's merely trash-talk as he's come for a fight and—being a representative of Death—knows he has to win eventually.

It's a lovely little conceit, but then the "Puss" and "Shrek" series have always been the most fun skewering fairy-tales and casting their tropes in different lights. The Big Bad Wolf, mainstay as he is in fairy-tales, of course, could be seen as some sort of opportunistic stalker, if you want to put it in an anthropomorphic, modern context, and here he's such a presence that he makes a fine foil for the Cat's foil, and intimidating enough that Puss does, indeed, retire to a cat-lady's house, where the sight of a litter-box makes him gag. "So...this is where dignity goes to die."

The plot involves Puss, a chihuahua-in-cat's-clothing named Garrito (Harvey Guillén)—who was stowing away at the cat-lady's— as well as Puss former fiancee, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), who are hired by soldiers-of-fortune Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and The Three Bears Crime Family (Ray Winstone, Olivia Colman, and Samson Kayo, all delightful!) to steal the legendary Wishing Star for that talisman-collecting Baker-turned-Crime Boss "Big" Jack Horner (Imagine John Mulaney saying "Well, You know what they say—Can't bake a pie without losing a dozen men!" Yeah. He's hilarious.), even with the constant threat of Lobo/Death ("Why the hell did I play with my food?") lurking nearby.

It is, quite frequently, laugh-out-loud funny (especially if you co-habit with a cat*), not only because the material is inspired but the voice-actors are hilarious doing it. Pugh, Colman, Winstone, and Kayo all play their parts like they've just come over from "Eastenders" and their quick-bickering banter is fast and a little furious—they're all about "family." If your family is "The Sopranos."

Now, what's special about this here Puss in Boots flick is the art. Dreamworks Animation has always been a little bit behind the curve when it comes to their CGI animated features—remember the play-dohish Shrek?—pushing towards verisimilitude and life-like imagery, long after Pixar gave it up starting with Geri's Game in 1997. Now, after the envelope-pushing example of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (which made an example of "playing it rough") they're giving it up.

Blow up any of the images on this page, and you'll see less attention to detail, and more to "the feel" of the thing. Just as realism and romanticism gave way to neo-realism and impressionism, the new crop of animators have discovered that you can do more with less. Here, the images are smeared, like paintings...or the way the old matte artists used to crate camera-realistic landscapes from just "blobs" of paint. Disney went through a "rough" phase of animation in the 1950's, but that was usually due to budgetary reasons. But, this is deliberate. And it is beautiful.

One wondered why Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was on the short-list of animated feature Oscars this year, but all questions are pushed aside after seeing the work. The best way to end this post is to post a few more images with the advice that one should skip the home-viewing and side this on the big, big screen.

* Mine (who is nameless), who loves a good Nature program about lions on the Serengeti, scornfully ignored this one, turned her back and went to sleep with a dismissive  scowl on her own puss.

The Departed

Written at the time of the film's release...

Institutionalized Ball-Busting  

 

Call it the Scorsese Thesis: First a guy tells you what he's gonna tell ya, then Marty shows ya, then you're on your own. 

 

In the case of The Departed "the Guy" is Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello, a seedy Boston crime-lord from "some years ago." "I don't want to be a product of my environment," says the shadowy Frank (Scorsese's way of showing Frank as a younger man). "I want my environment to be a product of me."

 

Nicholson's Costello makes good on that promise on two fronts—in the scenario of The Departed, and the movie, itself.  Costello's control over his Boston turf (or, using the accent Martin Sheen employs here, "too-urf") is so absolute, his reach extends from his surly band of criminals to the police department, culminating in one of his own crew (Matt Damon) infiltrating the very task force investigating his activities. Simultaneously, the player on the other side, Captain Queenan (Sheen) has trolled the new recruits to find his own mole (Leonardo DiCaprio) to infiltrate Costello's crew. 

It turns into a complicated Spy Vs. Spy with both moles straddling the moral fence, while completely unsure of their footing on either side. And while trying to rat out their suspected counter-part while not drawing attention to their own treacheries. They're mutually duplicitous. As Costello says in the Thesis: "When I was growing up, they would say you could become cops or criminals. But what I'm saying is this. When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?"

It's a complicated game of Jack's Straws...set in a house of mirrors. Drop Nicholson's weight into the middle of it, and the whole thing threatens to pancake...much like the movie. This first collaboration with Scorsese is similar to Marlon Brando's eccentric performance in The Missouri Breaks, where an actor so drapes himself in business that he attracts the eye in the same way as a car-wreck—you wonder what in Hell this crime-clown (it is much like Nicholson's Joker in Batman without the make-up) is going to do next. Damon and DiCaprio were not clued into his on-set antics and so their scenes are played with the right touch of paranoid hesitancy. There's a strained wariness behind their eyes and they've rarely been better.

As good as they are (and excessive as Nicholson is) best among the cast is Alec Baldwin as a fast-talking division head, but the real revelation here is Mark Wahlberg. Marky-Mark walks away with the picture and dominates every scene he is in, no matter who's in it with him. In fact, in the one scene Baldwin and Wahlberg share, Scorsese throws in a couple of Raging Bull camera moves for a verbal feint and parry between the two. It's a director's nod to two extraordinary actors doing solid work, free of gimmicks.

As for Scorsese, if you're looking for a return to his greatest efforts, this isn't it. It makes you wonder what he's up to. This story is nothing new, and is in fact based on a Chinese film (and its two sequels, actually) that owes more to the early personal style that he fails to deliver on here. What's the fascination? We've seen the cop/criminal discotomy, as well as the conflicts of working undercover in better films. He's doing program work, not personal work. This isn't Raging Bull or Mean Streets or KunDun or Goodfellas. This is Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Or New York New York. Or The Aviator. One senses he's pacing himself, keeping his hand in the game doing agency "package" movies until the next inspiration comes along. Perhaps he should ditch DeCaprio, and find that last, good DeNiro project. He's too good a film-maker to waste on remakes and empty biographies. Maybe after the struggles he went through to bring his last personal project to the screen he's asking himself at this point in his career "What's the difference?"

Black Widow (2021)

Giving the Widow Her Due

or

Lord Help the Min'ster Who Comes Between Me and My Sister.

The Marvel character, Black Widow (played eight previous times by Scarlett Johansson) has appeared in almost as many Marvel movies as Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man (and Samuel L. Jackson's Nicky Fury)...but, without a feature of her own. Sure, Marvel can crow about being progressive on roles for women after Captain Marvel, but, look at the facts: BW has appeared in an Iron Man movie, two Captain America films, an unbilled cameo in Captain Marvel, all four Avengers movies...and was the sacrificial lamb in the last one. Er, except that more attention was paid to the death of Tony Stark, and the Big Funeral at the end—with "everybody" in it—was for Stark. Just Stark.

At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Black Widow's sacrifice was merely an after-thought...maybe something was said at the reception (oh, except everybody was more concerned with who'd be the next Captain America...). Bowed heads was all she got. And then "Phase 3" ended.

Almost as an afterthought, Marvel Studios has given the character her own movie...now that she's safely dead and all—they'd been talking about it since 2004—and, like most initial Marvel films in a franchise, it's a good one (Marvel's second movies tend to be inferior bloats—the exceptions being the Captain America franchise—where all three films were good, and "Thor" where there wasn't a good film until the wildly irreverent third one).

Black Widow in Iron Man 2

But, Black Widow is on a par with the good introductory Marvel films, seeming fresh and giving much more back-story than had been given Natasha Romanoff in her previous appearances. In the MARVEL series, Nat was the glue that held people and missions together—if Nat was on your side, you were alright. Yet, her abilities, which were not super-powered, managed to put in her in the fray of most of the fights with the "Big Guns." Plus, she knew how to manipulate—calming down The Hulk, tricking Loki—she does something similar here ("Thanks for your cooperation" she says again here)—siding with Captain America while ostensibly trying to arrest him. She was a team-player while being her own person. And there was no questioning it that, after "The Blip," she would be the acting leader (as if they had one before...) of What Was Left Of The Avengers. Nat was the good soldier who didn't whine about things—she'd sit at conference tables with furrowed brow listening and thinking, while "The Boys" mansplained and postured. Not Nat, though. Just got 'er done, dude.

So, her self-titled movie is a good run—Johansson even got to Executive Produce *ka-ching!*—and it's a fast moving kind of "James Bond movie"—with several of the tropes on display, one former Bond "girl" in the cast and the plot of one of them taken whole-cloth (and combined with elements of the Mission Impossible franchise and In Like Flint)—but amped up to 11...It's a Bond movie for those who think a typical Bond movie is You Only Live Twice or Moonraker...with the stunts and situations moving beyond the outlandish to the preposterous. I was chortling in the theater watching Russian soldiers firing automatic weapons in free-fall. Tough to get volunteers with that kind of work.

Which is rather the point of the movie.

But, I digress. The movie, however, regresses.

We start out in Ohio, where two undercover Russian agents, Melina and Alexei (Rachel Weisz and David Harbour) live as "tyeepical" Americans (as long as the don't use the words "moose and squirrel") with their daughters Natasha and Yelena, when one night they make their escape to Cuba from agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and report back to their contact Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Melina has been wounded in the escape and Alexei, part of the USSR's "super-soldier" program as "the Red Guardian" reassures the kids that "Uncle" Dreykov will take care of them, but he doesn't tell them it's by imprisoning them in the "Red Door" facility and training them to become killers in the Black Widow program.

Cut to a Main Title sequence which fast-forwards through their training and some history—set inexplicably to "Smells Like Teen Spirit!"—to the film's proper timeline, nestling between Captain America: Civil War—because Hawkeye, Falcon and Ant-Man are in prison and William Hurt's "Thunderbolt" Ross is on the hunt for Nat—and Avengers: Infinity War where things get hairy. Nat has gone to ground, and her mail has piled up while in hiding—one of the packages contains glowing red vials and puts her in the cross-hairs of a villain called "Taskmaster" who can duplicate an opponent's moves merely by watching them.

Hey! Taskmaster's watching that first gif on this page!

It turns out the mail came from step-sister Yelena Bovel (Florence Pugh, who is spot-on perfect—and she better be because the movie is her audition for any sequels), who, while working as one Russia's widows got a snoot-full of one of those vials, which released her from Dreykov's psychotropic grip, breaking his mental hold over her to do whatever evil deed he has put into both their minds. Yelena is as dedicated as a QVC host to get these vials into people's hands, so she sends them to Natasha because 1) she's not hiding from Dreykov in Budapest like she is, she's hiding from S.H.I.E.L.D, who is looking for Nat all around the whole frickin' world and 2) she's an "Avenger" so her scientific friends can make more of the glowing red stuff in the vials. So, what does Nat do?—she goes to Budapest to find her sister. Because..."movie"

Together, they plan their revenge on Dreykov, starting by springing Alexei from the gulag hell-hole where he's imprisoned and finding Melina at her compound/lab—as she knows where the secret "Red Door" facility is and planning their attack. Sounds simple—there's barely enough plot for a full movie—but they have to do this while being pursued by Dreykov's army of widows and Taskmaster, so there are lots of action set-pieces, lots of bone-crunching (with seemingly little effect) and bickering—so much bickering—between the reunited family. It's funny, fast-paced, and barely believable...but when has believability stopped a superhero movie?

It all leads to an action set-piece in one of those "yeah, I'm not buying it" supervillain lairs that beggars the imagination that it could ever maintain itself without a lot of expenditure and a lot of luck, making one believe that it's powered by "suspension of disbelief," which may be the most powerful force in the Marvel Universe. As I said, I was repressing giggles, even as people are running up the sides of blown apart architecture that is hurtling to the Earth. I'd heard some pre-publicity talk about the action being "gritty" and "down to Earth" but it isn't in any way shape or form, heavily dependent on CGI wizardry (all the big names and quite a number of small digital companies are in the credits) and "down to Earth" is only applicable on letting you know where everything lands...in conveniently sparse locations. 

We also get some check-boxes ticked off—if anybody had been keeping score—about Natasha's past activities, one of which comes back to haunt her. It's one of those convenient stories that drive continuity-conscious comics fans nuts, but what can you do? They're different worlds and the movie doesn't have the run-time to accommodate any lengthy back-story, or do justice to "Taskmaster" fans.

Director Cate Shortland does wonderful work with the performances and the actors keeping the dialog breezy, overlapping and understandable (and the picture-editing that complicates it is adroit and nimble). Everybody's good when they're talking and interacting. But, the action scenes? Not so much. They seem to be story-boarded and shot to accomplish one move and it may or may not be related to the next shot/action or the one before it, as opposed to a cohesive whole that can be followed and a sense of the challenges and the surroundings inherent in it. It builds suspense and makes the action even more thrilling. Here, it's just a shot of an actor doing the action, there's a cut-away reaction, or meld with the stunt-double, but that's about it, and the next shot may be a larger perspective, or an insert of some particular aspect of the resulting conflagration. But, there's no flow to it—you get a kick-shot and the next shot is the kicked guy hitting the opposite wall. You know the two should be linked, but it's a leap for the audience.

And so much of it is action that it's a major chore to make your way through them, and once the Big "Blow-Uppy" Final Round starts happening, you might be forgiven for giving up and just letting things happen, looking at things uncritically. It's then that things get very dubious with a lot of fights happening in mid-air and shots of Natasha plummet/flying around hurtling debris and even a sequence where Nat crawls up some facade in free fall approaching terminal velocity with apparently no wind resistance. And then, you remember that Black Widow ultimately will die (or has already died if you're looking at it in movie-sequence) from a long fall* and one that isn't even as long as this one.

Okay, that's all dubiously on the surface. What made me smile as I was leaving the theater was that Black Widow, with all its talk about, and taking steps to stop, Dreykov's sapping of so many women's free will to do his nefarious bidding (without any dissent) makes it (when you reduce it down) a pro-choice movie. Pro-choice in a way that might impress both liberals and conservatives (but, I doubt it, I don't trust ideologies to be logical or consistent). With women executives and a woman director, I find that a lovely little shot-across-the-bow of the patriarchy, and gives this after-thought of the Marvel Studios...worth.

 

*

From Avengers: Endgame

Edge of Darkness (2010)

Written at the time of the film's release....

"Losing Your Edge"*
or
"I Love the British. They Deserve the Falklands."**

Those who've been reading this blog for awhile know of my deep and abiding love for the 1985 British mini-series "Edge of Darkness," Troy Kennedy-Martin's attempt to "politicize" the police procedurals that had become so prominent on the BBC. Martin took the standard murder mystery and made it a comment on the Thatcher era of politics,as well as on the growing nuclear industry in Britain and the apparent entanglements of British and American interests. Then, with director Martin Campbell, it became something more: not only a murder mystery, but a ghost story, a psychological drama and an almost mythological fable, with the Earth itself as a participating character in the balancing of the scales of justice. It also had strains of comic loopiness amid the gritty brownstones and harsh fluorescent lights of urban crime investigation, and an overall tragic tone of inevitability. Over six hours, it covered a lot of ground above and below the surface.

Campbell desired for many years to make a film of it and with his box-office clout resulting from resurrecting the Bond franchise with Casino Royale, he has finally managed to do it, bringing along many members of his Bond-team, including cinematographer Phil Meheux, editor extraordinaire Stuart Baird and costumer Lindy Hemming. Adapted by Andrew Bovell and William Monahan (he wrote The Departed), I've been curious (with an undercurrent of dread) of what the new version of one of my favorites would be like.

Well, this Edge of Darkness is not as good as the original, compressing and tossing a lot of the story to accommodate a two hour length. But, it's not half-bad either—efficient, taut, and, if you're paying attention, weaving its own commentary on the bad marriage between government and industry, especially in the post-911/W.years in which it is set. Gone is the humor, the tilted quality, the psychology and the Big Picture aspects of the tale. The ghost story is given up, as well, but it still manages to have the haunted quality of the original, while buttoning up the story for a less-delayed, more visceral conclusion.

Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson) is a widowed detective in the "Bahston" police force, welcoming his daughter Emma (Bojana Novakovic) home from a long absence. She's been using her Masters of Science degree interning at a local facility, the Northmoor nuclear facility working on cold fusion energy production ("It's very green," says its slimy CEO Bennett, played by a dead-eyed Danny Huston). But, at dinner, she begins to vomit uncontrollably and as Craven is desperately trying to take her to the hospital, they are attacked in the night. A single yell—"Craven!"—pierces the darkness and Emma is shot-gunned, mortally wounded.

The conventional wisdom is that it is one of Craven's enemies seeking revenge and missing his target, combining murder and accident. But Craven doggedly pursues clues, haunted by his daughter's memory, to pursue the assassin and get justice. Very quickly, the murder weapon and an old perp of Craven's is found—dead of a particularly nasty head-wound—the case apparently closed.

But not so fast. Acting alone, Craven digs further into Northmoor and his daughter's recent past to find out what happened, her cell-phone leading to a line of suspects that he questions seeking the truth. His lone-wolf quest puts him on the radar of Northmoor's private security firm and the U.S. government, particularly a "cleaner" named Darius Jedburgh (Ray Winstone), who makes his own inquiry, deciding if Craven should be allowed to proceed further or be stopped.

That's pretty much the opening thread of the original, too, except that the locales and characters are different. In the mini-series, British Intelligence is following Craven's investigation and they bring C.I.A. operative Jedburgh to provide Craven with information—a situation that creates an odd bond between the two men. In the original, Ronnie Craven is fragile, having had a break-down when his wife died, and keeps himself together by suppressing his emotions, except for the odd conversation he has with his dead daughter, whose clues lead him to different corners of the investigation. That may be his mental condition coming to hand, but it might not. He also has to deal with the guilt of being part of the authority that his activist daughter is working against. But Tommy Craven, of this version, is a coiled spring that only loosens in moments of extreme violence, periodically reliving his memories of his daughter and anything she says is non-specific to the case. A similar scene of Craven identifying his daughter's body is handled completely different. When the morgue nurse attempts to cover Emma's face after the identification, Gibson's Craven suddenly and violently hisses "Leave her alone!" Bob Peck's reaction was a loud wounded animal howl—"Leeeeave her!"

Jedburgh is a different creature, as well. Joe Don Baker's C.I.A. operative from the mini-series was a loud, Stetson-wearing Texan who waxed philosophically on the roots of all problems, arcane and mundane. Ray Winstone's British character is a low rumbling bear with a lower class argot, a disappearing act and an expression that gives nothing away but by what he says. In the mini-series, Craven and Jedburgh team up as an assault force to get clues, but in the 2010 film, they play opposite sides, aware of each other's presence and linked by common maladies and points of philosophy. The character is still amusing, but not a tragic-comic high wire act the way Baker played him.Tommy Craven (rather than his older mini-series brother Ronnie) is more aggressive, and frequently yells his dialogue in a cynical sneer ("I'm the guy with nothing to lose and I don't give a shit. So, fasten your seat-belt"), and, since there's less of a mystery to be solved due to the thuddingly obvious machinations of the bad guys, it all boils down to one man seeking revenge, something that was out of the question in the original. Those action set pieces are stunningly conceived and delivered by Campbell and shaped by Baird into especially visceral short bursts, with one bit of film mayhem coming so fast and so out of the blue that it practically knocks you out of your theater seat. It's refreshing in these days of salad-shooter editing to see fast, punchy dust-ups (and wet-works) that one can actually follow and has so much impact.

The new version is probably more satisfying for contemporary audiences jacked up on Red-Bull and obsessed with "closure;" I, for one, enormously enjoyed the hopeless quality of the original's ending with its ghoulishly ironic end-joke (which made everything all right in my eyes). But, the politics are still there, and this Edge does a fine job of being morphed into something for its time, with its stated philosophy of "It's not what it is—it's what it can be made to look like." In other words, you can have your yellow cake and eat it, too. Words to live and die by.

So, take it for what it is, it's a good boiling down and re-vamping, which has the dual effect of making it both fresh and too familiar, as so many things that made the original unique have been jettisoned out the old chute. But, as a display of technical craftsmanship, it is quite impressive.***

* I've known, ever since this project was announced, that whatever was done with it, it couldn't impact my admiration for the original mini-series. And it doesn't. It's like the story of a visitor to Raymond Chandler, asking him if he he felt bad about what the movies had done to some of his novels. Chandler took the guest into his library. "They haven't done anything to my novels," he said. "Look. They're still there." The mini-series is still a classic. And this one is good for what it is.

** A line from the original's Darius Jedburgh (played brilliantly by Joe Don Baker), as he and Craven sit, watching a dancing competition on the telly. "Look at that," says Jedburgh, before that particular line. "They don't have anything like this in the States." Well, they do now.

*** Since writing this, I've been looking at a smattering of reviews, and finding myself appalled. First off, a lot of reviewers seem to see this as a Mel Gibson production. It isn't, and although it makes it easier to knock the film if you mis-characterize it as such, Martin Campbell directed it. And too many reviews have led off with "Mel's being a martyr again" (which I suspect were cribbed from one AP review) which may be so, but he's got a way to go before he beats Charlton Heston's record. Quite a few get it wrong to compare it to Taken. Edge of Darkness isn't very original, no. It's based on the 1985 British mini-series (that's been established). Taken, however, isn't the heighth of originality, either, as it's a contemporary urban version of The Searchers. Finally, what genius over at "The Atlantic" hired Ed Koch to review movies, as he displays that he knows nothing about them? "How're you doing, Ed?" Badly.