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Movies Review

REVIEW – Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX – Beginning

Well THAT was a treat, a joy, and a hoot. A film cut of the earliest episodes of the upcoming latest television series in the never-ending Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, the GQuuuuuuX (pronounced “G-quacks”) feature opens with familiar sights and sounds to the seasoned GUNDAM fan, but things quickly take a turn, and then things just keep on turning throughout the first act of the film; it’s all prologue that sets up the new branching timeline off of Gundam’s venerable Universal Century setting, featuring as its protagonist classic and oft-imitated Gundam antihero Char Aznable.

Once the butterfly has flapped its wings enough and the tornado has taken out enough of the firmament of Gundam history, we arrive at the space colony Side 6 in the year U.C. 0085 and are introduced to Amate Yuzuriha, a red-haired “ordinary” high school student whose chance encounter with a purple-haired courier girl — who breaks Amate’s cell phone but accidentally leaves her with a mysterious package — pulls her into a world of illegal Mobile Suit fighting and lands her, in classic robot cartoon style, in the cockpit of Zeon’s newly developed Gundam, the titular GQuuuuuuX. Amate’s a great robot cartoon heroine, curious and spirited with an eagerness to jump into action to set things right. I’m less taken with her eventual partner in Mobile Suit combat Shuji, though the more I think about it, it’s clear that he’s cast in the more traditionally feminine “flighty Newtype” role — someone attuned to the classic Gundam ESP powers with a slightly zoned out persona who is very much marching to the beat of their own drummer.

While the show is largely their story, what long-time fans will likely be most fascinated by are the ramifications of the changes to the history established in the original 1979 series — what the whole geopolitical situation looks like, how this changed the lives of major figures in the series, what they’re up to if they’re even still alive — even just in this early going, there were a couple of surprising appearances that will very definitely be lost on a newcomer. Indeed, I do fret a little (and this seemingly was confirmed by some conversation I heard from our only other fellow viewers) that the opening combination homage and explanation of where things went wrong or right, depending on your perspective, might be a bit much for anyone not versed in the classic series or its film re-edit. That said, I do think that the extremely likable and straightforward lead gives viewers who were scratching their heads something — someONE — to latch onto for the balance of the runtime — and, honestly, even if the opening whirlwind threw them off balance, I also can’t imagine they weren’t at least a LITTLE intrigued by Char Aznable and his shenanigans.

GQuuuuuuX is directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki, a longtime Gainax animator who, for them, directed the classic oddball robot anime FLCL and the Gunbuster sequel Diebuster before ultimately following Evangelion director Hideaki Anno to his own studio Khara and serving as assistant director on Anno’s Rebuild of Evangelion films. (Khara is jointly producing this series with Gundam’s rights-holder and home studio Sunrise.) I can definitely feels hints of the mood, energy, and vibe of Tsurumaki’s earlier work here — for instance, the weirdos that Amate falls in with in the illegal Mobile Suit fighting world wouldn’t seem totally out of place in in FLCL’s ground-down oddball setting, while Amate’s own energetic behavior and its depiction remind me of the heroines of Tsurumaki’s work at Gainax.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the robot battles — largely 3D CG, I believe, but not in a way that sticks out like a sore thumb. The mechanical designs are fiddly as all hell; I’m not a huge fan of the Gundam designs, though the title unit does have its charms, including a “V” on its forehead that looks more like the crown from THOR: RAGNAROK antagonist Surtur’s brow. The Zeon suits are clearly recognizable if you’re familiar with their classic depiction, but now have inexplicably huge thighs. And yet despite the eccentric shapes and greebly surfaces, I never had a hard time following the mechanized melees — indeed, seeing the flashy and magnificently directed mecha combat on the silver screen was a highlight of the whole experience.

Despite my misgivings about how it may play for others, I personally had a tremendous time watching Char’s scheming segue into Amate’s awakening into a greater world. It’s all very familiar stuff, but executed extremely well by creators with a clear love for the material who are having a ball twisting a world they’re very familiar with into knots. The series proper starts in April, and I’m very excited to see how this all plays out — both on a macro “how does the rejiggered history work” level, and also on the character level of “how does a Universal Century Gundam series treat a chipper schoolgirl protagonist”? I really can’t wait to find the answers.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – Captain America: Brave New World

Well, bless Marvel, even with diminished attendance and reviewers increasingly booing their efforts, they just keep on working to build their little narratives, piece by piece, film by film. The latest installment of the soap opera of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, directed by Julius Onah (whose most notable flick ’til now was the third CLOVERFIELD movie, the one that was on Netflix), picks up several ongoing threads from prior projects, including a few long-thought to be dropped, and seeks to provide some resolutions while moving other pieces forward towards the next big finale on the roadmap.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – Companion

Our story opens five minutes into the future, where young-ish Josh (Jack Quaid) and his beautiful girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) are driving up to a very secluded “cabin” in the woods — more like a rich guy’s personal resort — for a weekend with his friends, one of whom is dating the cabin’s vaguely sinister Russian owner Sergey (Rupert Friend, hamming it up with the accent). After a fun but occasionally awkward night of drinking and dancing with his pals, Josh and Iris HAD planned on going out to the lake together the next morning, but he says he’s got a hangover and sends her on ahead. Well, when she gets there Sergey first subtly and then FORCEFULLY tries to have his way with her. Iris defends herself, and … well, that lights the fuse that blows up the whole weekend.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – The Brutalist

Always a bit amazed when the three-hour-plus Oscar-bait turns up at the local cinema, especially one with a (brief) overture and a fifteen-minute intermission. Brady Corbet’s multiple award-nominated period drama stars Adrien Brody as architect — gee, I wonder what style of buildings he designs — and Holocaust survivor László Tóth, who is trying to make a new life for himself in late ’40s America. The bulk of the narrative concerns him getting pulled into the orbit of a wealthy benefactor played by Guy Pearce, who wants László to design a massive multi-purpose public building in his late mother’s name; László is also trying to secure passage to America for his wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy). It feels like THE BRUTALIST is engineered to win a game of Oscar-bait Bingo: on top of the protagonist and his wife being Holocaust survivors, there’s also a drug addiction narrative, multiple sex scenes, a frank conversation about antisemitism that also felt like it could be applied to anti-immigrant feeling altogether, and an underlying theme about the power and peril of an artist holding to their truest vision. Certainly not regretting seeing it, the performances are all outstanding — it’s nice to see Guy Pearce in movies again, I think especially as a rich dickhead; he’s very convincing with both the polite and charming front and the “telling it like it is” douchebaggery — and it’s beautifully shot and cleverly constructed with either genuine or convincing recreations of mid-century shorts talking up what a great place Pennsylvania is, but eventually I really did feel the runtime. At some point ’round the middle of the back half I wondered, “if the building doesn’t get finished, how much more of this guy’s misery are we going to have to sit through?” Worth seeing, I’d say, but do get up and walk around during the intermission and maybe have some cheerier entertainment on deck for once it’s over.

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Movies Review

REVIEW – The Substance

What a wild ride of a thing. Coralie Fargeat’s pitch-black horror-comedy has in it, appropriately, the DNA of a half-dozen things you might’ve seen before — off the top of my head, there’s the “seemingly arbitrary rules that will inevitably be broken, and woe betide those who do so” of GREMLINS and the central bargain for youth and beauty very much reminds me of Robert Zemeckis’s DEATH BECOMES HER — and hell, I’ve never even seen the flick, but the ending has me going, “CARRIE, right?” But this whole stew of riffs and ideas is in service of one central thesis: ladies, holding yourself to patriarchal standards of youth and beauty is a losing game. The only winners are the leering perverts who prop this whole system up, who, no matter what you do, WILL invariably start looking the other way in search of fresh meat. This is what happens to actress and TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, who spends probably two thirds of the movie in a state of visceral rage and/or horror, and has been getting some well-deserved kudos for it), cast out of her long-running TV program by the World’s Grossest TV Executive (Dennis Quaid, hamming it up magnificently as someone you’d REALLY like to see suffer some consequences at the end). The sight of her own face coming down off a billboard (not even for the show, it’s a TOOTHPASTE AD) so distracts her that she gets in a car accident, and while she’s getting a clean bill of health, a suspiciously handsome nurse (I literally said to myself before anything happened, “hold on, that man is TOO HANDSOME”) slips a USB drive in her pocket. On it is a video advertisement for the titular Substance. Once she breaks down and buys in, the deal is this: Elisabeth injects herself with this green stuff and a second person cooked up by her own DNA, uh, *emerges* (in a weird, gross way — there’s lots of things in this movie that can be described as “weird” and “gross”): younger, prettier, “more perfect,” but still tethered to the original “her” in multiple ways. Like, it seems clear this is very similar to (weirdly) how the last Doctor Who regeneration worked — both remember everything up to the point this process happened, but then they’re going about their own lives.