Ultraman Rising (2024) Directed by Shannon Tindle

Ultraman rising is reboot of sorts of the Ultraman franchise as an animated movie. The animation is very good as is the sound and direction. Likes most current films, particularly animated ones the story has something to be desired. 

In this version o Ultraman, Ultraman is the father of a small family fight kaju that attack Japan making somewhat of a absent dad. His kid grows up and he and his wife grow apart. The young boy moves to the United States and became a egotistical but excellent baseball player. He comes back to Japan to play for a Japanese team but also to take up his responsibilities as the new Ultraman. He isn't the best in the role and one of the monsters dies trying to get it's egg back after it was stolen by the villain who wants to kill all kaju after the death of his family. Ultraman find the egg, which hatches and he is no charged with raising a giant monster and trying to continue his baseball career. 

This sets up conflict between the hero and the villain who are at odds at what to do about the giant monster attacks. He also meets a reporter who becomes his love interest and begins to patch up his relationship with father. His mother "disappeared" many year before and is assumed dead. 

Sadly this all works out in ways you can easily predict including a post credit sequence. I was about to say as the credit rolled that at least we didn't find out the mother was actually still alive but... sequel set up. 

It's fun enough and visually interesting but dragged a bit especially you know nothing really out of the box is going to happen. Oddly enough I found the live action mess of a fim Shin Ultraman more fun because it was such a train wreck of multiple storylines and foot fetishes. 

The House (2022) directed by: Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza

 

The House is a stop motion film presented on Netflix which tells three separate, non-related stories. The unifying element is that all take place in the same house, but in wildly different locals and situations. 

And heard within, a lie is spun

This first story is about a family on hard times offered a newly built home by a mysterious benefactor. It quickly turns to gothic horror and can be interpreted in a number of ways. The characters are sort of fuzzy humans that seem to be made from lint.

The Lost is Truth that can't be Won

This one did not resonate with me much a t all. The characters are anthropogenic mice, the main one being some sort of real estate developer renovating a large house and trying to sell it. There is a bug problem and an open house where an interested couple just doesn't leave and an odd subplot of him making calls to a love interest that goes off in a direction I didn't expect. Grotesque imagery abounds and there is even a really weird dance number... 

Listen again and seek the sun

This was the lightest offering of the three and again the main character is renovating the house but this time the actors are all cats and the house is sinking into a flooded landscape. The two renters don't actually pay rent and the owner simply can't see that the house is almost cause. A new age guru type arrives and turns everything on it's head. overall it's a positive and funny story but the hippy dippy characters are more annoying to me by the end. 

Worth seeing? Sure, the animation is mazing and the voice work well done. The stories were super weird, something normally like, but rambled a little much for me to get too involved. So maybe a B or B- for this one. 

Lost in Space - season 3 Netflix

 It's been a couple years since season two thanks to the Covid epidemic but the show has managed to keep it is fairly tight tone even if it couldn't keep its main character from growing up. Luckily that is explained by picking up not where we left off but a year or so later with the family split up between the children on a destroyed planet surrounded but the debris of it own destruction and the parents who are working on a an array of the other Jupiter spaceships while they look for an alien motor and alien robot to transport them all to the promised land planet. 

The episodes are of varying lengths and I found that a plus. No episode had to be padded to fill in the running time and I think the money saved on that went into keeping the effects work top notch. 

As this is the last season, I wasn't sure how it work out with all the characters, Dr. Smith in particular is not exactly on a redemption arc really as it goes on but I was happy with her final outcome. The war between the humans and robots gets resolved in a way I found a bit obvious. That said it was entertaining and all the actors were good in their roles even after the unplanned hiatus. There seems to be more integration of the original TV show theme music which worked really well. This is one show that knows what it is and doesn't try to be anything else. Might even rewatch the entire thing again at some point. 

The Midnight Sky (2020) Directed by George Clooney

Maybe it's just the result of the pandemic the world has been living through and how it has effected me, but I found this to be a little gem of a film. I like the slow pace some critics held against it and some of the plot elements are tropes but I thought they were well integrated and well done. 

After what appears to be nuclear Holocaust that is hinted started from a mistake, one man (Clooney) who is dying of an unnamed illness decided to be left behind at an Arctic station while everyone else is evacuated, knowing he will die there alone. While there he discovers he is not alone and a little girl had hidden herself away and he must deal with her. There seems to be literally no one on earth who can come and get her and her fate is as sealed as his in the long run. At the same time, a ship is returning back to earth from a  habitable moon the Clooney's character discovered as almost a second chance for earth. They do not know what happened but as they get closer to home with no contact, they are faced with a mystery of what could be going on. they get in touch with Clooney and he tells them to turn back and has calculated a route for them to take so they can start again on the moon. 

Since this is new and I really don't won't give away some of the plot turns, I won't say more. It's true at least of two of them are a little to coincidental for me but it still works. It's not hard sci-fi but it has the look and feel. It benefits greatly by not trying to explain too much. The holocaust, his sickness and the tech that takes them to another planet are all taken as fact without having needless exposition. I will say setting it in 2049 is a bad move, too soon and usually a bad idea to "date" a sci-fi film. Nice performances, nice effects and only what I would describe as a "soft" feel to the whole thing. A welcome change from movies that feel they need to overstimulate the viewer from start to finish giving no time to breathe. 

Circus of Books (2019) directed by Rachel Mason

Karen and Barry Mason were having trouble making ends meet when they decided to take a chance distributing  Hustler fro Larry Flint, a decision which led to them distributing even more x-rated magazines and that in turn led them to becoming owners of a gay porn bookstore, something the couple hid from friends and even their own children for years. To them is was a business decision and they ran the business well for decades until the internet and online free porn caught up with them and they had to close the business down. 

The director is the couple's own daughter and despite some pretty tough reluctance from her her mother i particular, she tells a very personal story of two people who get involved in a business they had no interest in but ended up being an inspirations to 1000s as they not only pushed to stay open during the reason years but dealt head on with the AIDS crisis and finally their own issues when they discover one of the children is gay. 

This is not a high budget film which I think helps keep it on subject and real. Mason keeps the story on her family while all the time showing the events and political world changing over the 3 decades of the store's existence. While her parents are great people, they are not perfect and are not presented as perfect which makes the whole thing very relatable. Brave to Netflix for bringing this to us, I wish it was around when some of my earlier documentaries were made. 

Dracula (2020) Netflix series by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss

Spoilers galore.

This version of Dracula can be lauded for playing with all the tropes and original story elements in new and surprising ways. As a three part series, each 90 minutes, there is plenty of time to horrify, shock and surprise even someone like me who is sort of a fan of Vampire lore. What the show does best is it takes some barely touched on sections of the Stoker Novel and expands them into a new main story. The first past takes place in the convent where Johnathan Harker is recovering... well recovering is not the right word in this version. In the novel he just spends some time there and then goes home to his fiancé. In this version, he is basically dead and turning into a vampire after having been feasted non by Dracula and then "killing himself" but jumping off the castle tower and into the river below. The set up is very much like the original story and then takes this turn into batshit craziness. He does not survive the first episode.  Sister Agatha, Agatha VanHelsing we find out is questioning him until Mina stakes him and Dracula arrives to collect Johnathan? It's not really clear why he is there but it works.

The second part starts with the good sister and Dracula playing chess and him explain to her how he survived on so few people while travelling from his home to Britain on the ship "The Demeter" which before a bloody game of "ten little Indians"  as the passengers and crew are quickly used for food and become suspicious, not of Dracula, but of the mysterious guest in room 9 who no one sees. As it turns out, it's Agatha who's chess game with the count is in their minds as he uses her for a steady food source. She does get the better of him as they try and hang her killing the missing crew when she spit blood at the vampire and his true nature is exposed. The episode is not fast moving but I thought it was effective and again, it's turned a detail in the novel into a main story. It ends in the most crazy way possible. The ship is blown up, Agatha drowns and Dracula hides in a remaining coffin on the ocean floor until he walks to shore where he is met by a helicopter, military looking personnel and... Agatha?

So now in modern day the end of the series pits Dracula against the ancestor of VanHelsing who has him imprisoned in a high security vampire facility. Well not all that secure, and thesis where the series starts to fall apart, as Dracula is somehow allowed to go free because... the law? Plus Zowie the new VanHelsing manages to just take a vile of vampire blood and drink it for... reasons. She is dying of cancer, but it doesn't help with that. It does let her communicate with the count in some sort of dreamworld. Meanwhile the Count Dracula falls for an egotistical millennial chick who let him feed of her for the eventual gift of eternal life. She gets her wish in the worst way as when she dies and is laid to rest... she get cremated, something Dracula didn't know was a "thing" in this new era and she escape, but is quite the gory mess. Up to this point the story is getting messier but it is still interesting and it remains that way, mostly due the excellent performances of Claes Bang (Dracula) and Dolly Wells (VanHelsing). The ending, to me a least, was a big letdown. Dracula throughout has been an unfeeling monster. Cold, cruel, inhuman. Seriously, he deserved to go out with bang and be punished for his actions, but instead he drinks the blood of Zowie which is poisonous to him after she reveals he ashamed of his immortal existence and most of his mutation, including being burnt by the sun are mostly self imposed.  It's a let down. When VanHelsing tears down the curtains in the vampires penthouse exposing him to the light he should have exploded in the rays of the sun, or suffered in some way that punished centuries of unforgivable behaviour. Nope, they lie in each other's dying arms in the light of the sun.... WTF?

Should you see it? I would say yes because it's pretty great until the last five minutes. there is much to recommend about the the majority of it. It is a shame the ending just doesn't live up to lead up.

Netflix' Search Results Still Suck

Yes, capital letters and quotation marks don't help.