Bad Sisters tells the story of five sisters, one of whom is married to a crappy husband. The other four sisters all hate him, and they hatch a plot to kill him. The show follows two timelines: it starts with the man’s funeral, and depicts the aftermath as insurance investigators dig into the suspicious circumstances of his death; and then, via flashbacks, we see the sisters’ plan(s) come together (or not).

The show is a delicate balance between comedy and drama. It has to make us root for murder, and it almost doesn’t work sometimes. The four sisters have really good chemistry, each likeable in her own way, and it’s often funny to watch them interact. But I think the greatest strength of the show is its depiction of the villain, JP. At first, he seems merely rude and disrespectful towards his wife (and everyone else), and I wouldn’t necessarily have described him as abusive for the first few episodes. But as his bad behaviour escalates, the show effectively redefines his belligerence as the tip of the iceberg, just a subtle sign of the deeper abuses going on.

The fate of JP is fully resolved in the first season, and it’s a satisfying story. There’s a second season, but after watching a couple of episodes, I noticed a significant drop in quality, and decided to quit. I think that the consequences of JP’s death tips the scale towards darkness, so that the light comedic tone is no longer convincing, and ends up feeling discordant and awkward.

Who do I have more of a crush on, Michael Fassbender or Cate Blanchett? I think it’s a tie.

He’s a spy. She’s a spy. They’re married. There’s a mole in the spy agency. He has to find out who it is. It might be her. The other four suspects are conveniently also paired romantically. What are the HR policies like at spy agencies? Emotional attachments are a huge risk to national security. Relationship discord, an equally huge risk. Fassbender and Blanchett, their relationship: solid. The others, not so much. I’m all for workplace romances, but with far-reaching, world-changing stakes like these, I’m not so sure.

He wears cool glasses throughout. I changed my mind. I think he wins.

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I’m not a parent. That ship has sailed for me, and there was a time when a twinge of envy would come over me whenever I encountered someone with children. A show like Adolescence takes that feeling of envy and replaces it with a deep appreciation for just how hard parenting can be.

The miniseries tells the story of a teenage boy who gets arrested and charged with stabbing and killing his classmate. It explores his motives, his school life, his relationship with the victim—a girl who he was involved with, in a confused teenage way—and especially, the effect of these events on his parents.

The current hype around this show mostly centres around the fact that each of the four 1-hour episodes is filmed in a single shot. I don’t have much to say about that aspect of it, other than kudos to the whole cast and crew for pulling it off. It’s truly impressive.

I recently caught up with the second season of Pachinko. The show follows the lives of a Korean family living in Japan, spanning from the 1930’s, when the main character, Sunja, was a young woman, all the way to the 1980’s, when she is a grandmother, and her grandson Solomon becomes the protagonist.

One of the main challenges that the entire family encounters is the discrimination that they face as a minority group, and it’s a fascinating to see how little this problem improves despite the decades of progress that has shaped the world around them. Somehow, they survive and thrive, but they end up going through life with a chip on their shoulder. Solomon, especially, uses his profession as a high-flying finance guy to make Succession-style deals and enact revenge against perceived cultural insults. It’s as if he’s getting back at all Japanese people for how they’ve treated his family through the years.

Kudos to the cast, who perform in both Japanese and Korean (and sometimes English). Not easy languages to learn, I’m sure. Speaking of the cast, though, one flaw that I see with the production of the show is that they don’t seem to age enough. The same actress plays Sunja from 1930-something, all the way to 1950, and she looks pretty much the same throughout. By the end of the season, one of her sons is a young man, and the two of them look like they’re the same age, which does make some dramatic scenes less convincing.

I’ll shout out one sequence in particular, where one of the characters lives through the nuclear bombing in Nagasaki. The blast itself is depicted only as a bright light, but the scenes covering the days before the explosion build tension in a cool way, by showing the date in big lettering on the screen. To emphasize the point, there are also conspicuously visible calendars on the wall in the background. It was a very effective way of building suspense.

Like many Apple TV+ shows, it seems like they have spared no expense in recreating the look of multiple historical eras, and I hope that their coffers don’t run out before they can complete the story in subsequent seasons.

Over the Christmas holiday season, I had more spare time than usual and got a chance to catch up with some recent movies, as well as revisiting some older ones.

The Master Plan is a play produced by the Soulpepper theatre company. Adapted from the book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the play tells the true story of the ill-fated project to develop an unused plot of Toronto land into a futuristic “smart city.”

The project would have been a collaboration between Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet), and a government agency. Predictably, the opposing forces of profit-driven capitalism and regulatory bureaucracy ended in a stalemate, and the project was scrapped. The public generally disapproved of the idea, because of understandable fears that residents of the neighbourhood would be spied on, their data sold for profit. Nobody knows if data privacy would have been a real issue, because the project never got very far; on the other hand, even if the project had started off in a benign way, the pattern of enshittification predicts that the lives of the “customers” would have eventually deteriorated due to the profit motive.

Spoiler warning: Out of necessity, I have to reveal the plot in order to discuss my opinions of this film.

On the surface, this movie is fun to watch. It’s suspenseful and propulsive, and features a great performance by the lead actor, Willa Fitzgerald. However, I ended up disliking it after giving it a few minutes’ thought.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the US presidential election, which seems like the perfect time to watch this film. During my viewing, I held a question at the back of my mind: could America actually erupt into violence? It’s depicted so realistically in the film that sadly, I feel like the answer is yes. But also, the film avoids commenting on the specific political realities that would lead to such a scenario, which I think is to its credit. If its messaging were too true to life, I would be so filled with dread while watching it that I would miss the more personal story at its core.

The protagonists of the film are photographers who pride themselves on documenting the truth in a neutral way. As someone who dabbles in photography, I bought into the film’s insistence on the power of images. Visually, the film gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing iconic American imagery—e.g. a Christmas village, a small-town Main Street, the many monuments of Washington D.C.—with soldiers in battle. The action scenes are intense and appropriately scary. Ultimately, the movie shows the inevitability of war journalists becoming hardened and traumatized by the death that surrounds them, and makes you wonder if it’s worth it.

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For this year’s first TIFF Secret Movie Club screening, we saw this Australian stop-motion animated film, about the tough life of a young woman who loses her family to various tragedies. Her emotional refuge is collecting—and hoarding—snails and snail-related paraphernalia; anything that evokes the spiral shape of a snail shell is irresistible to her. Like Uzumaki, this manifests as dense repeated visual patterns that I’m sure would reward repeat viewings. The jerky motion of claymation is inherently “cute,” but the colour palette of mostly browns and greys, as well the perpetually droopy-eyed expression of the protagonist Grace, serve to offset the quirkiness with a dour mood.

One of last year’s Secret Movie Club selections, The Iron Claw, depicted so much tragedy and loss that were it not based on a true story, I would think that the writers were overdoing it, sacrificing believability in order to tug at viewers’ heartstrings. Memoir of a Snail, because of its biopic-like structure, and of course, its title, had me believing that it also was a true story, despite its fantastical and whimsical visuals. I kept thinking, Wow, how did this person endure so much pain and trauma?, as if it were a real person.

It’s only in hindsight that I realize that it must be mostly fiction. Unfortunately, this leaves me feeling deceived. In my opinion, by putting its main character through the ringer, only to give her a twist happy ending, the film strays into emotionally manipulative territory. In the Q&A session afterwards, writer/director Adam Elliot says that he wants to achieve two things with his films: make the audience laugh, and make the audience cry. I think he tries a little too hard to reach this goal.

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I watched this movie before TIFF, and then I got busy with my “coverage” of the festival, followed by a vacation. But the film left enough of an impression on me that I wanted to circle back and write down a few thoughts.

I opted to watch this rather lengthy movie one hour at a time, over three consecutive days. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that it’s rare for me to be able to spend 3 uninterrupted hours doing any one thing.

As it happens, Drive My Car works really well as a kind of miniseries with roughly one-hour episodes. The film’s pace is definitely slow, with plenty of quiet passages where characters travel in—you guessed it, a car—but it didn’t test my patience, partly because I was coming to it fresh every day. There’s also a clear three act structure to the story, which lines up nicely at the hour marks.

The protagonist, Kafuku, is a stage actor and director, who is grieving the loss of his wife. His feelings are complicated, as he is aware that she was having a secret affair with another man. In an ironic turn, Kafuku heals partly by meeting and “befriending” the man who cuckolded him (although “be-frenemy-ing” might be a better term for it). In their tense conversations, the two men never explicitly mention the affair, but they both know that they both know.