"Everything is as it should be."

                                                                                  - Benjamin Purcell Morris

 

 

© all material on this website is written by Michael McCaffrey, is copyrighted, and may not be republished without consent

Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

Rebel Moon Part One: A Review - In a Dull and Derivative Galaxy...

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My recommendation: SKIP IT. Oh boy…this thing is garbage.

Rebel Moon, the new Zack Snyder directed sci-fi film on Netflix, tells the story of Kora, a young woman living on a remote planet in a galaxy ruled by an evil empire, who…you guessed it...rebels against her evil overlords.

Rebel Moon was originally a spec script written by Zack Snyder which he pitched to Lucasfiilm in 2012 as a Star Wars movie. Lucasfilm passed but Snyder kept the idea and took out the lightsabers and replaced them with fiery hot swords and now eleven years later he has made his non-Star Wars/Star Wars movie and it hit Netflix on December 21, 2023.

Having sat through the interminable two-hours and fifteen minutes of Rebel Moon, I can, for the first time in the last twenty-five years, not only understand Lucasfilm’s thinking, but respect it.

As frustratingly sub-par as the last bunch of Star Wars films have been, and boy oh boy have they been sub-par, they seem like Citizen Kane and The Godfather combined compared to the shitshow that is Rebel Moon.

This movie is an amalgam of every sci-fi and fantasy movie trope imaginable, thrown into an insipid and rancid stew of derivative dullness. The end result is one of the most suffocatingly boring and instantly forgettable films in recent cinema history.

I’d get into the plot of Rebel Moon but…what’s the point? You’ve seen everything in Rebel Moon in other, better movies.  

Zack Snyder is a very polarizing filmmaker. Surprisingly, I have, for the most part, been on Snyder’s side in the battles over his abilities over the years. I always appreciated his distinct visual style and I thought both 300 and Watchmen were good. Hell, I even enjoyed the director’s cut and SnyderCut of Batman v Superman and Justice League respectively.  

The cold hard reality is that I really wanted Rebel Moon to be good and was…God help me…looking forward to it…but unfortunately and unquestionably, Rebel Moon is Snyder at his absolute worst.

The script is a gigantic, steaming pile of excrement. The dialogue is painfully cliched and the story is jam packed full of the most tired and lazy sci-fi tropes imaginable. There’s stuff blatantly stolen from Star Wars, Avatar, and even The Lord of the Rings, among many others.

The film has Snyder’s signature visual style but just not as well executed. Everything is matted and hidden under a layer of washed-out gray. Slow-motion is used over and over and over again in action sequences to negative affect. There’s not a single memorable or noteworthy shot in the entire film despite Snyder’s ham-fisted attempts to create one.

Speaking of nothing being noteworthy, the cast of Rebel Moon are egregiously bad.

Sofia Boutella plays the tough girl lead Kora, and she is so devoid of charisma, magnetism or any semblance of acting skill, it felt like I was watching a corpse laying-in-wait for its autopsy to begin. How Boutella, a dancer who has been in some films but never been good in any of them, ever got cast in this thing is beyond me.

As bad as Boutella is, and boy is she bad, Michiel Huisman, who plays Gunnar, is maybe the worst actor to have ever been captured on film. This guy, who somehow was on Game of Thrones, is to acting what Stephen Hawking was to tap dancing.

Charlie Hunham, an actor I usually like, plays a mercenary named Kai. Kai is an awful and annoyingly inane character, but thankfully Hunham’s performance is so dreadful you almost forget the character he plays is ridiculously written. To add diarrhea atop the shit cake, Hunham busts out an Irish accent that would make Dick Van Dyke blush.

The two most horrifying things about Rebel Moon are, number one, that Anthony Hopkins is a voice actor in the film who plays a robot with a heart of gold. Hopkins is 86 years-old and it horrifies me to think there’s a decent chance this is the last movie he makes before he goes off to his eternal reward. I guess I can console myself with the idea that acting in Rebel Moon, even if it is just in voice-over, is a serious form of penance and thus Hopkins sins will be washed away and he’ll be ushered quickly into heaven upon his departure from this cruel earth.

The other horrifying thing is that Rebel Moon is actually titled, Rebel Moon PART ONE…which means, God help us…there is going to be a Rebel Moon PART TWO.

Part Two is supposed to hit Netflix in April of 2024, so every sorry son of a bitch like me who watched Part One has a few months to prepare themselves to skip Part Two entirely, up to and including gouging our own eyes out.

Not to go even darker, but the word on the street is that Snyder is working on the script for Part Three at this very moment…which…holy fuck…I can’t even begin to comprehend the scope and scale of mental illness ravaging the executive suites over at Netflix right now for them to green light more of this garbage.

In conclusion, it is difficult to put into words how truly atrocious Rebel Moon is. Just know that you never, ever, ever have to ever watch this really stupid and relentlessly, endlessly boring movie, because I already did. You’re welcome.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 113 - Saltburn

On this episode, Barry and I pour ourselves some bathwater cocktails and dance around our mansion in the nude as we discuss Emerald Fennell's new controversial film Saltburn. Topics discussed include the weirdness of Barry Keoghan, Emerald Fennell's major third act issues, and the cinematic skill of Linus Sandgren.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 113 - Saltburn

Thanks for listening!

©2024

The Holdovers: A Review - A Happy Humbug for the Holidays

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Not a great film, but a good enough one. It’s an exceedingly safe movie that boasts quality performances from a terrific cast.

The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Paul Giamatti, tells the story of a teacher, student and cook who are stuck together at a tony New England prep school over the Christmas holiday break in 1970.

I consider myself a marginal fan of director Alexander Payne. I’ve loved some of his movies, like About Schmidt and Nebraska. I’ve liked some of his movies, like Sideways and Election. And I’ve loathed some of his movies, like Downsizing and The Descendants.

The Holdovers, Payne’s first film since the box office and critical bomb Downsizing in 2017, was in theatres at the end of October and is now streaming on Peacock.

The film, set at the fictional prep school Barton, tells the story of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a stern and curmudgeonly academic who attended the school in his youth and has taught there for the vast majority of his adulthood.

Hunham is just like Robin Williams’ iconic character John Keating in Dead Poets Society…if Keating had a wall-eye, bad body odor and was despised by both students and colleagues alike. Hunham’s students would only stand and recite “O Captain! My Captain!” if they were about to frag him.

Hunham is, much to his chagrin, tasked with taking care of a rag tag group of students who, for a variety of reasons, have nowhere to go over the Christmas break. One of these students, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), is abandoned at the lasty minute by his mother and step-father for the holidays.

After a twist and turn of events, the only people left at Barton for holiday break are the sad-sack trio of Hunham, Tully, and the school’s head chef Mary Lamb (DaVine Joy Randolph). The one thing these three all have in common though is that they’re all in various stages of grief, such as denial, anger and depression.

The tone throughout The Holdovers is one of melancholy mixed with a cloying sentimentality. Yes, there are some amusing bits and sequences, and Giamatti’s Harvard educated Hunham has a quick, erudite and eviscerating wit, but for the most part this is a straight forward, throw-back, adult dramedy.

The Holdovers is a return to scale if not entirely to form for Alexander Payne. I thought the film was…fine. It isn’t great. But it is good…enough. It is proficiently made, well-acted, and entertaining. But what it lacks is…well…some sense of profundity, as it is incessantly safe above all else.

This is the type of film that would be perfect to sit down with extended family during the holidays and watch without anyone getting offended or upset or even all that excited. It is, as I said, above all else - safe…but it’s also entertaining and kept me captivated for its full two-hour-and-thirteen-minute running time.

The performances from the three main characters are all noteworthy. Giamatti, one of our better actors, is terrific as Hunham. The dialogue for Hunham is very well-written by screenwriter David Hemingson and is expertly delivered by Giamatti. Giamatti is very comfortable in the discomfort felt by the irascible egghead with the literal googly-eyes who smells like fish. He trudges through Hunham’s dramatic odyssey with his usual aplomb.

Dominic Sessa is a discovery as Angus Tully. This is Sessa’s first movie and while he is a bit rough-around-the-edges he brings a vitality and adolescent angst that is impossible to fake.

The big revelation though is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb. Randolph’s character Mary is the least well-written, but she fills the spaces with a weight that speaks volumes. What impressed me the most about Randolph though is that she absolutely, but subtly, nails her Boston accent, which is something that such luminaries as Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson and Julianne Moore have embarrassingly butchered (Hanks on multiple occasions).

When I have loved Alexander Payne’s films, like About Schmidt and Nebraska, it’s because they have had an acerbic and wickedly cutting and subversive nature to them. It also helps that those films star Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern respectively, giving some of the best performances of their careers.

When Payne loses me is when sentimentality and shtick come to the fore, like in The Descendants and Downsizing. (I also thought George Clooney and Matt Damon, respectively, were actively awful in both of those movies)

The Holdovers has a mix of both the best and the worst of Payne. It’s filled with sentimentality, but also features a great actor, Giamatti, swimming in a thick sea of acerbity (much like he did in Sideways).

It also has some shticky moments that disappoint and irritate. Like when Hunham chases Tully through the school, which was very reminiscent of a dreadfully bad sequence in The Descendants where George Clooney goofily runs up and down a long winding road.

But despite those contrived moments and disappointing bits, I found myself buying in to The Holdovers almost entirely because this type of movie – a smart, adult dramedy, which used to be so common in the 1970’s, is so rare nowadays.

Well-written, well-acted small comedy-dramas made by quality directors featuring skilled performers, are unfortunately few and far between in today’s Hollywood. Which is maybe why The Holdovers is being so well-received by critics and audiences alike.

If you have Peacock, I definitely recommend you watch The Holdovers, and if you don’t have Peacock, they’re always having one-week free trials so sign up for a free week and watch the movie and then cancel.

Ultimately, I enjoyed The Holdovers despite its various shortcomings and lack of artistic ambition, and frankly, I think you will too. It’s a safe movie and it definitely won’t change your life…but it also won’t disappoint.

 Follow me on twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Ferrari: A Review - Despite a Bad Driver, Ferrari Wins the Race

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A solid biopic that features some subpar acting but also some fantastic racing sequences.

Ferrari, directed by Michael Mann and starring Adam Driver, is a biopic that tells the story of iconic Italian industrialist and race car manufacturer, Enzo Ferrari, as he navigates a series of tumultuous business and personal events in 1957.

Ferrari, which is written by Troy Kennedy Martin and is based on the book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates, is a strange film. The reason for this strangeness is that sometimes the sum of a film is never as good as the quality of its parts, but that is not the case in regards to Ferrari, which is somehow able to be considerably better than the individual pieces that make up its whole.

For example, you’d think for a biopic about a hard-charging, iconic Italian race car impresario you’d have to have a strong performance from the lead actor in the title role in order for the film to work. In the case of Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the film works despite its lead actor, not because of him.

Driver is a mysterious actor in that it is an utter mystery to me why this insipid clod ever gets work, never mind works with great directors like Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese. As Enzo, a man juggling essentially two families, one with his wife and one with his girlfriend, and who is aggressively trying to have the greatest racing team in the world and maintain his auto business, the empty Driver feels like a kid playing dress up in his grandfather’s much too big suits. His ungodly awful, clownish Italian accent comes and goes like an engine missing the requisite sparkplugs, just like it did when Driver stumbled through the embarrassing Ridley Scott soap opera House of Gucci as another Italian titan of industry…Maurizio Gucci. Considering Driver’s artistic vacuity and acting vapidity, as well as his wandering parmesan cheese of an accent, and his insidiously shallow interpretations of characters, it seems to me the only iconic Italian he should ever be allowed to play is Chef Boyardee.

Another acting issue is Shailene Woodley, who is egregiously miscast as Lina Lardi, who is less Enzo’s gumar than she is his second wife and mother to his bastard son. Woodley gives a distractingly stilted and ineffective performance as Lina as she feels like she belongs in Malibu and not Molena.

The one saving grace regarding the acting is Penelope Cruz, who is absolutely brilliant as Enzo’s wife and business partner, Laura. There’s a scene early in the film where Laura visits her son’s grave and in the span of maybe thirty seconds Cruz, in close up, tells a wondrous and expansive story without saying a word. It’s a captivating and powerful piece of acting, and one that is heightened because Driver’s Enzo has a similar scene just prior to it that is nothing but verbosity filled with vacant histrionics.

Cruz is an actress that I rarely, if ever, think of, but her performance in Ferrari is yet another reminder for absent-minded dopes like me that she is among the most talented and skilled actresses in the world today.

Despite two of the three main performances being subpar, Ferrari pulls off the minor miracle of managing to be not just watchable but relentlessly compelling. A major reason for this is that the racing and driving scenes alone are worth the price of admission. Every racing scene is visceral, vital and undeniably electrifying. Mann and his cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shoot the racing from innumerable ingenious angles with energetic camera movements that capture the dynamic thrill of the sport, and master editor Pietro Scalia splices it all together for the absolute maximum potency and power.

That said, some of the racing sequences can be a bit confusing, as the racing teams from Ferrari and Maserati have similar looks and coloring. But beyond that the racing is superb, and contrary to some reports I’ve read, I did not find the CGI to be distracting or second rate at all.

Michael Mann is an often-overlooked filmmaker who boasts a robust filmography which features a bevy of good and sometimes great movies. In recent years Mann’s output has slowed and diminished in quality, with Ferrari being his first film since 2015’s dismal Blackhat.

Mann’s films are inhabited by a particular type of tormented masculinity, where the protagonist is insatiably driven and must overcome the numerous obstacles placed in front of him as well as the internal burdens which haunt him .

Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider and Collateral are all top notch pieces of cinema that capture Mann’s storytelling and slick visual style across different genres….. but it is his 1995 masterpiece, Heat, which is the absolute apex of his filmmaking career. Heat is one of the best films of the last thirty years as it features the greatest bank robbery and shootout scene captured in the history of cinema, which is an astonishing accomplishment.

Ferrari is nowhere near the level of film as Heat, but it does represent a somewhat more mature piece of storytelling from Mann, that is not to say that Mann’s earlier work was adolescent, but to say that Ferrari captures a man (and Mann) growing old and dealing with the precipitous burdens of his age and station.

 It must also be said that Ferrari is also not as good as James Mangold’s brilliant 2019 film Ford v Ferrari, which Michael Mann Executive Produced. Ford v Ferrari is a better film across the board and features better racing sequences, but Ferrari is no slouch and is a quality piece of cinema in its own right. In fact, Ferrari would make a perfect companion piece to Mangold’s auto-racing masterpiece.

The bottom-line regarding Ferrari is that I was very pleasantly surprised to find it a thoroughly solid, utterly compelling, if flawed, piece of cinema despite the often-lackluster acting. I wholly encourage you to check it out in the theatre if possible, or on streaming when the time comes.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 111 - Godzilla Minus One

On this rip-roaring episode, Barry and I don kimonos and talk all things Godzilla Minus One, the fantastic new Godzilla movie from Toho Studios. Topics discussed include Godzilla Minus One as companion piece to Oppenheimer, Jaws and other influences, and the skill and craftsmanship evident in the film that are sorely lacking in Hollywood. Bonus content - Barry and I have a hilarious discussion about the worst Christmas specials they've ever endured.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 111 - Godzilla Minus One

Thanks for listening!

©2023

May December (Netflix): A Review - A Comedy Wrapped in a Social Commentary Inside a Melodrama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This movie, like its subject, is elusive, but if you look at it through the proper lens, it often becomes fascinating.

May December, starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, is a dramatic reimagining of the salacious story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a school teacher who fell in love with her 13-year-old student back in the 1990s causing a huge scandal.

The film, which premiered on Netflix December 1st, is directed by esteemed auteur Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch.

May December follows the story of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a famous actress cast to star in a tv movie as Gracie, the woman who had a scandalous affair with her 13-year-old student Joe. Gracie went to prison for the rape/sexual misconduct with a minor, but when released resumed her relationship with the then-of-age Joe and later married him and had two children with him.

Elizabeth comes to Savannah, Georgia and integrates herself into Gracie’s life in order to better understand the character she will be playing in the tv movie. She observes Gracie and her family and community, and each night goes back to her hotel room and tries to capture Gracie’s essence by mimicking and imitating her.

But as time goes on the truth about Gracie and Joe, and even about Elizabeth, becomes more and more murky, and more and more elusive.

Director Todd Haynes is a unique filmmaker. I remember the first film of his that I ever saw was Safe (1995), which also starred Julianne Moore. That film was a very tense, deliberate, psycho-drama that was masterfully assembled.

Since then, I’ve found myself less enamored with Haynes’ work. His acclaimed films Far from Heaven and Carol felt decidedly flaccid and his more off-kilter attempts, like Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There fell flat.

May December though feels a bit different in that as a straight drama, it’s a colossal misfire, but as a sneaky comedy, melodramatic parody/satire, it works incredibly well. The question, of course, is whether Haynes is intentionally trying to be funny or if all of the comedy is purely unintentional.

One hint that Haynes is shooting for comedy is the recurring, and hilariously bad, music cues. The soundtrack for this movie is laugh out loud awful…and absolutely perfect for a cheesy, exploitationist, made-for-tv movie…just like the one Elizabeth is making regarding Gracie’s fall from grace.

There’s a scene in May December where Gracie’s adult son from her first marriage, Georgie, who is an absolute trainwreck of a human being, attempts to blackmail Elizabeth into getting him the job of “music supervisor” on the tv movie she’s making about his mother. How that resolves itself is never entirely clear but by the awful sound of the music in May December, I think if Georgie didn’t get the gig on Elizabeth’s film, he definitely got it on May December.

Haynes also treats us to some immaculately crafted, cheesy as hell zoom shots, and tightly choreographed scenes that are epically hilarious in the most subtle of ways.

The funniest part of the film though is that both Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, seem to be completely unaware that this is a comedy and entirely locked in to melodrama mode…and are both pretty awful at it.

Moore sports a grating and completely contrived lisp that is the height of distraction, and Portman is so mannered as to be a mannequin. Both of them are constantly acting, which is exactly what both of their characters are doing as well. It’s like they’re in a hall of mirrors and the real people, Gracie and Elizabeth, are impossible to differentiate from the spate of reflections upon reflections.

Speaking of mirrors, that’s not to say that there isn’t magic between these two acting icons. On numerous occasions Moore and Portman share a small space in the film and despite the lisps and the over-acting, the scenes crackle with life. These scenes are often shot, masterfully, in mirrored spaces, like bathrooms or changing rooms, and watching Moore and Portman work their instinctual magic through a camera and through a mirror or multiple mirrors, is absolutely mesmerizing.

Also mesmerizing, is Charles Melton, who plays Gracie’s victim and now husband, Joe. Melton gives the most layered, nuanced and finely crafted performance imaginable, and one of the best performances of the year. Melton, who is best known for starring in the CW series Riverdale (which I’ve never seen), is so present, genuine, grounded and exceptional as Joe it’s like he’s in a different movie altogether.

Another standout performance is by D.W. Moffet, who plays Gracie’s first husband Tom. Moffet has essentially one scene in the movie, and it’s a conversation between Tom and Elizabeth - who is asking him about the experience of being on the wrong end of Gracie’s infamous affair with an underage boy. Moffet is extraordinary in this compact scene. In lesser hand this scene is just an exposition dump and some mugging for the camera, but Moffet turns it into a profound and deeply moving drama all its own.

As the film unfolds, viewers can either accept it as a piece of heightened parody and camp, or can resist it and be extremely disappointed in it as a straight drama that gets lost in a swamp of melodrama.

I chose to enjoy the comedy of it all, and laughed out loud on numerous occasions…like when Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth does a skin-care commercial that is just like a real-life Natalie Portman skin-care commercial. I don’t know why I found that so funny…but I burst out laughing nonetheless.

If you’re looking for a smart, sly, sneaky and subtle comedy about predatory relationship power dynamics, the exploitative nature of our culture and the venality of fame, then May December is for you.

If you’re looking for a high-intensity, prestige drama that will move you deeply, then May December is not for you.

I chose the former and thought May December was a worthwhile cinematic venture. I think if you go into it with the proper, finely-tuned expectations, you’ll end up appreciating it and be glad you watched.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Leave the World Behind (Netflix): A Review - It's the End of the World as We Know It...and Obama Feels Fine

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This film never lives up to its potential but it does feature some impressive cinematography and a tantalizing and unnerving narrative. It isn’t a great movie but it does make for a good conversation/thought piece.

Leave the World Behind, written and directed by Sam Esmail, is a dystopian, apocalyptic, psychological thriller produced by Barrack and Michelle Obama now streaming on Netflix.

The film, which stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, is based on the novel of the same name by Ruuman Alam, and it tells the story of the Sanford and Scott families as they navigate an unfolding cataclysm across the U.S. from a tony neighborhood on Long Island.

The Sanford’s, a white family from Park Slope-adjacent Brooklyn, made up of the ornery Amanda (Julia Roberts), her easy-going husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their teenage children Archie (Charlie Evans), who is obsessed with girls, and Rose (Farrah McKenzie), who is obsessed with 90s pop culture – like Friends and The West Wing, rent a beautiful home at the beach on Long Island for a week.

In the middle of their first night, there’s a knock at the door, and two black people, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth (Myha’la), appear. The story between the Sanfords and the Scotts go from there but I won’t get any more in-depth on it in order to avoid spoilers.

The rest of the plot revolves around mysterious events that are happening in the U.S., specifically in relation to the Sanfords and Scotts, in New York City.

Technology, such as cell phones, the internet and cable television, stop working, leaving the protagonists in an information and communication blackout, which allows chaos and paranoia to flourish.

Once again, in order to avoid spoilers, I will refrain from delving much deeper into the plot than that.

The film’s director, Sam Esmail, is best known for creating the tv series Mr. Robot, but this is just his second feature film, and despite some very bright spots, at times it shows.

To Esmail’s great credit, he creates some very vivid and stunning images in Leave the World Behind, that rattle viewers to the core. Visually the film never fails to unnerve with one apocalyptic nightmare visual after another, like luxurious paintings hanging in a dystopian art gallery.

Esmail and cinematographer Tod Campbell use an often swirling, spinning, panning, zooming and rotating camera to make the viewer just as discombobulated and disoriented as the characters portrayed on-screen. All this camera movement isn’t just directorial masturbation, but instead is very cinematically effective and done with an admirable amount of precision and creative dexterity. As the character’s go through their strange journey, Esmail’s camera leaves viewers in a world where up is down, and left is right…literally.

The same is true of the camera framing, as things are often shot from odd angles, and despite the visuals being crisp and amid razor-sharp straight lines, everything is framed off-kilter and off-center, to great affect.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved the look of the film, the story it shows and the drama it reveals are often sorely lacking.

The biggest issue with Leave the World Behind is that it is bursting with a cavalcade of dramatic potential, but is never able to fully realize it.

The greatest obstacle to the film’s dramatic success is that it gives us one-dimensional, unreal characters, places them in an extreme yet compelling and entirely believable situation, and then has them behave in the most inane, counter-intuitive and annoying ways imaginable.

I can’t give too much away in regards to specifics, but things happen, and characters behave, in ways, both big and small, that are just ridiculous beyond belief and it frankly ruins the film as the tension and drama are undermined by these egregious plot and character improbabilities and decisions.

There’s a bit at the end which is meant to be poignant, and could have been really terrific, but is ultimately neutered by a failure of Esmail to thoroughly impress upon the audience, through repetition or targeted intensity, the crucial pieces involved. (Again, I am being intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.)

As for the cast, they do the best they can with the rather shallow characters they’ve been given.

Julia Roberts’ Amanda is basically an upper-middle class, left-of-center Karen, exercising her mid-life crisis muscles by being an irritable bitch for reasons she will never even try to understand. Roberts is a steady screen presence but she has never brought much of interest to the table and Leave the World Behind is no exception.

Ethan Hawke has matured into a solid actor and his good-natured Clay is a passable and likable attempt at an everyman – if ‘everyman’ were a college professor of English and Media Studies. It’s the character of Clay that is much more troubling than the actor portraying him, as Clay is the clueless, sack-less white man incapable of not only defending himself but of mustering the courage to even attempt it.

Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie play the teens Archie and Rose respectively, and there isn’t much to the characters or the actor’s performances. Neither of them jumps off the screen or generates the least bit of magnetism.

Mahershala Ali is, as always, a strong presence on-screen, but his character G.H., is an absurd stand-in for the film’s producer Barrack Obama. G.H. is impeccable. He is unfailingly good, smarter than everyone and entirely incapable of cowardice. He is principled, moral, ethical, noble, brave and above all…correct. Yawn. The truth is that there were twists and turns that could’ve occurred with G.H. to make him more interesting, but they never happen and so we are left with little more than a cardboard cutout of the man that Barrack Obama, and his slavish sycophants, thinks he is - paging Dr. Freud…narcissism alert!

Myha’la as Ruth Scott is fine, I guess, but again, she doesn’t have much with which to work. Ruth is, like G.H., better than everyone else…I suppose simply because of her immutable characteristics…namely that she is black and a woman. Like Roberts’ Amanda, Ruth is an incorrigible bitch but it’s ok because she’s just speaking her truth…or something like that.

The genuine drama between Ruth and G.H., and between the Sanfords and the Scotts, is eschewed in favor of a rather tepid, embarrassingly trite, middle-of-the-road, decidedly elitist and liberal, high school freshman level identity/race politics that feels forced and obscenely phony, which is very unfortunate.

Speaking of politics, the fact that the Obamas produced this movie, the first non-documentary film they’ve produced, is both telling and, frankly, quite unnerving.

The apocalyptic, dystopian, and totally believable plot of Leave the World Behind, and Obama’s insider status among the power elite, makes it feel like this movie isn’t a piece of fiction but rather a piece of predictive programming…or enlightened prophecy, as to what awaits us.

That may sound irrational, or like “conspiratorial thinking” – something that is lambasted in the film as being unserious despite it being proven correct in the story (and more and more often in real life), but whether conscious or unconscious, artists and art often have a way of showing us the catastrophe that is right around the corner. 9/11 is a recent example of this.

The film is marinated in an establishment politics that is entirely rigid, center-left and upper-class. This elitist, left-liberal orthodoxy is so deeply ingrained in the movie that most-mainstream, establishment indoctrinated viewers won’t even recognize, and if they did they wouldn’t see it as political.

I’ll write a much more in-depth, political, psychological analysis of the film in the coming days, but will state here only that this movie is riddled with as much insidious propaganda as anything I’ve seen in any feature film in recent times.

Whether it be subtle, or not-so-subtle, attacks on libertarians, right-wingers, white people, conspiracies, and even Elon Musk, or anything else that isn’t establishment approved, the film never fails to be in complete lockstep with mainstream orthodoxy as designed by the aristocracy and oligarchy.

In this way the film, despite its attempt to present itself as edgy and politically avant-garde/revolutionary, is, at its heart, an intellectually and dramatically flaccid but ideologically faithful homage to the status quo….just like the former President who produced it.

In conclusion, Leave the World Behind is chock full of dramatic potential but is never able to fully realize it. Despite some compelling visuals and sequences, the film’s dramatic and narrative failures ultimately leave it an unsatisfying viewing experience.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Boy and the Heron: A Review - The Master Miyazaki Returns

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

Hiyao Miyazaki is arguably the greatest director of animated film in cinema history. His filmography, which includes such classics as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Ponyo, is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful.

Miyazaki, who is 82-years-old, hasn’t made a feature film in a decade (The Wind Rises), and it was believed that he was finished making movies. But fortunately for us, Miyazaki is back with a new film, The Boy and the Heron, which premiered in theatres this past weekend.

The Boy and the Heron follows the travails of Mahito, a twelve-year-old boy living in Tokyo during World War II. Despite Mahito’s valiant efforts, his mother, Hisako, is killed when her hospital burns to the ground one night.

Mahito and his industrialist father Shoichi, then move to the countryside to live in the estate Hisako grew up on. Shoichi remarries with Hisako’s look-a-like younger sister, Natsuko – who becomes pregnant.

Things get typically weird from there as Mahito is pestered by an aggressive heron, and stumbles onto a hidden tower which leads him on a dark yet magical journey in the hopes of seeing his mother again and saving his step-mother from peril.

The Boy and the Heron, like so many of Miyazaki’s movies, deals with very deeply profound philosophical, psychological and existential issues. For example, grief and the meaning of life are the two pillars around which the film is constructed.  

Many of Miyazaki’s movies seem like dreams that often veer into nightmares, or like something cobbled together from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and The Boy and the Heron is no exception. There are shapeshifting demons/angels and giant, carnivorous warrior parakeets, and adorable pre/post life souls that float like balloons, and aggressive hordes of pelicans.

Through it all Miyazaki keeps his protagonist Mahito focused on finding his pregnant step-mother Natsuko and the dream of seeing his long-lost mother again, and it is that fragile humanity and gut-wrenching emotion that gives the film not only its meaning but its purpose.

As always with Miyazaki, the animation is glorious and gloriously weird. Things in Miyazaki’s world look ever-so-abnormal to the point of nightmarish. For instance, the heron is at first gorgeous, but then over time becomes grotesque. The old women, as is custom in Miyazaki films, are charming yet gruesome, witch-like characters.

The film is available in many theatres here in the U.S. either in Japanese with English subtitles or dubbed in English. I saw the film with my young son and subtitles move too fast for him to read, so we saw the dubbed version and it works well for the most part.

The cast are a collection of solid, well-known actors, such as Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Most of them are perfectly fine, with Pattinson in particular giving a quite remarkable performance that is unrecognizable.

Christian Bale, an actor I usually like, stands out though for a rather poor performance, as his work as Mahito’s father Shoichi is bizarre. At different times Bale gives Shoichi a New York accent that often stumbles into a Boston accent. All of Bale’s voice work here seems to be out of place and out of step.

Beyond that there isn’t much to complain about…it’s a Miyazaki movie after all, but it must be said that despite this being allegedly one of Miyazaki’s most personal stories, it is not among his best films. That is not to say the movie is bad, it’s just to say that in light of Miyazaki’s masterpieces, of which there are many, The Boy and the Heron somewhat pales in comparison.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing The Boy and the Heron and was thrilled that my son, who wasn’t even born when Miyazaki’s last film came out, got to see his work on a big screen. My son and I have watched all of Miyazaki’s movies in recent years and he is as big a fan as I am. It brings me endless amounts of joy watching my son watch Miyazaki movies, as he just loves everything about them.

We’ve yet to see a Miyazaki movie we’ve disliked. My son’s favorites are my favorites too, starting with My Neighbor Totoro. After that it’s Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Porco Rosso, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky and The Wind Rises. I would rate The Boy and the Heron below My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo, but right up there with any of Miyazaki’s other work. And it is most definitely better than any of the garbage Disney and Pixar have churned out in recent years.  

It was heartening to me to see that The Boy and the Heron was number one at the U.S. box office this weekend, which is something I never thought could happen. That both The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One, two Japanese films, would be so well received by U.S. audiences in back-to-back weeks is a glimmer of hope in an often-times dark and depressing popular culture landscape.

If you haven’t seen Miyazaki’s earlier films, you should go to the streaming service Max – and click on the Studio Ghibli portal, as it has all of Miyazaki’s films available to stream. Miyazaki’s movies are unique because they’re for both adults and children (I’d say kids 7 and up but your mileage may vary in terms of proper age to start). For kids I recommend you begin with My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, and for adults you can start with those or with Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, and go from there…you won’t be disappointed, and it’ll whet your appetite to see The Boy in the Heron in theatres.

In conclusion, I thoroughly recommend you see The Boy and the Heron in the theatre, and appreciate Hiyao Miyazaki while we have him on earth and still making movies.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Godzilla Minus One: A Review - The Glories and Horror of the God Encounter

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. As good as it gets in terms of Godzilla moviemaking. Not just a great Godzilla movie, but a really fantastic film all its own.

Language: Japanese with English Subtitles.

Godzilla Minus One, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is the 37th film in the Godzilla franchise, and the 33rd film produced by Japan’s Toho Studio, the place where Godzilla got his start back in 1954.

That original Godzilla movie, aptly titled Godzilla, wasn’t just the birth of the great kaiju film in modern cinema, it was also a truly fantastic piece of cinema. Every Godzilla movie since has paled in comparison, even the good ones, and there have been plenty of good ones…at least from Toho.

Godzilla Minus One is a reboot of the franchise and a remake of sorts of the first Godzilla movie. It tells the origin story of Godzilla and his first foray into his favorite sport…destroying Japanese cities.

The film is set at the tail end of World War II and in the early post-war years and it follows its protagonist, Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), as he tries to integrate back into civilian life after a deeply traumatic war experience.

Shikishima is a failed kamikaze pilot who ditched his suicide mission on the pretense that his plane malfunctioned. He ends up on a small Pacific Island used for airplane maintenance by the Japanese. It is here that Shikishima is confronted by not only his cowardice, but by a youthful and spry, mysterious sea monster the locals call Godzilla.

After the war, Shikishima is haunted by his shameful wartime cowardice, which he wears like a scarlet letter. He tries to build a life in the ruins of Japan and his mental state, and becomes a step-father and de facto husband to a young woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and the infant child she rescued during the war. He also gets a job aboard a ship that must destroy mines in the Pacific left over from the war.

While working this job, you’ll never guess who he runs into…his old foe Godzilla. But this time Godzilla is bigger and badder than ever thanks to the testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific by the U.S., which triggered Godzilla to grow bigger and stronger and angrier.

What makes Godzilla such a compelling movie monster is that he is, as Jungian psychology would describe him, the “God encounter”. Godzilla is, to quote the Bhagavad Gita and Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, “death, destroyer of worlds.” Godzilla is the void. He is both the immovable object and the irresistible force. One cannot help but feel insignificant and helpless in the face of such astonishing, horrifying destructive power.

In terms of the mythology of Godzilla, the foundation of it is that Godzilla is born both as a symbol of the dangers of the atomic age as well as the manifestation of Japan’s guilt and divine punishment for their aggression. In other words, he is God’s revenge on mankind for deploying nuclear weapons on earth, and hubris for Japan’s imperial ambition and heinous war time behavior.

The original Godzilla film resonated because it understood this mythology. As the Godzilla franchise has moved along over the decades, that mythology has been watered down if not entirely neutered, turning Godzilla into some sort of cuddly friend, or fierce environmental warrior.

Godzilla Minus One makes no such error. Here, Godzilla is not cute and cuddly, or friendly in the least. He is a dead-eyed and destructive killing machine that cannot be reasoned with, only endured.

The politics of Godzilla Minus One show a Japanese people exhausted by war and the malignant government that got it into one, and the incompetent government that survives after war. In this vulnerable state, the people of Japan are forced to do for themselves in the battle against Godzilla.

I won’t go into too much detail in order to avoid spoilers, but I will say that Godzilla Minus One is easily the second-best Godzilla movie ever made, behind the original – which is only the best in this instance because it is the original.

The sequences where we see Godzilla in action are spectacular, and considering the film had a budget of a measly $15 million, which is just 10% of what the most recent American Godzilla movie cost to make, is remarkable.

But this is exactly how you make a monster movie. You give people what they want…namely Godzilla wreaking havoc, and doing it in a realistic setting, with real-world consequences, inhabited by complex yet compelling characters. In other words, take the Godzilla subject matter seriously, something the recent spate…hell…ALL OF, the American Godzilla movies have failed to do.

Ironically enough, while reading the news this morning I read that the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer will finally be released in Japan after months of controversy. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, is not exactly a hero in Japan, where his handiwork slaughtered roughly 225,000 Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oppenheimer famously does not show the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor does it show their gruesome aftermath. When Godzilla comes to shore in Godzilla Minus One and makes his way through a Japanese city, what happens, and its aftermath, are undeniably evocative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the hell on Earth that Oppenheimer’s genius unleashed.

Accordingly, I think, as odd as this sounds, that Oppenheimer and Godzilla Minus One would make for a splendid double feature, as the former sets the stage for the death and destruction in the latter.

Take away the psychological musings, and as a pure piece of entertainment, Godzilla Minus One still works incredibly well. I went to the film with my wife and young son, who is too young to read the subtitles quickly enough – but he saw the trailer and wanted to see the film. My son had a few questions about the plot throughout, but not that many, and he could understand what was happening for the most part without reading the subtitles. He absolutely loved the film…for the same reason I grew up loving Godzilla…because Godzilla is awesome in the truest sense of that word.

Watching Godzilla unleash his destructive powers and fury onto the world is both horrifying and highly entertaining, and the fact that it is treated seriously and that characters you care about are in great peril when Godzilla rampages, makes that rampage all the more compelling.

In terms of the filmmaking, Yamazaki does a stupendous job directing this film. Godzilla Minus One pays homage to the original Godzilla in numerous ways, and does the same with a diverse array of films, from Jaws to Dunkirk.

The cast are terrific, without a bad note among them. And the special effects are better than anything I’ve seen in recent years from any of the American studios.

If, like me, you’re a huge fan of Godzilla movies, Godzilla Minus One is a dream come true, as it’s not only a great Godzilla movie, it’s a fantastic film in its own right.

If, like my wife, you couldn’t care less about Godzilla, you should still see this movie, as she didn’t just endure Godzilla Minus One, she actually enjoyed it.

At a time when blockbuster filmmaking from American Studios is at an all-time, ghetto-dwelling, nadir, Toho’s Godzilla Minus One is a glorious, shining city on a hill. Of course, that city is shining because Godzilla just stomped all over it and set it on fire with his atomic breath.

Godzilla’s back, baby!!!

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 110 - Cocaine Bear

On this combustible episode, Barry and I ingest heroic amounts of cocaine and then incoherently yell at each other about the comedy/horror movie Cocaine Bear. Topics discussed include guilty pleasures, bad taste and the perils of living with bears. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 110 - Cocaine Bear

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Killers of the Flower Moon: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Disappointing (with caveats elucidated below). Wait to watch it when it hits streaming.

To say I was excited to see Killers of the Flower Moon, the new film from iconic director Martin Scorsese, would be a terrible understatement. Scorsese is, along with Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa, among the most pivotal filmmakers in developing my incurable cinephilia, and when a film of his is released, it’s a major event in my life.

As a teenager, when I discovered Scorsese’s masterpieces Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (years after they were initially released) it was a holy experience that converted me into a true believer in the church of cinema.

Ever since that time I’ve been an ardent admirer and devout fan of Scorsese. That doesn’t mean I’ve loved all of his films…because I haven’t, but it does mean that I’ve always taken them very seriously and treated them with the deep respect they deserve having come from a master filmmaker.

Killers of the Flower Moon, which is directed and co-written by Scorsese and is based on the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, premiered in theaters on October 20th. Unfortunately, due to circumstances well beyond my control, I was unable to see the film until this past weekend. My nearly month long wait to see the film was excruciating as I had to quarantine myself and avoid any and all mentions of the film in the media/internet in order to stay clear of reviews and opinions. See, I don’t care what anyone else thinks of Scorsese’s films, I only care what I think.

I finally trekked out to the cineplex here in flyover country to see the three-and-a-half-hour-long film on Sunday, and the context of my viewing is a crucial caveat to my opinion on the movie.

Here in flyover country the local RC Theater is a fucking shithole, but it’s the only fucking shithole theater in town. The theater has shitty digital projectors, egregiously awful sound, refuses to turn the lights all the way off in the theater, and doesn’t have screens big enough to accommodate certain aspect ratios. So, I watched Killers of the Flower Moon with a projector that froze seven times, sound that rendered much dialogue inaudible and ambient sound injuriously loud, a condensed screen that cut off heads and compressed expansive vistas, staff members talking loudly in the projector room, and lights on at the top and sides of the theater that made it feel like I was watching a movie at an old drive-in during an especially sunny day.

Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? To be fair, I’m not sure how, or even if, me or Mrs. Lincoln can answer that question.

The reality is that upon viewing the film under these frustrating and infuriating circumstances, I thought Killers of the Flower Moon simply didn’t work, but I feel like I need to see it again under better circumstances before I can truly say. It is quite an indictment of our theater system that I will need to wait until the movie becomes available to stream at home before I can properly view and review it.

With that context in place, let’s dive into my thoughts on Scorsese’s 26th feature film Killers of the Flower Moon.

The film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Lily Gladstone, tells the story of a vast criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Whites against the Native American population living on the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s. I will avoid any more in-depth discussion of the plot in order to avoid spoilers.

I have not read the book so the plot was a mystery to me before seeing the movie. The story is unquestionably an important one, but the film lacks a cohesive storytelling approach and the narrative is at times barely coherent.

I am someone who actually prefers long movies (hell…I thought The Gangs of New York and Silence should have been LONGER), and Killers of the Flower Moon runs a daunting two hundred and six minutes long, but unfortunately it doesn’t earn that arduous run time. Despite so much screen time with which to work, the characters are under developed, the plot muddled and the drama neutered.

A major issue with the film is that its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, is horribly miscast. DiCaprio plays the dim-witted Ernest Burkhart, who sports an atrocious haircut, a perpetual frown and some fake, 1920’s idiot teeth. DiCaprio’s Ernest looks like he is the long-lost uncle of Sling Blade and the surly twin brother of Ben Stiller’s retarded character Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder.

Yes, there are the usual DiCaprio histrionics in Killers of the Flower Moon, as he weeps and wails and rends his garments like a toddler in a tantrum, but it all seems terribly vacant and dramatically ridiculous.

DiCaprio’s standing as the “greatest actor of his generation” has always felt slightly unearned to me as he often gives performances that are sub-par but which are filled with enough hyper-emoting to convince the uninitiated into believing he’s some great artiste. He’s much more an unabashed movie star than he is a great actor. That’s not to say he hasn’t given good and even great performances, because he certainly has (and these are all of them…What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Catch Me If You Can, Inception, Django Unchained, The Wolf of Wall Street, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), but often times, especially with Scorsese, he doesn’t.

This is DiCaprio’s sixth film with Scorsese and in most of them he has been at the very least outshined by his cast mates, and in some of them actively awful.

For example, in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio gives a relentlessly hollow performance and is absolutely blown off the screen by Daniel Day Lewis doing Daniel Day Lewis things. In The Aviator he seems like a little kid playing dress up as Howard Hughes. In The Departed, he gives a solid performance, but which at times feels forced and is definitely overshadowed by Matt Damon. Shutter Island is a mess of a movie and his performance is middling at best. The one exception is The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leo brings all of his star power and acting ability to bear and hits it out of the park.

I was hoping DiCaprio brought that Wolf of Wall Street level of acting to Killers of the Flower Moon…but he doesn’t. He is simply too bright-eyed to play such a dead-eyed dolt like Ernest, and his attempts to energize his performance with dramatic histrionics rings horribly hollow.

Robert DeNiro does very solid work as William King Hale, the local leader of questionable intent. DeNiro’s last two outings with Scorsese, this and The Irishman, have been the best work of the last two decades, and it’s nice to see him flex his considerable acting muscles once again.

Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie, Ernest’s Osage wife, eclipses her more famous co-star DiCaprio by giving a simple and subtle performance that radiates with charisma. Gladstone speaks volumes with a simple look and never over emotes or feels the need to press like DiCaprio does. She lets her compelling (and gorgeous) face tell the story.

The supporting cast features some truly dreadful performances, most notably, and unfortunately, by the Native American actresses. I will not name names but will say that there are some super cringy moments where a certain actress gives such an amateurish performance that it actually hurts to watch.  

Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer on the film and while there are some notable sequences, such as a burning farm sequence, the rest seems very ordinary. To be fair, as explained earlier my viewing experience was not ideal so maybe I was just not able to appreciate Prieto’s genius (and he is undoubtedly a fantastic cinematographer), but what I did see underwhelmed. For instance, early in the film there is a bunch of black and white Newsreel footage that gives the history of the setting and story that looks like a cheap flashback sequence in a bad tv show.

Then there is the ending, which I will refrain from giving specifics, only to say that this coda is, in the context of my viewing, gut-punchingly bad, especially when combined with the film opening with Scorsese reading a statement to camera that looks like a hostage video and sounds like it was written by the terrorists in the human resources department at Apple Corp.

Overall, I found Killers of the Flower Moon to be a terrible disappointment because my expectations were so high. It isn’t a great movie, but it isn’t awful either. That said, I really do reserve the right to change my opinion once I get to see it at home under better technical circumstances. I hope the film gets better upon my second viewing (which according to reports will probably be in late December or early January) because the story it tells is a vitally important one, and the director telling it is among the greatest to ever make a movie. But for now, it pains me to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is simply not worth seeing the theater…which may have more to do with how awful the theater experience has become than it does with the film…we’ll see.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Killer (Netflix): A Review - The King of Cold-Blooded Cinema

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My recommendation: SEE IT. A quintessentially Fincher film in every way. Coldly cinematic, diabolically dehumanized and darkly comedic, this movie’s icy embrace is undeniably compelling.

The Killer, director David Fincher’s new film about a fastidious assassin for hire starring Michael Fassbender, premiered on Netflix this past Friday, November 10.

David Fincher is one of the great auteurs of his generation, and his filmography, which, including The Killer, is twelve films deep, reveals a craftsman of such obsessive precision that it borders on the maniacal.

The Killer is the first Fincher film in his impressive filmography though that seems to unflinchingly reflect the artist himself, as the protagonist, an unnamed assassin, is every bit as meticulous and obsessed with process as the filmmaker telling his story.

The Killer seems to inhabit the same cold, nearly inhuman universe as previous Fincher films like Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Zodiac and even The Social Network. In a very real sense, The Killer feels like a thematic and tonal sequel to those films in the Fincher Cinematic Universe, just told from a different perspective.

Speaking of perspective, The Killer is told, with one notable exception, entirely from the assassin’s subjective perspective, and it is informed by the protagonist’s inner monologue as he goes about his ruthless business. This subjective approach is brilliant as it immediately connects us to the killer (Michael Fassbender) and in doing so compromises the viewer’s moral and ethical standing. We are so immersed into the mindset of this killer-for-hire that we simply accept his profession and ultimately root for him to succeed.

A nearly complete subjective approach to cinematic storytelling is not an easy thing to accomplish, and the proof of that is that other filmmakers rarely ever even attempt it. The God-like urge to show the audience something beyond the protagonist’s limited perspective is just too tempting and so directors succumb, which ends up watering down the audience’s experience.

In The Killer, Fincher and his cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt are, as always, masters of cold, yet deliriously crisp, visuals. Fincher’s signature, Carravaggio-esque, darkened, muted color scheme and use of forbidding shadows make for a glorious visual experience. As does Messerschmidt’s seemingly effortless camera movement and exquisite framing.

Adding to the perverse joy and humor of The Killer is Fincher’s use of the music of 1980’s British alternative band The Smiths. The assassin’s personal playlist on his ipod nano is chock full of The Smiths and their iconic and ironic anthems. Fincher matches his visuals to The Smiths soundtrack and it injects dark comedic irony into many scenes and elevates the film to an enormous degree.

In another rarity, the assassin’s voice-over, which reveals his inner monologue, also elevates and propels the film. Voice-overs are usually the sign of a director flailing, but in this instance the voice-over draws the viewer in to the unreliable narrator’s state of mind.

Fassbender’s killer is like Fight Club’s protagonist, but instead of saying to himself, “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise”, he says things like “trust no one”, “anticipate don’t improvise” and “skepticism often gets confused for cynicism”.

That the killer is often saying these things to himself while he is actually doing the exact opposite makes for an amusing and revealing trend.

As for Fassbender as the unnamed killer, he is perfectly cast. Fassbender is capable of saying everything while not speaking a word. His lithe frame and steely eyes are all the performance he needs and it fits masterfully with Fincher’s diabolically frigid cinematic style.

Tilda Swinton and Charles Parnell both have very brief, but extremely well done, supporting turns in The Killer, but besides that there is nothing but Fassbender and his delightfully dead pan voice-over.

The Killer, like much of Fincher’s work, seems to me to be a commentary on man’s struggle with his fast-fading humanity in a dehumanizing world.

Fassbender’s killer character seemingly wants to make himself mechanical, like some impervious, emotion-less Terminator. In order to do so he repeats his emotionless mantras like an inhumane prayer or playbook and wears an Apple watch to control his sleeping patterns and even his heartbeat (and maybe, just maybe, deep down to remind himself that he is indeed a human being with a heart).

Yet, despite this nearly mechanical meticulousness, the killer’s failures and mis-judgements, which are numerous, prove him to be all too human despite his best efforts.

The Killer also makes clear that maintaining one’s humanity isn’t just a struggle in the blackened human heart, it is an even more elusive goal in the grim outer world as well. In the world of The Killer, and in the real world, everything is corporate controlled and mechanized/digitized. You don’t use your hands to pick a lock in this modern world, you use your phone or a device to hack it. You don’t use your hands to hotwire a car, you use a fake credit card to rent it. You clean your filthy human body in an anti-septic shower in a soulless airport lounge for corporate customers with frequent flyer miles, like it’s an automated car wash. You don’t wear disguises to conceal your human face, but instead have multiple digital identities named after 70’s sitcom characters that were mere approximations of real people – and whom empty modern people devoid of, and detached from, their cultural history will never recognize.

The mechanized/digitized world, dehumanizes and isolates everyone who touches it, which enables Fassbender’s assassin to swim effortlessly through this icy, corporate-controlled pseudo-simulation of life like a shark through the frigid waters of the Atlantic.

Fassbender’s assassin, for all his inhuman mantras about “don’t trust anyone” and “forbid empathy”, is oddly inspired on his bloody spree by the most human of all emotional states…revenge. In this way, the killer fails miserably at his mechanical/digital ideology while only succeeding in deluding himself.

The somewhat anti-climactic conclusion of The Killer may leave some viewers unsatisfied, but I found it inspired and delightfully diabolical (and without giving away spoilers – it is insightful because it savagely exposes the deeply ingrained power dynamics of class in America, and rightfully eviscerates the proletariat for its flaccid weakness).

The truth is that Fassbender’s killer, for good and for ill, is every single one of us whether we want to believe it or not. Our culture has left all of us just as dehumanized and dead inside as the killer, and just as ultimately incompetent and impotent despite our instinctual desire to be just as demonically depraved.

Fincher masterfully lures us in with his gorgeous and entertaining filmmaking style, and convinces us to identify with, and root for, a committed serial killer. It’s an ugly business, but Fincher makes it look beautiful…and we are ultimately just as guilty as the man pulling the trigger.

I really love David Fincher as a filmmaker, although admittedly, I don’t like all of his films. Some of them, like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Gone Girl (yes, I know, I am decidedly in the minority in that I hate Gone Girl with a passion), are truly awful. Some of them, like Zodiac and The Social Network are magnificent masterpieces. The Killer is not as great as Zodiac and The Social Network, but it is definitely among the better films in Fincher’s filmography.

If you like Fincher films you will, not surprisingly, love The Killer, as it is quintessential Fincher. If you find Fincher films to be hit or miss, I would recommend you at least give The Killer a shot. It’s on Netflix so it doesn’t cost you anything…so why not?

The reality is that in our current culture of mediocrity there’s a desperate dearth of quality films from truly great directors, so you need to enjoy superior artistry when given the chance, and The Killer is definitely your chance.

 Follow Me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Nyad (Netflix): A Review - Sports Drama Drowns in Shallow Waters

****WARNING – THIS REVIEW CONTAINS CLEARLY MARKED SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Typical sports movie nonsense that avoids any genuine human drama in favor of generic hagiography.

Nyad, starring Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, is a sports biopic/docu-drama that chronicles famed long distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida as a 60-year-old.

The film, which is a Netflix original, is directed by Academy Award winning documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo) and is written by Julia Cox.

I vaguely remember Diana Nyad as a sports commentator on ABC’s Wide World of Sports back when I was a kid, but beyond that I knew absolutely nothing about her prior to seeing Nyad. Her feats of swimming endurance, such as crossing the English Channel and her attempt, as chronicled in Nyad, to swim from Cuba to Florida, were unknown to me.

Not knowing anything about Diana Nyad or her accomplishments helps to make the film Nyad somewhat compelling in the most rudimentary way as viewers will fall into the comfortable position of just being intrigued if she will or won’t make it on her perilous journey from Cuba to Florida.

The downside though is that if you know nothing about Diana Nyad before watching this film, you still won’t really know anything of substance about her when it’s over.

Nyad is as generic and cliché-ridden a sports drama as you’ll find, and it spends all of its time treading in painfully shallow water and avoiding diving into any noteworthy depths.

The reasons for the film’s tepid dramatic tone are numerous but obvious. The first of which is that Diana Nyad, and many of the real people portrayed in this movie, are still alive and were actively involved in the making of the film. It’s tough to tell a revealing, warts and all story about someone when you’ve actually met them and may run into them at the premiere. This is a major pitfall for all biopics and in our current age of documentary as self-produced marketing venture, in the documentary genre as well. A perfect example of this was The Last Dance, the Emmy award winning Michael Jordan documentary series that was executive produced by…Michael Jordan. Not surprisingly Jordan comes across as a god, who’s only flaw is that he was too committed to winning.

Biopics and documentaries made about or by people who are involved in the process, seem like job interviews where the applicant is asked what their weaknesses are and the answer is “I work too hard and care too much!” Nyad is no exception as Diana Nyad’s greatest failing is revealed to be she is too driven to greatness. Yawn.

Another reason why Nyad was so forgettable was that the directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin simply aren’t very talented or skilled filmmakers when it comes to feature films. Their documentary Free Solo was an astonishing piece of work about a remarkable man and his deadly sport, but feature films are a different animal from documentaries and Nyad is evidence that these two directors were out of their depth.

Screenwriters Julia Cox is equally to blame for the film’s soft-pedaled approach and allergy to genuine drama, as the story she focuses on, Diana Nyad’s attempted swim from Cuba to Florida, is actually not the most interesting, or dramatic, tale to tell about Diana Nyad…but more on that in a bit.

The performances in Nyad are as shallow as the story. Annette Bening’s Nyad is an ornery, tenacious narcissist…and is as one note as it gets. Gruff and determined appear to be the only emotions that Diana Nyad has ever felt, at least according to this movie.

Bening brings plenty of bluster to Nyad but never any genuine humanity. It all feels like an actress avoiding the uncomfortable emotional truth of her character and instead wallowing in frivolous play-acting.  

Jodie Foster is at least likable as the beleaguered yet loyal assistant/coach Bonnie Stoll, who bends over backwards to keep Nyad content and focused. Unfortunately, Foster is reduced to being little more than a collection of soft smiles and worried and concerned looks. The character of Bonnie is the ultimate supporting role since all she does is support.

Rhys Ifans plays John Bartlett and while he looks like the real-life Bartlett, he seems terribly miscast as the grizzled navigator with the heart of gold. His somewhat stilted American accent is a major cause for that failing.

After watching Nyad I went to Wikipedia to read about Diana Nyad’s life. What I discovered there was quite fascinating, especially considering little of it made it into the film.

***************SPOILER ALERT*******************

The most important thing I learned is that Diana Nyad’s remarkable swim from Cuba to Florida, which is the centerpiece of the film, is decidedly in question. Both the Guinness Book of World Records and the World Open Water Swimming Association (WOWSA) have declined to ratify or acknowledge the accomplishment due to “lack of independent observers and incomplete records”.

This was quite a revelation to me as the film goes to extraordinary lengths to point out that Nyad followed all the stringent protocols in order to make her swim legitimate.  

According to articles written in conjunction with the film’s release, Nyad’s swim from Cuba to Florida isn’t the only thing that may not be totally on the up and up, as some have claimed she is a serial fabulist.

I have no personal opinion on Diana Nyad as a fabulist or whether she did or did not cheat while swimming from Cuba to Florida, but as a cinephile I do have an opinion.

Frankly…the more compelling, dramatic and interesting story to tell wouldn’t be the black and white sports drama of Nyad, but rather the tale of Diana Nyad being so obsessed with making this historic swim and fulfilling her destiny that she cuts corners and cheats. That is a story that would be much more profound, insightful and dramatic, especially in our current age of self-assured righteousness where if you believe your cause is noble and your intentions pure then any wrongs you commit are actually right.

Diana Nyad as a self-obsessed, self-absorbed, virulent narcissist who commits fraud in order to convince the world she is great out of a need to cover the grievous wound from her childhood that aggressively haunts her, is the stuff of dramatic gold. But the makers of Nyad, including Diana Nyad herself, are incapable of that kind of honesty, only hagiography.

In this way, Nyad reminds me of The Imitation Game, the 2014 Academy Award Best Picture nominee starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The film chronicles the travails of Alan Turing, a brilliant British mathematician and computer scientist who creates a codebreaking machine that in essence helps the allies win World War II.

Turing was a closeted homosexual at a time when that was a crime. The film dramatizes his struggles with his secret sexuality while he helps the Allies win the war…and then the movie ends.

I found the film to be, like Nyad, rather generic fare and decidedly underwhelming. After the final frame though a scroll ran which informed viewers that less than a decade after the war, Turing was persecuted and prosecuted for his homosexuality and eventually submitted to chemical castration as part of a plea deal. Then, a few years later, he killed himself.

After reading that I sat in stunned silence…I mean…my God…that is absolutely and utterly horrific. I then wondered why I just watched a two-hour movie about Alan Turing which ended before the true drama of Alan Turing’s life had even begun. Turing helping to beat the Nazis should’ve been the first half hour of the film, and his crucifixion at the hands of the British government, which he had just helped save, should have been the majority of the story.

The same is true of Nyad. Diana Nyad is a fascinating character, but she is much more fascinating, and illuminating, if she cheated on her historic swim than if she actually did it. And the fact that the movie Nyad simply wants to avoid that controversy and make Diana Nyad out to be an uncomplicated, if disagreeable, hero, is why the film fails.

***********END SPOILERS****************

If as a filmmaker you want to take the safe, generic path then you shouldn’t be making films, you should be directing corporate commercials. Go get a job at a public relations and marketing firm and leave the art of cinema to artists who don’t mind getting their hands, and their idols, decidedly dirty.

If you like movies that stay in the shallow end of the pool, then Nyad is for you. But if, like me, you like films to dive into the dark depths of the raging sea in order to find the truth, and in so doing, the drama and humanity of it all, then Nyad is most definitely not for you.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Pain Hustlers (Netflix): A Review - Phony and Forgettable

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A remarkably empty cinematic exercise that is neither insightful nor entertaining.

Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, in the new Netflix movie that tells the tale of Eliza Drake, a stripper in Florida who becomes a highly successful pharmaceutical saleswoman of fentanyl who gets caught up in a corporate criminal conspiracy.

The film, directed by David Yates and written by Wells Tower, is based on the book of the same name by Evan Hughes and is a true story.

I had heard little about Pain Hustlers before checking it out on Netflix. All I knew was that it was in some way about the pharmaceutical industry and the opioid epidemic, and that is starred Emily Blunt. I am all too familiar with the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects, and I like Emily Blunt, so I thought I’d give the movie a shot.

I regret that decision.

Pain Hustlers is one of those movies, which are all too common in the streaming era, that is instantaneously forgettable. The images and story pass before your eyes and evaporate into the ether before you can even register their existence. This film is so forgettable it feels like I never actually watched it…even though I know I did because I wish I hadn’t.

The story at the heart of the film is interesting enough I suppose, as Eliza Drake’s rise from poverty and fall from grace have great dramatic potential, but everything about the film, its writing, its direction, the acting…is poor.

Let’s start with the casting. I think Emily Blunt is a terrific actress. I just rewatched Sicario and she is phenomenal in that great movie. She’s also outstanding in The Devil Wears Prada and A Quiet Place. But in Pain Hustlers she is painfully miscast as a white trash Florida woman who’ll do just about anything to make ends meet. Emliy Blunt is as an actress is, and can be, many things…Florida white trash isn’t one of them.

Blunt is simply too beautiful, too classy and too put together to ever be white trash. Put her in sweatpants and she doesn’t look cheap she looks like an elegant and chic woman in sweatpants. It’s not her fault…it’s just the way things are.

Due to Blunt’s natural grace and style her Eliza never seems too down and out for us to think she or her daughter are in true peril. And when Eliza climbs the ladder of the two-bit corporation that hires her to sell pain medication, it isn’t all that compelling because Blunt makes Eliza seem like she’s well above the low-rent operation anyway.

Chris Evans plays Pete Brenner, the hard-charging pharma salesman who brings Eliza into the fold. Chris Evans is a truly terrible actor and always has been…but just when you think he couldn’t get any worse as an actor, he gives us Pete in Pain Hustlers. Evans puts on an absolute clinic in awful acting in this movie.

Evans, a native of Massachusetts, is remarkable in that he often times as Pete – but not always, attempts a Boston accent, and yet still butchers it. That the accent comes in and out is forgivable only because, like a toddler trying to play drums, it’s so awful you’re glad he occasionally stops trying.

Evans is one of those atrocious actors who thinks he’s really, really good. Like you can see it in his eyes that he thinks this performance as Pete is definitely Best Supporting Actor ground he’s confidently marching across. This level of irrational confidence no doubt helps Chris get the ladies in real life, but the camera is a bullshit detector and it sees right through a dimwit charlatan like Chris Evans.

The always entertaining Catherin O’Hara plays Eliza’s white trash mom Jackie and somehow manages to not be entertaining at all. O’Hara’s Jackie is nothing but a walking caricature and never manifests as a human being, just an annoyance. If she played this character in this way in a three-minute comedy sketch you’d still think it was shallow.

Andy Garcia plays Dr. Neel, the founder of the pharma company in question, and his performance, which he seems to think is fantastic, is instead flaccid. Garcia huffs and puffs and crazies his way through the role but it all feels like a put on and not an actual performance emulating a real person.

Besides the casting and acting, the direction is as second rate as it gets. David Yates, whose claim to fame is having directed 7 of the Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts films, tries to turn Pain Hustlers into a combination of Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas set in the strip-mall pharma world in Florida, but wildly misses the mark.

Yates interjects black and white interview segments into the film to make it all seem “real”, but these segments are legitimately bad as everything comes across as ultra-phony. It doesn’t help that the performances in those black and white interview segments are particularly bad.

Yates also uses a voice-over (Goodfellas style) that doesn’t propel the narrative but just feels like a cheap way to cover over the glaring flaws in the cinematic storytelling. As my film school editing professor once told me, “voice-overs are bad…unless your Scorsese…and nobody is Scorsese.” David Yates is certainly not Scorsese.

The film is consistently visually stale, the performances are relentlessly uneven and remarkably dull, and the story lacks a compelling or dramatically satisfying arc. What is left is a big budget after school special film that comes and goes without the least bit of notice. That stars like Emily Blunt and Chris Evans are in this film only makes it all the more perplexing as to how this got made…and why.

Pain Hustlers is set in 2011, in the wake of the first wave of the opioid epidemic when a chill had gone through the pain management industry thanks to America’s waking up to Purdue Pharma’s rapacious greed and criminality. The drug at the center of this movie though is not oxycontin, but rather fentanyl, an opioid even more powerful, and deadly, than oxycontin.

The film tries to walk along a straight razor as it argues that fentanyl is a great drug, but that corporate greed is what causes it to become problematic due to over prescribing. It presents charming rogue pharma salespeople as the real working-class heroes who get screwed (sometimes literally) by the corporate big wigs who ruin the fentanyl utopia these hard-working, hustling salespeople created.

That is a very complicated moral and ethical argument to make, and maybe it’s a worthwhile one, but Pain Hustlers and its director Yates are too low rent artistically (and intellectually) to ever clearly make this argument, or any argument regarding the opioid crisis coherently. Which is a shame as nuance is welcome artistically even in the most seemingly Manichean of circumstances.

In recent years there have been numerous opioid epidemic projects based on non-fiction books that have made it to streaming services. In 2021 there was the miniseries Dopesick on Hulu, and in August of this year the miniseries Painkiller premiered on Netflix. While Dopesick wasn’t great, it was decent enough…but now with Pain Hustlers, Netflix has churned out two straight, similarly titled, really bad opioid themed projects based on books in the span of three months. Not good.

As much as I proselytize and evangelize regarding the horrors of the opioid crisis (which is still ravaging the country) and the villainy of the pharmaceutical industry and the corruption of our government, I simply cannot recommend Pain Hustlers as it isn’t informative, insightful or entertaining.

The truth is that Pain Hustlers is completely and entirely forgettable, so don’t waste your time watching it. I’ve not read the book Pain Hustlers by Evan Hughes, but I can only hope that it is better than the movie…so go read that. Or better yet, go read the books Dopesick by Beth Macy, Painkiller by Barry Meier, American Overdose by Chris McGreal and Dreamland by Sam Quinones. What you discover in those books about our country and the moral and ethical corruption of our vile ruling class, will change the way you look at our world and help you to understand that those who rule and own us, passionately despise us and actively want to do us great harm.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

No Hard Feelings: A Review - An Impotent Sex Comedy in the Age of Political Correctness

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A sexless sex comedy that fails to be funny.

No Hard Feelings, a much-hyped comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence, hit theaters back on June 23rd, but I, like most people, didn’t trek out to the theatres to see it then. But it is now available on Netflix and I finally got a chance to check it out.

The film tells the tale of Maddie Barker (Lawrence), a 32-year-old working class Uber driver and bartender living amongst wealthy elites in her hometown of Montauk in the Hamptons.

Maddie lives in a modest home in the otherwise tony Hamptons left to her by her mother when she died. Despite her house being paid off, Maddie cannot afford the local property taxes and must hustle to make ends meet. The town repossesses her car due to unpaid taxes and therefore Maddie is unable to do her Uber side hustle and faces the loss of her home.

She then stumbles upon an ad placed by a wealthy couple who want to socialize their helicopter-parented, nerdy, shy, reclusive 18-year-old son Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) for the summer before he goes off to Princeton. In return for Maddie “dating” their son they will give her a used Buick Regal…as long as Percy never finds out about the arrangement.

The deal is made and then comedy is supposed to happen but never really does.

No Hard Feelings, which is written and directed by Gene Stupinsky, a writer/director/producer of the American version of The Office, was supposed to be a glorious renaissance for the raunchy comedies of the first decade of the 21st Century – like 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers. Unfortunately, the renaissance of raunchy comedy will have to wait as No Hard Feelings falls as flat as a shit pancake and never even manages to muster a minimal chuckle.

The film’s comedic beats are all a bit off and never land with any rhythm or power. Stupinsky’s direction is shoddy as performances are uneven and many scenes feature continuity errors that speak to a less than sturdy hand at the directing wheel.

Stupinsky’s script is even worse than his direction as a big part of the reason why the film stumbles from sub-par scene to sub-par scene is that the story is unnecessarily complicated.

For instance, the twists and turns of Maddie needing to get a car so she can then work as an Uber driver in order to earn enough to pay off her taxes, is convoluted and dilutes any narrative momentum. Why not just simplify and say Maddie needs $20,000 to pay off her taxes and these rich parents will pay her that to date their teenage son? That approach would streamline the story and allow the characters and their relationship to develop instead of wasting time setting up a premise that doesn’t work.

As charming as Jennifer Lawrence can sometimes be, and she can be extremely charming at times, her performance here is an unruly mess that never coalesces.

For example, Lawrence does a very courageous full frontal nude scene in the film that is played entirely for laughs, but it’s so poorly executed and so tonally and narratively obtuse that it just feels uncomfortably stupid instead of ballsy and bold…and I say that as someone who wholly encourages Jennifer Lawrence, and any actress really, to do as many full-frontal nude scenes as possible. Needless to say, this particular full-frontal nude scene isn’t even remotely funny, never mind the least bit titillating.

Andrew Barth Feldman plays the neurotic Percy and is as charismatic and interesting as a stray tumbleweed. Feldman brings no inner life to his character and so Percy is just a walking, lifeless prop who loiters on screen. To call Feldman’s performance flimsy would be generous.

Percy’s parents are played by Laura Benanti and a ghastly looking Matthew Broderick. Benanti is quite good in the small role as the overbearing, self-conscious mother. Broderick, on the other hand, looks like he ate two Ferris Buellers and is auditioning for the role of the corpse in a stage revival of Weekend at Bernie’s at a dinner theatre just off the interstate in Dayton, Ohio.

Broderick is a perfect example of Stupinsky’s weakness as a director, as his line readings are so flat that he monotonously misses the rhythm and beat of every joke in every scene.

No Hard Feelings was hyped quite a bit back in June when it hit theatres, as it was held up as a sort of rebirth of the raunchy sex comedy but from a female perspective. This approach was novel but ultimately fell short of expectations as the film only made $87 million on a $45 million budget.

Of course, if No Hard Feelings had switched the genders and had a 32-year-old man trying to bang a nerdy 18-year-old girl, it may have created a nuclear meltdown and caused its creators to be sent to the gulag by woke culture warrior Torquemadas for atomic levels of toxic masculinity and cultural problematicity.

The truth is that the traits that made 40-Year-Old Virgin and Wedding Crashers funny, and remarkably successful and popular, namely their raunchy, risqué and randy nature, are verboten in our painfully tight-assed current culture. And so, when a film like No Hard Feelings comes along and tries to emulate that previous era’s comedic tone, but only within very stringent creative and comedic, politically correct limits, it’s neutered before it starts and stands barely a chance to be successful on any level, be it creatively, comedically or financially.

No Hard Feelings is aware of the woke hurdle it must overcome and even tries to chide the suffocating political correctness of this era in a sequence at a high school party, but it, like every other sequence in the film, falls flat and feels decidedly flaccid.

The ceiling for No Hard Feelings was that it could’ve been mildly amusing…but it needed the script to be sharper and the direction to be more precise for that to happen as it would’ve given a chance for Jennifer Lawrence to shine. But the egregious limitations of our current cultural age upon comedy, and the glaring skill and talent limitations of Gene Stupinsky as a writer/director, scuttled the possibility of No Hard Feelings being even average before it ever got going.

If you missed No Hard Feelings back when it was in theatres in June, you dodged a bullet. The truth is No Hard Feelings is too bland and dull to even elicit hard feelings from me…only indifference. This movie represents much of what is wrong with the current state of film comedies…so trust me when I tell you there’s no need to waste your time on this sub-par, unfunny, toothless comedy.

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 108 - Wes Anderson Four Short Films - The Roald Dahl Collection

On this episode, Barry and I talk all things Wes Anderson and critique the four short films he recently made for Netflix based on the Roald Dahl short stories The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Ratcatcher, and Poison. Topics discussed include the joy of short films, the challenging style of Wes Anderson and the awful marketing of Netflix. As a special bonus - watch Barry’s own classic short film "...With No Hands"…which stars me!! It was the first time Barry and I ever met.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 108 - Wes Anderson Four Short Films - The Roald Dahl Collection

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Wes Anderson's Roald Dahl Collection (Netflix): A Review of Four Short Films

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A compelling and often captivating collection of four short films from an often times singular cinematic genius.

Idiosyncratic filmmaker Wes Anderson, who earlier this year released the feature film Asteroid City, is back after a brief respite with four short films streaming on Netflix.

The films, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Ratcatcher and Poison, are all adaptation of literary works by Roald Dahl. Dahl is best known for his children’s stories such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox (which was adapted to film by Wes Anderson in 2009), but these Dahl short stories adapted by Anderson are of a more grown-up variety than Dahl’s dark children’s stories.

Anderson is a filmmaker of considerable talent and skill, and his early filmography boasts a plethora of quality films such as Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums, which are among my favorites. With the lone exception of The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is his very best film, the more recent cinematic output from Anderson has often been sub-par due the burden of either a formulaic story where adults behave like children and children behave like adults, or a mountain of painstaking yet pedantic cinematic style.

For example, Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012), which many adore, was an aggravating bore to me because of the kid/adult – adult/kid formula. I simply had seen Anderson’s shtick too many times by that point to be entertained, never mind captivated, by it.

As for Anderson’s style, he is as impressive a visual storyteller as we have, but he often of late becomes so enamored by the beauty and intricacy of his creation that the rest of the cinematic experience, be it the storytelling or acting, gets lost under a mountain of manic meticulousness and artifice. A perfect example of this are Anderson’s last two feature films The French Dispatch and Asteroid City, which felt too cute by at least half to be truly worthwhile cinema, despite being gloriously and gorgeously photographed.

Which brings us to these four new short films. In these films, Anderson doesn’t diminish his artistic assault on the cinematic senses, but instead he heightens it, turning the Wes Anderson of it all up to eleven. Remarkably though, this approach, which I have found off-putting to the point of being irritating in recent feature-length Anderson outings, works incredibly well in the short film form.

Anderson’s intricate sets and staging, his actor’s performance style and his lush, exquisite visuals, turn what could have been rather mundane short stories into always engaging, often compelling and sometimes captivating short films which feature an ensemble of actors, which include Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Rupert Friend and Ben Kingsley, playing a variety of differing roles in all four of the short films.

The longest of the films is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which runs 41 minutes. This film stars Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ben Kingsley, and they give top notch performances and fit seamlessly into Anderson’s contrived performance style.  

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a winding tale that stars Cumberbatch as Sugar, a wealthy bachelor who uses his inherited fortune to fuel a gambling compulsion. Through some pretty extraordinary narrative twists and turns Henry Sugar ultimately finds meaning and purpose in his life.

Anderson shoots this film, and the other three shorts, like an extravagant stage play. Anderson’s use of stage theatricality in his works has gone through an interesting, if sometimes unsuccessful, evolution. For example, in Rushmore (1998), the main character, Max, puts on a stage play at his high school. This stage play is a very cinematic, and derivative, Vietnam story, which includes multiple explosions. In contrast from the cinematic stage play in Rushmore, in Asteroid City (2023), Anderson makes a film with a play and the making of that play at its narrative center. The ridiculously cinematic stage play in Rushmore was hysterically funny, but the stage play aspect of Asteroid City was an albatross and a banal burden to the film.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, particularly Ben Kingsley’s work in it, and having not read the short story, was pleasantly surprised by its narrative twists and turns.

The Swan, which features a terrific performance from actor Rupert Friend, is a mere 19 minutes long, but it grabs you from the get go and never lets you go. It tells the story of a young boy in a bird sanctuary and it’s a remarkable little story.

Anderson’s stellar use of straight lines within his frame to accentuate depth, movement and stillness, as well as his masterful camera choreography, are all on full display in all of these shorts, but none so gloriously as in The Swan.

Poison, which also runs 19 minutes, features solid performances from Cumberbatch and Patel, as it recounts a potentially perilous snake bite situation.

Anderson skillfully heightens the drama of this scenario and gets a helping hand from his actors Cumberbatch, Patel and Kingsley, all of whom fully commit to the circumstances. The turn near the end is quite interesting on a variety of levels…all I’ll say about it is that the poison isn’t what you think it is but is more toxic than you imagined.

The final film is The Ratcatcher, which also runs just 19 minutes. The film tells the story of a small English town that hires a ratcatcher to rid it of its rat infestation. Fiennes and Friend star in this one and do admirable work.

I found The Ratcatcher to be the weakest of the four films, mostly because I found the theatrical artifice of it to be the most objectionable. For example, there are props that are mimed instead of being real. So, Fiennes must pretend to hold an object in his hand instead of actually holding one. Having worked in the theatre for a great deal of my life, I found this level of theatricality to be quite off-putting (or maybe just triggering!) as it was just too silly.

In addition, Anderson pushes the envelope…even for him…when he tries to shoot some darker, confrontational type of sequences that to me were unsuccessful as they fell a bit visually flat. That said, it was nice to see Fiennes “sink his teeth” into the role of the ratcatcher, as he’s quite good.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the short films of the Roald Dahl Collection by Wes Anderson and recommend them to anyone who wants to be entertained and enraptured, even if it’s just for a brief twenty-minute stint. Oddly enough I think if Anderson had lumped these four stories together and put them out as a feature film, much as he did with The French Dispatch, I would’ve disliked it. I think the sickly-sweet visual style of Wes Anderson coursing through these short films would’ve been too much to handle if force fed to me in a two-hour feature film.

For some strange reason, Netflix has not even packaged these films together, so you have to search each one out individually on the streaming service. If you search Roald Dahl collection on Netflix, you’ll get not just the individual Wes Anderson short films but also movies like Matilda…which is sort of weird. It’s also weird that if you watch one of the Roald Dahl Wes Anderson short films, it will not automatically roll into the next Roald Dahl Wes Anderson short film. I have no idea why that is…just that it is.

My recommendation is to seek out and watch these four Wes Anderson short films. Watch them at your leisure and enjoy them for what they are….which is pieces of short, fascinating cinematic art from one of our most singular filmmaking talents.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 107 - No One Will Save You

On this episode, Barry and I talk about No One Will Save You, the terrific new sci-fi/horror movie on Hulu. Topics discussed include UFOs, the uncomfortable accuracy of the film's  title, the excitement of an ambitious and well-made movie, and the exquisite performance of actress Kaitlyn Devers. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 107 - No One Will Save You

Thanks for listening!

©2023

No One Will Save You: A Review and Commentary - Keep Your Eyes to the Sky for the End is Nigh

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that features a mesmerizing lead performance and top notch sci-fi and horror thrills.

In a movie year that has thus far been consistently underwhelming, No One Will Save You, the new sci-fi horror film currently streaming on Hulu that was written and directed by Brian Duffield, is an invigorating cinematic experience that far exceeds expectations.

No One Will Save You tells the story of Brynn (Kaitlyn Devers), a young woman living alone in a rural part of America in modern times (the exact year is never made clear at the film’s open). Brynn is an odd duck and an outcast in her rather unfriendly small town. She is unquestionably living a life of alienation and isolation…and then some-thing arrives in the middle of the night, and she is forced to deal with it…and with other things she’s long tried to avoid.

To be clear, No One Will Save You, which is writer/director Duffield’s second feature film, has its flaws and it isn’t perfect, for instance the last quarter of the film is tonally and stylistically not as strong as the first three quarters, but it is ambitious, inventive, very well-made, exceedingly well-acted and undeniably compelling.

Director Duffield shoots the film with an impressive amount of confidence and directs with a strong but deft touch. In order to avoid spoilers, I will not get into specifics but will only say that there are numerous scenes that are expertly choreographed and shot that leave you feeling like you’re in the hands of a master. For example, the kitchen sequence, bedroom sequence and basement sequence, are all top notch and exceed expectations and audience conditioning.

Even the last quarter of the film, which transitions from a survival story to a sort of spiritual and psychological, Jungian confrontation with the self, despite its unorthodox nature, is handled extremely well from a filmmaking perspective.

Throughout the movie Duffield pays homage, and borrows liberally, from a plethora of films, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Signs, War of the Worlds, and even The Exorcist, but he does so subtly and ultimately ends up putting an original spin on his alien encounter movie that in lesser hands could have been a trite and forgettable cinematic experience.

Duffield’s greatest tactic is that he consistently pushes back against the audience’s conditioning. We think we know what will happen next and how Brynn will behave, but Duffield almost always subtly subverts that expectation, and it is often exciting, occasionally confounding, but always compelling.

As great as the directing is on this film, the straw that stirs the drink is Kaitlyn Devers who stars as Brynn. Devers, who speaks only one line of dialogue in the entire film, is absolutely mesmerizing as she carries this entire enterprise on her shoulders and never falters.

Devers, who was terrific in the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick, fills her continuous silence with a vibrant and vivid inner life that reveals itself in her expressive eyes. She wisely avoids the pitfall of over expression and simply lets her Brynn be and react in the moment, even when frozen in horrifying moments.

Devers’ skill and talent are on full display in this movie, and it is the type of performance that can catapult an actress on the road to the A list. One only hopes that Devers follows an artistic path rather than chase stardom, as she seems well-equipped to play nearly any role, but ill-equipped to do vacuous Hollywood bullshit.

Another notable thing about No One Will Save You are the visual effects. The film’s stated budget is $22 million and one can assume that a healthy portion of that went into the CGI aliens and it is money well-spent as the look and feel of the aliens elevate the film a great deal.

Most films with a smaller budget would bend over backwards to avoid showing the aliens in order to save money, but director Duffield never shies away from exploiting his superb supply of aliens.

The aliens in this film are fantastic as they are familiar enough to us from previous movies, but are still unique and original in their own right. The most impressive part about them is how organic and real they seem, and the diversity of alien types.

No One Will Save You comes at an interesting time in terms of taking the notion of aliens and UFOs seriously. In recent years the subject has been taken much more seriously by the political establishment and the mainstream media.

Just this year we’ve had congressional hearings on the issue and have had legislation passed giving whistleblower protections to people in the know who’ve been working in the shadows on the topic and may literally and metaphorically know where the bodies are buried. Exciting stuff for someone like me who’s been ravenously devouring any and all UFO related info since I was a kid.

In this context, No One Will Save You is an unnerving tale as it lays bare a likely reality regarding the UFO phenomenon…namely that aliens are not here to help us and that they are not benign. Many in the ufology field and many in the military hierarchy believe that UFOs and aliens are malignant predators and likely colonizers or destroyers. Some believe that the reason “disclosure” of all UFOs and aliens is being thwarted by the powers that be is because civilization will collapse when humans acknowledge that the reality of aliens on earth means we as humans are considerably lower on the food chain than we had hoped.

In this sense No One Will Save You is correct…if aliens are real and are coming to earth, no one will save us from them…not your community, not your government and not your church – as shown in the movie. If history teaches us anything it is that beings that have advanced technology and intelligence will enslave and slaughter those who are intellectually and technologically inferior.

The film’s title isn’t just accurate in regards to an alien invasion, as the coming collapse of not just the American Empire, but also the U.S. dollar and the economy as well as the entirety of Western Civilization (American and European), will lay bare the cold hard reality that…No One Will Save You. Your government won’t save you, the magic soil you live on won’t save you, the police won’t save you, your community won’t save you, your church won’t save you and your delusions of national grandeur won’t save you. And some benevolent alien species finally revealing themselves and solving all of our problems won’t save you either.

The Fourth Turning is upon us here in the West and that sound you faintly hear is the thin ice we’ve been living on cracking right before we plunge into the deep, dark depths of a new dark ages.

All the signs are there and they are flashing bright red. From our decadent culture to our decrepit ruling class to our malevolent media to our know-nothing citizens and our criminal underclass and criminally corrupt overclass. The house of cards is teetering and when it falls, not if it falls – but when…NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU.

Another interesting subtextual idea that you can ever so slightly perceive in the film is that tyrannical leadership, a sort of fascist or communist oppressive system, is the only thing that can keep humanity/community alive, even though the illusory life led under that despotic rule is not really living. In order to avoid spoilers, I won’t get into the specifics of how that conclusion is revealed in the film, but I think by the end it becomes clear.

Neo-Cons and war-hungry Neo-Liberals might argue that the thesis of the film is that the aliens are the Communist Chinese and they aim to wipe out human freedom and control all people…I am not reflexively anti-China but I can see that interpretation, especially considering the notion of social credit scores and incessant surveillance.

Regardless of what the film means – and it could mean even more than I’ve spelled out here, it is undeniably cinematically invigorating and definitely worth watching. Despite its flaws it features a terrific performance from Kaitlyn Devers and strong direction from Brian Duffield, as well as some fascinating CGI aliens. Overall, I highly recommend No One Will Save You to anyone even remotely interested in sci-fi movies or horror films, and even to those who don’t usually get into those genres.

 Follow me on Twitter: MPMActingCO

©2023

Asteroid City: A Review - The Unbearable Quirkiness of Wes Anderson

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Cinephiles should watch it because it really is masterfully photographed, but normal people will find its excessive twee-ness and unorthodox storytelling tiresome and/or irritating.

The word “twee” is defined in the dictionary as “excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty or sentimental.” Surprisingly, filmmaker Wes Anderson, whose films include Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch and his newest cinematic venture, Asteroid City, is not pictured next to that definition in the dictionary since his movies are the ultimate cinematic embodiment of the word – for good or for ill.

Asteroid City, Anderson’s 11th film, hit theatres this past June 16th and barely anyone noticed. The film, which boasts a large ensemble cast of stars, including such luminaries as Scarlet Johansson and Tom Hanks, quickly came and went, but it just premiered on the streaming service Peacock – where I got a chance to finally see it.

As a general rule I love that Wes Anderson films exist even when I don’t love the Wes Anderson film I’m watching. This is very true of Asteroid City as it is an impeccable piece of cinema, but not a very good movie.

On its surface, the film, set in a sort of hyper-stylistic 1950’s America, follows the travails of a disparate group of people who come to a remote desert town (Asteroid City) for a youth astronomy convention and science competition.

Of course, Wes Anderson being Wes Anderson, he doesn’t just tell a straight forward story about people and a place. Asteroid City is really like a cinematic Matryoshka Doll (Russian Nesting Doll), as it is really a stage play, within a stage play, within a stage play, within a movie.

That set up is as twee as can be, and the execution of the film is twee too…but in a good way.

Anderson, as always, shoots a glorious movie. His highly stylized approach is visually stunning and includes sharp framing, crisp camera movements and exquisite colors and lighting. Anderson and his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Robert Yoeman, once again create a film with a stunning level of visual precision to it that is greatly appealing and extraordinarily impressive.

But despite the visual feast on display, the film’s storytelling and drama is pretty thin gruel.

There are, as is par for the course in a Wes Anderson movie, the cavalcade of eccentric, emotionally distant characters who behave in idiosyncratic ways as they experience dramatic life anomalies.

In terms of storytelling and character development, like much of Anderson’s recent work, it falls very flat. Yes, the story is clever…but much too clever for its own good, and the end result is a film that feels too cute by half…or considerably more than half.

The story’s Matryushka Doll/multiple layers don’t add to the drama but consistently detract from it and feel like a cheap cinematic parlor trick to try and enhance a shallow idea. The characters are all thin caricatures, and the dialogue feels less stagey and theatrical than just plain phony.

The lead of the film is Jason Schwartzman, a frequent face in Anderson’s films. Schwartzman is a mystery to me as he has never been good in anything in which I’ve ever seen him. Schwartzman is cousins with the co-creator of the story for Asteroid City, Roman Coppola of the vast and impressive Coppola family. Hmmm…maybe I’m beginning to understand why Jason Schwartzman has a career despite his minimal talent.

Scarlet Johansson is very good in Asteroid City as Midge Campbell, an actress and mother, and her work in this film is a pretty notable reminder that she is a movie star and would’ve been one in any era of Hollywood.

The rest of the cast are fine, I guess. From Tom Hanks to Bryan Cranston to Tilda Swinton to Maya Hawke to Jeffrey Wright to Steve Carrell and on and on, are all pretty forgettable. Watching this cast perform this script is unfortunately like watching a junior high drama class play out an inside joke that no one else gets or even remotely cares about.

Like seemingly all of Wes Anderson’s films, the movie also features oddball teenagers and kids who act like adults, and goofy adults who act like kids. This formula has occasionally worked in Anderson’s past, but here it feels tired to the point of cliché.

As for the deeper analysis of Asteroid City, it is interesting that it deals with the notion of aliens, UFOs and visitation all while those topics are in the headlines in the real world.

As congress holds hearings on alleged crashed UFOs that have been retrieved along with Non-Human Biological Entities, and military pilots share their stories and data of interactions with UFOs, it is pretty interesting to watch a film that somewhat grapples with the question of how earthlings would handle the notion of not being alone in the universe, or that they’re not on top of the knowledge food chain.

I’ve been interested in, and studying the UFO topic for a very long time, and Asteroid City portrays a scenario which feels surprisingly pretty realistic despite being played for laughs.

If a UFO landed on the White House lawn and aliens got out and waved for the cameras, there would probably be a gigantic freak out by the populace accompanied by a reflexively authoritarian and tyrannical response from government. And then, after a few weeks (or even days considering our attention deficit culture) people would basically go back to their lives and their usual petty bullshit. Governments, of course, would keep their newly pronounced and always-expanding powers – in order to consolidate their power, silence dissent, line their own pockets and cover their own asses, forever and ever.

The aliens would probably not really care about us one way or the other, which may be the most frightening prospect of all…that the human race is utterly irrelevant.

Anyway, those are the thoughts I had after watching Asteroid City, which to its credit, at least had me mulling the future of mankind, aliens and the impact of disclosure.

As for whether I recommend Asteroid City? Well, if you work in the film industry or are a cinephile, then yes, I’d say you should watch it because Wes Anderson is a very particular talent and his films are important in the grander arc of cinematic history and within the current art of cinema. But if you’re a normal human being who just wants to watch a good movie, maybe be entertained or enlightened or deeply moved, then Asteroid City is not for you because, unfortunately, it doesn’t really do any of those things.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023