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

Ahsoka (Disney +): TV Review - The Force is Female...and Boring as Fuck

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

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a poorly written, poorly acted (with the lone exception being Ray Stevenson) series that further diminishes the Star Wars brand.

This past week Ahsoka, the most recent of Disney’s Star Wars series, concluded its eight-episode first season on Disney +. The series, which is a spin-off from The Mandalorian and stars Rosario Dawson in the title character, follows Jedi Warrior Ahsoka Tano as she investigates a potential threat to the New Republic in the wake of the fall of the Empire.

If I’m being kind, I would declare that Ahsoka is completely and entirely forgettable. If I’m being honest, I would say it is an embarrassment. This series, like so much of Disney’s Star Wars material, is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst an absolute atrocity.

Ahsoka’s failings are numerous and include, but are not limited to, completely ignoring any sort of previously set rules for the Star Wars universe. For example, the “rules of the force” are abandoned entirely, as is the deadly nature of the light saber, a once fearsome weapon which is turned into a mere flesh wound maker on Ahsoka.

Besides destroying the most fundamental of things from Star Wars canon, one of the other major issues with Ahsoka is the abysmal acting and inferior cast.

I remember seeing Rosario Dawson when she made her big screen debut in the unnerving Larry Clark film Kids (1995). Dawson was a natural screen presence and absolutely magnetic in Kids, but a lot has changed in the last 28 years. Over the ensuing decades Dawson has become not just a bad actress, but a terrible one. She was so atrocious in the recent Hulu series Dopesick as to be shocking. Here in Ahsoka she is so uncomfortable on screen that it left me actually perplexed. If I saw one more scene where a wooden Dawson as Ahsoka just folded her arms and stared blankly at her scene partner, I was going to light myself on fire. Dawson folds her arms so often on Ahsoka that if you did a drinking game where you did a shot every time she crosses her arms in an episode…you’d die.

Then there’s Dawson’s awkward, anti-athleticism in the fight scenes. To be fair, the fight scenes on Ahsoka are poorly staged, poorly shot and poorly executed. They all seem slow, dull and like they’re being performed underwater, but Dawson in particular moves like an arthritic, elderly woman in a nursing home….as opposed to the mere unathletic middle-aged woman she is.  

The younger actresses in the cast fare no better in terms of fighting or acting either.

Natasha Liu Bordizzo plays Sabine Wren, a Mandolorian and former Jedi apprentice to Ahsoka. Wren is an egregiously poorly written character, but Bordizzo doesn’t help matters by being so vacant in the role. Sabine is supposed to be the energizing force in the series but she’s so vacuous as to invisible. Making matters worse is that Bordizzo is just as bad as Dawson in the action sequences despite being half her age.

Diana Lee Inosanto, daughter of famed martial artist Dan Inosanto (under whom I trained many moons ago), plays Morgan Elsbeth, and unfortunately, is not a good actress. Inosanto is terribly stilted and uncomfortable to watch as she’s devoid of even the slightest bit of presence. Even her fight scenes are yawn-inducing, which is shocking considering her impressive lineage.

Then there’s Eman Esfandi who plays Ezra Bridgers. Esfandi looks like a guy who would be cast to play Jesus in a National Geographic documentary re-enactment, and has that same level of talent too. Esfandi has all the charisma of a tumbleweed and seems like a background actor who mistakenly stumbled in front of the camera.

The big bad in the series is Grand Admiral Thrawn, underwhelmingly played by Lars Mikkelsen. Thrawn is an epic character in the Star Wars universe and here he is reduced to loitering through each scene which he so barely inhabits.

The most striking thing about Ahsoka is Ray Stevenson, who plays Baylon Skoll, a Dark Jedi who stands in the way of Ahsoka as she pursues the truth. Stevenson is literally the only actor in the entire series who brings any inner life to his character. He’s also the only actor with presence and gravitas. When Stevenson is on-screen he effortlessly demands your attention. Stevenson is one of those British actors who is just highly skilled and a master craftsman. His skill and craftsmanship are subtle but extremely effective and the rest of the cast would have done well to learn from him.

Baylon Skoll is also the only interesting character in the whole series, but unfortunately, he is sidelined for the majority of it. Even worse, Stevenson tragically died after filming the series, which is a terrible loss for all of us…made all the worse in that Baylon Skoll will never get his own series.

That Stevenson, who had a bit of a knock around career despite being a fine actor, is the best actor in this series by a mile says a great deal. In contrast, Andor, another Star Wars series, was littered with top notch performances by people with similar careers and backgrounds to Stevenson. Why the hell can’t Disney just cast decent actors like Stevenson in EVERY Star Wars series and movie and in every role?

The writing on Ahsoka is as bad as there’s ever been in a Star Wars series, which is quite an accomplishment. The plot is incomprehensible to the point of being just plain silly (lightsabers can’t kill, there are stormtrooper zombies, witches, and space whales…yes…fucking space whales), and the dialogue is Junior High School drama club level of bad.

Of course, there’s the usual Star Wars nostalgia injection to placate old timers hungry for their lost youth, this time in the form of Anakin Skywalker, the always dreadful Hayden Christensen, and C3PO. One would need to be lobotomized to care the slightest about either cameo.

Since Disney bought Star Wars back in 2012, the franchise has undergone a transformation that has left it bereft of the things that made it noteworthy in the first place. To be fair, Lucas hadn’t exactly crushed it with his lackluster prequel trilogy, but Disney’s post-Lucas Star Wars output makes the prequel trilogy look like The Godfather trilogy.

Since the Disney takeover of the galaxy far, far away, the studio and Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy have, for some reason, decided to declare that “The Force is Female”. The problem is that the female force, whether in films or series, has proven to be boring as fuck.

Why Disney has leaned so far into gender politics in Star Wars that they’ve stumbled over their own sagging tits is beyond me. Star Wars has, for the most part, been something boys have nerded out over since it hit big screens back in the 70s. The animating myth and archetype of Star Wars is, as Joseph Campbell told us, a masculine one. Disney’s intention to turn the franchise mythos into a girl power vehicle is so obviously self-defeating as to be demented as it neuters the Star Wars myth and renders its archetypes psychologically powerless, diminishes the Star Wars brand and alienates the core audience.

That Disney is also castrating their Marvel myth and brand with the same diminishing creative, artistic and commercial results, only makes the decision to feminize Star Wars all the more perplexing.

The bottom line is that the Star Wars franchise in general, and Ahsoka in particular, are symptoms…and Disney is the disease. Disney’s steadfast determination to inject cultural politics into all of their franchise material and ignore artistic and dramatic quality has aggressively corroded the value of Star Wars (and Marvel) to an astonishing degree.

Star Wars tv series like Ahsoka should be slam dunks for Disney as the franchise is chock full of fascinating stories and characters, and yet the studio consistently churns out underwhelming, if not abysmal, series that act as little more than cultural political vehicles that ultimately actively destroy what people used to love about Star Wars.

In conclusion, Ahsoka is simply not worth your time or energy. Even hardcore, rabid Star Wars fans should skip Ahsoka as it really is a blight on the brand.

 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

Winning Time (HBO) Season Two: A Review – 'Winning Time' Plays a Losing Game

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Great topic. Poor execution. Bad series.

Winning Time, the HBO series that chronicles the Los Angeles Lakers tumultuous rule atop the NBA during the 1980s, finished its second, and later announced, final, season on Sunday night, and it wasn’t so much an airball as it was a brick that landed with a resounding thud.

Watching Winning Time has been one of the more frustrating experiences for me as a cultural critic and basketball fan who was fortunate enough to live through the events portrayed in the series because the story it attempts to tell is so fascinating, interesting and dramatically compelling, and yet the series has consistently missed the target on every attempt.

The first season was a frustrating and muddled mess, but at least it had a bit of edge to it as it dramatized the rather uncomfortably voracious, and sometimes predacious, sexual appetites of both Lakers owner Jerry Buss and the team’s young superstar Magic Johnson.

Buss’ crude and problematic sexual behavior was well-known and, of course, so were Magic’s sexual escapades as they led to the HIV infection that ended of his career, which makes those stories vital to tell. But there can be little doubt that current Lakers owner Jeannie Buss, Jerry Buss’ daughter, was uncomfortable with that level of truthful examination and pressured the producers to be less edgy in their portrayal of her father…and probably Magic too, as Winning Time decidedly lost its balls in season two in regards to Buss and Magic’s failings.

Jerry Buss in season two was transformed from a creepy old-man, wannabe playboy into a broken-hearted victim of lost love, and Magic went from being a hopeless horn dog into a sexless monk who only had eyes for his hometown girl, and eventual wife, Cookie. Neither of these storylines was in the least bit compelling but they ate up the majority of season two.

Another indication of the producers genuflecting to Jeannie Buss is that her new husband, comedian/actor Jay Mohr, was given a small role in season two as an agent.

Interestingly enough, Winning Time did not change its very odd and at-odds-with-reality approach to Jerry West, the team’s GM and former iconic player. West, one of the greatest players and executives in league history, was made out to be a raving lunatic in need of institutionalization in season one – and the real Jerry West publicly complained about it, but he’s treated not much better in season two.

The problems with season two are numerous, chief among them is that it tries to cover so much ground and end ups rushing through most everything.

Season one had ten episodes and covered the team from drafting Magic in 1979 to winning the championship in his rookie year (1979/80). Season two has only seven episodes and has the gargantuan task of chronicling the 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1984 seasons…which is a hell of a lot as the Lakers went through major coaching and personnel changes as well as three NBA finals, winning one.

In addition to that Herculean task, the show also struggles to have a discernible protagonist upon whom it can focus the majority of its attention. Season two stumbles between Jerry Buss, Magic and Pat Riley as the drivers of the story and while all of them are worthy of being front and center in a tv series, none of them get adequate story time here to fully flesh out their character and fully realize their story arcs.

The antagonist is a shifting target as well…as it is sometimes snooty head coach Jerry Westhead, and often-times the boogie man of racist archrival Boston Celtics, their fans and the team’s star Larry Bird.

It is certainly not surprising in this day and age that race and racism is centered in a story, but the racial angle in Winning Time is never effectively manifested. For instance, the Celtics’ only sins are that they have more white players than usual in the NBA. None of them are overtly racist, their only crime is being white. In fact, the only people who comment on race are the black players on the Lakers, for example, Kareem calls Larry Bird a “punk ass white boy”.

The series also makes stuff up about Boston fans attacking the Lakers’ team bus after an NBA finals game in 1984. It seems to greatly undermine the series’ thesis of Boston and its fan’s being rabidly racist when the writers/producers have to concoct a pseudo-racist incident in order to make their point. It seems obvious to say but if you have to make things up in order to show groups of people (or individuals) as racist, then that probably means that the alleged racism in question didn’t exist in the first place.

Larry Bird is made out to be some sneering devil incarnate, which I suppose the Lakers and their fans felt he actually was at the time, but in reality, for all his trash talk and fearless play, Bird was as shy and progressive a soul as any human being despite being an absolute killer on the court.

Unfortunately, with the series being cancelled after season two which ended with the climax of the contentious 1984 finals, which is the height of unintentional comedy as the Celtics won the series, which must’ve tortured the blatantly pro-Lakers/anti-Celtics makers of this series. (As an aside, I attended the infamous game 5 of this series in the furnace known as Boston Garden, and laughed deliriously as Kareem, sitting a mere 50 feet from me, sucked on an oxygen mask as he tried to survive the sweltering, suffocating heat). The series ending its story in 1984 means viewers never get to see Bird and Magic’s bitter rivalry transform into real life friendship on screen. Although to be honest, I can’t imagine the series would be any more effective portraying that than they have been portraying anything else.

The acting in Winning Time has always grated as it gravitated much too close to caricature for my taste, and it always failed to re-create the basketball with any sort of realism.

For example, Quincy Isaiah plays Magic Johnson. Isaiah does a decent job in portraying Magic in the dramatic scenes, and has a passing resemblance to him, but Isaiah on the basketball court is an embarrassment. First off, he is a chubby guy with a paunch, which is difficult to overlook. I mean, you knew there was going to be a second season so why not bust your ass with a personal trainer and get into shape? Secondly, he is awful at basketball…and can’t even fake being a player. If I saw Isaiah as Magic do one more – jump in the air/fake left/ pass right move, I was going to gauge my eyes out. Although to be fair, that repetitious basketball garbage wasn’t nearly as bad as the endless phone calls between Magic and Cookie where he tries to sweet talk her. Yikes.

A different type of example is Solomon Hughes, who plays Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Hughes is actually quite good in the role and perfectly captures Kareem’s brooding and distant personality. And Hughes is even a respectable basketball player (he played briefly in the NBA) so he passes that physical test. My one problem with Hughes is that he’s playing Kareem Abdul Jabbar, one of the greatest players of all time, and yet he never attempts to replicate Kareem’s signature shot, the skyhook. That’s like playing Elvis and not learning how to shake your hips. I can go out into my driveway right now and mimic Kareem and take ten skyhooks and hit maybe five of them…so why couldn’t Hughes work on that one shot and get it down? I mean, it’s not like he needs to be able to actually score in a real game, they’re playing on a film set so everything is fake…so why not?

A positive example of this is that Sean Patrick Small, who plays Larry Bird, actually tries to shoot in a similar fashion to Bird. His rendition of Bird’s shot isn’t a perfect replica but its close enough and believable enough. Small also has a passing resemblance to Bird, which is a compliment to his playing of the role but on the street would probably be fighting words, and he actually does a solid job in the dramatic scenes.

The same cannot be said for my old friend Adrien Brody who plays legendary coach Pat Riley. Riley is a master motivator who looks like a male super model but Brody is a phony and dullard who face looks like someone took a baseball bat to a Jack-O-Lantern that had melted in the summer sun. That Adrien Brody has won an Oscar is remarkable considering his shallow and toothless portrayal of Riley in Winning Time, as Brody lacks the presence and gravitas of the real-life Riley, and commands zero respect on the screen.

Jason Segal as feckless coach Paul Westhead is no better. Segal is an uncomfortable dramatic actor who relies on shallow mannerisms instead of depth of character and acting skill, and his Westhead barely registers as caricature, never mind character.

Jason Clarke is usually a good actor but his Jerry West is on another planet as he’s a one-note crazy person. West is one of the most remarkable people in NBA history and yet here he’s reduced to a yelling machine.

On the bright side, John C. Reilly really is terrific as Jerry Buss. Reilly never loses his grip on the enigmatic Buss despite being saddled with a below average script. It is a shame that Winning Time never lives up to the quality work that John C. Reilly does in it.

Another bright spot was Hadley Robinson. who plays Jeannie Buss and is quite compelling, but unfortunately the script never gives her anywhere to go or anything to do. She is nothing but a second-thought in the story and that’s a shame as in real life Jeannie has lived a very interesting life.

I didn’t like Winning Time, as it felt, despite its big budget, like a rather flimsy series that was better in in thought than in execution. But the truth is that I’m not like most people as I’m not looking to be distracted or mildly entertained by a tv series. I’m actually looking for something great, something transcendent and Winning Time sure as hell isn’t that. Greatness, which was the hallmark of the showtime Lakers on the 1980s, is nearly non-existent in modern day film and tv, so rare as to be virtually non-existent.

I realize my standards may be higher than other people’s so I try to watch things through more lenient and forgiving eyes. Which begs the question… is Winning Time at least entertaining? Frankly the answer to that is…not really. The series is, at its heart…just a sort of silly exercise, as it has the feel of grown-ups play acting…and not very well.

The bottom line is that as a member of the prime target audience for Winning Time, I wish it were better and I wish it succeeded…but it isn’t and it didn’t…and now its cancelled…so it ultimately doesn’t really matter.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 106 - Ted Lasso Season Three

On this long-awaited episode, Barry and I kick around season three of Apple TV's Ted Lasso. Topics discussed include the misery of comedy without conflict, the cancer of self-satisfied tv shows, and the incomprehensible fall of a once enjoyable series.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 106 - Ted Lasso Season Three

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Painkiller (Netflix): A Miniseries Review - An Uncomfortably Dumb Take on the Opioid Holocaust

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This miserable mess of a miniseries is so abysmal it dishonors the actual victims of the opioid epidemic.

Like many people, the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged this country for the last quarter of a century, has had a direct and profound impact upon my life. The particulars of my situation are personal, so I won’t share them here, but just know that the topic of the 21st century’s plague of opioid addiction is one which holds great importance to me and of which I know a great deal. So, when Painkiller, the new six-episode Netflix miniseries debuted on the streaming service on August 10th, I was very interested.  

The series, based upon the nonfiction book Painkiller: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier as well as an article in The New Yorker by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain”, dramatizes the story of the deplorable Sackler family - owners of Purdue Pharma, and the powerful drug they developed and deceptively marketed, Oxycontin, an opioid equivalent to heroin which sparked an epidemic of addiction across America that has killed over a million people and devastated the lives of at least five times that.

I’ve read both Meier’s book and Keefe’s article, as well as all of the other relevant gospels about the opioid epidemic, like Dopesick by Beth Macy and American Overdose by Chris McGreal (as well as Dreamland by Sam Quinones about the heroin trade). I found all of the books to be indispensable in trying to understand the magnitude of the evil unleashed by the Sacklers and the insidious and insipid corruption endemic in America. (I recommend them all but if I had to list them I’d say 1. Dopesick 2. Painkiller 3. American Overdose…I’d also say that Dreamland is absolutely, without question, essential reading not just on the topic of opioids but in general.)

The Sackler family pharma empire was started by Arthur Sackler who in the 1950’s turned medicine into a marketing and sales business. In the 1960’s Arthur came up with brilliant marketing plan for Valium and masterfully inflicted mother’s little helper onto an unsuspecting public. Thirty years later his nephew Richard would do the same with Oxycontin, which unleashed an opioid apocalypse upon America.

The scope and scale of the Sackler family’s diabolical nature is difficult to grasp as normal human beings simply cannot even begin to comprehend the rapacious evil of malicious and malignant mega-sociopaths. But normal people can grasp the consequences of the Sackler family’s inherent evil because they were the ones who suffered under it. For the last twenty-five years no one has been safe from Oxycontin’s spread. Rich, poor, urban, rural, it didn’t matter. Everyone knew someone who was devastated by the opioid epidemic that went across this country like a blitzkrieg.

Some areas were originally harder hit than others. Western Virginia for instance, was initially targeted by the Sackler machine because it had high rates of disability claims, which in the Sackler’s eyes meant high need for opiates and addicts-in-waiting. If you look at a map and draw a circle around Western Virginia which encompasses South-Western West Virginia, Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky, the release of Oxycontin and its accompanying marketing campaign was the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb being dropped at its epicenter. In its wake, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, died and families and communities were destroyed. I read one statistic that left me shocked which said that in some of the counties in this area 75% of children in schools were being raised by someone other than their birth parents because of the opioid epidemic. The magnitude of this catastrophe is nearly impossible to comprehend.

Of course, rural Virgina, West Virginia, Southern Ohio and Eastern Kentucky weren’t the only places the be obliterated the by Sackler’s scorched-earth Oxycontin campaign, as it was nationwide. And it should come as no surprise to anyone with a brain between their ears that in corruption riddled-America it was operatives and bureaucrats from both political parties that pushed Oxycontin through the FDA approval process and then exerted influence to make sure that the Sacklers got off scot-free for their crimes. Corruption makes for strange bedfellows as people like the Democrat douchebags like Saint James Comey and Clinton lackey Mary Jo White, as well as Republican uber-scumbag supreme Rudy Giuliani all played big parts in covering the Sackler’s asses.

But enough of what actually happened during the Oxycontin-fueled, Sackler-family-instigated opioid crisis, let’s get to Painkiller which attempts to dramatize these events.

Unfortunately, Painkiller, which is created by Micah Fitzeman-Blue and Noah Harpster, and directed by Peter Berg, is absolutely atrocious, an utterly abysmal affair, so much so that it does a tremendous disservice to the victims, living and dead, of the Sackler slaughter.

The series attempts to tell a vast story by using four narratives that are meant to tie together. There’s the story of Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), president of Purdue Pharma and driving force of the Oxycontin express. Then there’s Edie Flowers (Uzo Uduba) – an assistant U.S. attorney, who is sort of a narrator to events. There’s also new Purdue Pharma Oxycontin saleswoman Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny) as well as the story of working-class addict Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch).

The biggest problems with Painkiller are the uneven tone, the atrocious casting and equally awful acting.

Let’s start with the tone. Each episode starts with real parents of people who have died from opioid overdose, and their stories, as brief as they are, are absolutely heartbreaking. You can feel the profound depth of their pain just by hearing them speak a few words, or in their inability to speak a few words. Seeing the genuine and devastating pain of these parents and then contrasting it with the phony baloney, tone deaf bullshit which follows in the dramatization of the epidemic which killed their children, feels very uncomfortable if not outright disrespectful.

For example, the Richard Sackler storyline is so ridiculous as to be absurd. Richard is haunted by the ghost of his evil uncle Arthur, and has conversations with him. Yes, that’s not a misprint, this actually happens throughout the series. Richard lives in a pseudo fantasy world which borders on the slapstick. It is impossible to take this garbage seriously, especially when it is preceded by real people struggling to keep their shit together as they briefly recount the hell that is the loss of a child.

Then there’s the grounded story of Glen Kryger, who struggles with addiction to Oxycontin. The tone of this is more serious, and it feels like the rest of the series should follow suit, but none of it does.

Jumping from Richard Sackler’s fantasy life to Kryger’s reality hell to the odd capitalism porn of saleswoman Shannon Schaeffer’s life and then to the entirely extraneous (and fictional because the character is made up) history of Edie Flowers is enough to cause whiplash and induce vomiting.

As for the acting, let’s start with Matthew Broderick. Broderick as Richard Sackler is an embarrassment. Fat Ferris fakes his way through the role and never even remotely touches the ground. He hams his way through scene after scene with the vitality of mule on barbiturates and the charisma of cadaver in the hot sun. Equally awful is the seemingly always awful Clark Gregg, who plays the ghost of Sackler sparked epidemic past in the form of Richard’s uncle Arthur Sackler, the guy who started the whole Sackler shit sandwich from which we have to take a bite.

Both Broderick and Gregg are embarrassingly bad in their roles, and they aren’t helped by Peter Berg’s asinine direction.

Peter Berg is, at his very best, a third-rate directing talent, but at his core he is a visionless, talentless, hack. His direction on this series is no less than disgraceful. The uneven tone, which varies widely between gritty realism and absurdist fantasy, is so poorly executed as to be offensive to anyone who has suffered as a result of the Sackler scourge.

Berg’s incompetence, ineptitude and inability to make anything dramatically coherent should come as no surprise considering his horseshit filmography, but considering the stakes involved with Painkiller, it is still a major disappointment.

As for the rest of the cast, Uzo Aduba, who has somehow won three Emmys, is an absolute mystery to me. Never has an actress so devoid of talent, skill and charisma been so overly praised and honored. Adding to the entire issue with the series, Uduba’s character Edie Flowers is totally made up. I would assume the producers felt they needed a woman of color to bring the black girl magic to the opioid epidemic (they needed a heroine to fight heroin!) and to sassily stand up to all those evil white men who made it happen. Of course, that isn’t what happened in real life…and shoehorning diversity and inclusion into a story about an epidemic that killed vastly more white people than black, feels pretty disgusting to me (btw…. The Hulu miniseries Dopesick did the same thing, no doubt for the same reason, creating Rosario Dawson’s DEA agent character out of thin air just to appease the diversity gods. God help us all), as does trying to shoehorn the crack epidemic and race into the story, and then somehow attempting to give a black crack dealer absolution for their sins. Could it be that the black crack dealer and Richard Sackler are both vile animals worthy of violence upon them? Or is that too complex for simpleton twats like Peter Berg and company?

Ultimately, Aduba is an egregious bore and a grievous burden to the story. We don’t need her character and we certainly don’t need her and her aggressively amateurish acting which feels like a petulant child pouting and preening in order to get more ice cream.

Dina Shahabi plays Britt, a morally and ethically compromised Oxycontin super saleswoman who is absolutely wild about capitalism…and she is maybe the worst actress I’ve seen in a major film or tv project in the last decade…which is saying a lot. Shahabi is so transparently dreadful and in over her head as to be painful. If I saw a child in a middle school play act this badly, I would not only demand their drama teacher be fired but also physically assault them (the teacher not the child!)  for their crimes against the art of drama.

West Duchovny, daughter of David Duchovny and Tea Leoni and this week’s winner of the Hollywood Nepotism Award, is a pretty blonde who plays Shannon Schaeffer, Britt’s pretty blonde protégé/salesgirl. Duchovny is considerably better than Shahabi, but that doesn’t mean she’s particularly good….because she isn’t.

On the bright side, Taylor Kitsch is a good actor and he does superb work as Glen, a forty-something mechanic who gets hurt and goes down the Oxy rabbit hole to hell. Kitsch has always been a good actor, but the fact that he’s able to rise above the shit swamp that is Painkiller and acquit himself so well where others fail so miserably, speaks to his talent and skill.

Carolina Bartczak, who plays Lily, Glen’s wife, also brings a refreshing bit of realism to her role and does some solid work as well.

As much as I like Kitsch and Bartczak and found the Kryger family storyline to be the most compelling, I also found it to be an inadequate representation of the horrors of the opioid holocaust. Glen Kryger is no one’s child. We never meet his parents. We never get to know any younger people ravaged by the Sackler scourge, which I think is a missed opportunity as it would’ve been even more impactful.

As previously mentioned, Dopesick, based upon the Beth Macy book of the same name, was a Hulu miniseries that premiered in October of 2021. It covers the same exact ground as Painkiller but is much more thorough, accurate and effective. I thought Dopesick was very flawed but worth watching for Michael Keaton’s absolutely stunning performance. As flawed as it was, Dopesick looks like The Godfather and Citizen Kane combined when compared to Painkiller.

The bottom line is that the story of the Sacklers and the opioid epidemic is vitally important and to have this terrible tale told in such a frivolous, flippant and glib way is, frankly, blasphemous if not criminal.

Peter Berg, Matthew Broderick and the rest of the sorry sons of bitches who made Painkiller should be ashamed of themselves for trying to exploit the devastation of real people, and for doing so in such a shoddy and shitty manner.

I wholly encourage you to skip Painkiller the series and instead go read the book Painkiller, as well as Dopesick, Dreamland, and American Overdose. It is absolutely vital that people understand what happened with the Sacklers, the corruption in modern America, and the intimate horrors of the opioid epidemic. The scope and scale of this story is vast but reading these books will help you understand, in gruesome, minute detail, the world we live in and the evil and vile people running it, and how the powers that be see us regular folks as nothing more than disposable cannon fodder for their misery-inducing, money making machines.

 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

Barbie: A Review - Pink Bubblegum Bullshit

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Underwhelming and disappointing. If you’re desperate to see it I’d say save your money and wait until it hits a streaming service.

I had no intention of seeing Barbie, the new blockbuster about the iconic Mattel doll starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, because I didn’t HAVE to see Barbie. You see, when I worked as a cultural critic for RT I had to watch and write about a lot of stuff I wasn’t that interested in simply because other people were interested in it which meant that it was culturally relevant. Well, I no longer work for RT so I no longer have to do that.

So, when Barbie came along, I just thought, due to the film’s obvious cultural politics and the fact that the film’s writer/director is Greta Gerwig – someone whose work I’ve never thought much of, it wasn’t for me so I’d skip this new battle in the endless and tiresome culture war.

But then Barbie, due to its relentless and highly effective marketing campaign, became an undeniable phenomenon, hauling in over a billion dollars at the box office and igniting a fan frenzy not seen at cineplexes in years, so I thought maybe I should see it. And then my wife said she wanted to see it…and whatever Lola wants…Lola gets! My thinking was, if people are going so nuts for this film - then maybe it’s worth seeing.

I went to a 10:30 AM screening on a Tuesday morning. Barbie had been in theaters for over two weeks at this point and still my screening here in mundane Middle America was totally sold out. Barbie is, like the recent Taylor Swift tour, satiating a primal need among our collective feminine culture for a massive communal “event”. An example of this eventizing impulse was that the theater I attended, which admittedly is not particularly big, looked like a sea of Pepto Bismol as it was overwhelmingly packed with pink wearing middle aged women (including one wearing just a big pink t-shirt…which didn’t cover nearly enough of her nether regions as it should have!) as well as teenage and pre-pubescent girls donning a ton of pink…along with some rather unfortunate looking pink-clad teen boys imprisoned in the friend zone desperate to win favor with their girl crushes with whom they were attending the screening.

My hope in seeing Barbie was that it was good and that I’d like it – I wasn’t the least bit interested in hate watching it. I fully expected to dislike the de rigueur girl power politics – something which I find to be pitiful and pathetic, but I hoped to like the film despite its predictable politics…something which I often do (for example my review of Promising Young Woman) if for no other reason than my own personal politics are so unorthodox.

The opening scene was a perfect example of what I was hoping for…as the film opens with a glorious homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Gerwig replaces Kubrick’s monkeys with little girls playing with baby dolls and the mysterious monolith is replaced with a towering Margot Robbie as Barbie. While I was off-put by the visual of little girls smashing babies (even if they are dolls) in reaction to their newfound Barbie evolution, I still nodded in approval at this brilliant bit of moviemaking and it filled me with great anticipation for what followed.

And then I watched the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there as the film meandered aimlessly through a convoluted yet corporate cookie-cutter plot, allergic to profundity or purpose, and never even remotely approaching the genius of its opening.

In totality Barbie is an underwhelming, disappointing, cheap, shoddy, shitty, bland, boring, corporate money-grab wrapped in a vacant, vapid and vacuous feminist manifesto. In other words, Barbie is a poorly made version of exactly the thing it often pretends to belittle and/or satirize.

The film begins in Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia devoid of not only male power but babies or children….even the lone pregnant Barbie is exiled to the outskirts of girl boss heaven. The bit of the film initially set in Barbieland is ever-so-slightly amusing at first and then it gets old very, very fast. There’s a dance number in this Barbieland sequence that is supposed to be fun and funny but that is so anemic and tiresome as to be astounding. The low point is when Gerwig uses a ridiculously cliched record scratch to inject reality into the phony festivities. Yawn.

The final two-thirds of the film feature Barbie venturing to the “real world” – which is nothing like the actual real world, and the “real world” venturing in to Barbieland. All of it is sloppy but the scenes in the “real world”, in particular, are a total storytelling and cinematic shit show devoid of any redeeming cinematic qualities. The Barbie in the real-world, fish-out-of-water stuff shockingly doesn’t even muster a minimal amount of comedy.

To be fair, I did laugh out loud a few times during Barbie, all thanks to the aggressively amusing Ryan Gosling who absolutely crushes it as the desperate and dim-witted Ken. Gosling is destined to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his unbreakable and unshakeable performance as Barbie’s platonic boy toy.

Speaking of the Oscars, it’s 100% guaranteed that there will be a Barbie-themed musical number at this year’s Oscar ceremony. You can absolutely bet your life on that. You can also count on Mattel to turn the success of the Barbie movie into a Broadway musical…which is an eerily similar concept to the hysterically funny Marvel musical featured in the Disney Plus series Hawkeye…except Mattel won’t be making the Barbie musical ironically.

Margot Robbie is ridiculously gorgeous and perfect as Barbie but there isn’t much there, there. Robbie’s physical perfection is all she needs to play this part and when she’s asked to do more than that her acting is undercut by a really abysmal script that is chock full of cringe, freshman level women’s studies diatribes that ring hollow and feel forced making Barbie feel less human than she already is.

Besides the glorious Gosling, the other supporting performances in Barbie are shockingly devoid of life.

Who knew that both Kate McKinnon and Will Ferrell could not only be so unfunny, but so bland and so forgettable? You’d be hard pressed to find two more energized comedic actors but on Barbie they seem constrained to the point of comatose.

Somewhat surprising is that for a movie full of Barbies, there’s only one attractive one in the bunch – Margot Robbie…and she is certainly very attractive despite the sneaky and obtuse internet marketing campaign prior to the film’s release arguing that she isn’t. I have no problem with a Barbie movie featuring the vast diversity of the Barbie doll collection…which means we get a black Barbie, a fat Barbie, a wheelchair Barbie, a trans-Barbie and so on…but what befuddles me is why do all these Barbies have to be so “beauty-impaired” and visually unappealing?

The rest of the supporting cast are all interchangeable, dull and completely forgettable. Issa Rae and Simu Liu are like two sides of the same charisma-deficient coin. Neither one is remotely interesting or likeable.

Michael Cera as Allan feels like he’s in an entirely different movie…maybe because the script he has to work with is so incoherent and idiotic.

America Ferrera plays Gloria, a mom and Mattel employee, and she is utterly abysmal. She does get to have the big monologue in the movie which begins with “it’s literally impossible to be a woman…” and goes downhill from there. This monologue has middle-aged women across the nation pumping their fists in the air like gold chain and muscle shirt wearing Guidos at a Rocky movie when the Italian Stallion gets off the canvas and beats the shit out of the villain du jour. But here’s the thing…I understand the perspective behind the “it’s literally impossible to be a woman” monologue, but the fact is it isn’t “literally” impossible to be a woman…billions of women do it every minute of every day. Yes, it is no doubt difficult to be a woman due to the constant contradictions one must navigate…but you know what else is equally difficult…being a man. The obstacles and difficulties one must face and overcome as a woman are no harder than the ones men must overcome, they’re just different.

Life is hard for human beings, and for modern day feminists to claim empowerment by perpetually play the victim all while demonizing men, is pretty repugnant and frankly counterproductive.

Barbie also does what our awful culture has normalized which is to conflate masculinity with toxic masculinity, a perilous proposition since it is unquestionably masculine men that carved out a safe space in a dangerous world where women are free to make insipid and insidious films about how awful men are.

My wife, a very, very independent, powerful and, dare I say it, feminist woman, turned to me after the film and the first thing she said was that she found it to be “damaging”. As the mother of a young son, she felt the film sent a negative message to girls and woman not just about the nature of men and boys but about what it means to be a girl/woman, so much so that it depressed her and made her fear for the future. And I must say, I completely concur with her astute observations.

I’ve heard it said that Barbie is Black Panther for white women, and that is very true as Black Panther was an overhyped, shitty movie too that became super successful because seeing it was an act of cultural-political virtue signaling.

Other movies have somewhat captured the cultural political zeitgeist in the same way that Barbie has but from a different angle. For example, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper was a terrible movie but flag waving numbskulls flocked to see and support it because it reinforced their patriotic – or rather anti-liberal, bona fides. That American Sniper was a God-awful movie regardless of its politics was irrelevant as all the flag-wavers loved it even before it started – they loved it simply because it existed…just like the pink clad buffoons are enamored by Barbie regardless of how obviously bad it is.

Sound of Freedom is another movie that is a virtue signal movie currently in theatres. Sound of Freedom is about the scourge of child trafficking and has become a cause celebre for anti-libtard right wingers and as a result has done exceedingly well at the box office – raking in over a hundred million dollars. No doubt the crossover of American Sniper fans with Sound of Freedom fans is enormous. I’ve not seen Sound of Freedom…mostly because I just assume it is poorly made…but I can plainly see that it’s a virtue signal movie just like Barbie.

Another film I thought of when watching Barbie was, ironically enough, The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film smashed box office records for an independent film and made him something like half a billion dollars since he financed it himself. Gibson wisely marketed the film directly to churches and church groups and it became a cultural signifier among Bush loving right wingers.

The marketing of The Passion of the Christ was remarkable, as, just like Barbie, everyone was talking about it even if they hadn’t seen it. Barbie’s marketing was brilliant because it removed the film’s politics from the campaign, made it seem as if it were for adults AND kids (it’s not for kids!) and it was absolutely everywhere. You couldn’t escape the Barbie marketing machine, and frankly still can’t. That the marketing campaign has succeeded in making Barbie a cultural phenomenon doesn’t diminish the fact that the movie is garbage.

Truth be told I’ve never understood the critical love for Greta Gerwig’s films. Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird was so overrated as to be astonishing. Critics adored the film yet I found it to be painfully thin and embarrassingly amateurish. It seemed to me that Gerwig, much like Jordan Peele who came out with Get Out in the same year (2017), was cashing in on the angry liberal political hysteria of the post-Trump election and were being elevated due to their race and gender, not their talent. Having seen both of Gerwig’s and Peele’s films since 2017 has only reinforced my belief regarding their lack of talent and skill and the absurd critical love they’ve received.

As for Barbie, I’ve had a rather interesting perspective on the film as I’ve watched from a distance as the usual suspects on both the left and right instinctively and reflexively loved or hated the film. Having finally seen the movie I can say that people who love it, who when pressed on its numerous shortcomings all say the same thing in defense of it, namely that “it’s fun!”, are delusional dupes and dopes. On the flip side, many of the critics reflexively hating it are so stuck on its politics that they don’t even care to examine the filmmaking….which feels less delusional than just plain disingenuous.

As for me, I didn’t like Barbie for the sole reason that Barbie isn’t a good movie.  Barbie isn’t funny and it isn’t interesting. That the film pretends to be rebellious, if not revolutionary, in its messaging, but then spews out the most corporate-friendly and approved, pedantic neo-feminist pablum, wrapped in a cavalcade of visually listless, dramatically lifeless, comedically flaccid scenes, makes it feel like watching a pink-hued Human Resources film for corporate employees to learn the new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office rules.

The bottom line is that the masses being so enamored of Barbie says considerably less about the quality of the movie than it does about the easily manipulated morons populating our world and their astonishing level of group-think and gullibility, as well as the sorry state of our society and cinema.

Unfortunately, so few people nowadays are self-aware or introspective enough to resist massive marketing campaigns like the one around Barbie, which brainwashed otherwise intelligent people into not only mindlessly devouring this odious, rancid corporate pink taco but declaring they love it. I too succumbed and took a bite of the gigantic, rancid corporate pink taco that is Barbie, but to my minimal credit I at least am not foolish enough to don an oversized pink t-shirt sans pants and shriek “yummy…how fun!”

In conclusion, it is literally impossible for me to recommend Barbie.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Meg 2: The Trench - A Review : I Don't Love the Smell of Rotting Fish in the Morning

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

My Rating: ½ stars out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is bad…and not so-bad-it’s-good type of bad…just plain old bad.

Meg 2: The Trench, starring Jason Statham and directed by Ben Wheatley, could technically be classified as a docu-drama as it dramatizes the greatest threat we as humans face in the 21st century…Megalodons escaping from a prehistoric deep sea trench and wreaking havoc upon mini-submarines and expensive island resorts populated by wealthy Chinese social media influencers.

The scourge of Megalodons upon the earth is a topic very close to my heart as my cousin Rusty was killed by one five years ago while nude para-sailing in the South China Sea. In the wake of Rusty’s tragic, yet erotically-charged death, I studied up on the subject and learned that Megalodons are the leading cause of death for people nude para-sailing as well as for those driving mini-subs into a pre-historic deep-sea trench.

Due to my sad history with Megalodons, I knew that watching Meg 2: The Trench would be emotionally taxing. And it was…so very, very taxing. But I also knew that I was in good hands on my Meg 2 journey as the film’s star Jason Statham is unquestionably the world’s greatest actor, and the film’s director, Ben Wheatley, is arguably the greatest filmmaker in the history of cinema.

Speaking of the history of cinema, as a student of film history I often try to put the films I review into the broader context of the overall expanse of the art form. In the case of Meg 2: The Trench, I can confidently say that one hundred years from now people will look back and clearly be able to delineate that cinema history is broken down into to two basic eras…Before Meg 2: The Trench, and After Meg 2: The Trench.

The specifics as to why Meg 2: The Trench is so astounding are almost too long to list, but I’ll try.

First there’s the story. Thankfully screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber decided to discard a coherent approach and instead threw together some incomprehensible scenes that don’t seem to have any connection to one another at all.

The decision by the Hoebers to avoid creating any interesting characters, or writing compelling scenes or action sequences, was also a wise choice, as it forces the audience to imagine a better movie in their heads while stuck watching this movie. To force imagination exercises upon audiences is a courageous and much-needed decision by the writers of Meg 2, as audiences have coasted long enough by having stories told to them and not having to make up their own in order to pass the longest two-hours of their life.

The editing on Meg 2 is particularly noteworthy as it borrows heavily and poorly from the French New Wave movement by splicing together scenes and movements which have no connection at all. The editing jumps around so much that characters appear in places at which they shouldn’t appear, which makes the whole thing very confusing and gives the audience the sense that they have suffered severe head trauma. Bravo to the editors for forcing audiences to better understand the experience of head trauma survivors!

Director Wheatley’s mastery of underwater filmmaking is on full display in the cinematically muddled and dramatically inert deep-sea hike that is completely incomprehensible. Wheatley’s decision to remove the drama from the film by eliminating peril to any of the main characters by basically giving them superpowers, is also a masterstroke, as is his sprinkling in of impotent jump scares throughout. Equally brilliant was the idea to have the Megalodons be basically background actors in their own movie. And adding in some bizarre, amphibious deep-sea dog monsters is just another piece of evidence that Ben Wheatley is the Kurosawa of the 21st Century.

But the greatest part of the film is undoubtedly the cast, most notably star Jason Statham. Statham’s Olivier-esque performance is not surprising considering his past work, but it is still jaw-dropping. No one, and I mean no one, can act on a Jet Ski as well as Statham. Statham’s connection with his Jet Ski is considerably more believable than his character’s alleged parental love for a teen orphan he’s sort of adopted.

The rest of the cast are equally magnetic and compelling. Wu Jing is a Chinese guy who can’t act and plays a Chinese guy. Sophia Cai is a Chinese girl who can’t act who plays a Chinese girl. Sienna Guillory is a white woman who can’t act and she plays an evil white woman…the same is true of Skyler Samuels. Not to be outdone by any of the other bad actors is Sergio Peris-Monchetta, who is a Latino guy who can’t act who plays a Latino bad guy. As an ensemble, this group is remarkably both wooden and lifeless as well as ridiculously over-the-top, and one can only tip their cap to their dedication to entirely ignoring their craft.

Meg 2: The Trench is the sequel to 2018’s The Meg. If you haven’t seen The Meg you might be a bit confused watching Meg 2, but to be fair I saw The Meg (and thought it was a harmless, silly bit of fun) and was a more than a bit confused watching Meg 2, so who knows, maybe it doesn’t matter…and not to get all existential on you, but after watching Meg 2: The Trench I’m feeling like maybe nothing matters.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 105 - Oppenheimer

On this apocalyptically combustible episode, Barry and I go nuclear in our discussion of Christopher Nolan's new movie Oppenheimer. Topics discussed include a heated debate over the movie, musings on Nolan's career and a ranking of his filmography from top to bottom. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 105 - Oppenheimer

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Jury Duty: A TV Review - Guilty of Being Funny

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

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Brevity is the soul of wit and this quick hitting reality/hoax series is brief and funny.

I finally got around to watching Jury Duty, the much-talked-about reality/hoax/sitcom series that premiered in April of this year on Amazon, and I have some thoughts.

The premise of Jury Duty is that a collection of people are called to serve jury duty for a civil trial in Los Angeles. But the twist is that the entire trial is fake, and all of the jurors except one – the target of the hoax, are actors who are in on the scam, as are the fake judge, bailiff, plaintiff and defendant.

The thing about Jury Duty that really surprised me was that unlike nearly every other reality tv show ever made, it actually left me with some hope for humanity.

The “regular guy” who is the target of the hoax is Ronald Gladden, who is the most normal of normal guys imaginable, and he is a really good dude. He treats everyone, no matter how weird or annoying they may be…and they are often very weird and very annoying, with not just respect but with genuine kindness. He also takes his civil duty as a juror seriously and doesn’t just bide his time on jury duty but actually fully engages with the process.

Watching Ronald navigate some very potentially uncomfortable-to-the-point-of-being-ludicrous situations with grace and good-nature restored some of my long-lost hope in humanity.  

The reality, pardon the pun, is that the majority of people in the world are like Ronald, but the vast majority of reality tv, the most loathsome of television genres, is about rewarding boorish behavior and spotlighting self-serving, self-centered, fame-whoring anti-Ronalds.

For this reason, I was skeptical of even giving Jury Duty a try as I assumed it was the usual soulless formula of talentless/narcissistic people masquerading as real people acting like fake people reality tv bullshit that always leaves me irritated, aggravated and depressed. But watching Ronald thoughtfully negotiate through the bizarre situations he is thrust into, and do it with such a pleasant and appealing attitude, not only left me laughing but also optimistic…not a state I’m used to.

Jury duty in real life is like spending time in Darwin’s waiting room, and the series Jury Duty is no different as the fake jurors are a perfect and hilarious encapsulation of the army of morons and misfits that inhabit our world.

For example, there’s Todd, the socially awkward pseudo-inventor, who never fails to be incessantly weird. The actor who plays Todd, David Brown, is remarkable as he repeatedly does the most insane and inane things but never even approaches breaking character or laughing…a Herculean accomplishment.

Joining Todd is Noah, the clueless Mormon, and the far-out floozy Jeannie, who is hungry to take Noah’s virginity.

There’s also the crotchety old lady, Barbara, and Ken, a slow-talking Korean, who are unique enough to be realistic but not so odd as to raise red flags. The same is true of Nikki the bailiff, who I never expected to NOT be a real-life bailiff.

The “star” of the show is actor James Marsden who plays a hyper-narcissistic version of himself. This version of Marsden is constantly talking about his fame and his movies and even gets his own private bailiff so he can stay at home and not be sequestered with the riff raff at a hotel for the trial. Ronald takes all of Marsden’s celebrity quirks in stride and with a smile…even when Marsden takes egregious advantage of him in the most odious (literally) of ways.

I am a pretty tough audience, but Jury Duty was actually able to make me laugh out loud on numerous occasions, something that rarely happens when I watch tv.

The last show that had me laughing and cringing this much was last year’s bizarre, pseudo-reality show The Rehearsal on HBO. In fact, The Rehearsal and Jury Duty would be a fascinating and fantastic double feature to watch back-to-back, as they somewhat inhabit the same documentary/hoax genre but approach it in very different ways.

Jury Duty is a breezy watch, as each of its eight episodes average a brisk 24 minutes or so and keep you engaged the whole time.

So, if you want to experience the absurdist humor of serving on a jury without having to experience the hell of actually serving on a jury, then I strongly recommend you hop into the bizarro-world of Jury Duty.

My final verdict on this show is that it is NOT GUILTY of being the usual reality tv junk and is definitely GUILTY of being funny…and maybe…just maybe…a little bit profound…or at least inspirational.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Oppenheimer: A Review - Destroyer of Worlds, Creator of Great Cinema

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. The rarest of the rare in our current culture, an exquisitely crafted movie made for grown-ups. A masterful work that deserves to be seen on the big screen.

Oppenheimer, the new film written and directed by Christopher Nolan which recounts the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man who first made the atomic bomb, is a stunning accomplishment for a variety of reasons.

The first of which is that it is made with a level of technical and cinematic proficiency rarely seen in our current age of mundane, mind-numbing, moviemaking sub-mediocrity.

Secondly, Oppenheimer is remarkable because it’s a mature movie made for adults that features zero fights and car chases that has generated a tremendous amount of interest, and if reports are to be believed, box office.

My screening here in flyover country (I’m currently living on a farm in an undisclosed part of Middle America) at noon on a Saturday was packed with a striking cross section of regular folks, the overwhelming majority of which I can confidently assume do not consider themselves cinephiles or even count themselves among regular movie goers.

As I watched the three-hour film that consists almost entirely of dramatic scenes of people talking unfold before me, I couldn’t help but wonder if these ‘regular’ people around me liked this film as much as I did.

Oppenheimer tells the sprawling story of its protagonist’s struggle with the moral and ethical burdens of his world-altering calling, but compresses it into an intimate drama that, much like how Oppenheimer builds the first atomic bomb, explodes inward first, which then triggers the greater outward conflagration.

Watching Oppenheimer, one cannot help but marvel at a filmmaker bristling with confidence and competence, the former of which is all too common (and unearned) and the latter of which all too rare nowadays. This is an ambitious movie to the point of being audacious, and I cannot think of another living filmmaker who has the unique artistic style and populist storytelling skillset of Christopher Nolan who could even approach pulling it off.

To be clear, I am not some Nolan fanboy. I respect him greatly but have had some mixed feelings about his previous work. For instance, I thought both The Dark Knight and Dunkirk were masterpieces (I think Dunkirk is his greatest film and one of the very best films of the 21st Century), but I thought Interstellar and Tenet were garbage. On the whole I find him to be a sort of new generation Spielberg without the shmaltz and obsession with children. He is the rare auteur nowadays who makes big budget – big box office, popular movies.

Nolan empties his bag of moviemaking tricks on this one as he uses time jumps, different film stocks and aspect ratios, and wonderfully deft editing to create a mainstream movie that often feels like an impressionistic fever dream.

The key to the success of this massive undertaking is Cillian Murphy who plays Oppenheimer – the American Prometheus who gives the ultimate fire to humanity. Like Dr. Frankenstein, he meddles with powers beyond his moral comprehension that ultimately hunt and haunt him for the rest of his life. If Murphy fails even a little bit in the role this movie crumbles under the weight of its own ambition, but he never stumbles, not even a little.

Murphy is able to convey the vivid, rich inner life of his character with a single, hollow-eyed close-up, and Nolan takes full advantage of his talents. Over the course of the film Murphy’s Oppenheimer goes from being a ravenously ambitious student to a callously arrogant expert to a hollowed-out martyr desperate to be punished for his egregious moral sins and all of it feels grounded and genuine and gloriously compelling.

Another very effective performance comes from Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, an administrative admirer of Oppenheimer and bureaucratic bully. It was an absolute joy to see Downey back to serious acting after his long and fruitful run as Iron Man. Downey has not lost his chops as his Strauss is a cauldron of conflicting and conniving energy that is captivating to watch.

The other stand out performance comes from Gary Oldman, who has just one scene, but he is phenomenal in it. It’s a testament to Oldman’s prodigious talent that he can be so thoroughly unforgettable in a mere matter of moments in a movie.

The rest of the cast, for the most part, acquit themselves well enough. Matt Damon as a demanding American General Leslie Groves, is fine, as are the cavalcade of actors like Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek and Josh Hartnett who pepper the cast.

Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt are the two main actresses and they do the best they can with roles that feel underwritten and a bit uneven. Pugh is always terrific and brings her dark magnificent energy to bear here. Blunt at first feels out of sorts in her role as Oppenheimer’s wife, but she finds her stride in the last third of the film and nails one critical scene when it matters most.

The only performances I thought were notably underwhelming were Benny Safdie as Edward Teller and Rami Malek as David Hill. Both seem out of place and rather awkward in their roles.

On the bright side, it seems definite that Cillian Murphy will be nominated for Best Actor and will probably be the odds-on favorite to win. Downey Jr. will also likely be nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

The film is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who himself could be staring at a second Oscar nomination (his first was for Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk). Hoytema’s framing, close-ups in particular, are exquisite, as is his use of color and contrast.

The soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson is also very effective and well-done. It skillfully but subtly enhances the drama of the film without over-imposing itself and feeling manipulative.

As good as the cinematography and music were, the editing by Jennifer Lame really stands out. The film jumps back and forth in time and yet never loses coherence thanks to Lame’s deft and skillful work.

It is always difficult to discern any sort of political or cultural meaning from Nolan’s films, but they seem much more apparent than usual in Oppenheimer, at least to me. Of course, one must be self-aware enough to know that they may be projecting their own ideological perspective onto a film rather than discovering the director’s intent.

For example, after Nolan’s superhero masterpiece The Dark Knight came out in 2008 there was lots of talk among members of the George W. Bush torture and death-cult that the film was about Bush as Batman being scapegoated for what he has to do to defeat the Joker/Bin Laden, the ultimate terrorist agent of chaos. I never found that argument compelling and always thought it had more to do with the guilty conscience and vacuous ideology of its adherents rather than with Nolan’s intended sub-text.

The same may be true of my reading on Oppenheimer, which seems to me to be a movie that speaks to much of our current era’s issues. For instance, Oppenheimer is persecuted for speaking out against establishment orthodoxy and for holding views deemed to be dangerous. That seems to be very relevant to our current times where wrong-think is a cultural crime as has been well documented here and elsewhere.

Oppenheimer is also a stark reminder of the destructive power and nature of human beings, and how serious that subject is but how we often take it much too lightly.

For example, we have both liberals and conservatives in this country hell bent on escalating the proxy war in Ukraine up to and including to the point of direct conflict with Russia, a nuclear armed state, in order to desperately cling to our self-delusional empire. Oppenheimer eventually came to understand the power he unleashed by building an atomic bomb, but somehow our modern culture has forgotten the earth destroying ability it possesses and feels so comfortable toying with.

And finally, one can’t help but think of Artificial Intelligence while watching Oppenheimer. AI is a great achievement for scientists but like the team at Los Alamos that unleashed the destructive power of the gods onto humans, the unintended and long-term consequences of AI seem to be a moral and ethical minefield for which its creators never seriously prepared or even remotely considered. The impending, and most likely inevitable, dire consequences of artificial intelligence feel all the more chilling when considered in the context of the moral dilemma and outcome of Oppenheimer.

Whether the film is actually about those things or I am just projecting my own fears and ideologies on to it, is ultimately irrelevant, as the film stands on its cinematic artistry alone regardless of its deeper or wider meaning.

The thing that stood out to me the most regarding Oppenheimer was just the fact that it exists and that regular people are interested in seeing it.

For decades the art of cinema has been in steep decline and in recent years the business of movies has followed suit. For the entirety of this century Hollywood has been training audiences to watch nothing but dumbed down bullshit and to instinctively yearn for mindless entertainment. Oppenheimer is counter to that. To be clear, this film isn’t highbrow or arthouse, but it is definitely elevated, adult, populist moviemaking, storytelling and entertainment.

I doubt this will turn the tide of franchise excrement coming from Hollywood, but it is a sliver of hope. In the sea of shit that has been movies over the last four years, original, mature stories from auteurs have been few and far between and even the ones that did come out were among the lesser of the director’s filmography. But with Oppenheimer we have Christopher Nolan, one of the more successful directors in recent Hollywood history, putting out an original, adult-targeted film, and one of his very best films, when all hope seemed lost in the industry for this sort of thing.

Audiences are desperately hungry for quality films that are made for grown-ups…and with Oppenheimer Christopher Nolan has delivered. I, for one, am grateful.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 104: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to listen to Barry and I as we jump off a cliff on a motorcycle while discussing all things M:I 7 - Dead Reckoning, the newest installment of Tom Cruise's long-running Mission: Impossible action franchise.  Topics discussed include the franchise's unique history, the odd stunt-obsessed turn in Cruise's later career, and Barry's attraction to various women like Rebecca Ferguson, Hayley Atwell and Vaness Kirby...as well as a special prediction segment where we guess the box office for Barbie and Oppenheimer's first weekend. This podcast will, like its hosts, self-destruct every five seconds or so.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 104: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One: A Review - Assume the Missionary Position

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. Compared to all the other vapid junk recently available at the cineplex, this is the best of the vapid junk. If you love Mission Impossible movies you will love this one. If you loathe those movies or Tom Cruise, you’ll definitely hate this one.

I can say without reservation that Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh film in the Tom Cruise starring Mission: Impossible franchise, is most definitely a movie…but whether it’s a good one or not is a much more complicated question.

Mission: Impossible is one of the more confounding film franchises in cinema history. Astoundingly, it has been around for nearly thirty years (Cruise was 33 on the first one and is 61 now!), and for the majority of those years it has been considered pretty forgettable, second tier entertainment at best.

Oddly, the films have become more popular as the series has gone along. The films always made money…but they never made that much money. The first three films generated a respectable but not earth-shattering $457M, $546M and $398M respectively at the box office…but with budgets of $80M, $125 and $150m.  Movies four, five and six made a much more impressive $694M, $682M and $791M respectively with budgets of $145M, $150m and $175m.

In addition, fans and critics were lukewarm at best on the first three films, with Rotten Tomato scores of 66 critical/71 audience, 56 critical/42 audience and 71 critical/69 audience respectively for films one, two and three. Interestingly enough, starting with the fourth film, both critics and audience’s love for the films has grown exponentially, with the RT scores being 93 critical/76 audience, 94 critical/87 audience and 97 critical/88 audience for films four, five and six respectively.

That Mission: Impossible survived its first three middling movies to become a respectable franchise is pretty astonishing. It would not have been surprising if, after any of the first three films, the studio (and Cruise) just decided to close up the Mission: Impossible shop.

But what happened instead is that the films stopped being films and transformed into the Tom Cruise Stunt Experience. Starting with the fourth movie, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the franchise’s focus became less about the stories it told and more about the insane stunts Tom Cruise performed in each movie. For example, in Ghost Protocol, Cruise climbed the tallest skyscraper in the world – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The marketing around the film was all about Cruise’s insane stunt work, and not about the film itself.

That approach has only grown more vociferous since, with the focus of the Mission: Impossible films being Cruise’s increasingly daring stunt work as opposed to…I don’t know…his acting or the story. There was the famous scene in Rogue Nation (film #5) where Cruise hung off of an Airbus as it took off and flew, and then the HALO parachute jump into Paris in M:I 6.

The marketing approach of highlighting Cruise’s death-defying stunts has worked incredibly well, even when those stunts don’t look particularly good on-screen – like the HALO jump. But the point of the stunts isn’t for them to look good but to distract people from the actual movie by making them mutter in amazement, “wow, Tom Cruise just did that crazy thing!”

The newest film, Dead Reckoning Part One, written and directed by longtime Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, is no exception. The marketing around the movie is all about Cruise’s motorcycle/parachute jump off a cliff. The stunt is no doubt impressive even if it doesn’t exactly visually translate very well once Cruise and his motorcycle leave terra firma.

The rest of the movie is…fine…I guess. I mean it’s good for a Mission: Impossible movie, considering the franchise that has always been a parody of itself. Yes, it’s utterly ridiculous and absolutely absurd, but I did find myself mostly engaged for the rather bloated two-hour and forty-five-minute runtime, but I also found myself pondering a more existential question in the wake of watching Dead Reckoning, namely is this movie now considered good because everything else is so bad?

In my case, the last two movies I saw before this were The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Those two movies were, like most of the movies I’ve seen over the last few years, dreadfully bad, and Dead Reckoning is much better than them, but that doesn’t necessarily make it good.

My theory is this…it seems to me that cinema in particular, and our culture in general, has been decaying for the last decade, and in precipitous decline for the past four years, so much so that what was once second-tier, forgettable garbage like Mission: Impossible, is now considered elite franchise filmmaking.

This is a round-about way of saying that objectively, Dead Reckoning isn’t a good movie, but in the context of the shit filling the cineplex these days, it is entertaining and enjoyable.

What makes it entertaining and enjoyable? Well, first off, it makes the rather rudimentary and obvious decision, which Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ignored, to fill itself to the brim with a cavalcade of sumptuous eye-candy.

The eye-candy comes in the gorgeous form of Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson. These three women are not only attractive, they’re very talented. Contrast that to Indiana Jones which featured only one woman prominently, and that was the ungainly Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a sub-par and rather unattractive actress.

Hayley Atwell is the best thing about Dead Reckoning and it isn’t even close. Atwell is charismatic, compelling and fun as Grace, the pickpocket/con artist who gives Cruise’s Ethan Hunt a run for his money. Atwell is so appealing she’s actually able to make it seem like she and the dead-eyed Cruise have chemistry…which brings to mind the Rolling Stones lyric from Start Me Up – “you made a dead man come!”

Vanessa Kirby is back as Alana - the White Widow, a sexy arms dealer and she is, as always, undeniably magnetic. Kirby smolders with a palpable dynamism that jumps off the screen. Kirby needs to be a bigger movie star than she already is.

Rebecca Ferguson is the rogue MI 6 agent Ilsa Faust who may or may not have stolen Ethan Hunt’s heart. Ferguson is actually quite good in this enigmatic role, which is no easy task opposite the often lifeless Cruise.

As for the eye-candy for women…well…sorry ladies…all you get is Tom Cruise. Cruise is in absolutely incredible shape but his boyish good looks are long gone and left in their place is a sort of strangely puffy, post-plastic surgery face that always looks just a bit off.

Cruise doesn’t so much act in these movies, as play-act, and it can be pretty cringe-worthy. Cruise is undeniably one of the biggest movie stars of the last forty years, but he is not a particularly good actor, and he lacks a physical presence and dynamism that you’d expect to see from someone of his standing.

Cruise’s attempts at being sincere always feel manufactured and his attempts at being tough feel hollow. But on the bright side we at least get to see Cruise run in this movie…a lot. Cruise’s Mission Impossible running is legendary to the point of being hysterical. It never fails to make me laugh when Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, busts out his hyper-focused sprint. That all of these movies feature numerous scenes of Cruise sprinting, and they all hold those shots of him running for roughly twenty to thirty seconds too long, is one of the more puzzling things about them. Are Cruise and the filmmakers in on the joke or do they think this is really awesome? Who knows?

For a franchise that has been around now for seven movies and nearly thirty years, it should come as no surprise that it is cannibalizing itself. For example, in Dead Reckoning Ethan Hunt is once again facing a villain intent on destroying the world. And once again this villain, a sentient AI named the Entity (no I’m not joking), is so omnipotent that it predicts what all of the Mission Impossible guys and gals will do before they do it…which leads to dialogue about ‘should we do this? – But the Entity KNOWS we’ll do it!!’ This is all very reminiscent of The Syndicate and The Apostles and every other villain in recent MI history.

Dead Reckoning is also seemingly stealing/paying tribute to other films including earlier Mission Impossible ones. For instance, there is yet another sandstorm featured prominently in a sequence in this movie, which also occurred in Ghost Protocol. There’s also a climactic train sequence, which is similar to the one from the very first M:I movie.

Other movies are borrowed from as well, like The Hunt for Red October and Jurassic Park 2. It is never clear if these are a result of homage or creative bankruptcy.

Ultimately, all Mission: Impossible films feel like ego-events with Tom Cruise playing messiah. Dead Reckoning is no exception. That said, it is much better and more entertaining than the vast majority of junk I’ve had to sit through in recent years, including Indiana Jones, The Flash and even everyone’s favorite piece of rancid pop culture shit Top Gun: Maverick.

If you liked any or all of those movies (God, help us!), you’ll think Dead Reckoning is Citizen Kane mixed with The Godfather. If, like me, you loathed those movies, you’ll find Dead Reckoning, filled with pretty woman and beautiful locations, to be a passable piece of franchise entertainment in a culture deeply enmeshed in a seemingly endless entertainment drought.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023