Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio: A Review - A Wooden Puppet on a Wooden Cross

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A dark but timely and profound version of the old classic that features glorious stop-motion animation.

2022 is apparently the year of Pinocchio directed by Academy Award winners.

First this year was the live-action remake of the 1940 Disney animated classic Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks.

Zemeckis’ Pinocchio hit Disney + on September 8th and was promptly skewered by none other than little old me for being an absolute piece of shit. After watching this true cinematic abomination, I wrote, “when I wish upon a star, I wish that this horrendously heinous movie is the final nail in the coffin for Zemeckis and Hanks’ insipidly saccharine careers. A man can dream.”

Zemeckis’ career has been in a downward spiral ever since he fell in love with motion-capture technology on The Polar Express in 2004 and Pinocchio would seem to be his hitting the very bottom of the worst toilet in Hollywood.

Director Guillermo del Toro on the other hand, seems to be only growing into more of a singular artistic genius. Coming off his Best Picture and Best Director winning efforts on The Shape of Water (2017), he gifted us with last year’s under-appreciated gem Nightmare Alley.

Now del Toro is back with his own take on the Pinocchio story – now streaming on Netflix, and it’s a testament to his artistry, vision and originality, not to mention proof of his vast filmmaking superiority to Robert Zemeckis.

Del Toro’s Pinocchio, inspired by Gris Grimly’s illustrations in a 2002 version of the original Carlo Collodi novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a stop-motion animated musical film that is an existential dream/nightmare which wrestles with such unfathomable topics as mortality, humanity, fascism, war and love.

The movie certainly looks inviting to kids with its gloriously lush and detailed stop-motion animation, but its tone is undeniably dark. I watched with my 7-year-old son and he said afterward that it had “too many bombs and stuff for kids”.

That said, when he originally saw the preview for the movie, he said he didn’t want to watch it at all because it looked “terrible”, and he encouraged me to write a negative review of it without even seeing it. After a long and probably fruitless conversation about the ethics of professional film criticism, I convinced him to watch it with me and, despite some philosophically weighty subjects, he did really enjoy it, as did my wife and I.

It's not surprising that a story about the tumultuous but unbreakable love between a father and son would resonate with a father and son attached at the hip, but what made this Pinocchio even more poignant for us, and profound in general, was its focus on death and the fleeting and fragile nature of life, as we have been grappling with those perilous and ponderous topics in our home of late.

It's not surprising that del Toro would imbue his Pinocchio story with such profound existential depth, since his 2006 masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, also dealt with a young child confronting the most onerous of topics, such as death and fascism.

Del Toro, ever the idiosyncratic artist, makes the wise decision in his Pinocchio to replace the Pleasure Island storyline from the original with a striking examination of militarism and fascism that is remarkably insightful in our hyper-militarized culture.

Instead of little boys eschewing discipline in pursuit of bodily pleasures, del Toro’s boys eschew bodily pleasure in favor of fascism and its discipline, militarism and pursuit of battlefield glory. This is a tale as old as time about how young men (and their parents) are blindfolded by a waving flag and surrender to a thoughtless conformity which results in their fighting wars for the rich against other poor people in far off lands.

Considering Hollywood is in reality the propaganda arm of the Pentagon and intelligence community – which has an iron grip on what movies and tv shows get made and which don’t, it’s shocking to see such a fearless anti-war message front and center in a mainstream movie.

In addition to the fascism storyline – which seems as relevant as ever as the drums of war against Russia are mindlessly and relentlessly beaten on a daily basis across American culture, del Toro adds some of his uniquely morbid flair to the festivities with a visit to the afterworld/underworld, which is both amusing, alarming and unnerving.

Besides those specific changes, del Toro also plays a little fast and loose with some other parts of the story, but despite this his Pinocchio still manages to ring spiritually true to the original.

Speaking of which, what makes del Toro’s Pinocchio so very interesting is that it features religion – Catholicism. Worship of Christ is seen in a few scenes, and the moral foundations of Catholicism are present thematically throughout the film.

In our supposedly secular age where moralistic therapeutic deism and identity politics pass for religion, traditional religion is usually used in entertainment only to convey the inherent evil of its adherents, but del Toro masterfully weaves the magic and mystery of Christ into his tale, thus giving his film a profundity and depth unimaginable in something like Zemeckis’ version, which was a virtue-signaling affair dedicated to the shallow, putrid waters of political correctness.

The voice cast in del Toro’s Pinocchio, which consists of Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket, David Bradley as Geppetto, Tilda Swinton as the Wood Sprite, Ron Perleman as Podesta and Cate Blanchett as Spazzatura the monkey, are all fantastic.

And yes, there are songs in the film, but thankfully the music never overwhelms the movie and the songs are actually quite good.

The best thing about the film though, besides del Toro’s visionary script, is the stop-motion animation. Stop-motion, for those unfamiliar, is the type of animation used on movies like Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, or on those great old Rankin/Bass productions of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and A Year Without a Santa Claus which run every year around Christmas on tv. It is a painstaking art form but it creates a unique visual experience by making the setting and characters three dimensional.

I’ve always loved stop-motion animation, and del Toro’s distinctive vision, which is on display in all his films, and the artistry of the animators, makes for a truly captivating cinematic experience.

I highly recommend Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for cinephiles and normal folks alike. The film is as compelling a version of this story as has ever been produced.

I think kids (and adults for that matter) mature enough to handle dipping their toes into the cold, deep waters of existentialism, and who are able to consider the fragility of life without melting down into despair, ought to watch del Toro’s Pinocchio as it’s as profound as any movie made in the last three years.

©2022

The Banshees of Inisherin: A Review – Journey to the Irish Heart of Darkness

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but well-written and well-acted dark comedic fable that speaks to our current hyper-polarized time.

The Irish are often caricatured by outsiders as a bunch of rosy-cheeked, pseudo-leprechauns blessed with a persistent good-nature and the relentless gift of the gab.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Irish are not jolly jig dancing leprechauns, they’re a complicated people inflicted with a deep-seated darkness and melancholy that confounds psychiatry and could swallow universes whole.

Yes, the Irish are blessed with the gift of the gab but they’re also cursed with the impulse to jab. Wherever two or more Irishmen are gathered, a fight is more likely than not.

Which brings us to The Banshees of Inisherin, the new dark comedic fable written and directed by acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh which stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, with supporting turns from Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan.

The film, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, tells the story of Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson), two men living on a small island just off the coast of civil war torn Ireland in 1923, as they navigate the end of their friendship.

The troubles (pun intended) start when Colm decides one day that life is too short to spend another moment in the presence of the dull and dim-witted Padraig. Fiddle-player Colm wants to leave his mark on the world by writing a great Irish song, and believes Padraig’s company is holding him back by taking up too much of his time. Colm would rather cut off his nose to spite his face than to spend another minute of his life chatting inanely with Padraig.

Padraig, who really is dull and dim-witted, is blindsided by this turn of events and simply can’t wrap his head around Colm’s behavior. Padraig is nice and only aspires to be nice, so Colm’s rather rude demand that they not be friends anymore is a shock.

The story of Colm and Padraig’s progressively uncivil civil war unfurls from there but I’ll refrain from sharing any more details to avoid spoilers except to say that things escalate to literally absurd extremes.

The Banshees of Inisherin has a lot going for it. For one, it is simply but beautifully shot, the setting is glorious and the costumes are sublime.

In addition, Colin Farrell gives a phenomenal performance as the doe-eyed dumb-ass Padraig. Farrell has discovered himself as an actor in recent years under the direction of both McDonagh and Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer). Hell, he was even terrific in the Ron Howard nothing burger that was Thirteen Lives from this past Summer.

Padraig’s character arc gives Farrell a great deal to sink his teeth into and he makes the absolute most of it. I would assume that an Oscar nomination is in his future and he’s definitely deserving of a win.

Brendan Gleeson too is superb as the determined yet despondent, gruff but good-natured Colm. Gleeson is a fantastic actor and the more we get to see of him the better. Make no mistake, The Banshees of Inisherin is Colin Farrell’s movie, but none of it is possible without the subtle and sublime work of Brendan Gleeson.

Kerry Condon plays Siobhan, Padraig’s sister and she is captivating as she perfectly captures the tortured and tormented existence of the Irish woman stuck on an isolated island with the hell that is Irish men.

Barry Keoghan gives an uneven but at times spectacular performance as Dominic, the lonely and desperate son of the local brutish policeman. Keoghan sometimes gets lost in histrionics, but when he slows down and stills himself, he is capable of immense dramatic power and that is evident in his work as Dominic.

I’ve enjoyed Martin McDonagh’s plays but I’ve not been a huge fan of films. I thought In Bruges (2008) was good but not that good, and found his most recent effort, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri to be a steaming pile of donkey shite.

The Banshees of Inisherin is by far his best film as it tells a bleakly funny, layered and complex allegory about the nature of men, Irish men in particular, and the perilously polarizing nature of our fractious time.

Men like Padraig and Colm, are designed to communicate shoulder-to-shoulder, whether it be in a foxhole, the fields, an assembly line or at a bar. Shoulder-to-shoulder. The problems start when Colm forces a face-to-face discussion, which is unnatural to men. When men are face-to-face, they’re squaring up to fight…and that’s what occurs with Colm and Padraig…and with all men who attempt to deny their masculine nature no matter how suffocatingly self-destructive it may be.

As for the more current notions addressed in The Banshees of Inisherin, the recent trend of celebrating the banishing of friends or family over the differing of opinions, is front and center.

Nowadays as a cold civil war rages in America, disagreement over politics, of all stupid, fucking useless things, is punishable by exile, which is lustily cheered on by the cacophony of clowns manning the echo chamber of social media.

Like Padraig I’m a dim-witted dullard, and like Padraig I’ve been cast out of the garden by friends. Unlike Padraig, I don’t give a flying fuck. Like Colm I prefer to be alone, and do not want to waste my time or disturb my peace with inane chit-chat with dopes, dipshits and douchebags.

This is part of the brilliance of The Banshees of Inisherin as Padraig and Colm are two parts of the masculine Irish psyche that are forever in and out of accord with one another. Colm’s newfound, fear-of-being-forgotten inspired ambition and Padraig’s yearning for comfort coupled with his fruitless hope to be remembered as nice, are the two clashing desires in the heart of all Irishmen, and maybe in all men.

Ultimately, what Martin McDonagh understands is that the thing to remember about the Irish is that they are the best friends and the worst enemies. They’re happy to talk your ear off or rip your head off, either one, you decide. They have short-tempers and long memories and they don’t hold grudges, they ARE grudges.

The Banshees of Inisherin understands all of that and all of the darkness in the Irishman’s heart, and that’s why it’s both amusing and gloriously insightful that this movie feels like a prequel to some epic grudge inspired feud that will burn the fictional island of Inisherin to the ground in the years and decades to come…which is a wonderfully Irish thing to do.

The Banshees of Inisherin is possibly the best movie of the year, but to be clear, it isn’t a great movie. It’s good, and interesting, and insightful, but it isn’t great. But in the current cinematic drought in which we suffer, I guess I’ll have to drink from the well of the pretty good while I dream of greatness past.

If you’re Irish or of Irish descent, you’ll probably recognize yourself in The Banshees of Inisherin. But regardless of your connection to the Emerald Isle, be forewarned, The Banshees of Inisherin is a subtle but dark…very dark…comedy. If that’s not your thing, then this is won’t be your thing.

©2022

Tar: A Review - Beware of Women in Pantsuits Behaving Badly

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: Cate Blanchett gives a phenomenal performance, but it might not be enough to elevate this movie above its massive third act failures.

Lydia, oh Lydia, have you heard about Lydia? Lydia the conductor lady.

The Lydia in question is the self-destructive, megalomaniacal, world-renowned, superstar conductor/composer Lydia Tar, the fictional lead character played by Cate Blanchett in the new movie Tar.

The film chronicles Tar’s balancing act atop the classical music world as she navigates her darker nature as well as cancel culture and the #MeToo movement. That Tar is a lesbian woman in a male-dominated field who abuses her power, is either a clever or cowardly twist on the story…but more on that later.

Tar is the first film for acclaimed director Todd Field in sixteen years, unfortunately, it fails to live up to all of its intriguing and tantalizing possibilities, but it does feature moments of brilliance that are deliriously enticing and highlight the art of cinema at its best.

For example, the very best scene in any movie this year is a ten-minute tour-de-force from early on in Tar. The scene, which has no cuts, revolves around Lydia Tar, one of the greatest living conductor/composers in the world, teaching a conducting class at Julliard. In the class, she interacts with a sheepishly overwhelmed but defiant “pan-gendered, BIPOC” student who mindlessly regurgitates the current cultural buffoonery regarding the “evils” of the canon of white European “cis” males…like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. This student doesn’t like Bach because he was a “misogynist” who fathered twenty children, and therefore refuses to study him or examine his work.

Tar tries a variety of tactics to get this young student to abandon their myopic, identity-fueled, anti-intellectual position but to no avail. Then out of frustration, or fury, she drops her considerable intellectual hammer on him and exposes his personal idiocy for all to see. Then, in typical modern fashion, the “pan-gender, BIPOC” student does not engage Tar in debate or defend himself, but just storms off in a huff.

Watching this scene, which features a bravura performance from Blanchett, brilliant writing and deft camera choreography, was pure joy. So much so that I’ve gone back and watched just this single scene more than five times since I finished the film…it’s that good.

Part of what makes that scene so compelling is that Blanchett is simply one of the great actors and she’s on the top of her game in Tar.

Blanchett’s performance is mesmerizing because it’s so complex and layered. Blanchett is performing as Tar, who is someone who is constantly performing. Lydia Tar wears a mask incessantly in order to maintain the cult of artistic greatness she has built up around herself. Blanchett’s ability to maintain Tar’s deception and self-deception, is a testament to her expansive talent and enormous skill.

I’ve no doubt that Blanchett will be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and most likely will win it, and deservedly so, and that single, extended scene of her teaching at Julliard should be required viewing for any actors or actresses or aspiring actors or actresses.

But as glorious as that Julliard scene is, it’s also a sign of how far the film falls in its third act. I won’t give details to avoid spoilers, but this scene is visually referenced later in the movie in such a ham-handed, cheap, ‘Lifetime Movie of the Week’ way that it truly tarnishes and diminishes the entire film.

The first third of Tar is a truly engaging and phenomenal piece of arthouse moviemaking that skillfully pulls you in. But the final third is so rushed, and filled with a bevy of unearned narrative and character developments, that it scuttles the entire venture.

For example, the nadir for Lydia Tar comes in the third act when she humiliates herself in public (once again I won’t give details to avoid spoilers), but this scene is so poorly conceived and executed as to be absurd. It’s the height of unintentional comedy and the depths of cinematic malpractice.

The film’s devolution away from reality into hyper-drama, which includes the previously mentioned exploitation of the Julliard scene, as well as the over-the-top dramedy of Tar’s ultimate breakdown, destroy its cinematic and dramatic credibility. Ultimately, this renders the film an overly long, dramatically inert enterprise that is conspicuously devoid of artistic satisfaction.

One of the more intriguing themes of Tar is the notion of the cult of the great artist. Tar may or may not be supremely talented, but she deftly builds around herself this persona of great artistry and masterfully navigates the political landscape of the music world to make it manifest.

In this way Tar is reminiscent of her creator, writer/director Todd Field. Field was a middling actor before he became a director, and his great claim to fame was playing the supporting role of Nick Nightingale in Stanley Kubrick’s last movie Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick died before that movie came out in 1999, but two years later Todd Field’s first feature film, In the Bedroom premiered. The marketing around Field and In the Bedroom dealt a lot with the notion that Field learned filmmaking at the foot of Kubrick, like he was Kubrick’s protégé or something. This narrative was untrue but it was clever, after all Field did act in a Kubrick film and Kubrick was no longer around to refute the notion of being his mentor.

I thought In the Bedroom was massively overrated and it seemed to me that critics, and the Oscars, loved the film and Field because they were, by extension, paying homage to the late, great Kubrick.

By constructing this Kubrick creation myth around his directing career, Field had successfully built a brand critics would support going forward. To be clear, Field is not some fraud, he did get his MFA from AFI after all, which is so small feat. And his movies, both In the Bedroom and Little Children, are not bad movies, but they also aren’t remarkable in any way. The point being that Field and his films simply are not worthy of the critical love they’ve received.

It's this theme of the cult of the great artist that I found to be the most alluring in Tar because it rings the most-true, as I’ve seen it up close and personal in its various stages in London, New York and Hollywood.

Other themes, like the cancel culture/#MeToo stuff, actually feel a little too cute by half. What I mean by that is that telling an abuse of power/sexual predation story but putting a lesbian woman as its protagonist is self-defeating and an act of artistic cowardice.

Audiences love Cate Blanchett and are willing to give her character a benefit of the doubt. Certain audiences, like the target audience of coastal elites who will be more likely to see Tar, are reflexively forgiving of “minorities”, like a gay woman in a male dominated field, Like Tar. This makes Lydia Tar, no matter her faults and failings, very redeemable in their eyes.

These audiences in turn would be automatically repulsed by a man who did the same things as Tar, because in their belief system and in our culture’s eyes, men are, simply put, irredeemable.

Because of this, it seems to me the more difficult, but ultimately more worthy and satisfying story to tell, is that of a man abusing his power like Tar, and trying to make that deemed irredeemable, redeemable.

For example, I couldn’t help but think that, as great as she is, if Cate Blanchett’s Tar were a man played by say…Robert Downey Jr., this film would’ve been infinitely more interesting, and much more controversial, which in turn would’ve led it to be at the center of the cultural zeitgeist.

No one is talking about Tar now. Normal people haven’t and won’t see it, and the talk shows and all the rest of the media world aren’t buzzing with debates over its merits or failings, its morality or immorality.

If Robert Downey Jr. was playing Tar, a charming yet arrogant musical genius (is anyone better at being arrogant and charming?) while Harvey Weinstein and Danny Masterson’s rape trials were on-going, people would have very strong opinions about it and not be afraid to share them.

But instead, we get a sort of soft peddling of a woman abusing her power, which feels like the equivalent of dipping a toe into the swamp that is sexual exploitation, instead of taking a deep dive.

To be clear, there’s a bunch of stuff I liked in Tar. Blanchett’s performance, Florian Hoffmeister’s subtle but powerful cinematography and Hildur Guonadottir’s score are worth the price of admission.

But unfortunately, the movie’s third act failings and its reluctance to get its hands too dirty on the #MeToo manure pile, neuter its artistic and narrative power and render it ultimately a rather unsatisfying and frustrating cinematic experience.

Regular audiences more at home at the cineplex, will be bored to tears by Tar’s deliberate arthouse pacing and its more symbolic storytelling devices.

Afficionados of the arthouse should give Tar a try, but I recommend if they wait until it hits streaming, as shelling out big bucks, either at the theatre or on Video on Demand, will feel like a bad decision in hindsight.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

On this episode, Barry and I don our coat and tails, grab a baton and orchestrate a discussion about Tar, the new Todd Field movie starring Cate Blanchett. Topics discussed include the ghost of Stanley Kubrick, the brilliance of Blanchett, self-marketing and the cult of the great artist, and the pain of a promising start followed by a failed finale. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Wonder: A Review - If You Hate the Irish, You'll Love This Film

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Some solid performances and beautiful cinematography are tainted by the film’s Hollywood narrative and truly ugly anti-Irish ideology.

The Wonder, directed by Sebastian Lelio and written by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue based on Donoghue’s novel of the same name, is a new Netflix film that tells the story of an English nurse sent to a rural Irish town in 1862 to investigate the supposed miracle of a young girl who hasn’t eaten in four months.

The nurse, Elizabeth “Lib” Wright (Florence Pugh), must struggle against patriarchal forces, local custom, and deeply-ingrained religious belief to try and find the truth about what exactly is happening to Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Kassidy), the allegedly miraculous young girl.

The Wonder has a lot of things going for it in attempting to keep me interested. First of all, the film stars Florence Pugh, an actress of great talent and skill who thus far has never failed to impress me. Even in the recent cinematic disaster that was Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh delivered a worthy performance. No small feat in such a bad movie.

Secondly, my grandfather grew up in an impossibly tiny, rural village in County Mayo in the West of Ireland which was very close to the town of Knock. Knock, for those who don’t know, is a religious shrine and place of pilgrimage because in 1879 apparitions of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist all appeared to a group of villagers.

The Catholic Church has long since put its stamp of approval on the Knock incident and such notables as Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa and arguably the most Holy and most notable Catholic of all, me, have visited the shrine.

The Wonder reminds of the mystery at Knock because of the question of religious validity at the heart of its narrative as well as the rural and somewhat foreboding and forbidding nature of the setting.

All of this is to say that The Wonder had me intrigued simply from its premise, but unfortunately it makes certain choices, some odd, some predictable, some rather vicious and ignorant, that greatly diminishes its value.

For example, the film opens with the shot of a movie soundstage accompanied by a voice-over telling viewers “This is the beginning of a film called The Wonder. The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories. And so we invite you to believe in this one.”

The camera then turns its attention to a movie set populated by actors, and through voice-over the narrator sets the scene telling us that its 1862 and English nurse Elizabeth Wright is headed to Ireland and the story begins…but not without a small comment that speaks volumes about the film’s ugly ideology – but more on that later.

I found this attempt at an unorthodox artistic opening to be painfully patronizing and distracting as it needlessly creates a hurdle to suspending disbelief while speaking down to its audience. The detached narrator later resurfaces in the film but not enough for it to be profound or to make any sort of narrative or artistic sense.

Once the actual story begins, we are treated to two positive things, firstly, Florence Pugh once again proves her worth as she gives a very solid performance as the lead “Lib”.

The rest of the cast all do solid work as well, with Brian F. O’Byrne, Ciaran Hinds, and Toby Jones doing dutiful work in supporting roles. Kila Lord Cassidy is also good as the young girl in question, Anna.

In addition to the acting, the film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Ari Wegner, who makes the most of the Irish setting and the candlelit era. Wegner scored an Oscar nomination for her work on The Power of the Dog last year and I wouldn’t be surprised if she snags another this year with The Wonder.

The problem though is that the window dressing of Wegner’s crisp and luscious cinematography and Pugh’s pointed performance are overshadowed by the smug, deplorable politics of the film and the pedestrian nature of its narrative, which ultimately spirals into preposterousness and banality.  

I’ll refrain from going too much further into the plot of The Wonder so as to avoid spoilers and conserve the viewing experience for those interested, but I will say that the Hollywood nature of the narrative ultimately fails to live up to the artistry of Pugh and Wegner.

The surface politics of the film are predictably trite with the usual misandry and anti-religious (more accurately anti-Catholic) sentiments of our vacuous era front and center. Pugh’s “Lib”, like every female protagonist nowadays, struggles against the all-powerful patriarchy which infects the entirety of the world with its singular evil. Yawn.

To give an indication of the film’s intellectual vapidity and political crudeness, “Lib” is the female “liberator” – how subtle - trying to free a young woman, Anna, from the grips of backwards Irish-Catholicism and bring her to a progressive utopia. Eye roll.

As formulaic as the ‘patriarchy as villain’ storyline is, the thing that really repulses is the unabashed anti-Irishness of the film.

Now for that small but revealing voice-over comment I referred to earlier. It was made by the narrator at the tail end of the unorthodox opening to the film. The narrator explains that “Lib” is an Englishwoman traveling to Ireland while the potato famine of the previous decade is tapering off, and then we are told with a seemingly straight face that “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation.” Ummm…No shit. “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation” BECAUSE THE ENGLISH WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT DEVASTATION!

What makes it even worse is that the narrative of the film is such that it doesn’t just minimize The Great Hunger, which killed a million Irish and displaced twice as many, its sub-text is that the famine was the fault of the Irish – to the point of being their choice. I mean, this is a story about a girl who doesn’t eat – and thus may be starving herself for ulterior motives. That’s pretty explicitly saying the Irish are liars responsible for their own starvation – which is obviously historically wholly inaccurate.

Imagine if a film about Jews in Europe in 1948 opened with a voice-over stating that in regards to the Holocaust “Jews hold Nazis responsible for that devastation” and then dramatized how Jews were actually the ones who caused the Holocaust, and the protagonist is a Nazi sent to liberate a Jew from other Jews. Or a film about former slaves in the American South in the wake of the Civil War describing slavery with “blacks hold white southerners responsible for that devastation”, and then dramatized that blacks were actually responsible for slavery and a white Southerner is the intelligent protagonist trying to free a black man from stupid and backward black people.

People in our current culture of outrage would be apoplectic at such an insidious and insipid twisting of history being imposed on those two groups that are officially-approved as victims. But with the Irish no one bats an eye at their attempted extermination first being downplayed and then actually blamed on them.

The Netflix show The Crown is currently getting some heat because Queen Elizabeth II recently died and they aren’t being adequately respectful to her or something, but The Wonder minimizes and Brit-washes the genocide of the Irish, and then blames the Irish for it, and no one says a word. Yes, let’s respect the Queen, symbol of British colonialism that murdered millions not just in Ireland but across the globe, and let’s portray these victims of the British Empire, like the Irish, as the true brutal monsters who brought the horrors upon themselves. Insane.

The Wonder maintains this aggressive anti-Irish attitude throughout, portraying the Irish as a cruel, backwards, barbaric and utterly savage people with Lib being the English voice of reason/saviour.

The film, not surprisingly, does the same with Catholicism. Of course, audiences are so conditioned to hate the Catholic Church in modern film (and culture) that I doubt anyone will care. And to be clear, it’s not like the Catholic Church over the years hasn’t dutifully earned the scorn it receives. It’s just that singling out a specific religion as an abominable institution, while whitewashing the evils of the British Empire, is a bit much and feels ever so slightly hypocritical.

Director Sebastian Lelio, a Chilean, may very well be ignorant of the history of Ireland, the British responsibility for the genocide of The Great Hunger and for centuries of violence and oppression across the globe. But if you’re going to make a movie about Ireland you might want to read up a bit on the place and the people. Lelio’s ignorance is on him. And if it isn’t ignorance, and if he really thinks this way, then that says more about his moral and ethical depravity than it does about the Irish and Catholicism.

The film’s co-writer Emma Donoghue, who authored the book it’s based upon, is an Irish woman. Her take on Ireland, the Great Hunger, and the relationship with the English is stunning for its imbecility. Donoghue’s Irish self-loathing is no doubt fueled by her having grown up a lesbian in Ireland, which at the time was a robust Catholic country. I assume that wasn’t easy, but hating Catholicism for its sins is still no excuse to ignore history and reflexively lick English boots.

It's fascinating to see Lelio and Donoghue’s hierarchy of beliefs play out in real time in their movie. I’ve no doubt both are devout liberals and believe they are profoundly expressing those beliefs with this story. But their blind spot is that they’ve placed anti-Catholicism, and by extension anti-Irishness, higher on their hierarchy than anti-British colonialism, which is both astonishing and revealing. This choice speaks to the current tortured state of the bourgeois, capitalism-addicted liberal mind and its accompanying depraved and trans-actional morals and ethics.

Despite the rancid ideology of the film, The Wonder is bursting with cinematic possibilities, but unfortunately the potential complexity of the premise is scuttled on the rocks of simplicity due to acute artistic vacuity and story-telling conventionality.

To the film’s credit, it did keep me captivated for a good portion of its 103-minute run time, but ultimately left me deeply dramatically and narratively unsatisfied at the end. In addition, it’s aggressive anti-Irishness left me aggravated and agitated.

The Irish have been through a lot through the years, from conquest to occupation to subjugation to discrimination to genocide to civil war to terrorism and all the rest. We’ve survived it all, and goodness knows we’ll survive some rather forgettable anti-Irish movie streaming on Netflix too.

©2022

My Policeman: A Review - Welcome to Blokeback

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly acted and executed, knock-off Brokeback Mountain for Brits.

My Policeman, directed by Michael Grandage with a screenplay written by Ron Nyswaner based on the 2012 book of the same name by Bethan Roberts, tells the story two gay men, their forbidden love and the woman stuck between them in 1950’s Brighton, England.

The film, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, stars Brit-pop superstar Harry Styles as the aforementioned gay policeman, as well as Emma Corrin, David Dawson, Linus Roache, Gina McKee and, since it’s a gay British movie, Rupert Everett is legally required to appear…and he dutifully does.

My Policeman is not a good movie for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that it’s so painfully derivative – it’s basically Brokeback Mountain for Brits but without the cinematic skill or quality acting.

In fact, My Policeman was such a dull slog I spent much of my time watching it thinking of cheeky British tabloid headlines to describe it. The best I could come up with was “BUM-LOVING BRITISH BOBBIE GOES FULL BLOKEBACK!” Yes, I agree…I AM clever.

Back in the early 90’s Kurt Cobain sang the lyric “what else can I say? Everyone is gay!”, and if you watch tv and movies nowadays you’d think he was right. It seems every tv show and movie now prominently features a gay character, and every commercial has either an interracial couple, a gay couple or an interracial gay couple.

Despite gays and lesbians being roughly 5% of the population, gayness is so omnipresent in our culture that last week I was watching a hockey game and a commercial for some HIV drug that featured a cavalcade of gay men in various forms of homosexual embrace ran approximately a dozen times. I couldn’t help but think of another song when I saw this ad, which was “Everyone has AIDS” from Team America: World Police. This begs the question…who exactly do they think is watching hockey nowadays?

The reality is that you can’t take two steps in our culture without tripping over some movie, tv show or commercial that is all about gayness. For example, just last week I reviewed the new Jennifer Lawrence movie Causeway, and in it, for no explicable reason whatsoever, Lawrence’s character was a lesbian. The thing that made this character choice so odd was that her lesbianism actually worked to defuse the drama, rather than heighten it. Oh well.

Just recently there was a much-hyped gay rom-com, Bros, and even kid-friendly pop culture fair like Star Wars and Marvel movies now feature gay characters. Hell, there was even gayness in the most recent Toy Story movie…you’ll be glad to know I’ll be refraining from making any Woody jokes.

This is all to say that in our aggressively progressive culture that in the last forty years in general and last ten years in particular, has changed at hyper-speed, being gay is no longer a big deal. Nobody in our very modern times cares if, to quote Spartacus, you prefer to “eat oysters or snails”. Which is why it’s so bizarre that while gays sit comfortably on the throne of pop-culture they’re so adamant to wear the crown of victimhood as they do so.

The recurring theme of popular gay films and tv shows in recent years, from The Imitation Game to Call Me by Your Name to My Policeman and of course the granddaddy of them all, Brokeback Mountain, is oppression. Another thing these films all share is that they must go back in time to find said gay oppression because it doesn’t exist in the modern Western world.

This recurring theme, a sort of sad-sack, woe-is-me, self-pitying, martyr-making view of homosexuality by homosexuals, is a sign of deep-seated insecurity from a gay community that is reflexively uncomfortable with its astounding cultural success, and has, in my mind, become a very tired trope used to avoid seeking deeper meaning and purpose, not to mention artistry, in gay film and tv.

Brokeback Mountain was a stunning piece of cinema, but what made it so astonishing is that it basically obliterated the need for this gay oppression storyline to ever be examined again, as it did it to perfection.

Unfortunately, My Policeman shamelessly mimics Brokeback Mountain. It even, rather blatantly, references Brokeback twice. Once when young Patrick Hazelwood (played by David Dawson) mentions that men often go on “fishing trips” together, wink-wink, and also when he recounts how his gay lover was beaten to death by thugs, which is exactly how Jack Twist came to his demise in Brokeback Mountain.

Patrick Hazelwood is the Brit Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) of My Policeman, as he’s the “gayer” of the two men and the one who is unable to control his “urges” which society deems depraved. Harry Styles and Linus Roache play young and old Tom Burgess respectively, and Tom is to My Policeman what Heath Ledger’s Ennis is to Brokeback Mountain.

The similarities don’t stop there as Emma Corrin plays young Marion Taylor, and Gina McKee plays the older version of the character, and Marion is basically a more educated version of Michelle Williams’ Alma character from Brokeback Mountain.

You get the point, My Policeman is literally a very, very cheap British rip-off of Brokeback Mountain.  

Unfortunately, Harry Styles is no Heath Ledger. I am sad to report, since I was so sure it was going to happen for him, but movie stardom is not in the cards for Harry Styles. Styles is a wooden, dead-eyed actor who brings absolutely nothing to the screen. It seems as though Styles has either gotten too little or too much acting coaching at this point as he’s lost whatever charisma he had in the first place.

Yes, he does have his legion of loyal teen girl fans, and no doubt a bevy of gay male fans too, and they all might appreciate handsome and hunky Harry’s homosexual hump-fest in My Policeman, but his acting is, pardon the pun, hard to take.

Emma Corrin does decent work with a pitifully under-written character, Marion. Corrin was brilliant in The Crown as Princess Diana and here she shows the same dexterity and commitment. She certainly has the makings of a solid actress and one can only hope she gets better material to work with next time.

David Dawson is supposed to be some sort of irresistible gay Svengali in the film but he lacks the presence of…ironically…a young Rupert Everett, to pull it off. This leads to Dawson and Styles seeming mismatched as a gay couple due to their decided lack of chemistry.

The older versions of the characters, Gina McKee as Marion, Linus Roache as Tom and Rupert Everett as Patrick, appear lost in another movie entirely. The “older” storyline is almost entirely incomprehensible and illogical. These characters behave in completely nonsensical ways and the entire premise of the venture seems lost in some sort of dementia fog.

Director Michael Grandage, comes from the theatre and it shows, as the film lacks any and all visual style and is utterly incapable of showing instead of telling.

I’ve not read the book My Policeman, and it will come as no surprise that I never intend to, but I can only assume it’s as trite and cliché-ridden as the screenplay for this movie by Ron Nyswaner. Nyswaner, it will not shock you in the least, also wrote the screenplay for Philadelphia…which reminds me again, “Everybody has AIDS!”

The bottom line is that My Policeman, and frankly most gay-themed movies, are stuck in a rut of unoriginality where vapid cultural messaging is more important than profundity or dramatic meaning.

At the moment it seems that gay culture bursting out of the closet in recent decades has stripped it of its dramatic and artistic power…and My Policeman is damning evidence of that.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 83 - Causeway

On this episode, Barry and I hop on one leg down to New Orleans to talk all things Causeway, the new Jennifer Lawrence movie now streaming on Apple TV +. Topics discussed include my shameless name-dropping, J-Law's lost mojo, and the basic fundamentals of film-making missing from this movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 83 - Causeway

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

On this episode Barry and I man the trenches and do battle as we discuss the new Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front. Topics discussed include Barry's unhealthy obsession with Spartacus, the troubling paucity of anti-war movies and the powerful dichotomy of cinematic beauty and wartime brutality.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Don't Worry Darling - A Review: Cinephiles should definitely worry darling!

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An absolute mess of a movie.

Don’t Worry Darling, the much-hyped and much-discussed sophomore directorial effort from actress Olivia Wilde, premiered with a resounding thud in theatres back on September 23rd and is now available to stream on HBO Max…and I just watched it.

My three-word review of Don’t Worry Darling would simply be, “definitely worry darling”. Unfortunately for you, brevity has never been my strong suit, and therefore neither has wit, so I’ll expound further upon my thoughts.

Don’t Worry Darling was actually deemed an Oscar contender heading into this year because Hollywood had crowned Olivia Wilde as the new “it” girl moviemaker after her first film Booksmart (2019) received positive reviews but underwhelmed at the box office.

I was less enthused about Booksmart and Ms. Wilde’s alleged directing abilities than my brethren in the critical community. It seemed to me that Booksmart, a middling rip-off of Superbad, was, like Lady Bird (2017), vastly overrated because Hollywood and weak-kneed critics wanted to celebrate a female filmmaker even when they made an at-best mediocre movie.

Booksmart and Lady Bird, and their directors Olivia Wilde and Greta Gerwig, were hyped beyond all proportion as a result of Hollywood and the access media being desperate to show allegiance to the #MeToo mania gripping Tinsel Town. Hollywood’s obsession post-2016 election and post-Weinstein scandal has been to hire as many female and minority moviemakers as possible, the overwhelming majority of which have been completely devoid of talent, skill and craftsmanship. If you want to understand why the movie industry and the cinematic arts are suffering so much right now, look no further than this blind addiction to diversity, representation and inclusion over talent, skill and craftsmanship. That’s not the only reason for the recent drought of good films, but it’s certainly a major reason for that shortage.

It was due to this current female filmmaker hype and hysteria that Don’t Worry Darling got labelled as an Oscar contender before anyone even saw it. But then the discussion about the film quickly shifted from the female empowerment of it all to the various “scandals” surrounding the production.

There was the alleged feud between the film’s star Florence Pugh and director Olivia Wilde. There was the rehashing of the firing of Shia LeBouf which included a back and forth about exactly why he was fired, the result of which revealed Olivia Wilde to be a bit of a liar. And then there was the allegation that Ms. Wilde was having an affair with LeBouf’s replacement, cast member and co-star Harry Styles, during filming…while she was married to Ted Lasso…oops, I mean Jason Sudeikis. Oh dear.

That’s a lot of negative press swirling around a movie. The problem though is that those gossipy stories are infinitely more compelling than anything that actually happens in Don’t Worry Darling.

Describing the plot of Don’t Worry Darling is a difficult if not impossible thing to do, not because I want to avoid spoilers but because it’s so ridiculously convoluted and incoherent.

The basic premise, I guess, is that there’s a couple, Alice and Jack, living in what someone suffering from #MeToo induced mania would describe as some sort of banal precursor to the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale disguised as a 1950’s supposed utopia in the California desert named Victory. Victory – a less than subtle declaration of victory for the patriarchy, is a company town where all the men work on the mysterious, top secret “Victory Project” for their boss Frank (Chris Pine), who seems more like a cult leader than anything else.

While Jack (Harry Styles), a bargain basement looking James Bond with the fancy car to match, and his fellow employees go off to work every day, their cadre of beautiful housewives stay home and cook, clean and gossip.

Alice, played by the ever-captivating Florence Pugh, is one of these sexy housewives who gossips with the other sexy housewives in between making sumptuous dinners, keeping a tidy house and having Harry Styles perform oral sex on her.

But something seems off. Alice can’t quite put a finger on what it is but she keeps having dreams and flashbacks to…something…that is not of this neat and controlled world she finds herself inhabiting.

As the plodding movie progresses and the plot further unfurls, all of the supposed promise of that premise evaporates into thin air. Eventually there’s absolutely nothing of any note left to hold onto.

The film is a D-level Stepford Wives for the modern generation as it’s obviously trying to make some profound statement about the patriarchy and the inherent evil of men, but to call the film’s gender politics trite would be the most profound of understatements.

To be fair to the film, there are some positives. For example, Florence Pugh is terrific. I remember the first time I see Pugh in a film, it was 2016’s Lady Macbeth, and I instantly recognized what a special actress she was, writing, “Pugh…has stardom written all over her. She is a beautiful woman, but her beauty never overshadows her talent. She is blessed with the skill of being able to convey her character's intentions and vivid inner life with the slightest of glances. Pugh is a charismatic and powerful screen presence who exudes an intelligence and strength that few young actresses possess. I am willing to bet that she has a most stellar career in front of her.”

Pugh is such a dynamic, magnetic and charismatic screen presence in Don’t Worry Darling that she’s able to overcome the albatross of the moronic script and middling moviemaking and avoid embarrassing herself.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique also does notable work as he gives the film an appealingly crisp visual style and luscious, cinematic flair.

As for everything else…oh boy…its bad.

Screenwriter Katie Silberman needed at least three more drafts of this script as it simply makes absolutely no sense as currently structured.

Wilde also drops the ball consistently as the film’s pacing is relentlessly lethargic yet the plot also moves too fast in the second half to be remotely comprehensible.

Pugh aside, Wilde is incapable of drawing solid performances from her cast, most obviously from herself in a supporting role. Wilde’s acting is just as bad as her directing, as there’s a lot of posing and preening and histrionics but nothing believable.

I remember the first time I ever saw the film’s co-star Harry Styles. I had never heard of, or seen, his boy band One Direction, because, you know, I’m a grown man and not a teenage girl. But then while watching Sesame Street with my young son I saw this group of absurd pretty boys singing some song about the letter “U”. I had no clue who these people were or the tune they were using, but I immediately noticed this one guy who jumped off the screen. Upon further investigation I learned it was Harry Styles. As silly as this sounds, Styles’ Sesame Street performance impressed the hell out of me because it oozed with an effortless charisma and lack of self-consciousness that you just can’t teach. In addition, he seemed to innately understand how to fill a screen, another skill not easy for people to pick up.

I then saw Styles in Christopher Nolan’s magnificent movie Dunkirk, where he played a desperate British soldier trying to survive and escape France as the Germans closed in on Dunkirk. Styles’ role was pretty minimal in the movie, but once again I was impressed by him.

The next time I saw Styles was in a post-credit scene for the truly unwatchable Marvel monstrosity Eternals. I have no idea what Styles was doing in that moronic scene, and frankly, it looked like he had no clue either.

And now Styles, who is currently dating Olivia Wilde to much fanfare, has two movies out. The first is Don’t Worry Darling and the second is My Policeman, a film I intend to see very shortly.

As much as I had high hopes for Styles’ acting career, I see them fading very, very fast as the bloom is definitely off the Harry Styles acting rose. He’s truly, abysmally awful in Don’t Worry Darling. I’m rooting for this guy to be good and goddamn he is just one cringe after another in this movie. There are scenes where his amateur acting status is laid so bare as to be uncomfortable. And his girlfriend/director Olivia Wilde does him no favors as it seems he wasn’t “directed” at all but rather left to his own rather limited devices.

That said, I did find it somewhat amusing seeing pretty boy pop star Harry Styles with glasses, bad skin and greasy hair in one of the movie’s flashback/dream sequences.

The bottom line regarding Don’t Worry Darling is that the various controversies surrounding the film have nothing to do with how bad it is. To be clear, I don’t care who Olivia Wilde is sleeping with, unless of course she wants to sleep with me, something I’d be more than happy to accommodate.

What I want from Olivia Wilde is not juicy gossip but a good movie, something she seems incapable of delivering. On Don’t Worry Darling Wilde’s bloated ambition vastly exceeded her minimal talent, and the end result is a movie that is so poorly put together that it’s actually embarrassing.

My hope for Wilde’s next film, and she’ll definitely get another one, is that she reins in her inflated ego, loses the infatuation with trite cultural politics and instead focuses on the fundamentals of storytelling and the art of cinema. A man can dream.

©2022

Causeway: A Review - New Apple TV movie another wrong turn in Jennifer Lawrence's once-stellar career

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW…BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS AWFUL AND YOU SHOULD NEVER WATCH IT!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Abysmally amateurish movie that is entirely and utterly forgettable in every single way.

I’m old enough to remember when Jennifer Lawrence was a solid and sometimes spectacular actress who also happened to be the most captivating and compelling movie star in Hollywood.

In 2010, at the tender young age of 20, she had proven her acting bona fides by giving an absolutely scintillating, Oscar-nominated performance in the uncompromising arthouse gem Winter’s Bone.

She then made some extremely savvy career moves. First, she joined an existing popular film franchise, X-Men, as Mystique, and then originated a franchise as Katniss Evergreen in The Hunger Games. These moves, which made not only Lawrence but a lot of other people a lot of money, solidified her standing in the industry and with younger audiences, and set her up to consistently have high profile work with a built-in fan-base for the foreseeable future. Very smart.

She also made a savvy move to continue to reinforce her status in terms of prestige by following up her artistic success in Winter’s Bone by teaming with Hollywood auteur and Oscar darling David O. Russell for three films. The result of this collaboration was a Best Actress Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook (2012), which she won at 22 years old, followed by a Best Supporting Actress nomination for American Hustle (2013). Pretty impressive.

Back then Lawrence was a charming presence and a luminous beauty, with impressive acting chops and artistic bravado. She was also sexy yet approachable because she was goofy, grounded and genuine. She was the woman other women wanted to be and the woman guys didn’t just want to have sex with but hang out with.

But then things started, slowly but surely, to fall apart.

The Hunger Games franchise lost steam after the first two movies as budgets expanded and box office diminished. The final two movies of the four-film franchise continued to make money, but they failed to capture the cultural imagination of the earlier films.

The collaboration with Russell hit a snag as well with the 2015’s Joy, which saw Lawrence miscast and resulted in the movie being a misfire. Lawrence and Russell have not worked together since.

The X-Men franchise found new life with Lawrence in the cast for her first two movies, X-Men: First Class (2011) and Days of Future Past (2014), but then immolated with the abominable X-Men: Apocalypse  (2016) and the catastrophic to the point of ending the franchise, Dark Phoenix (2019).

Between Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix another auteur tried to use Lawrence to elevate an arthouse film. That auteur was Darren Aronofsky and the movie was Mother! (2017), a mindbogglingly ambitious cinematic enterprise that ended up being an epic disaster despite Lawrence’s noble efforts in it.

She also tried to start another franchise with Red Sparrow (2018), a spy thriller about a Russian woman trained in the art of sex and seduction. The movie garnered some headlines because Lawrence was naked in it, but unfortunately her nudity was the only good thing to be found in this dreadful dud.

This stretch of bad movies resulted in Lawrence stepping back from the industry for a bit. In 2019 she got married and in 2022 she gave birth to her first child.

This brief pause in her career could have been a reset, and Lawrence could’ve come back and reclaimed her title as the biggest star, or the best actress, or both. But that’s not what happened.

In 2021 she co-starred in Adam McKay’s apocalypse comedy Don’t Look Up. What was remarkable about Don’t Look Up is that it’s easy to forget that Jennifer Lawrence is in it. She isn’t bad in it, she just isn’t very memorable, which is not something you’d ever expect to say about Jennifer Lawrence.

The film is remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as a Leonardo DiCaprio movie first, and an Adam McKay movie second. Lawrence never comes into the equation.

Which brings us to Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence’s new film which is streaming on Apple TV +.

The movie is almost instantaneously forgettable for a variety of reasons, such as the meandering script and the amateurish direction. But what makes Causeway so alarmingly bland is that Jennifer Lawrence seems utterly lifeless and charisma-free in every scene she inhabits.

Yes, her character, Lynsey – who was wounded in Afghanistan and is now back home in New Orleans and trying to get back to Afghanistan, isn’t supposed to be some dynamic presence, but what is striking about Lawrence ‘s performance is that she is so dead behind her eyes. There is no internal life, no fire in her eyes, or belly or anywhere else. It was unimaginable to me that I would ever feel like Jennifer Lawrence was just going through the motions of a role, but here we are.

This dead-eyed performance is accentuated by the moribund script which gives Lynsey essentially zero character arc, but still, Lawrence used to be the type of actress that could fill this character with something…extraordinary. And now she’s unable to bring the most minimal bit of life to her.  

A great actress would’ve created something out of the nothing that is Lynsey. A movie star would have brought a boatload of charisma and magnetism to the Lynsey and made audiences root for her. As much as it pains me to say, Lawrence is no longer a great actress or a movie star, as she is incapable of doing either.

Another actor considered top-notch by some people in the know is Brian Tyree Henry, who plays James in Causeway, a local mechanic who fixes Lynsey’s truck and strikes up a friendship with her.

I’ve never thought Henry was as great as everybody else says he is…and his trite work in Causeway reinforces my skepticism.

To be fair to Lawrence and Henry, the acting is the least of the problems of Causeway.

The script is atrocious as the story goes nowhere, the characters have no arc and the drama is non-existent.

The biggest problem of all though is director Lila Neugebauer. Neugebauer is a theatre director and this is her first feature film…and it shows. The most rudimentary aspects of moviemaking go awry in Causeway. For example, a freshman film student knows to never put somebody smack dab in the center of the frame and yet this happens so consistently in Causeway as to be maddening.

In another scene, Henry’s James reveals an important piece of information about his body, that he has a prosthetic leg. In the scene James tells Lynsey about his leg and then lifts his pant leg up and shows it to her…but the director never shows  this to the audience either in the wide shot or in a close-up. It’s as if they couldn’t afford to just get a prosthetic leg and shoot it in a cutaway or something. What makes this all the more bizarre is that later in the film there’s an entire sequence showing that James has no leg. This is just the most rank amateur filmmaking possible.

In another scene, Lynsey visits her brother in prison and we find out her brother is deaf. Of course he’s deaf because everyone in this movie has to be either handicapped, gay, or gay and handicapped. Anyway, Lynsey and her brother have a long and seemingly important conversation through sign language at the prison, but for some inexplicable reason halfway through the scene the sub-titles disappear. I assume this is some artistic choice on the part of Neugebauer, and it’s a laughably bad one.

The bottom-line regarding Causeway is that it’s not just a dull, languid, listless misfire of a movie, it’s that it feels like the end of the line for Jennifer Lawrence being a relevant actress and movie star.

Lawrence could’ve gotten away with playing this type of role back when she was the life of the Hollywood party in 2013 or 2014. She could’ve been Lynsey and brought her vivacity and vibrant inner life to the work and screen and it would’ve been accepted by the audience and notable to critics, with the caveat that a different, much better, director were at the helm.

But now, with Lawrence having lost her movie star mojo and also apparently her acting chops, this role and this movie come across as nothing but an artistically anemic, dramatically lethargic, narratively meandering exercise of which there is no meaning or purpose.

I personally think the world is better when Jennifer Lawrence is a relevant movie star and actress, and I sincerely hope that happens again someday. But if I’m being honest, after watching Causeway and ruminating on the downward trend of her movies over the last decade, I’m not optimistic.

©2022

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022): A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic film that tells a story that is as relevant today as it’s ever been.

It is morbidly ironic that as German director Edward Berger’s bleak and beautiful new remake of the classic World War I film All Quiet on the Western Front begins streaming on Netflix, that all is most definitely not quiet on Europe’s Eastern front.

It’s not insignificant that the movie, a remake of the 1930 Academy Award Best Picture winner based on the 1929 novel of the same name, which recounts the tale of a group of young German men intoxicated by the fantasy of fighting in World War I who are then eviscerated by the brutal reality of it, should premiere while a vicious war rages on Europe’s Eastern front between Ukraine and Russia.

The lesson of the book and all film iterations of All Quiet of the Western Front is that war is a fruitless, savage endeavor that, like an insatiable, gruesome beast, devours men’s bodies as it mangles their spirits and souls.

Of course, we know all of this to be true about war, and yet, we in the West, in the U.S. in particular, are such thoroughly disinformed, misinformed and propagandized Russo-phobic war fetishists and superhero fantasists that we convulse with glee at the notion of escalating the war in Ukraine – a war which we started via the U.S. backed Maidan coup and ensuing slaughter of ethnic Russians in the Donbas, up to and including calling for more muscular American military intervention and even the use of nuclear weapons.

This is all madness…but as All Quiet on the Western Front teaches us, all war is madness, and some form of extreme psychosis is required to participate in it. Berger’s two-and-a-half-hour film effectively captures this madness, from the young men’s giddy rush to enlist at all costs to their grim death sprint out of the open air coffin trenches and across the hell of no man’s land.

The movie is exquisitely and exceptionally photographed, and that cinematic beauty juxtaposed against the inhuman brutality of the behavior captured in the frame is jarring and deeply unnerving.

Berger also uses a technique which I almost always find off-putting but which works here, which is using modern music in a period piece. The music is a grinding, industrial guitar that accompanies the young German men as they take their first few steps out of the fantasy of war and into the reality of it. This music is used sparingly throughout, but it is remarkably effective in conveying the sense of this war, as is true of all wars, as being a mindless meat grinder, industrial in its level of dehumanization and carnage.

The opening of the film, of which I will refrain from revealing the specifics, is simple yet extraordinary in transmitting this same sensation of war as mass murder incorporated, and it sets the stage for the rest of the film to expound upon that thesis.

The battle scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front are realistic, disturbing and exceedingly well-executed. Director Berger and his cinematographer James Friend are able to maintain audience orientation while never sacrificing artistic vision. The battles look, and therefore feel, grounded, gritty and gruesome.

Cinematographer Friend masterfully lights and composes his frame not only in the battle scenes but in the quieter moments. There are shots of landscapes, trees and the sky in this film that would look right at home in a Malick movie or framed in a museum.

The acting, particularly Felix Kammerer as the lead Paul Baumer and Albrecht Schuch as Kat, are terrific as both men bring quiet intensity and sensitivity to their roles. Kammerer’s mastery of the thousand-yard stare and Schuch’s innate humanity elevate their performances and the movie.

The rest of the cast are subtle and superb as well, bringing life to what in lesser hands would be well-worn war movie stereotypes.

The film is not perfect though, as the narrative break aways to follow the ceasefire negotiations among the German contingent of bureaucrats, headed by the great Daniel Bruhl as Matthias Erzberger, feel like they should be in a different movie. These sections are interesting, but they break the spell of the film by removing the viewer from the myopic madness in the muck and mire of the front lines. I understand the desire to want to take a glimpse of things from 10,000 feet so to speak, but in this case, it works against the film’s better interests and drama.

That said, the rest of the movie is glorious as it vibrates with a sort of dramatic Malickian chaos mixed with existential inevitability that is captivating, compelling, exhausting and unnerving.

This movie should be mandatory viewing for Americans, the majority of whom are vociferous cheerleaders for the current war in Ukraine. These American idiots with Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bios are no different that the young German men at the center of All Quiet on the Western Front eager to prove their worth and courage, except, of course, that those Germans didn’t just pose and preen about war on social media, they actually went and fought and died in it.

The neo-con, armchair tough guys who’ve gotten us into every war of my lifetime, of which we’ve won none, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and now Ukraine, are like the bloated and bloviating military bureaucrats in All Quiet on the Western Front as they’re eager for other men to pay dearly for the exorbitant faux-nationalist checks that their flag-waving egos were so excited to write. The neo-cons con is to destroy their host nation from within as they accuse dissenters from the self-destruction of being traitors (or in the case of Ukraine - Putin shills and apologists) . These nefarious neo-cons always demand other, more masculine, working class men sacrifice their bodies, minds and souls for the sake of the neo-con’s fragile eggshell egos and deep-seated genital insecurities.

If you follow media narratives throughout history, this war in Ukraine has all the markings of America’s typical modern war psyops/propaganda playbook. There’s scaremongering using the delusional domino theory about some expansionist enemy/ideology, be it communism (Vietnam), Islamism (Afghanistan/Iraq) or Putinism (Russia), that will conquer the earth if the U.S. don’t role play as Churchill to some new Hitler. And there’s always a new Hitler, an alleged madman who is a history breaking tyrant that is simultaneously an evil genius and an incorrigible, bloodthirsty idiot. Today it’s the media-crafted Bond villain Putin. Before him it was the madman Saddam, or the madman Qadaffi, or the madman Bin Laden, or the madman Ho Chi Minh and on and on and on.

Will watching All Quiet on the Western Front wake up American morons from the establishment media’s Russo-phobic propaganda spell and remove from the memory hole the U.S.’s and Ukraine’s role in starting and enflaming this war? No, probably not. Nor will it disabuse Americans of the notion that they are the good guys and that this is a good war, as there are no good wars and there are no good guys fighting in them.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a fantastic movie, but it’s not a miracle worker and it would take a miracle for America and the rest of the West to wake up from their propaganda-fueled dream of the war in Ukraine as history-making hero machine and to see it for what it really is, a senseless, money-making meat grinder, which contains within it the possibility of a worldwide war of unimaginable carnage.

All Quiet on the Western Front is Germany’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It most definitely deserves to be nominated, and in my mind is thus far the number one contender for the award.

You should watch All Quiet on the Western Front because it’s an excellent film, and also because it contains lessons that we in the West should already know but apparently need to learn over again, and fast…namely, that war is hell and only devils want it.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever

On this episode, Barry and I grab our magical dufflebag filled with a never-ending yet mysteriously weightless supply of beer and head into a war zone to discuss The Greatest Beer Run Ever, the new Peter Farrelly movie currently streaming on Apple TV. Topics discussed include awful acting, bad movies about great stories, and the curse of endless and empty streaming content.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 78 - Blonde

On this episode, Barry and I let the wind blow up our dresses as we discuss the bleak Marylin Monroe bio-pic Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas. Topics discussed include the mystery of Marilyn's Cuban accent and shifting aspect ratios, Netflix's curious foray into the land of NC-17, and the incandescence of the one and only Marilyn Monroe.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 78 - Blonde

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Blonde: A Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ambitious mess of an arthouse movie that misfires on all cylinders.

If you’ve always wanted to see an artistically decadent, narratively and dramatically impotent, nearly three-hour-long slog that recounts the endless abuse Marilyn Monroe endured during her tumultuous life, starring an actress with an absurdly pronounced Cuban accent playing the American icon…have I got the movie for you!

Blonde, the new NC-17 rated Netflix film based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, which stars Ana de Armas and is directed by Andrew Dominik, is a most puzzling movie.

The film, like the novel upon which it is based, takes dramatic license with the facts of Monroe’s tragic and turbulent life, and is a fictional biography despite chronicling some true events.

The only way I can make sense of this baffling film is to look at it not as a bio-pic, but as a horror movie with Monroe reduced to being the pretty victim trying to survive the devil stalking her. The film does nothing but portray Marilyn as she endures the continuous nightmare of her existence. There’s no reprieve for Marilyn, or the audience, as she drags the heavy cross of her exploitable beauty on the death march to the New Golgotha known as Hollywood. There’s also no growth or salvation for Marilyn…or the audience…just the repetitious banging of the drum of despair.

On this journey Marilyn is subjected to a cavalcade of either vicious, or cruel, or viciously cruel men, all of whom are icons or icon adjacent, who use and abuse her like Roman centurions at a crucifixion, the only difference being the centurions assigned to torture Jesus knew not what they did, while Marilyn’s abusers know exactly what they were doing.

My thesis that this is a horror film, which to be clear - still doesn’t make it a good film, requires the audience to understand and accept the fact that Hollywood is a death cult, fame is an evil demon, and that Monroe’s beauty and powerful sexual energy were not blessings but curses inflicted upon her.

In real life, Marilyn Monroe was captured by an energy and archetype that absolutely devoured her. Like two other of her contemporaries, Elvis and Marlon Brando, who became avatars for explosive sexual energy during the sexually repressed 1950’s, Marilyn was ultimately destroyed under the weight of her archetypal burden. Think of it as Dionysus’s revenge.

Unfortunately, director Andrew Dominik is incapable of exploring his subject matter with any such depth, and instead simply turns Blonde into abuse porn, and in so doing turns other American icons, like JFK and Joe DiMaggio, into vacuous props meant to convey the obvious point about the nefariousness of the American patriarchy.

Dominik is a visual stylist, of that there is no doubt, and I genuinely enjoyed his film The Assassination of the Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but on Blonde, Dominik is all style and no substance.

Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin use a plethora of interesting stylistic choices, like going from black and white to color and back again, and changing aspect ratios, but these choices lack coherence and dramatic intent.

As I pondered the film and Dominik’s distinct visual choices, I wondered if he was attempting to make a larger statement about the disposable nature of Monroe’s life and career, something along the lines of things being ‘pretty but meaning-less’. Or maybe Dominik was trying to make a movie about the exploitation of Marilyn Monroe by actually exploiting the image of Marilyn Monroe, and the actress playing her. Those potential intentions are astonishingly vapid, but Blonde is so bad I’m left grasping at straws to decipher it.  

Even the film’s politics are incomprehensible and at cross-purposes as the movie is both making a statement against the patriarchy but then also presenting a rabidly pro-life argument in regards to abortion. And the abortion stuff is not some throw away scene, it’s a recurring theme and one that is actually the most disturbing and most effective part of the film, but it will no doubt infuriate the movie’s feminist target audience.

Blonde has gotten quite a bit of attention because it’s the first Netflix film to be rated NC-17. I’m sure that rating will attract a few perverts hoping to see my two favorite things, nudity and gratuitous sex, but I found the NC-17 rating to be, pardon the pun, overblown. While the movie does feature a bevy of boobs, all of which belong to Ana de Armas, which are both real and spectacular, the sex is extraordinarily subdued and the nudity confined to the waist up. And while there is some adult subject matter dramatized, it’s nothing that an R rating wouldn’t comfortably cover.

Speaking of Ana de Armas, she is undoubtedly a beauty, but she is no Marilyn Monroe. De Armas is not well cast as she doesn’t particularly look like Marilyn and she most definitely doesn’t sound like her. De Armas’ Cuban accent, which manifests in the cadence of her speech and in pronunciation of certain letters and words, is egregiously incessant and a constant distraction. De Armas playing Marilyn Monroe is like having Desi Arnaz play JFK, or Matthew McConaughey play Fidel Castro.

To her credit though, de Armas does give her all in the very demanding role, but that said she is still terribly miscast.

There are really no other performances of note in the film. Bobby Cannavale plays Joe DiMaggio and Adrien Brody plays Arthur Miller and there’s not anything of interest there. Julianne Nicholson plays Marilyn’s crazy mom and she does crazy mom things.

Blonde felt to me like an arthouse bio-pic gone wrong. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Jackie(2016), which is a much better film, and Spencer(2021), which is not as bad as Blonde but still isn’t a good film (both are by director Pablo Larrain). I also thought of David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive, which does a substantially better job at depicting the corrosive and corrupt nature of Hollywood on women and the devil’s bargain that is fame.

Ultimately, Blonde is, unlike Marilyn Monroe, entirely forgettable. If I’m being generous, I’d call it an ambitious failure of a film. If I’m being blunt, I’d call it a rancid shit sandwich. Either way, Blonde is not something you should ever trouble yourself to watch even though it’s ‘free’ on Netflix. The time spent watching this misfire of a movie could be much better spent literally doing anything else…like seeing Marilyn Monroe’s performance in a small, breakout role in The Asphalt Jungle. When you see her on-screen for the first time you instantly get why Marilyn became the most famous woman of the 20th century.

©2022

Nope: A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here. Just more cinematic fool’s gold from Jordan Peele.

Back in 2017, writer/director Jordan Peele became an adored critical darling, and Academy Award winning screenwriter, for his box office hit, socially-aware horror film, Get Out.

What critics and many fans failed to realize at the time, and still seem completely blind to, is the fact that Peele became the new “it” director not because he’s a great talent or because Get Out was some brilliant piece of moviemaking, he isn’t and it wasn’t, but rather because liberals were in such a furious tizzy over Trump’s election victory and presidency that they were defiantly grasping for anything at all to hold on to and celebrate. As a decades-long Trump-loather myself, I understood the impulse, but refused to fall under its disorienting spell, especially when it comes to cinema.

Get Out was the perfect movie to be celebrated in this rather insane moment for two reasons. First, because it was a movie about how awful white people are and white liberals could signal their virtue and how they were “one of the good ones” by watching it and being vociferous in their praise of it.

Secondly, Get Out was directed by a black man and critics were desperate to heap praise upon anything that made them seem “not racist” aka “one of the good ones” and which inflated the “diversity and inclusion” balloon.

I said it at the time, and it only holds more-true today, that Get Out is an absurdly over-rated movie written and directed by an even more absurdly over-rated director. If Get Out had come out at any other time it would have been quickly, and rightfully, forgotten for being shallow, tinny, amateurish and vapid.  

Proof of my thesis regarding Jordan Peele and his sub-par work was evident in Peele’s follow-up film, Us (read my review of it here). Us was, like Get Out, somewhat clever in theory, but an absolute shitshow in execution. Whatever kernel of a good idea Peele had regarding Us, eventually grew to be an unwieldy and incoherent mess of a movie. But since Peele has been tapped as the new “it” director, critics, and many fans, pretended that Us was brilliant. So-it-goes in matters of cultural/political faith, I suppose.

Which brings us to Peele’s latest cinematic venture, Nope.

Nope, a sort of sci-fi/horror/western, stars Academy-Award winner Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings, the depressive O.J. and the aggressively depressing Emerald Haywood respectively, who grew up on their family’s horse farm in Southern California. The family raises and trains horses to be used in the movie business and are actually related to the first man to have ever been captured on film (a black man riding a horse).

Things start to get interesting for O.J. and Emerald when some very strange, UFO-related stuff starts happening on the ranch.

I will refrain from any further exploration of the plot to avoid spoilers but will answer these specific questions about Nope.

Is it coherent? Nope.

Is it well-written? Nope.

Is it well directed? Nope.

Is it well-acted? Nope.

Is it a good movie? Nope.

The reality is that Nope is a frustrating and irritating, middling misfire of a nonsensical sci-fi horror film that has nothing of import to say about much of anything.

Of course, other critics are slobbering all over Nope for the same exact reasons they slobbered all over Get Out and Us. But critical and fan praise of Peele is becoming more and more untenable as he continues to churn out these cinematic shit sandwiches that are critical fool’s gold.

It’s somewhat amusing to me that one of the least comprehensible parts of the movie concerns a neighbor of the Haywood siblings, the Park family, whose patriarch is a former child star named Jupe (Steven Yeun). Jupe suffered a horrible tragedy while working on a sitcom in the 90’s, and that story is infinitely more interesting than the Haywood’s UFO stuff. In fact, I’d love to see a movie about Jupe and the calamity he witnessed rather than the tedious tale of the Haywood ranch.

I mean, I get it, Jupe’s story and the Haywood’s story in Nope all deal with the horror of being moved down on the food chain as well as the exploitative nature and dangers of fame and fortune, but Peele seems allergic to profundity and brings nothing unique or mildly interesting to those topics.

As for the cast, Daniel Kaluuya is a terrific actor and a very pleasant screen presence, but his O.J. feels flat because there’s nothing for him to grab onto in the script.

Keke Palmer may be a good actress, I don’t know, but her Emerald is one of the most annoying characters imaginable and grates to epic proportions every moment she appears on-screen.

Other characters, like Steven Yeun’s Jupe and Brandon Perea’s Angel, are so thinly written as to be vacant caricatures. Although to be fair, Yeun at least fills his vacuously written Jupe with some semblance of inner life which is missing from the rest of the cast.

The problem is that due to the fact that there is almost no character development beyond exposition, it’s next to impossible to feel any connection to these people or to ultimately care what happens to them.

Other issues with the film abound as well. For example, the special effects are second-rate…and they include one of the more laughable on-screen monsters in recent memory as it looks like an origami jellyfish or a paper-mache octopus or a headache-inducing screen-saver or something.

Peele’s writing on Nope is scattered, his pacing lethargic, his storytelling anemic and the entire affair feels egregiously bloated with its excruciating 131-minute runtime.

Peele also loads the film with a series of empty scares that are false and cheap and ultimately undermine audience trust in the film and the director. This tactic can sometimes work in building tension, but in Nope it ends up strangling audience anticipation until in the climactic final act they are left with nothing to give and nothing to care for.

Nope will do fine at the box office because there is basically nothing else out there and the weak-kneed critics and Peele fans will relentlessly bang the drum for its brilliance, but let’s be real…Nope is not a good movie.

And finally…can we stop? Can we just fucking stop pretending that Jordan Peele is Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg? He isn’t. Hell, he isn’t even M. Night Shyamalan for god’s sake.

Look, I get it. I thought Alex Garland was the next big director after I saw Ex Machina. Unfortunately, he wasn’t (and it should be said that Ex Machina is an infinitely better film and better made film than Get Out) and has churned out two dogs in its wake.

Other people fell for Jason Reitman in the same way after his early films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air), which, like Get Out, were all ridiculously and egregiously over-rated.

It happens, critics and movie fans can get carried away and envision a bright career for an “important” movie maker that requires talent you think you see but which isn’t really there. But you’ve got to snap out of your spell of infatuation when the facts are contrary to your fandom inspired delusions.  

In regards to Peele, Jason Reitman is the perfect example because, at best, Jordan Peele is maybe…maybe, a mediocre moviemaking talent who has successfully pulled the wool over critics and fan’s eyes, just like Jason Reitman did. That’s it. Jordan Peele is Jason Reitman, and now we are just waiting to see if critics will ever wake up to that moribund reality.

As for Nope, it is not a good sci-fi film, or a good horror film, or a good western, or a good social satire. I can honestly report that not only do you not need to see this movie in the theatres, you actually never need to see this movie at all. If someone wants to take you to see it, just look them in the eye and say “nope”.

©2022

The Northman: A Review

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

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

 My Recommendation: SEE IT. This weird, arthouse action movie is flawed but also unique, interesting and gorgeously photographed, so best to see it in the theatre.

The Northman, directed and co-written by arthouse darling Robert Eggers, may be the most brazenly bizarre big budget action movie in cinema history.

The best way I can describe the film is to say that it’s like if Conan the Barbarian and Hamlet had a baby and Norse mythology was its wet nurse.

Writer/Director Eggers is one of the more intriguing talents to come along in recent years, and he made a name for himself with his distinctly stylized, visually impeccable, first two films, The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). Those movies were arthouse ventures through and through, and while I liked The Witch much more than The Lighthouse, I respected what Eggers was up to in both films.

With The Northman, Eggers is stepping out of his comfort zone and stepping up in budget to an estimated $90 million, in an attempt to expand his audience with a more action-oriented movie. With more money comes, well, less responsibility, as Eggers lost the power of final cut of his movie, leaving him no doubt unhappy to have his film be left at the mercy of soulless suits from the studio.

The plot of The Northman is as old-school as it gets, as it’s a revenge story, one which has no doubt been told and retold since the dawn of history.

The film follows the trials and tribulations of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard), a Viking prince who sets out on a journey to avenge the murder of his father and capture of his mother.  

Amleth’s odyssey is epic in concept but Eggers makes it feel intimate in execution, whether that is a plus or minus is entirely a matter of taste, with arthouse aficionados probably liking it and action fans being disappointed by it.  

What makes The Northman so fascinating as an action movie, and it is an action movie as there are some gorgeously shot battle sequences that are as good as it gets in the genre, is that scattered among the usual revenge story twists and turns are scenes that explore the esoteric spirituality of the Vikings. To put it mildly, these scenes are weird, and viewers who signed up to just watch the spectacle of a Viking kicking some ass will no doubt be irritated and annoyed by such artsy distractions.

I found these forays into the Norse netherworlds to be fascinating, but I am admittedly a strange person and that sort of stuff is right up my alley, so take that for what it is worth.

The biggest problem for me about The Northman was not the winding story or the esoteric detours, but rather something much more basic…namely that the film’s star, Alexander Skarsgard, isn’t up to the job.

To be clear, Skarsgard isn’t a bad actor and he doesn’t embarrass himself as Amleth, the Berserker on a mission. No, the trouble with Skarsgard is that he simply lacks that “it” factor which all movie stars need. Yes, he’s is impossibly handsome and he is in incredible shape for the role of a Viking – for example, his traps are absurd, but Skarsgard just doesn’t have the requisite supply of charisma, magnetism and blind ambition to make a compelling enough screen presence.

Skarsgard is in nearly every frame of this film and yet he never jumps off the screen. Unlike his co-star Anya Taylor Joy, who obviously loves the camera and the camera loves her back, Skarsgard often times seems to be trying to hide from the camera and by default, audiences. In contrast, Taylor Joy’s ambition oozes out of her every pore, and you see her seek out the camera at every opportunity, but Skarsgard feels like a reluctant leading man.

That said he does pull off the action scenes with aplomb, but it’s when things slow down, that Skarsgard recedes into his shell.

As for Anya Taylor Joy, who plays Olga – a Slavic Sorceress, she makes the most of her supporting role. Taylor Joy was fantastic in Eggers’ first film The Witch, and her career is in steep ascendance, and you can see why in The Northman. She steals nearly every scene in which she appears, and her magnetism and dynamism are absolutely undeniable. She is a star who is in the early stages of going supernova.

Other actors in supporting roles, like Ethan Hawke as Amleth’s father-king, and Willem Dafoe as a court jester, do solid work in smaller roles.

Nicole Kidman plays Amleth’s mother Queen Gudrun, and while I admire the attempt, she seems to be out of sync with the acting style of the rest of the film.

Unfortunately, Claes Bang, who plays Amleth’s nemesis Fjolnir, is not up to his task and makes for an underwhelming villain.

The real star of The Northman is director Robert Eggers and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. There are sequences in this movie, most notably the climactic battle scene and an earlier scene of a raid on a village by Vikings, that are stunning to behold. Gloriously and gorgeously photographed, The Northman is elevated from a run of the mill blood, beards and brutality Viking tale into a piece of semi-populist cinematic art.

The screening of The Northman I attended was the first screening on the Sunday of opening weekend, and it was sold out. I saw the film in a mall in a rural part of upstate New York, and the audience reactions were very muted. No doubt audience expectations of a blood and guts action movie were thwarted by Eggers’ unique arthouse style and narrative decisions.

Due to my experience of seeing the film in “rural America”, I can’t help but feel that The Northman will under-perform at the box office because it’s arthouse weirdness will alienate regular viewers and negative word of mouth will be the kiss of death.

That would be a shame, as The Northman isn’t a great movie, but it is a good and interesting one. Despite its weak leading man, The Northman is a captivating cinematic experience that is worth the effort to see in theatres…but you should hurry as I don’t think it’ll be in theatres long, and its stunning cinematography will seem less so on a smaller screen.

In conclusion, if all action movies boasted the masterful artistry and depth of understanding of The Northman, then cinema would be a much more interesting and relevant artform than it is now. We need more movies like The Northman, not less. I pray to Odin that he makes it so.

©2022

Everything Everywhere All at Once: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Not worth paying to see on the big screen but definitely worth checking out when it hits a streaming service.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, the new film written and directed by the “Daniels”, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, which is currently in theatres, has gotten a bevy of buzz and is the sleeper hit of the Spring.

It’s easy to understand why as on its surface Everything Everywhere All at Once is an exceedingly ambitious movie to the point of being audacious.

For example, one way to describe the film would be to say that it’s an existential kung fu family dramedy with weaponized dildos, butt plugs and lesbians with hot dog fingers. That sounds pretty audacious to me.

But barely beneath that zany surface lies a foundational narrative that is so orthodox and generic as to be trite.

At its core the story of Everything Everywhere All at Once is a simple family drama about a Chinese immigrant woman, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who is ashamed of her troubled lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), judged harshly by her old school, patriarchal Chinese father (James Hong), and stuck in a lifeless marriage to her feckless husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan).

That baseline story acts as a launching pad for the metaphysical madness of multi-verses, and the accompanying weaponized dildos, butt plugs and lesbians with hot dog fingers, to rain down on Evelyn like a major monsoon.

You see, outside of her mundane existence running a Simi Valley laundromat in our universe, Evelyn exists in an infinite number of other universes and she discovers that she can access her more powerful self in those other universes in order to fight against an inter-dimensional villain named Jobu, who seeks to destroy everything everywhere.

If all that sounds confusing, it sort of is, but not so much so that you can’t enjoy the silly spectacle of the movie. The multi-verse jumping may not make much logical sense if you stop to think about it, but the movie keeps things moving pretty fast so you never stop to question what the hell is happening, you just enjoy the mad-capped mayhem.

On the bright side, Marvel’s recent full-fledged foray into multi-verses has definitely paved the way for audiences to accept the universe bending of Everything Everywhere All at Once, but unfortunately, Marvel mainstreaming multi-verses has also blunted this film’s narrative edginess.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is definitely fun and entertaining and maybe even at times poignant, but for a film that poses as being profoundly philosophical in nature, it is remarkable for being completely devoid of profundity, and ultimately ends up feeling like a lot of empty calories.  God knows there’s nothing wrong with empty calories, and everybody likes a treat now and then, but let’s not confuse Jujubes with Filet Mignon.

The philosophical message of the movie is the equivalent of those posters with a cute kitten hanging onto a branch with the words “Hang in There!” written underneath.

The narrative nuttiness of the movie papers over the film’s stifling conventionality. The drama of the Asian immigrant experience and the accompanying tension between generations feels so played out at this point as to be cliché, and Everything Everywhere All at Once doesn’t bring anything new to the table. And the inclusion of an LGBTQ storyline into that orthodox immigrant tale feels entirely forced and like a bit of blatant pandering.

The movie also suffers because despite a plethora of action sequences, it isn’t particularly well-shot. Visually, the movie feels very flat and rather stale, and the action sequences are energetic but not particularly original.

One of the best parts of the film though is that across the board the cast does terrific work.

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn is captivating from start to finish, and she commands the viewer’s attention like the middle-aged movie star and great actress that she is. This movie never works without Yeoh, as her physical and emotional presence in the film elevates the material enormously.

But the greatest acting revelation in the movie is unquestionably Ke Huy Quan as Waymond, Evelyn’s husband. Quan was a child star, you may remember him as Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom back in 1984, but his career floundered as he aged and he basically dropped out of acting about 25 years ago.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Quan is back and he is spectacularly good. He switches between his “real world” Waymond, and the Waymond of other universes with remarkable ease and believability. In one sequence, he goes from being weak-kneed Waymond to a sort of Chow Yun-fat looking leading man, and the transition is entirely seamless and quite stunning. It’s a shame that Quan got chewed up and spit out by Hollywood, but I found it exhilarating to have him back and for him to be so outstanding.

Also quite good is Jamie Lee Curtis as Deidre, a surly IRS inspector. Curtis fully inhabits the uncomfortable skin of Deidre with aplomb and seems to thoroughly enjoy her screen time as the irritatingly enigmatic shlub.

On the whole, Everything Everywhere All at Once isn’t a great film, it’s rather a fun yet flimsy movie that entertained but didn’t enlighten. It’s popcorn entertainment masquerading as philosophical cinema and edgy art. That said, if you manage your expectations, it’s certainly worth checking out when it hits a streaming service, but not worth shelling out hard earned money to see at the theatre.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 65 - Pig

On this episode, Barry and I dig through the dirt to discover the truffle-like gem that is Pig, starring Nicholas Cage. Topics discussed include the strange career arcs of Nic Cage and director Michael Sarnoski, Matthew McConaughey as used-care salesman, defying audience expectations, and the shameful paucity of competently made movies in our cinematically troubled times.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 65 - Pig

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Film 'Come and See', the Russian Psyche, and the War in Ukraine

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT NOW. Arguably the greatest war film, and greatest anti-war film, ever made.

‘COME AND SEE’ IS VITAL TO UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIAN PSYCHE REGARDING THE WAR IN UKRAINE

A few years ago, in order to commemorate the 75th anniversary of V.E. Day, I wrote a list of the best war films ever made that was published at RT.com, an English-language Russian news outlet. I got a lot of feedback on my list, as readers shared their favorite war films and compared them to mine. Interestingly, I was inundated with emails and comments from Russian readers who were outraged I failed to have Come and See, the 1985 Soviet war film directed by Elem Klimov, not only not on my list, but not at the top of it.

The truth was I hadn’t seen Come and See because it isn’t widely or easily available here in the U.S. The film, which for years was nearly impossible to find on any streaming service, is now available on the Criterion Channel (which is wonderful and a must have service for any cinephile). Having finally watched the movie I can now say that those Russian readers were right and I was wrong…Come and See deserves to be on the top of the list of best war films ever made. It is a terrible injustice that the film has thus far remained mostly undiscovered in the West as it is an astonishing piece of cinematic art.

I think now, as the war in Ukraine rages into its second month, it’s most imperative that Westerners watch Come and See in order to better understand historical context and how it effects the collective Russian psyche regarding perceived enemies on its western border.

The dramatically scintillating Come and See is unquestionably a cinematic masterpiece, and I don’t use that word lightly. The film chronicles the odyssey of Florian Gaishun, a young teenage boy trying to survive the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Republic of Belarus in 1943.

Florian is eager to join a rag tag group of Soviet partisans in a guerrilla war against the Nazis. But his mother, afraid to be left alone in their small village with two young twin daughters, is adamant he stays home.

But once Florian discovers a discarded but usable weapon buried in the dirt, the partisans come to his house and officially conscript him into service.

Thus begins Florian’s coming of age story, which is a trial by fire where a Focke-Wulf 189 German reconnaissance plane haunts the skies above his head like a blood-thirsty vulture and Nazi savagery dominates and decimates the fragile world around him.

Florian is thrust into most harrowing journey through the brutality of war and the darkness of the human heart, and must endure the most hellacious of circumstances and devastating of tragedies.

It’s impossible to adequately describe Florian’s gruesome crucifixion upon the cross of war, and the ungodly horrors he must suffer. The viewer must simply bear witness to them too and suffer the same visceral anguish as Florian.

The film boasts two terrific performances, one from Aleksei Kravchenko as Florian, and the other Olga Miranova as Glasha.

Kravchenko’s face over the course of the film is a roadmap of the horrors he’s experienced. His ‘thousand-yard stare’ is a monument to the soul-crushing and heartbreaking ordeal he’s undergone.

Miranova is electrifying as Glasha, a young woman Florian meets in the early days of his time with the partisan guerrillas. Miranova is like a beautiful, gaping wound walking the earth, trying to avoid catastrophe but sentenced to an endless parade of calamities.

Director Klimov pulls no punches on Come and See, as he masterfully, using a variety of clever and intriguing filmmaking techniques, such as a split diopter lens and the use of reduced sound to heighten drama, tells Florian’s tale. Klimov’s brilliant direction immerses the viewer in the hell of war, as well as expresses the collective rage against the Nazis that unleashed a wave of brutality and barbarity against the Soviets that is staggering to contemplate.

This is why it’s so imperative that Westerners watch Come and See, because it so forcefully conveys the palpable fear, anxiety and angst left on the Soviet/Russian psyche by the barbarity of the Nazi invasion forty years after it happened, as well as today.

Hitler sent his very best divisions when he invaded the Soviet Union because he understood that to win the wider war the Nazis needed to destroy the USSR and usurp its plethora of resources, most notably oil and wheat, which would then fuel and feed Hitler’s war machine.

Hitler, like Napoleon before him, found out the hard way that invading Russia is never a good idea, as the winters are brutal and the people made of extraordinarily stern and resilient stuff.

Roughly 30 million Soviets died in World War II (compared to about 418,000 Americans), but their deaths were not in vain as it was the Soviets who broke the Nazi war machine’s back and won World War II. But there isn’t a Russian family that didn’t suffer immensely during the war and for generations after, and the psychological damage from that trauma still resonates today.

In the West, when we hear talk of Russia wanting to “de-nazify” Ukraine, it sounds like a vacuous talking point. To Russians it deeply resonates though because it’s driven by a palpable existential fear – a fear perfectly captured in Come and See.

My intention here is not to try and change any minds regarding the war in Ukraine, as I’m aware enough to know that when emotions are as inflamed as they are now, and the bullshit propaganda is piling up so high you need wings to stay above it, as it is now, appealing to reason and logic is a fool’s errand.

But what I am here to do is to try and get people to watch Come and See for its cinematic mastery, and its collective cultural insights, so that they can at least understand the deeper psychological and historical context of Russia’s actions and impulses.

For instance, most people in the US don’t know this but in 2014 the US backed a coup in Ukraine that overthrew a democratically elected government. The overthrown government was more inclined to Russia’s viewpoint, and the newly-installed government was beholden to the US.

To Americans, that bit of history is largely unknown, but to Russians it’s not only well-known, but deeply troubling and anxiety-inducing.

The same is true of the fact that the newly installed Ukrainian government sat idly by as 42 pro-Russian activists were burned alive in the Trade Union House in Odessa, Ukraine post-coup in 2014, something which most Americans don’t know but that Russians know all too well (and which is remarkably reminscernt of one of the more horrifying scenes in Come and See).

Another example, which most Americans don’t know but of which Russians are keenly aware, is that this same US installed Ukrainian government then banned the Russian language and went to war with ethnic Russians in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine. Since that war started in 2014, nearly 14,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians, including women and children, have been killed.

Another piece of historical context largely ignored in the US is that when Russia and Ukraine signed a ceasefire/peace agreement called the Minsk Agreements (Minsk Protocol signed in 2014, and Minsk II – a ceasefire signed in 2015), it seemed peace was possible, but Ukraine and the US ignored those agreements and the slaughter of ethnic Russians continued in the Donbass.

To watch Come and See gives Americans an opportunity to see the developments in Ukraine through the eyes of Russians. To Russians, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which western media reported on extensively for years as a battalion of devilishly devout Nazis but which now ignores that context, is not an outlier, but the crux of the issue. As evidenced by the brutal wholesale slaughter of an entire Belorussian village in Come and See, which the film informs us was something that happened to 628 Belorussian villages at the hands of the Nazis during the war, Nazi bloodthirst isn’t a speculative talking point to Russians, it’s a historical fact and a traumatic trigger.

The way Russians see it, the US installed a Nazi friendly regime in Ukraine, and Russians remember what the Nazis did the last time they had power in the region…and it was genocidal in its scope and scale and demonic in its unabashed cruelty.

When Russians see pro-Russian activists burned alive in Odessa, and ethnic Russians massacred in the Donbass, the horrors of World War II as exquisitely captured in Come and See are conjured in all their grueling and gruesome savagery.

I understand that many Americans, fed a hearty diet of establishment media Zelensky worship as well as ludicrous propagandistic tales of the Ghost of Kiev and the Heroes of Snake Island, might watch Come and See and interpret it very differently. For instance, Americans might watch Come and See and believe Putin to be Hitler and the modern-day Russians in Ukraine the equivalent of the Nazis in Belarus in 1943.

I disagree with that assessment and find it to be historically illiterate and painfully myopic, but that said, I completely understand why, after years of relentless Russo-phobic propaganda, people would be conditioned to feel that way.

Regardless of how you interpret Come and See, I whole-heartedly encourage you to watch it. By being one of the greatest war movies of all-time, Come and See succeeds in being the greatest anti-war movie of all-time.

As for the war in Ukraine…like all wars, I hate it and vehemently oppose it. I understand why it’s happening, what triggered it, the wider forces at play in it and the stakes involved in it, but I despise war in all its brutality and callousness and inhumanity.

I know most people don’t believe in this sort of thing anymore, and frankly I don’t blame them, but I ardently and earnestly pray every day that the war in Ukraine ends and an everlasting peace is found and prospers. Ukraine is nothing but a boiling cauldron of suffering, and the last thing this world needs is more suffering, the brilliant Come and See is a testament to that fact.

©2022

8th Annual Mickey™® Awards: 2021 Edition

THE MICKEY™® AWARDS

The Mickey™® Awards are undeniably the most prestigious award on the planet….and they almost didn’t happen this year. You see 2021 was the worst year for cinema in recent memory, so singling out movies to celebrate with the highest honor in the land seemed an impossible task.

For example, this past January I was invited on my friend George Galloway’s radio show The Mother of All Talk Shows, to discuss the best cinema of 2021. In preparation I tried to put together a top ten list…and could not find ten, or even five, films I thought were decent enough to label as ‘good’, never mind ‘great’. Thankfully, George and I had an interesting conversation nonetheless about the state of cinema rather than a more conventional top ten list because I couldn’t conjure one.

The bottom line regarding 2021 is that there wasn’t a single great movie that came out this year. Not one. I have to admit that I was stunned by the cavalcade of cinematic failure on display, as a year where PT Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Adam McKay and Denis Villeneuve put out movies, and in Ridley Scott’s case he put out two, should have some gems in it, but this year had nothing but dismal duds.

Let’s not kid ourselves, last year was no walk in the park either, but this year was even worse. But what’s more alarming to me than the deplorable state of cinema is the even more deplorable state of film criticism. It felt like this year was the year where critics just decided that slightly below mediocre was the equivalent of greatness. Never have I felt so disheartened by cinema and criticism.

To think it was just three years ago that we were blessed with a bountiful bevy of brilliance. In 2019 we had four legitimately great films, Parasite, Joker, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Irishman, as well as significant arthouse films like Ad Astra, Malick’s A Hidden Life, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Claire Denis’ High Life, in addition to finely-crafted, middle-brow entertainment like 1917 and Ford v Ferrari. All of those films were significantly better than anything that came out in 2021. All of them.

But, after consulting with the suits on the Mickey™® Committee, we have come to an agreement that the Mickeys™® will take place this year but under protest. The Mickeys™® retain the right to revoke these Mickeys™® at any time in the future if we feel like it.

Before we get started…a quick rundown of the rules and regulations of The Mickeys™®. The Mickeys™® are selected by me. I am judge, jury and executioner. The only films eligible are films I have actually seen, be it in the theatre, via screener, cable, streamer or VOD. I do not see every film because as we all know, the overwhelming majority of films are God-awful, and I am a working man so I must be pretty selective. So that means that just getting me to actually watch your movie is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself…never mind being nominated or winning!

The Prizes!! The winners of The Mickey™® award will receive one acting coaching session with me FOR FREE!!! Yes…you read that right…FOR FREE!! Non-acting category winners receive a free lunch* with me at Fatburger (*lunch is considered one "sandwich" item, one order of small fries, you aren't actors so I know you can eat carbs, and one beverage….yes, your beverage can be a shake, you fat bastards). Actors who win and don't want an acting coaching session but would prefer the lunch…can still go straight to hell…but I am legally obligated to inform you that, yes, there WILL BE SUBSTITUTIONS allowed with The Mickey™® Awards prizes. If you want to go to lunch, I will gladly pay for your meal…and the sterling conversation will be entirely free of charge.

Enough with the formalities…let's start the festivities!!

BEST ACTOR

Joaquin Phoenix – C’Mon C’Mon – C’Mon C’Mon was not a great movie. In fact, it was one of the more irritating cinematic experiences I had this year because the kid character in the movie is so annoying and his mom is one of those awful mothers who creates a monster of a child but who still thinks she’s a great mother – an uncomfortably common species in Los Angeles. All that said, Phoenix eschews his signature combustibility and gives a subtle and powerful performance as just a regular guy. A quiet, touching and skilled piece of acting.

Oscar Isaac – The Card Counter – I’m not a fan of Oscar Isaac as I’ve found much of his work to be trite and shallow over the years. Much to my surprise, in The Card Counter, Oscar Isaac creates a character that is grounded whose internal wound is palpable. It is easily the best performance of his career.

Matt Damon – The Last Duel – Damon co-wrote this screenplay and took on the most complex of all the roles. Gone are his movie stardom and good guy persona, and front and center is an insecurity and egotism that fuels his delusion and destructiveness. A really finely tuned, well-crafted performance and a great piece of mullet acting.

And the Mickey™® goes to….

Joaquin Phoenix – C’Mon C’Mon: Phoenix is the best actor on the planet and in a year when no one even noticed, he still gave the best performance.

BEST ACTRESS

Jodi Comer – The Last Duel – Comer is an oasis in the conniving and brutish world of The Last Duel. She effortlessly changes the mask she is required to wear for each re-telling of the story of the attack on her character. Comer exudes a magnetism that you can’t teach, and it is on full display in her masterful performance here.

Olivia Colman – The Lost Daughter – Colman is the best actress working right now (readers should check out her work in the intriguing HBO mini-series Landscapers). Her presence elevates any project in which she appears. In the dreadful The Lost Daughter, Colman is unlikable, unlovable and unenjoyable, but from an acting perspective, she is un-look-away-able. Colman is on a Michael Jordan in the 90’s type of run right now and we should all just sit back and enjoy her brilliance.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Jodi Comer – The Last Duel: Comer has been overlooked by the multitude of other awards, but she wins the only one that matters.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jonah Hill – Don’t Look Up – Jonah Hill does nothing more than be Jonah Hill in Don’t Look Up, and while it isn’t exactly the greatest performance of all time, it is undeniably amusing.

Bradley Cooper – Licorice Pizza – Cooper goes all in as hair cutting mogul, lothario and Barbra Streisand boyfriend, Jon Peters. An absolutely batshit crazy performance of an even crazier person.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Bradley Cooper – Licorice Pizza: The most striking thing about Bradley Cooper has always been his ambition rather than his ability. But as Jon Peters he goes balls to the wall and injects much needed life into PT Anderson’s rare misfire.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Kathryn Hunter – The Tragedy of Macbeth – Hunter was so mesmerizing as the witches in Macbeth that it unnerved me. She contorted her body and voice to such elaborate degrees that she transformed into a supernatural presence that was captivating and compelling while also being chilling and repulsive. Pure brilliance.

Ariana DeBose – West Side Story – West Side Story was a useless cinematic venture, but the lone bright spot was DeBose, who brought a dynamic presence to every scene she stole.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Kathryn Hunter – The Tragedy of Macbeth: Hunter’s incredible performance is what acting is all about, and this Mickey is well-deserved.

BEST SCREENPLAY

The Last Duel – This screenplay, despite at times being a bit heavy handed in its sexual politics, was at least interesting in how it was structured (like Rashomon). It isn’t earth-shattering, but it’s better than anything else from this dismal year.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

The Last Duel: Well, I guess Matt Damon and Ben Affleck can put another trophy on the mantelpiece, but this time it’s the greatest trophy of all time.

BEST BLOCKBUSTER

Spider-Man: No Way Home – Not a great movie, but a really fun one. It gave fans anything and everything they could ever want out of a Spider-Man movie.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Spider-Man: No Way Home – What’s better than three Spider-Mans? One Mickey.

BEST DIRECTOR

Ridley Scott – The Last Duel – The duel that takes place at the end of The Last Duel, is the most compelling piece of filmmaking I saw this whole year. That’s not saying much…but it is saying something.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Ridley Scott – The Last Duel: This film is not among Scott’s greatest, by any stretch, but it at least is the best one he put out this year, as House of Gucci was god-awful. Regardless, Ridley showed he might have lost his fastball, but he can still bring some heat with The Last Duel.

BEST PICTURE

5. The Tragedy of Macbeth – An ambitious but very flawed re-telling of the old tale of the Macbeth by one Coen brother. Beautifully shot in a German expressionist style, the film suffered from uneven and sub-par performances, most notably from Frances McDormand.

4. Licorice Pizza – An uneven movie that had some very bright spots but ultimately lacked narrative cohesion and clarity of purpose. Was less mesmerizing than it was meandering.

3. Nightmare Alley – Gorgeous to look at, this very bleak meditation on the heart of darkness deep inside the American psyche was flawed but still managed to cast a spell on me.   

2. The Last Duel – Let’s not kid ourselves, The Last Duel is flawed, but it was good enough to land on the list of best movies of the year. That says a lot…and not all of it good.

1.Bo Burnham: Inside – Bo Burnham: Inside isn’t a movie, it’s a comedy special on Netflix. So why is it ranked number one on my list of films for 2021. Because there were no great films in 2021. None. And the thing that I watched this year that I thought was the most insightful, most artistically relevant and frankly the very best, was Bo Burnham: Inside. It should be an indicator to readers of how dreadful this year in cinema was, and how brilliant Bo Burnham is, that I, self-declared cinephile of cinephiles, would name a Netflix comedy special as the Mickey™® Award winner for Best Picture.

But no movie made me think or feel as much as Bo Burnham: Inside. It was a subversive, stunning, singular piece of genius caught on camera. And in honor of Bo Burnham’s undefinable and distinct brilliance, I hereby do honor him with the most prestigious award in all of art and entertainment…the Mickey™® Award.

And thus concludes another Mickey™® awards. We usually have quite the after party to celebrate the winners but due to the abysmal state of cinema, the after party is cancelled. Everyone should go home and think about what they’ve done and figure out a way to do better.

God willing the art of cinema will bounce back after two tough years in a row, and next year we’ll really have something to celebrate.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next year!!

©2022