"Everything is as it should be."

                                                                                  - Benjamin Purcell Morris

 

 

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Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

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

Barbarian: A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but smart and original horror movie that keeps you on your toes. If you like horror, you’ll love this.

I must confess that I don’t consider myself to be much of a horror movie afficionado. That’s not to say that I dislike horror movies, just that a horror movie has to be very good movie for me to enjoy it. I know people who just adore the genre and watch every horror movie and love it just because it’s a horror movie, but that’s not me.

My taste in horror is pretty specific, I love supernatural horror movies like The Shining, The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, and I also like classic horror films. For example, this year on the week of Halloween I watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as well as the Universal Monster Movie classics Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and thoroughly enjoyed them all for their originality, craftsmanship and artistry.

In contrast, I didn’t watch the most recent and allegedly last movie in the seemingly endless Halloween franchise, Halloween Ends. I loved the original Halloween (and most John Carpenter films) but I just don’t see the need to ever watch another Halloween movie.

In the wake of Halloween, the holiday not the movie, I did sit down and watch a new horror movie that has generated some buzz recently and which is now streaming on HBO Max. That movie is Barbarian, which is written and directed by Zach Cregger, and stars Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgaard and Justin Long.

Barbarian was released in theatres in September and despite having the most minimal of marketing budgets, it generated an impressive box office of $43.5 million against a $4.5 million budget.

I knew nothing about Barbarian prior to seeing it and the HBO description simply says that it tells the story of a woman who gets stuck sharing an AirBnB with a strange guy. Red flags immediately went up for me when I read that description as I assumed the movie was going to be just another flaccid #MeToo-men-are-monsters movie. As a devout kidnapping enthusiast who over the years has kept a multitude of women captive in my incredibly creepy basement, the last thing I want to watch is another scolding “men are awful” movie, thank you very much.

Fortunately, Barbarian masterfully plays with that expectation, and while it most certainly is a meta-textual meditation on #MeToo and the menace of men, which at times gets a bit too heavy-handed, it’s also a sophisticated sub-textual criticism and fascinating deconstruction of the #MeToo archetype.

I will not even begin to delve into the plot of Barbarian in order to avoid any semblance of spoilers, but will only say that, thankfully, the movie is so deftly directed and written by Zach Cregger that it’s never what you expect it to be. In fact, the film uses viewer’s preconceived notions, assumptions and cultural conditioning against them to always keep them off-balance. The film keeps its audience on its toes and is always one step ahead.

The film is structured in three acts with each successive act luring viewers deeper and deeper into the disorienting maze that is Barbarian.

The first act, starring Campbell and Skarsgaard, is so well-done as to be astonishing. Cregger plants various notions into the audience’s mind as to what type of film this is going to be…a Detroit-based Amityville Horror? A mixed-race The Sixth Sense or a mixed gender Single White Female? A straight-forward rip-off of Saw? Or is it an homage to all of the above and more?

Just when you think you know what’s going on in Barbarian, Cregger nudges you in a different direction and leads you by your nose down into a very dark and disorienting path.

Act two features the criminally under-appreciated Justin Long in a fantastically Long-ian role that spotlights his likeability and immense talent. Once again, I will not get into specifics of plot, but the jump from act one to act two is so jarring as to be cinematically glorious.

I admit that act three is the weakest of the three, and I found it to be considerably less engaging, intelligent and challenging, but, once again without giving anything away, I think that has to do with the type of horror movie that act three is paying homage to…which is my least favorite type of horror.

The thing I enjoyed the most about Barbarian is that while it’s certainly a #MeToo movie, it never panders and or signals its socio-political virtue too much. It tackles that complex topic with a nuance and complexity that is shocking for a low budget horror film.

Also tantalizing is how Cregger turns the film into a profound statement not just on the predatory nature of men but also on the apocalyptic results of Reaganism on America and the dehumanizing nature of poverty.

While there were certainly some flaws in Zach Cregger’s directing, most notably in a scene shot in dim light that fumbles perspective (to avoid spoilers I won’t say anything more than that) and act three’s many mis-steps, he’s obviously a filmmaker with some interesting ideas. One can only hope that Barbarian is a stepping stone for Cregger to make even better things.

The bottom-line regarding Barbarian is that if you are a horror afficionado you’ll love this movie as it operates from a deeply well-informed position in the genre. If you are, like me, a rather fair-weather horror fan, or are less-inclined to enjoy the genre, Barbarian is good enough to be worthwhile even though it sort of loses its way in act three.

The reality is that 2022 has thus far been an utterly abysmal year for cinema, so Barbarian, despite its glaring act three flaws, stands out because it’s a well-crafted, original piece of work, and that is reason enough for me to recommend it.  

 

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 81 - Barbarian

On this episode, Barry and I head to Detroit to confront our darkest fears as we talk all things Barbarian, the sneaky-good horror hit currently streaming on HBO Max. Topics discussed include the joy of Justin Long, the misery of the Motor City, and why exactly does Barry feel so at home in creepy basements?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 81 - Barbarian

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 80 - Black Adam

On this episode, Barry and I head to Kahndaq to go toe-to-toe with Black Adam, the new DC superhero movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Questions debated include to Rock or not to Rock? Will aliens murder us to put us out of our cinematic misery? And who ya got...The Rock or John Cena?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 80 - Black Adam

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Black Adam: One Rock to Rule Them All

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW..BUT THE MOVIE IS SO BAD IT DOESN’T MATTER!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A bad, boring movie.

I just watched Black Adam, the new DC superhero movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, which tells the tale of, you guessed it, D-level superhero Black Adam, a 5,000-year-old super being awakened to either wreak havoc on modern-day earth or save certain segments of it, and there’s only one thing I can take away from the film…that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is going to eventually be the President of the United States of America.

I don’t think The Rock is going to be president because the movie is great and he’s fantastic in it. The movie is garbage and The Rock makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Sir Laurence Olivier. To give an indication of how bad Black Adam is, after the film, my date, a much younger woman who, the last time we went to the movies we saw Eternals, debated which movie was worse. We concluded Eternals was worse…but it was close.

No, the reasons I think the The Rock will be president are multitude. The first of which is that, even people who loathe his consistently atrocious movies, like me, still begrudgingly say that The Rock seems like a nice guy because he does seem like a nice guy. Americans love the idea of the “nice guy” president, which is how we got not only dementia-addled pedophile Joe Biden, but also bailout Barack Obama – the drone king and Espionage Act champion, and sociopathic war criminal George W. Bush (remember – he was the guy people wanted to have a beer with…yikes!).

Secondly, like his presidential predecessors (most recently The Donald), The Rock is a raging sub-mediocrity that has consistently failed upward throughout his life despite not actually being good at anything but self-promotion. Once you get past his incessant charm offensive it becomes clear that The Rock is so devoid of substance that even his attempts at style feel vapid.

Coincidentally or not, The Rock’s presidential bona fides are fully on display in Black Adam as he kills people with ease and without a second thought, and does so with a cock-eyed smirk on his face. Like numerous previous presidents, The Rock as Black Adam kills all these people in the Middle-East, but unlike those other presidents, the people he kills in the movie are almost universally white. I’m sure some will see that as progress.

Put on your tinfoil hat because Black Adam feels like a rather shameless subliminal and symbolic two-hour campaign ad for The Rock’s presidency directed at the only constituency that truly matters – the behind-the-scenes, nefarious power brokers who pull the strings in our perpetually fucked-up world. The soulless, blood-thirsty beasts at the World Economic Forum, as well as members of The Council on Foreign Relations, The Club of Rome, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, and the Bilderberg Group, among many others, will adore Black Adam, and will no doubt loudly receive the message from The Rock that he is all-to-happy to fellate them and serve their interests, and they will act in kind to make him the charming front-man to cover for their relentless deviousness and deviancy.

For example, the Illuminati hand symbol is a major plot point in the film, and is the symbol for the superhero/anti-hero Black Adam. The Illuminati symbol leads to and unleashes Black Adam – a Christ/anti-Christ figure, awakening him from a 5,000-year slumber. Black Adam’s rise brings all the non-white peoples of Khandaq, some exploited shithole in the Middle-East, to join together to repel, of all things, Satan. Yes…Black Adam is basically the second-coming of Christ but this time he’s a ruthless killer who splits Satan in two – again more duality symbolism. You see Black Adam isn’t actually destroying Satan, he’s destroying the Christian archetype of the last 2,000-years. The new ruling archetype will be an even older, more barbaric, more savage, less forgiving one, and it will usher in an equally barbaric, savage and unforgiving age.

In terms of just pure modern-day, mindless American politics, The Rock’s Black Adam is a champion of non-white people, for that is who he represents and rules over. Black Adam even performs the most blatantly false of symbolic acts when he destroys his new throne atop Khandoq to show that he’s not a king, he’s a man of the people. How subtle.

Delicious conspiratorial musings aside…and boy are they delicious, Black Adam is less an actual movie than a series of dull movie trailers strung together with barely the least bit of coherence.

Black Adam is a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with the DC film universe. When DC goes otherworldly instead of gritty, things get shitty really quick. Gods and spells and ancient dog shit make for bad plots, bad cgi, bad action, and bad movies.

The action sequences in Black Adam are almost as dull as the non-action sequences, which is quite an accomplishment for director Jaume Collet-Serra. The film has all the visual style of month-old roadkill.

The script is, not surprisingly, laborious. The back story of Black Adam is convoluted and stupid, and the modern-day story lacks any and all interest and intrigue.

The characters are, across the board, moronic, annoying, or both.

The non-superhero characters, Adriana and her son Amon, are the types of people you pray get killed in every scene in which they appear. Amon, played by Bodhi Sabongui, is the most irritating character in any movie I’ve seen in recent memory. Amon is basically a Middle-Eastern Eddie Furlong from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and The Rock’s Black Adam is Arnold’s good guy Terminator who must be taught that killing is bad and what catch-phrases to say. Like Furlong’s teen John Connor, Amon skateboards – and is super fucking annoying. I’ve never wished so much for a character to be murdered in my entire life.

The collection of D minus level superhero characters aren’t any better.

Poor Aldis Hodge, a usually appealing screen-presence, plays a race-washed Hawkman and is given nothing but catch-phrase buffoonery to regurgitate. Noah Centineo is supposed to be the comic relief as Atom Smasher, but isn’t funny. Quintessa Swindell is a nearly invisible Cyclone, who may be the dullest superhero ever created. And finally, Pierce Brosnin plays Dr. Fate…and is actually pretty good. I’d prefer to see a Dr. Fate movie than a Black Adam one.

The Rock has been accused of always playing The Rock in his movies, and that holds true in Black Adam…and reinforces my subliminal and symbolic presidential campaign ad thesis.

The Rock’s biggest flaw as an actor is that he is completely devoid of any genuine charisma and is unconscionably dull. He is, at heart, a meathead wrestler who thinks arching an eyebrow is clever and meaningful.

To his credit, the guy is 50 and looks more like a superhero than any superhero we’ve ever seen, so he obviously works hard in the gym and with his pharmaceutical team, but at some point, you’ve got to bring the goods. Schwarzenegger was a steroid addled meathead too, but he had at least some inner life to him on-screen. Stallone too fits into the steroid/meathead type too, but he imbued his characters with a certain sad-eyed, sad-sack persona. The Rock isn’t Arnold or Sly, he’s a sort of dead-eyed, cheap imitation of them. But that won’t stop him from ruling us all from the White House someday.

But for now, The Rock will have to try and rule the world from the box office. And while fans will no doubt flock to see Black Adam…the movie is not going to break any box office records. Word of mouth will be brutal, and this movie, unlike The Rock’s political ambitions, will quickly fade from the spotlight and public consciousness. But that won’t stop the Sauronic powers that be from acquiring this one Rock to rule them all. You’ve been warned.

 

©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

The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unforgettable true story turned into a completely forgettable motion picture.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is the amazing, nearly unbelievable, true story of John “Chickie” Donohue, a seemingly dim-witted, ne’er do well merchant mariner from Inwood in New York City, who decides to show his support by traveling to Vietnam in 1968 to deliver beer to his neighborhood buddies serving in the war.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which is written and directed by Peter Farrelly and stars Zac Efron and is currently streaming on Apple TV +, is a really great story…but unfortunately, it’s a bad movie.

Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary) won a Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar four years ago for Green Book, his much-maligned movie on race relations, which was also set in New York City in the 1960’s and dealt with a conservative seeing the light and embracing a more progressive vision.

Green Book wasn’t as bad as the interminably aggrieved victimhood brigade would have you believe, but it also definitely wasn’t Best Picture material (although with the laughable CODA winning the award last year who the hell knows what a Best Picture worthy movie is anymore). Green Book was basically a well-crafted, well-acted, rather simple-minded movie about hope for humanity, no wonder it was so hated in our current awful age.

With The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Farrelly seems to, in the wake of the Green Book criticisms, be trying to either bolster his much tarnished liberal bona fides or give a mea culpa for his perceived sins against the new woke religion. Whatever he’s trying to do…he fails miserably.

Green Book, for all its shortcomings, worked as a piece of middlebrow entertainment masquerading as upper middle-class art, because it featured two really terrific actors, Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali (who won a Best Supporting Actor for his work). The Greatest Beer Run Ever is not so blessed, as it stars poor Zac Efron.

Efron seems like a nice guy, and I have absolutely no animus towards him whatsoever and wish him nothing but success. But the truth is he’s an extremely limited actor and those limitations are laid bare in this film.

Efron’s Chickie is like a more handsome, street-smart Forest Gump who stumbles through history oblivious to his own buffoonery. As one Sergeant says upon meeting Chickie in a war zone, “don’t worry about him, some people are just too stupid to get killed.”

As for Efron, he’s a good-looking kid (“kid” – he’s 34!) but he’s utterly devoid of charisma and magnetism. He almost seems to be trying to hide in front of the camera. Emotionally he’s a black hole from which no life or light escapes. And his dismal New Yawk accent is come and go for the first third of the film and then disappears completely for no apparent reason.

To be clear, Efron isn’t the only bad actor in the movie. The entire supporting cast, with two notable exceptions, are simply dreadful.  The egregiously amateurish cast are either over-the-top caricatures or underwhelming to the point of invisibility.

In particular, Chickie’s group of friends in New York are portrayed by a collection of the worst actors I can remember seeing in a mainstream movie and their accents are less New York than they are a rancid stew of Providence, Boston and Maine. I won’t name any of them out of some twisted sense of compassion, but holy shit they are embarrassingly bad.

The two notable exceptions regarding the abysmal acting are Bill Murray as The Colonel, a World War II vet who runs the local bar, and Russell Crowe, as a journalist in Vietnam. Murray and Crowe are not particularly exceptional in their roles, but whenever they are on-screen a sense of relief comes over the viewer as they know at least they’re in the hands of professionals. Murray and Crowe feel at home on the screen, whereas everyone else, most notably Zac Efron, does not.

To be fair to Efron, Farelly’s script and his direction are no help either as they’re utterly atrocious.

There are major plot points and dramatic moments throughout the movie that need to be earned but simply never are, like when Chickie makes the decision to go to Vietnam, it just sort of happens…and everything, particularly the crucial emotional beats, are as vacuous as that.

Another grating thing about the movie is that a major plot point is Chickie must carry a bevy of beers (Pabst Blue Ribbon cans) in a duffle bag across the ocean and all over Vietnam. Beers are heavy, but Chickie’s wondrous bag always seems nearly weightless and empty, but he continuously pulls beer after beer after beer out of it like it’s a magic hat.

If that bag were realistic, and Chickie had to lug it around and decide between dumping out beers or staying true to his mission, then the story and his burden would take on great meaning. The duffle bag literally could’ve been Chickie’s (and America’s) cross to bear across the globe for the sin of the Vietnam war…but instead it’s just a ticky-tack prop that draws viewers out of the reality of this astounding true story.

Another major issue is that Farrelly’s tone through much of the movie is whimsical, and it undermines the horror of the war we see unfolding before us and it all feels…unseemly. There’s a scene like this at the front lines in Vietnam which is so poorly choreographed and directed, and tonally off-kilter, that I found it repulsive.

What’s so grating about The Greatest Beer Run Ever is that it really could have, and should have, been great.

As I watched I kept thinking of how amazing this film would’ve been if it were made in the 1970’s, when the topic, a conservative ‘Road to Damascus’ moment regarding the crime and calamity that was the Vietnam war, would have more cultural resonance, meaning and impact. Imagine a movie like that directed by someone like Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson, I mean God-damn…THAT would’ve been worth seeing!

But instead, we get this rather pathetic modern-day effort from Farrelly and Efron that feels almost instantaneously forgettable.  

To be fair, there are a few sequences that I thought were well done, most notably when Chickie runs into a little Vietnamese girl in a field and tries to interact with her. The scene is shot without sound with music playing over it and it’s easily the best and most profound scene in the film. Another interesting visual is what I will call “the falling-man” shot…which was very reminiscent of 9-11 and therefore was loaded with uncomfortable but insightful symbolism.

What is most interesting to me about the rather uninteresting The Greatest Beer Run Ever though, is that Farrelly was attempting to make somewhat of an anti-war movie in an age when anti-war movies are so rare as to be extinct. The reason for this is two-fold…first, the Pentagon and intelligence community control Hollywood and the messages about the military and war that it produces – and anti-war sentiment is not on their agenda. This manifests in movies and tv shows like Top Gun: Maverick and Seal Team getting made and movies like Oliver Stone’s long planned project on the My Lai massacre not finding funding. Secondly, the anti-war movement in America, along with Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party and the rest of the populist movements of both left and right, have been successfully co-opted and crushed by the establishment, resulting in the anti-war movement being virtually non-existent today.  

Anti-war sentiment is now anathema in America, as liberals – long the vanguard in anti-war movements, have been so easily conditioned to demand blood lust, most notably against Russia. The same liberals I marched with against the Iraq war in 2003 are now ignoring the War in Yemen and demanding all-out war in Ukraine – up to and including nuclear war, and unthinkingly regurgitate vapid establishment propaganda like children reciting their A-B-C’s.

If you apply logic and dare to question establishment propaganda, like the obvious inanities of the Ghost of Kiev, or the Snake Island buffoonery, or the less obvious but equally dubious claims of the Bucha massacre, or the supposed Russian rape camps, or you speak out against the U.S. escalating the war by sending billions upon billions of dollars to Ukraine (in the form of weaponry) and sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, you’ll be reflexively tarred and feathered as a shill or stooge for Putin.

People have become deathly allergic to context (and thinking), so if you point out the fact that the U.S. instigated the illegal coup in Ukraine in 2014 ,and later broke the Minsk Peace agreements, and point out the fact that Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians (who were Ukrainian citizens) in the Donbas in the eight years after the coup, and that the Ukrainian government is riddled with fascists who banned the Russian language and shut down media outlets and opposing political parties, you’re just a useful idiot on Putin’s payroll.

This sort of shallow, simple-minded, historically illiterate, Manichean, knee-jerk jackassery used to be what liberals called out on the right and righteously fought against, but now liberals act exactly like flag-waving, McCarthy-ite right-wingers demanding all those with opposing views slavishly obey the establishment line or be branded a traitor or Russian sympathizer, or both. These empty-headed, emotionalist liberal fools are afflicted with the same disease they used to fight against, and are completely blind to their reactionist Russo-phobic conditioning.

The co-opting of the anti-war left by neo-con war mongers and neo-liberal corporatists is a calamity and will be catastrophic for the health of our nation, and may well lead to another world war and all of us to a fiery death.

On that less than pleasant note, let’s return to an equally unpleasant but much less important topic…The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

In more skilled and gifted-hands The Greatest Beer Run Ever could have made salient points on these weighty and vital issues and held a mirror up to reveal the madness that has engulfed America and its anti-anti-war discourse and actions. But unfortunately, Peter Farrelly lacks the needed craft, talent and courage to make such a meaningful movie, and instead churns out this flaccid, flimsy, D-level nonsense that will come and go with no one noticing.

The bottom line is that The Greatest Beer Run ever is a missed opportunity, and you would be wise to miss it too.

 

©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

Pinocchio (2022): A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! BUT THE MOVIE IS SO BAD IT DOESN’T MATTER!!!****

My Rating: .25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Truly horrendous film. Go watch the original 1940 animated version instead.

I’m old enough to remember when Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis were considered among the most talented in their respective crafts in Hollywood.

Hanks won back-to-back Best Actor Oscars in the mid-90’s, the second of which came for his work in Forest Gump, which was directed by none other than Robert Zemeckis, a feat which earned him both a Best Director and Best Picture statuette at the Academy Awards.

Forest Gump was a coronation for both Zemeckis and Hanks. Zemeckis had been a “Spielberg-in waiting” ever since he hit the jackpot with the Back to the Future franchise and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the Forest Gump Oscar triumph solidified his standing as the pop cinema auteur of his time. Hanks’s win for Forest Gump crowned him as the new Jimmy Stewart and nice guy King of Hollywood.

Well, a lot can change in 28 years.

Proof of that is the new live-action Pinocchio currently streaming on Disney +. The film is directed by Zemeckis and stars Hanks and it stands as a monument to how far their once glorious careers have fallen.

In the early 2000’s Zemeckis fell in love with motion capture CGI technology and churned out a plethora of idiotic, ugly garbage like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol. As a result of his CGI infatuation, Zemeckis’ career has gone deep down the toilet and landed in the septic tank that is Pinocchio.

Since the start of the 21st Century, intelligence agency asset/lapdog/mascot Tom Hanks has not fared much better as his choice in films and his performances in those films, has exposed him to be a rather shallow, vacuous, vapid and remarkably unskilled actor.

For example, even in good films, like say, Catch Me If You Can or Captain Phillips, Hanks manages to be the worst thing in them as he mucks things up with egregiously awful accents of which he has absolutely no clue, never mind mastery. In recent years he has been reduced to slumming it in second and third-rate direct to streaming projects like Pinocchio.

Which brings us to Pinocchio. It is sort of remarkable how appalling this movie is. The script is abysmally bad, the acting atrocious and the direction simply dreadful.

The story of Pinocchio is well-known, and I assume everyone’s seen the original Disney animated film from 1940 which Disney it’s theme song of “When You Wish Upon A Star”. That film is terrific, but Disney apparently needs to remake everything now in order to keep up with ever-changing cultural mores and assuage the PC police, and so we get the NEW Pinocchio.

This new Pinocchio features Tom Hanks as Geppetto, who once again rolls out once of the worst accents in film history. It is difficult to overstate the awfulness of Hanks’s acting in this movie. His shtick is so tired and amateurish it would be laughed off the stage at a Children’s Theater in a small Midwestern suburb.

Hanks, and the rest of the cast, do something that is a surefire sign that they are mailing it in and are being under-directed, which is they incessantly either laugh or smile to fill the empty space in scenes. Hanks spontaneously and inappropriately laughs so much in Pinocchio he appears to be having either a nervous breakdown or a stroke.

Luke Evans as the Coachman and Guiseppe Battistone as Stromboli do the same laughing thing over and over. And poor Cynthia Erevo, who is brutally miscast as the Blue Fairy, paints the most uncomfortable smile on her face for the duration of her dismal scene.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the voice actor for Jiminy Cricket who, for some reason, has an accent from the American South despite the story taking place in rural Italy, and he sounds like John Waters reading the minutes from a NAMBLA meeting.

Changes were made to the Pinocchio cast and story in order to accommodate the current cultural climate, so we get a rather sever looking Erivo as the Blue Fairy and Kyanne Lamaya as Fabiana, the puppeteer of Sabina the ballerina. Poor Lamaya is forced to pretend to be a ventriloquist for no apparent reason, and then at one point in the film that charade is discarded, again, for no apparent reason.

Other changes are that the whale who swallows Geppetto and Pinocchio (in this version they are eaten together at the same time) has been morphed into a giant whale/squid/Kraken monster for some unexplained reason. And the ending of the movie is different too…again…for no apparent reason.

The film is riddled with inanities and idiocies that boggle the mind. For example, at one point Pinocchio and Jiminy want to go to sea to find Geppetto but can’t figure out how…but then they jerry-rig a seagull and para-surf out to sea. But then when they are escaping the sea monster, Pinoccio shows he can swim faster than any human because of his wooden legs and carries Geppetto to safety. I’d highlight more of this nonsense but let’s be honest…nobody gives a fuck.  

On top of all this, the CGI in the film is so second rate as to be embarrassing. Zemeckis does all he can to accentuate how awful the CGI is by having real life actors hold and caress CGI animals, which only highlights how fake everything looks.

And of course, the movie ends with Pinocchio still a wooden toy but because in his heart he thinks he’s a real boy, then he is a real boy. I suppose this is Disney’s way of signaling their virtue regarding the trans movement. How brave.

The bottom line regarding this version of Pinocchio is that there is no reason to make this movie and certainly no reason to make it so poorly.

I’m sure Hanks and Zemeckis will make more movies going forward and I’m sure they’ll be as shitty as Pinocchio, but when I wish upon a star, I wish that this horrendously heinous movie is the final nail in the coffin of their insipidly saccharine careers. A man can dream.

 

©2022

Samaritan: A Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An amateurish, derivative piece of superhero drivel.

Samaritan, starring once-upon-a-time Hollywood mega-star Sylvester Stallone, is a new superhero movie now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The film, based on the Bragi F. Schut graphic novel of the same name, is written by Schut, directed by Julius Avery, and produced by Sly Stallone himself, and tells the story of Samaritan, a superhero who died decades ago in a face off against his supervillain twin brother Nemesis…or did he? Thirteen-year-old Sam (Javon Walton) thinks Samaritan is alive and well and living as his neighbor in a dilapidated apartment building in a rough and tumble section of Granite City. Joe Smith (Stallone) is the shredded old-man who works as a garbage man that Sam thinks is the superhero in hiding.

Sam and Samaritan’s hometown, Granite City, is on the brink of collapse and is populated by a group of Nemesis worshipers who want to see the world burn. These Nemesis lovers are led by Cyrus (Pilou Asbeak), who is sort of a poor man’s Bane. Sam, trying to help his single-mother pay the rent, gets mixed up with some bad seed Nemesis people and Joe Smith comes to his rescue and the story goes from there.

I’ve not read the Samaritan graphic novel, but its premise sounds intriguing and this film version certainly has similar potential. Samaritan is trying to be an original, grounded, alternative superhero movie, in the same vein as M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. But I know Unbreakable, and due to dreadfully amateurish direction and abysmal acting, Samaritan is no Unbreakable, in fact, it’s absolute garbage.

Director Julius Avery is an unquestionable hack behind the camera. Avery is entirely incapable of eliciting even remotely competent performances from his cast, with the lone exception being the magnetic Pilou Asbaek.

Javon Walton is ostensibly the lead and is an egregiously grating screen presence. Apparently, Walton is the next big thing among young actors, but his work in Samaritan is atrocious.

Speaking of atrocious, Sly Stallone is nearly unwatchable in the film.  Yes, Sly still has his absurdly ridiculous perfect body and surgically enhanced face to match, but he once again resurrects his usual sad-eyed, sullen-faced character of which he is so associated, without the least bit of aplomb. As evidenced by his decades long success playing Rocky and Rambo, you’d think Stallone could do tough-guy sad-sackery in his sleep, but Samaritan literally proves that thesis wrong as its just Sly sleep walking.

Stallone isn’t exactly Olivier, but he has always had his own distinct brand of charisma, but in Samaritan his dead-eyed performance is so awful as to be alarming. For example, Stallone’s monotone dialogue lacks all semblance of life as well as any natural rhythm. This isn’t Rocky mumbling some brain-damaged speech, in Samaritan Stallone sounds like a non-native English speaker reciting lines in a second or third language for the very first time. It’s like he’s an alien who has never heard people talk before. Sly is so appallingly bad in some scenes as to be astonishing.

Stallone was the producer on the film, so it’s not like he’s just playing the role for a quick buck, he’s invested in the movie, which is why his abominable performance is all the more concerning.

Stallone is so bad that one can’t help but blame not just Stallone but director Avery, who didn’t yell “Cut! Let’s do it again!” Maybe Avery felt he couldn’t actually direct his boss, who knows? Or maybe he just doesn’t know how to direct.

Another strike against director Avery is his work with cinematographer David Ungaro. There are some scenes in this movie that are so poorly filmed as to be ridiculous. For instance, there’s a rooftop confrontation in the movie where the lighting is so unprofessional that it would be laughed out of a student film.

As for the writing, the plot, its twists, and the rest of it, everything is second or third rate at best, including the production design which somehow makes the $50 million budget look like less than a million.

Samaritan is an MGM film and came over to Amazon when the Bezos behemoth bought the movie studio for $8.45 billion. Another MGM property which came to Amazon in that buy is the Rocky franchise, which propelled Sly Stallone to mega-stardom when it first hit big screens back in 1976.

My advice to anyone contemplating watching Samaritan is to do yourself a favor and skip this cheap, derivative piece of inanity, and just watch any of the Rocky movies, even the awful ones, instead. You’ll still see inanity aplenty in the Rocky movies, but at least you’ll also get to see Sly Stallone being a better version of Sly Stallone…one with life in his eyes.

 

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 77: Prey

On this episode, Barry and I don our war paint and go toe-to-toe with Prey, the newest installment in the Predator franchise now streaming on Hulu. Topics discussed include the benefit of low expectations, the disadvantage of dismal directing, and the potential future of all things Predator.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 77: Prey

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 76: Elvis

On this episode, Barry and I check into the Heartbreak Hotel and chat about the Baz Luhrmann film Elvis, starring Tom Hanks. Topics discussed include the pitfalls of biopics, Luhrmann's aggressive cinematic style, and the staggering magnetism and undeniable power of the real Elvis.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 76: Elvis

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©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 74: The Rings of Power

On this episode, Barry and I get our hairy Hobbit feet moving and head to Middle-Earth to talk about the first two episodes of the new Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Questions discussed in this episode include, is this what a billion dollars buys you? Why is the acting so bad? And, why is this adaptation of Tolkien so terrible so far?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 74: The Rings of Power

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Rehearsal (HBO Max): TV Review

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Batshit, bizarre and brilliant.

“ONE TIME A THING OCCURRED TO ME, WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT’S FOR SALE?” – Vasoline by Stone Temple Pilots

It is very difficult to describe The Rehearsal, a new six-episode series written, directed and starring Nathan Fielder, now streaming on HBO Max.

At first glance, the series is a ‘reality tv’ show about Fielder helping regular people navigate their anxiety by directing elaborate rehearsals of difficult situations they will encounter in the future.

For example, in episode one Fielder assists a man who has been lying to a friend about his level of education and wants to come clean but is worried about how the friend will react. This is pretty standard reality tv stuff…nothing to see here. Except Fielder goes to extraordinary lengths to recreate the setting and the individuals involved in the encounter. He builds an exact replica of the bar where the conversation will take place, and hires actors to play everyone involved except for the man who wants to confess, and then rehearses the hell out of it trying to build a roadmap to follow for any contingency that may arise.

Episode one is amusing for how ridiculous Fielder is in his quest for “authenticity” regarding setting and cast…but it’s child’s play compared to what comes in episodes 2-6. That’s where the show turns the lunacy up to eleven and the absurdity up to infinity.

The first episode actually has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series. I won’t spoil anything vital from episodes 2-6 only because it simply has to be seen to be believed…and even seeing isn’t believing as I assume all of it is as phony as a smile on a two-dollar whore. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating and insightful.

I’ve never seen any of Nathan Fielder’s earlier work, but from what I understand he’s a comedian/actor and comedic provocateur, so The Rehearsal is, I guess, best described as a docu-comedy…or maybe a mocku-comedy, or maybe an off-the-rails, reality tv social experiment.

I’m a notoriously difficult audience for comedy and am incapable of giving pity laughs. The Rehearsal made me guffaw numerous times, and not with traditional build-ups and payoffs but with subtle, understated, insanely weird moments of glorious absurdity.

Nathan Fielder is the ethically and morally corrupt ringmaster and clown of this straight-faced, three-ring circus, and he’s a passive-aggressive, raging narcissist suffering from supreme self-absorption and cluelessness…and it’s hysterical to behold, even when, or maybe especially when, he acts so superior to the rubes he’s supposedly silently judging, despite being just as ignorant, oblivious and self-delusional as they are.

I have no idea if this Fielder persona is genuine or an act, and I don’t much care. Like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Fielder’s persona is able to tell a complex story without ever needing to utter a word.

Fielder’s ‘act’ is, in some ways, sort of a more subdued version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat work, where he bonds with the audience because he’s in on the joke and uses ‘normal’ people as the punchline. But unlike Borat, Fielder’s insecurities and arrogance keeps slipping out from behind the mask.

The Rehearsal reminded me of a documentary/mockumentary from 1999 titled American Movie, which chronicled some passionate but unfortunate Midwestern filmmakers trying to make a movie that is destined to be terrible. American Movie was all the rage amongst a certain sect of hipster cinephiles back in the day. I even worked on a similar project as a cinematographer/actor in the same time frame. Similar to The Rehearsal, debates raged about whether American Movie was a real documentary or a mockumentary, and the answer is still elusive. I’m less in doubt about the dubious voracity of The Rehearsal.

The Rehearsal is also somewhat reminiscent of the Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, NY, which blurs reality and manufactured reality in a post-modern cauldron of existentialism.

And the last thing that The Rehearsal reminded me of was Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special, Inside. Although The Rehearsal is nothing like Bo Burnham’s Inside in content and character, it’s similar in the sense that it is undoubtedly a singular work of genius.

Many moons ago while studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, my class did a sort of Meisner-esque exercise where an actor sits on a chair and looks straight ahead. The actor is supposed to be still and just listen to the words other classmates say to them from across the room and see if they generate a genuine, spontaneous emotional or physical reaction.

It's an interesting exercise in that it is meant to remove the impulse of the actor to “show” or indicate and instead just open themselves up, to be and to react organically and naturally.

I had already gone to film school prior to the Royal Academy so I realized during this exercise that it was very similar to the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Theory of Montage. In layman’s terms Eisenstein’s theory claims that the context surrounding an image is what assists the audience in projecting onto it meaning and emotion. For example, the shot of a stoic face is given meaning if it is preceded or followed by different images. The audience projects upon the stoic face a pleasant demeanor if it is preceded by a baby laughing, and the audience projects a darker meaning if the stoic face is preceded by a shot of war or carnage.

All of this came to mind watching Nathan Fielder, as his usually expressionless face and monotonous voice is a blank canvass upon which the audience can project their own meaning, including their own bias and prejudice.

For example, for much of episodes 2-6, Christianity is often positioned to be the butt of the joke by Fielder, who is Jewish. So much so, that at one point that prejudiced sub-text bubbles to the surface as someone openly declares without any opposition, that being a Christian is itself an irredeemable act of anti-Semitism. But afterwards another discussion takes place regarding Judaism, and the previously espoused anti-Christian sentiment is then given more context and its meaning changes radically. This is an instance of Fielder finding insight because of his lack of self-awareness, not in spite of it.

In that class at the Royal Academy there was a student, I’ll call him “Tushy”, who was a recent Ivy league grad, came from a very wealthy family, and seemingly had everything going for him, and yet he still felt the need to tell everyone fantastical stories about the famous women he had dated. Everyone knew these stories were obviously untrue for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that Tushy was very gay, but he and his stories were harmless so nobody really cared.

In the Meisner-esque exercise though, Tushy’s inability to just “be”, which is a form of being honest with yourself and thus your audience, proved a liability. Tushy was incapable of just “being” and had to push and indicate all of the feelings he thought he was supposed to have during the exercise. As an audience member and participant this was uncomfortable to watch because it was so painful, obvious and painfully obvious. The teacher, who was one of the best in the world, gently tried to remind him of the purpose of the exercise and re-direct him to stillness but Tushy would have none of it. He kept pushing and urging himself to have a profound reaction (in this case crying) because he wanted everyone to think he was a profound person having a profound reaction.

There’s a pivotal sequence in The Rehearsal where Nathan Fielder turns into Tushy, and is betrayed by his desperate yearning for profundity and therefore creates a manufactured profundity. Except in this case, Fielder’s forced profundity is actually profound in its own right as it exposes the deeper ‘reality’ about him, his series, and his audience, which is that our culture, marinated in malignant narcissism and saturated with social media, has devolved humanity to the point where we are no longer capable of ever feeling genuine empathy.

On its surface The Rehearsal is a simple bit of reality tv comedy, but beneath that façade is an astoundingly complex piece of work that speaks volumes about the diminished and depraved state of humanity.

The bottom line is that Nathan Fielder is a modern-American holy fool, and his series The Rehearsal is batshit, bizarre and absolutely brilliant.

 

©2022

The Last Movie Stars (HBO Max): A Documentary Review

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful and thoughtful examination of two Hollywood icons and their long marriage.

The Last Movie Stars is a six-episode documentary mini-series which examines the lives, careers and marriage of acting icons Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. The series was directed by actor Ethan Hawke and is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Since well before I was ever born, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were the standard for the perfect marriage. Newman was the impossibly handsome, gracious, generous and grounded movie star, and Woodward was his down-to-earth, doting wife, mother to his kids and a powerful, Academy Award winning actress in her own right.

I once had the surreal experience of sitting directly behind them at a play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music about twenty years ago, and was struck by two things…how ridiculously beautiful they both were and how unnervingly normal they were as a couple. If it weren’t for their impeccable bone structure and piercing eyes, they could have been any other old couple out for a night at the theatre.

The Last Movie Stars attempts to go beyond the sterling façade of Newman and Woodward’s marriage and reveal their personal complexities and their deeply complicated relationship to one-another, their kids and their art.

Hawke obviously respects, admires and adores his subjects, and the series is much closer to hagiography than hit piece, but to his credit, he doesn’t dismiss or ignore the messier aspects of both Woodward and Newman’s lives. For instance, though it is done with a loving touch and no sense of animosity, Newman and Woodward’s children speak frankly and freely about their father’s alcoholism and their mother’s somewhat indifference to raising children. The rather uncomfortable topic of how the two met and started dating is also thoroughly explored and it isn’t the least bit flattering to Newman…or Woodward.

Hawke bases his documentary on a discarded memoir that Newman had intended to write with the help of a co-writer. Newman gave that writer permission to interview everyone in Paul’s life, which the writer did. But the tapes of those interviews were burned when Newman decided against the book…but thankfully the transcripts of those recordings have now been found and are the roadmap for The Last Movie Stars.

To bring those transcripts to life Hawke enlists a bunch of famous actor friends to voice the people from the transcripts. For example, George Clooney voices Paul Newman, Laura Linney is Joanne Woodward, Zoe Kazan is Paul’s first wife Jackie, Bobby Cannavale is Elia Kazan and so on and so forth.

It is somewhat ironic that George Clooney voices Paul Newman as his casting proves the title’s point. Newman was a mega-movie star with an Actor’s Studio background who dominated movies for forty years. Clooney was supposed to be as big of a star but he lacked, first and foremost, the craft and skill of Newman, but also his charisma and his artistic prowess.

There’s a very strong argument that Newman really was the last movie star because he was a “method actor” raised in the studio system who transitioned through the artistic/business revolution of the 60’s and 70’s without losing any of his star power.

George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and all the rest of the recent era wannabes have certainly had success, but their cinematic, cultural and artistic power is minuscule compared to Paul Newman.

Much to my surprise, Hawke’s decision to voice cast the film with well-known actors works astonishingly well. In addition, Hawke’s rapport with his cast in side discussions is endearing and brings a familial feel to the festivities.

 As for Newman and Woodward, their individual journeys and their journey together, are simply remarkable.

Newman came up during the Method Acting revolution of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. He attended the Actor’s Studio in New York with luminaries such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Newman was born ten months after Brando, but he was no Brando. He wasn’t James Dean, either. But thanks to an undying work ethic and an astonishingly persistent relationship with luck he carved out a career path that outlasted (but not outshone) them both.

As an actor Newman was different than Brando and Dean in that he wasn’t about emoting but withholding. Everything happening in a Newman character is happening beneath the surface, in a cauldron boiling deep in his famous blue eyes. That somewhat reserved approach at first left him overshadowed by his supernova contemporaries, Brando and Dean.

But then luck intervened and James Dean’s untimely death opened the door to Newman’s ascension and directly led to his being cast in Somebody Up There Likes Me.

Brando’s erraticism and combustibility eventually led him to burn out and self-destruct, while Newman’s tightly contained personality kept his career from ever falling apart. And so, Paul Newman, by sheer force of will, perseverance and luck, became the actor of his generation.

Joanne Woodward was a great actress in her own right. She was the bigger star when the two met, and early in their relationship she won a Best Actress Oscar (Three Faces of Eve). But patriarchal demands forced parenthood to replace career ambitions for her just as Paul’s career went meteoric. That would be a thorn in her side for the rest of their time together.

Woodward’s filmography is often overlooked, and even Zoe Kazan, a terrific young actress who’s a talking head in the documentary – and who happens to be Elia Kazan’s granddaughter, shockingly admits she has never seen a Joanne Woodward film. That’s a shame as in her heyday she was as good as anyone on screen. Her work in Three Faces of Eve and Rachel, Rachel is impressive and worth a watch to get a taste of her talent.

Newman’s filmography needs no introduction, and his work in The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict and The Color of Money is must-see for any aspiring actor.

Watching The Last Move Stars is enjoyable because it gives Woodward and Newman’s work a new perspective that reveals even deeper meaning to their artistry. And that’s the thing about this supposed Hollywood glamour couple that is so compelling and impressive, and that is their commitment to two things, their art and each other.

Through thick and thin they stuck it out. They didn’t bail when things got tough, and things often got very tough. They endured, and that is a lesson for every couple out there, even the ones who aren’t glamourous movie stars.

Yes, Woodward and Newman stumbled a lot, both artistically and as people. For instance, Newman was a terribly flawed man and a failed father, but he was ever on the search for forgiveness and/or redemption. His staggeringly impressive charitable work, including his camp for seriously ill children and his Newman’s Own food lines, speak to that yearning.

Despite the slings and arrows of life, or maybe because of them, Woodward and Newman never lost their humanity. It’s their flaws and failings and their steadfast refusal to give up in the face of them that make them relatable and even more captivating as a couple.

The Last Movie Stars is as insightful a documentary about movie stars as you’ll find because it focuses less on the myth and more on the humans embodying the myth. Ultimately, this documentary is, like the stars it attempts to explore, most notable for its humanity, and that’s a credit not only to the extraordinary Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but to Ethan Hawke.

 

©2022

Prey: A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A clever twist on the Predator sci-fi action formula that results in the movie being the second best in the franchise.

Prey, the fifth film in the Predator franchise and a prequel to the previous films, made its exclusive premiere this past weekend on the streaming service Hulu.

The original Predator (1987), directed by the criminally (pun intended) under-rated, populist master craftsman John McTiernan (Hunt for Red October, Die Hard) which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger at the peak of his powers, and boasted a phenomenal supporting cast of hall-of-fame badasses, including Bill Duke, Carl Weathers and the scene-stealing future governor of Minnesota, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, with his classic line “I aint got time to bleed!”, was a supremely entertaining sci-fi spin on the ‘man is the most dangerous game’ premise.

The subsequent Predator films, Predator 2 (1990), Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018) were without Arnold and McTiernan, and were incoherent, cringe-worthy embarrassments.

Which brings us to Prey, which is written by Patrick Aison and directed by Dan Trachtenberg, and stars Amber Midthunder and Dakota Beavers.

Prey is, if nothing else, very clever. It’s premise, setting the challenge-seeking hunter Predator alien in the early 1700’s in a region where the Comanche live, is simple yet original enough to revive this moribund franchise.

The plot revolves around Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman and accomplished healer and tracker who yearns to become a hunter/warrior like her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers).

There is no doubt that Prey got greenlit because the film espouses the ‘proper’ cultural politics of the current age, and checks all the right gender and ethnic diversity boxes. For instance, Naru’s navigating of the “patriarchal” Comanche culture in which she lives and rising above the limits imposed on her gender was a storyline that must’ve sent thrills into the loins of the suits at Hulu/Disney. No doubt the movie’s majority Native American cast did as well.

And while the film does signal its cultural/political virtue much too often for my tastes, and those scenes of vapid feminist defiance are by far the worst in the movie, it still manages to be a thoroughly entertaining piece of movie-making despite all the incessant, eye-rolling, girl-power garbage.

The film also works because Amber Midthunder as Naru is a compelling and charismatic lead. The luminous Midthunder’s naturalistic style is never too much or too little as she effortlessly carries the movie from start to finish.

Dakota Beavers as Taabe is also excellent, as he brings tremendous nuance to a role that in lesser hands would’ve been caricature filled with empty posturing.

While some might feel that a flaw of the film is that Naru and Taabe are the only truly fleshed-out characters, which they are. I actually felt that minimalist approach to character development helped the film stay lean, focused and on point.

The best part of the movie though is that director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison stick to the basics (protagonist gender swapping aside - which i admit is a major caveat) and make a Predator movie that would make Joseph Campbell proud due to its proper use of myth as its narrative foundation.

For example, like many coming of age stories or myths, Naru must cross geographical barriers, in this case rivers and ridges, to seek out the dragon that she must kill in order to ascend from childhood to adulthood.

Taabe, ever the dutiful big brother, has already made his own journey, and tries to mentor Naru, but there’s only so much he can do for her, as Naru must make the perilous journey herself.

Taabe’s pivotal role in propelling Naru on her journey and towards her destiny is right out of the Campbell playbook and will make fellow Jungians/Campbell enthusiasts knowingly nod in agreement.

Trachtenberg and Aison’s commitment to Campbell’s mythic storytelling fundamentals is what makes Prey such a psychologically satisfying film. It isn’t a great film but it is an entertaining one because it’s so satisfying to the audience’s unconscious mythic yearnings.

As for the movie-making itself, director Trachtenberg does solid work by once again staying true to storytelling fundamentals. He plants small seeds throughout the story and lets them grow to be useful later on in the story, and never deceives his audience or ignores the internal logic of the film. He also does a good enough job in visually telling the story, and despite some ups and downs he gives enough cinematic flair to the film for it to be worthwhile.

I also think that Disney’s decision to release Prey on Hulu is a wise one. The Predator franchise is on life-support, and it seems difficult to imagine a star-less Prey generating a great deal of box office at the moment. By releasing straight to Hulu, the film can build an audience slowly by word of mouth without the pressure of being labelled a box office bust. This approach will help future Predator films be viable for theatrical release.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t help but think about the potential future settings of the Predator franchise now that history is its playpen. Predator in Shogun era Japan, or in Mayan era South America, or Qing Dynasty China, or Aboriginal Australia, or early Zulu Kingdom Africa, or Ancient Egypt, Sparta or Rome. The possibilities are endless, and one can only hope that the Predator franchise stays the course and keeps making clever and interesting movies like Prey.

The bottom line is that Prey is the second-best Predator movie, a distant second to the original. If you like sci-fi action movies, and can tolerate a dose of vacuous, vapid and venal virtue signaling stuffed into a cool Comanche/Predator movie, then give Prey a shot, you might like it…I was pleasantly surprised to find that I did.

 

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 73 - The Grey Man

On this episode, Barry and I try not to put a bullet through our gray matter as we suffer through The Grey Man, the new Russo Brothers directed Netflix action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. Topics discussed include awful acting, awful directing, awful writing, awful establishing shots, awful action sequences, awful Chris Evans and Netflix's awful future. On the bright side, listeners will get to hear Barry's spirit break when he learns some shocking news about the Grey Man movie universe.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 73 - The Grey Man

Thanks for listening!

©2022