Halloween Viewer's Guide - A Horror Movie Round-Up for the Harrowing Holiday

Horror Movie Round-Up And Halloween Viewer’s Guide

It is Halloween week so I thought I’d put together a quick movie guide to help you set the tone for the spooky times ahead.

I love Halloween, always have, and have spent the last few weeks gearing up for the festivities by catching up on some of the horror films released this year, and the last few years, that I’ve missed.

Here are the films I watched for the first time in recent weeks (all rated on the “1 to 5 horror movie scale” not the “1 to 5 regular movie scale”).

MaXXXine (2024) - Available on Max: This is the third movie in Ti West’s trilogy – which began with X (2022), then Pearl (2022), and now MaXXine. MaXXXine is hands down the worst of the three films. X was terrific and Pearl was pretty good too, but MaXXXine is just an incoherent mess that never finds its footing or a distinct flavor. It’s a mish mash of 1980s nostalgia stuffed into a dour and dull narrative that doesn’t really know what it wants to be.

Yes, Mia Goth is an intriguing screen presence, but even she can’t overcome the flaccid and foolish script for this seriously sub-par film. Very disappointing and definitely not worth watching. 2 stars out of 5

Late Night with the Devil (2024) - Available on Hulu: An extremely clever and well-executed movie that deftly uses the medium of 1970’s late nite tv to plumb the depths of devilry and the demonic depravity of the ruling elite who sell their souls to the dark lord at Bohemian Grove.

David Dastmalchian gives a fantastic performance as a desperate late night talk show host trying to catch Carson in the ratings. A very effective and captivating film…especially if you lived through the 70s. 4 stars out of 5.

The First Omen (2024) - Available on Hulu: Speaking of the 70s!! The First Omen is a surprisingly well-made and executed prequel to the iconic 1976 film The Omen. The First Omen won’t change your life but it will keep you mildly entertained and reasonably spooked for its two-hour run time. 3 out of 5 stars.

Immaculate (2024) - Available on Hulu: This is a not great movie but serves as a decent enough vehicle for Sydney Sweeney to keep building the foundation to her movie stardom. A rather forgettable film with a tenuous premise but the luminous Sweeney, who still manages to be insanely sexy even in a nun’s habit, makes the most of it…especially in the final scene. 2.5 out of 5 stars

Doctor Sleep – Director’s Cut (2019) - Available on Amazon Prime: A shockingly well-made and completely compelling sequel to The Shining which, like Late Night with the Devil, casts a severely jaundiced eye toward the ruling elite and their demonic ways, which include feeding off of the pain and suffering of regular people, most notably children. It’s impossible to watch this movie and not think about the infamous pedophile rings involving people of power, including the Jeffrey Epstein ring, the P Diddy accusations and the horrific Franklin Affair…not to mention the wholesale sickening and senseless slaughter of children in Gaza by the Israelis.

Doctor Sleep features two great performances, the first by Ewan McGregor, who gives a subtle, layered and impressive performance as the adult Danny trying to navigate life after the horrors he endured in The Shining. The other by the absolutely luminous Rebecca Ferguson. Ferguson is so good, so charismatic, so gorgeous and so sexy in Doctor Sleep it is astonishing.

I completely skipped Doctor Sleep when it came out in 2019 because I thought “a sequel to The Shining? No thanks!”. To me The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies of all time…and to be clear Doctor Sleep is nowhere close to being an equal of The Shining in terms of the filmmaking or storytelling. But…it really is a fantastic horror movie.  In some ways I’m glad I missed it in the theatre though because my first watch of it was of the three-hour Director’s Cut which is available on Amazon Prime. I highly recommend you watch the director’s cut and not the theatrical release.

Know this going in though, Doctor Sleep – The Director’s Cut, has one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve seen in a film in a long time. It deeply disturbed and unnerved me – which may say more about me and my life’s circumstances, but still…this scene was tough to watch, but necessary to see. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Smile (2022) - Available on Hulu: Smile came out in 2022 and has a sequel out this month…but I never saw the original so I watched it last week. Smile is a decent enough piece of trauma porn horror movie making. It’s got some clever story lines and keeps you engaged through out. I thought Sosie Bacon did a solid job as the lead, and she had some very heavy lifting to do. In some ways Smile is a typical middle of the road horror movie, but to its credit, it works. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

As for the rest of a Halloween Movie Guide…

My usual go-to horror films are previously mentioned The Shining (1980), The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). They are, to me, the best horror films around and they never fail to scare the living shit out of me.

I also love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Wolf Man (1941) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Another old movie classic is F.W. Murnau’s masterful Nosferatu (1922), which is creepy as hell and well worth watching.  

Other less ancient notables would be most anything by David Cronenberg, his remake of The Fly (1986) is particularly fantastic and his films The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1983) and The Dead Zone (1983) are solid choices as well.  

You also can’t go wrong John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982), which are all time horror classics that never fail to frighten no matter how many times you’ve seen them.

More current horror films that are most worthy of a watch are Robert Eggers’ extremely eerie The Witch (2015), and Ari Aster’s formidably frightening and fearsome Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).

And finally, one movie which is not technically categorized as a horror film but which is as creepy, frightening, disturbing and unnerving as any movie out there, is David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). Zodiac is a great film that pulsates with a darkness of such depth that haunts you for days and weeks after after watching.

And thus ends the Halloween viewer’s guide!! I hope everybody has a Happy Halloween and gets a bevy of tricks AND treats!!

©2024

Trap: A Review - More Forgettable Garbage from M. Night Shyamalan

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another massive misfire from M Night Shyamalan. Poorly conceived and poorly executed from start to finish.

Trap, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is a psychological thriller starring Josh Hartnett which premiered in theatres back in August. It just became available on the streaming service Max and I got a chance to watch it.

I had coincidentally watched two M. Night Shyamalan movies, The Sixth Sense and Signs, last week, unaware that Trap was being released on Max this past Friday, so when I stumbled across it I was surprised, and in the context of having watched some of Shyamalan’s stellar early films, excited to see Trap.

It is easy to forget what a big deal Shyamalan was at the turn of the century. The Sixth Sense was a smash hit and garnered a bevy of Academy Award nominations and both Unbreakable and Signs were huge hits as well.

Shyamalan’s run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, is as good a three-movie run for a director as you could ever hope for. All three were original, superbly crafted, gloriously entertaining, top-notch films.

Shyamalan was portrayed back then as the second coming of Hitchcock and he fully embraced the label – most notably by putting himself in all of his movies. In interviews, Shyamalan even about how he doesn’t shoot “coverage” of his scenes because he knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to have nothing to fall back on…which is a level of cinematic arrogance and hubris that was stunning to behold at the time.

As is almost always the case with that level of hubris, Shyamalan’s inflated ego led him to a catastrophic fall from grace. His precipitous creative collapse was interesting because it happened incrementally at first, but then all at once.

Here’s how it played out. 2004’s The Village was much hyped, and did well enough at the box office, but fan’s irritation at Shyamalan’s increasing reliance on “plot twist reveals” became much more pronounced.

This was followed by 2006’s Lady in the Water, which was a decidedly murky misfire that further alienated his audience, and did very little at the box office. After the mess that was Lady in the Water, Shyamalan needed to prove himself as a big-time director and box office behemoth.

The film he made next was 2008’s The Happening starring Mark Wahlberg. The Happening was an absolutely abysmal, excruciatingly awful piece of excrement. Yes, it made some money at the box office, but in its wake the bloom was officially off the rose of Shyamalan the prodigy filmmaker in the eyes of fans and critics alike.

And things went downhill from there as every movie Shyamalan made after that got progressively worse. The Last Airbender? After Earth? Yikes.

It’s hard to imagine a more precipitous fall from cinematic grace or steeper drop in quality of work as Shyamalan has endured. Yes, he had a bit of a comeback in 2016 with Split and in 2019 with Glass, but he has never recaptured the magic of those early movies and after having sat through his newest one, Trap, I can confidently say he never will.

Trap tells the story of Cooper Abbott, a regular guy/dad in Philadelphia, who takes his teenage daughter to a concert to see her favorite artist, Lady Raven.

Like all Shyamalan movies there is a twist…(I will refrain from revealing the twist even though the marketing of the movie explicitly reveals it), but the twist here is given away much too soon and much too easily.

Shyamalan doesn’t draw his viewers in and then turn things on their head, he just rather lazily goes through the motions of revealing this twist without much build up (which maybe explains the poor marketing decision to not maintain the illusion).

After the reveal is made, the movie, which hadn’t built up much dramatic momentum to begin with, feels like a barely inflated balloon being stepped on…it never floats, it never pops, it just squishes from side to side.

As the film goes on it becomes more and more inane until the final half hour of the movie, which is so absurd as to be idiotic. The final act is so bad and so poorly executed it boggles the mind and grates the soul.

The film seems intent on being as vacuous as possible and dedicated to not standing firmly on any dramatic ground whatsoever. There were lots of possibilities on how to resolve this unfailingly incoherent mess of a movie, but Shyamalan, in his now usual custom, paints by numbers and does nothing interesting or unique…or even slightly entertaining.

Josh Hartnett is a decent enough, B or C level movie actor/star, for example he was quite good in Oppenheimer last year, and he could’ve been decent here, but Shyamalan never gives him the chance to cook and to delve into his character with any verve. Ultimately, Hartnett’s portrayal comes across as quite amateurish and vapid.

In true Shyamalan form he casts himself in a small role, and is dreadful…but even worse is he casts his daughter Saleka in the role of Lady Raven. Apparently Saleka is a singer in real life, but her anemic musical performances in Trap are not the showcase her famous father was probably hoping for. In fact, Saleka is so dull and lifeless it feels like her father cast her so that she could play act at being a famous singer because in real life that shit is definitely not gonna happen.

In the final third of the film Saleka is tasked with a lot of heavy lifting in terms of acting, holding audience attention and driving the story. Unfortunately, she is so charisma and talent deficient she isn’t anywhere remotely close to being able to pull it off.

Hayley Mills appears in the film in the role of an FBI profiler, and she is uncomfortably out of place to an alarming degree. Every time Mills appears on-screen it feels like she is a homeless person who has wandered onto set and is looking for the bus station.

As for the filmmaking, Shyamalan tries some stuff in Trap, but none of it works. For example, he uses takes where the actors speak directly into the camera, a technique used by Jonathon Demme in Silence of the Lambs to great success. Here though it just seems trite and a bit ridiculous given the context of the story surrounding it.

The reality is that Shyamalan has gone from being a moviemaker that matters to being one that just churns out odious garbage in order to make some money. Trap is a perfect example, as it is a thoughtless and fruitless film made with a minimum amount of care…something that would have been unimaginable from Shyamalan a quarter century ago.

Even if you are a huge Shyamalan fan, I’d find it hard to imagine you’d love Trap. It is a small and inconsequential piece of nothing cinema, and I recommend you avoid it because it’s so poorly made that watching it will make you angry – or at the very least,  should make you angry.

 ©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 123 - Joker: Folie a Deux

On this episode, Barry and I don our comic greasepaint, clown nose and big shoes and belt out some American Standards as we debate the merits of Joker: Folie a Deux, the critically and commercially panned follow up to the Oscar nominated 2019 smash hit Joker. Topics discussed include the nearly universal negative response to the film, the blessing of seeing through the fog of it all, and director Todd Phillips as prophet of doom. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 123 - Joker: Folie a Deux

Thank you for listening!!

©2024

Joker: Folie a Deux - A Review: It’s a Mad, Mad World

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. But be forewarned, this is an aggressively arthouse movie that will be very unappealing to those seeking comic book entertainment.  

 Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Philips’ sequel to his controversial, billion-dollar blockbuster Joker (2019), and features Joaquin Phoenix reprising his iconic, Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck aka Joker, but this time he’s joined by Lady Gaga as his love interest Harley Quinn.

Joker was, and still is, an extraordinarily polarizing film. Back in the hyper-politicized year of 2019, Joker was instantly reviled by weak-kneed critics who labeled Phoenix’s Fleck/Joker as the “patron saint of incels”, and the film vile and potentially violence inducing because it captured the anger and resentment boiling just under the surface of America.

Despite the cavalcade of establishment media fear and loathing of Joker, the film still managed to make gobs of money and garner eleven Academy Award nominations and two wins (Best Actor and Best Original Score).

Unfortunately, no one need fear Joker: Folie a Deux becoming a blockbuster or hording trophies at the Academy Awards. Joker: Folie a Deux is going to be a certified box office bomb and is despised by critics and fans alike.

I try to quarantine myself from reviews and criticisms of a film before seeing it, but with Joker Folie a Deux it was impossible to avoid the overwhelming hate the film was receiving. Some of the most animated vitriol toward the film was coming from people who, like me, loved the original movie.

So when I strolled into an empty Sunday afternoon screening of Joker: Folie a Deux, I was mentally sharpening my knives in order to be able to properly and precisely eviscerate the shitshow I was about to watch.

But then I watched it…and maybe it was because I went in with such low expectations, but not only did I like Joker: Folie a Deux, I thought it was, in a way, much like the first film, bleak but utterly and absolutely brilliant.

The film opens with a Looney Tunes style cartoon which features Arthur Fleck and his literal and figurative shadow, Joker. This opening gives the perfect psychological backdrop for Fleck/Joker and buttresses my Jungian shadow thesis regarding Joker where Arthur Fleck is a Christ-figure and Joker is the anti-Christ/Satan figure.

The film then goes to live action and the story begins where Joker left off, with the now famous Arthur Fleck sitting in Arkham Asylum awaiting his trial for murder.

Over time the film descends into the madness of Arthur Fleck…and uses the genre of a jukebox musical as a manifestation of that madness. So as reality and fantasy blend together in Arthur’s mind, he and his friend Lee Quinzel – aka Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, sing a bevy of American Standards…it’s sort of like a grotesque fever dream/nightmare version of La La Land.

But make absolutely no mistake, Joker: Folie a Deux is not, and is not meant to be, “entertaining”, not in the traditional sense, but it is most certainly enlightening and insightful, something which is exceedingly rare in cinema nowadays, most especially in Hollywood films in general, and franchise movies in particular.  

Joker: Folie a Deux is a work of art, which is a jarring and frustrating thing for viewers to experience when they head into the cinema expecting a franchise film piece of pop entertainment. This subverting of expectation, signified in the film with the recurring theme of “That’s Entertainment!”, is no doubt responsible for the film’s very poor reception among audiences and critics that have been conditioned by Marvel’s mindless money-making machine movies over the last 16 years…and to a lesser extent DC’s too, to expect a certain kind of pre-teen drivel as comic book cinema.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not that, instead it is a relentlessly bleak and brutal film. It is grungy, gruesome and glorious. It may make you angry, it may make you anxious, it may make you bored. But whatever your reaction to it is, that says infinitely more about you than about it, because this movie is a mirror held up to our insane, inane, indecent cancer of a culture and the vicious and vacuous world we all inhabit. Your reaction to Joker: Folkie a Deux, is your reaction to the madness of our broken and fallen world.

It seems obvious to me that Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Phillips’ giant middle-finger to the people who hated the first movie…and to those that loved it too. I never would’ve guessed that Todd Phillips of all people – the guy who made the Hangover trilogy, would be the auteur with balls the size of Hindenbergs who morphs into his main character, lights the match and watches the whole shithouse go up in flames. But here we are…and I’m glad to be here.

The animating characteristic of Joker: Folie a Deux is despair. Phillips’ Gotham is a hellscape…literally. For not only is it filled with vile, venal and loathsome creatures, but it is entirely devoid of any love. In a world devoid of love, despair rules the day because hope is replaced by delusion.

Arthur Fleck is, as a Christ figure, an open wound, a raw nerve, and it isn’t the hate of this world that affects him so greatly, but rather the complete absence of love.

Joker, on the other hand, as the devil, thrives in this hell for the exact reason that it cripples Arthur.

Many critics and hipsters hated the first Joker movie because Arthur Fleck was a white guy. This sort of shallow, identity driven thinking is all too common in our current age, and it reduces otherwise smart people into myopic fools unable to see the forest for the trees.

Arthur Fleck isn’t a symbol of white disenfrachisement…he is a symbol of the forgotten, the downtrodden, the outcast, and the loser of all colors, creeds and genders.

Arthur Fleck is the shaking, orphaned child in Gaza surviving in the rubble. He is the Palestinian prisoner gang-raped by his Israeli guards. He is the gay man thrown from a roof in Saudi Arabia. He is the teenage girl in Kabul beaten for showing her face. He is the black boy abused and neglected by an overwhelmed foster care system. He is Kelly Thomas, the mentally ill homeless man beaten to death by police in California. He is Ethan Saylor, the young man with Down’s Syndrome who died when Maryland cops kneeled on his neck in a movie theatre. Arthur Fleck is the helpless and the hopeless, the weak, the sick and the old…and critics and audiences who see him as a threat or a symbol of the oppressor simply due to the color of his skin and his gender are the ones who make this world the cruel, inhumane and uninhabitable shithole that it is.  

Joker is Arthur’s shadow…he is his vengeance and justice. Joker is the Hamas member slaughtering Israeli men, women and children at a desert rave. Joker is the Israeli soldier executing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. Joker is the cop killing pets in front of children. Joker is the school-shooter settling scores for social slights. Joker is the mayhem, murder and madness unleashed by those who feel fueled by righteousness.

Joker is the king of this fallen world…and Arthur Fleck is its victim.

Joaquin Phoenix is once again fantastic as Arthur and the Joker. Phoenix is a fragile yet forceful screen presence. His transformations throughout Joker: Folie a Deux are subtle and simply spectacular. I doubt Phoenix will be considered for any awards since Joker: Folie a Deux is so hated, but he is more than worthy of accolades.

Lady Gaga is an actress I have never been able to tolerate. I despised the trite and treacly A Star is Born and found her distractingly bad in House of Gucci.  But here in Joker: Folie a Deux I finally got to understand her appeal. There really is just something about her that is magnetic and undeniable, at least in this movie. I found her character arc to be somewhat poorly executed, but I thought her performance was quite good.

Brendan Gleeson plays a prison guard and is an ominous presence whenever he graces the screen, most particularly when he isn’t being menacing. Gleeson is, like Phoenix, one of the best actors on the planet, and he never fails to elevate any scene he inhabits.

And finally, Leigh Gill, who plays Gary Puddles, is fantastic in his lone scene. This scene, which features Puddles being questioned on the stand in court, is extraordinarily moving, and exquisitely captures the deeper meaning and purpose of the film.

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Joker, once again does phenomenal work on Joker: Folie a Deux. Sher shoots the film with a distinct 1970’s grittiness and grime. He turns multiple musical numbers into uncomfortable flashbacks to Sonny and Cher episodes or other seventies type showcases and does so with a cinematic aplomb.

Hildur Guonadottir, who won an Oscar for her original score on Joker, is back on this film and once again sets the scene with an uncomfortably menacing and ominous score that drives the emotional narrative.

As for Todd Phillips, as I previously said, it’s astonishing the balls on this guy. He is basically saying “fuck you” to critics and fans alike. It’s tough to imagine him bouncing back and being allowed to do a worthwhile film after having a critical and commercial flop like this. That’s a shame though because he has proven his worth as an artist with Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux.

Phillips is a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad, but one thing that he has been in recent years…is right.

It’s always struck me that no one (except me) seemed to notice that Joker accurately diagnosed the incandescent anger and fury that was boiling just beneath the surface of America back in 2019. I wrote about this profoundly disturbing anger prior to Joker, but Joker showed it to mainstream audiences, and elite coastal critics were so horrified by it that they blamed the film rather than the country and culture it revealed.

Joker was proven right though as less than nine months after its release that volcano of anger erupted in Joker-esque fashion with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots and chaotic violence in the streets of American cities…just like in Joker.

The Joker was every BLM rioter, and every opportunistic looter and arsonist in America’s summer of rage in 2020…just like he was every flag-waving MAGA moron on January 7th, 2021, who stormed the Capitol looking to “Save Democracy”.

That Joker was correct has never been admitted by the coastal elites who hated the movie. That Joker: Folie a Deux is also correct in diagnosing the unremitting cruelty, malignant madness and incessant insanity of our culture and country will also go unnoticed by those who are too offended, or bored or angry or inhumane to care or notice.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not a polarizing film like Joker. The consensus is that it is awful to the point of being an abomination. But I am here to tell you that Joker: Folie a Deux is a brutal, ballsy and brilliant film. It is, like Oliver Stone’s manic and maniacal 1994 masterpiece Natural Born Killers, well ahead of the curve, and will only get its due when the history of this era is written and the ugly truth of our current time fully revealed.

If you have the fortitude for it, and the philosophical, political and psychological mind for it, and the ability to tolerate the arthouse in your comic book cinema, then Joker: Folie a Deux is not the steaming pile of shit that critics and audiences claim it to be, but rather a startling revelation. And like most revelations it is reviled in its own time because it tells the unvarnished and unabashedly ugly truth that no one wants to see or hear because it’s too painful to ever acknowledge.

©2024

The Wild Robot: A Review - Domo Arigato Mrs. Roboto

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

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but emotionally potent film that is deeply moving for parents and children alike. Just be aware of the movie’s less than ideal sub-text.

The Wild Robot is an animated science fiction film that follows the travails of Roz, a utilitarian robot marooned on an island inhabited by a variety of animals.

The film, written and directed by Chris Sanders and based on the wildly popular book series of the same name by Peter Brown, features Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Bill Nighy and Catherine O’Hara among its voice acting cast.

The Wild Robot has a lot going for it. For example, the book series it is based on is enjoyable for both children and adults, and the animation on display in the film is as good as it gets in the genre.

While the film does enough with what it has to be an enjoyable and emotionally moving experience, deep down I couldn’t help but feel that it could have been better. That’s not to say that it’s bad, because it isn’t, in fact I assume this movie will be a front runner for a Best Animated Feature Academy Award, but I still think that it could have been better than it is.

Let’s start with the positive.

The film, which I’ll do my best not to spoil for the uninitiated, centers on the love between a robot and an orphaned gosling. The relationship between Roz (the robot) and Brightbill (the gosling), is sweet and funny and ultimately realistically heartbreaking as Brightbill matures into goose adolescence.

To writer/director Chris Sanders’ credit, The Wild Robot hits all of the proper emotional beats and does so extremely effectively. Both parents and children will be emotionally moved by the film in untroubling and at times exquisite ways.

Any parents in the audience will recognize themselves in Roz and easily relate to Roz’s heartbreak – which is the natural state for any parent. And children will recognize, at a minimum sub-consciously, the yearning Brightbill has to break free of parental control and go make his way in the world, but also the sadness and sense of loss that comes with embarking on that exciting adventure.

The biggest issue I had with The Wild Robot was not the perfection or potency of its emotional journey, but rather with the rhythm and rhyme of the narrative and the morality and ethics of its sub-text.

The story of The Wild Robot works best when it is simple – namely when Roz is trying to raise, protect and teach Brightbill. But when the story expands it loses its dramatic power and becomes, dare I say it, meandering and, at times, tedious.

In addition to losing narrative momentum when the story expands, the film also loses its emotional power amidst a bevy of action sequences that feel flat and derivative.

Another minor issue I had with the film was that the voice cast was just ok. For example, Pedro Pascal, who voices the character Fink, a mischievous fox, lacked a vocal crispness and dexterity that the character required. His vocals were a bit mushy for my taste and felt off for the character.

That said, I thought Lupita Nyong’o was very good as Roz.

I saw the film with my young son and when it ended, I asked him if he liked it, which he did (as did I despite my criticism). I then asked him which he liked better, the movie or the book. Much to my shock, since he had just seen the movie and had read the book many, many months ago – and reading is not his favorite thing to do, he said he liked the book better than the movie.

The movie does change things from the book. For instance, the pivotal character from the book, Chitchat – a motormouthed squirrel, is all but disappeared from the movie and replaced in the narrative by Pinktail, a mother possum (voiced by Catherine O’Hara).

The ending of the movie is different from the book as well, and is another reason why the emotional power of the film gets diminished in its final third.

Other book to movie changes are more subtle but no doubt book readers will notice and be either mildly or majorly disappointed by them.

Ultimately, The Wild Robot tells a story of love between a parent and a child, and that is moving and meaningful no matter how that parent/child relationship begins.

But there’s also a more subtle, and some might say nefarious or malignant sub-text that fuels the final fourth of the film, and that is about acquiescing to fascistic power. The sub-text of this film is the polar opposite of the old adage that “it is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees”. The Wild Robot sub-textually endorses the notion of living on one’s knees, which is a total subversion of the hero’s journey – which has historically been a masculine tale, replacing it with the feminine instinct to placate and survive rather than to fight and die.  

So instead of teaching children to fight tyranny and authoritarianism, The Wild Robot in its cinematic form teaches them to bend the knee and keep their head down in order to scrape out a meek existence where freedom and love are momentary gifts to be stolen under an ever-watchful tyrannical eye instead of God-given rights worth fighting and dying for.

No doubt most people would roll their eyes at this interpretation of the film and claim I am reading way too much into it…but they’d be wrong. Movies (and tv and all other entertainment) are powerful propaganda tools and are used to manipulate and condition people in general, and children in particular, as to how to see their world and what to find acceptable.

The story of The Wild Robot is a benign and beautiful one…until it turns into a malignant and malicious one. That turn occurs late in the film and effectively uses the overwhelming emotion of the first three quarters as a way to bore into the collective unconscious of audiences and then drops the seed of acquiescence and impotence in the face of power.

Interestingly enough, the book is not structured in the same way as the film and it’s hero’s journey is therefore different, more traditional and therefore mythologically and archetypally more satisfying.

With all of that said, the truth is I “enjoyed” The Wild Robot because it effectively made me feel, and that’s what we want from cinema, even if it involved animated animals and robots living out the drama of life.

That the emotional strings plucked by The Wild Robot are used to promote a nefarious sub-text, is, if you are able to watch it consciously, still dismaying but somewhat less relevant.

The bottom line is that The Wild Robot is an emotionally profound movie that suffers a bit from a narrative that gets a tad meandering, but overall, I think it is still worth seeing.

Just watch it with an open heart and a watchful mind – and teach your kids to do the same thing.

©2024

Wolfs: A Review - This Star-Studded Dog Won't Hunt

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here at all.

Wolfs, starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, is the new movie on Apple TV + that tells the tale of two New York City based lone-wolf “fixers” who are forced to work together on a complicated job.

The film, written and directed by Jon Watts – who is best known for directing the recent Spider-Man movies, describes itself as an action comedy, which is a bit of an inaccurate moniker since Wolfs is neither action-packed nor funny.

The film follows the travails of Jack (Clooney) and Nick (Pitt) as they are called to the hotel room of Margaret (Amy Ryan), who is running for District Attorney. Unfortunately for Margaret, the young man she brought back to her hotel room for a tryst has died and so she calls a secret number and a fixer is sent. Then there’s a twist and another fixer is sent and these two lone wolf fixers do not want to form a pack and work together. Comedy is supposed to ensue…but never does.

Writer/director Watts uses a lot of filmmaking techniques, like numerous quick edits on mundane events like a car backing out of a parking space, and languid camera movements, to give the impression of cinematic sophistication, but he fails at even the most rudimentary elements of storytelling.

With a convoluted story and middling direction, the movie is forced to rely upon the star power of Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

Pitt and Clooney have, to varying degrees of success, previously worked together in the Ocean’s Eleven movies, and their reunion on Wolfs is meant to cash in on their status and stardom. In other words, Wolfs is our chance to hang out with two handsome, cool, movie stars for two hours – lucky us.

Unfortunately, Wolfs features zero chemistry, zero comedy and zero coherence. It is one of those movies where as you’re watching it you feel like you’re waiting for the story to actually start and it never really does.

The plot of Wolfs has all the clarity of a drunk toddler’s storytelling while playing with action figures. The rules of the world in Wolfs are random, arbitrary, confusing and ultimately annoying. Nothing makes much sense and it seems as though none of it was really meant to.

In this way Wolfs is a perfect companion piece to the previous movie Apple Films released, The Instigators, starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. Both movies are so vehemently vapid, vacant and venal as to be apocalyptic. If some poor soul were to watch these bro-fueled bombs back to back they’d be tempted to light themselves on fire in order to feel something, anything at all, and to kill the malignant stupidity that was just implanted in their brains.

The final scene of Wolfs is the one that helped me to understand how Clooney and Pitt see themselves, or at least see their pairing, and it is astonishingly delusional. I won’t give anything away except to say that this scene is meant to demonstrate that Clooney and Pitt are the modern-day Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Let me be as clear as I can about this…Clooney and Pitt are not Newman and Redford. Not even close. They never have been and they never will be.

To be fair, Pitt has matured into a much better actor than his pretty boy beginnings would’ve hinted, and he’s become a very astute and successful producer as well. His choice in projects and his taste are admirable, but let’s not kid ourselves, he’s no Robert Redford.

Clooney is, obviously, not Paul Newman, who was one of the greatest actors and movie stars in Hollywood history. Clooney is now, and frankly always has been, a bad actor, a bad movie star and a truly terrible director.

For the last twenty-five years or so Clooney has been one of those people who populate our culture who are only famous for being famous. He’s the male equivalent of Jessica Simpson, and equally as vacuous.

It has been reported that Clooney and Pitt were paid $35 million each to star in Wolfs, which if true, is pretty amusing. Apple’s desperation to be a player in the movie business has forced them to pay exorbitant prices to talent in exchange for truly abysmal movies. Considering that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is the best Apple movie ever made, and is one of Scorsese’s lesser films, is an indictment of Apple, the movie business and Killers of the Flower Moon.

Wolfs spent a week in theatres before hitting Apple TV+ on Friday September 28th. It will, rightfully, languish on that atrocious, backwater of a streaming service, mercifully hidden from wider audiences. Those without Apple TV+, and those unable to navigate the incomprehensible maze that is Apple TV+ to find Wolfs, are blissfully unaware of how truly lucky they are.

In conclusion, Wolfs is a poorly conceived and poorly executed movie that is so small and inconsequential as to be instantaneously forgettable. It means nothing. It has nothing. It is nothing.

©2024

An Autopsy of Bombs: The Fall Guy and Furiosa Edition

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

This year we’ve had a few notable box office bombs, the most intriguing of which are The Fall Guy and Furiosa.

Like the vast majority of people, I did not see those movies in the theatre, hence their under-performance at the box office. But now both films are available to stream and I recently checked them out to see what, if anything, I missed, and if they deserved to be ignored in the theatre.

Let’s start with The Fall Guy, which is currently available to stream on Peacock.

The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch, was set up to be the big office blockbuster to open the summer movie season when it hit theatres on May 3rd. The film, which stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, had a huge marketing push pre-release, which included a witty bit of banter at the Oscars between the two stars. The film sold itself in a plethora of television ads as an old-fashioned, 1980’s style Hollywood action movie with likeable movie stars (Gosling and Blunt).

But upon release the film fell flat as nobody came out to see it. It was number one at the box office on its opening week, but with a severely subdued haul of $35 million. Not great. It went downhill from there.

It dropped to number two in its second week of release and then fell off a cliff. It ended up making a paltry $180 million in total off of its $120 million budget. In Hollywood accounting, that means it lost a ton of money. (Hollywood accounting means you roughly double the budget to account for marketing and for the theatre’s haul – and the rest goes to the studio – so The Fall Guy is about $240 million underwater)

So why did The Fall Guy fail?

The Fall Guy does have two very charming and beautiful movie stars as its leads, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who are, you guessed it, very charming and very beautiful. But on the downside, The Fall Guy is a movie no one wanted…and so no one went to see it. Myself included.

The movie is sort of attached to the rather forgettable B-tv series from the 80’s, The Fall Guy, which is second rate Lee Majors material, as Majors is remembered for the Six Million Dollar Man, not The Fall Guy. But The Fall Guy brand doesn’t have a built-in fan base as Gen Xers may remember the show from their childhood but don’t really give a shit about it because it wasn’t beloved, and younger audiences will have absolutely never heard of it.

Another major issue is that The Fall Guy is, frankly, a really bad movie. It features an abysmally incoherent and relentlessly stupid script, as well as stunts that are rather tepid and cinematically mundane.

As charming as Gosling and Blunt are…and they are incredibly charming…they’re not charming enough to tolerate the excruciatingly boring and stupid nonsense going on around them for the duration of this idiotic movie.

In some ways The Fall Guy is meant to be a love letter to stunt men, which I suppose is a nice thought. Stunt men are a different breed (and deserve an Oscar category)…but if you’ve ever met one you know that while their work is often interesting, they often are not.

On the bright side stunt men will always be happy to have you break a chair over their head, which is very cathartic. Truth is I’d rather break a real chair over my head than watch The Fall Guy again.

The Fall Guy’s failure is a stark reminder that wishful thinking from the C Suite of Hollywood studios doesn’t translate into audience interest. The Fall Guy had seemingly everything going for it except for the two things it actually needed, audience interest and good storytelling. Oops.

In conclusion, The Fall Guy most definitely deserved to fail, and it certainly did just that.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga on the other hand…

Furiosa is the fifth film in the Mad Max franchise and is a prequel to 2015’s fantastic Fury Road, which received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won six Oscars.

Fury Road didn’t break box office records but it did break more than even making $380 million on a $160 million budget.

In all honesty I am not a Mad Max fanatic. The first movies came out when I was a kid and I didn’t see them in the theatre. I did see them all as a teen on VHS though, and liked most of them (I wasn’t a real fan of Beyond Thunderdome), some a great deal…but it’s not a franchise with which I ever strongly identified despite my respect for it.

When Fury Road came out in 2015 after a thirty-year absence of Mad Max material, I didn’t see in the theatre but caught it on cable…and was absolutely blown away. Fury Road is an astonishing movie and is a monument to director George Miller’s brilliance.

Despite having missed the boat on Fury Road in the theatre, when Furiosa came along I, being the moron that I am, once again didn’t venture out to theatres to see it. In my defense, my time is much more limited now than it was back in 2015 (having kids will do that), so I sort of have an excuse – but not a very good one.

Unfortunately, I was not alone in not seeing Furiosa when it hit theatres on May 24th, as the movie made a measly $172 million during its run against a $168 million budget. The film performed so poorly that it seems likely that the Mad Max franchise may have breathed its last breath. Considering that the franchise’s director, George Miller, is 79, one can assume at the very least that Miller is done making Mad Max movies…which is a shame because he is extraordinarily good at it.

But now Furiosa is streaming on Max and I’ve seen it.

I can report that missing Furiosa in the theatre was a grievous mistake.

Furiosa isn’t perfect by any means. For instance, it isn’t nearly as good as Fury Road. But…it does feature some truly imaginative and original stunt sequences that are breathtakingly spectacular.

The film also features a stoic but solid performance from Anya Taylor-Joy, who lives up to the name of Furiosa with a fire in her eyes that is undeniable.

All of the magic that make George Miller such a dynamic moviemaker are evident in Furiosa, as he shoots his action sequences with a verve and aplomb that are unequalled in our CGI addicted world. (to be fair there is some CGI in Furiosa, but nothing compared to most movies).

As for why a film as good as Furiosa failed, it is difficult to say.

The marketing for Furiosa wasn’t particularly strong, I mean it didn’t move me to go see it, so that could be a reason.

I do recall the marketing being “female driven”, and some have speculated that having a female lead, Anya Taylor-Joy, could have turned off male audiences, so that could be it. People are certainly tired of culture war bullshit in their movies – myself included, and the impression could’ve been given by Furiosa’s marketing that this was a girl power movie…which is kryptonite nowadays for male audiences. But counter to that, that certainly wasn’t the case with Fury Road, which starred Charlize Theron, so it seems to be a thin argument. Although counter to that counter, Tom hardy had a starring role in Fury Road as well, so who knows.

Another reason could be that Furiosa is a prequel and people are tired of prequels and of having to “do the homework” of having to see all the other movies just to understand what is going on in the new movie. I think Marvel definitely suffers from this and maybe Mad Max does now too.

The truth is that Furiosa’s failure is both a mystery and frustrating to me. It’s a mystery because I can’t quite pinpoint what caused it, and it’s frustrating because Mad Max is a perfect action franchise for our times and would be a great franchise for Warner Brothers to mine for film and tv projects going forward. But now with Furiosa’s failure, that won’t happen.

After having seen Furiosa, and having found it to be a very well made, extremely solid piece of action entertainment and a noteworthy bit of Mad Max franchise filmmaking, I really don’t know why people didn’t go see it and why word of mouth wasn’t better and more useful.

To end this discussion, here’s my ranking of Mad Max movies.

5. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome – Not an awful movie but easily the worst of the Mad Max movies.

4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – This movie is world’s better than Beyond Thunderdome, and is very close in the running with Mad Max and Road Warrior.

3. Mad Max – The original is a down and dirty and disturbing movie that is undeniable.

2. Mad Max: The Road Warrior – The franchise makes the leap into the big time with a gritty and explosive action extravaganza.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road – The best of the best. Truly extraordinary piece of action filmmaking.

And finally…my ratings for The Fall Guy and Furiosa.

THE FALL GUY

Streaming: Peacock

Rating: 1 out of 5 Stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT

FURIOSA

Streaming: Max

Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SEE IT!!

Thus concludes today’s autopsy of a bomb…or bombs as the case may be.

 ©2024

Rebel Ridge: A Review - Where's Rambo When You Need Him?

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An action thriller with little action and no thrills.

Rebel Ridge, written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, is a Netflix original action thriller that tells the story of Terry Richmond, a former Marine who is wronged by a small-town police force in the deep south, and seeks justice.

At first glance Rebel Ridge looks like a First Blood rip-off/homage with Aaron Pierre’s Terry the stand-in for Sly Stallone’s John Rambo. But that impression is the wrong one.

Rebel Ridge is not First Blood, not by a long shot. The movie is an action thriller that is short on action and devoid of thrills. Its biggest problem is that it simply refuses to satiate the audience’s bloodlust, which ultimately makes the film deeply unsatisfying.

The premise is simple enough - a guy gets mistreated by police in a small southern town and fights back (sounds just like First Blood). In this case the cops use civil asset forfeiture laws to confiscate Terry’s life savings which he planned to use to start a new life with his troubled cousin. The local cops are, of course, both corrupt and racist, and their criminality leads to deeply dire consequences for the people Terry cares about.

But as simple as this premise is, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier makes the unfortunate choice to make the plot a long and winding tale that is much more complicated and convoluted than it needs to be, and ultimately less gripping than it should be.

The issue of civil asset forfeiture is a compelling one to spotlight, but Rebel Ridge fails to stay focused on that issue and instead gets lost with sidetracks into other topics, among them structural racism, the confederacy, the patriarchy, and the opioid epidemic, not to mention the budget crises of rural governments in America. All of these side issues end up burying the lede, which is the innate injustice of civil asset forfeiture laws, and that is disappointing.

Adding to the problems is the fact that for an alleged action movie there is a paucity of action, and what action there is, is quite mundane and poorly executed.

Rebel Ridge is no First Blood mostly because there is so little blood on display. The actual first blood in the film isn’t spilled until very late in the festivities and even then, it’s pretty tepid.

The reason for this is that the most distinct character trait of Terry, a martial arts expert, is that he refuses to use a weapon or kill anyone, which neuters Rebel Ridge from the get go, and this impotence only makes the film more flaccid as time goes by.

This lack of a killer instinct from Terry is not only boring to watch, it is taken to such extremes that it removes any sense of reality from the movie, thus making it all seem silly. I mean, I get not wanting to kill anyone, but when you are surrounded by bloodthirsty racist cops who are all shooting at you and you disarm every gun you touch and refuse to actually shoot back, then the suspension of disbelief goes right out the window along with Terry’s instinct for self-preservation.

The fact of the matter is that violence should’ve been the centerpiece of the film, but Rebel Ridge uses only the threat of violence as its centerpiece, which isn’t exactly cinematically compelling.

On the bright side, Aaron Pierre, who stars as Terry Richmond, proves himself a very worthy lead. Pierre’s performance is minimalist and isn’t so much dynamic as it is magnetic.

Pierre has a fine mastery of stillness – a skill lacking in so many of our current crop of actors, and exudes an undeniable power through minimal movement. Pierre never reverts to histrionics or hysteria, but instead is a picture of control while maintaining a vivid and vibrant inner life.

Action stars are hard to come by and Hollywood is desperate for them, so I hope Pierre gets more opportunities based upon his intriguing and often impressive performance in Rebel Ridge.

The rest of the cast, for the most part, fall short of Pierre’s work.

Don Johnson plays the local police chief Sandy Burnne, and he restrains himself from going full caricature but only barely. Johnson gives a paint by numbers performance that underwhelms.

AnnaSophia Robb plays Summer, a court clerk sympathetic to Terry’s plight. Robb acquits herself well in the poorly written role by bringing a nervous energy and palpable fragility to the character.

Emory Cohen’s Steve, a local bad guy cop, is a mindless caricature and dull as doornails, as is James Cromwell’s local judge character.

To top it all off the film lacks a distinct visual style that is most notable in the poorly choreographed and executed fight scenes. The whole movie looks like a second-rate television show…which is not a compliment.

Rebel Ridge has gotten good reviews and is doing robust streaming numbers, so it seems I am in the minority with my mostly negative feelings about the movie. I simply cannot understand why anyone would be exhilarated by this film. I understand the excitement over Pierre, who seems like a good find, but the rest of the film really flounders.

The bottom line is that Rebel Ridge feels like an action movie for people who don’t like action movies and but who want to say they like action movies. Therefore, I cannot recommend Rebel Ridge, but I’m hoping that Aaron Pierre’s next movie is a better one, since he shows great promise as a lead actor.

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 122: Deadpool and Wolverine

On this episode, Barry and I don our superhero tights and talk all things Deadpool and Wolverine. Topics discussed include the value of Ryan Reynold's shtick and a multitude of multi-verse cameos, as well as the tenuous future of the MCU.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 122: Deadpool and Wolverine

Thanks for listening!!

©2024

The Instigators: A Review - A Boston Bro Bore

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A lifeless and laugh-less Boston-based heist comedy that is not the least bit interesting or entertaining.

The Instigators, starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, tells the tale of Rory and Cobby, two mismatched, down on their luck, sad sack Bostonians who get hired to pull off a heist.

The film, which is directed by Doug Liman and was co-written by Casey Affleck, is currently streaming on Apple TV+ - which is maybe the worst designed streaming service in the history of mankind…a fact that no doubt leaves Steve Jobs twisting and turning in his grave.

Speaking of twisting, turning and graves, The Instigators is best described as a comedy-heist movie, although it isn’t the least bit funny and the heist isn’t remotely compelling.  

The Instigators is as middling as middling can be as it is a lifeless, mostly charmless, gratingly predictable exercise.

The failure of this film is somewhat baffling as it is chock full of acting talent. Besides Damon and Affleck there’s Paul Walter Hauser (one of the best and one of my favorite actors), Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlberg, Ron Perlman, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames and Toby Jones.

Despite this solid cast the acting is, frankly, mostly dreadful. Perlman, in particular, seems to be in another movie entirely as his performance is unconscionably cartoonish.

Everyone else seems to be just going through the motions as there isn’t a real person to be found on-screen for the duration.

Casey Affleck and Damon too seem to be painting by numbers as they play an emotionally distant wise cracking, Boston smart ass with a heart of gold who teams with emotionally traumatized and distant Boston dad with a heart of gold. Yawn.

This is well-trod ground for both of these guys and it definitely feels that way watching this movie as neither of them seem to be the least bit engaged and are only cashing in on their tired, well-worn Boston personas.

One final note regarding the cast, and that is regarding Jack Harlow. Harlow plays a criminal named Scalvo and I just don’t get it with this guy. I genuinely don’t understand who this Harlow guy is, where he comes from or why they are trying to make him into an actor or a movie star. I saw him in the remake of White Men Can’t Jump and had the same feeling. I just don’t get it at all. Can we please just remove Jack Harlow from public life? Please.

As for the directing, Doug Liman seems to be just as disengaged as the cast. The film is listless and flat and never gains any momentum - dramatic, comedic, or otherwise.

There’s a big Limen-esque car chase while Petula Clark’s hit song “Downtown” plays and you know it’s supposed to be the action comedy centerpiece of the film and a major highlight but it is decidedly lackluster, underwhelming and cinematically flaccid…as is the entirety of the movie.

That car chase is Liman play-acting at being Doug Liman – whose famous car chase in The Bourne Identity is a cinema classic, just like Damon and Affleck are play-acting at being deviations of their more famous and successful Boston characters from Good Will Hunting and Manchester-by-the-Sea.

Ultimately, The Instigators is an empty and fruitless cinematic endeavor that lacks both comedy and cool. Nothing matters in this movie because nothing is even remotely real. The stakes are never heightened because the characters are never clearly defined beyond stereotype and caricature.

The Instigators is a product of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company Artists Equity, which is a bad sign for that endeavor going forward. The company’s first film, Air, which starred Damon and was directed by Ben Affleck, showed some promise, but The Instigators is a major step back.

If Damon and Affleck want to be real producers who bring meaningful change to the film industry, they have to make films that matter. And the only films that matter are films that are very good, or very successful, or both. The instantly forgettable The Instigators is none of the above.

This is the type of film that you should be able to mindlessly watch and get a few chuckles from…unfortunately The Instigators can’t even muster the energy to be mindless, yet fun, entertainment. It’s a dull, poorly designed and constructed vanity project that no one, not even the people in it or who made it, really gives a shit about. And neither should you.

©2024

Deadpool and Wolverine: A Review - Shticking and Screaming

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

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Rating: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you like Ryan Reynolds’ shtick, you’ll like this movie. If you don’t, you definitely won’t.

Deadpool and Wolverine, the third film in the Deadpool franchise and the…God help us…34th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hit theatres on July 26th, and I just got a chance to see it.

The film, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, has made over $800 million dollars in just two weeks of release, and seems poised to cross the billion-dollar threshold. That is an impressive haul even considering the film’s $200 million budget.

One of the more intriguing things about Deadpool and Wolverine is that Deadpool is the first of the 20th Century Fox cinematic comic book characters to have his own movie since Disney purchased Fox back in 2019. The first two Deadpool movies, as well as all of the X-Men and X-Men adjacent movies like Wolverine and Logan, and the Fantastic Four movies, were all Fox properties. Now Disney owns those characters and has to figure out a way to use them to save their floundering Cinematic Universe, which has fallen off a cliff in terms of box office and cultural relevance in since the high point of Endgame in 2019.

Deadpool is an interesting character to debut the Fox and friends comic book heroes in Disney’s family friendly realm because he is a self-aware, cynical and sarcastic symbol of Generation X and believes in absolutely nothing but snark and raunch.

In Deadpool and Wolverine Ryan Reynold’s signature snark is certainly turned up to 11, but the raunch is reduced to a Disney-friendly 4, with Deadpool’s usual sexual antics, like getting pegged, being only spoken about but never shown. Walt Disney is no doubt looking up from hell quite pleased.

The Deadpool franchise has always relied entirely upon the comedic stylings of its star Ryan Reynolds, and thus far has done so to great success. But at the moment it’s not just Deadpool but the entirety of the MCU that is relying on the Reynold’s singular self-aware superhero snark…and while I am a fan of Reynolds as Deadpool, his shtick is definitely starting to wear thin…frankly bit too thin to sustain any dreams of carrying the MCU on his back.

The first Deadpool movie was an exhilarating breath of fresh air, and Reynolds was perfectly suited and situated to pull it off. Deadpool lampooned the superhero genre at the height of its success, while also being a top-notch superhero movie in its own right, no easy task.

The second Deadpool film was less successful mostly because the first film had been so successful, and so expectations were high. Deadpool 2 was still very funny, but it got caught up adoring itself a little bit too much to work as well as the original.

Deadpool and Wolverine, which is Deadpool 3, is the least successful film in the franchise, at least in terms of comedy, drama and action, but looks like it will be the most financially successful as it hurtles toward the billion-dollar mark heading into its third week of release. And so it goes here in Hollywood.

Deadpool and Wolverine is essentially an odd couple-comedy-road movie, with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine playing a short-tempered, violent Bing Crosby (not unlike Bing Crosby in real-life) to Ryan Reynold’s foul-mouthed, violent Bob Hope.

The movie definitely made me laugh out loud a couple times, and I noticed about midway through that I had a stupid smirk stuck on my face the entire time I watched. These accomplishments are not to be taken lightly as I am notorious difficult to please when it comes to comedy.

Yes, there is a plot in the film, sort of, but it’s not worth getting into at all because it is not only moronic but basically inconsequential, which is not a great thing in terms of storytelling…but it is what it is.

Yes, there’s a cornucopia of cameos, none of which really work beyond a momentary nod of recognition, but superhero fans will adore them.

Yes, there’s a villain, Cassandra Nova, who is almost instantly forgettable and is played with a rather remarkable lack of verve and panache by Emma Corin.

Yes, there are action sequences, some of which are fun and some of which are bland and derivative.

The cinematography is often painfully dull and devoid of the vibrant colors of the first two Deadpool movies. The film looks flat and uninspired. Not a shock that it is directed by Shawn Levy, whose signature style is flat and uninspired.

The best things about Deadpool and Wolverine though are, not surprisingly, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.

I’ve never been a huge Hugh Jackman fan, and thought his being cast as Wolverine – one of the greatest comic book characters of all-time, back in 2000 was a let-down, especially when Russell Crowe was allegedly the first choice. But I readily admit after having watched all of the X-Men and Wolverine movies, the fantastic Logan in particular, that Jackman is a terrific Wolverine.

Logan was a great way to end his run as the iconic character, and Deadpool and Wolverine feels a little disappointing in that regard as it diminishes the impact and accomplishment of Logan, one of the best comic book films ever made, but in Hollywood in general, and Disney in particular, money talks and artistic bullshit walks…so here we are.

Deadpool has always worked because it is essentially a self-aware parody of not just superhero movies but the superhero movie industry. It spotlights and skewers all of that genre’s flaws, most notably its absurdities, inanities and insanities.

But the real reason the Deadpool movies work is because of Ryan Reynolds and his singular comedic style which is a magnetic mix of manic, foul-mouthed and insecure fandom in character form.

The reality is that if you like Ryan Reynolds you’ll love all of the Deadpool movies, Deadpool and Wolverine included. Reynold’s humor is only heightened when matched with Jackman’s brooding Wolverine, which is a shockingly powerful piece of acting considering the silliness that surrounds it.

If you like Ryan Reynold’s and his usual shtick, you’ll like Deadpool and Wolverine. I like Ryan Reynold’s shtick and that’s why I liked Deadpool and Wolverine. Is it a good movie? No, not really. Is it a well-made movie? No, not really. Is it a fun and ultimately instantly forgettable summer movie you can mindlessly chuckle at and never really consider ever again? Yes…yes it is.

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 121 - The Bikeriders

On this episode, Barry and I hop aboard our Harleys and discuss The Bikeriders, the biker gang movie starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy. Topics discussed include Barry's undying love for Austin Butler, the unsexing of Jodie Comer and the yearning for decent, mid-budget adult dramas. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 121 - The Bikeriders

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Beverly Hills Cop 4: Axel F - A Review: Eddie Murphy...is that you?

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. It’s a formulaic action-comedy…but it does boast an engaging and energized Eddie Murphy…something we haven’t seen in a really long time.

It’s hard to believe it but Beverly Hills Cop, the blockbuster action comedy that made Eddie Murphy a megastar, hit theatres forty years ago in 1984.

To put that into context, consider that forty years before Beverly Hills Cop, World War II was still going on and Bing Crosby was the biggest star in Hollywood.

It’s easy to forget now, but Eddie Murphy was, back in the 1980’s, the most massive star in the Hollywood universe – he was like Bing Crosby with ba-ba-ba-balls. He was the biggest tv star (SNL), movie star and comedian on the planet…he was so big he put out musical albums that were atrocious but they still sold well and got continuous radio play. I mean, who could forget the hit song “Boogie in your Butt”?

Murphy’s superstar status, which reached its apex in 1984 declined slowly…and then all at once. In the wake of his supreme successes with 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Coming to America (1988) the quality of work began to decline - despite a minor renaissance in 1992 (Boomerang, The Distinguished Gentleman).

In an effort to salvage his stardom Murphy made Beverly Hills Cop 3 in 1994 and it was brutally bad and instantly forgotten. At that point the bloom was definitely off the Murphy rose. He then sold his soul and dignity and dove into the Nutty Professor and Dr. Doolittle franchises and his cache and career went precipitously down from there.

Murphy has spent the last quarter of a century – with the exception of 2006’s Dreamgirls, churning out the laziest, most awful, money-grab garbage imaginable.

In recent years he has returned to his earlier successes in the hopes of a career resurgence or a money infusion. First there was Coming 2 America, a sequel to 1988’s brilliant Coming to America…which is arguably Murphy’s last good movie. Coming 2 America was a comedically flaccid venture devoid of Murphy’s charm and heart that so effectively fueled the original.

And now there is Beverly Hills Cop 4 which premiered on Netflix July 3, 2024. Murphy is back as Axel Foley, the wise cracking Detroit cop who is a very fast-talking fish out of water in the posh confines of Beverly Hills. Also back are Taggart and Rosewood, John Ashton and Judge Reinhold respectively, as well as Paul Reiser as Axel’s fellow Detroit cop Jeffrey and Bronson Pinchot as Serge. Joining the festivities are Beverly Hills Cop newcomers Joseph Gordon-Leavitt as a cop, Kevin Bacon as a bad guy cop and Taylour Paige as Axel’s adult daughter.

Beverly Hills Cop 1 and 2 were big hits and perfect vehicles for Murphy’s charisma and comedy. Beverly Hills Cop 3 (1994) was apocalyptically awful. Beverly Hills Cop 4 is…somewhere in between.

Is Beverly Hills Cop 4 a good movie? No. Is Beverly Hills Cop 4 a bad movie? Not really. It’s just sort of a formulaic movie (that somehow cost $150 million to make!) that plays out in front of you and then it’s over and no one will really care one way or the other.

The one notable thing about Beverly Hills Cop 4 though is that it’s the first movie in decades…maybe since Bowfinger (1999), where Eddie Murphy seems engaged and energized and not simply there for the check.

Murphy, at his height, had an undeniable charm and charisma that dominated the screen, which is why it was always so jarring to see him dead-eyed and dull sleepwalking through the second half of his career.

But in Beverly Hills Cop 4 Murphy is back being at ease and comfortable on screen. Axel Foley is sort of the Eddie Murphy of old and Murphy makes the most of it. He is funny, cool (but not too cool) and enjoyable to be around. You never feel like Eddie Murphy is phoning it in and just going through the motions…which is a refreshing change of pace.

The film follows its action-comedy roots and sticks pretty tight to the formula…a formula which it perfected back in 1984 and which others have used and abused ever since with ever more diminishing returns. To give an indication of how culturally mammoth the original Beverly Hills Cop movie was and what an extraordinary talent Murphy was, consider that Michael Bay poached the formula with his Bad Boys franchise and had to use both Will Smith AND Martin Lawrence to fill the Eddie Murphy role.

Beverly Hills Cop 4, which is the directorial debut of Mark Molloy and is written by Will Beall and Kevin Etten, is very conscious of the franchise’s past and winks along to the nostalgia. For example, in the first ten minutes of the movie it features the hit songs from the Beverly Hills Cop movies in the 80’s. It opens with Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is on”, followed by Bob Seger’s “Shakedown”, then the Pointer Sisters “Neutron Dance”, and of course the franchise’s synth-heavy anthem by Herbie Hancock. That Glenn Frey and one of the Pointer Sisters are dead, and that Bob Seger is permanently retired, only goes to emphasize how damn long ago that first film really was.

The plot of Beverly Hills Cop 4 is not really important. Just know that there’s trouble in Beverly Hills involving Axel Foley’s estranged daughter and he comes to LA from Detroit to figure everything out and make things right. Taggart (John Ashton) is now a police chief in Beverly Hills, Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) is a private detective and Serge (Bronson Pinchot) is still a weirdly gay-ish foreign man about Beverly Hills.

There’s a copious amount of plastic surgery apparent on both Reinhold and Pinchot’s distorted faces (oh Hollywood!) and none of the old cast bring the same joie de vivre as Murphy does, but what can you do?

There are some action sequences, none of which move the needle very much. And there’s some shootouts which feature villains who can’t shoot straight and good guys who can.

You won’t care about the convoluted plot or how it resolves (it resolves exactly like you think it does) or anything like that, but the only reason to tune in, then tune out and watch Beverly Hills Cop 4 is to see Eddie Murphy.

Murphy isn’t his old self in this movie…and he isn’t even a shadow of his former self in this movie…but he is a shadow of a shadow of his former self…and that’s better than anything Will Smith and Martin Lawrence or any other pretenders to the Murphy crown could ever hope to muster.

If you like Eddie Murphy, then Beverly Hills Cop 4, despite being mindless and middling movie mundanity, is worth watching to remember what was…and what might have been.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

The Bikeriders: A Review - Foundational Flaws Make 'The Bikeriders' an Uneasy Rider

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A flawed movie that could’ve been great but ended up being just average.

The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, chronicles the trials and tribulations of a Chicago-area motorcycle club from its benign founding in the early 1960’s to its malignant expansion throughout the 70s.

The film, which is inspired by Danny Lyon’s photo-book of the same name and is written and directed by Jeff Nichols, opened nationwide in theatres last weekend.

The Bikeriders has a lot going for it, like an appealing aesthetic, a banger of a soundtrack and three solid, attractive actors atop the cast list. And yet, the film struggles to captivate because it is fundamentally at cross-purposes with itself.

On one hand it wants to be a gritty, Goodfellas-esque, guys being guys motorcycle movie/crime drama (in fact an early sequence in the film is an homage to Goodfellas), and then on the other hand it wants to be a rather safe, cinematically antiseptic Hollywood movie and star making vehicle.

These differing desires are never more apparent as when comparing the performance styles of the two lead actors, Austin Butler and Jodie Comer, who play Benny and Kathy, the couple at the center of the drama.

Jodie Comer is a very, very pretty woman, but she’s not nearly as pretty in The Bikeriders as the beautiful Austin Butler, whose Benny is the brooding, blue-eyed, bad boy biker with the perfectly tussled hair who is the object of everyone’s desire.

The Bikeriders is a star-maker for Butler, as his job is to show up and pose and preen his way through a role without actually doing much heavy lifting. That he can be little more than a mannequin in this movie and women will still go absolutely bananas for him and dudes will still want to be him, is a testament to his innate star potential.

In contrast, Jodie Comer plays Kathy and has been unsexed to such a staggering degree as to be astonishing considering her preternatural allure. Adding to her unsexing is the fact that she’s doing a deeply studied performance which features a spot-on, but still grating, Chicago accent, and her wardrobe seems designed to eliminate any possible feminine appeal.

In terms of acting style, Comer is doing 1970’s Meryl Streep method acting and Butler is doing an Armani photo-shoot, and the clash of styles is not only cinematically confounding but also greatly diminishes the drama.

For example, Kathy and Benny, whose attraction/relationship is the center piece of the narrative, are completely devoid of any sizzle. There is not one iota of chemistry between Butler and Comer. Adding to the frigidity is that they never kiss, not even once, in the entire film. In fact, I don’t recall seeing the two of them ever touch…and not even in a sensual or romantic way, but at all. How can you have two ridiculously gorgeous people play a couple in a movie and never once show them kiss?

Now, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal except it undermines the narrative and dramatic premise of the entire project. Benny is allegedly torn between the motorcycle club and Kathy, but he doesn’t seem all that interested in Kathy, and frankly, Kathy doesn’t seem all that interested in him, which makes the whole thing dramatically incoherent.

What Kathy and Benny need is uncontrollable, blood-pumping, frantic passion, which would give Benny a reason to keep coming back and, more importantly, Kathy a reason to do EVERY SINGLE THING SHE DOES. But it has none of that and thus the drama of the film is neutered.

To be clear, I didn’t hate The Bikeriders. In general, I dig motorcycle movies (or car movies) and the film looks good, is aesthetically pleasing and stylistically intriguing, and it has a cast of solid actors.

For instance, Tom Hardy does a good job as Johnny, the founder of the Vandals, the fictional motorcycle club at the heart of the movie. Hardy splits the difference between Comer and Butler’ acting styles by giving a half method/half Hollywood performance, and it actually works.

The collection of actors in the motorcycle club, guys like the always reliable Michael Shannon, as well as Damon Herriman, Norman Reedus and Boyd Holbrooke, all do solid supporting work and make for believable bikers.

The costumes work as well, and the cinematography by Adam Stone is pretty standard but well executed.

Ultimately, The Bikeriders is one of those movies that could have been great but which never figured out what it wanted to be and more importantly, how it wanted to be or why it wanted to be.

The film could’ve been a steamy star-vehicle with Butler and Comer being their beautiful selves and lighting up the screen with a scintillating and sexy love story.

Or it could have been a gritty crime drama, with Benny and Kathy as the Henry Hill and Karen in a Goodfellas style tale.

But instead, the film tries to be both and ends up being neither.

One can’t help but wish that director Jeff Nichols could have had a more clear, coherent and concise vision for The Bikeriders, and a more-deft artistic, dramatic and cinematic touch in order to make the most of the tantalizing story hinted at in Lyon’s compelling photo-book of the same name.

The Bikeriders could have been extraordinary, but due to a lack of narrative and dramatic clarity, it’s just ordinary. Which is disappointing, but nowadays, not all that surprising.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

@2024

Hit Man: A Review - Missing the Target...but Not by Too Much.

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

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A harmless bit of entertainment that is enjoyable if you go in with low expectations.

Hit Man, starring Glen Powell and directed by Richard Linklater, is a noir rom-com loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a psychology and philosophy professor who worked undercover for the New Orleans police department posing as a “hit man for hire”.

The film, written by both Linklater and Powell, follows the travails of the nerdy Gary as he finds his true self by embodying the various hit man-characters he concocts in order to dupe customers and thwart murders before they happen.

Hit Man was released on Netflix on June 7th, 2024, which is how I watched it.  

I have heard Richard Linklater called the cinematic voice of Generation X, which I find to be an odd choice for a variety of reasons, the least of which is that he is just a bit too old to qualify for Generation X. As a Gen X-er myself, I have found Linklater to be, for the most part, a forgettable filmmaker. I find the vast majority of his work to be, at best…just fine. In general, I find nothing remarkable about his work at all. I don’t hate it, but I also don’t love it, and the truth is I never think about it.

The film that put Linklater (and Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck) on the map was Dazed and Confused (1993). I never understood the love for that movie despite having recognized my life being portrayed in it. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it also wasn’t a very good one.

I felt the same about Before Sunrise (1995), which made Ethan Hawke a movie star. Once again, I recognized myself and my generation in that movie, I just didn’t think it was particularly noteworthy or compelling cinema.

In 2014, Linklater was a favorite to win an Oscar with his coming-of-age film Boyhood, which was famously shot over a ten-year span. Critics adored the ten-year-shoot gimmick, but I found the whole enterprise to be gratingly vapid, pretentious and second-rate.

The Linklater films I have liked a lot are Waking Life (2001), an esoteric cinematic exploration of the meaning of life, and the mainstream School of Rock (2003). Waking Life was a ballsy movie to make because it was unapologetically arthouse while School of Rock was unabashedly crowd-pleasing.

Which brings us to Hit Man. Hit Man is a mainstream movie but not quite as mainstream as School of Rock…but it also has a subtle strain of the arthouse weaving through it.

The film flies as high as its star, Glen Powell, will take it…which is high but not that high. Powell, who is definitely the current “it” guy in Hollywood, and is poised to have a big Summer with his new Twister movie coming out in July, is charming and relentlessly likeable, but there is no denying that he’s a sort of a C or D level McConaughey – which isn’t exactly a compliment.

Powell’s various hit man characters are good for a few laughs in a showy “look at me” acting type of way, most notably his impression of Christian Bale from American Psycho, which is pretty great. But Powell, for as conventionally handsome as he is, is just a nice, good-looking guy…and that’s about it. He’s likeable, but he’s not very interesting. That doesn’t mean he won’t be a big movie star, it just means that he won’t be a very interesting movie star.

Powell’s co-star, Adria Arjona, who plays Gary’s love interest Madison, is certainly easy on the eyes, and she does a decent enough job in the role. But Arjona, like Powell, feels like a C or D level talent…which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it also isn’t the best.

One can’t help but think while watching Hit Man that thirty years ago a movie like this would’ve starred George Clooney and Julia Roberts and been a massive hit…but in today’s world, it stars Glen Powell and Adria Arjona, and is streaming on Netflix and, frankly, will be forgotten almost as soon as the credits roll.

And that is the problem…Hit Man isn’t a bad movie, but it also isn’t great. It is an adequately-made, amusing-enough piece of middle-brow entertainment with some dark twists thrown in to give it some artistic credence.

The film tries to be sexy, but just isn’t steamy enough to make the grade. It tries to be funny, but never consistently hits the comedy mark. It tries to be dark and daring but doesn’t have quite cajones to be fully either.

This isn’t to say the film is bad…it really and truly isn’t. It certainly has its charms and it is entertaining enough, and to its credit it does have something to say and says it in a rather clever and covert way. It is well-constructed and professionally crafted, but ultimately this is a movie that comes and goes and that is the end of that…which is emblematic of the state of cinema and the movie business.

Unfortunately, Hit Man is, like so much of cinema today, fine but forgettable. That many critics are fawning all over it speaks less to the quality of the film than the overall diminishment in the quality of cinema (and film criticism) as a whole in recent years.

To circle back to the notion of Linklater as the cinematic voice of Generation X, I would point readers in the direction of a film that came out last year, also about a hit man, also on Netflix, titled The Killer. The Killer is darker, smarter, funnier, more masterfully made and substantially better movie than Hit Man. The Killer’s director is David Fincher, who is of the same generation as Linklater and is infinitely a better filmmaker…as are a plethora of filmmakers from a similar era, which is why Linklater being the labelled the Gen X guy is so absurd.

Regardless of Linklater’s filmmaking status, the question is…is Hit Man worth watching? My answer would be…sure…why not? It seems like a good date movie as it’s a rather harmless, safe, middle of the road movie that breezes by and never moves you one way or the other over its brisk 115-minute run time.  

So, if you do watch Hit Man, my recommendation is to go in with low-expectations…you won’t be overwhelmed, but you won’t be disappointed either.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Hollywood's Self-Inflicted Box Office Problems

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

There’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth in recent weeks because the box office has been so sluggish, most notably the failures of The Fall Guy and Furiosa, which both painfully underperformed in their opening weekends and beyond.

The Fall Guy had such bad box office numbers it actually went to VOD 17 days after premiering in theatres. Not good for a movie boasting two “movie stars” and a gigantic marketing push.

If one were to look at the dismal box office results this Spring and come away thinking the sky is falling, that would be understandable.

Ever the optimist, let me put your mind at ease though regarding the sky is falling pessimism. The sky isn’t falling regarding the movie business…because it’s already fallen. Many will point to last year’s duel strikes as a reason for this year’s box office gully…but that misses the big picture.

The movie business, like American empire, is a dead man walking. That doesn’t mean it’ll vanish off the face of the earth and never be seen again…no, it just means that it will continue its descent into irrelevancy year after year after year until a giant asteroid comes and wipes us off the earth.

The reasons for this are numerous but here are a few of the major ones. 

The corporatization of Hollywood that began in the Reagan years is now complete. The corporate mindset has destroyed the mid-level budgeted movie in favor of blockbuster hunting, and that has led to bloated budgets, and bad movies. The stark decrease in the quality of cinema is pretty dramatic (with notable exceptions).

Another issue is that movie theatres and the theatre-going experience are both abominable. Theatres throughout the country, thanks again to corporate short-sightedness, are equipped with sub-par projectors which result in a greatly diminished viewing experience. Why go to the theatre and pay all that money when you can have a better visual experience at home on your big screen tv in a darkened living room?

As Sartre once taught us…hell is other people…and that is never more apparent than when you go to the movies. Dipshits and dumbasses talking and looking at their phone throughout a screening makes for a very tense and distracting movie going experience….another issue that is resolved by watching a movie at home.

Add to this that very, very few movies are so culturally compelling that people NEED to see them right away in order to stay in the loop. Barbie and Oppenheimer filled that bill last Summer, but those are definitely outliers. For example, would you be “out of the cultural loop” if you didn’t see Dune II in theatres this winter? It’s now streaming on Max just a few short months after premiering in theatres and you can watch it without all the bullshit of theatres, in the comfort of your own home…and go to the bathroom when you want without missing anything and not have to tell people to shut the fuck up or put their phones away. Will a big budget film like Dune II be diminished at a home theatre? One would expect the answer is ‘yes’ as it was made to be seen on a big screen…but considering when I saw it at a movie theatre I felt like I was watching it under three feet of water because the projector sucked so bad, my answer would be no.

The same is true of Furiosa. I like the Mad Max movies, but I’m not itching to go see Furiosa in the theatre because it isn’t mandatory in order to stay current culturally. So, I’ll see it when it comes to Max in a few months…or sooner.

The same is true for the glut of Marvel movies. For the longest time Marvel movies were must-see because everyone was talking about them….and now they’re not. Marvel movies ran its course but Disney keeps cramming them down our throat expecting the same results. I’m sorry but The Marvels isn’t moving the needle. No one cares.

Speaking of Marvel and Disney, another issue is that the massive success of the Marvel movies pre-2020 totally skewed the expectation IN HOLLYWOOD for what constitutes a successful movie.

Marvel movies routinely hit the billion-dollar mark and that became the standard for success. But that was then and this is now and studios and analysts are delusional about the box office potential for most movies. And that delusion gets baked into the cake regarding the budget for films.

Once again Barbie and Oppenheimer were outliers in this regard, and ironically have done more harm than good in regards to setting expectations for studio executives (and the general public).

For example, spending over $300 million to make a new Indiana Jones movie or Mission Impossible movie, is frankly nuts since neither of those creaky franchises are going to generate the kind of interest that will satiate a billion-dollar box office yearning.

The same is true for the new Marvel movies, as the stars of that franchise and the characters they played, are gone. Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is not walking through that door…and I’m sorry but Brie Larson isn’t going to fill that void.

The solution to the Hollywood problem is to change the corporate strategy, and instead of trying to make a billion dollars with a single blockbuster that costs at a minimum $250-300 million to make and another$150-250 million to market, is to make six or seven medium budget films for $50 million or less each with a focus on quality, in the hopes that one of those movies will hit big and fill the coffers.

Examples of what I’m talking about are movies like Parasite, which costs $15 million to make and brought in $262 million at the box office. I understand that Parasite is a remarkable movie from a brilliant filmmaker, but it shows what is possible.

The same is true of movies like Spotlight, which had a $20 million budget and made $98 million. Or even Good Will Hunting, which starred nobodies (Affleck and Damon) and was directed by a non-mainstream guy (Gus Van Sant) on a $10 million budget and raked in $225 million.

The key of course is that the movies have to be good and they have to avoid bloated budgets. The other benefit of making good movies is that more often than not if you make a good movie, it will get Oscar recognition and thus free marketing and a second life at the box office.

It goes without saying that Hollywood will not change its approach if for no other reason than corporations are allergic to actually thinking. And so, the studios will continue to relentlessly bang their heads against the bank vault door in the hopes one of these times it’ll open, even if just for a moment…like it did with Barbie and Oppenheimer, but if Barbie and Oppenheimer type success only comes along every five years or so, that won’t work as a business model.

The bottom line is that Hollywood fucked up their business and fucked up movies in the process…and we are all paying for it and will continue to pay for it for years to come. As a cinephile it gives me no pleasure in saying this but movies, much like popular music, is essentially dying as an artform and is too beholden to corporate interests to be able to save itself.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

The Idea of You: A Review - Looking for Love (and Entertainment) in All the Wrong Places

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An insidiously venal piece of rom-com slop.

The Idea of You, the new Amazon movie starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, is one of those insipid romantic comedies that is neither romantic nor comedic.

The film, written by Jennifer Westfeldt and Michael Showalter and directed by Showalter, tells the tale of Solene Marchand (Hathaway), a 40-year-old divorcee and single mother who owns an art gallery in Los Angeles.

Through happenstance Solene takes her teen daughter and her friends to Coachella for a music festival and there she meets and begins a love affair with Hayes, the lead singer of a popular boy band, who happens to be sixteen years her junior.

The story of The Idea of You, which apparently is based upon a book of the same name that no self-respecting human being should have ever read, is one of those divorced wine-mom wet dreams where middle-aged women can imagine themselves being so uber-desirable and hyper-successful and amazing that some high value, wealthy, famous and handsome young stud falls head over heels for them.

For an outsider like me, who is neither divorced nor a wine mom desperate for glory days gone by, this story and the character of Solene seem both fantastical and frankly pathetic. No doubt I would be run out of the mid-day chardonnay ladies book club for voicing such a misogynistic and hateful opinion.

The problems with The Idea of You go well beyond the ridiculous premise. The film bills itself as a romantic comedy yet there isn’t a single thing in it that is even remotely funny or even approaching funny.

The romance side of it is pretty lacking as well, as Hathaway and Galitzine have all the sexual chemistry of week-old dog turd roasting in the hot sun.

That Anne Hathaway is once again playing a sort of ugly duckling transformed into a princess (sexy or otherwise) is, to borrow from her favorite acting tick, eye-rolling. Yes, she has succeeded in this type of role in the past in films like The Devil Wears Prada and those Princess Diary movies, but the bloom is off the rose and it falls entirely flat in The Idea of You.

Ms. Hathaway is certainly a beautiful woman, and to pretend like she’s not or that she’s some frumpy old hag, is absurd to the point of being annoying. Even more absurd is the fact that her daughter in the film, Izzy (Ella Rubin), looks like she is Solene’s slightly younger sister.

In fact, the age difference stuff is the most-inane part of this entirely inane movie. Solene is forty but looks thirty-three, and Hayes is twenty-four and looks thirty-two, and Izzy is seventeen and looks twenty-eight. Everyone seems to be in the same suffocating age bracket and none of it makes any sense whatsoever.

Another extremely annoying part of the movie is that viewers must suffer through musical performances by Hayes and his insufferably awful boy band. Galitzine is apparently a singer in real life, so I assume he’s doing the actual singing in the movie, and I suppose it’s fine, it’s just that the songs are so god-awful atrocious as to be criminal. And that we must sit through entire renditions of these terrible songs that seem interminable throughout the film, feels like a crime against humanity.

In addition, Galitzine’s Hayes and his boy band bros are supposed to be the biggest boy band around but they are so relentlessly amateurish and such raging mediocrities, and their performances so stilted and underwhelming that it all seems even more ridiculous than the asinine premise of the movie.

The Idea of You also violates one of the rules that rarely if ever fails me, namely that if a character must run the gauntlet of a gaggle of rabid journalists/paparazzi at any time in a movie…then that movie sucks. I cannot recall a time when this rule was violated and the film was good and The Idea of You is perfect evidence of the rule’s validity.

Now, to be clear, I am not exactly the target audience for this film. But it is streaming on Amazon and that behemoth has put its considerable corporate heft behind the movie and promoting it, so it caught my eye and I gave it a watch…so you don’t have to.

What is so striking to me about The Idea of You is that this movie, its aesthetics, its tone, its story, the performances and everything about it except its star, is a Hallmark level piece of work. If this were starring Lacey Chabert and running on Lifetime, no one, myself most of all, would even know it exists or ever watch it. But because it stars Anne Hathaway and Amazon is behind it, it is thrust into the cultural spotlight and is taken seriously…or as seriously as a movie like this can be taken.

The truth is that if this movie were made fifteen years ago and starred Julia Roberts and Ryan Gosling, then it maybe, might’ve had a chance to be a big hit. But it wasn’t…and it definitely isn’t.

Anne Hathaway has her charms, but in a role like this in a film like this, they wear unconscionably thin, and Nicholas Galitzine is neither sexy enough nor interesting enough to move the needle in either direction, and so, The Idea of You ends up falling decidedly flat.

If you are looking for a mindless piece of rom-com entertainment, best avoid The Idea of You because it is either too mindless…or ironically, not mindless enough, to be of any value or worth.

The bottom line is that The Idea of You is a bad idea made into a bad movie, and rom-com lovers who seek it out will be looking for love in all the wrong places.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: A Review - Middling Monkey Business

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This flawed film is the worst of the fantastic recent reboot franchise, but it’s decent enough for Planet of the Apes fanatics despite its very pronounced flaws.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth film in the Planet of the Apes franchise reboot (and the ninth in the overall franchise), hit theatres this past weekend and handily won the box office by raking in $129 million.

The film, written by Josh Friedman and directed by Wes Ball, is set many generations after the events of its tremendous predecessor, War for the Planet of the Apes, which dramatized Caesar, the patriarch of the intelligent apes, delivering the first generation of said apes to the promised land.

In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the memory of the founding father Caesar is long forgotten by many tribes of apes living in isolated enclaves. One of these tribes is an eagle collecting group of apes, among them a young chimp named Noa (Owen Teague).

Noa accidentally stumbles upon another group of apes who not only remember the history of Caesar, but exploit it for nefarious, authoritarian means. This group, led by Proximus Caesar and his henchman gorilla Sylva, go on a rampage of conquest in order to Make Planet of the Apes Great Again….and Noa and his peaceful tribe bear the brunt of their ambition.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has Sasquatchian-sized shoes to fill considering the brilliance of its three predecessors Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes, and, to be frank, it never even approaches adequately filling them. To be clear, the film isn’t bad, but it also isn’t the least bit great, and it is easily the worst of the four films in the rebooted franchise.

Planet of the Apes films, even in the original franchise of the late 1960s and early 1970s, have always been great ideas with social issues embedded deep within the sci-fi splendor.

The same is true of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as it explores authoritarianism, exploitation, manipulation and other social issues. But just like the flawed early 1970’s sequels, Kingdom is much better as an idea than it is in execution.

The biggest issue with Kingdom is that none of its characters are even remotely compelling. The protagonist, Noa (Owen Teague), is no Caesar. He’s a rather dull and disinteresting chimp surrounded by equally dull chimps, like his friends Soona and Anaya. It also doesn’t help that it’s very difficult to tell the chimps apart as they – excuse my chimp racism – all look alike.

The uniformity of Noa’s tribe is further hampered by the flatness of each character. None stand out and none are fully fleshed out. As a result, none of their relationships are developed to the point where they’d be meaningful, never mind captivating.

The humans don’t fare any better. Nova (Freya Allen) is a mysterious human woman who isn’t that mysterious nor interesting. We never truly understand where she comes from or what motivates her. Trevathan (William H. Macy), is a human who works with apes and his story might’ve been pretty interesting but we never get to see it so we’ll never know.

Besides the lackluster characters, the film also suffers due to a lack of narrative clarity and visual crispness. Both of these shortcomings fall in the lap of director Wes Ball. Ball’s previous films include the Maze Runner trilogy, which isn’t exactly the pinnacle of cinematic experience. Watching Ball’s Planet of the Apes movie only increases Matt Reeves standing, as he directed the stellar Dawn and War films and has now graduated to the Batman franchise.

Kingdom’s plot jumps around from a coming-of-age story to a road picture to a fight-the-power narrative, but by trying to be all of these things it ends up being none of them.

Yes, Kingdom does nicely pay homage to the original 1968 film, particularly in one section with its distinct visual style and signature music, and it also gives adequate depth to the franchise’s mythology and archetypes, like having Noa (the biblical Noah – get it?) survive a flood of monkey shit both figuratively and sort of literally. But the movie never grabs you by the throat and makes you pay attention. It never makes you care much about the characters you’re supposed to care about, and never hate the characters you’re supposed to hate.

The best character in the entire film is without question Raka (Peter Macon), a monastic Orangutan who is keeping the gospel of Caesar and his sacred sayings alive, even if it is just to himself. But even Raka is not as good as say Maurice, the stunning orangutan from the previous trilogy.

That said, Raka has far too little screen time, and would be very well served with a Disney + mini-series (as would the entirety of the Orangutan class in the Planet of the Apes universe – give us a Dr. Zaius series!!), which I would voraciously watch. But instead, he’s given short shrift and the film suffers because of it.

The same is true of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the villainous chimp leader of a powerful group of apes, and his number one general Sylva (Eka Darville), a rough and tumble lowland gorilla.

The origin story of Proximus and Sylva too would make an interesting mini-series or feature film, no doubt more compelling than the rather tepid adventures of Noa, the good-hearted country ape forced to face the big, bad world. But instead Proximus and Sylva are rather thin characters despite there being a lot of meat left on those bones.

As far as the visuals of the film go, cinematographer Gyula Pados never paints with much flair, unlike his predecessors in the reboot trilogy. The film looks fine, but in comparison to the luscious visual feast of War for the Planet of the Apes for instance, Kingdom falls flat. The same is true of the action sequences, as the fight scenes, most notably the climactic battle, are dramatically underwhelming and poorly designed.

In addition, the CGI, for some reason, looks a little bit off compared to the previous films, or maybe it was just the lack of unique and compelling characters that made the visuals seem less than. For example, there is no character in this entire film that looks as good as say Koba or Maurice from the three previous films.

Another issue is the acting. Despite it being motion-capture acting, it is still acting, and the cast of the previous three films, most notably Andy Serkis as Caesar and Toby Kebbell as Koba, showed audiences the brilliance possible while acting through technology. Nothing in this film even comes close the stellar work of the cast in the previous films.

For example, Kevin Durand gives a rather trite and predictable performance as the villain Proximus. His bluster and big voice are routine for any first-time actor trying to play the heavy.

Owen Teague as Noa never lives up to the work Serkis did as Caesar, which to be fair, is an impossible task as Andy Serkis is the Marlon Brando of motion-capture acting….but still, the drop-off is notable and uncomfortable.

Now, with all of that bitching and moaning aside…I still have to admit that I liked Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes mostly because the original Planet of the Apes movies were my favorite film franchise of all-time and the reboot trilogy has only made the franchise in total even greater as they were sensational. Kingdom definitely has massive flaws – as explained above, but on the bright side, unlike Tim Burton’s shitty 2001 Apes movie, this is a real film and is passable entertainment. While not great, it is not an embarrassment to the franchise or the rich mythology of the franchise.

If, like me, you love the Planet of the Apes in general, you’ll like this movie well enough. It isn’t anywhere near as good as the previous three films, but it isn’t catastrophically bad either. But the bottom line is…Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a professionally made movie about talking monkeys plotting against and beating the hell out of each other…what’s not to like?

That said, one can only hope that the next Planet of the Apes film is a step up from Kingdom, or at least a step in the right direction, and this extraordinarily long-running, high-quality, fascinating franchise finds better footing moving forward.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Shogun (Hulu): TV Review - A Leafless Branch

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A beautiful but dramatically and emotionally empty series that features quality craftsmanship across the board yet never rises to become must-see.

Shogun, the highly-acclaimed ten-episode mini-series based on the James Clavell book of the same name, just finished its original run on the streaming service Hulu…and I have some thoughts.

The series, which began streaming on February 27th and concluded on April 23rd, was created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks and stars Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis.

Shogun tells the fictional tale of John Blackthorne (Jarvis), an English sailor marooned in 1600s Japan, who must navigate the customs and culture of his new land and serve as an advisor/political pawn to Lord Taranaga (Sanada), the powerful lord of Kanto. A critical side story involves Blackthorne falling in love with his translator Lady Mariko (Sawai).

Shogun is a strange series in that I watched each episode as it rolled out weekly and yet never thought about the show for a single second when it wasn’t playing in front of me. I never once mused or anticipated about what would come in the following episode and very often entirely forgot what had happened in the episode I had just watched. For example, I watched the final episode five days ago and cannot remember much of anything from it.

In this way Shogun is like so much of tv in this bloated streaming era, in that it is eye-candy that comes and goes without the slightest impact one way or the other.

Another show I watched recently, Netflix’s Three Body Problem, was similar in that it generated lots of manufactured light, especially in terms of cultural discission, but exactly zero heat. The big difference between though Three Body Problem and Shogun though is that Three Body Problem was a thoroughly second-rate production that looked unconscionably cheap…whereas Shogun is undeniably a top-notch production that looks more expansive than it probably was.

Shogun is a beautiful production that is exquisitely shot, professionally acted, and boasts superb production design and costumes…and yet…as good as the show looks and all the pieces are near perfect, it still seems oddly forgettable, or better yet – irrelevant, as a whole.

To the show’s credit, it does believably transport you back to 1600’s Japan, and that can be enjoyable, but it never rouses enough interest in its characters to cross the threshold from interesting to emotionally or dramatically impactful.

The thing that struck me most about Shogun was that it was, much to its credit, shot and framed like a feature film. Rarely were objects of interest set center frame, which was a refreshing change since center-framing has become standard, particularly in television, in our wholly unfortunate era of Tik Tok. So often nowadays television cinematography has all the skill and artistry of a grandmother using a disposable instamatic on a family trip to Disney. Thankfully, Shogun never suffers from this lack of attention or visual care.

Also compelling are many of the performances.

Anna Sawai, in particular, is quite good as Lady Mariko, the tormented translator who must contain her emotions and control Blackthorne. I last saw Sawai in the Apple TV series Monarch, and thought she wasn’t quite yet ready for prime time, but here she is sharp and sexy…a luminous and alluring presence filled with a vivid and visceral inner life she masterfully fights to contain.

Hiroyuki Sanada too does solid work as the scheming Taranaga. Sanada is so unrelenting in his performance that it is actually surprising when Taranaga isn’t quite as smart as you believe he is.

Cosmo Jarvis as Blackthorne gives an intriguing performance, as he at once feels out of place yet also somewhat magnetic. Jarvis never quite earns the emotional arc his character takes, but to his credit he is game and never shies from the challenge or the camera.

The CGI used in Shogun is worth mentioning as well as the wide shots of Osaka are obviously fake but still impressive to behold. As are the fight sequences – with a few notable exceptions…like when Lady Mariko morphs into a girl power goddess and slays some samurai.

Despite all of the positive attributes present in Shogun, it just never grips you by the heart or throat and forces you to care. Ultimately, I didn’t actually care about any of the characters in Shogun…not really. And the usual cultural storytelling instincts we have become accustomed to are not satisfied in the story because it ends not with a compelling climax but with understated subtlety.

I have never read Clavell’s book, nor have I watched the 1980 mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain and the great Toshiro Mifune. Maybe if I had I would have more attachment to the characters and investment in the story. But I didn’t and I don’t.

At the end of the day Shogun is a beautiful but forgettable piece of television that I desperately wanted to love because of the subject matter, but never did. The series is simply something to watch to pass the time, and requires little emotional investment and negligible dramatic payoff.

I didn’t hate Shogun, not at all, but I didn’t love it either. It’s an impressive piece of television solely for the craft on display, but in my opinion is not compelling enough to be considered must-see.

I respect the craftsmanship on display in Shogun enough that my recommendation is to watch the first episode and see if it grabs you, and then proceed accordingly.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 120 - Civil War

On this episode, Barry and I charge headlong to the front lines of Alex Garland's dystopian film Civil War. Topics discussed include missed opportunities, spitting out the lukewarm, and the albatross of poorly developed characters.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 120 - Civil War

Thanks for listening!

©2024