"Everything is as it should be."

                                                                                  - Benjamin Purcell Morris

 

 

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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

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

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

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

Anyone but You - A Review: Sydney Sweeney Busts Out

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite Sydney Sweeney’s breast efforts, this movie falls flat.

Anyone but You, the rom-com starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, hit theatres back in December and became a bona fide box office sensation. I missed Anyone but You in theatres but it’s now on Netflix and I just watched it…and I have some thoughts.

The film, written and directed by Will Gluck, tells the story of Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell), two attractive people who had a magical meet cute but then for some moronic reason now hate each other and are forced to attend a getaway wedding in Australia. In order to stave off prying parents and make ex-lovers jealous, Bea and Ben decide to pretend to be a couple at this wedding…which of course is not just a lesbian wedding but an inter-racial lesbian wedding because we live in a pandering hellscape.

The premise of the film is absurd to the point of abject stupidity, and the filmmaking on display is at best amateurish…so why did this film make $219 million at the box office. I’ll tell you why…because Sydney Sweeney is a force of nature…or more accurately stated, Sydney Sweeney’s magnificently magnetic mouth-watering melons are a force of nature and may in fact be so perfect as to be the epicenter around which the known universe rotates.

I’m kidding…sort of. Sydney Sweeney is an odd duck…she’s certainly beautiful and sexy…and her ample bosoms are the greatest thing this country has produced in the last 200 years…but she also talks like she has a hearing impairment and has the facial expressions of the new kid in the special ed class.

To her great credit though she is totally game and up for anything to try and get a laugh in this movie…most of the time she fails miserably but it is her commitment to the buffoonish bits that makes her such an appealing and compelling screen presence.

Sweeney is sort of a cross between Bridget Bardot and Jennifer Lawrence. She’s not as naturally gregarious or hot-girl-next-door-ish as Lawrence or as incandescently sexy as Bardot, but she’s got roughly 25% of each woman within her and that makes her 50% interesting.

Sweeney’s co-star, Glen Powell, is poised to be the next “it” guy and it’s easy to see why in this movie. He’s certainly handsome in a rather boring and sterile way, but like his co-star he too is down to do whatever needs be done to make a bit funny. Again, the bits rarely if ever work, but Powell’s commitment to them is very endearing.

Powell feels like a hybrid between Matthew McConaughey and Ryan Gosling. He’s sort of a safe version of the lesser parts of both men. Powell isn’t as charming and sexy as McConaughey or as funny and talented as Gosling, but he’s sort of in the same ballpark…if it’s a really, really big ballpark…like the Big House in Michigan – home to the NCAA Football National Champion University of Michigan Wolverines (Go Blue!).

Despite the charms of Sweeney and Powell, Anyone but You is, frankly, dreadful. It is painfully stupid, poorly shot, and except for Sweeney and Powell, exceedingly poorly acted. For example, GaTa, who plays the lesbian bride’s brother and Ben’s friend, may be the worst actor I’ve seen in a feature film in the last decade. This guy is so awful it felt like a mentally ill homeless man wandered on to the set and no one had the heart to ask him to leave.

But in GaTa’s defense, much better actors didn’t fare any better. For example, veteran actors Bryan Brown and Dermot Mulroney both give astonishingly poor performances that are not just awful but embarrassing. Brown and Mulroney’s performances feel like they’re from two people who’ve never seen a movie, never mind acted in one. The once promising Rachel Griffiths doesn’t fare any better.

The truth is that the only reason to watch this witless movie is to spend two hours with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. Whatever Sweeney’s and Powell’s faults as actors the one thing that is undeniable about them is that they are both extremely likable…and in today’s watered-down movie culture that’s more than enough to pass as a “movie star”.

Anyone can guess what the future holds for Sweeney and Powell. Sweeney, who was quite good in HBO’s Euphoria and The White Lotus, needs to navigate the perilous minefield that is being a sex symbol in our current culture, no easy task as being so sexually appealing to men can often turn the female audience against an actress. She and her team will need to figure out how to make men want her and women relate to her – something Anyone but You successfully accomplishes. One hopes that she can find her way and build a career filled with much better films and interesting roles…she certainly has shown flashes of the talent and skill required to become an actress of impact.  

Glen Powell seems to have a much lower ceiling than Sydney Sweeney, but a much higher floor only because he is not the type of actor men will dislike since he isn’t one of those grating Hollywood pansy-ass pretty boys. Powell’s greatest strength is that he seems to be a good dude…and while he is good looking, he isn’t too good-looking…hence the high floor/low ceiling.

As for Anyone but You and whether you should watch it…well…I can’t imagine telling anyone that they need to see this movie. It is instantly forgettable and aggressively idiotic. It’s the type of movie you watch on a plane when there’s nothing else available, or when you’re on the couch recovering from surgery and can’t quite reach the remote without bursting your sutures.

The bottom line is that Anyone but You is a bad movie, but years from now we might look back on it as the big box office breakout for the biggest, breastiest movie star of all time, Sydney Sweeney, and say “thanks for the mammaries”…I certainly hope so.

 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

Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire - A Review: The Bigger They Are, the Harder Empires Fall

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Popcorn Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: One of the weaker MonsterVerse movies, but it still features some pretty cool monster brawls. Ultimately, a mindless monster movie that unfortunately speaks to our current moment in all the wrong ways.

Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire, directed by Adam Wingard, is the fifth film in the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse and is a sequel to the 2021 film Godzilla vs Kong.

Godzilla x Kong is the second Godzilla movie to hit theatres in the last six months, following in the large footsteps of the Academy Award winning blockbuster Godzilla Minus One. The big difference between the two films is that Godzilla Minus One is a Japanese production and Godzilla x Kong is in every way, shape and form, an American production…up to and including having the word “Empire” in the title.

I am a huge Godzilla fan and have been since I was a kid watching the Toho films of old which featured a guy in a Godzilla suit destroying model Japanese cities. I loved those movies and am a total sucker for all things Godzilla because of it.

That said, I’ve never truly loved any American Godzilla films. Starting with Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), the atrocious Americanized version of the fantastic original 1954 Japanese film Godzilla.

Then there was the 1998 film Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick, or as I call it, “Ferris Bueller Fights Godzilla”. Not a good Godzilla movie.

Then after a long dry spell came the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse, which started in 2014 with Godzilla – a film I was lukewarm on. This was followed by Kong: Skull Island in 2017, a film I disliked. In 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters hit the big screens and I liked it a bit but it wasn’t great. Then in 2021 we got Godzilla vs Kong, a flawed but fun brawl. Which brings us to today and Godzilla x Kong.

In preparation for Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire I spent the last week rewatching the Legendary MonsterVerse movies….but this time I watched them with my 8-year-old son, who had never seen any Godzilla movies until Godzilla Minus One this past fall, but has grown up hearing me tell endless tales of Godzilla’s exploits.

Rewatching the MonsterVerse with my son was a great deal of fun…as is watching every movie with my son. Seeing movies through his young, unjaded, uncynical eyes, is refreshing for a bitter old cinema war horse like me. My son doesn’t roll his eyes at cliches or tired tropes, he shakes with excitement and joy and it makes me very happy. In order to maintain his cinematic purity, I never tell my son I dislike a movie…ever. I let him bask in the glow of the fun and in fact encourage it, always adding positive thoughts to our discussions post-movie.

Upon rewatching the MonsterVerse, I discovered a few things.

The first is that some of the movies were better than I remembered or at first believed. To be clear, none of the films are as good as say Godzilla Minus One, but they have their moments.

For example, I thought my son would be bored watching Godzilla (2014) because it takes a long time for Godzilla to show up and when he does you don’t see him all that clearly. But the opposite was true, my son was totally sucked into the story and thoroughly enjoyed it. As a result, I ended up liking Godzilla (2014) more as well.

My son liked Kong: Skull Island more than me, but I still thought it had some cool moments, and thought the premise was top-notch but the execution had some issues.

Upon rewatch I really liked Godzilla: King of the Monsters, as did my son. This is just an old school monster movie banger. Big monsters kicking the hell out of each other…lots of fun but never silly – which is vitally important.

Then came Godzilla vs Kong, which was, like the Toho movies of my youth, a fun and solid monster movie too. But Godzilla vs Kong also marked a major shift in the franchise. This was Adam Wingard’s directorial debut in the MonsterVerse, and he changes the tone of the franchise dramatically.

Toho’s Godzilla Minus One was so impactful because the damage Godzilla brings to the real world kills real people and those people have value and meaning to those who survive.

In the first three MonsterVerse films the monsters, be they Godzilla, Kong or any of their adversaries, were destructive and deadly, and a major dramatic throughline of those films is the trauma inflicted upon mankind by the death and destruction caused by the monsters.

For example, Godzilla (2014) opens with Juliette Binoche getting killed as a result of monster movement, which spurs the rest of the film. A major plot point in Godzilla: King of the Monsters is that a father’s young son is killed during Godzilla’s rampage in San Francisco in Godzilla. In Kong: Skull Island, Samuel L. Jackson moves heaven and earth to kill Kong because Kong killed men in his military unit.

Real people die as a result of these monsters in the first three MonsterVerse films, and those deaths resonate throughout all the living characters. That sentiment disappears once Wingard takes the helm.

That said, Wingard choreographs some pretty sweet monster brawls in Godzilla vs Kong so it’s cool, but it just doesn’t really mean much of anything.

Which brings us to Godzilla x Kong. Let me start by saying my son loved the movie….which makes sense as seeing big monsters on the big screen is pretty awesome even if the movie is not so great…and Godzilla x Kong is…well…not so great.

It seemed to me that Godzilla x Kong was a bit of a jumping of the shark for the MonsterVerse, as it featured an incoherently elaborate plot, a plethora of silliness, and a dearth of life and death consequences that reduced the proceedings to utter absurdity.

Yes, there are some cool monster fights and I enjoyed them no end, but there’s a tone of frivolity infused in the film that makes it feel tongue-in cheek and winking (literally), which I dislike.

To get into the plot is sort of a foolish endeavor, I’ll just say that Godzilla and Kong are not fighting each other at the film’s open because Godzilla lives on the surface of the earth and Kong lives in the hollow earth. But then there’s trouble in hollow earth when a super-secret extra hollow earth is discovered. The story goes from there and involves the Iwi tribe from Skull Island, a tyrannical ape-king, an ice-breathing monster and lots of strange science regarding inverted gravity.

If you’re looking for big monster fights, you’ll definitely get your fair share in this film as there’s spectacle galore, featuring some of earth’s most well-known tourist attractions being stomped by pissed off monsters.

Some of the fights are better than others, and there’s not enough Godzilla in the movie for my liking, but that said, if you’re just looking for some empty-headed monster brawls, the movie gives it to you. Unfortunately for me I like movies like Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which rest on the premise that these monsters are real and exist in a real world with real people. Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire is not that.

Speaking of real world and real people, it is striking to me that this movie has the term “Empire” in its title, as does the new Ghostbusters movie Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.

As someone who notices these sorts of things, it is quite fascinating that as the American Empire erodes and crumbles in real time before our eyes, we are given signs of a “new empire” and a “frozen empire”. If I had to choose, I’d say our empire is well on its way to “freezing” and a new empire is rising to take its place – maybe/probably centered in Beijing.

There’s a recurring visual in Godzilla x Kong which shows Godzilla curling up in the Roman Colosseum, sleeping in the belly of an empire long past. Then there’s the battle between Godzilla and Kong at the pyramids, a symbol of an empire even deeper in history.

This all ties in with the lack of humanity featured in these last two Wingard directed Godzilla movies.

What is striking about this symbolism and wordplay regarding “empire” and the elimination of concerns about human life, is that a real-world drama involving empire and a disregard for humanity is playing out right before our eyes if we only had the courage to look and see it clearly.

The American Empire is directly responsible for the bloodbath in Ukraine, as it has made it very clear it is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian in its narcissistic proxy war against Russia.

The American Empire, led around by its nose by its Israeli paymasters, is also responsible for the wicked slaughter in Gaza, where more than 30,000 people, mostly women and children, have been massacred by the vile Israeli regime, armed by America.

The American Empire is losing on every front and no longer has the skill or will to win a fight for its survival. That, of course, doesn’t mean it won’t violently flail as it sinks into the graveyard of history, killing thousands, if not millions, on its way down.

The symbolism throughout Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire certainly kept me thinking, but only a certified lunatic like myself would ever notice these things. Most other people will only see the big monsters beating the hell out of each other and the poor performances of the cast, most notably Dan Stevens, giving one of the most vacuous and phony performances in recent cinematic history as Trapper, the most derivative character in recent cinematic history.

The bottom line is that if you want to watch truly mindless death and destruction nowadays you have two choices…you can either turn on the news and watch the bloody and brutal fruits of America’s demonic foreign policy in Ukraine and Gaza dance across your screen…or you can go watch Godzilla and Kong dance across the big screen at the local cineplex.

Regardless of which choice you make, the end result will be the same, and that is that America and its allies will slaughter more innocent people across the globe, and American Empire will slowly suffocate under the immense weight of its own endless moral corruption.

 FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Dune: Part Two - An Arthouse Blockbuster Rises From the Desert

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. If you’ve read the book, see the movie in a good theatre (emphasis on “good”). If you haven’t read the book, you should read it because it’s very good…and then watch the movie when it hits streaming.

Dune: Part Two, written and directed by Denis Villeneuve based on the classic science fiction book series by Frank Herbert, continues telling the tale of the struggle for the control of the pivotal, resource-rich planet, Arrakis, also known as Dune.

The film, which stars Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Austin Butler and Florence Pugh, among many others, is the sequel to Dune (2021), a Best Picture nominee and six-time Academy Award winner.

Last Saturday I ventured out to the cineplex to see Dune: Part Two, which no doubt will be ending its theatrical run in the coming weeks having been initially released on March 1st.

I went to the 11:50 am showing because I had a very tight window in which to see the two-hour and forty-five-minute film, and that show was the only one that worked.

I went to a Regal theatre which I’d never been to before…and my experience was…dismaying.

First off, the theatre was a confusing mess that felt like it hadn’t been cleaned or refurbished in forty years.

Secondly, the ticket printer wasn’t working so I had to wait forever to get my actual ticket.

Thirdly, when I went into the screening room, it was 11:45 am – plenty of time before the film started, but unfortunately the film didn’t start at 11:50 am. No, the commercials which were already running pre-show continued at 11:50…and kept going and going and going….until 12:10 pm…and then the film still didn’t start…but the previews did. The actual movie didn’t start until 12:20, a full half hour after the listed start time.

What are we doing people? I get maybe ten minutes of previews and commercials, but thirty minutes?

And to top it all off, Regal, like nearly every cinema in America – and certainly every cinema in fly-over country where I currently reside, has a shitty, poorly maintained digital projector that is too dark, and a screen that is too small, and theatre lights that are never dimmed enough. The end result is it feels like you’re watching a movie underwater, or worse, like watching a movie at a drive-in in broad daylight because corporate theatre companies have no interest in spending money on upgrades to their venues, most notably their god-awful projectors.

So that was the context of my Dune: Part Two movie going experience…and yet, I was still able to enjoy the film to a certain degree despite having to literally imagine in my mind what each gloriously framed shot from Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser actually looked like as opposed to the muddied mess I was presented at Regal.

As for the film itself, Dune: Part Two picks up exactly where its predecessor finished, and both movies combined tell the story contained in Herbert’s first book titled Dune – which chronicles Paul Atreidis struggle to survive on Dune following an invasion and the murder of his father the king, and then his attempt to avenge his father’s death and conquer the planet. A third film, titled Dune: Messiah, is allegedly being made and is to be based on the book of the same name which is the second book in Herbert’s series.

Dune: Part Two is what I would describe as an arthouse blockbuster. Villeneuve is a highly skilled auteur, and his cinematic capabilities are on full display in this film – the same ones that garnered the first Dune film a bevy of below the line Academy Awards (Cinematography, Sound, Editing Visual Effects, Production Design), but so are his weaknesses.

For example, the fight scenes, action scenes and battle scenes are a mixed bag. Some are spectacularly well-conceived and miraculously executed, while others, particularly the climactic battle and subsequent individual fight, are underwhelming and visually muddled.

Another weakness of the film, and in my opinion its greatest, is the acting of its two leads. Timothee Chalamet is a mystery to me. I don’t think he’s a very good actor, and while he is passable as Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides in Dune: Part Two, he still isn’t very good. Chalamet is such a wispy, flimsy, charisma-free screen presence that it seems so improbable he be a messianic leader to a warrior tribe as to be ridiculous.

An even bigger problem is Zendaya. I really have no idea how Zendaya became such a massive star, but it sure as hell wasn’t because of her acting talent. Zendaya is actively awful in the role of Chani, Paul’s love interest, to a distracting degree. All she seems able to do is give a dead-eyed pout.

Both Chalamet and Zendaya are incapable of being anything on-screen other than petulant Gen-Z poseurs, and that is a terrible burden for a film which is mostly populated by a cast of rather skilled professionals, set in an imagined science fiction future.

Speaking of disastrous casting decisions, Christopher Walken plays the Emperor Shaddam IV, and is egregiously atrocious. Walken is doing Walken things and it all feels so out of place as to be cringe-worthy.

On the bright-side, there are some very noticeable performances. Austin Butler is fantastic as the ferocious Feyd-Routha, and chews the scenery with a relentless aplomb. I couldn’t help but wonder if Butler should’ve been playing Paul instead of Chalamet, although he might be too old.

Rebecca Ferguson is as solid as they come and she certainly doesn’t disappoint as Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother and a spiritual figure to the Fremen people. Ferguson is such a striking screen presence and magnetic actress it is astonishing she doesn’t work even more than she already does.

Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem and Lea Seydoux all give solid supporting performances as well.

When I saw the first Dune film I was about sixty pages into the book Dune, so I knew enough to know what was happening, but not enough to really understand it.

Having now read the first three books of the Dune saga – which is phenomenal by the way, I have a much greater understanding of everything going on in the story, and that is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because Villeneuve tells these stories in shorthand, and expects viewers to understand the references being made. Having read the books I know understand those references and it makes the movies much more enjoyable.

On the downside, Villeneuve does make some pretty substantial changes to the story (I won’t say what exactly to avoid spoilers), particularly in Dune: Part Two. I understand why changes like this are made in film adaptations of books, they’re not the same storytelling mediums so this is inevitable, but it is still jarring and makes the whole enterprise feel a bit watered-down. To be frank, the story in the book is much better than the story in the movie…but that is usually the case when it comes to adaptations.

Dune: Part Two has done very well at the box office thus far, generating $574 million on a $190 budget. If this were a Marvel movie it would be considered a disappointment…but it isn’t a Marvel movie…and that’s important.

Villeneuve’s Dune franchise is off to a very steady start and is successfully threading the needle between box office success and artistry. The first film won 6 notable Academy Awards, and this one will be contending for those same awards.

Marvel seems to be a dying entity and no genre/IP is thus far poised to take its place. Dune represents not so much a replacement for Marvel IP, but a replacement for the idea of movies that Marvel has propagated. Instead of making movies expecting a billion-dollar box office, maybe Dune sets the expectations that auteurs can venture into the land of IP and use their artistry and vision to create something new that is both respected as art but also as blockbuster entertainment (with the definition of blockbuster scaled back ) – hence my description of Dune: Part Two as arthouse blockbuster.

If Dune and this type of filmmaking is the future of blockbusters, then sign me up. Villeneuve is a highly-skilled moviemaker, and despite his flaws he never fails to make something visually compelling and dramatically interesting.

Dune: Part Two isn’t for everybody. In fact, I’d say, if you haven’t read the books then you’d probably struggle to understand what is happening a good portion of the time. That said, I’d highly recommend the books as they are fantastic…and then once you’ve read the first book check out Dune and Dune: Part Two.

My recommendation for cinephiles, those who have read the book and those who enjoyed the first film, is to go see Dune: Part Two in a good theatre.

Unfortunately for me, I will have to wait until Dune: Part Two becomes available on streaming where I can watch it in my home, without thirty minutes of commercials and with superior audio-visual equipment, before I can accurately judge and thoroughly comment on its true cinematic value.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 119 - Dune: Part Two

On this episode, Barry and I don our stillsuits and head to Arrakis to discuss Denis Villeneuve's new film, Dune: Part Two, starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya. Topics discussed include the dismal state of modern cinemas, the weak acting of Li'l Timmy and Zendaya, and the future of sci-fi movies. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 119 - Dune: Part Two

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 118 - Poor Things

On this episode, Barry and I head to Victorian England to discuss Yorgos Lanthimos' crazy Frankenstein-fueled, feminist sex-romp Poor Things, starring Academy Award winning Best Actress Emma Stone. Topics discussed include the astonishing brilliance of Emma Stone, the misery of miscast Mark Ruffalo, and the originality, skill and talent of Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 118 - Poor Things

Thanks for listening!!

©2024

The 10th Annual Mickey™® Awards (2023)

10th ANNUAL MICKEY™® AWARDS

Estimated Reading Time: The Mickey™® Awards are much more prestigious than the Oscars, and unlike our lesser crosstown rival, we here at The Mickeys™® do not limit acceptance speech times. There will be no classless playing off by the orchestra here…mostly because we don’t have an orchestra. Regardless… expect this awards show article to last, at a minimum, approximately 6 hours and 37 minutes.

It’s that time of year again when Hollywood and the whole world holds their breath to find out who wins the most prestigious and most glorious award in human history...THE MICKEY™® AWARD!!

The Mickeys™® are far superior to every other award imaginable…be it the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, the Grammy, the Pulitzer or even the Nobel. The Mickey™® is the mountaintop of not just artistic but human achievement, which is why they always take place AFTER the Oscars!

It is pretty amazing that the Mickeys™® turn ten years old this year! It’s crazy to think that means the Mickeys have been around long enough that they are now old enough to drink!!

This has been a decent year in cinema. It wasn’t a massive success like in say 2019, but it was considerably better than the last four miserable years.

There are a multitude of outstanding films eligible for a Mickey™® award this year. Actors, actresses, writers, cinematographers and directors are all sweating and squirming right now in anticipation of the Mickey™® nominations and winners. Remember, even a coveted Mickey™® nomination is a career and life changing event.

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

The Prizes!! The winners of The Mickey™® award will receive a free lunch* with me at Fatburger (*lunch is considered one "sandwich" item, one order of small fries, and one beverage….yes, your beverage can be a shake, you fat bastards). I will gladly pay for the Mickey™® winner’s meal…but know this…the sterling conversation will be entirely free of charge…and will probably not be sterling.

Now…fasten your seatbelts, gird your loins, and get ready to rumble…because IT’S TIME!!

Here are the 10th Annual Mickey™® Awards!!

POPCORN MOVIE OF THE YEAR

Godzilla Minus One – This movie crawled out of the Pacific and stomped across the globe winning hearts and minds while destroying everything in its path. Godzilla is back, baby!!

Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse – These Spider-Verse animated movies are really great stuff as they fully embrace the Spidey of everything while churning out some jaw-dropping animation.

The Killer – Fincher’s take on the assassin’s life is pure Gen X cinematic bliss. It qualifies as a popcorn film simply because it’s so deliciously amusing and so light on its feet.

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE! Not just a fantastic Godzilla movie, but a really terrific movie! Welcome to the Mickeys™ Godzilla!

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Oppenheimer - Hoyte van Hoytema – Hoytema, who won a Mickey™® in 2017 for his work on Dunkirk, is one of the best in the business. His work on Oppenheimer was as good as it gets and is a testament to his outrageous skill.

The Zone of Interest – Lukasz Zal – Zal’s previous work on Ida (2014) and Cold War (2018) got him the attention of the Mickey nominating committee. This year he stunned with his precise and pristine cinematography on The Zone of Interest. An absolute masterwork in minimalism and framing.

Asteroid City – Robert Yoeman – Yoeman brought a vibrant color palette and a strict adherence to Anderson’s infatuation with straight lines to Asteroid City. As beautifully and uniquely shot a film as seen all year.

Poor Things – Robbie Ryan – A glorious and imaginative piece of work that utilizes black and white and then color with a glorious verve. Ryan is among the best cinematographers in the world and his stellar work on Poor Things is a testament to that fact.

And the Mickey™® goes to…LUKASZ ZAL – THE ZONE OF INTEREST! Zal’s visual discipline and inventiveness are what makes The Zone of Interest the powerful cinematic experience that it is.

BEST SOUND

Oppenheimer – The sound on Oppenheimer was extraordinary, and it needed to be. The sound was integral in conveying the mammoth, existential event that was being dramatized before us.

The Zone of Interest – This movie used sound to such great effect it feels like as cinematic miracle. When sound was introduced into the cinematic arts this is how it was meant to be used.

Godzilla Minus One – The earth-shaking sound on Godzilla Minus One kept the film in reality, and turned that reality into a horrifying experience…as it was meant to be.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE ZONE OF INTEREST. As great as the sound on Oppenheimer was, the sound on The Zone of Interest was even better. Just a masterful sound design, execution and mix. This is not only the best sound of the year, but among the best sound in a film of all-time.

BEST SCORE/SOUNDTRACK

The Killer – The mod and morose pop-infused laments of The Smiths are what makes The Killer the darkly fun ride that it is. Never has a soundtrack so matched the emotional and mental theme of a film and character.

Oppenheimer – A wonderfully dark and majestic score that effortlessly mixes with the sound of the film to create a mesmerizing cinematic sensation.

The Zone of Interest – A bizarre and unnerving score makes The Zone of Interest feel like a disorienting horror movie. Just a sterling piece of work.

Killers of the Flower Moon – The late Robbie Robertson mixes and matches modern guitar driven music with Native American drums and vocals to create a swirling and scintillating soundtrack that is the best thing about Killers of the Flower Moon.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE KILLER! This win is based on The Killer’s masterful use of the musical musings of Morrissey and The Smiths.

BEST COSTUME/HAIR/MAKEUP

The Mickey™® goes to…Poor Things – I am not exactly as fashionista, but even I appreciated the original and fascinatingly unique costumes, hair and make-up on display in Poor Things. The artisans who created these looks and perfectly executed them, are absolute masters deserving of the highest praise…and the highest praise available is a Mickey™® Award.

BEST EDITING

Oppenheimer – A truly spectacular piece of editing kept this mammoth story from flying off the rails.

The Zone of Interest – Subtle editing gave this movie a perfect pace and tone.

Anatomy of a Fall – The editing on this film was so seamless and deft as to be miraculous.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER – Editor Jennifer Lame’s work was stunning as she wrestled this sprawling, time-jumping behemoth and turned it into a smooth and easy ride.

BEST EFFECTS

Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla feels real and utterly terrifying in this film and that is thanks to the special effects geniuses who threw him together with a minimal budget.

Oppenheimer – A lot was made of the fact that Christopher Nolan used minimal special effects and mostly actual effects to make this movie. How-ever he did it, it is astonishing to behold.

No One Will Save You – This little movie made the most of it when designing and executing their movie monster aliens. It is quite incredible that a small movie like this was able to make such notable effects and utilize them so effectively.

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE!! Somehow these filmmakers were able to make the best special effects of the year…and of the last few years, on a shoestring budget that would be laughable on a Hollywood blockbuster. Well done Team Godzilla!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Willem Dafoe – Poor Things – Dafoe, as always, brings his weirdness to the fore as the Dr. Frankenstein in this bizarro movie. Despite his eccentricities, Dafoe is able to find humanity in every role he touches.

Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer – It’s easy to forget that Downey is more than just iron Man and amusing snark. In Oppenheimer, Downey’s restraint isn’t just necessary but notable and it creates a compelling and convincing character that subtly dominates every scene he inhabits. The line, “no, just a shoe salesman”, is delivered with such perfection as to be devastating.

Ryan Gosling – Barbie – As much as I loathed the movie Barbie, I loved Ryan Gosling as Ken. When Gosling goes for it he is an unstoppable force, and he goes for it with gusto as Ken. Good for him.

Milo Machado-Graner - Anatomy of a Fall – This kid is so good in Anatomy of Fall I forgot I was watching some kid actor. A nuanced and tormented performance that feels as real as real can be.

Charles Melton – May December – I had never heard of Christopher Melton prior to May December, but apparently, he was on some stupid teen show. Who knows? All I know is that he gives the very best performance in that film and it isn’t even close. Subtle and heartbreaking, Melton never falters.

And the Mickey™® goes to…ROBERT DOWNEY JR. – OPPENHEIMER – This was a very tight category, with Gosling and Melton tying for second place just mere percentage points behind Downey. But Downey’s work in Oppenheimer is layered, nuanced, subtle yet very powerful. A true tour de force performance that despite its wins in award shows, is often downplayed because Downey is such a Hollywood icon. The truth is he absolutely crushed this role….and now he’s got the Mickey™® award to prove his worth….as well as all that Iron Man money.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Sandra Huller – The Zone of Interest – Huller’s Nazi wife in The Zone of Interest is an absolutely stunning piece of work. Banal yet bravado, Huller imbues her housewife with a drive and fear that make her part momma bear and part Nazi supremacist. Pray she never runs for your school’s PTA board.

Penelope Cruz – Ferrari – Cruz is often overlooked (even by me) but she is a master craftswoman. Her work in Ferrari could have been throwaway stuff (like her counterpart Shailene Woodley) but in Cruz’s hands it became a well-rounded, nuanced and subtle piece of dramatic work that never fails to compel. Her scene in the cemetery is the best acting caught on screen this year.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers – Ms. Randolph was a revelation as the grieving mom in The Holdovers. More impressive is the fact that she absolutely nails the Boston accent that has been butchered by so many other notable actors. A truly impressive performance.

Julianne Moore - May December – Speaking of actresses that have butchered Boston accents…Julianne Moore plays a weird lady in May December with a relentless aplomb. This is the type of role that she excels in…it’s like a cross between her work in Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

And the Mickey™® goes to…PENELOPE CRUZ - FERRARI!! I have not been able to get the scene where Cruz’s character visits her son’s grave out of my head since I’ve seen it. In the scene Cruz doesn’t say a word and yet conveys a panoply of emotions and tells a dramatically compelling and emotionally devastating tale in less than a minute of screen time. It really is incredible and a monument to her colossal talent and skill.

BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

The Mickey™® goes to….the little kid in Godzilla Minus One and the Dog in Anatomy of a Fall – Okay…I’m a grown man so I don’t really care about babies or whatever…but the little kid in Godzilla is so damn cute and is such a good actress it’s astonishing. This kid was crying on cue so well I was worried she was being abused in order to trigger it. Hopefully she wasn’t.

Speaking of great acting…I’m being serious when I say that Messi, the dog in Anatomy of a Fall, is maybe the greatest actor in a movie this year. His near-death scene is so good it had me weeping. This dog has it all…charisma, good looks and acting chops. Somebody get this dog a movie franchise!

BEST ANIMATED FILM

The Boy and the Heron – Hayao Miyazaki is among the greatest animated filmmakers of all-time. The Boy and the Heron may, or may not, be his last film, but if it is he went out with a bang. With his distinctive bizarre flair Miyazaki relays a boy’s grief and fears and his first steps on the journey to manhood. It is the work of a master craftsman and a singular genius.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – These Spider-Verse films are as great as can be as they treat the Spider-man mythos with respect all while generating some of the most impressive animation styles imaginable. This is the second film in a trilogy and the third will be very highly anticipated.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE BOY AND THE HERON!! Miyazaki’s work is a favorite of both mine and my son (who is also a member of the Mickeys Voting Committee) so this was a no-brainer. It is nice that a master like Miyazaki can now retire in peace if he so chooses, having won the most prestigious award in human civilization – The Mickey™®

BEST FOREIGN FILM

Godzilla Minus One – This is the movie Godzilla and Godzilla fans have been waiting decades for. It is a brilliant piece of work that is a truly great movie.

The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer’s film about the banality of evil is so steady and precise that it seeps into your brain and refuses to let you forget it…which is both a blessing and a curse.

Anatomy of a Fall – Expertly made and fantastically acted, Anatomy of a Fall is the type of movie Hollywood used to make but hasn’t for like fifty years.

The Boy and the Heron – Miyazaki is the epitome of the master craftsman combined with artistic genius. There is no one better than him and there has never been anyone better than him.

And the Mickey™® goes to…THE ZONE OF INTEREST!! Not only a cinematic masterpiece but a staggeringly relevant piece of culture in a time when we are so eager to be blind to the evil and moral and ethical corruption that surrounds us to such an extent it feels as prevalent as the air we breathe.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Godzilla Minus One – The key to this script’s success is that it treats Godzilla as a real threat with real human consequences. It’s shocking how beautiful this script is.

Anatomy of a Fall – Masterfully written court room drama that keeps audiences guessing for weeks after seeing the film.

No One Will Save You – A truly original and energizing piece of work that elevated what could have been a mundane alien movie into a deeply poignant psychological story.

The Boy and the Heron – Miyazaki is in his 80s and is still exploring the wounds from his youth. Beautifully written.

The Holdovers – A vibrant and well-paced drama that never lacks for witticisms.

And the Mickey™® goes to…ANATOMY OF A FALL! As well-rounded an original script as we’ve seen in years as it refuses to indulge in easy labels and black and white thinking.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Ferrari – This adaptation was floating around for years and finally made it to the big screen. It is a nice companion piece with 2019’s Ford v Ferrari.

Oppenheimer – It’s impressive that Christopher Nolan read this book, never mind adapted it. This massive tome would be an unruly mess in most other writer/director’s hands, but Nolan tames the wild beast and creates a beautiful historical tapestry.

The Zone of Interest – Glazer apparently used the Martin Amis book of the same name as a launching off point and he creatively catapults his adaption into the stratosphere.

Poor Things – An absolutely batshit tale that is so unbelievable but feels realer than real. A solid piece of work.

American Fiction – Funny and insightful, the flawed American Fiction loses focus occasionally but it never fails to be amusing, and its premise is spot on.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER! That Christopher Nolan could make a compelling and coherent film out of the massive tome about a scientist is a testament to his extraordinary storytelling capabilities. As impressive an adaptation as we’ve seen in decades.

BEST SCENE OF THE YEAR

The Killer - Fight scene – Fassbender’s assassin engaging in hand-to-hand combat with a giant gang leader in the middle of the night is as viscerally engaging a scene as you can imagine. Great stuff.

No One Will Save You – First contact scene – This heart-pounding scene is so well executed it stayed with me for days. Just a glorious piece of quality and imaginative filmmaking.

Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla city rampage – Godzilla coming ashore and leveling a Japanese city is what you want from a Godzilla movie…and boy oh boy does this one deliver.

Poor Things – Dance scene – Nothing had me laughing harder this year than watching Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter cut the rug at some fancy French ballroom. Fantastic!

And the Mickey™® goes to…GODZILLA MINUS ONE!! This gripping scene is jaw-dropping and spellbinding.

BEST ACTRESS

Emma Stone – Poor Things – Stone’s bravura work in Poor Things is absolutely mesmerizing. Like an acting exercise on steroids, Stone’s Bella matures before our eyes and never fails to completely command your attention.

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall – As genuine and grounded a performance as you’ll see, Huller brings nuance and subtlety to new heights.

Kaitlyn Dever – No One Will Save You – An energized and unnerving performance that grabs you from the get go and never lets you go.

And the Mickey™® goes to…EMMA STONE- POOR THINGS! Emma Stone is the best actress in the world at the moment, and it isn’t even close. She now possesses a Mickey™® award proving she is an acting goddess who walks amongst us.

BEST ACTOR

Cillian Murphy – Oppenheimer – Murphy’s controlled yet frantic Oppenheimer is a masterclass in containment and a vivid inner life. A sensitive and deeply moving portrayal.

Christian Friedel – The Zone of Interest – This is an astonishing performance as it embraces the ordinary amongst the extraordinary. Subtle and skillful.

Jeffrey Wright – American Fiction – Wright is a terrific actor and his work in American Fiction is a testament to not only his likability but his acting ability.

Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers – Nobody embodies curmudgeons like Paul Giamatti, and he does some of his best curmudgeonly work in The Holdovers.

And the Mickey™® goes to…CILLIAN MURPHY – OPPENHEIMER!! The Mickey Awards have been the center of controversy since their inception for our notorious and blatant anti-Irish bias. Despite the uproar, the Mickeys™® have refused to change their stance at all…and still believe that the Irish are sub-humans and the most base and vile of creatures. That said, it is a testament to Cillian Murphy’s talent and skill that he convinced the Mickeys™® that he wasn’t just human, but the particular human that was Robert Oppenheimer. For his noble and notable work, Cillian Murphy wins the most prestigious award of all…the Mickey™®. But the Mickeys™® still consider him to be an Irish animal and no award, no matter how prestigious will ever change that.

ACTOR/ACTRESS OF THE YEAR

Sandra Huller – Anatomy of a Fall/The Zone of Interest – Sandra Huller has the highest distinction this year in that she came in second place in both the Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress categories of the Mickey™® Awards. Her work in both films is astonishing, and one can only hope she finds equally challenging and impressive roles and films in her future because when given quality material she is as good as it gets. Her 2023 was as good as a year as we’ve seen from an actress in quite some time.

BEST ENSEMBLE

Poor Things – Great cast with a few exceptions (Mark Ruffalo and Jerrod Carmichael are actively awful in the movie) is led by the inimitable Emma Stone, who brings her absolute A-game to the festivities.

The Holdovers – Paul Giamatti leads a strong ensemble that features two quality supporting turns from Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa. Just a solid cast across the board.

Oppenheimer – Everywhere you turn in this movie you run into a quality actor turning in a solid performance. Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Jason Clarke among many others. This film doesn’t work without such a notable and strong cast.

Anatomy of a Fall – A bevy of French actors and actresses…and even a dog, turn in subtle and nuanced performances in a film that never gives away the game. A very strong group.

And the Mickey™® goes to…OPPENHEIMER! This movie would crumble if it weren’t for the genius of Christopher Nolan and the cornucopia of strong actors and actresses he put together for the ensemble.

BEST DIRECTOR

Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer – Mickey™® award winner (Dunkirk - 2017) Christopher Nolan is the best blockbuster auteur working in cinema today and he lives up to his impressive history with his stellar work on the massive cinematic achievement that is Oppenheimer. It is inconceivable that any other director could have pulled this film off as well as he did.

Jonathan Glazer – The Zone of Interest – Glazer is a bit of an odd duck of an auteur, but his vision and the execution of that vision, on The Zone of Interest is the most artistically ambitious and insightful directorial work since Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. Just extraordinary.

Justine Triet – Anatomy of a Fall – As skilled a directorial job as any this year, Triet’s firm and steady hand kept this film from floundering and showed her to be a master craftswoman.

Yorgos Lanthimos – Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos is an acquired taste…but I’ve acquired it. His sense of humor and his ability to draw out superb performances from his cast while embracing the comedy and drama with an exquisite cinematic artistry, is what makes him one of the best, and most original and interesting, filmmakers of our time.

And the Mickey goes to…JONATHAN GLAZER – THE ZONE OF INTEREST! Glazer doesn’t make many movies, but when he does, they demand your attention, none more so that The Zone of Interest. That Glazer could be so artistically committed and disciplined with his approach on this film speaks to the power of his cinematic vision and his artistry. Kudos to him and congratulations on winning the most prestigious award in cinema and world history.

BEST PICTURE

10. American Fiction – A funny and sometimes insightful film that may or may not be in on the joke its telling. The film is flawed and a bit scattered, but is an amusing ride.

9. Ferrari – Hamstrung by a poor lead performance from Adam Driver, this movie still manages to be compelling thanks to director Michael Mann and supporting actress Penelope Cruz.

8. No One Will Save You – A little movie with big ideas that never fails to keep you guessing or on the edge of your seat.

7. The Killer – David Fincher goes full Fincher in this wry and culturally aware assassin’s tale which feels like a poorly camouflaged autobiography.

6. The Boy and the Heron – A Miyazaki movie through and through as it is deeply moving and also deeply weird.

5. Anatomy of a Fall – A masterfully constructed and acted courtroom drama that grabs hold of you and never lets you go…even in the days after seeing it.

4. Godzilla Minus One – Godzilla is back, baby! This movie is a truly top-notch piece of cinema.

3. Poor Things - Yorgos Lanthimos proves once again why he is among the very best filmmakers in the world, and Emma Stone proves she IS the best actress in the world. A stunningly original piece of work.

2. Oppenheimer – A massive and sprawling film that director Christopher Nolan makes feel intimate. A throw-back to Hollywood’s glory days when big movies about big ideas got made and made very well.

1.The Zone of Interest – An unnervingly banal yet artistically ambitious look at the Nazi death machine that is masterfully directed by Jonathan Glazer.

MOST IMPORTANT FILM OF THE YEAR

The Zone of Interest/Oppenheimer – These two films have much in common. For example, they both deal with the same World War II era, albeit from different sides of the divide. They also have protagonists that are employed by the state to manage their massive industrial machinery of murder.

And most notably, at least in my eyes, is that both films strictly refuse to show the fruits of their protagonist’s nefarious labor.

The Zone of Interest is set in a concentration camp but never shows Jews being murdered, and Oppenheimer is about the atomic bomb but never shows the slaughter it produced.

These two films are the most important films of the year because they dramatize and embody our own steadfast refusal to see what is right in front of our eyes…namely the insidiously evil nature of the government of the United States of America and its affiliates, and the slaughter and suffering they cause across the globe.

I can’t remember who it was, but someone once said, “isn’t it funny how the good guys win every war?” The reason that joke is funny of course is because it’s the winners of wars who write the history of those wars and they always see themselves as the good guys. To the victor’s go the spoils and the spoils in modern warfare are that you get to paint yourself as a hero…always and every time.

If Rudolf Hoss, the protagonist of The Zone of Interest, had written a book in the wake of a Nazi victory in World War II, it no doubt would’ve been about how through his brilliant management style he heroically helped save Germany and the rest of Europe. It would probably be titled “Somehow I Manage”.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara once stated in the wonderful Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War, that if the U.S. had lost World War II the entire American military command would’ve been tried and hung as war criminals for the firebombing of Tokyo.

Of course, the same would be true for Robert Oppenheimer as a result of the massacres at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were directly the result of his scientific achievements.

The U.S. was on the winning side of the war, and so Oppenheimer faced no executioner. Rudolf Hoss, on the other hand, was on the “wrong side of history” and was tried at Nuremberg and hung for his war crimes.

To be clear, no one weeps for Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz, despite the fact that Hoss, like Oppenheimer, was just “following orders” and “doing his job” and “fighting for his country”, but that doesn’t make him any less culpable or morally and ethically repugnant.

Hoss and Oppenheimer were both exceedingly good at their jobs and both were deft bureaucratic infighters who could maneuver through some very tricky situations in order to get what they wanted. Both of them ultimately paid a price for their successes, Hoss was hanged and Oppenheimer hung out to dry.

Hoss was a Nazi and I think we can all agree that the Nazis were a stunningly clear embodiment of evil. But if the Nazis were so evil why were so many of them absconded from post-war Germany and brought to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip? Why did so many Nazis, like scientist Wernher von Braun, become integral parts of the U.S. power structure?

Could it be that our moral preening in the wake of WWII was just that, empty preening, and our victory, which wasn’t really ours but the Soviet Union’s, was nothing more than window dressing for the masses – the shuffling of cards in a rigged deck? Could it be the Fourth Reich is alive and well and ruling the world from some smoky backroom in D.C. or Geneva or some other monied capitol?

The Nazis, or Not-sees as my friend The Falconer calls them, did NOT-SEE the humanity of the Jews and Slavs they slaughtered on an industrial scale. But that inability to see the humanity of their enemy isn’t a Nazi thing, but a human thing, an impulse and instinct we must struggle against.

The most-clear example of this is that the ancestors of the same Jews who survived the Holocaust perpetrated upon them by the Nazis, are now perpetrating a holocaust upon Palestinians. The same dehumanization that animated the Nazi Holocaust is the same one that animates the current holocaust inflicted upon the Palestinians.

In a way, the brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis is the epitome of a historical tragedy because Israel was formed as a direct result of the Holocaust, and now it has become the monster from which it was birthed. It is like a child conceived in rape growing up to become a serial rapist.

That Israelis and Palestinians cannot see one another as human is no surprise considering the tormented, tortured, bloody and brutal history of that region, but that Americans refuse to see their own complicity in the dehumanization and slaughter is much more alarming and shameful.

Americans are as ill-informed, mis-informed and dis-informed as any group of people on the planet, and their ignorance and willful blindness to the U.S.’s malignant presence in not just the Middle East, but across the globe, is truly disturbing.

American’s refusal to see that they are complicit in the massacre in Gaza and the war in Ukraine, is exactly what The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer are dramatizing, consciously or unconsciously.

The U.S. instigated the war in Ukraine with a coup in 2014, and have thwarted any and all peace attempts and encouraged Ukraine to break any peace accords or ceasefires. As a result, hundreds of thousands are dead…mostly Ukrainians. But our media and political establishment stomp their feet and screech and wail about the villainy of evil Putin and so on and so forth. You don’t have to think Putin is a hero to know that we Americans are the villains in Ukraine.

The same is true regarding the Palestinians and Israel. Israel’s occupation and long-time expansion of settlements in the West Bank, only occurs because we give them financial and military aid as well as diplomatic cover at the U.N.

The tens of thousands slaughtered in Gaza? Their blood is on our hands because if our leadership – and I use that term loosely, wanted it to stop they would simply say to Israel, “if the settlements in the West Bank aren’t torn down, and the killing in Gaza doesn’t stop now, then all U.S. aid, be it financial or military, will cease now and forever”, but that will never happen. The reason it will never happen is something you aren’t allowed to say but is true nonetheless…namely Israel does whatever it wants because it runs America, not the other way around. Joe Biden doesn’t tell Israel what to do, Israel tells Joe Biden what to do. And the same was true with Trump and will be true if Trump wins this year’s election. It doesn’t matter who the President of the United States of America is in regards to Israel because the American leadership class in its entirety is thoroughly compromised by Israeli’s over-sized lobby and massive money-machine, Israeli’s ruthless intelligence apparatus (does anyone remember Jeffrey Epstein?), and a bevy of Zionist fifth columnists throughout the U.S. government.

This is why the U.S. is so quick to slander Putin as a war criminal but would never dare to suggest that of Israel…because Netanyahu IS a war criminal, but…he’s OUR war criminal. And Americans simply accept this unending hypocrisy and moral duplicity blindly and without a second thought.

This desperate and willful blindness, be it moral, ethical or political, is what animates The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer, and what animates the entirety of the political and media establishment, as well as the populace, in the United States of America.

The bottom line is that closing your eyes to moral atrocities doesn’t actually make you blind, it only makes you gullible and culpable…and the American people are lots of both.

Well on that very, very upbeat note….the tenth (THE TENTH!! – and God-willing not the last!) Mickey™® Awards comes to a close!! Thank you so much for continuing to read my work and for sticking with me through thick and thin. I greatly appreciate it. I hope you have a great 2024 and we’ll see you next year…AT THE MICKEYS™®!!

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Napoleon: A Review - You Can't Always Get What You Want

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The film could have, and should have, been great, but it just never coalesces and much to my chagrin ends up being a rather dull, formulaic and flaccid affair.

Napoleon, the highly-anticipated bio-pic from iconic director Ridley Scott, stars Joaquin Phoenix and dramatizes the rise and fall of France’s famous Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

The film, which hit theatres back on November 22nd, is now available to stream on Apple TV+, and I finally got a chance to see it.

I admit I was very excited to see Napoleon when it first hit theatres as I’m a big fan of Ridley Scott and consider him one of the master filmmakers of his generation. I also think the film’s star Joaquin Phoenix is the best actor on the planet, and his co-star Vanessa Kirby, is no slouch either. But despite avoiding reading reviews it was readily apparent that the film had garnered no cultural traction upon initial release, so I never put in the effort to see it in the theatre.

Napoleon has long been a tantalizing subject for cinematic exploration. For instance, in the late 1960’s Stanley Kubrick set his sights on the diminutive tyrant and got far along in the pre-production process but due to the high cost of shooting on location the film got scrapped.

I saw a Kubrick exhibit a decade ago in Los Angeles at LACMA which had a plethora of artifacts from his various movie projects. There was a bevy of material from his un-made Napoleon project…and I found it mesmerizing.

Unfortunately for me…and you too, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is not a Kubrickian Napoleon. Truth be told it doesn’t really even feel like a Ridley Scott movie. There is no epic feel to the festivities nor is there an intimate one. Filmmaking 101 tells us that you can either be epic or intimate, and on rare occasions both…but you can never be neither.

Napoleon, which runs two hours and thirty-seven minutes, is a dramatically impotent, narratively inert exercise in expensive wheel-spinning.

The film follows a rather tedious and trite bio-pic formula of jumping from one notable event to another, but provides no dramatic or human insight into any of it.

Despite some stunningly gorgeous cinematography from Dariusz Wolski, most notably in the coronation scenes – which are breathtakingly beautiful, the film just never coalesces into anything more than bland background noise.

There is rumor of a four-hour director’s cut of Napoleon that will one-day be available to screen but isn’t yet. I hope that is true because that director’s cut might unlock the dramatic and narrative coherence the theatrical release lacks. This was true with Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), a film that failed as a theatrical release but shines in its lengthy director’s cut…one can only hope Napoleon follows the same course.

Joaquin Phoenix is, in my never humble opinion, the best actor in the world, and yet in Napoleon he fails to settle into the role and feels decidedly detached from the character. This just isn’t a solid performance, as it feels scattershot and dramatically random, which is a shocking thing to say about a performance from a titanic acting talent like Joaquin Phoenix.

Vanessa Kirby is, as always, a luminous screen presence but she too is out of rhythm and entirely forgettable as Josephine, Napoleon’s wife. Josephine is quite a character and yet we never see her as an actual human being, only as a sort of conniving figurine…lovely to look at but ultimately empty.

Worse still is that the infamously combustible relationship between Napoleon and Josephine is deprived of any and all life. There is no chemistry or electricity between Phoenix’s Napoleon and Kirby’s Josephine. It is a lifeless and meaningless affair, which renders the rest of the film equally lifeless and meaningless.

The script, written by David Scarpa, is rudimentary, as it avoids getting under the skin of its subjects, and thus removes their motivations and humanity.

Yes, we know that Napoleon was a small man looking for a balcony, but why was he like that? And how did his relationship with Josephine propel that tyrannical instinct? And who was Josephine and what drove her to make the choices she makes? These are important question and none of them are answered or even remotely pondered in Napoleon.

There can be little doubt that Scarpa’s limited script is a large contributor to the less than stellar performances from usually spectacular actors like Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.

I really wanted to love Napoleon because I love the talent involved (Ridley Scott, Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby) and the topic explored, but ultimately the movie, at least in its two-hour and thirty-seven-minute form, is a strange one that seems to be devoid of not just artistic and entertainment value, but of purpose and meaning.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon reminded me in some ways of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Both Scott and Scorsese are two of the most iconic filmmakers of their generation, and they both came out with sprawling, lengthy films this year that failed to live up to their prodigious talents and astonishing previous work. If I’m being brutally honest I would say that at least Napoleon looked better than Killers of the Flower Moon…but both fall decidedly flat.

At the previously mentioned Kubrick exhibit at LACMA, as I perused his notes, pre-production materials and photographs of his Napoleon that were on display, it pained me deeply upon seeing those treasures that Kubrick never made the film. I had the same feeling watching Ridley Scott’s version of Napoleon but for different reasons…as Scott’s failure on Napoleon simply taints what should have been a magnificent cinematic story, and leaves it terribly tarnished and unusable for at least another generation – not because its “so bad”, it isn’t, but because it’s just entirely uneventful and forgettable.

Back when Kurbick was contemplating his Napoleon movie, The Rolling Stones sang that “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you find, you get what you need”.

Well, the first part is right…but as Ridley Scott’s Napoleon proves, the second sure as shit isn’t as I definitely didn’t need this Napoleon.

Kubrick’s Napoleon is what I wanted…Ridley Scott’s muddled mess of Napoleon is what I got.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

The Zone of Interest: A Review - The Profound and the Mundane

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This is a masterful arthouse film about the banality of evil that normal audiences will despise but cinephiles will adore.

The Zone of Interest, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, is an unconventional and unorthodox film that will confound and frustrate general audiences to the point of exasperation. It is also one of the very best films of the year, and one of the most insightful Holocaust films ever made.

The film, which is adapted from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, chronicles the daily life of Nazi Commandant Rudolph Hoss and his family in their new house right next to Auschwitz concentration camp.

Hannah Arendt coined the term “The Banality of Evil” when describing the men who perpetrated the Holocaust. According the Arendt, these men, like Rudolph Hoss, where not sociopaths or Nazi fanatics, but rather bureaucrats and middle managers motivated by professional success rather than ideology.

The Zone of Interest is Arendt’s Banality of Evil brought to cinematic life. The mundanity of the Hoss family life is a damning indictment as it is surrounded by the most monstrous evil that was the Holocaust, which is only ever heard, but never, not once, seen in the film.

The Zone of Interest features no true plot. Nothing really happens in the movie. But the mundanity of it all within the historically cruel setting is what generates the film’s profundity.

Auschwitz is a company town, and Hoss is a good company man. The business of Auschwitz is killing and business is good. Hoss is successful and is very good at his job. He’s an admired and respected man among his peers and underlings.

Rudolph’s wife, Hedwig, is the queen of Auschwitz, and she is constantly at work on her beautiful home and exquisite garden, which are attached to the concentration camp’s outer wall. Beyond that wall the cries of children and screams of parents are routinely heard…so routinely that they become empty background noise.

Rudolph and Hedwig, along with their five children, are living the American dream – or more accurately the Nazi dream. They have gone East (as opposed to West in the American myth), built a beautiful home, found meaningful work they are good at, and have lots of open space and freedom of movement. Their life is idyllic…except for the sounds and smells of slaughter which occasionally break through and pierce their ignorant bliss.

That their blessed life exists because, and within, the most degenerate and dehumanizing industrial genocide imaginable, is something that they are deeply skilled at keeping at bay. The Hoss’s aren’t unaware of the atrocities that surround them, they just choose to focus on other things….just like the rest of us.

The Zone of Interest is exquisitely directed by Jonathan Glazer who never veers from his brazen artistic thesis. The film’s meticulous visual style, its deliberate pacing, it’s odd and jarring photographic and time alterations, all point to a filmmaker who knows exactly what he is doing and exactly what he wants to say and how to say it.

The film is shot by Lukasz Zal, and he and Glazer put on a masterful cinematography clinic. The camera never moves in The Zone of Interest, as every shot is perfectly still. Any movement in the frame is made by the characters or by use of edits to a different angle.

There are straight lines everywhere, spotlighting the precision of the filmmaking and the horrifying meticulousness of the Nazi machine which keeps everything in order in the Hoss’ world.

There are no close-ups of characters in the entire film, and scant few close-ups of anything else…the only one I remember is of a flower. Instead, Zal’s still camera is kept at a cold distance, in a wide frame, never moving, never judging, just observing.

There are times when the film is shot with thermal imaging, which is an alarming change from the cinematic stoicism employed for the majority. That this thermal imaging is used to spotlight the rare moments of humanity, as opposed to the still, distant camera’s capturing of normalized inhumanity, is striking and very effective.

Also very effective is the sound design and music. Mica Levi did the music and it is an industrial sounding horrorscape, that when accompanied by a black screen or a red one, makes for unnerving viewing and listening.

Sound designer Johnnie Burn’s work is astonishing as the ambient sounds of the Holocaust are expertly recorded and deployed throughout, creating an unseen but very deeply felt sense of moral malignancy and madness.

The performances in the film are so understated and naturalized as to be astonishing. Sandra Huller, who is nominated for her work in Anatomy of Fall at this year’s Academy Awards, is absolutely astonishing as Hedwig Hoss.

Huller’s Hedwig is in constant movement and always searching for something, anything to occupy her. She is a proud mother and wife and loves to show off her success to her mother. But beneath her surface there is a calculating and vicious woman who knows what and who she is and what she will do to maintain her kingdom and maintain her status.

Christian Friedel is the picture of normalcy as Rudolph Hoss. Friedel’s Hoss could be at home as a bank manager, a car manufacturer or any mid-level bureaucrat middle-manager in any company in the world. That he is skilled at managing a death factory is almost beside the point.

It is common nowadays to call one’s political opponents or enemies “Nazis”. The U.S. routinely calls whomever it has deemed it adversary on the world stage “Hitler”, and anyone who negotiates with them or fails to go to war against them, “Chamberlain” – as in Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain who famously signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler which was seen as appeasing tyranny.

The thing that has always bothered me about the depictions of Nazis, whether it be in films/tv or in our culture in general, it is that they are cartoonish versions of evil. These men are shown as being blood-thirsty and often completely insane. These depictions make it much too easy for us to see Nazis solely as something that other people become, never ourselves.

The truth, of course, is much more complicated and much more unnerving. The reality is that we are all very capable of becoming Nazis…hell…we are all Hitler’s in waiting who would reflexively dehumanize our opponents and enemies, and/or ignore atrocities that become so common as to be background noise.

Back in the wake of the 2016 election and Trump’s rise to power, there was a debate in our culture about the legitimacy and efficacy of “punching Nazis”. I wrote at length about it expressing the danger of that line of thinking. The majority of liberals and leftists I knew, and many readers of this blog and my writing at RT, were fervent in their belief that punching Nazis was always, and every time, the right thing to do.

My counter-argument was, that is exactly how Nazis think…that punching/silencing/eliminating your opponent/enemy is a righteous act and that violent impulses are to be indulged in the name of that righteousness.

My friends on the left said I was a Nazi myself for not wanting to punch a Nazi, which is sort of ironic since I was much more likely to punch anyone in real life than they ever were.

The reason I bring all of this up in the context of a review about The Zone of Interest, is that the power of the film is that it lays bare in excruciating detail, how all of us, in similar circumstances, would fall into the rhythm of our time and place and would ignore the atrocity right outside our zone of interest in order to maintain our comfort and our sanity.

For example, while there are protests, most of which are performative and impotent, against Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the truth is no one is actually going to do anything about it and it’s not going to change because we have all been conditioned to, at a bare minimum, accept it, if not celebrate it. Thousands of children slaughtered in Gaza? Oh well… shrug emoji…did you see who Taylor swift is dating?

The same is true of the senseless and endless epidemic of murder in inner-city Black communities, and the ceaseless epidemic of suicides by the White working class, and homelessness and drug overdoses among the ever-expanding under-class.

We are overwhelmed by the scope and scale of all of these rapacious tragedies, and so we simply go along to get along and we live out lives of comfort on the mountain of misery our nation routinely produces.

We don’t think of ourselves as Nazis, despite the fact that our government is a malignant force around the globe which inflicts great harm and suffering upon millions, all on our dime and occasionally at our behest. For example, we send billions to nefarious nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia and turn a blind eye when they massacre innocents, just like we turn a blind eye when our nation directly massacres innocents, be it in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan or Yemen.

The denizens of D.C., be they venal politicians or craven lobbyists and the weapons manufacturers across our nation, don’t think of themselves as being Rudolph Hoss, but they are. Those diabolical fools are just like the mainstream media members who think of themselves as Woodward and Bernstein and not Joseph Goebbels. They are mini-Goebbels all.

The Zone of Interest is such a great film because it lays bare this fact that we are all Nazis, in action if not intent, whether we like it or not. And that is why the film is such mandatory viewing.

Unfortunately, The Zone of Interest, despite being nominated for five Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best International Feature and Best Sound, is an arthouse movie through and through, and mainstream audiences, conditioned to expect films that are structured in certain ways and have familiar dramatic arcs, will be repelled by Glazer’s artistic choices.

In common parlance, this film will bore the shit out of normal people because nothing happens in it. But the problem is that nothing happening is the point of the movie.

In my opinion, The Zone of Interest is one of the very best, and best-made, films of the year and is a critical piece of art in our current times. It would be a fantastic companion piece to watch in an ad hoc film festival with Michael Haneke’s masterful The White Ribbon (2009) and Elem Klimov’s masterpiece Come and See (1985), the greatest war film ever made, to try and capture, and understand, the zeitgeist of pre-war and wartime Germany as it is afflicted with the cancer of Nazism.

In conclusion, The Zone of Interest is a magnificent piece of cinematic art that cinephiles will adore and normal people will despise. If you’re a normie, then skip it, but if you are a lover of cinema and all of its artistic possibilities, then The Zone of Interest is definitely a must see.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

El Conde: A Review - Netflix's Toothless Political Vampire Movie

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A bore and chore of a movie that never fully fleshes out its intriguing premise.

El Conde, the new film by director Pablo Larrain streaming on Netflix, describes itself as a black comedy horror film, which I suppose is accurate for a movie that depicts former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet literally as a centuries-old vampire.

The problem with El Conde though is that while it is certainly black, at least visually - as it’s shot in a crisp black and white, it isn’t funny or horrifying or, unfortunately, even all that interesting.

The premise of Pinochet being a blood-thirsty monster is more than just metaphor. While Pinochet was not a “vampire”, he certainly was a brutal and vicious dictator who came to power through a U.S.-backed coup in 1973, and was responsible for the torture, rape, murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of Chileans.

Pinochet is unquestionably a monster, as is the other political figure featured in the film, Margaret Thatcher, which makes the animating idea of El Conde an intriguing one that piques both my artistic and political interest, but despite its alluring thesis the film fails to coalesce as it keeps dramatic and narrative coherence at arm’s length.

The film, which is in Spanish, English and French, can be watched by English speakers either dubbed or with subtitles. The dubbing is distracting because the voice-actors are painfully poor. Subtitles made for a more fluid cinematic experience but it also neuters the comedy…or the attempts at comedy.

The cast, which features Jamie Vadell as Pinochet and Stella Gonet as Thatcher, is entirely underwhelming. All of the performances seemed muddled and stale.

The Pinochet family, including his adult children and wife Lucia (Gloria Munchmeyer), all melt into one amorphous blob of forgettableness, like so much flotsam and jetsam in a dirty stream.

Carmen, a nun hired by the family to exorcise and kill Pinochet, is played by Paula Luchsinger, and the character is so poorly written that one wonders why she’s in the film at all.

No doubt the actors struggled because the script is so distracted and disheveled. None of the characters are dynamic or magnetic and none of the plot lines is thoroughly fleshed out enough to generate any drama.

Writer/director Pablo Larrain is an interesting talent. The first film of his that I ever saw was 2016’s Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy. That film was very polarizing because of Portman’s mannered performance, but I found it fascinating and thoroughly enjoyed it as an arthouse experience.

The next Larrain film I saw was 2021’s Spencer, which was about Princess Diana and starred Kristen Stewart. I think highly of Stewart as an actress (at least in her pre and post Twilight work) but found Spencer to be the most vapid and vacant garbage imaginable. It struck me as arthouse posing rather than artistic adventurism.

Now with El Conde, Larrain’s artistry is becoming clear to me in that he is someone who excels in the bells and whistles but not the foundational elements of filmmaking.

For example, El Conde is exquisitely photographed by Edward Lachman, who is nominated for Best Cinematography at this year’s Academy Awards. Lachman’s black and white is sharp and lush, and the flying sequences in the film are elegantly staged and executed and beautifully shot.

But despite Lachman’s stellar work and the gorgeous look of the film, the movie fails because the story at the heart of it is not fully fleshed out and the drama/comedy lackluster and banal…and that falls entirely on Larrain.

The noticeable thing to me about Larrain and his films is that he doesn’t actually have anything interesting to say. To declare that Augusto Pinochet is a blood-thirsty monster, and to do it in such an obvious way, isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

The one oddity of El Conde, which means “The Count”, is that the film unintentionally makes Pinochet into a mush less horrifying beast than he was in real life. Turning this ruthless torturer and murderer into a vampire makes him appear…dare I say it…like someone innocent of his crimes because of his inherent demonic nature. Pinochet is no longer a depraved human-being, he is a struggling demon/animal who doesn’t kill out of maliciousness but out necessity. The real Pinochet inflicted pain because he could, not because he had to, which is why he was such a deplorable person.

One would maybe think that Larrain is being artistically courageous in making such a case, but in context it becomes clear that this defense of Pinochet is purely accidental and not intentional at all. Larrain just doesn’t understand anything about his project beyond its surface layer and its catchy elevator pitch.

Ultimately, El Conde fails at being a black comedy, a horror film or even a mildly entertaining movie. While I thoroughly enjoyed Edward Lachman’s cinematography, I found the rest of the movie to be a bore and a chore.

I simply cannot recommend El Conde because despite its gorgeous photography and intriguing premise, it just never comes together to create a worthwhile or even moderately entertaining piece of cinema.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 116 - Oscar Nominee Barbie

Barry and I don our pink beach wear as we talk about Greta Gerwiog’s blockbuster summer hit, Barbie, which is nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Topics discussed include the potential path of Greta Gerwig’s career, Margot Robbie’s alleged snub, and the sneaky brilliance of Elf.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 116 - Oscar Nominee Barbie

Thanks for listening!

©2024