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

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

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

Thanks for listening!!

©2024

Hollywood's Self-Inflicted Box Office Problems

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Echo (Disney +): TV Review - The Cries of Failure Echo Forever

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an awful and idiotic waste of time.

Echo is the new Marvel five-episode mini-series streaming on Disney + and Hulu. The show stars Alaqua Cox in the title role, with supporting turns from Vincent D’Onofrio and Graham Greene.

Echo, in case you don’t know, is a Native American woman named Maya who is a master martial artist who is also deaf and has lost a leg. The character was first introduced to the MCU in the Disney + series Hawkeye.

I liked Hawkeye a great deal, and thought Echo was an interesting and intriguing hench woman. As a peripheral character she added depth to that show, but as the lead in a project she falls decidedly flat.

Echo is an absolute mess of a show. I’d call it an unmitigated disaster but disasters are more interesting.

The plot for Echo is laughably bad, the execution of it even worse. The action anemic and the acting atrocious.

Echo is categorized under the banner of Marvel Spotlight, which means it is supposed to be a stand-alone series, but if you haven’t seen Hawkeye, Echo will make absolutely no sense. Although to be fair, even if you have seen Hawkeye, Echo will still not make any sense.

Echo is set in Oklahoma, where Maya goes to get away from trouble in New York City and reconnect with her family and her native American roots.

The show leans heavily into Maya’s Native American lineage, and it is littered with flashbacks to the birth of Native people and the mysterious power Maya’s family has inherited from them. When these flashbacks aren’t incoherent, they are idiotic.

We also see flashbacks of how Maya lost her leg, and how a deep rift grew among her family. None of it is interesting or even adequately rendered.

Alaqua Cox stars as Maya, and she herself is actually deaf in real life, and also has lost a leg. One can only imagine the diversity, equity and inclusion orgasm Kevin Feige and Bob Iger experienced when they found a deaf, one-legged Native Woman to put in one of their projects. If Ms. Cox had been trans and/or queer too Iger and Feige’s loins would’ve gone thermo-nuclear.

Let me say first off that I’m glad that Cox has found acting work because it cannot be easy to be deaf and one-legged and get a lot of auditions. But it also must be said that Alaqua Cox isn’t exactly Meryl Streep as she is…by her nature, a very limited actress. The rest of the cast aren’t exactly the Royal Shakespeare Company either.

A major issue when committing to cast from a very specific ethnic group, in this case Native Americans, is that the talent pool is very, very limited. There are fewer actors to choose from and among that group there are even fewer good ones. Echo is populated by third-rate native actors and actresses that are entirely out of their league even on a silly series like this one.

The same thing happened with Martin Scorsese’s recent film Killers of the Flower Moon, where the Native actresses, in particular, were really dreadful. Lily Gladstone did solid work in the film, but besides her the cast is noticeably sub-par.

In Echo, Alaqua Cox is…not good, but she is someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged playing someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged…so she has that going for her. Besides that, she is quite wooden and impenetrable.

Graham Green is usually a very good actor, but even he is awful in this show. He plays a grandfather type figure to Maya and he seems to be fluctuating between sleepwalking and play acting.

My old friend Vincent D’Onofrio reprises his role as Kingpin in Echo and it is an embarrassment, not so much because of D’Onofrio’s acting, but because of how demeaning the entire enterprise is to the iconic character.

D’Onofrio was perfect as Kingpin in the Netflix series Daredevil, which for my money is easily the very best Marvel series ever made. But after a brief appearance in the Hawkeye finale, and now here in Echo, Kingpin’s status as a big, brutish badass, is in danger of being revoked.

Disney is reviving the Daredevil series and is returning the majority of the cast, but one cannot help but fear, if not expect, that they will completely fuck it up just like they’ve fucked everything else up in recent years. The castration of Kingpin in Echo points to the likelihood of the Daredevil series being neutered as well.

Disney is a disaster area and Marvel (and Star Wars) is in a state of such rapid decline and decay as to be shocking considering it stood at its apex just 5 years ago the culmination of its Infinity War saga.

Disney and Marvel’s addiction to feminization and diversity has sapped the MCU of its mythological meaning and its narrative and dramatic purpose.

Marvel has been turned into a weapon for cultural engineering instead of being a myth-making, and money printing, machine. Disney’s princess brigade has successfully castrated and feminized both Marvel and Star Wars, and both franchises are now left empty husks of their former selves.

As I have been saying all along, the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey are two completely different things, and you cannot simply replace a hero with a heroine and expect it to resonate in the collective consciousness. In other words, Disney/Marvel’s feminization/princess-ification of their franchises does not, as they hope, empower women, but rather strips the stories of all of their psychological, mythological and archetypal power.

Echo is a bad series not because it stars a twice disabled, Native American woman. No, Echo is a bad series because Disney/Marvel think that if a series stars a twice disabled, Native American woman that is all it needs. To Disney/Marvel, the show doesn’t need to be good…it just needs to be.

This is why diversity, equity and inclusion is such a cancer, it’s because diversity becomes the main focus, and quality is reduced to an after-thought if it is thought of at all.

In conclusion, Echo is a complete waste of time. The show is shoddy, shitty and stupid. I watched Echo so you don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Love and Death (HBO) - Miniseries Review: Trite True Crime Deep in the Heart of Texas

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite a great cast this is just another true crime retread with a prestige tv veneer.

The HBO miniseries Love and Death, which stars Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons and tells the true story of an extra-marital affair and murder in the small town of Wylie, Texas in 1980, finished its seven-episode run on Thursday.

The series, which was written by David E. Kelley, recounts the salacious tale of Candy Montgomery, a mild-mannered Texas housewife and church choir member who has an affair with a fellow married church member Allan Gore. Months after the affair ends Allan’s wife Betty is found brutally murdered with an axe.

Despite the fact that this is apparently a well-known tale and has already been made into a Hulu miniseries (Candy – starring Jessica Biel – which I have not seen), I did not know the Candy Montgomery story prior to watching Love and Death and so I won’t recount it in detail here for you in order to preserve spoilers for any of you who are in the same boat as I am.

The verdict regarding Love and Death is that it’s little more than a true-crime, Lifetime movie with an HBO prestige veneer and some top-notch acting.

Elizabeth Olsen is particularly good as Candy, as she masterfully captures the performative nature of a certain breed of Southern woman. Candy’s mask is so effective it even fools Candy into thinking she’s not who she really is.

As evidenced by her breakout role in Martha, Marcy, Mae, Marlene (2011), Olsen is a terrific actress but her career seems to be a bit stuck at the moment after getting caught in the MCU cul-de-sac. Her performances in the MCU films as Scarlet Witch have not been notable, but her work in the MCU TV series Wandavision was magnificent for the intriguing first half of that flawed season.

One can only hope that Olsen has put the MCU in the rearview mirror and now that she’s financially secure can explore more interesting projects and roles. Love and Death may have been her attempt at doing that, but unfortunately the series never lives up to her stellar work in it.

Jesse Plemons is also very good as the subdued and rather odd character Allan Gore, who sports a hairdo that is a first ballot Hellacious Haircut Hall of Famer.

Plemons is a master at filling quiet characters with a peculiar and pulsating inner life, and his Allan, who we are told has a “perfectly formed penis” – good for him, is bustling just under the surface and behind those curiously dead eyes but is always assiduously contained and constrained.

Plemons is one of the more oddly compelling actors of his generation and it’s always a treat when he’s on screen, even here in the tepid Love and Death, but he deserves better than this series.

Tom Pelphrey, who recently made a name for himself in the Netflix show Ozark, is terrific in the under-written role of the passionate and combative lawyer Don Crowder. After reading the post script at the end of the series I have to say that Crowder’s life seems to be much more interesting post Love and Death than it is during this story, and would prefer to have seen that tale told.

And finally, Lily Rabe does the very best she can with the unfinished character Betty Gore, and she too deserved much better than what was written for her.

As good as the cast is across the board, the problem with Love and Death is without a doubt the overrated writer David E. Kelley, who simply never elevates the story or makes it more than just another recounting of a true crime in a culture awash in true crime.

Kelley is considered one of the untouchables in Hollywood but I’ve never understood his appeal. Doogie Howser, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal and Big Little Lies are his most famous series and they’re all egregiously awful to the point of being entirely unwatchable. I’ve never liked a single one of his shows and never understood why others fawn all over him.

The failure of Love and Death lies at the feet of Kelley, who across his career has seemed allergic to insight and addicted to disingenuousness. Kelley’s consistent vacuousness as a writer and his vapidity as a storyteller infects Love and Death and leaves it completely devoid of profundity and power.

Love and Death reminded me of another true crime story given the HBO prestige treatment last year, The Staircase. That series, which starred Colin Firth and Toni Collette, was intriguing on its salacious surface but once you dig in to it there was nothing there…as it was devoid of even an ounce of drama or insight.

Like The Staircase, Love and Death is underwhelming as the longer the series went on the less interesting it became until finally you only finish watching it out of a demented sense of obligation or in my case, completion OCD.

Ultimately, Love and Death plays acts at being meaningful but is a rather vacant exercise in true crime exploitation and failed titillation. If you haven’t watched the series then trust me when I tell you that you never need to start. And if you have watched it then I assume, like me, you either regret the time committed or have entirely forgotten it.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 45: Black Widow

On this episode Barry and I head back to the MCU and do battle with Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. A wide array of topics are discussed including ScarJo's falling star, Florence Pugh's bright future, Marvel's few missteps and The Rock as Humphrey Bogart.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 45: Black Widow

Thanks for listening!

©2021