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<![CDATA[CINEMABRIEFING.COM - Latest]]>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:50:15 -0500Weebly<![CDATA['Ballerina' briefing]]>Fri, 06 Jun 2025 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/ballerina-briefing

3 (out of 4)

That Cuban interlude early in No Time to Die was so good it elevated the whole movie — hell it elevated the Craig era, or at least it did 90 minutes before the legacy was blown to smithereens — and it was in no small part due to what Ana de Armas brought to the table, not just as probably the last Bond girl proper but in disarming, mousy moxie. It was, for all intentions, an audition tape, one that made the announcement of John Wick’s first non-Chapter detour Ballerina (one of those spin-offs you never expect to make it anywhere close to fruition) seem like a damn good idea, even if the charming rookie energy of her character in Bond 25 had to be reduced to regular revenge motivations — I guess cute cheekiness is more permissible if you’re murdering people left and right for the CIA instead of living out the archetypal role of the righteously indignant, cold-blooded assassin.

De Armas doesn’t go for as grave as Keanu’s trademark stoicism, but her wrangled charisma and less ludicrous spite (gonna kill her cat or something?) are among the few less likable aspects of Ballerina, aside from any and every spin-off suffering from a sense of superfluousness. To no discredit, this fifth Wicked picture is unable to outstrip its small company of lady-led action thrillers, even by franchise alum — David Leitch assisted as director of the 2014 original uncredited and would immediately do what Ballerina does only better in the lucid, lean, lip-smacking Charlize Theron vehicle Atomic Blonde. Then of course it’s hard to live up to quasi-feminist, high-heeled carnage in touchstones like Kill Bill, Luc Besson’s boldest (namely the underground recruitment/revenge formula of La Femme Nikita) and Steven Soderbergh’s impeccable treat Haywire. You can throw The Villainess in there too, the most recent tragic-beauty-kicks-ass-in-some-extortion-cult scenario (Korean style!) as this franchise continues its nods in the direction of eastern influences akin to that pair from the Raid movies (Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman) popping up in Chapter 3 and, well, the whole Osaka sequence of Chapter 4 supported by Japanese legend Hiroyuki Sanada, with Donnie Yen beyond mentioning.

Even if it turns out to be one of the World of Wick’s worst (maybe I’m a soï for thinking this bests Chapter 2), it’s sure as shit sharper than similar RBF knees-to-the-nuts cinema fit for progressively duller career moments for Scarlett Johansson (Lucy/Black Widow), Angelina Jolie (Salt) and Jennifer Lawrence (Red Sparrow). And not that it means much, but Ballerina is director Len Wiseman’s finest hour by leagues — the guy hasn’t made a movie since the complete memory-holing of 2012’s stale Verhoeven recycle Total Recall and 2007’s shoddy Live Free or Die Hard (PG-13? For real?). Otherwise Wiseman’s claim to fame is Underworld and its beefed up sequel Underworld: Evolution, where in either case grave style (and no doubt Kate Beckinsdale in leather spandex) did the heavy lifting — this retains some of the hard-R larger-than-life backstabbery, swapping the strong suit of gothic edge for a clandestine, neck-deep dip in neon. However unlike the trashy, pontificating politicking of Lycan/vampire shadow wars, Ballerina insists on being as brisk in the action-comma-action-comma restlessness of its sister installment John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum. This is the best sorta numbing non-stop roller-coaster ride bullshit you could ever hope for, especially in trying to follow up Chapter 4’s slow, swelling setups to huge, sustained, orgasmic releases of tension.

In taking place during (and I suppose after?) the events of Parabellum, this primer for John Wick: Chapter 5 (Ballerina’s breather serves more as Reeves’ R&R than franchising) finds Lionsgate shoehorning Keanu’s character into the fray even before third act shenanigans, overplaying their already strong hand. I was already plenty pleased enough without his own personalized cutaway sequence on top of a “””fight””” with de Armas’ Eve Macarro in which he is conveniently completely holding back. But since the joke of John Wick is his role as the ultimate Gary Stu, despite her less legendary ledger you can’t accuse Ms. Macarro of flaunting the quite the same superhuman plot armor — she fights dirty and even goes full Karen in order to ensure her survival… however while in JW3 he gets pricked in the neck and needs a doctor in the first 15 minutes, Eve takes two nasty blows by blade to the back and it’s not a thing. But HEY Lance Reddick lives once more, my goodness!

Then, finally, spin-offs just always suck… this may be the most respectable ever made, since what, is Minions best in show for actually outstripping its progenitor? Ballerina positively dunks on the underrated Elektra, overrated Birds of Prey and, for garish excuses for fight sequences, Snake Eyes can eat it too. The fact that it feels about as assured as George Miller’s Furiosa (also key fem-revenge fare) is not too shabby… Sorry, I can’t qualify sequels to spin-offs, so Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Logan don’t really count. Leitch directed the all too relevant Fast & Furious offshoot Hobbs & Shaw but Ballerina turned out so much better, cut more from cleaner cloth and just pound for pound very, very entertaining and infinitely more rewarding in its written-off ridiculousness.

What an altogether delectable waste of time, with great variations on the assassin antics popularized by Wick (gun-fu on ice! Interrupted gear-up sequences! Grenades-only extravaganzas!) that somehow doesn’t feel like a careless comedown after the exacting cinematic surge of Chapter 4 but rather like Wiseman afforded us more traditional action movie editing rather than a daft imitation of Chad Stahelski’s now signature wide-framed stunts-do-the-talking staging. Ballerina’s a mirthful, mindful extension of the most palpably exhilarating action franchise still breathing (since I’m taking Mission: Impossible’s mammoth curtain call on its word) so even if there’s nothing terribly indispensable about this action heroine amuse-bouche, more importantly there’s surprisingly little wrong with it. It economically skips the prerequisite cult-come-up after investing in necessary tragedy (of course her Dad looks like Reeves’ stunt double), is hardly over-sexualized and male-g(l)azey like all of F&F, reduces as many in-references as it can, the solid do-nothing villain courtesy of Gabriel Byrne doesn’t whip out karate or anything and, most importantly, they don’t pat themselves on the back for bravely presenting the LADY John Wick movie, so props.

There are maybe 5-6 sequences cascading thru the second act, so especially next to Marvel’s latest bouts of boredom (Thunderbolts has what, one SINGLE sequence, also I don’t give a shit about the characters? Sweet.) this movie is just what subversive blockbusters should be, like Wick 3 was in 2019, just a sensational, stubbornly self-indulgent, semi-sadistic respite of gnarly, bisexually-color-blasted, bloody good-spirited combat and life-taking, reveling in what choreography-driven showmanship can do for the CGI-dominated dilution of summer’s moviegoing delight. “Hell hath no fury” and all that jazz… Seriously who doesn't like watching an attractive female assassin beat the shit out of people?

]]><![CDATA['Thunderbolts*' briefing]]>Fri, 02 May 2025 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/thunderbolts-briefing

1 ½ (out of 4)

Kevin Feige you son of a bitch, I just knew that asterisk was up to no good. But I had no idea you would assume the most obvious twist of all time — so obvious you had to spoil that the THUNDERBOLTS are now THE NEW AVENGERS before the movie even came out — could win us over in the end even if scruffy, scrappy heart did not. I didn’t guess what you actually wanted was to innocuously, comprehensively rebrand everything in order to resuscitate the regularly declining interest in what’s left of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, uh, sorry but this ain’t no Guardians of the Galaxy (any Volume) even if it wants to be. A Minecraft Movie probably handled the “bickering misfits who must learn to work together in the end” bullshit better than Thunderbolts*.

I really don’t get it, who could genuinely claim this movie is saving, rescuing, ahem avenging ANYTHING, let alone the MCU? ‘bolts is such a comically slight, self-admitting shrug of a movie, an entertainment insult excusing itself with crude psychological commentary. I’m quite astounded any sane person could see this as a rebound, “the best since Endgame!” I’m sorry are you on crack? You astroturfing me bro? Thunderbolts* is a most pathetic meta-acknowledgement of the MCU’s rut — it’s somehow more direct than Deadpool & Wolverine’s digs last year about stewing in the universally accepted “low point” of 2020s Marvel movies.

The biggest draw — the bored Sebastian Stan as Bucky — is still some suit, doing roughly nothing two movies straight. Taskmaster is ironically capped IMMEDIATELY, don’t even bother checking if Bond girl #57 Olga Kurylenko is still under there. I got the best of the emotional play between Florence Pugh’s Yelena and David Harbor’s Red Guardian in Black Widow. Then heck yeah, there’s a THIRD super soldier in Wyatt Russell’s sub-Cap’n ’Murica — wow so many version of the same brooding, quipping grumpy gills, likewise for the pretty neat Ant-Man and the Wasp villain Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) that you sideline, just another frowning reprobate in need of redemption along with every one of her interchangeable co-characters… Something’s cooking in the first act just as our cruddy cavalcade of mercenaries realize they criss-cross on each other’s hit-lists and cooperate for survival to break out of an oversized death trap, but Thunderbolts* then promptly hits the snooze button on becoming a creditable comic book adventure all the way until its grotesque mid-credit denouement has overstayed welcome.

This is stepping-stone Marvel at its most meandering and mundane, and Phase Four and Five have basically been the stepping stone saga (anyone still multiverse-hungry should die) rearing the infinity one. But even next to the recent MCU misfires that left me most disappointed, I’m still baffled here — for current contrast, Captain America: Brave New World was more involving and cohesive than this drab clusterfuck deplete of grace, action goodies and anything other than pandering thematics in hand with yet another bad guy in need of some super-therapy. The time to pull out and prop up D-list characters was whenever you hired James Gunn, whose riskier ridiculousness was tethered by Guardians’ mission to win you over somehow, if annoyingly so. This shit thinks that with tepid, tactless discussions and depictions of depression it can be INSTANTLY RELATABLE OMG ALSO LET ME SHIP YELENA AND SENTRY.

Poor director Jake Schreier is rolled right into the Disney pulverizer, his light hand lost after guiding and getting the best of odd ensembles in both geriatric android buddy comedies (Robot & Frank) and even peak pointless, insipid YA adaptations (John Green’s Paper Towns). Here Schreier is virtually voiceless — what did you nab him for, the emo faux-poignant shit specifically? Marvel and themes don’t mix, and when they did it was never as clumsy, baffling and embarrassing to hear and witness, this was almost worse than the big bear of emotion at the end of the similarly desperate demi-reboot New Mutants. The bang for your buck in Marvelville and most major flicks is sheer entertainment value, HELLO! NOT goddamn teen novel coming-of-age pretension like “it’s OK to be sad” and “you have to literally face your fears, except don’t face your fears, oh no facing your fears was a trap!” WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!

No, Thunderbolts* is a structurally, ideologically confused mess. There’s also something about the tone and self-awareness that is especially distasteful to me: “This isn’t a marketing opportunity” Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Nega-Nick Fury string-puller transparently remarks. Are you messing with me? That’s all this is, feigning the arrival of something BRAND NEW but trojan-horse-ing the same ol’ shit as always in some reverse mystery box. Come expecting something fresh and unexpected and you get stale leftovers — its just too ironic how empty the 36th MCU misadventure is considering the cute cereal box marketing, there’s no sustenance, no prize, not even a plastic bag. At this point they’ll try to shill us Jon Favreau’s Happy movie, YES all the MCU periphery will become the focal, don’t worry we’re definitely not creatively grasping at straws and leaving audiences to gnaw on substandard scraps!

While before I could say The Fantastic Four: First Steps was a ”finally!” moment for capeshitters, at some point these past several months I realized I couldn’t care less. Why admit you’ve peaked when you can’t even regularly pretend to give it your all, to hell with whatever Fox property crossovers you have up your sleeve. Even divorced from the advertising, Thunderbolts* wants to act like it’s this big surprise, ready to sweep people off their feet. Coming out the other end it’s possibly the most charmless, underwhelming ”blockbuster” I’ve ever seen in my life — eh if The Marvels didn’t exist.

]]><![CDATA['Snow White' briefing]]>Fri, 21 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/snow-white-briefing

1 (out of 4)

“I’ve read so many stories where the prince saves the princess in the end — I think it’s time we change that ending”
“NO, YOU’RE TRYING TO MESS WITH TRIED AND TRUE STORYTELLING, IT’S BEEN FOCUS GROUPED AND IT WORKS! JUST LET ME SAVE YOU!”

If Disney’s dreaded remakes of their beloved original feature length films were a thing back in 2012, just before they began regularly re-adapting their 2D animated arsenal, it wouldn’t look too dissimilar to the cute, opulent revisionism of Mirror Mirror, especially when they had recently pushed something like 2007’s Enchanted. 13 years ago the not so modest Mouse certainly didn’t have the teeth for something like the LOTR-lifted dark fantasy grit of Snow White and the Huntsman, and since the twin film year has a third, a triplet in the Spanish silent homage Blancanieves, I'll say no recent inspiration comes close to that particularly magnificent little muted matador makeover. 2012 is really the cornucopia of Snow White media, since other than weird German sex parody flicks over the decades of the late 20th century (not that I’ve browsed) there’s only (one imagines) the more innocent 2007 version where Amanda Bynes goes to college, the crass but forgivable Sydney White. And these movies still managed to survive in a world where Shrek exists, having punctured the public’s mindset on princess fantasy in countless priceless ways, like Austin Powers all but forcing Bond to get Bourne serious.

But even if none of the aforementioned forebears existed, Disney’s Snow White (2025) would still be the same stale, repulsive, untenable flavor of corporate-concocted filler film content, maybe the queasiest and most unpleasant of the 20ish they’ve pumped out since Kenneth Branagh’s standard by which they would be judged, 2015’s Cinderella. It’s one of only two Disney do-overs that have ever really been OK by me — as the relative first of its kind, ignoring the 90s and Maleficent and such, Branagh’s traditionalist taste wins you over. I was also late to realize how much Dumbo helped itself with histrionics, capitalizing on a tiny narrative and letting Tim Burton make amends for just how agonizing Alice in Wonderland can be. As far as the most covetous, vacuous of pop filmcraft goes, director Marc Webb’s only competition in captaining crap and shepherding sheer creative confusion is Robert Zemeckis and his wooden Pinocchio, as each exude that awful feeling from their perfunctory, primarily profit-pilfering purposes, corrupting Walt’s earliest masterpieces.

So yeah, it’s one of those where every metric measures out a whopping failure — CG dwarves, abysmal, Broadway-brash musical numbers (/Waiting on a WiiiiIIIISHHH/) burying the tidy story, Gal Gadot’s arduous attempts at performance... Then there's Prince Charming, sorry I mean JONATHAN (Andrew Burnap) as discount Robin Hood and truly testing original songs (“Princess Problems”* is a special sort of smarmy torture) in addition to all the emotional and inspirational cues cribbed from (or just plain much worse than) those 2012 features that actually had reasonable respect for the balance between reinvention and reverence. For God’s sake they substitute “skin was white as snow” dealio via opening narration for some origin story about her birth the night of a snow storm, um WHAT? This shit was Grimm for sure — from the box office it had me hoping Snow White could be one of the last gasps of this godforsaken addendum to anti-art, ugh if not for Lilo & Stitch and the realization that time will no doubt bring about a live action Tangled, Frozen and probably Encanto, especially if they think they can force Moana’s practical redo only TEN YEARS OUT? Their pool will soon run dry (after Hercules and a few others) but not fast enough! Damn you Barry Jenkins! Hell, if Mufasa: The Lion King became a sleeper hit, maybe we’re stuck with this ever-stockpiling shitheap forever.

I just couldn’t let this one go, stinker or no — it made me sit through basically all these damn live-action remakes save the Lady and the Tramp no one knew existed. 2025’s Snow White is ruthlessly mediocre and obscenely unnecessary… I hold the original 1937 film in a special place in my heart for the wonderful rotoscoped animation and all the terrifying aspects Disney has only softened over the years (the scary wooded hallucinations, the climax where the dwarves make sure the witch falls off a cliff with the freaking LIGHTNING) and the timeless amusement of incredible slapstick sequences, delicate comedy and amazing, trifling little songs that this new movie almost makes note of before ruining them all. Don’t expect any innocent, kinetic kids movie cogency here. How about two crappy villain songs, a cobbled screenplay and an ugly, lifeless palette? And despite promises to keep outmoded sexism of romance at bay, it's somehow even more pronounced than the original and inducing ALL of the cringe. “Weird. Weird!”

Please stop fucking with real classics (or movies older than Iger) and you won’t end up with a 200 million dollar loss. This is Disney at its most disgraceful; what an overwhelmingly well-deserved flop! Of the live action redos, it's easily the most careless of them all, just kind of revolting, wretched and repugnant, dear Jesus this movie almost has an odor. But yeah I’ve only reviewed Mulan and Jungle Book I believe, and those impractical wastes of time and money still have this junk beat by miles. For Webb I’d rather watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and for Shrek 5 parody fodder, I suppose I had a decent laugh between the squirming and deep sighing.

]]><![CDATA['Black Bag' briefing]]>Fri, 14 Mar 2025 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/black-bag-briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

After a soft return to theatrical experiences when he slipped back into director mode for the third Magic Mike (for XXL he was only executive producer, cinematographer and editor, lazybones), 2023’s Last Dance, Steven Soderbergh delivers one of his famous one-two punches in January’s Presence (paranormal in POV) and now Black Bag all of two months later. The twofer’s were never quite as exacting and elegant as a pair of distinctly different Best Picture nominees in 2000 with the masterful mosaic drug drama Traffic and the schmaltzy grassroots Julia Roberts show in Erin Brockovich. However 2025 finds the profoundly prolific director still dipping between his respective hipster selves, the fidgeting experimental guru and the less pretentious, pop-aspiring traditionalist.

Though he would drop any distinct auteur trademarks as a writer after the 90s, the comprehensive realignment to editing and cinematography (usually under pseudonyms like Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard) meant he would become even more Spielbergian, a guy with command of craft (Soder sometimes loves imitating Kaminski’s haloed light sources) but not the pen. Anyway, here we are after a series of collabs in scripting from Scott Z Burns (The Informant!, Contagion, Side Effects) to Lem Dobbs (Kafka, The Limey, Haywire) and plenty in between but David Koepp (director/screenwriter known for penning stuff for Spielberg, De Palma, Fincher, Howard) has got to be the most royal of the frequent linkups so far. I’m ready to give Black Bag some due praise but it’s worth noting that before he penned Steven’s most recent two, he wrote the wicked thrills of Soderbergh’s straight to streaming affair Kimi, a film with which the fears of the technological spear of time are backdrop for the reliable satiation of conspiracy, surveillance and subdued spy stuff…

Black Bag is like most Soderbergh pieces — it’s efficient, cleanly (if hazily) shot, edited, backdropped (by stellar Ocean’s scorer David Holmes, though the synth-savant Cliff Martinez is his usual suit), acted with class by players of pedigree new and old, and can be most accurately described as airtight, vacuum-sealed, crisp, calmly rapturous, essentially silk-fucking-smooth. Steven here particularly seems to have returned to the digital Fincher yellows of his 2010s renaissance, which saw sequential stretches of quality as assured as Haywire into Magic Mike into Behind the Candelabra into Side Effects, all in about two years. He’s a man who likes it lean and minimalist — Soderbergh can’t wait to start the dialogue before you see the conversation start, his art or his fancies subsisting on sustained low stakes despite his own scrupulousness, like he’s aiming for timelessness by composing pictures so breezy and at times convoluted (like The Informant!, No Sudden Move, OCEAN’S TWELVE) that the lasting power in the case of Black Bag will be more for the games of deception, Fassbender’s front and center fastidiousness and the film’s brave, winningly resistant urge for twists on twists in favor of a delightful nod to monogamy over the duplicitousness of a typical femme fatale, Allied-esque setup.

The man is an unstoppable machine of chic, clinically modern stylization and well-curated sorta coffee table cinema that tells you to relax and let him do all the work. With spies some might expect Black Bag to fit closer to the art-action feel of Haywire, probably this movie’s closest companion given the related Fassbender role, as well as The Good German for Cate Blanchette and more noir nonsense to paint this whodunnit (her only other sus-seductress turn is Guillermo’s Nightmare Alley). But as mainstream media its a modest movie, another keyword for Soder — like many features outside of his hiatuses and threatened retirements and streaming deals, Black Bag could’ve premiered online and it wouldn’t be worth any less. Kimi alone was enough to say for once that a movie doesn’t need a theatrical release (NOT EVEN A FESTIVAL DEBUT MY WORD is this even a MOTION PICTURE?!) to be considered, well, considerable, boy that’s hard to type — but in the end filmmakers matter much more than the format, and Steven’s workmanlike dexterity continues to be all but untouchable in his corner of Gen X determination and detachment.

]]><![CDATA['Captain America: Brave New World' briefing]]>Fri, 14 Feb 2025 05:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/captain-america-brave-new-world-briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

“You’ve gotta do better!”

After a dozen or so post-Endgame excuses for the longest denouement in cinema history (some of which have tallied insane budgets to exhibit the worst visual effects in all of modern blockbusters) the ceaseless Marvel slinky has become more than mangled and messed up, the Universe tripping over itself countless times in order to kickstart momentum for the brand’s new narrative scope.

I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to say this is how even the admirers and carefree casuals see things by now, a waning empire. Beforehand the pleasures were consistent enough to just enjoy the ride — now we’re lucky if one of these immediately memory-holed movies crosses your brain again without looking them up. In a world where The Marvels is ACTUALLY FRESH on Rotten Tomatoes (I had to double check then double take), that means the fourth Captain America becomes somehow just the third MCU movie with a dreaded green splat, ranging from the rightful ridicule for the totally asinine Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Phase Five sprinted for Kang Dynasty until Jon Majors’ legal problems forced a hasty audible… uh DOOMSDAY yeah, AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY!) to people ripping Eternals, which simply filtered fools as Chloe Zhao’s mature masterpiece (it honestly craps all over Nomadland, we’ll see ‘bout Hamnet) is worth many watches. Brave New World is right in between and not just because I was expecting trash beyond RT scores considering all the rumors of endless reshoots — the final product is not so disheveled, underwhelming certainly, but far more formidable as entertainment than it deserves, the script respectably two-stepping as it justifies Captain Falcon without getting too abrasive, direct or preachy about the racial subtext. Is even worth bringing up director Julius Onah made something as thought-provoking as 2019’s Luce, a Funny Games reunion for Tim Roth and Naomi Watts with some similarly simmering violence behind the more nihilistic bent of polite socialization — ignoring the practically pre-disowned hodgepodge sci-fi hack-job that is The Cloverfield Paradox, Onah’s other resume-ready conceit is the only neo-noir with a black leading man I can think of since (and maybe before?) Denzel in Devil in a Blue Dress, the character-rich The Girl Is In Trouble.

The first Post-Evans affair sprints to escape shadows via a simple conspiracy/assassination semi-Manchurian thriller tale molded after fan favorite Captain America: The Winter Soldier — the first act of Brave New World is just so eerily similar, with an opening stealth mission meant to uncover a devious plot of internal corruption stocked with political intrigue, followed by street-set ambushes (courtesy of an underused Giancarlo Esposito) and our heroes (an ex-Widow played by Shira Haas, half ScarJo’s size, still dropping dudes 150 pounds heavier, and the winsome Danny Ramirez as Falcon 2.0 Joaquin Torres) on the lamb and out for Ethan Hunt levels of righteous curiosity and responsibility. Sebastian Stan's forced cameo is supposed to make us all feel better — Bucky remains a barely second-billed bestie but he’s also a congressman? How… boring. Despite Carl Lumbly as an OG super soldier unfamiliar to me, this movie doesn’t really have that “didn’t you see Falcon and the Winter Soldier?” moment. It’s Anthony Mackie’s assurance making it all the more tolerable, and same goes for Sam Wilson’s relationship with protégé Torres, so strong you can end the picture on an emotional reconciliation — did you ever see that between Rogers and Wilson, really? Mackie holds his own so well considering he was treated like a token character at best before (Imagine them trying to sell a Don Cheadle War Machine movie, how few people would show up?), he’s even written to be kind of annoying in Infinity War. Mackie keeps his respect with nothing but earnestness, which felt natural since the ex-soldier angle is carried over from maybe his best performance in The Hurt Locker, the first thing I ever saw him in (my suburban ass had to catch up to 8 Mile).

Anyway Anthony’s attempt to make sure the film is worth its salt is offset by Harrison Ford who really didn’t need to openly admit he was doing it for the paycheck this time, unlike back ’97 when he cared about his fake presidential role in Air Force One. It took me too long to realize he replaced William Hurt’s character, who appeared most prominently in Civil War and The Incredible Hulk — Brave New World subliminally serves as a latent conclusion to the loose ends of the latter, oft-ignored second MCU feature, including Liv Tyler’s pointless return as the character’s daughter. Tim Blake Nelson as a goofy-ass Martian-like gamma-goosed-up villain, fuck what a class act, it’s pleasing watching a great character actor do his thing, especially as an underutilized peripheral figure in the mediocre, unmemorable Hulk movie directed by Louis Letterier and not the mediocre, more memorable Ang Lee interpretation. Otherwise, without Ed Norton or Mark Ruffalo in sight (or She who twerked with Megan Thee Stallion) this is all pretty darn perfunctory padding.

The mild moxie of Brave New World now makes that 180 million price tag more reasonable — sure this doesn’t live up to the involving action and headlong pace of a Russo Brothers romp (Winter Soldier’s prudent punch or the brimming bustle of Civil War) but it isn’t far off from the off-balanced rush of The First Avengers’ role as crossover-springboard. Captain America: Brave New World, for pointing us toward X-Men and reformed Avengers team-ups, is significantly less of a product/advert movie than its forebears. It’s got decent enough intentions, fights and flow, even as the movie is undone by marketing that can’t help but overshare Ford’s transformation into Red Hulk, the late climax of the picture. But Cap’n 4 miraculously doesn’t snake oil sell you anything — the movie made me go from scoffing at the idea of Mackie spearheading the leftover Avengers to rather curious how they might pull that sucker off. The fifth Avengers is right around the bend and general interest has to be a little higher for Thunderbolts (right?) and much higher for Fantastic Four: First Steps (r-right?). I might be going soft on Brave New World but sorry, even the gag-inducing humor is practically non-existent here (only ONE CRINGEY PAUSE FOR LAUGHTER MOMENT?), the banana peel under any wishfully slop-side-stepping superheroics.

]]><![CDATA['Flight Risk' briefing]]>Fri, 24 Jan 2025 05:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/flight-risk-briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

So back when his reputation was lowest, after raving about Jews during his DUI arrest nearly twenty years ago, critics and filmmakers still couldn't help calling Mel Gibson’s brutal late-Mayan survival epic Apocalypto a bold, masterful achievement. Decades later I may still find myself peeking through my fingers for that 2006 sucker punch more than just about any horror movie I’ve ever seen, its got that all-encompassing brutality and bravado allowing the carnage, thrills and scenic splendor all align like a gosh dang solar eclipse, enough to insist on separating art from the alcoholic.

I’m surprised Mel’s responsible for something as modest as Flight Risk this late in life, since this marks only his sixth directed feature in over 30 years. Including his mighty melodramatic debut The Man Without a Face, he’s never NOT gone hard, particularly in his quick follow-up two years later in Braveheart’s Oscar-clinching sorta-Scottish war epic ego-explosion (about as shameless as Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves) — apart from Apocalypto that just leaves 2004’s The Passion of the Christ and 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge, showcasing Christ figures literal and oh so plainly figurative and both pretty fascinating true stories. I suppose Flight Risk pays the bills while he funds The Resurrection of the Christ, the holiest sequel since Matrix 3. Despite some abysmal critical responses to this headstone in the typical January cine-cemetery, I must be quite contrary — I feel safe from damnation saying it’s more worthwhile than his Jesus movie — for aiming low Flight Risk isn’t automatically his worst ever.

It’s a pressurized thriller that’s in ’n’ out in 90 minutes flat, exhibiting exceptional performance work from its three equally dynamic leads, despite Markie Mark singlehandedly selling the thing while acting kookier (more loathsome than badass) than probably five of his solo Jason Statham-flavor heroics combined. Actually, outside of Boogie Nights and The Departed, I’m struggling to name any others noteworthy turns aside from All the Money in the World and The Other Guys… how can one keep up with the bad family comedies, bad adult comedies and Transformers flicks on top of his regular mid-budget action movie mode? Topher Grace never really got another big break since Eddie Brock, and here its so nice to see what might've been a third wheel role become a chance for the guy actually act in between stretches set aside for his naturally funny self. But really its Michelle Dockery of Downton Abbey renown (who even appeared in the planeslop of yesteryear, Liam Neeson’s cruddy Non-Stop from 2014) as the tested US Deputy Marshall yanking the spotlight away from Whalberg to command the film with conviction as she unravels a conspiracy through phone calls like this is Locke for the skies and Tom Hardy was unavailable.

What I mildly cherish about Flight Risk is bringing back plane movies, bottle movies (less My Dinner with Andre and more Assault on Precinct 13, as it's usually horror thrillers coasting on one-location claustrophobia such as Phone Booth, Devil, Buried or 10 Cloverfield Lane) but most importantly PLANE BOTTLE MOVIES — the screenplay (first-timer Jared Rosenberg) has to put in overtime and Gibson’s more than minor entry will go down in the microgenre’s brief history, hovering above Snakes on a Plane and Flightplan, if just below Wes Craven’s Red Eye and Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One — Simon West’s Con Air is simply in another league.

You could reject it as seasonal trash — for early year surprises Companion is far more fulfilling but Flight Risk is a definitive “don’t let the critics deceive” kinda moment. For all its B-movie mishaps — like laughable CG mooses (meese?) before the quickly imperceptible mid-air green-screening — Flight Risk could carry you through a matinee or a short layover, it basically feeds you a constant, convenient countdown. You could ask questions like, “Why didn’t they just shoot this psycho-murderer forever ago?” But I’ll take watchable characters and irresistible drama even if you occasionally gotta drop logic like ballast.

]]><![CDATA['Sonic the Hedgehog 3' briefing]]>Fri, 20 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/sonic-the-hedgehog-3-briefing

3 (out of 4)

PUSH THE BUTTON

I’ve purposely neglected to throw in my two cents about Sonic with each passing movie — the first was basically the last theatrical release to take the money and run right before the pandemic hit hard in 2020, and the second was one of the surest early signs that we’d come full circle around COVID in spring of 2022. Needless to say I consider myself a movie guy, not some video game NERD, and thus the new wave of more legitimate adaptations (finally not so frequently derided and ridiculed) has taken some time to reconcile with.

In general Mortal Kombat has either some of the worst lines of the 90s or you’ve only seen the 2021 version, with a sequel due next year. I for one have never experienced the Resident Evil franchise but would probably enjoy it if I did — elsewhere I remember watching Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li because I heard just how laughably bad it was, and it didn’t disappoint (the 90s original can't be too far off). Silent Hill has only been followed by the likes of Five Nights at Freddy’s, Lord knows when horror gaming will be tapped for mucho moolah. But like, Gran Turismo? Need for Speed? Angry Birds and Assassin’s Creed? What could these amount to? Fuck I did review that Lara Croft reboot, 2018's Tomb Raider, what a forgettable flick. Back in the day I enjoyed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for what it was. Alas, as far as the most watched game adaptations, I skipped Warcraft, Uncharted and didn’t even know Rampage was one. I can say Detective Pikachu is the poorest excuse for a major live action Pokemon movie, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie was as good as it needed to be for its massive global audience. So you see, I barely know what I’m talking about.

ANYWAY, Sonic has carried the torch on finding a real space for all this crap, and this third installment is a weirdly self-actualizing moment for both vidya at large and Sonic specifically. Finagling that detached yet sincere tone, measuring out the meta humor, and knowing how to tune out the human element without losing it altogether, director Jeff Fowler has been there for the whole hog thus far… all told Sonic the Hedgehog 3 isn’t too different from the last two, but it is more efficient, entertaining, stuffed with Jim Carrey jollies and naturally populated with its brightly feathered animated characters. If the first was a modest road tripper, the next some by-the-books action-adventure questing, then this is the real blockbuster of the series, one that can dunk on Disney while emulating exactly what Dreamworks wants to be every time they put out some franchise fodder. Paramount has slyly wielded Sonic to advance the art of irreverence to places where saying this is the best video game movie in forever, or the best movie you can take your kid to outside of The Wild Robot (i.e. NOTHING) is actually less than the regular ol’ praise this stupid, seriously slaphappy movie deserves.

Carrey — now going all Eddie Murphy on us in a multiplied role, his first and only since A Christmas Carol, since the alter egos of The Mask and Batman Forever don't quite count — has made Robotnik the cornerstone of his late career, and he will pry at least five good laughs out of you before the curtains close, just above par with stellar supporting silliness throughout the trilogy. But by this point (or maybe for the first time), I can say Ben Schwartz IS Sonic, I’ve warmed up to a classic “grown lady pitches her voice to sound like a little boy” for Tails as well as Idris Elba’s ironic gravity as Knuckles. You even give enough of a shit about James Marsden despite this movie spending about ten minutes with any of those hominid, family film fools. Add the kind of tragic backstory this movie affords Keanu Reeves’ Shadow (improving on Knuckles' all too similar villain redemption arc last time) and you have a winter blockbuster teeming with fun and emotion and giggles — even the visual effects look less like the usual made-for-cheap skimping on the part of Paramount (whose pockets have been picked by Tom Cruise for a couple of the most expensive movies of all time).

But it can't all be golden rings and loop-de-loops. Like its predecessors the jokes are hit and miss even if Carrey ably carries the team on his back, and as storytelling it’s inevitably somewhat stale, yet the third Sonic can’t help but put in the work between the plot, action and pauses to sort out how to be a real movie amidst all the ridiculous, rambunctious revelry. Now there’s a GIRL Hedgehog and a ROBOT Hedgehog, and the manic, mildly crude Hedgehog saga will soldier on — it seems Carrey will return from retirement every time, and until he phones it in my money's yours. I’m highlighting this flick over Barry Jenkins' Mufasa: The Lion King because frankly I couldn’t see a reason to invest in some cinematic world that has to steal its soul from other sources — Sonic 3 glides when you expect it to stumble. It's what Disney used to be, entertainment for the young and old, and until the Citizen Kane of video game feature films comes along (somehow I think A Minecraft Movie will keep us digging), I’ll keep rolling right along with this spiny blue smart-aleck.

]]><![CDATA['The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim' briefing]]>Fri, 13 Dec 2024 05:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-war-of-the-rohirrim-briefing

1 ½ (out of 4)

For the vested Tolkien nerd, who could be anything but disappointed about what led to this empty, unhappy dud? Not until very close to the release of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim did I wonder where the marketing was — I couldn’t be too surprised when the box office opening weekend was like seven million, especially you find out New Line Cinema was basically in the same situation as Sony when they clung to their Spider-Man rights by fast-tracking those Andrew Garfield reboots. The quality of The War of the Rohirrim has to be calibrated later since it’s all clouded by business decisions rather than clear creative spurs... at least in Sony’s case you have piles of comic books to flip through, meanwhile Peter Jackson’s best interns are working with about three or four pages from one of the appendices in the back of The Return of the King, and HECK I THOUGHT THE HOBBIT MOVIES WERE BLOATED! By the same math (in terms of butter being scraped over way too much bread) they could’ve split The Hobbit dozens of times instead of into infamously criticized thirds, just incalculable levels of milking that money machine bone dry!

It didn’t do anything too drastic to violate those precious few pages at its disposal and anything directly lifted from those numerable paragraphs gets a pass. But note for note, The War of the Rohirrim is a never-ending ladder of pointlessness, fan or no. Even when you get to the cinematic story and the whole gun-to-your-head moviemaking arrangement, it’s just glorified, glossy fan-fiction — working with so little is like making a movie out of an illustration on the back of Reader’s Digest. For weird standalone spin-off movies I can’t help but think of Star Wars "Stories" and all those damn streaming shows… akin to Rogue One, this is based on the nugget of a nothing idea and, along with Solo, there’s an absurd amount of teased and reworked lines meant only to repeatedly reference The Two Towers and Return of the King’s Rohirric elements. You HAD to have Helm Hammerhand’s son Fréaláf kill a big ol’ war elephant Legolas-style, and screw it, why not shoehorn wizards and resurrect Christopher Lee’s voice from beyond the grave, for no reason! I’m vexed by vacuous lore media, I can’t decide whether it’s worse as an outsider or not, regardless I sure don’t need every other exchange to mirror or reconfigure the most throwaway lines in LOTR to some degree, no matter how faint — “we must be reminiscent at every POSSIBLE MOMENT, EVERY MOMENT can be a fan service moment!”

Then you get to anime aspect, which from afar seemed benign enough, maybe even inspired, ’til you realize the studio just wanted costs minimized. Expensive things like sets, costumes, special effects and horse trainers weren't worth it to Warner Bros, and they were sadly, cynically right. Listen, I’ll not pretend I’m familiar with anime outside of basics like Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, and I'm sure I've never touched a manga — ignorance aside this looked like Nausicaä in the worst way…. the integration of the backdrops and CGI flourishes (done beautifully like in Makoto Shinkai's works, most famously Your Name for instance) does nothing for this decades-dated, drab-ass accident of an anime. Despite a positive Japanese influence in reverence for the world, when it came to the fights this was certainly more a wuxia than English fantasy. As much as I can’t really compare it to much Eastern animation, I really don’t have to! The style is a facade, a distraction, for even at its most scenic and transporting, it’s just copy-pasted from the visual hallmarks of Jackson’s films, primarily manifested from the page to the palpable by illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, as well as WETA Workshop creative director Richard Taylor, all of whom return here to no artistic avail after translating so much of Tolkien’s visual ideas as we know them. Their brilliant old designs are recycled to almost exclusively showcase the Rohirrim, the least fantastical culture in all of Middle Earth no matter how many eagles and mûmakils you cram in there — I’m kinda shocked the ents didn’t cameo.

This movie’s stately, pompous masquerade will have you longing for the daytime soap opera feel of the awful, overproduced Rings of Power show on Amazon Prime, picking your poison between serious sentimentality or absolute schlock. If you’re gonna fuck up Tolkien why not make it interesting? But LOTR adaptive scribe Philippa Boyens, now solely producing, has let the 'next generation' take a stab at Middle Earth, namely her untested daughter Phoebe Gittins, as well as collaborator Arty Papageorgiou, who both re-wrote the COVID script from another novice duo Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews. The four hacks stretch it as far as they can, sorry, what does that work out to, like a paragraph per person? The first act is full-scale nonsense aside from the inciting death-punch by King Hammerhand (Brian Cox) uppercutting his chubby, covetous brother Freca, leaving the fall of Edoras, its people’s exodus and the eventual siege at Helm’s Deep (including Helm slaying Dunlendings in the dead of night) by a vengeful progeny Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) to situate you’re remaining movie but JESUS, 133 minutes of this unceremonious excess? WOW a Watcher in the Water swallowed an oliphaunt… it’s all relatively inoffensive and simultaneously utterly insulting.

You can see why Fran Walsh and Jackson sat on the sidelines rather than than go all in tricking us with shameless nostalgia and a fucking UNTOLD story that is just politically desperate. From square one Miranda Otto’s narration as Eowyn (nicely echoing Galadriel’s prologue in the original trilogy) tells us not to look for said tale in writings as “there are none,” (*TITLE DROPS*), as these New Zealanders try to frame business-dictated limitations with asspull, Princess-Peach-level girlboss feminism, all for a character with literally no name? “DON’T BOTHER, IT WASN’T RECORDED BECAUSE OF SEXISM OR SOMETHING.” Sure, yeah, Rohan’s historians are misogynists didn’t you know?

And all this for what? To ensure the same hacks can help Jackson make two mother-fudging parts of The Hunt for Gollum, which will be more fan-fictiony than ever considering you’re working with ZERO PAGES IN THAT CASE RIGHT?? I hate the bitter irony of holding on to your precious piece of the IP to prevent the step-by-step dismantling of a wondrous legacy, Tolkien’s death by a thousand cuts, only to wield the knife yourself? And the Hobbit movies already drew a considerable amount of metaphorical blood. Maybe they’ve prevented Jeff Bezos from rebooting LOTR and I should actually be super grateful, not sure. But The War of the Rohirrim, Eru almighty it’s so useless I shouldn’t even be talking about it, it’s already forgotten. Like all box office failures of recent days, it was online within TWO WEEKS — just another Warner Brothers write-off, they didn’t even blink.

]]><![CDATA['Gladiator II' and 'Wicked' briefings]]>Fri, 22 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/gladiator-ii-and-wicked-briefings

Gladiator II

2 (out of 4)

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, even the guy that used to make ‘em. I like Ridley well enough, sure he’s made more than his share of blunders (Napoleon, Alien: Covenant, The Counselor, Body of Lies, Hannibal, etc.) but his best (Duellists-tier), near-best (American Gangster-tier), overrated 'classics' (Black Hawk Down, Thelma & Louise) and even some forgotten fare (All the Money in the World, Matchstick Men, 1492), namely White Squall, still endure real nice — from the cut of this boomer blockbuster he’s finally circled back to sailing: “OY what if the gladiator battle was on the WA-UH!” Yes it’s been long enough for Gladiator 1.5 aka Gladiator Reborn (with sharks this time!) — let’s not even think about how they transported those, I don’t think you could pay me enough danerii to catch a shark in 200 AD.

The way this movie tries to both mimic Gladiator’s formula and outstrip it at the same time is confusing. Gladiator II is a legacyquel to its core, you can’t escape the gravity of ancestry and it’s almost as hard to sidestep the structural imitation — however, like the Hunger Games prequel (only so much worse), Scott thought he could give you the whole blood for sport revolt on fast forward, THEN try to get away with last minute character development out the door. It’s discomforting the way this movie’s blunt brevity softens the tragedy, the politics and even the spectacle of 2000’s brawny Best Picture winner, but just for mainstream entertainment, this is dumb as palm-rubbed dirt. There were only so many moments that actually convinced you of millennia-removed history made real — with something like 300 million dollars at hand, it really doesn’t come off like it. And what a shame since his films can be beautifully edited (this one’s like a best and worst of, ranging from judiciously airtight to just plain jenky), Ridley’s got long-tested skill with scale and LIGHTING, GOODNESS next to Wicked this is like a godsend, seeing composite CG shots where everything matches... he’s certainly not incapable of transporting you in passages DARN IT. Still, looks alone cannot counterweight a crumby script (and Wicked Part 1 basically has the inverse issue).

They know they have to be a little different, so they sub early CRAAaaaAAAZY Joaquin for some actual irredeemable weirdos (siblings played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) and revise the revenge so it’s aimed at someone who doesn’t deserve it, General Acacias as played by Pedro Pascal, channeling Eric Bana’s Hector from Troy with half the noble gravitas. This movie doesn’t have anything but recycled emotional investments, therefore a slightly variant shade of the stoic, scorned rage monster doesn’t suit Paul Mescal, he can't imbue Maximus Jr. (Lucius Vernus Aurelius, son to a murdered father) with the warm spark of his work in All of Us Strangers or channel the possessed mythic sadness on display in Aftersun. I really hate his character’s selective memories: “OH I have all these remote psychological imprints that would totally suggest that I have some trace of who I am but instead I’m gonna act like a stubborn little BITCH til the third act!” Finally the not so big twist basically borrowed from the Training Day playbook (1. let Denzel be Denzel until the script won’t have it anymore) isn’t a fresh step and leaves you bored after wearing you out. The original is like some Japanese fantasy movie, hardly more than a fun sword and sandals revenge flick, the linchpin of the 2000s wave of redacted, simplified, pop versions of the historical epic like Troy, Alexander and his own Kingdom of Heaven… and Gladiator II is the speedier, stupider version of THAT.

This won’t save a fossilized genre, and I don’t think such decent box office numbers will secure the old man’s obsession with genre entertainment after all these years. Frankly even if this is technically better than Exodus: Gods and Kings or less pompous than The Last Duel, this might be the most broken yet of his big, brash windows to the past, though if you count it, I suppose this is a touch more tolerable than House of Gucci. Armed with his defiantly boyish instincts and sweaty, gritty knack, his shape jumps from eager and economical to sporadic, flimsy and fractured — and I thought Napoleon felt undeveloped, riddled by disinterest and primed with unnecessary appeal to modern audiences. I’d rather be watching GI Jane, or GI Jane II for the that matter, CAN'T WAIT TO SEE IT!

Wicked

2 ½ (out of 4)

Any upfront aversion to this ludicrously anticipated event film was less to do with Wicked itself and more uncertainty about director Jon M. Chu, even if In the Heights happens to slap. I was always indifferent to the idea of Oz-related media, but admit most of it is pretty good: The Wiz (a reasonably cool musical mutilated by Sidney Lumet's insistence on plopping you in the worst seat in the house, number after number), Return to Oz (a fever dream of 80s dark kids fantasy worthy of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth) and Sam Raimi’s underrated Oz the Great and Powerful are rarely punishing, in fact they’re peripheral pleasures.

But Wicked was due eight years ago and has clearly been trapped in production purgatory (so much so that the Part 1 and Part 2 were there long before I could accuse them of cash-grabbery) after development began in 2010. Because of its tangential relation to the classic 30s flick, let alone Baum’s actual children’s book series, let’s forgive my plebeian theatre acumen, as well as how easily I gave up on consuming even half of Chu’s filmography — sorry I don’t have time for your debut (Step Up 2 the Streets) or even your follow-up, Step Up 3-D, sure I’ll watch a YouTube clip or two. But, uh, I would never, EVER touch your SET of Justin Bieber docu-tour-movies (2011’s Never Say Never and 2013’s Believe), and while we’re at it I also just can’t with G.I. Joe: Retaliation, no thanks, even if I did suffer through Rise of Cobra back when I was a dumb teen (and Snake Eyes as a dumb adult). I can’t believe I got swindled by Now You See Me 2 (like with G.I. Joe or Step Up, Chu appears to have had nothing to do with the original) and in between he spits out a low budget rendition of the 80s animated show Jem via Jem and the Holograms’ pauper to pop star fantasy-fulfillment. But this guy clearly only comes into his own when he helms the successful, historically significant (if not the best of his full frontal sense of entertainment) Crazy Rich Asians, the first Hollywood movie with an all-Asian cast since ’93 and clearly a step in the right direction, finally. Then, with a decent assist from Lin-Manuel Miranda, In the Heights blew me away a few summers back in 2021, and remains his most volatile, impressive film partly by default.

As far as the source though, Baum didn’t want to impose moral lessons, akin to Oz’s overseas inspiration Alice in Wonderland — meanwhile Wicked scribe Gregory Maguire specifically sought big message-making apparently in honor of Dickens or something? For siphoning from prime American children’s fantasy and as the offspring of the wildly popular Broadway/touring musical incited in 2003, itself derived from Maguire’s saucy 560-page 1995 revisionist novel (praised and also criticized for turning Baum’s world upside down for the sake of moral relativism and pretty outlandish expansions on a Western wonderland setup) Wicked: Part 1 (2024) could be worse — at least kids are looking out for propaganda or something? It seems Baum wanted to end the books after six and they made him spit out 14, basically until he was dead! I’m sorry Hollywood where’s the fucking Nome King? OH RIGHT we only care about what we know well, since the wellspring for all this media is less Baum and really just Victor Fleming’s 1939 all ages musical spectacular, his crumby side project while he hammered out the forever and always popular domestic pinnacle of all cinematic offerings, Gone With the Wind, released the same year. ALL TO SAY, there was mostly reason to be concerned about the state of a two-part Wicked extravaganza, especially considering how awful and all-consuming the marketing has been. Plus, given that this first act totals 160 minutes while the full show on stage totals 165 (and looking at the story sum of Maguire’s novel, it would appear there wasn’t all too much borrowed) … my first feelings on this portion of the Wicked musical film adaption were exhaustion mixed with moderate enthrallment.

As an unfamiliar I still couldn’t help but spot the original performers (Adena Menzel AND BLANKER) popping up to do a side by side piece with the new Galinda and Elphaba, but what makes this a natural rendition is how stupendously typecast and then impossibly well-met the performances by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande really are, they are just too suited it’s kind of freaky. Obviously in this big fat weekend with the most masculine of releases shadowed by the most feminine (Oppenheimer and Gladiator II dwarfed by Barbie and now Wicked) it’s a go-woke-go-broke-breaker, and yet, (UNLIKE BARBIE) this is one where all the politics of a supposedly very political book can’t be spotted past animal rights or ableism stuff (Barbie did indeed have wheelchairs working the dancefloor) — I guess I'm saying I always thought that Elphaba would be played by a black woman, why WOULDN’T she be? No offense to Menzel, obviously it’s just that the ‘race-swapping’ in this fantasy setting, for that particular character, isn’t only fine but recommended. Erivo, like Elphaba, is esoteric and vulnerable, and likewise the words blonde and vainglorious don’t NOT make you think of Ariana Grande, acting like Audrey Hepburn auditioning for Jane Austen’s Emma — but Cynthia outshines the doting thing’s falsetto at every turn though. With Chu’s flair for big ensemble numbers, effortless, whirlwind dance choreography, slick cameras moves and tricky editing particularly in the most comedic numbers, the middle of this movie is full on fun between the loathing, the life-lusting and that “Popular song,” all pretty joyous. All the two-handed competition was charming and the silent duet dance is a risky moment that really pays off — for awhile you’re sold you on why this story, and the arrangement of songs surrounding it, have become so ubiquitous with the cream of Broadway pageantry and passion. Next to The Lion King and Cats, what is there?

It does its best to make good on giving you what you can’t travel to or afford, meeting the masses with what they’re missing (major theater is like what opera was, an exclusive medium for the privileged, if only geographically) but its a pretty phony excuse for a slice of the best modern musical theatre can offer notwithstanding — sure it’s a sight sweeter than Les Mis and Cats (EAT IT TOM HOOPER, seriously) but nowhere remotely close to a classic. For only half the story Wicked often overstays its welcome, yeah I know it ends with fan-favorite “Defying Gravity,” Lord knows how they flew like Spider-Man onstage considering it didn’t even look good in a shiny 150 million movie. All the CG looks expensive and terrible next to the plentiful amount of setwork (especially those rotating library shelves!) and often Wicked compensates its technical shortcomings with livewire breathlessness, the insurance of the songwriting and reasonably respectful, noteworthy performances by our leads. Still it’s crazy that the undoing of a movie with such goodwill is just crappy digital VFX, sickly, sourceless lighting and the overbusy, bloated way with which it has to extend the whole affair for the sake of milking Jeff Goldblum, cutesy cameos and nineteen added dramatic pauses to the far more fluid literal show-stopping climax of “Defying Gravity.” How can Universal smack of Disney so? How can anyone stand THAT CRINGIFYING LEWIS CARROLL VERNACULAR?? Maybe it’d all make more sense if I was gay.

]]><![CDATA['Here' briefing]]>Fri, 15 Nov 2024 05:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/here-briefing

2 (out of 4)

“Life-affirming scmife-affirming!”

At first glance, Here functions as something of a 30-year reunion between director Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright of 1994’s dopey, darn good Forrest Gump. It’s even more similar than it looks, as both weave a broad, syrupy tapestry of 20th century history and pop culture pitstops, though Here has to cram and contain it all to a static view of a plot of land, the central living space of a sturdy colonial home changing hands through generations as the film’s grand timespan isn’t satisfied to move in a linear direction the way, uh, LIFE DOES. This dreamy-eyed boomer nostalgia montage just subs out the bookending CG feather for a fussy hummingbird.

Two decades after his third pairing with Hanks for Zemeckis’ Polar Express, his inception into the foray of motion-capture, admittedly Here’s instantaneous de-aging technology is extraordinary magic. Maybe there’s an assist in makeup or post-production fine-tuning but there are stretches where the result is unnoticeable, roughly invisible as we long hoped it would be. From his other tech-testing 3D-animated features Beowulf and A Christmas Carol to other not-quite-there digital checkpoints like Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, film innovation has inched us closer to the cusp of the uncanny valley, and with Here you can literally see how they’re ALMOST OUT, spinning on rim’s edge like a freaking basketball! Sure, trying to revert the slowly advancing Wright and Hanks back into beaming teenagers is like a domestic video game cut scene, but otherwise this movie’s basically out of the past in this regard, and that’s without even mentioning they all but solved de-aging an actor’s voice as well, WOWZA what a time to be alive!

And at least Robert’s heart is in the right place — a mixture of earnestness and brand-spanking-new film-form-futurism is what has made legends out of George Lucas and James Cameron, although somehow Zemeckis has always felt like if Cameron Crowe or James L. Brooks or some other comfortable, even more family friendly auteur got his hands dirty with all the envelope-pushing. It’s actually rare if Bobby Z. doesn’t pursue something testing the boundaries of visual effects, from the Back to the Future trilogy to Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Death Becomes Her to Gump and Contact, through the mo-cap era and into recent works that still insisted on innovations — Welcome to Marwen, The Witches and even his Pinocchio with Hanks (somehow not quite as nightmarish as you’d imagine) spell out a pretty lame leg of the late career, and aside from the decent Roald Dahl stint (don’t try to outdo Nicolas Roeg!), they’re all unremarkable excuses to go hogwild on the CGI. Even his autumnal epoch his pared down, more traditional and most appreciable films, his all too brief ‘mature’ era (Flight, The Walk, Allied), live and die by VFX.

And speaking of retarded reasons to get all technical, Here has to maintain visual variety by insisting the film be littered with transitional frame-within-frames, rarely aligning any clever juxtapositions, just nonsense like a TV broadcasting The Beatles on Ed Sullivan while you jump back to the native American timeline, uh what? It’s as if you’ve found this on YouTube and pop-ups are constantly begging you to exit out of them. With more brutal editing (and obviously less of the expected, sugary, greeting card schmaltz) there could be some real existential nuggets to unearth from a film with as much in common with The Tree of Life and Boyhood as it has with Michael Snow (like Wavelength had a Lifetime movie inside) and genuine experimental film. Zemeckis, for all his zealous reaching, arrives somewhere eerily safe on the cinematic plane. The first moments mimic Terrence Malick’s return to the primordial shape of the earth, a preamble into what the idea of being alive meant to the cloistered, divinely gifted director. If this movie miraculously managed to take its many strands of the family tree to heart and didn’t use them as filling to space out the lives of the central mid-century couple, this could have been a remarkable exploration of ancestry, progeny, the idea of one’s individual relationship to civilization or any other naval-gazing notions that, when ineloquently communicated, make you want to gag but under the right conditions have you dying to figure out the scope of your own life. This must be based on a real lineage (why would you reference Lay Z Boy and Benjamin Franklin so much if not?), it’s just too specific and scatterbrained. The original graphic novel, I assume, has something that screams MOVING COLLAGE more than Robert’s granny flick for those who prefer their reality rose-tinted.

But it really depends on who you are whether this movie will smack of honesty or just enlist cliché after cliché. Paul Bettany’s war vet alcoholic patriarch (played with so much dexterity it’s like he’s doing O’Neil) is the film’s surest acting asset — he understands the strange, living photo album theatricality that the world’s-a-stage gimmick has to offer. His character breaks down at Thanksgiving after his wife (an always welcome Kelly Reilly) has passed, and Wright’s own counterpart Margaret chokes up at her 50th birthday — OH GOD, SEIZE THE DAY, IT’S ALWAYS RIGHT NOW, TIME FLIES, GOLLY GEE — any more idioms and you won’t even have to make up any dialogue! The passing of ages, lifestyles and cultural concerns is such a weighty, cumbersome topic that Zemeckis is just too spineless to make the most of… Forrest Gump, for all the horrific manipulation of old footage, is a more bluntly tuned recollection of the recent chapters in America’s story — even when we’re honestly touching on divorce and disease and all the passed-down discomforts of life, Here is content to be recognizable but not relatable, too desperate and unfocused to weasel its way into your heart.

This kind of philosophical filmmaking bets it all on the supplemental veracity, of which Here has a meager offering. Even the idea of a core memory is so treacly — the movie announces when an early moment will be called back to, and once the parting shot of the movie finally pushes the camera out of fixed place for the first time in 100 minutes simultaneously, it’s not exactly revelatory like Ozu working with a dolly. Between the maudlin melodramatics there are hints at what has made Zemeckis such a loud, often indisputably agreeable voice in pop filmmaking. But this was just baldfaced Oscar bait and a pretty poor showing of it too. If not for Bettany, this movie and the "It’s a Wonderful Life for Dummies" setup (OH GOD MY DREAMS ARE FALLING AT THE WAYSIDE FOR MONETARY CONCERNS… ain’t no somber reactions as train whistles blow, too subtle, and unlike Mary, Margaret wants anything other than to stay in the same crumby house) would be all too easy to dismiss — as it stands, Here is just a lofty, grandiloquent whiff. But if you live and breathe home decor this is the movie you’ve been waiting for!

]]><![CDATA['Anora' briefing]]>Fri, 01 Nov 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/anora-briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

At first brush, Sean Baker did not make a fan out of me. I love a good character you can hate and there few complaints more plebeian than “I can’t relate to this character” when “MAYBE YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO.” But in The Florida Project, that perfume-pawning excuse for a mother and her diabolical devil child couldn’t make me care too much, even if Willem Dafoe’s audience insert breaks down a bit. I’ve come around a bit since that 2017 film put Baker on the map in a real way (capitalizing on attention given to 2015’s Tangerine), but it was the next, his last, 2021’s Red Rocket, that spoke to me just as it seemed to place him back into cult obscurity. The horrifically hilarious humdinger about a groomer run amok was his best yet, with another (not so) tragic comeuppance he enjoys parceling out from all vantages and emotional gradients. But Anora is the real deal, Baker’s fringe filmography arriving at its most comfortable crowd pleaser, that Palme d’Or is nice and all… Sean’s features have never come off more visually, cinematically, existentially beautiful, nor have his characters been more uniformly fascinating (the man is one hell of a fearless, pitiless casting director, either intensely empathetic or not at all), his neorealist exploitation of the lives of sex workers never so damn strategically sad and funny.

After a patterned row of subjects from 2012’s Starlet (porn star) to Tangerine (street prostitute), not to mention The Florida Project (the ex-stripper mom eventually evicted for sex solicitation) and the whole underage push into the porn industry for Red Rocket, this riff on Pretty Woman for film nerds is almost a little tame even if it has many hedonistic hexes to cast. Anora is his most epic feature yet, with gloriously precise editing, particularly in the movie’s mesmerizing, depraved honeymoon of a first act, the bracing blitz immediately met with some tests of patience and audience expectations, of which he has become a soothsayer. Even if you know exactly where Anora is heading, its sordid romanticism has that sweet and sour screwball hijinks that lets him unleash typically Harmony Korine-adjacent (like what if he wasn’t a Waters-wannabe douche) portraits of the “common (wo)man” without getting off to the so-called seedy underbelly of society and WHATNOT.

Mikey Madison (free of any fires lit under her ass) can rightly take this career jumpstart wherever she’s destined for, apparently Sorkin’s Social Network sequel is first up? Unlike say Emma Stone in Poor Things last year, this is that sort of the arthouse erotica / distinguished dirty movie that doesn’t make such a spectacle of it, Baker’s practically unsimulated approach to demystifying sex rendered with far more humanity, intimacy and rewarding comedy than simply taking the piss just about all the time, eh Lanthimos? It’s one of those great warts and all female character studies (of course made by MEN) that spins you round, like A Woman Under the Influence, Safe, To Die For, Tár or even better…. There’s a clear distinction between feminism and fetishism but Baker is quick to discard either, instead choosing to take independent cinema and it’s host of hallmarks to the next level. As he effortlessly staging the necessary improvisational spirit Baker captures some shimmer of the “cultural zeitgeist” (whatever that means) in its sleaziest form with overlapping delivery, inexpensive chaos, jump cuts, non-diagetic music only and family actors (killing his largest role besides Prince of Broadway, as the desperate rich-kid-wrangler Toros, reliable Armenian actor Karren Karagulian appears in all eight of Baker’s pictures, usually as the gold-hearted asshole) .

Baker has everyone’s attention, and the way this movie fucks you fast then slow, then challenges your every expectation move by move, it’s a damn fine, fidgety, many-splendored pleasure, a head-spinning kind of drug-bent love story turned tragicomic crime thriller with flavors of Coen irony and the freedom of French New Wave, yet Sean’s speaking a language all his own. From the indebted takeout cyclist to the shitty Jamaican Dad to the guilt-absolving adult film actress, backstabbing trans prostitutes to Florida’s worst white trash to aging, shameless porn actors/pedos, he has to balance the usual karma or moment of clarity, and Anora’s ingredients amount to something so subtle, strange and startling, made up of feelings you can barely keep up with, which is odd considering none of his former, brutally immediate features were ever allowed to breathe this much. Baker’s such a rascal, I don’t know how he can write and shoot these scenarios and not feel like he’s going to be arrested. And yet his kind of jaunty, Cassavetes-comparable camerawork and casualness keeps everything feeling not so creepy, and Mikey feels like a memorable muse to match Starlet’s fashion model blonde Dree Hemingway.

If this can ride out critical contentment to a Best Picture win I’ll be pleased, this and Oppenheimer could redeem the decade and the actually phony, insincere poorsploitation dreck in Nomadland, not to mention disability checklist bait in the otherwise harmless CODA and of course the exasperating exuberance of Everything Everywhere All At Once and its baffling wacky win has quickly aged like day old dairy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was too transgressive to make it through to the end and I don’t care. Anora is a celebration of original filmmaking, proving there’s plenty of room between ‘sanitized’ and Showgirls (Baker’s a stable genius next to Paul Verhoeven in ’95) when it comes to sex in movies. Sean simply flexes his still-burgeoning, ever-consistent impulses and Anora inevitably becomes an honorable moment of topping yourself even as you’ve left behind hardly a miss, so long as you can really stand back far and appreciate The Florida Project (and even Tangerine) as the most abrasive of his service industry blues standards. Annie is one of his least deplorable subjects, and far and away the most arresting — she’s wholehearted and hard-skinned, no ditz, just a Jersey girl who bites and kicks, draws that vape pen like a cigarette and ends more than a few sentences with “motherfucker.”

The story structure is so measured and deliberate, the Russian-American affair to remember sold with the peephole-like warped film lens carrying the masterful, manic montages and most desolate passages to similarly kaleidoscopic, precisely absurd movements of blissfully sobering guerrilla filmmaking fireworks. But it’s his opus so far even before you even consider his technical finesse, meaning Anora amounts to a very loud, vibrant movie by a rascally, albeit minor figure on the landscape, until now — man I can’t wait to see what’s next, experience shows it’ll be something to do with making sure those of the world’s oldest profession or thereabouts are taken even LESS for granted. More excavation of unseen transactional truths would be no bad thing, only putting his finest efforts in classic company abreast Nights of Cabiria, Belle du Jour, Street of Shame, maybe even Klute or Leaving Las Vegas, or one of my favorites, Jean-Luc Godard’s divine, stinging, sleek slicer of lifer Vivre sa Vie. Some say the best directors are the ones who make the same movie over and over… Do your thing Sean, please show us more of that euphoric, humbling, effusively entertaining all-you-can-eat Americana for the appropriately empathetic palette.

]]><![CDATA[Venom: The Last Dance' briefing]]>Fri, 25 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/venom-the-last-dance-briefing

1 ½ (out of 4)

I can’t really say "ENCORE!" when I wouldn’t even bother to stay for some severely superfluous post-credits moments put there to undo any sense of a sendoff this Last Gasp feigns commitment to. At least it wasn’t a fucking jukebox musical, and from that title it very well could’ve been. No, the third Venom is hardly anything at all — Andy Serkis’ Let There Be Carnage felt incomplete and underwhelming (just as it proved we were out of the worst of COVID times with its impressive haul in early fall 2021) but I’m already longing for that far less testing trifle, as at least the first sequel to 2018's Venom kept the B-movie charms in check and was ruthlessly cut. The Last Dance is one of the most poorly edited major movies I’ve seen in some time, not nearing Sony’s barrel bottom worst, Madame Web, but getting darn close.

Even with silly symbiote horsepower, personally my goodwill is too used up to call this a pleasing parting in a run of anti-heroics that never had critics on its side but always the audiences — with consistent budgets of only just over 100 million, for putting up the lowest numbers of the trilogy the profits of The Last Dance still could have easily secured a needless future for Sony’s only non-Spidey attribute, regardless of Morb- or Madame-sized flops. Frankly this was worse than Morbius, which is insane given how lovable the Eddie-Venom bond remains in their least lovable showing.

Tom Hardy looks bloated, unhealthy and as Brock he’s just getting that paycheck — but secretly voicing Venom in addition this whole time is mighty admirable. For Michelle Williams, understandably, two movies was already two too many, and I don’t believe there’s a single reference to Eddie's lost love interest. Rhys Ivans as a hippie Dad scoping out aliens, Chiwetal Ejiofor playing the generic hardheaded sergeant, an almost unrecognizable Juno Temple and her co-star Clark Backo as the caring scientists — at least no one became some last-minute hero or villain but the characterization is crazy bad, and it's not like the last one made you fall in love with Carnage and Shriek. Peggy Lu as the clerk Mrs. Chen from the first two movies is probably the highlight returning character, how very sad.

Anyway when this Last Dance drops the pretense of some grandiose bit of blockbuster science fiction, it only becomes acceptable putting the plot on the backburner for hippie family shenanigans and Las Vegas revelry. Cutting back to desert government facilities will take you right back to some bastardized 'big finale' like any other movie masked under resolution, about to bust out plenty of sequels coming off their Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare or The Final Destination or whatever fleeting finish can be immediately ignored if necessary. So if the throwaway leisure time is the good stuff, it make sense how slight each installment and now the whole pathetic trio has been — Venom is still funny and Hardy’s dynamic with his better half still makes up for so much of the man on the lam nonsense this “movie” has to offer. Why not entirely ignore the tacky mid-credits tease in Let There Be Carnage that our pair had somehow landed in the MCU, since you just play it off here?

Freaking Kelly Marcel (who clearly met Hardy during her emergency rewrite of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson) has been writing and producing these movies the whole time, and otherwise has dipped her pen in schmaltz (Saving Mr. Banks's sentimental, sanctimonious take on Walt Disney acquiring Mary Poppins), sultriness (Fifty Shades of Grey’s fundamentally not-so-freaky foolishness) and even a story credit for the long-winded, crudely indulgent Cruella (Emma Stone at her most unbecomingly exaggerated) before stepping into the director’s chair for the first time. Serkis and Ruben Fleischer might not have been hosts to so much more coherent, quality escapism, but they sure didn't offer regularly crumby, callous whiplash where the sum feels about as cacophonous as it is careless. This is low-rent moviemaking that still can’t handle its wide audience for mainstream, gutless, body-horror buddy-movie hijinks, and for its few full comedic moments it’s just not enough to offset trying to be taken seriously enough while refusing to outdo what little was memorable about the first two installments. Although how could I not enjoy when a separated Venom hops from fish to frogs in a desperate running river chase to return to Eddie?

When you have to edit and write around your titular character's gruesome head-snacking for some edgy teenage dollars, you end up with movies that feel too screen-tested or not enough, where you can’t tell if shit was added or chopped or anything at all because it’s such a clusterfuck mess. With so many story inconsistencies and moments of excruciating expository excess it really becomes a challenge to settle into The Last Dance and not treat it all like a chore. God willing Kraven the Hunter isn’t perfectly putrid, which would make Sony three for three in 2024 comic book movie calamities — please just whip those animators into shape and complete the Spider-Verse trilogy so I can forget all this sinister sub-cinema.

]]><![CDATA['Smile 2' briefing]]>Fri, 18 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/smile-2-briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

Director Parker Finn has big plans for the SMILE UNIVERSE (spare me) but 2022’s Smile was nearly left to media purgatory, colloquially know as direct-to-streaming. Paramount switched the feature to a theatrical release last minute due to strong test scores AND YET, in spite of sizable turnout and enough word of mouth to ensure sequels, those darn cinemascores were low. How does the scariest mainstream horror flick, one of the most effective psychological/supernatural affairs in God knows how long, still leave the casuals unmoved?

An ambitious follow-up was beyond question, box office aside anyone can tell you the chain curse premise is primed for installments and then some — Final Destination is currently getting a sixth this coming May, (almost 15 years since the last, at least the first two sequels were worth it), It Follows will become a pair once They Follow finally gets here, and both Sinister and The (American) Ring have their plodding, inferior posteriors. These don't end well and never do, and ignoring that there’s seemingly no escape (perhaps the faintest chance of survival in this and It Follows, the primary victim of Parker's pastiche) Smile almost seems like it could go on forever. So instead of overlaying a formidable formula across as many movies until it gets old, Parker immediately high jumps from passing along paranormal predators to straight-up Freddy Krueger shit (Dream Warriors is also a much more illustrious influence). The parting seconds leave me to assume a concert-crowd-sized plague of Smile-specter spectators is about to be unleashed for maybe the mass-suicidal flavors of The Happening’s B-movie extremism and hopefully some Body Snatchers-borrowed bananas paranoia in the third installment.

As its own sequel Finn does a fine enough job, which is hard for me to say considering twists negating a decent chunk of the movie will always and forever drive me nuts. I can still mostly make out how the edges break between reality and this evil entity’s tricks, although for playing so many mind games it’s a shame this doesn’t make more sense — the original was plainly the more frightening, though Smile 2 masters a sort of sustained tension even when it’s all in your head, man. Of course sequels must go bigger, and the added oomph is justified as this invisible haunter might not be fucking with its victim in a variety of new ways like the stretch of Paranormal Activity flicks (pretty decent until the fourth one), since the glad ghoul itself admits it has been waiting for someone of influence, consequence or fame. The trauma-thirsty haunter yields more obvious themes as we swap an everywoman for the less preferred pop star played by Naomi Scott (the worst 1/3 of a terrible Charlie’s Angels reboot and an alright Jasmine in Guy Ritchie’s half-assed live-action Aladdin). Her character’s unverifiable psychosis is believed even less than Sosie Bacon’s therapist character due to a recovering addiction (the Smile spirit always felt like the devil on your shoulder à la some bad habit) but mostly for her coming off like a typically shallow prima donna.

The film begins with a sharp simulated one-take that seals the fate of our ultimately afflicted cop friend (Perry Strong) from the first installment, a nice reversal on transferring the paranormal parasite via murder plus witness as we see in the hilarious imaginary scenario last time with Kal Penn. But other than the presumed taunt turning out to be a source of aid, there are not many special wrinkles — we slowly are fed a tragic backstory in which our lead woman unwittingly commited manslaughter, copy paste… The cheesin’ demon fucks with her while she loses her mind, goaded into burning bridges and escalating public humiliation, but the chills arrive with significantly less rapid elemental terror and even the comforting humor in between isn’t as reliable. Finn likes his distorted exterior shots and the score is more warped, unexpected minimalism, all stylistics articulations furthered from the first. Rewatching the original I noticed a foreign poster of Michael Ritchie’s 1968 debut Downhill Racer in the cop’s apartment — innocuous except that Ritchie’s third film after two Robert Redford projects, that skiing drama and a scathing political lampoon The Candidate, was 1975’s Smile, a semi-satire on teenage beauty pageants. Smile '75 has more in common with Smile 2 and all the confetti, glitter and parasocial problems that come with pop stardom, but after going down a pre-Bad News Bears rabbit hole, it's clear Finn just wanted to nod to a coincidental favorite more than indicate an actual influence.

Smile 2 ultimately admits it can’t keep this shit up forever, and Parker swings for the fences as he forces us to cliffhang waiting on a third installment to see if the gonzo gear-shift pans out. Between Beetlejuice’s bummer of a late sequel and personally lacking the appetite for gore fetishism in the Terrifier franchise (and my guess Speak No Evil was going to be at best a tacky knockoff of the Danish original), it’s a sad time for the horror fan outside of The Substance’s stupendous synthesis. The Smile movies may boil down to It Follows for the less discerning, nonetheless this second take is a relatively robust set of freaky frightmares that tickled me even if it was unable to make my spine shiver as the familiar, nearly masterful first film solicited scene after scene. I was not laughing or singing praises with Joker 2 but Smile 2 had me grinning many a time, like when her backup dancers become a prowling ensemble straight from satan’s nightclub.

]]><![CDATA['Joker: Folie à Deux' briefing]]>Fri, 04 Oct 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/joker-folie-a-deux-briefing

1 (out of 4)

“It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message.”

Why not hold off assessing the billowing, flaming clusterfuck that is Folie à Deux and just discuss Todd Phillips — this guy is what liberals means when they say toxic masculinity, and that’s before you get to the depressed loner incel version of the Joker. Everything he does endorses the stink of man-child cinema without enough wit or anchoring comic talent to justify it, certainly not Ken Jeong or Zack Galifinakis... the latter couldn’t save his Planes, Trains and Automobiles for dummies Due Date, and the two together couldn't redeem much of the Hangover trilogy for that matter. That first 2009 hit was a zeitgeist-wrangling fluke just like Joker, and similarly both “franchises” thrive via insults to the poor folks who gave a shit in the first place, all in the name of some kind of subversive, nasty nothingness, like The Last Jedi only more repugnant, somehow.

He’s a crass, indulgent purveyor of lame male fantasies, his bread and butter still just a sadder shade of the Adam McKay, Judd Apatow and whoever was directing Seth Rogen’s stuff at the moment. At least they could regularly make you laugh. Road Trip and Old School are just paler National Lampoon knockoffs, School for Scoundrels isn’t far off… see his decently reviewed stuff is no different from most of his panned bunk — if Starsky and Hutch (transmuted 80s cliches lined with lazy improv) and War Dogs (like Lord of War, The Social Network and The Big Short had a collective miscarriage) can get a fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, oh boy I just don’t know how critics could be so easily swindled by a charlatan, a phony, a poor director — Joker, for me and many others, was accidentally good, carried like freaking Atlas by a gangled, giggly Joaquin Phoenix attaining peak method madness and earning him an overdue Academy Award.

But there was no first prize at the Venice Film Festival this time, and there will be no Best Director nominations next year MR. PHILLIPS because (and I’m so curious if you know this yourself) but Folie à Pee-yew is a TURKEY, a really foul failure, a perfect exercise in second-hand embarrassment, cinematic detritus posturing as even more of a misunderstood avant-garde affair than last time. Joker circa 2024 has a tripled budget seeing a fraction of the returns, so WB went from making at least 10x their investment to likely losing tens of millions at least, damn even the Hangover flicks were printing money through the third. This 140 minute massacre of your Monday matinee really does make you wonder if it was all a farce (no pun seriously), if Warner or Todd somehow insisted on dismantling the cult created by the first film with a feature length epilogue (one made up less of elaboration and more erasure) meant to metaphorically put the audience on trial right up there with Arthur Fleck.

Lady Gaga has to stick her nose in things and in this putrid jukebox musical (I’d rather be watching Trolls, any of them) she’s somehow NOT doing most of the singing?? “And actuallyyy for art’s sake it’s best if your mouth is dry and you're off-key and, you know what fuck it who cares about tempo.” God save the editor of this epic junk as it bores the shit out of you in steadily unpleasant uncertainty, waiting for something to happen — when it does you wish it hadn’t, because it’s just more of the first film COMING FULL CIRCLE, oh I see the frat boy fancies himself a film festival frequenter now. You just want to tell Todd that, even though you may have enjoyed one of this film’s fantasy dream sequences for the decent song and a little violence and vindication (you know, like the first movie), YOU SUCK PHILLIPS. Your hackneyed effort, ironic or sincere, makes for such a mess that not even the greatest living actor on screen right now can do shit for you, so yeah no Best Picture nom this time, just humiliation to follow up your heyday.

I don’t even know what to think — oh wow the psycho who murdered people was murdered by a psycho SO POETIC. This film is somehow an airy, crunchy, cumbersome concoction of courtroom show, prison drama and musical theater — did returning Oscar-winning composer of 2019's Joker Hildur Gudnadóttir have any say in maybe not reciting "That’s Entertainment" five times? Sure, with those sick ARRI ALEXA IMAX cameras you can get a few decent shots since Phoenix + cigarettes + dancing is somehow all that apparently inspired this movie to begin with and you can’t argue with what you get. But the terrible Harvey Dent crowbarring, Arthur’s “I was gonna blame society but maybe I’M the one to blame” breakdown at the end, Gaga’s smugness in this reversed power dynamic with Harley Quinn exploiting the Clown Prince, the tasteless thematic dissection of mental illness (again) and a dimwit’s examination of duality — it’s such pugnacious, self-indulgent sophistry, somehow even more ridiculously edgy than where we left off.

Why do the guards let him get a new suit after they beat him to a pulp, or let him cackle in the rain? Why did Phillips feel the need to imply the prison rape, why? Why must this movie take you through every moment and character of the first movie? How little reason did Folie à Deux actually have to exist? The first film literally left you with “the end,” so the fact that Phoenix wanted to do something more 'out there' is nice but this semi-gamble is simply asinine and alienating, especially as you abandon projects with actual auteur’s like Todd Haynes days before production. Reboots aside, adjacent, outlier fans now solely have Matt Reeves' perpetually delayed Batman Part II to rest their hopes on.

]]><![CDATA['The Substance' briefing]]>Fri, 20 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/the-substance-briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

Walking straight into this sucker cold you could just about lose your mind. Fortunately 2017’s Revenge was probably the easiest director homework (One movie? No sweat) I’ve had the pleasure to complete — by the time I was watching a rapist dig glass out of his foot in excruciating detail, I knew I was lucky to be watching the overseas invasion of the New French Extremity, or some tricky, more mainstream branch of its movement as the international icebreaker was likely Julia Ducarnou with her coming-of-age cannibals in 2016’s Raw, later followed up by the Palme-d’Or-winning auto-erotic gender-bender Titane.

Director, writer, editor and co-producer Coralie Fargeat has so far made the grotesque her weapon of choice, but this really isn’t so unpalatable next to what she gets away with in Revenge — each film would have protestors en masse were it a man behind the staggeringly sexed-up send-ups. Revenge was a treasure trove of genre forgery inverting the rape revenge setup with scary, disgusting, vibrant, thematically dense laughs and thrills, and The Substance is roughly just style-forward in its ingenious take on pure sci-fi body-horror, seasoned with a fresh feminist angle on the cycles of Hollywood stardom, like All About Eve for masochists. It may be an egregious 140 minutes, the amoebic final form of your “perfect self” might go on and on, but there’s something about Coralie’s thorny, gonzo, hardcore style that has you hoping it never ends — the implications here may be blunt as a botoxed bag of bricks but this kind of forward, emphatic filmmaking could metaphorically move mountains and bottle lightning. Her eye is so probing, almost Kubrickian this time around, with Shining-esque sets and 2001's Jupiter light show spliced in the transformation sequences — its mathematical escalation into unashamed insanity is such an appreciable rarity, the simple mechanics of the story hardly ever out of sync with its own hopscotching case of one-upping yourself.

The Substance is one of those dreaded ‘poison valentines’ worthy of Lynch’s lines of thought (like if The Elephant Man weren’t so sympathetic, or Eraserhead, or Mulholland Dr…), a bright, flashing warning against vanity, navigating the slippery slope women ride when it comes to age, the makeup market, the media’s perception of female worth and all the tradeoffs the familiar premise’s devil’s bargain has to offer. This black market magic solution could be a symbol of any youth-robbing addictive tendencies, or just serve as the instrument of some stupendously feminist horror, both gratuitous and gratuitously enjoyable. Her amalgamation of the most astounding of body horror’s outlandish offerings (Carpenter, Cronenberg, Henenlotter or any of the more cult, low budget ugly beauts of the 80s) is just the subsurface, even if you could squarely sum up The Substance as some bastard bred of Frankenhooker and Brain Damage as well as The Fly and The Brood. There’s also notes of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, in addition to the fashionable immediacy and style-suffusing of great modern South Korean cinema (likely Kim Jee-woon most of all), not to mention Jon Waters’ flippant disregard for polite society’s taste. It’s not pastiche when it’s so purely inspired, though of course her springboards, outside of the foibles of advancing, go on and on. Fargeat is already some goddess of “good Lord!” and The Substance becomes a sensory experience with little like it even as it cribs from all of the above, confidently skipping from sublime to so sickening you’re compelled to enunciate some kind of guttural panic now and again.

It’s tidy in its scripting but schizophrenic in it’s scrupulous execution — by the time the ballet sprinkler of blood is painting a horrified, scrambling audience in a more nightmarish riff on Carrie, you’re either going cuckoo too or you’ve probably checked out long before. I’m pleased as punch that something so incisively, roundly, darkly meaningful (The Neon Demon makes a good visual/temperamental companion piece), gloriously well-produced and cheekily parodic has already secured a cult following. The Substance is an escapist crazy-scape, a novel-like exploration of self-worth and self-destruction — sex sells and even the sparkliest of us are so easily replaceable. Fargeat has a case for the most promising new voice in horror, horror comedy, or just no-fucks-given cinema in general.

Speaking zero Fs, I don’t care for Demi Moore or Margaret Qualley in general but they each have gone to hell and back for this one. After popping up in nothing of note this side of 2000 apart from maybe Margin Call, Moore is about as amazing as they say, it’s probably the best thing she’s ever done, a complete comeback and a pluming feather in her cap. She’s not exactly brave for this career-definer (she wasn’t even the first casting choice lol, neither was Dennis Quaid). IN FACT, it’s hilarious that Quaid’s whole bathroom break smear of her character, the “Oscar-winner my ass” bit referencing King Kong would make her what, Jane Fonda or Naomi Watts in this case? Anyway it’s a nice rewrite since Moore’s Razzie-winning role in G.I. Jane is one she considers a career highlight (and not without reason) and Lizzy Sparkle may as well be an all-too-vain version of herself. Regardless of whether Mikey Madison’s sexy moves outshine her, Demi's stock just shot up. Nothing in the film is as scary, or honest about women, or anyone’s personal feelings of inadequacy, than that makeup sequence just as the green goo starts to go sour, when she can’t even face a nobody from grade school — it’s probably the best scene in the film, no gimmicks just Demi demolishing her role. Meanwhile Qualley has done her darnedest to outstep her prominent nepotism status, and she’s scoped out some range since she was a Manson Girl for Tarantino five years back — her teeth and 'tude don’t match a demure Demi (one would assume a younger you popping out of the stretch of your spine would uh, LOOK like you) but I’ll forgive it for the premise’s sake. Margaret, born from the back of Andie McDowell, is curiously well cast, and likewise enhances the film as she secures her own professional benchmark.

With the cinematographer from Promising Young Woman (Benjamin Kračun), a fresh DJ doing the score (Raffertie), untenable creative confidence and a premise to relish (and boy does it), man, this has got to be one of the least expensive movies with what’s gotta be the most interesting behind-the-scenes, hell it's not far-fetched to say Fargeat’s second has perhaps the most memorable horror makeup since The Exorcist. The Substance is lethally entertaining and effortlessly intriguing, rising from flavor of the month curiosity to the most instantaneous instant classic these eyes have graced in a moment, since maybe The Lighthouse, another peerless, auteur-making sophomore effort. As a movie about self-hatred it’s very, very funny, feminist in such a brutal fashion BUT it’s made by a woman so HELL YEAH, can’t nobody say nothing, actually here, take a Best Picture nod and a Best Director nomination. Ironically maybe ladies gotta break horror’s glass ceiling in the eyes of the Academy Awards, Get Out might not have been enough.

It’s a pretty epic, exhaustive cautionary tale, an acute allegory, a deranged, prickly parable, a fucked-up fairy tale, a fantastic freak-show, an unfussy body image paradox come to life, masterfully arranging movements of repulsion and pure sexsploitation satire on standards both patriarchal and self-imposed. The Substance is unforgiving, irresistibly counterintuitive Faustian food for thought.

]]><![CDATA['Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' briefing]]>Fri, 06 Sep 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/beetlejuice-beetlejuice-briefing

2 (out of 4)

The legacysequel is already as tired as all the latest, laziest cinematic trends, the live action Disney reboots (Burton gets in some digs at the mouse despite just coming off Dumbo), the soulless spin-offs (he also had a firm hand in the Wednesday show), the prequel-sequels and whatever else have you. With Beetlejuice Squared, Burton seemingly could be making a sequel to any of his early, cherished features — this may as well be Edward Scissorhands 2, OK I admit it has gotta be a better bad idea than reviving Pee Wee or Mars Attacks.

But this is no Top Gun: Maverick, this is like the straight-to-streaming sequel Coming 2 America, and I haven’t seen that Hocus Pocus sequel but it couldn’t have been far off either. I heard they cut Burton’s budget and weren’t even planning to show this in theaters, god ghouly gosh are you allergic to money WB? Something about this screamed Netflix (even without characters outright referencing it) and it’s because he actually wasted time making up for all the Addams Family projects he didn't direct? Whatever, so your new Winona Ryder (going from goth cutie to goth mom with permanent anxiousness plastered across her face) is Jenna Ortega, who of course Burton loves since she’s as gaunt, pale and passively pretty as his movies demand. “Oh no Helena they didn’t like me saying black people don’t fit my vibe… uh how bout the ‘soul train,’ eh? Nothing?”

But between the heavy CGI in spite of a light budget and a meandering story that doesn’t lend itself to a full pitch let alone a complete narrative, it’s hard to get on board with what amounts to his most negligible endeavor in awhile, like almost grazing Alice in Wonderland awful — somehow Dumbo had more heart, Ms. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children at least had some stretches of novelty, Big Eyes was acceptable Oscar bait and both Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie (from silly TV adaptation to personal adaptation of a animated passion project) were obviously more attuned to Tim’s gothic gifts. Even after just few collaborations with Bruno Delbonnel, Burton’s movies started gliding by on a residual blue-grey glaze.

The sum of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice falls well short of a full functioning motion picture, but Michael Keaton has some fun even if his colorful undead grifter was formerly a more memorable part of a better ensemble. Beyond writing so slight and telegraphed, this cast is rough, with Burton using stop motion to write around sex offender Jeffrey Jones' character, using the Charles Deetz’s death by shark attack to incite a laughably thin plot. Catherine O’Hara is always stealing scenes as the pricelessly prepossessed artist Delia, Ryder’s looking constipated, obviously Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are nowhere to be seen and Ortega, sorry dear but you’ve been typecast by twenty-two — there’s got to be more to this girl than bags under the eyes. Arthur Conti is the best of far too many villains when Beetlejuice is right there and you're utterly wasting both Willem Dafoe goofing about as a dead actor and the vengeful, cobbled ex of BJ incarnated by Monica Belluci, all too reminiscent of better Burton characters from Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride — same goes for Justin Theroux whose loathsome character is given scene after scene of grim comic nothingness.

But Burton is still who he is — there’s enough mischief in the macabre, hell I’ll even call that Mario Bava/Black Sunday riff a stirring homage. If only this late sequel didn’t have to inherit, reinterpret or freshly exposit EVERY DAMN THING from the original movie without outright remaking it (so much lip-syncing! ooh that giant clay snake). All for a movie that is stretched, tedious, overpopulated and sorely lacking in the silly-spookiness that has made the 1986 original one of the enduring gems of Tim’s entire oeuvre.

Of course I’ll take Ed Wood any day, and I feel as though his most recent to-be-topped near-masterpieces were Sweeney Todd and Corpse Bride. This is a sad retread, theoretically and sporadically amusing but largely a misuse of talent in the name of easy fall season bankability. As far as all-ages horror, (the mode that he prides himself on most, me I got a serious soft spot for Sleepy Hollow) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could be so much worse, but if you want to let your kids get goosebumps you would never start here — despite any ultimate crossover to digital, you can easily use this and the original as a pretty stark, depressing before and after of the career of an emo filmmaker rock star. Not even Depp could've saved this (he may need saving actually), if Keaton somehow couldn’t.

]]><![CDATA['Alien: Romulus' briefing]]>Fri, 16 Aug 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/alien-romulus-briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

If you were at all interested in how Ridley Scott’s prequel trilogy was working out, WELL FORGET IT! Hell, let me start off by maybe controversially admitting I admire the thoughtfulness and mystery of Prometheus and still do, somehow more than Aliens, sorry but enough of the James Cameron acolytes and apologists! It’s hard to love Alien: Covenant, the only entry I believe to be truly repulsive rubbish — it has the series’ most moronic cast of characters (all couples, coincidence?), almost exclusively CG xenomorphs, plus even faultier, even more pretentious philosophical, intellectual posturing than Prometheus. If Scott weren’t so hit and miss in his own right it would be hard to believe he had anything to do with Covenant, especially considering he’s got criticisms for all the Alien sequels past his personal high watermark, the original 1979 classic (c’mon it’s better than Blade Runner).

But considering this is the first attempt post-Fox-acquisition, I can’t be too mad at the Mouse since 20th Century was clearly no stranger to the soft reboot. Under cuddlier stewardship, often it’s amazing how hard an R Alien: Romulus reaches for, still some of it is troublingly Disnified. The seventh installment is hardly the first Alien sequel to feel like a retread, it’d be weird if it DIDN’T when, regardless of a few more deviations in the narrative DNA of Scott’s oft-debated prequels basically every successor has felt like the latest wrinkle on the recipe. No reason then to expect anything extra from director Fede Álvarez, who is at least a few leagues below the auteur status of Scott, Cameron, David Fincher and even the Amélie dude Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Maybe Fede will ultimately stand out by finally rejecting director’s cuts, or abstaining from posting deleted scenes released early on YouTube. Obviously one look at his debut (the Evil Dead revamp) and you can feel out exactly how Romulus will rub off — with that 2013 sorta remake of Sam Raimi’s classic, crafty, cacklingly-funny splatstick treats, Alvarez doubled down on the gore, young everyday characters and a portion of fan-service nose-thumbing. Álvarez’s first quasi-reinvention also similarly took place in a series full of one-off riffs on the same great horror idea — Dead by Dawn immediately ignored continuity and reconfigured the original, then Army of Darkness leaned deeper into comedy-heavy horror. The Millennial's Evil Dead is far too joyless to take its grindhouse, possession-forward take on Deadites anywhere close to Raimi’s high-reward horseplay, and likewise Romulus lives in the shadow of its preferable predecessors, serving as a functional half-decent entry point for new fans and shaking things up just enough for devotees.

For Fede I would say Don’t Breathe has more economy, originality and clever thrills (let’s just pretend The Girl in the Spider’s Web doesn’t exist, AGAIN with the franchise refresh) but Alien: Romulus is his most handsome movie yet, finding him handing in sci-fi lighting arrangements worthy of Interstellar (or better) and production design reminiscent of the breathtaking retro-future/aged-tech atmospherics (almost to the point of textural fetish) of Blade Runner 2049, another late sequel that slipped from Scott’s creative grip. Though it harkens back to better days, all that Alien universe “porn” reeks of Disney’s assaults on your nostalgia through mood and feeling, but after the silent opening credits the movie only feels less and less like it’s been ripped from the late 70s.

I hate that Romulus was the Marvelization of Alien (Whedon took it halfway there) but I also feel as if, like with Mission: Impossible, eating your own tail is just a product of existing for such a long while surviving largely on stylistic elements between installments to be excited about, with plot all but predetermined. I don’t think it’s too crazy to call a digitally resurrected Ian Holmes (why spend more time than a cameo’s worth on not even the same Ash from the original?) a glaring fucking error, as well as any of the other easy Easter eggs and streamlined decisions that make it feel like this comes with A Star Wars Story spinoff subtitle beneath. At its most intrepid and involving it fulfills pretty outstanding fan-fiction moments (45 years and no zero G? I don't mind a mu/th/erload of exploits), but because of the strong filmmaking craft the fan-fondling moments are all the more unbearable.

Fincher’s notorious debut Alien 3 appears to be Romulus’s closest companion, with parallels from a thick-accented platter of xenochow, the moodiest, grungiest mise-en-scene you could muster and the unrelenting pursuit of the nastiest notion of a space slasher setup. Even though Fede is edgier and less scrupulous than Fincher, even with MCU-tier swill holding it back, this flick somehow bests Fincher’s ugly, interminably repetitive initial trilogy capper — take the theatrical or the Assembly Cut of Alien Cubed, there aren't quite as many gonzo gotchas or beautiful shots. However, for perspective Romulus doesn’t have an advantage over the stylized shlock that followed, the campy camaraderie from Joss Whedon’s insistent script for Alien: Resurrection — this new one rips off the surprise coda of hybrid abominations, but despite superb visual effects circa 2024, that kooky fourth installment is more energetic, freakier, sustained by surer sequences and populated with more interesting people. I admit Cailee Spaeny must be our best lead player since Aliens, since Sigourney was a little too horny in 3 and is barely herself in what might as well be Winona Ryder's show in Resurrection — as the best Ripley stand-in she outstrips Katherine Waterston from Covenant (saddled with a crap script and a deleted James Franco for a dead husband) and Noomi Rapace, the faith-fueled final girl of the best modern xeno-kino Prometheus.

This is doubled-edged swords all the way down, highs and lows, my god this movie made me question my sanity before the end. I’ve rarely been whiplashed or flip-flopped back and forth more as a movie went along — momentarily it almost made me feel like I didn’t even know what it means to like or dislike something… Beyond technical aptitude the film has pretty sublime spectacle here and there and twists on the Alien archetypes that make this something a little more than ‘79 for zoomers. But damn, tastelessly resurrecting Holmes digitally like Peter Cushing in Rogue One? Referencing basically every previous movie, even lifting whole scenes? A host of supporting players that can barely act? That one awkward, negligible exposition scene just there to acknowledge that the Ridley Scott prequels happened? Tepid reflections on AI in a history of fascinating ethical dilemmas (that never stooped to ISN'T THIS, LIKE, A NEW FORM OF RACISM)? I feel like I could go on, suffice it to say there were myriad flaws that made me want to give up on this movie and nearly as many that eagerly found a way to win me back: That launch into orbit? Dodging acid blood in zero gravity? Goofy WTF genetic hybrids that make less sense than the end of Prometheus, following the nastiest alien birth you could ever ask for?

At least there’s no ‘plan’ about trapping the titular villain in a certain part of the ship and then blowing it out, although thems the brakes regardless. This third act is a reasonably scary crowdpleaser, redeeming sloppy humor, annoying background players (even by monster movie standards), dimwitted nostalgic breaths and the quaint, rushed, compendium feel of the movie. It’s an anomaly, Alien: Anomulus, and regardless of slight box office waves we’re getting the direct sequel… Why does a franchise exclusively built around the mysterious "other" always end up the same same same? Why is the cosmic unknown so predictable? Maybe the stupid TV series Alien: Earth will touch on whatever Neil Blomkamp was up to for so long?

]]><![CDATA['Trap' briefing]]>Fri, 02 Aug 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/trap-briefing

3 (out of 4)

“Dad I'm concerned, why are we making a movie about a teenage girl with a serial killer for a father prominently starring me, your teenage daughter?”

So Saleka Shyamalan, eldest daughter of M. Night, appears a touch more talented than Ishana Shyamalan, who devised this summer's The Watchers the kookiest supernatural horror premise about evil woods and nocturnal people-peeping monster-voyeurs? The fuck? The younger Ishana served as a second unit director for her father’s last two films and directs her more pop-star-aspiring sister’s music videos. Saleka is more than commendable and thankfully her real-life persona bleeds naturally enough into this movie’s fascinating escape-thriller father-daughter dynamic. Based on the one featured single credited to her at least and the bits of performance onscreen, she has songwriting skills, and fine enough chops in acting and singing. Sure, she very nearly nepo-baby’s her way to commandeering the screen, her all too righteous character tailored for a prolonged Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.

I probably prefer the philosophy and more airtight bottle structure of Knock at the Cabin, but Trap is arguably another step in M. Night’s revival — I say he’s still back baby, one more and it’ll be a renaissance. Such a comeback was hinted at in the farce-forward found footage thriller The Visit, still Trap is capably put together even if it’s too indulgent to be swift and tidy. Josh Hartnett’s hidden two-face is outta the stadium within an hour, and after exploiting the cold-blooded cat and mouse concert setting, the film leaves you wondering how they’re gonna fill up an act and maybe then some over the course of the extended finale in search of a climax. At its most lazy and regrettable, Shyamalan spins his wheels a little too generously with offscreen asspulls forcing you out of killer’s perspective merely for convenience.

But gosh darn it, ignoring silly monologues and protruding plot contrivances, Trap is pure De-Palma-does-Hitchcock gratisfaction, M. Night’s Snake Eyes (from Gary Sinise’s POV in this scenario), a consistently absorbing, split-diopter-stocked, deeply Shyamalanian (peripherally Pennsylvanian) affair of less is more filmmaking wizardry, flat character oddities and some dodgy dialogue. All that backhanded praise is counterbalanced by the SHEER FLIPPING WILLPOWER of Hartnett, who even leaning completely into the campiest idea of the family man/secret serial killer dichotomy somehow comes out the other side incomparably unscathed, particularly when measured against James McAvoy’s mugging, untenable travesties in Split. Young Ariel Donoghue as the unwitting, holiday picture of a daughter sells the love, and the underappreciated Alison Pill as the suspicious madre also saves the day in more ways than one.

For late summer servings this is one spicy meatball, a real old-school thriller that doesn’t require a classic M. Night last minute yank on the rug to be memorable or tie things together — the twists come along with delicious punctuality, as well as laughs genuine and unintended. It could’ve been sad or funny walking into a movie called Trap and getting stuck listening to a set of zoomer pop music, the kind with triplets or whatever, that garbage Ariana Grande sound. Trap does indeed smell a little fishy and is very nearly a bait and switch, but really its just good fun, making it the bees frickin’ knees after a mostly craptastic summer.

]]><![CDATA['Deadpool & Wolverine' briefing]]>Fri, 26 Jul 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/deadpool-wolverine-briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

Deadpool 2 began with a simple “FUCK WOLVERINE” and things aren’t too different now… if you’re coming into the latest Deadpool flick for the clawed curmudgeon you may as well stick to The Wolverine, hell the only Huge Act Man X-Men movie worse than Deadpool & Wolverine is obviously X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a deservedly scorned spin-off with admittedly decent choreography if awful VFX), no bar to exceed considering Wade and Logan play odd couple for about four minutes together onscreen. As technically the first X-Men movie in the MCU, you can’t be too mad at it when there’s a dozen Easter baskets worth of stupid comic-nerd nuggets — for that specific cameo that’ll make you chuckle (for me it was rescuing Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie from the empty sea of developed and unrealized movies) this flick is like an upended cereal box.

Akin to Spider-Man: No Way Home’s playfully unconcerned Multiverse-mucking, D&W has just as little actual story and likewise feels like a pure product rather than a real movie. However, even when 40% of the jokes are falling flat, Ryan Reynolds’ steadfast creative commitment ignites the third Deadpool with at least some marginal sense of unequivocal uniqueness, which is more appetizing than James Gunn’s own irksome irreverence, although Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 may be the only good Marvel movie out of their last seven or so. Deadpool & Wolverine may be a whopper of pound for pound entertainment value — it’s still hard to genuinely say it’s good.

Wolverine is almost more sidelined than Godzilla in that last Kong mash-up, here though I understand more since it’s Deadpool’s unlikely franchise at the end of the day. Because the first film has terrible non-linear narrative structure with a pretty unsatisfying outline of an origin and a quickly outdated sense of what meta means, I think the third is just too double-stuffed with fun not to be superior, even if both are too insanely specific products of their cultural place to age gracefully. Deadpool 2 is the actual movie in the franchise, the bona fide blockbuster, the most seamless mix of impressive action sequences (David Leitch in the driver’s seat helps), crisper self-aware commentary, more effectively base humor and pinch of actual characterization. This movie still has the sword-swinging slapstick in effective bouts between our titular foul-mouthed, virtually unkillable mental cases, and you can’t help but laugh at some of Reynolds’ ridiculous wisecracks (or Hugh giving what he’d give Shakespeare) — next to the way this Cinematic Universe has insisted on one-liners and tension-eviscerating asides, Ryan relatively feels like a comic savant since too much of Whedon, Gunn and the new Spidey shtick has rubbed me wrong.

The real victory is this is an authentic Deadpool movie — despite the way Fantastic Four and of course the rest of the X-Men are starting to seep into the cracks of the GRAND TIMELINE or whatever, you don’t even blink at the first R-rated Disney/Marvel flick by a LONG SHOT (the closest was a weak F-Bomb in Guardians 3), or wait around for MCU cameos when they could bring back Pyro, Toad, Juggernaut, Laura/X23, Tatum to finally play Gambit for Christ’s sake and throw in Wesley Snipes and Jennifer Garner as Blade and Elektra for respective good measure, needless as they are, then of course there’s Chris Evans’ sneaky cameo as Johnny Storm rather than Steve Rodgers, a crappy recurring joke turned a solid one. But what matters is that this actor/character switcheroo ties in COMPLETELY to the Comic Con craziness occurring just as this movie easily has the biggest opening weekend of 2024 — if Chris Evans can be both Captain and the Torch in our universe, than Downey Jr. can be BOTH IRON MAN AND DR. DOOM! FUCK IT FEIGE! Yes let us all forget the Kang fiasco which would have been shit even if Jonathan Majors hadn’t become a problem child and everything went according to “plan.” Fantastic Four now has the subtitle First Steps (what like they’re Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2?) because if Phase Four or Five will be remembered, if at all, it’s whiffed one-offs and really paltry, poorly considered attempts to slam the reset button on the MCU’s stalled out, inevitable entropy.

The movie mourns the death of Fox in that evil, manipulative arrangement of sentimental behind the scenes footage of better superhero movies Disney had no hand in — they’re flaunting and flexing their not so recently acquired IP harder than ever and this is just the start. I’m just so happy that by sheer financial calculus Feige has to bend over and take Reynold’s quips about Deadpool & Wolverine arriving at a “low point” in the series. That’s no joke though as the last one, The Marvels, in money or moviemaking, is just shit, worst ever for the brand, and even if this movie’s self-awareness about the drop-off since Endgame is a distraction of insincere “honesty,” it’s just delightful to witness onscreen. Fortunately Reynolds is just as inseparable from his character as Jackman form Logan or Downey from Tony… plus there’s that rando Peter (Rob Delaney), the elderly blind roommate (Leslie Uggams) and all the glib, giddy decisions making this a weirdly lovable trilogy contrary to the smarmy swill the first movie suggests on its own.

D&W has reasonable respect for Logan (less for Logan, who is a different animal than we’ve seen before with the same grimaced redemption arc) and yet this second swan song, this meme-able encore (DID WE MENTION HE’S WEARING THE CLASSIC YELLOW SUIT OMG FINALLYYY) is just more gore and mockery and dumb needle drops — I almost don’t even need to bring up director (and first-time writer, alongside four others, after twenty-five years of mediocrity exclusively behind the camera) Shawn Levy, most famous for the stinky Night at the Museum trilogy, one-off unfunny Steve Martin vehicles like Cheaper by the Dozen and the 2006 Pink Panther plus crappy, crass but still sentimental comedies This Is Where I Leave You and The Internship. His latest era may be his best, as this is his third charming enough/“eh not bad” Reynolds collab in a row, rearing 2021’s late summer sleeper hit Free Guy and the sci-fi coming-of-age Netflick The Adam Project — which family friendly movie with a slavish religiosity toward Star Wars, 80s nostalgia and basically all forms of mainstream nerd culture would you prefer? Anyway, like Tim Miller directing 2016's Deadpool, there’s really no voice to make out here, and Levy is so tasteless you can’t even lament another director getting tangled up in the Disney turbines.

With eight months after the embarrassment of The Marvels and eight months until Captain America: Brave New World (probably not the first on anybody’s anticipated list) this is a desert stretch for MCU disciples. Then we figure out what’s going on with that asterisk Thunderbolts*'s title before Fantastic Four seemingly directs us to two new Avengers only just subtitled Doomsday for obvious RDJ-related (but Majors mostly) reasons and the unchanged Secret Wars in 2026. As someone totally finished with actually expecting ANYTHING of significance to happen (2020s MCU really is the true TV-identical serialization of cinema) I’m glad Deadpool & Wolverine took the tiresome, messy malarkey of cinematic interconnectivity to more pleasingly flippant and freewheeling places than Doctor Strange in the Mulitverse of Madness or any other failed attempt to widen this Universe’s reach since 2019.

]]><![CDATA['Twisters' briefing]]>Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/twisters-briefing

2 (out of 4)

Can you really claim a plural title (à la Aliens) when your dumber sequel features half the cyclones spinning in 1996? Jesus, I don’t think there’s a single way in which this soft remake (so soft it's barely holding together) isn’t paling in comparison to the already pretty corny disaster movie thrills of the original Twister — trading “From the director of Speed” for “From the director of Minari” doesn’t make your affair classier, it just makes it a marvel of boredom and wasted effort in search of actual escapism, probably like watching real storm chasers.

With nothing in common to its IP besides natural phenomena and a reference to their Dorothy machine, it's amusing how much Twisters tries to correct certain things about the original but hey, let’s play that game: sure swapping Twister’s crumbier cold open for an even more obvious investment in backstory makes sense, but the plot is utterly lost on Minari man Lee Isaac Chung, the removed antithesis to director Jan de Bont’s restless insistence. The first movie is all about them trying to get their little science balls into the deadly suck zone, in fact the ENTIRE MOVIE is just race to see who can get this dizzying data — it’s frustrating but you’re invested after all the spills and when they accomplish their macho meteorological maneuver it’s so rewarding, exciting, pent up and released like a theme park ride as DISASTER MOVIES GENERALLY SHOULD BE. In 2024 we would apparently rather drown in melodrama, the ‘dead friends’ kind rather than the ‘love triangle between my separated storm chaser wife and the therapist fiancé' routine. Believe me I can barely stomach when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are screaming about Daddy issues with a ‘nado just down the road, but that goop is still preferential.

It can’t go without saying the action is either unimpressive or nonexistent — only one of its four or so major sequences involves some technical interaction between the practical effects and digital enhancements, and regardless any of the film’s unfussy spectacle still kinda blows. Again it’s living up to no masterpiece, I can’t even say I even like Twister but when they have to drive a truck through a house they drive a truck through a fucking house. Twisters is so slick and phony, despite real locations and shooting on Kodak film — de Bont’s film had stunning aerial photography this movie can’t even come close to with today’s drone technology, ha maybe you should’ve handed this over to someone who knows their way around both shlock and new tech like Michael Bay.

And although Twisters sidesteps any climate change rhetoric, the film still has to promulgate a message about evil lowballing profiteers pilfering storm-swept lands, something this shoddy script wants to play with morally but won’t commit to… Worse still, the reverence for nature is somehow diminished even when you account for how quiet Chung’s film is in contrast to 1996’s second biggest domestic feature (behind disaster maestro Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day). So what if Twisters features a scene at a rodeo, plays a couple country songs and refuses to let you forget we’re in the beautiful, scenic southern paradise of OOOOOOOOKlahoma where the cows go flying through the aaaiiiiiiirrrrrr. State pride aside Twisters has a smokescreen of authenticity, especially as it is carried by a crop of “rising stars.”

Apart from professional third wheel Anthony Ramos from In the Heights (no mackin’ for you this time), we have Daisy Edger-Jones from Where the Crawdads Sing (her unreadable demeanor is forced to conceal some already communicated trauma and guilt), and Glen Powell (whom you rightfully and wrongly expect to save the day and the movie), of Top Gun: Maverick and Hit Man, as the thrill junkie YouTube personality with a degree AND a heart of gold, too charming and romantic to make into the simple clone of Cary Elwes' original antagonist — Lordy the way this movie tries to eliminate the ‘good chasers vs. bad chasers’ angle isn’t mature or realistic, the tiresome "modern moral grey" is just another of this movie’s forgettable, inferior alterations. Even the 2nd act respite with our lead character’s accommodating Mom is worse — in ’96 Lois Smith offered superb presence and made you care about her character’s survival in a medical rescue moment. In the background no figures here have shit on the former, stupendous supporting ensemble spearheaded by Philip Seymour Hoffman and including Todd Field, Anthony Rapp, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Patrick Fischler, Sean Whalen and Joey Slotnick, just a king's ransom of "ah, that guy!"

I can’t believe Joseph Kosinski is responsible for the story (and just the story as he’s probably too busy directing F1), since Top Gun: Maverick is precisely the textbook Twisters doesn’t follow, namely an emphasis on cinematic realism, warm, genuine emotions, plus Powell as part of a greater whole rather than the only grace note, all in all the legacyquel with dignity. Chung is candid and clever as director, producer, cinematographer and editor of the Rwandan journey of liberation disguised as revenge saga Munyurangabo — regardless this felt like the Universal equivalent of an indie-to-Marvel one-step yes-man process, since hardly any of his sensitivities bleed through even the quieter passages.

The disaster movie was my first love, yet it’s such a dilapidated, dogshit genre that, in hindsight, there are seldom few quality examples. Nostalgia carries The Day After Tomorrow far for me, War of the Worlds contains far too many other genres to include (but it’d be the GOAT far and away if you did), and similarly pandemic flicks (like Contagion or Outbreak) don’t quite qualify and maybe there’s more an argument to be made for harrowing historical features like Titanic or The Impossible or, ugh, The Perfect Storm, lame. As what one would call a desperate apologist for such saturated spectacle and waves of what-would-you-do-in-that-situation cinema, I’ll say the original Poseidon Adventure (and Wolfgang Petersen’s remake damn it!) represents what we crave, otherwise Deep Impact (gtfoh Armageddon) and Dante’s Peak (you can stay Volcano, whatever) are the only really strong excerpts from the genre of suffering as showmanship. Recent attempts to reclaim mainstream attention for popcorn apocalypses like Pompeii, San Andreas and Geostorm certainly don’t speak to a bright future.

The fact that Twisters was maybe only a hair above the made-for-cheap found-footage-plus-tornado-twist Into the Storm is concerning. Frankly if I’m favoring The Core and 2012 above this new summer smash, something’s gone seriously wrong, and that includes critic’s giving this lousy, limp-wristed blockbuster masquerade a pass. You can find more awe-inducing tornadoes in The Wizard of Oz.

It’s amazing how the mediocrity of 30 years ago can so easily outstrip the well-received slop of today. I thought this would be an overnight shoo-in for disaster movie all-timer rather than a dud you can barely call a distraction — if you’re going to replace sequences of man vs. nature with cheesy character development, just make sure such an exchange in entertainment value is actually worth it.

]]><![CDATA['Longlegs' briefing]]>Fri, 12 Jul 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/longlegs-briefing

3 (out of 4)

“I don’t give a shit about the Bible” — Writer/Director Osgood Perkins

Though it may nip from the same stupid horror-mystery-thriller serial-killer-police-procedural playbook, this ain’t The Snowman — Oz Perkins, son of Anthony Perkins, has been quietly cultivating some serious sensory skills as the ‘other’ indie arthouse horror guy just recently made mainstream, I guess apart from Mike Flanagan or Robert Eggers or Ari Aster or whoever comes to mind quickest. Longlegs could be called an ode to much greater movies of the same warm, eerie, investigative ilk, namely Michael Mann’s Manhunter, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, David Fincher’s Seven and Zodiac, Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder, Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and most immediately Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s chilling 1997 masterpiece Cure, in which our killer seemingly bewitches his victims into performing horrible acts on our hands-free psycho’s behalf.

Whatever pastiche Longlegs is liable for, ’tis a certain turnaround and more comfortable way to try out the spotlight than whatever idiotic imprint in pop consciousness was left by his last, 2019’s Gretel & Hansel, a feeble dark fantasy interminably stretched. Perkins fourth film is a technically exquisite horror flick, with arrangements so indelibly predisposed, guerrilla marketing so sharp, its cult flavor basically built-in before the divided audience reactions — within the inviting, autumnal palette, there’s a tasteful balance of extreme wides in an otherwise claustrophobic concoction of enigmatic summer counter-programming, not to mention a sparing, bewildering Nicolas Cage performance for more memorable color. Oz’s typically opaque, ethereal, grimly gorgeous affairs range from the narratively leisurely (or glacial in Gretel’s case), borderline translucent gothic ghost tales of Netflix’s I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House to his drab debut The Blackcoat’s Daughter and it’s own teenage shade of devil-dabbling murder mania. Even the most primitive example of Perkins’ distanced, aurally spacious and psychologically obscured proclivities are recognizable as part of a brand of freaky, story-light, old-fashioned instinct and restraint.

But Longlegs, with its more focused, fleshed out screenwriting and marvelous imagery, quickly dissolves from proper police work to an inscrutable cinematic “reality” built around the creepiest uncle you forgot about — but another ride on Ozzy’s crazy train actually leaves you APPROPRIATELY, INTENTIONALLY vexed this time! It might just be a mini-classic simply based on the painstaking composition of its meditative, nostalgic style and the help of an it-girl anchor like Maika Monroe front and center as the near-psychic, indeterminately autistic young detective/birthday girl. With The Guest, It Follows (plus it’s due sequel They Follow, soon, hopefully) and Watcher in her pocket, Ms. Monroe has already become a coveted RBF scream queen fit for the modern age, even more than Sophia Lillis (where’s she been?) seemed to become thanks to Gretel, rearing her work in 2017’s It. Apart from a mess of Cage meme-moments to rest along 20 others (in a rare villainous role, it’s pretty much Face/Off otherwise), there’s Alicia Witt as the naggy religious mom (with more skeletons in her closet than magic murder dolls), Blair Underwood as the cool, black, comic relief Police Chief for that true late 20th century feel, plus a bonus creepy Kiernan Shipka, who may as well be reprising her grown-up bad-seed role from Blackcoat’s Daughter.

I wish Oz was tactile with more than sheer atmosphere, since the inevitable upfront aversion to this film’s story is because playing things straight here in our fucked up world is more acceptable than bringing Satan into the picture — for obsessives, apparently there are 15(!) appearances by “the man downstairs” himself hidden in some shadowy Easter egg form. But even with early psychic setups (as well as the impossibility of the murders) we're foolish for expecting an episodic, easy answer, like how it always pan out. “Ah, of course there’s no ghosts, no God, fucking idiot!” That’s all before Oz’s mystifying marionette misdirections but, for breaking the mold, the hand he plays is hard to be mad at. The preternatural element is an Achilles heel, but it doesn’t hold Longlegs back exactly — like Blackcoat’s Daughter, you’re not in trouble just for introducing extrasensory evil and there’s no film of his so far that doesn’t. At least it takes that impressively dumb twist from The Black Phone (what if the crazy psycho I’m tryna catch actually lived in the basement?) and almost makes it work.

His curious, esoteric trimmings include corny, outdated orchestral flair to juxtapose its 70s rock backdrop of T Rex and Lou Reed (sorta like the other Cage insta-cult-classic Mandy, with loosely tied-in metal/rock ’n’ roll for tone, including lyrics as opening quotes and all), 8mm/16mm montages of nonsensical, abstract subconscious flashes and just myriad aesthetic artistry so thank the Lord (OF DARKNESS) that Longlegs’ script has just enough meat on its bones to resist accusing of style over substance. I can’t believe it roughly adds up in spite of supernatural shenanigans and its deflating parting — Oz makes you wish it were much longer by climaxing with no comedown, so if he hasn’t lost you with the actual satanic witchcraft, special effects right from Lynch’s latest, you may be taken aback by such a blueballed cut-to-credits for somehow this guy’s least frustrating feature yet. Regardless of an almost possessed need to weave the unreal into the mundane, Longlegs indeed delivers on the promise of Perkins’ so far predominantly unrealized gifts.

Even at its toughest to swallow, it’s still one of the year’s best so far, if not exactly a new horror classic then a near-great one. Perkins may be too precious with having you feel like you’re watching a 30-year old movie, but his gauge on calming creepiness is exacting. The first half is as arresting as I’ve seen in some time, and in sum we’ll have to settle for one of the best dressed spookers of the last decade ’n' change, and just wait to see how its reputation waxes or wanes — for scary movies that radically redirect partway through, like Barbarian it might become a curiosity rather than a genre touchstone. No points can be given for originality considering its laundry list of influences, but for once Perkins didn’t need any short-film-premise padding, no instead this movie has distinct acts and a few shocking moments. I couldn’t care less about CG blood, oh no where are my gosh darn squibs! Sorry I don’t have THAT much devotion to the 90s .

As someone with a birthday on the 14th, I was spooped. Longlegs is too engrossing to be upset by the stubbornly strange unveiled mystery — cult films this cryptic and calculated are as uncommon as a movie character quoting the Bible outside the horror genre (or mainstream Christian cinema, I’ll get you one day Angel Studios!), and Perkins' best yet is as singular as a Peter Strickland rabbit hole and as ideal a picture as someone like Ti West could ever make. Sure, it’s a little more Amityville Horror and less The Shining, though his outlandishness is operating on familiar levels of Stephen King crazy and, wouldn’t you know it, his speedy follow-up is a King adaptation The Monkey due in February, not to mention another horror project Keeper scheduled a few months later in Fall 2025. I'd prefer overly-influenced originality, but I'll be more than interested how his stone-faced senselessness bounces off a legacy lunatic — with Longlegs it's like he's already well on his way to cuckoo town.

]]><![CDATA['A Quiet Place: Day One' briefing]]>Fri, 28 Jun 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/a-quiet-place-day-one-briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

This might be where I draw the line concerning my tolerance for dopey spin-offs that never should’ve never seen the green light of day. When X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Minions have more reason to exist than your apocalyptic prequel, it only goes to show that when movies branch from their franchises in the name of exploiting some pliable premise (or often exploring some specific character), the zoomed-in, scrutinized side-storying rarely amounts to anything worth the trouble to make apart from money. Even as a cash-in scheme they’re a gamble, there’s a reason X-Men Origins: Magneto became a full-on reboot, same goes for why there are only two Star Wars Story’s, and the one that killed them was Solo… just because the Conjuring series has made a ceaseless ruse out of this doesn’t mean everyone should PARAMOUNT!

But anyway, I hate to admit, for being the lesser of three sci-fi horror-thrillers, A Quiet Place: Day One at least continues the tradition of great cut to credits parting moments. It exceeds at least the 2018 original in exploiting the modes of modern silent cinema with nods to magic and puppetry — but there’s no real challenge to communicate an alien invasion survival flick scaffolded by a joke plot. For spin-offs this was probably better than Birds of Prey but certainly similar, as Lupita N’yongo (doing her best as always) and her damn slice of pizza is just as annoying as Harley Quinn and her fucking breakfast sammich — at least it made sense why it was stupid in the Fantabulous whatever the fuck… but the Quiet Place series intently posits itself as artier mainstream horror, so NO don’t make your new wrinkle in the premise about some suicidal cancer patient trying to score some ‘za. Talk about diminishing your already diminished “installment.” It’s as if a professional production solely about the Twinkie subplot of Zombieland was worth planning out a whole trip to the movies.

There are some neat, terse chase sequences, that first migrating scramble with thousands in the streets was taking a page from Spielberg’s War of the Worlds with little oners and plenty of dusty panoramic panic. But this non-story has nowhere to go, except past DAY ONE, EXCUSE ME there were at least two days witnessed here minimum, sorry whatcha gonna call the next one? This almost moves like a decent TV pilot no one picked up (wait for the Quiet Place streaming series, just guessing) — it’s almost respectable and utterly superfluous. For second time director Michael Sarnoski, there’s barely a hint of the same lovelorn despair translating from the quiet melancholy of Pig, ultimately there’s hardly a scrap of stylistic difference between this and Krasinski’s brief encounters of suspense and spectacle.

Lupita is stupendous in spite of the shlock, but her support is just Sarnoski’s second collab with Alex Wolff, an under-present Djimon Hounsou (who recounts a way cooler, crazier ending to this movie in Part II, where 10 boats were massacred by our deadly disabled invaders) and some coward (Joseph Quinn) whose not even as self-sufficient as his little pussy — why are you nearly getting yourself killed to save a creature capable of making much, much less noise than you? If this is what passes for a blockbuster, let alone a horror-thriller monster movie (let me just forget this was once the date for the eighth Mission: Impossible) I may have to tune this shit out unless you give me a spin-off just about the cat.

]]><![CDATA['Inside Out 2' briefing]]>Fri, 14 Jun 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/inside-out-2-briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

Hey Pixar, any chance of a real renaissance or resurgence at this point? Calling anything they produce from here out “the best since Soul” wouldn’t mean much even if Inside Out 2 was an exceptional sequel — it isn’t though, just another entry of entertainment entropy they've regularly released since the decline, save an exception or two.

At the end I hoped the credits-adjacent dinnertime zoom-ins ’n’ -outs of the parent’s own internal command modules would yield a great parting gag like the first Inside Out but nope, just more of “Wow isn’t anxiety annoying?” Is anxiety just a fistful of adderall and planning your day? In constructive life situations this new movie makes anxiousness look downright useful, though of course Inside Out 2’s thematic promise, like last time, is it takes the balance of ALL emotions (the good, the bad, the indifferent) to amount to a full person. This sequel feigns as new and different, aiming lower perhaps for the sake of keeping story potential alive for more sequels, but what’s the next step (OH God a Disney+ show??), what emotions could they add on top of the better additions like Ennui and especially Nostalgia as some closeted grandmotherly emotion for a rainy day, the best recurring bit. Pixar’s not going to get its hands dirty with sexual frustration and the temptations of substance abuse or some other deadly sin now are they, unless these flicks truly become message movies.

Limiting children’s human emotion to five distinctly incomplete subsets was begging for an adolescent upgrade, so long as they retained enough heartwarming, psychologically healthy ideas and proper pathos — but Inside Out 2 doesn’t just talk down to teenagers, they’re shortchanging the kids as well. The original was so original it took seven suggested scripts for any production to began — this was already a concept too high for its own good whether it wanted to be or not, and if the idea of an Inside Out is the sum of riffing and pitching small concepts within the larger umbrella of insular insanity (probably how plenty of Pixar screenplays are pieced together) is this sequel honestly the best bundle of bits you got?

For the sake of color let’s look at certain Pixar series — Toy Story is the flagship and, for me, without a weak one in the bunch, unless you count Lightyear and who does? Finding Dory was cash-grabby but has that sturdy center of sentiment and more than a few cute additions in character. Incredibles 2 was no doubt a flight of steps down from Pixar’s finest two hours but an intermittently awe-inducing follow-up. But Inside Out 2 is about as trivial as a Cars 2 (or 3, remember?) or a Monsters University, so inconsequential you don’t even need to see it, it may as well not even exist. And for puberty allegories I would honestly say both Turning Red (despite paling next to Encanto and Coco) and Brave were more agreeable, girls-will-be-girls one-of-a-kind affairs, the sequel isn’t even up to their most dismissed of COVID and post-COVID under-the-radar affairs like Luca or Elemental.

Inside Out was the OG Pixar comeback, a renewing moment for their acclaimed invention and most literal emotional complexity — this has neither, just less enlightening gags and minuscule social insight. Of course I’m not upset that the more pointed growing pains episode of this now fresh series has you squirming, teeth on edge and collar pulled, but that’s also what you got last time when young Riley was formerly out of control of herself, manipulated like a marionette by her color-coated brain-bureaucracy. If this is a rebound outside of Disney finances, it’s a sad one — for me Soul is their closest and only scrape with cinema greatness in almost 15 years. Even 2015’s Inside Out isn’t quite as exceptionally clever as they say, like when Phyllis Smith’s Sadness has to explain every stage of abstract thought just so you understand one sequence of their mind-mission. Then there’s no Bill Hader as Fear (Tony Hale ain’t no bad trade) or even Mindy Kaling as Disgust from what I can tell (Liza Lapira instead), though Lewis Black, Smith and Amy Poehler exude earnest returning voice work. Maya Hawke has attempted to make a name for herself beyond identifiable nepo-baby status through 2023’s Asteroid City and Maestro but as the voice of Anxiety (and as far as redeemed villains go), it’s no character exactly destined to be anyone’s favorite.

I just felt disheartened, as if, like the upcoming Moana 2 (formerly a show reworked into a theatrical sequel), this is a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency kind of project, where it’s about nothing more than the bottom line rather than actual artistry. For Dreamworks’ parallel products, Trolls Band Together and Kung Fu Panda 4 demand less of you, deliver more dutiful distractions and are better for it — Pixar, meanwhile, is constantly betrayed by their pantheon-packed past, like having your darlings kill you. Somehow Orion and the Dark (and from the looks of it The Wild Robot) is finding Dreamworks accessing slip-on sincerity and silliness better than the GOAT. Albeit, from afar Pixar's next original project, Elio, appears too promising for me to neglect the studio’s still-lingering potential for a stunner.

Especially following up Richard Kind’s heartbreaking bro for the ages Bing Bong, the second Inside Out doesn’t hit you right in the feels in any remotely comparable sense, and I rate my Pixar movies in no small part due to the tears they elicit. Regrettably, all the sentimental and psychological simplifications of Inside Out 2 may be messing with kids heads and hearts more than making sense of them, and Nostalgia will be the only reason this will ever be remembered.

]]><![CDATA['Hit Man' briefing]]>Fri, 07 Jun 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/hit-man-briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

I love Richard Linklater — boy oh boy, do I — and while I could lament his career getting caught in the Netflix vortex, that this and Apollo 10 1/2 will become just another morsel of everyone’s streaming choice paralysis, I’m just content that his content is primed to please just about everyone who lays eyes on it. Hit Man doesn’t exactly blow your socks or your head off, it doesn’t exactly break new ground for the king of casual kino, but it is absurdly easygoing and effortlessly engrossing from head to toe, just kinda classic Linklater emitting wide-eyed, blissed out decency into the universe.

Humanism is a loaded term but I don’t think anyone else in modern film has quite so candidly tapped in the way things really are, fine-tuned the temperament of actual reality, all without making shit too boring, hammy or muting his mentality with mumblecore modesty. For someone whose screenwriting mantra is something along the lines of “hey maybe you can change your life for the better (or maybe it’s already alright)," Linklater makes all his contemporaries look like self-help cinema. It’s a state of mind Capra used to force his audience into, and Richard doesn’t even have to get all socialist on us to make us feel more whole and understood. In a sea of crap trying to redpill you or bluepill you (or blackpill you), he’s the one guy extending a whitepill, even if he has to divy up a movie with college philosophy lectures to help marry his rippling themes to simple diversions. Like his former Texan oddball profile, 2011’s Bernie, broke the rules for character studies, Hit Man finds Linklater’s trademark navel gazing most palatable and his storytelling most clear and considered.

He's no stranger to crafting movies about the duplicity and multiplicity of the self, the idea of a person as unfixed, and his usual jolly ethos is most literally illustrated by a fairly fictionalized Gary Johnson, the NOPD rat that repeatedly impersonated an assassin in order to arrest some seedy local folk. Like Keanu Reeves’ Bob (or is it Fred?) in his unctuous adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, it’s good, mildly harrowing fun getting lost as to which of the police informant’s two identities dominates, regardless of any Orwellian backdrop. Glen Powell makes a multicolored display of his performative potential far exceeding his supporting charm which helped Cruise himself coast in Top Gun: Maverick — he proves beyond doubt, beyond another looming 80s legacy sequel Twisters, that he is a leading man, and a force for good outside of good looks. Linklater gave Powell some limelight already with a bit part in Fast Food Nation way back but noticeably in 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!! as the mustached, sage upperclassman to his own freshman baseball pitcher self-insert, plus there’s a brief appearance in Rick’s last Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood, a marvelous, mood-boosting return to former greatness particularly after how bad Where’d You Go, Bernadette? sucked. Meanwhile his co-star Adria Arjona turns heads as ably as she in turn makes herself a star, only a few stepping stones behind Powell — there’s a delirium to her irascible charms.

Linklater has range, confidence and a natural sense of moviemaking given his near-constant hand in the script. Hit Man may go down like nourishing nectar but the average Netflix consoomer doesn't even know how good they have it, especially with Noah Baumbach making such peerless, exclusive features as well. While this compares to say, Adam McKay or David O. Russell, and their same slack-loose true-storying that comically, flippantly eschews actuality, in Linklater’s case Hit Man ain’t some hazy boomer history lesson, he just wanted to make sure his dramatic license didn’t accidentally have the masses believing Gary is a murderer. As a summer distraction so spry and feathery, it’s incredible how darn nerve-wracking the film becomes by its last act, pushing the undercover moonlighting and red-hot rendezvous’ to their breaking point. The film never gets too pleased with itself (even if the meet-cute pushes it) or too out of hand — Richard and Glen’s screenplay is exceedingly clever, populated by strong supporting characters and has a handy way of detailing the veracity of deceit. Hit Man neatly illustrates the subjective capacity to take advantage of how narrowly people see you (or don’t) and work the edges of perception, then bottles the idea via new parents and the way they communicate the story of their lives together to their gullible children, hammering home personal narrative’s and the natural naiveté of others.

You think it’s fluff (you’re right) but goddamn it’s the most assertively old-fashioned, unashamedly sexy (not interrupted by credits or bickering like the Before sequels), mathematically funny and most unexpectedly suspenseful fluff in a long while. It’s uncomplicated and free to fictionalize a real guy without worrying about interrupting what could make a good rom-com thriller — the writing is pinpoint, the camerawork is sharp, the performances are just shy of perfection and the stranger-than-fiction headline-ripping is a mischievous springboard for a frothy cocktail of romance and duplicitous noir tropes (not to mention the history of fem-dom couples from hell like Gun Crazy, Natural Born Killers and possibly Intolerable Cruelty), all drenched in Linklater’s typical glaze of sensible sunniness and humming, positive vibes. Sadly his most marketable movie in ages is a Netflix prisoner foremost, but with a TIFF premiere and fresh star power in Powell, there’s enough prestige and eyeballs to make for Linklater’s most appreciably mainstream moment since, what School of Rock?

All to say is there’s no mutual exclusion between “lighter” movies and art. Try-hard or “try harder,” serious or comedic, it will all wither in the wake of genuine intent, considered craft, particularly the kind of infectious spirit that makes you think of Woody Allen and Billy Wilder and some of most benevolent filmmaking souls ever to play the game. He hasn’t made something huge since Boyhood (hey, he’s busy with 20 more years of adapting Merrily We Roll Along!) but disregarding Bernadette, this, Apollo and Everybody Wants Some!! are a decade’s proof aplenty of Linklater’s enduring versatility and lust-for-life chutzpah.

]]><![CDATA['Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' and 'The Garfield Movie' briefings]]>Fri, 24 May 2024 04:00:00 GMThttp://www.cinemabriefing.com/latest/furiosa-a-mad-max-saga-and-the-garfield-movie-briefings

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

3 (out of 4)

Despite the twilight years, George Miller has been maxing out hard between his most recent efforts, if you don’t count Happy Feet Two — between Mad Max: Fury Road, Three Thousand Years of Longing and now Furious: A Mad Max Saga, it’s kind of insane how much vehement electricity is retained in these film's vibrant, lucid frames. It’s odd that even with only Fury Road for comparison, the 80-year-old’s latest still somehow feels like it's almost from a different hand, like Miller passed the beloved, unsullied series on to some digitally minded hybrid of Lucas, Rodriguez and especially the Wachowskis — Furiosa is wild and consistently inconsistent, visually cut from a much cleaner shade of crazy, yet the world is so much more grotesque than you’re used to, full of maggots and nipple rings. This advancement of even more sensory, kinetic delirious craft doesn’t make this anything less than authentically Australian or somehow unworthy of the Mad Max legacy of truly dreamlike, depthless, unimaginable yarns of future mythos, all the fire, blood, dust and diesel one can handle from the derelicts down under.

I’ve fallen asleep on this movie twice, and it’s because Miller can send you to your own desperate dreamland like no one else. The editing is crisp and roomy, the storytelling is even more roundabout and freewheeling than the original trilogy can prepare you for — for about an hour longer than the usual Saga, the structure is the only thing apart from the cartoon-caliber Fury Road aesthetic keeping Furiosa at its own slightly lesser echelon, this oxymoronic attempt to make the slightest entry the most epic. It all makes something of a more than complete world-building spin-off out of a cinematic franchise that never felt the need to explain itself or it’s situation, let alone bother to care about any continuity between each installment. Even in between my first-viewing naps I could glean how much politicking and pulling from every corner of post-pockyclips lore was happening, as the fifth Miller/Max motion picture incorporates the original’s simple revenge rev-up (and sweetness upended), the patience and payoff of Road Warrior’s iconography, Thunderdome’s gonzo, Spielbergian giddiness and of course Fury Road’s rabid, modernized, hard-R blockbustering about. All we needed was Mel Gibson, which would’ve beat a pointless blink-and-it's-done Max cameo considering there’s already diet Mad Max (Tom Burke) as Praetorian Jack.

Anya Taylor-Joy, boy if I was only in 60% of my own movie, I’d bring the little girl (Alyla Browne) on the press tour or else feel the guilt of undue credit! She does her best Charlize (and Max) impression, mostly by looking the part with occasional digital assistance and also saying very, very few words. Australian native Chris Hemsworth inherits the film's charisma, and with a protruding prosthetic schnoz he’s absolutely ridiculous but never winking the way the later Thor movies would have him. There’s a new Joe, and a host of other figures vying for the memory halls of turnpike biker pageantry (I ONLY ANSWER TO THE OCTOBOSS) but there’s nothing close to the The Nightrider or Master Blaster here, no way, though it at least contributes to an already full catalogue of memorable psycho-gearhead-gangsters. I can’t believe this geriatric thought he was gonna make more of these in the event that this DIDN’T flop so very hard over Memorial Day Weekend. But dismissive audience don't deserve better than even the weakest in the Mad Max series, which still amounts to a handsome if uneven excursion into peak apocalyptic franchises, Apes be damned and that’s a good set of movies overall… Like Sam Raimi with Evil Dead (well before the 2010s), the Mad Max movies are just so strange, intimate, home-grown and unfettered by commercial concern. Even if Furiosa is the least of a fantastic series, that still makes it the best movie of the summer and then some, believe it or not (had Hit Man hit theaters for real there'd be a different story).

As someone who likes Fury Road a lot but never jumped aboard the ‘best of the century’ brigade, I will say if you crave ceaseless excitement Furiosa will not satisfy — there’s not an action sequence proper til an hour in, but when they get to the fireworks, despite the more insistent CGI (Fury Road had its share) the film is still a singular visual delight, like if The Wachowskis jumped directly from Speed Racer to this, the energy is that pinpoint and utterly berserk. Even if it only amounts to a meager but marginally mighty companion piece to Fury Road’s stunning display of pyrotechnic, acrobatic, automatic immediacy, this Mad Max Saga makes you hope the series either stops in its tracks right here or never makes its way into other hands, at least not of those in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Garfield Movie

1 ½ (out of 4)

When I was younger and dumber and thought I was funny or artistic, I wanted to make comic strips, or I should say I did after I won a contest in third grade wherein you had to fill in Garfield’s thought bubble with anything at all. He was smiling and reading a book on the couch, and having heard the word onomatopoeia recently in a movie or TV show (Hey Arnold! maybe?), I thought it’d be a clever juxtaposition to fill in the spelling bee answer and “wow I’m surprised the Teletubbies know that word” even though what, are there Teletubby novels? Anyway I was one of 15 or so out of 1500 (or was it 15000?) nationwide, so I won some gifts and books and started to read strips — never had the comic books obsession. Through the years it became one of those weird collections one attracts and accumulates, like Criterion’s for me now or the Pokémon cards I stopped collecting probably around the same time as Garfield knick-knacks.

I regularly enjoyed what Jim Davis’ delivered, particularly the earlier stuff — by the time I started checking the funny pages I liked the most recent compilations but thought the current daily comics were a little lesser. The old Garfield was really fat, had no skinny legs and the tiniest eyeballs. The modern output just doesn’t compare, and in general I realized Calvin and Hobbes was the finest of the medium, particularly because of its lack of commercialization to go with the wit, insight and beautiful artwork. In contemporary stuff, Pearls Before Swine perfected the snarky talking animals thing for the newspaper comics by the time it picked up a groove.

Regardless of 2004’s Garfield or 2006’s A Tale of Two Kitties, I don’t feel as though my childhood was ruined by The Garfield Movie, not that the billionaire merchandising magnate Davis would give a fuck anyway. All I know is Chris Pratt is no Bill Murray even on that washed up fart's laziest Monday, trained animals are more impressive than animation of Illumination's ilk and I’d rather have a plot of Odie and Garfield becoming friends during the course of some adventure (or destroy Dickens with prince and the pauper shit) before accepting some mishap of farm animal romance, trite daddy issues as emotional tethers and endless non-sequitur gags. At least Odie's still the bro who knows better than his bully, master, co-pet, though the poor, lovable beagle is underutilized.

Even to mix my one early nostalgia with my current kind (though Spy Kids probably paved the way), all the Mission: Impossible references are too much — despite Ving Rhames playing an anthropomorphized cow, he nonetheless remains the tech guy behind the middle act heist sequence. There's a moving train climax, Tom Cruise references and they even using the M:I theme overtly, it’s like being trapped in that one parody moment from Shrek 2 for 30 minutes. It was probably even worse than Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget's own heist-lampooning jail breaks, but at least there are some personal stakes — Garfield has no motivation here, nothing, it's not an origin story and outside of cute references in the film’s final moments to, you know, a more accurate, interesting display of what Garfield media is (imaginary scenarios, at least something with NERMAL PLEASE...) this movie is just a quell-your-kids affair and a shoddy one at that — Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4, as money-back-guaranteed general audience entertainment, will lap circles around this crap financially if not critically.

This isn’t Disney or Dreamworks, it's DNEG whose only other full feature on their own is Ron's Gone Wrong (no comment) plus a few assists for Universal and Paramount. All I know is this fits every definition of weak children's cinema — The Garfield Movie is visually textureless, kinetically exhausting, of course soundtracked by Pharrell or worse and plagued by the dullest wisecracks I could imagine thought-bubbling out of the world’s most sardonic kitty. It’s like my seven-year-old self wrote this shit for school.

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