Licorice Pizza briefing
3 ½ (out of 4)
How does one touch on perhaps the most gifted American with a film camera? It’s funny (for me) that Tom Cruise is the link between Kubrick’s death just after the completion of Eyes Wide Shut and the proverbial passing of the baton in Magnolia (ALL IN 1999), when we knew just how gifted, challenging, original and possibly even more self-possessed a replacement we were being left with. In place of Kubrick’s more symmetrical mind Anderson frittered about with impressions and versions of the filmmaker he’d like to be.
Then came There Will Be Blood. Prior, with Punch-Drunk Love, he began a regular partnership with cinematographer Robert Elswit and the Sandler redemption was the tip of the iceberg for both parties. Formally he was controlled chaos, indivisibly Californian, playful and poignant. He could craft scenes that ripple right down to your core — There Will Be Blood was full of them. He topped himself with The Master, though many pretended not to notice. Then Inherent Vice broke everyone’s brain, and only the faithful like myself eventually found the particular patience to realize it’s his best by a hair, the summation of a true artist leaving behind an untouchable body of work. I like Phantom Thread well enough, but away from the States Anderson seemed to age 20 years. Licorice Pizza finds him in a former state of mind, choosing to put us off but also refusing to lean on those previously conspicuous influences. Nipping from George Lucas’s American Graffiti, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or any other of the era's ilk only takes him so far, and his slippery instincts have to fill in the rest of the film’s abnormality and emotional clamminess.
Following such a disappointing comeback year for theatrical moviegoing, I was worried that my most anticipated film of the season might have me saying something like, “It truly is a sign of cultural degradation when even our best are so completely drunk on nostalgia, not unlike those behind The Matrix Resurrections, Spider-Man: No Way Home and, well, essentially most current media suffocating us with rosy-tinted projections of the past." My fears were assuaged, as the true Mr. Anderson is here to let you know that way back when, things were basically the same; he does not romanticize the past.
Making the most of his sonically inclined associates, Paul Thomas more substantially partners with Haim, the indie pop siblings he has shot plenty of music videos for, and it’s been clear he enjoys the company of Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, still his scoring practitioner for almost 15 years. I’m honestly surprised Grimes didn’t have a cameo, since PTA is such a completionist collaborator. While I thought perhaps the youngest Haim sister, Ms. Alana, serving as the essential lead of Licorice Pizza would not ultimately fly, she was realized remarkably, unaffected yet far from unprofessional — young Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who made impossible impressions in The Master as well as Anderson's first four features), is equally if not more pretense-less and impassioned. Sure the film confirms Anderson’s inscrutable qualities as an original screenwriter but more importantly it’s fresher proof he’s perhaps the best director of actors around — his filmography is altogether impeccably cast. I don't think he's ever fouled up the assignment of a role.
Though no DDL, Burt Reynolds or an ensemble as ideal as Vice, Pizza has big names and their specific moments had me dying. Years ago, when this movie was miles ahead, I was under the impression Bradley Cooper was the lead of this movie and not an exceptional face in the supporting cast. He’s had a sterling year (or week should I say, a handful of days in late December) with this and Nightmare Alley, keenly accessed for the evil beneath his eyes as del Toro's derelict lead and here playing film producer Jon Peters, and weirdly I swore from the initial synopsis he’d be serving as some kind of mentor to Hoffman’s child-actin' ass. Meanwhile, Sean Penn’s ignorantly thrill-seeking, constantly acting in-movie screen legend helps solidify our central couple’s care for one another.
But the best bit is clearly the intensely eccentric Harriet Samson Harris as the unreadable child talent agent Mary Grady. The highlight casting sequence is incredibly controlled and mighty hilarious, her possessed, indecipherable phone call shining with farcical mystery. Her screening of Alana is a paramount comic sequence — “You’re a goddamn fighter arencha? You remind me a pitbull dog with sex appeal… and a very Jewish nose!” Like the Penn portion, there’s some brain-bending ambiguity at play, particularly when you’re caught in an extreme close-up. Everyone is arranged into amazing non-sequiturs built on non-sequiturs, but the writing is so dense that you feel immediately familiar with the most transitory peripheral characters although they're seldom seen, like young Gary's even younger brother and buddies. Otherwise there's no one of note besides Ben Safdie’s gay man playing the straight politician or Anderson’s own partner Maya Rudolph as a TV ad director's casting assistant. PTA ingeniously edifies the performative nature of everything.
Even with all the mirrored love interests (both leads have their own string of opposites they could be easily better suited for) it's almost as if the sex comedy template behind the whole exercise keeps our leads together as cinematic “destiny” often does — alternates are almost treated like temptations. Loosely Licorice Pizza is about the rigid borders of taboo, how easy it is to see to the other side, the enterprise of entrepreneurship, romantic rank and the unpredictable intrigue of social relativity.
As is expected, this is cinematic craftsmanship you can’t poke a hole through — at this point Anderson knows how to shoot a movie so naturally he doesn’t even need cinematographer Robert Elswit anymore to retain the essentially invisible, indescribable style he saves up for the precise picture. And when you get down to the substantive narrative content, I fancy basically any topic and genre he’s tackled, this being no exception only moreso since I’m a sucker for love, coming-of-age tales, plotless yarns, boomer culture and all sorts of serious talent taking it all kinds of easy.
Unlike his other Kubrickian tendencies, PTA doesn’t have to adapt anything to be singularly amazing — here he’s taken pieces of interest from Hollywood anecdotes and amplified them into full-fledged dreams. Pizza’s chiefly inspired by offhand tales of childhood from film producer Gary Goetzman involving Yours, Mine and Ours, water beds and pinball machines. Anderson’s latest is very invested in historical specificity, but not too steeped in “AAAAAHHH the 70s…” and ultimately there is no mention or sight of the titular record store chain supposedly serving an atmospheric, descriptive purpose more than a functional one.
But, I mean, damn does PTA have a hard-on for the 70s. That last-minute Live and Let Die drop let us know we’re a mere two years off from Inherent Vice’s setting; in 1973, aurally Licorice Pizza acts as the gentle afterglow of another soundtrack of Greenwood doodles and a fine mixture of popular and eclectic era-tied tunes. IV also has near-caricatures in unbelievably rich, funny one-off dialogue duels — maybe he’s so good with actors, always getting the best from them because he IS the best. There’s some blissful reciprocity happening at all times here and in Anderson’s foremost features.
The film is sensibly, wonderfully conceived, especially the incredible blocking, as he almost always finds the most interesting, intuitive way to shoot any given beat. Anderson’s a staunch classicalist, but he bends and kneads the form just to the point where it and you are putty in his hand. I was mesmerized — PTA writes sequences where you’re just hanging off of every line and gesture. Licorice Pizza stirs up bizarre, uncomfortable feelings, only just odd enough to transcend classification, but even generally speaking it's the most notable notable coming-of-age movie of the millenia other than Boyhood.
It’s funny to think back to right after the success of Boogie Nights, when New Line Cinema told Anderson he was free to do whatever he wanted, that he assumed he would never be in this position again, failing to imagine or foresee all the times he would eat that sentiment from gamble to gamble. Anderson’s only ended up in even greater situations of artistic elbow room, film after film, regardless of box office, due to snowballing clout — in reality, he’s been doing as he pleases since forever. Returning closely to his own earlier style where the original writing was built on ‘what if this happened next’ moments, Licorice Pizza is probably stronger than them all, competing only with Love for inscrutable, radical romantic comedy superiority. Before I would have said Punch-Drunk feels like the biggest trifle of his career, great as it is, but Licorice is even more feathery and freewheeling. Boogie Nights, while a cold classic without doubt, is, for me, overinflated and over-influenced. This movie felt pure and poignant, marked by flawed characters and untested lead actors diving naked into a director’s capable, cunning hands.
The 35mm PanaVision looks superb, even if I don’t think I’ll worship these images to the same degree as his early 2010s work. Licorice Pizza moves through a few courtship clichés before becoming truly its own idiosyncratic, wildly unexpected love story/hangout movie hybrid. It’s a righteously real, self-conscious spin on 50 years past teen movie classics. Even if, in the end, it’s just Anderson huffing the farts of his childhood, it’s an incredible display of self-pleasure — the film is so easily compared to Quentin Tarantino’s last (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, like LP, is also the legendary modern director’s ninth film) in that place and time eclipse any and all narrative nagging.
I swear deep down Anderson is the most crafty hippie to play with the medium and pin critics under his thumb. He’s the unassuming, unofficial king of cinema, consistently levying his creative freedom in such recklessly rewarding ways — Licorice Pizza is conspicuously creepy and comprehensively charming all the same. I’ll be damned if this isn’t the best movie released this hopelessly Godforsaken year — mid-shelf Anderson is still masterpiece material for cineastes and his own peers.
How does one touch on perhaps the most gifted American with a film camera? It’s funny (for me) that Tom Cruise is the link between Kubrick’s death just after the completion of Eyes Wide Shut and the proverbial passing of the baton in Magnolia (ALL IN 1999), when we knew just how gifted, challenging, original and possibly even more self-possessed a replacement we were being left with. In place of Kubrick’s more symmetrical mind Anderson frittered about with impressions and versions of the filmmaker he’d like to be.
Then came There Will Be Blood. Prior, with Punch-Drunk Love, he began a regular partnership with cinematographer Robert Elswit and the Sandler redemption was the tip of the iceberg for both parties. Formally he was controlled chaos, indivisibly Californian, playful and poignant. He could craft scenes that ripple right down to your core — There Will Be Blood was full of them. He topped himself with The Master, though many pretended not to notice. Then Inherent Vice broke everyone’s brain, and only the faithful like myself eventually found the particular patience to realize it’s his best by a hair, the summation of a true artist leaving behind an untouchable body of work. I like Phantom Thread well enough, but away from the States Anderson seemed to age 20 years. Licorice Pizza finds him in a former state of mind, choosing to put us off but also refusing to lean on those previously conspicuous influences. Nipping from George Lucas’s American Graffiti, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or any other of the era's ilk only takes him so far, and his slippery instincts have to fill in the rest of the film’s abnormality and emotional clamminess.
Following such a disappointing comeback year for theatrical moviegoing, I was worried that my most anticipated film of the season might have me saying something like, “It truly is a sign of cultural degradation when even our best are so completely drunk on nostalgia, not unlike those behind The Matrix Resurrections, Spider-Man: No Way Home and, well, essentially most current media suffocating us with rosy-tinted projections of the past." My fears were assuaged, as the true Mr. Anderson is here to let you know that way back when, things were basically the same; he does not romanticize the past.
Making the most of his sonically inclined associates, Paul Thomas more substantially partners with Haim, the indie pop siblings he has shot plenty of music videos for, and it’s been clear he enjoys the company of Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, still his scoring practitioner for almost 15 years. I’m honestly surprised Grimes didn’t have a cameo, since PTA is such a completionist collaborator. While I thought perhaps the youngest Haim sister, Ms. Alana, serving as the essential lead of Licorice Pizza would not ultimately fly, she was realized remarkably, unaffected yet far from unprofessional — young Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who made impossible impressions in The Master as well as Anderson's first four features), is equally if not more pretense-less and impassioned. Sure the film confirms Anderson’s inscrutable qualities as an original screenwriter but more importantly it’s fresher proof he’s perhaps the best director of actors around — his filmography is altogether impeccably cast. I don't think he's ever fouled up the assignment of a role.
Though no DDL, Burt Reynolds or an ensemble as ideal as Vice, Pizza has big names and their specific moments had me dying. Years ago, when this movie was miles ahead, I was under the impression Bradley Cooper was the lead of this movie and not an exceptional face in the supporting cast. He’s had a sterling year (or week should I say, a handful of days in late December) with this and Nightmare Alley, keenly accessed for the evil beneath his eyes as del Toro's derelict lead and here playing film producer Jon Peters, and weirdly I swore from the initial synopsis he’d be serving as some kind of mentor to Hoffman’s child-actin' ass. Meanwhile, Sean Penn’s ignorantly thrill-seeking, constantly acting in-movie screen legend helps solidify our central couple’s care for one another.
But the best bit is clearly the intensely eccentric Harriet Samson Harris as the unreadable child talent agent Mary Grady. The highlight casting sequence is incredibly controlled and mighty hilarious, her possessed, indecipherable phone call shining with farcical mystery. Her screening of Alana is a paramount comic sequence — “You’re a goddamn fighter arencha? You remind me a pitbull dog with sex appeal… and a very Jewish nose!” Like the Penn portion, there’s some brain-bending ambiguity at play, particularly when you’re caught in an extreme close-up. Everyone is arranged into amazing non-sequiturs built on non-sequiturs, but the writing is so dense that you feel immediately familiar with the most transitory peripheral characters although they're seldom seen, like young Gary's even younger brother and buddies. Otherwise there's no one of note besides Ben Safdie’s gay man playing the straight politician or Anderson’s own partner Maya Rudolph as a TV ad director's casting assistant. PTA ingeniously edifies the performative nature of everything.
Even with all the mirrored love interests (both leads have their own string of opposites they could be easily better suited for) it's almost as if the sex comedy template behind the whole exercise keeps our leads together as cinematic “destiny” often does — alternates are almost treated like temptations. Loosely Licorice Pizza is about the rigid borders of taboo, how easy it is to see to the other side, the enterprise of entrepreneurship, romantic rank and the unpredictable intrigue of social relativity.
As is expected, this is cinematic craftsmanship you can’t poke a hole through — at this point Anderson knows how to shoot a movie so naturally he doesn’t even need cinematographer Robert Elswit anymore to retain the essentially invisible, indescribable style he saves up for the precise picture. And when you get down to the substantive narrative content, I fancy basically any topic and genre he’s tackled, this being no exception only moreso since I’m a sucker for love, coming-of-age tales, plotless yarns, boomer culture and all sorts of serious talent taking it all kinds of easy.
Unlike his other Kubrickian tendencies, PTA doesn’t have to adapt anything to be singularly amazing — here he’s taken pieces of interest from Hollywood anecdotes and amplified them into full-fledged dreams. Pizza’s chiefly inspired by offhand tales of childhood from film producer Gary Goetzman involving Yours, Mine and Ours, water beds and pinball machines. Anderson’s latest is very invested in historical specificity, but not too steeped in “AAAAAHHH the 70s…” and ultimately there is no mention or sight of the titular record store chain supposedly serving an atmospheric, descriptive purpose more than a functional one.
But, I mean, damn does PTA have a hard-on for the 70s. That last-minute Live and Let Die drop let us know we’re a mere two years off from Inherent Vice’s setting; in 1973, aurally Licorice Pizza acts as the gentle afterglow of another soundtrack of Greenwood doodles and a fine mixture of popular and eclectic era-tied tunes. IV also has near-caricatures in unbelievably rich, funny one-off dialogue duels — maybe he’s so good with actors, always getting the best from them because he IS the best. There’s some blissful reciprocity happening at all times here and in Anderson’s foremost features.
The film is sensibly, wonderfully conceived, especially the incredible blocking, as he almost always finds the most interesting, intuitive way to shoot any given beat. Anderson’s a staunch classicalist, but he bends and kneads the form just to the point where it and you are putty in his hand. I was mesmerized — PTA writes sequences where you’re just hanging off of every line and gesture. Licorice Pizza stirs up bizarre, uncomfortable feelings, only just odd enough to transcend classification, but even generally speaking it's the most notable notable coming-of-age movie of the millenia other than Boyhood.
It’s funny to think back to right after the success of Boogie Nights, when New Line Cinema told Anderson he was free to do whatever he wanted, that he assumed he would never be in this position again, failing to imagine or foresee all the times he would eat that sentiment from gamble to gamble. Anderson’s only ended up in even greater situations of artistic elbow room, film after film, regardless of box office, due to snowballing clout — in reality, he’s been doing as he pleases since forever. Returning closely to his own earlier style where the original writing was built on ‘what if this happened next’ moments, Licorice Pizza is probably stronger than them all, competing only with Love for inscrutable, radical romantic comedy superiority. Before I would have said Punch-Drunk feels like the biggest trifle of his career, great as it is, but Licorice is even more feathery and freewheeling. Boogie Nights, while a cold classic without doubt, is, for me, overinflated and over-influenced. This movie felt pure and poignant, marked by flawed characters and untested lead actors diving naked into a director’s capable, cunning hands.
The 35mm PanaVision looks superb, even if I don’t think I’ll worship these images to the same degree as his early 2010s work. Licorice Pizza moves through a few courtship clichés before becoming truly its own idiosyncratic, wildly unexpected love story/hangout movie hybrid. It’s a righteously real, self-conscious spin on 50 years past teen movie classics. Even if, in the end, it’s just Anderson huffing the farts of his childhood, it’s an incredible display of self-pleasure — the film is so easily compared to Quentin Tarantino’s last (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, like LP, is also the legendary modern director’s ninth film) in that place and time eclipse any and all narrative nagging.
I swear deep down Anderson is the most crafty hippie to play with the medium and pin critics under his thumb. He’s the unassuming, unofficial king of cinema, consistently levying his creative freedom in such recklessly rewarding ways — Licorice Pizza is conspicuously creepy and comprehensively charming all the same. I’ll be damned if this isn’t the best movie released this hopelessly Godforsaken year — mid-shelf Anderson is still masterpiece material for cineastes and his own peers.
The Tragedy of Macbeth briefing
3 (out of 4)
There’s only so much to say for an adaptation of something so foundational to the written word and the fabric of storytelling, let alone one of the quintessential works of Shakespeare. Macbeth is cream of the crop for Willy and been subject to the tampering of many cinematic marksmen — Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood favored the mystic nature of the semi-supernatural story and is likely the most coveted adaptation. Orson Welles kept it stagey and straighter prior in 1948, Roman Polanski’s leaned into carnage, realism and made sure the practical surpassed the strange. Scotland, PA even had fun turning the Bard into a backdrop for fast food wars. Most recently, 2015’s iteration with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard by Justin Kurzel was a visually fiery, formally spacey arthouse flick, realizing the story too seriously but with sincere Scottish novelty nonetheless.
Joel’s Shakespeare is almost shrink-wrapped. Stark, simple sets with German Expressionist lighting and composition lowers the tale into a steep pretension — the seasoned solo Coen occasionally fumbles to conduct his vision naturally but oftentimes he basks in the grim, symmetrical beauty. When he finds a fresh mode with which to make the monologues move, his hat in the ring is worth the fuss. Otherwise, I don’t need to see the director cinecuck himself with his wife Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth and Denzel Washington as the titular, trepidatiously-fated thane turned king. McDormand is too annoyingly affected to be properly sinister and persuasive, and even though Denzel does an amazing job, he also takes the act of acting to self-servicing places. The rest of the host makes the most of it, with race blind choices like Corey Hawkins as Macduff meeting the Potter reunion of Brendan Gleeson as Duncan, Harry Melling as Malcolm and Kathryn Hunter as the three witches, the latter locked into some unholy trinity of performance peculiarity and prowess. She is the surest reason this film stands apart from others — her acting is otherworldly.
It’s just that my brain is often set to filmography mode, meaning I see The Tragedy of Macbeth more as the first post-breakup album for perhaps the most cherished set of cinematic siblings in American cinema (sorry Wachowskis, Lana didn’t exactly make the best of her alone time). But I can’t say I’m too caring about what Joel sans Ethan is up to… there is claustrophobia encasing the filim in brutally minimalist decorum, but it’s sad that the distinguished domestic filmmaker needed A24 to sell a stock hipster aesthete like B&W and squarer aspects for no reason other than to make sure you KNOW for a FACT you’re watching “art” and not just, you know, one of the best directors around doing Shakespeare. There’s little to make of the cinematographic choices — excellent as Bruno Delbonnel is, this doesn’t hold a brief candle to his own blue-grey doom of the last Coen Bro masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis.
Coen has as much right as any to stand on the shoulders of a theatrical madman of millennia-spanning brilliance, but like Spielberg just did with Sondheim, I don’t see the point of inputting a cinematic cheat code with such statured source material unless your heart is 1000% in it. At least 2021’s WSS feels like it was directed by a young, ruddy, energetic man trapped in an aged filmmaker’s body — 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth feels a bit like Joel on autopilot as he carves out some new chapter separated from his other half. But even for their 10th Western or whatever the brother’s last true effort, 2018’s Netflix anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, felt so much more true and time-testing if reminiscent of their past.
I want to call this a new masterpiece and a great first leg of a burgeoning filmographic journey, but I don’t know. It’s neatly theatrical rather than cinematic, but its justifications for the trouble are slim and none outside of the production reduction’s exemplary screensaver shots. This Tragedy is more storybook than stage adaptation.
There’s only so much to say for an adaptation of something so foundational to the written word and the fabric of storytelling, let alone one of the quintessential works of Shakespeare. Macbeth is cream of the crop for Willy and been subject to the tampering of many cinematic marksmen — Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood favored the mystic nature of the semi-supernatural story and is likely the most coveted adaptation. Orson Welles kept it stagey and straighter prior in 1948, Roman Polanski’s leaned into carnage, realism and made sure the practical surpassed the strange. Scotland, PA even had fun turning the Bard into a backdrop for fast food wars. Most recently, 2015’s iteration with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard by Justin Kurzel was a visually fiery, formally spacey arthouse flick, realizing the story too seriously but with sincere Scottish novelty nonetheless.
Joel’s Shakespeare is almost shrink-wrapped. Stark, simple sets with German Expressionist lighting and composition lowers the tale into a steep pretension — the seasoned solo Coen occasionally fumbles to conduct his vision naturally but oftentimes he basks in the grim, symmetrical beauty. When he finds a fresh mode with which to make the monologues move, his hat in the ring is worth the fuss. Otherwise, I don’t need to see the director cinecuck himself with his wife Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth and Denzel Washington as the titular, trepidatiously-fated thane turned king. McDormand is too annoyingly affected to be properly sinister and persuasive, and even though Denzel does an amazing job, he also takes the act of acting to self-servicing places. The rest of the host makes the most of it, with race blind choices like Corey Hawkins as Macduff meeting the Potter reunion of Brendan Gleeson as Duncan, Harry Melling as Malcolm and Kathryn Hunter as the three witches, the latter locked into some unholy trinity of performance peculiarity and prowess. She is the surest reason this film stands apart from others — her acting is otherworldly.
It’s just that my brain is often set to filmography mode, meaning I see The Tragedy of Macbeth more as the first post-breakup album for perhaps the most cherished set of cinematic siblings in American cinema (sorry Wachowskis, Lana didn’t exactly make the best of her alone time). But I can’t say I’m too caring about what Joel sans Ethan is up to… there is claustrophobia encasing the filim in brutally minimalist decorum, but it’s sad that the distinguished domestic filmmaker needed A24 to sell a stock hipster aesthete like B&W and squarer aspects for no reason other than to make sure you KNOW for a FACT you’re watching “art” and not just, you know, one of the best directors around doing Shakespeare. There’s little to make of the cinematographic choices — excellent as Bruno Delbonnel is, this doesn’t hold a brief candle to his own blue-grey doom of the last Coen Bro masterpiece Inside Llewyn Davis.
Coen has as much right as any to stand on the shoulders of a theatrical madman of millennia-spanning brilliance, but like Spielberg just did with Sondheim, I don’t see the point of inputting a cinematic cheat code with such statured source material unless your heart is 1000% in it. At least 2021’s WSS feels like it was directed by a young, ruddy, energetic man trapped in an aged filmmaker’s body — 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth feels a bit like Joel on autopilot as he carves out some new chapter separated from his other half. But even for their 10th Western or whatever the brother’s last true effort, 2018’s Netflix anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, felt so much more true and time-testing if reminiscent of their past.
I want to call this a new masterpiece and a great first leg of a burgeoning filmographic journey, but I don’t know. It’s neatly theatrical rather than cinematic, but its justifications for the trouble are slim and none outside of the production reduction’s exemplary screensaver shots. This Tragedy is more storybook than stage adaptation.
The King's Man briefing
2 (out of 4)
As much as Matthew Vaughn can be a considerably talented, mirthful mainstream moviemaker, this prequel to his two Kingsman films is empty and embarrassing. There’s no real lore to speak of for starters, so no common prequel plunders to excavate.
From the trailers I could tell The King's Man would be more slight than its predecessors but, sooner or later, Vaughn would pull out some cool steampunk stops given the era but nope, not really. Maybe there are some interesting characters? No, not even close — stock and standard. Gemma Arterton doesn’t even know what accent she’s doing and Djimon Honsu is less Merlin and more the butler with an appetite for killing. It’s Ralph Fiennes show, and while he continues to be a performative treasure as Orlando Oxford he doesn’t carry the film with untapped comic charisma as he did as Monsieur Gustave H. in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Fiennes' aptitude can't level the tonal whiplash and the film’s emotional volatility asks too much of him, or maybe too little. However Daniel Brühl and Matthew Goode are in tune with loony antagonistic abrasiveness.
I was never terribly excited to begin with, but Kingsman in The Great War could’ve worked. Related to Vaughn’s arguable peak X-Men: First Class, I didn’t think this film could even try to make me consider that, just how the X-Men ultimately settle the Cuban Missile Crisis, the King’s Men could single-handedly help end WWI, but dammit they did. Ludicrous as that sounds, the first hour, holy hell it’s very boring. But nonetheless they have to eventually echo the earlier film’s salacious humor with a bit involving Rasputin — Rhys Ivans killing it in a role I could’ve sworn was being dominated by legendary character actor Peter Stormare (who’s who of the “that guy” Hollywood Olympics) — wanting to seduce Oxford's son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) who dies shortly thereafter. To kill your presumed Eggsy is a ballsy move, but I can only mourn with the Duke if he hadn’t comically offered up his offspring for sex not 20 minutes earlier. Similarly, prior to such an extreme second act turn, the trench combat sequence (this film’s Church scene equivalent) would’ve been actually impressive and thrilling in a more suitable context. The third act then immediately transitions to fun times, but it’s so strangely unbalanced I couldn’t possibly know how to feel by that point, let alone before.
It was like Vaughn got jealous watching all these recent British war movies like Dunkirk and 1917 but he decided to Trojan-horse his own. This movie was mismarketed, horribly mismarketed in fact — they made it look like it was gonna be fun but The King’s Man plays largely like some weighty war drama, tryna scooch closer to All Quiet on the Western Front and further away from Bond for edgy zoomers.
Before this mess the Kingsman movies were so congealed — even portions of winks and nods, a pinch of meta, but mostly just playful, pseudo-sophisticated, spry spy fare. I don’t mind Vaughn branching off and trying something sincere, but considering how the silly shit sells these things, I don’t know why he didn’t save the heavy emotions for a more serious separate endeavor and head straight for Kingsman 3 proper, which now will be an awkward follow-up to this DOA detour won’t it? Are you just going to go back to Taron Egerton’s Eggsy and Colin Firth's Harry now that this flick has obviously flopped on its ass? Eh, maybe Vaughn didn’t want to be obligated to keep ramping things up like John Wick does.
I imagine the reviews for this one are no worse than The Golden Circle — see, that sequel was lively, well-structured, indulgent and, probably (ok admittedly) way too long. It was for those who craved even more of the original's insanity whereas this… I’ve no idea who this movie was for... *shrug* There was some accomplished action toward the end.
This is almost surely Vaughn’s worst movie, a remarkably underwhelming feat of mediocrity, trapped in a contradictory mindset of wanting to be most ridiculous at its straightest moments and vice versa. The King’s Man isn’t much more than a confused, clusterfucked bust, a 20th Century acquisition simply cut loose by Disney. Teasing Hitler as a future prequel/sequel villain was a sad excuse to imitate Marvel’s obsession with mid-credits fan favors — I sure can’t wait til these mannered men retcon the Fuhrer’s suicide!
As much as Matthew Vaughn can be a considerably talented, mirthful mainstream moviemaker, this prequel to his two Kingsman films is empty and embarrassing. There’s no real lore to speak of for starters, so no common prequel plunders to excavate.
From the trailers I could tell The King's Man would be more slight than its predecessors but, sooner or later, Vaughn would pull out some cool steampunk stops given the era but nope, not really. Maybe there are some interesting characters? No, not even close — stock and standard. Gemma Arterton doesn’t even know what accent she’s doing and Djimon Honsu is less Merlin and more the butler with an appetite for killing. It’s Ralph Fiennes show, and while he continues to be a performative treasure as Orlando Oxford he doesn’t carry the film with untapped comic charisma as he did as Monsieur Gustave H. in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Fiennes' aptitude can't level the tonal whiplash and the film’s emotional volatility asks too much of him, or maybe too little. However Daniel Brühl and Matthew Goode are in tune with loony antagonistic abrasiveness.
I was never terribly excited to begin with, but Kingsman in The Great War could’ve worked. Related to Vaughn’s arguable peak X-Men: First Class, I didn’t think this film could even try to make me consider that, just how the X-Men ultimately settle the Cuban Missile Crisis, the King’s Men could single-handedly help end WWI, but dammit they did. Ludicrous as that sounds, the first hour, holy hell it’s very boring. But nonetheless they have to eventually echo the earlier film’s salacious humor with a bit involving Rasputin — Rhys Ivans killing it in a role I could’ve sworn was being dominated by legendary character actor Peter Stormare (who’s who of the “that guy” Hollywood Olympics) — wanting to seduce Oxford's son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) who dies shortly thereafter. To kill your presumed Eggsy is a ballsy move, but I can only mourn with the Duke if he hadn’t comically offered up his offspring for sex not 20 minutes earlier. Similarly, prior to such an extreme second act turn, the trench combat sequence (this film’s Church scene equivalent) would’ve been actually impressive and thrilling in a more suitable context. The third act then immediately transitions to fun times, but it’s so strangely unbalanced I couldn’t possibly know how to feel by that point, let alone before.
It was like Vaughn got jealous watching all these recent British war movies like Dunkirk and 1917 but he decided to Trojan-horse his own. This movie was mismarketed, horribly mismarketed in fact — they made it look like it was gonna be fun but The King’s Man plays largely like some weighty war drama, tryna scooch closer to All Quiet on the Western Front and further away from Bond for edgy zoomers.
Before this mess the Kingsman movies were so congealed — even portions of winks and nods, a pinch of meta, but mostly just playful, pseudo-sophisticated, spry spy fare. I don’t mind Vaughn branching off and trying something sincere, but considering how the silly shit sells these things, I don’t know why he didn’t save the heavy emotions for a more serious separate endeavor and head straight for Kingsman 3 proper, which now will be an awkward follow-up to this DOA detour won’t it? Are you just going to go back to Taron Egerton’s Eggsy and Colin Firth's Harry now that this flick has obviously flopped on its ass? Eh, maybe Vaughn didn’t want to be obligated to keep ramping things up like John Wick does.
I imagine the reviews for this one are no worse than The Golden Circle — see, that sequel was lively, well-structured, indulgent and, probably (ok admittedly) way too long. It was for those who craved even more of the original's insanity whereas this… I’ve no idea who this movie was for... *shrug* There was some accomplished action toward the end.
This is almost surely Vaughn’s worst movie, a remarkably underwhelming feat of mediocrity, trapped in a contradictory mindset of wanting to be most ridiculous at its straightest moments and vice versa. The King’s Man isn’t much more than a confused, clusterfucked bust, a 20th Century acquisition simply cut loose by Disney. Teasing Hitler as a future prequel/sequel villain was a sad excuse to imitate Marvel’s obsession with mid-credits fan favors — I sure can’t wait til these mannered men retcon the Fuhrer’s suicide!
The Matrix Resurrections briefing
1 (out of 4)
Hey Warner Bros, hey singular Wachowski sibling — you don’t get to make a stink about how fucked up and desensitized our world is only to feed that evil beast even more with needless studio slop. Resurrections is a generous portion of painful postmodern swill, treating The Matrix and its legacy with as much reverence as Space Jam, all free with Disney-level soul-incinerating corporate nihilism included. This is Dogshit Absolut — I hated this movie and even figured going in that I’d give it a chance, eager to find anything to latch onto. Ultimately I was more than a little confused by The Matrix Resurrections, and not just because the clotted, convoluted plotting complements the pointless story.
I was baffled — it all hinges and is justified by the early mega-meta-montage that makes your stomach churn and is also probably the best way to update to The Matrix in a moment. The weird, sickening, yin-yanging, paradoxical highlight AND lowlight of this entire excretion is Resurrections' ham-fisted crux because it’s the only part that contains anything culturally or socially relevant, the one time the movie seems to have its own idea, but its own idea is to have no ideas. “What if we throw out a bunch of pitches for Matrix 4 IN Matrix 4???” That’s not clever, that’s like the ‘work smarter not harder’ saying except that relates to life problems, not making your garbage screenplay easier to pinch off.
I know I sound like a frothing fanboy but I’m not really attached to the Matrix movies and, considering the original lore is already kind of scrambled (Animatrix is probably better than any sequel deep down) there isn’t much to really foul up. But it was just like the late Luke Skywalker thing of, “Oh I’m sorry Neo, but your sacrifices don’t matter anymore! They were actually reversed because of corporate greed, but we’re gonna pretend it’s an inspired, important, revisionist storytelling decision.” Keanu shows up but barely tries meanwhile Carrie-Anne Moss barely shows up and then she’s superwoman. At first they seem to make Jessica Henwick's blue-haired Bugs (as in Bunny? The WB property? Just making sure you didn’t forget) the protagonist but then it’s still basically Reeves. To be fair I kind of like the new Architect (now a smug NPH in the Analyst spot) keeping extra-special watch over Neo.
After revisiting the earlier films I can clearly map out a downward slope in quality with every successive sequel — Reloaded and Revolutions barely have enough material for one follow-up let alone two, and as such Reloaded is bloated by its own condescending, pseudo-intellectual airs, forgiven with some truly impressive action beats. While not too different from the original, the second installment was a lot hornier, thinkier, and committed to the most spectacular showmanship of the entire franchise, a few CGI Smith’s notwithstanding. Revolutions is different, underwhelming, ponderous, generally a bad war movie and a conclusion more residual than climactic, yet it has fascinating structure and moments to capitalize on from the previous movies. Whereas the original spans from digital hero’s journey to actualized enlightenment, really the inanities of any Matrix sequel hides behind cybertronic gobbledegook and biblical turn of events.
But The Matrix Resurrections doesn’t even follow through on its own watered down, rehashed themes. Neo loves Trinity, but love was only a small, cringy section in the OG trilogy and hardly the main backbone until the later arc of the sequels. The trilogy’s subtext was interesting if stodgy, built out of something as ancient as it was futuristic. Resurrections is little more than a literal product of WB’s current desperation, just movie execs going “eh, what else we got?” They’re simply starving for reliable money-milkers: The Batman looks more like A Batman movie to me, Harry Potter spin-offs are barely producing, Chris Nolan has left and their only real movie this year, Dune, wasn’t quite a hit. Outside of DC's cultural irrelevance (Superpets included), Barbie, Dune Part Two, some Lord of the Rings anime and Furiosa are the only tricks up their sleeve for several years.
I wish they were better than this — Resurrections is one of the worst movies of the year and an irredeemably misguided sequel, yet, oddly enough, it's probably better than any attempt by someone other than at least one of the OG creators. It has moments, just enough to fill a slick trailer spliced with Jefferson Airplane’s "White Rabbit." There are even decent story threads of a post-Revolutions world, but little rising above WB’s own cloying sense of corporate identity, or anything coming close to Animatrix’s fleshed out concepts and inspirations.
But what is this some Scream sequel? 22 Jump Street? Reloaded wasn’t fantastic but it was a real follow-up that eventually made its mark and justified its existence, not just mucking its way along with meta malarkey. The action is overly-edited ass as opposed to rigorously storyboarded; the quick-cut, high frame-rate garbage ironically honors a different face of Y2K-era action filmmaking, just not the classic, anime-allocated ambitions of the trilogy. Especially when a returning Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) shouts out valid critiques of the movie itself during a crappy "set piece," Resurrections is like a HAL 9000 you have to shut down — way too self-aware for its own good.
The fourth Matrix is a consequence of really deadening cynicism and without mincing many more words, it sucked hard. This flick couldn’t existentially stir any of the sheeple except, possibly and hilariously, with the power of its profound, embarrassing failure. “Tragedy or farce?” this movie’s resurfaced Morbius (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) proposes. Why not both?
Hey Warner Bros, hey singular Wachowski sibling — you don’t get to make a stink about how fucked up and desensitized our world is only to feed that evil beast even more with needless studio slop. Resurrections is a generous portion of painful postmodern swill, treating The Matrix and its legacy with as much reverence as Space Jam, all free with Disney-level soul-incinerating corporate nihilism included. This is Dogshit Absolut — I hated this movie and even figured going in that I’d give it a chance, eager to find anything to latch onto. Ultimately I was more than a little confused by The Matrix Resurrections, and not just because the clotted, convoluted plotting complements the pointless story.
I was baffled — it all hinges and is justified by the early mega-meta-montage that makes your stomach churn and is also probably the best way to update to The Matrix in a moment. The weird, sickening, yin-yanging, paradoxical highlight AND lowlight of this entire excretion is Resurrections' ham-fisted crux because it’s the only part that contains anything culturally or socially relevant, the one time the movie seems to have its own idea, but its own idea is to have no ideas. “What if we throw out a bunch of pitches for Matrix 4 IN Matrix 4???” That’s not clever, that’s like the ‘work smarter not harder’ saying except that relates to life problems, not making your garbage screenplay easier to pinch off.
I know I sound like a frothing fanboy but I’m not really attached to the Matrix movies and, considering the original lore is already kind of scrambled (Animatrix is probably better than any sequel deep down) there isn’t much to really foul up. But it was just like the late Luke Skywalker thing of, “Oh I’m sorry Neo, but your sacrifices don’t matter anymore! They were actually reversed because of corporate greed, but we’re gonna pretend it’s an inspired, important, revisionist storytelling decision.” Keanu shows up but barely tries meanwhile Carrie-Anne Moss barely shows up and then she’s superwoman. At first they seem to make Jessica Henwick's blue-haired Bugs (as in Bunny? The WB property? Just making sure you didn’t forget) the protagonist but then it’s still basically Reeves. To be fair I kind of like the new Architect (now a smug NPH in the Analyst spot) keeping extra-special watch over Neo.
After revisiting the earlier films I can clearly map out a downward slope in quality with every successive sequel — Reloaded and Revolutions barely have enough material for one follow-up let alone two, and as such Reloaded is bloated by its own condescending, pseudo-intellectual airs, forgiven with some truly impressive action beats. While not too different from the original, the second installment was a lot hornier, thinkier, and committed to the most spectacular showmanship of the entire franchise, a few CGI Smith’s notwithstanding. Revolutions is different, underwhelming, ponderous, generally a bad war movie and a conclusion more residual than climactic, yet it has fascinating structure and moments to capitalize on from the previous movies. Whereas the original spans from digital hero’s journey to actualized enlightenment, really the inanities of any Matrix sequel hides behind cybertronic gobbledegook and biblical turn of events.
But The Matrix Resurrections doesn’t even follow through on its own watered down, rehashed themes. Neo loves Trinity, but love was only a small, cringy section in the OG trilogy and hardly the main backbone until the later arc of the sequels. The trilogy’s subtext was interesting if stodgy, built out of something as ancient as it was futuristic. Resurrections is little more than a literal product of WB’s current desperation, just movie execs going “eh, what else we got?” They’re simply starving for reliable money-milkers: The Batman looks more like A Batman movie to me, Harry Potter spin-offs are barely producing, Chris Nolan has left and their only real movie this year, Dune, wasn’t quite a hit. Outside of DC's cultural irrelevance (Superpets included), Barbie, Dune Part Two, some Lord of the Rings anime and Furiosa are the only tricks up their sleeve for several years.
I wish they were better than this — Resurrections is one of the worst movies of the year and an irredeemably misguided sequel, yet, oddly enough, it's probably better than any attempt by someone other than at least one of the OG creators. It has moments, just enough to fill a slick trailer spliced with Jefferson Airplane’s "White Rabbit." There are even decent story threads of a post-Revolutions world, but little rising above WB’s own cloying sense of corporate identity, or anything coming close to Animatrix’s fleshed out concepts and inspirations.
But what is this some Scream sequel? 22 Jump Street? Reloaded wasn’t fantastic but it was a real follow-up that eventually made its mark and justified its existence, not just mucking its way along with meta malarkey. The action is overly-edited ass as opposed to rigorously storyboarded; the quick-cut, high frame-rate garbage ironically honors a different face of Y2K-era action filmmaking, just not the classic, anime-allocated ambitions of the trilogy. Especially when a returning Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) shouts out valid critiques of the movie itself during a crappy "set piece," Resurrections is like a HAL 9000 you have to shut down — way too self-aware for its own good.
The fourth Matrix is a consequence of really deadening cynicism and without mincing many more words, it sucked hard. This flick couldn’t existentially stir any of the sheeple except, possibly and hilariously, with the power of its profound, embarrassing failure. “Tragedy or farce?” this movie’s resurfaced Morbius (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) proposes. Why not both?
Nightmare Alley briefing
3 ½ (out of 4)
Let’s put a spotlight (or perhaps a rain-spotted, smoke-stained streetlight) on the lead and emphasize that Nightmare Alley is one of Guillermo del Toro’s best films, easily one of 2021’s brawniest efforts and among the surest straight-up noirs of modern times. That is to say, at least the kind rejecting the neo- quality the most, as this is but a notch below the authenticity of the Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There. If considered a remake, it’s already among the finest, but just like Spielberg doesn’t want you to think he just revised the 1961 Best Picture Winner, I’m sure Guillermo would rather have this deemed a new adaptation. If we’re comparing, this year's version is impossibly superior to 1947’s, which itself was a speedy turnaround of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel.
Like he followed some textbook law, del Toro found some crinkle in culture I wasn't at all familiar with, then made me familiar, appreciative and aware of all the improvements waiting in the wings to be made. As long as you’re doing it better, that’s how the coolest cinematic echo chambers keeps on pinging and a-panging — personally I just need a fifth, fitful adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Whether considered a new Gresham repurposing or the 75-year removed redo of the 1947 Edmund Goulding film, Nightmare Alley is masterfully lit, shot, acted, conceived and otherwise composed — the insane 65mm digital wide-angle cinematography, especially during the flawless tracking shots, is incredible, capturing more in every frame than seems physically feasible. Del Toro is a phenomenal master of color, which Nightmare Alley was stunningly designed for, HOWEVER, in beautifully converted B&W for the subtitular Vision in Darkness and Light, the film is nevertheless stunning stripped down to the more traditional chiaroscuro experience.
Though purists may differ, I found del Toro had more respect for the characters than the older take, digging and justifying a more tragic, honorably histrionic angle, as evidence by the time and attention devoted to special supporting players in Rooney Mara and David Strathairn’s roles. Taking a far broader, grander, emotionally heightened approach purifies the pulp simplicity of the story, even finding more concealed ways to poke at the dangerous tether between grief and belief, as well as smoothing out the original version’s interludes of narrower, religious directness.
It’s simply superb filmmaking, an inconspicuously towering achievement of shrewd, scintillating, spellbinding care and craft, quite untouched by flaw. The writing is sharper than you expect — even just the silly double entendre you might find in any noir is wittier, deeper than you bargain for. It may just be the better variation on the book, evoking the story’s cyclical, karmically balanced composite — this script by both del Toro and Kim Morgan has the themes down pat. This Nightmare Alley tries harder to conflate psychology, grifting, faith, as well as the nature of deception and self-deception, creating a genre epic relatively unmatched in its escalation of the traditional structure, thoroughly rounding out this tragedy's circular shape.
Thanks to Cate Blanchett’s head-hurdling femme fatale, we’re offered chilling moments of paradoxically dead-calm unease, capable of making your hairs stand up and your heart rate get real low. The mid-show confrontation, the lie detector test, the psychoanalysis — the film’s fantastic midsection is stuffed with goods equally edifying and mystifying. Is Blanchett the best actress alive? She might be, but speculative sensationalizing aside it was just great to watch her sleaze and seduce the shit out of her role, something she’s never been afforded with great purpose, other than maybe Steven Soderbergh's The Good German — she was also the only real acting happening in Don’t Look Up, except for Mark Rylance’s helium-toned hilarity. Bradley Cooper is also exceptional as our scummy, sagacious swindler; I don’t think I’ve seen him better in anything prior. With assists by Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins and a Guillermo-guaranteed Ron Perlman, altogether there are no weak links in this cinematic chain mail.
This year has been lined with disappointments big and small so thank you sir, Mr. del Toro sir, for a real goddamn winner. Nightmare Alley is his most consummately impressive creation since Pan’s Labyrinth, revealing an entire subset of Guillermo’s mind we've never seen, though he is still basically, metaphorically getting to play make-believe with his beloved monsters. While del Toro prefers something tasteful over pure shock value, Nightmare Alley is softly stunning before becoming startlingly, sporadically violent sans warning — yet the film stays subtle even at its most extravagant.
This is a brilliant, devoted exercise, a lovingly sublime movie in every measurable technical quality and yet the period psych-thriller could be a little whelming to the layman — if you’re not steeped in noir’s history, I couldn’t say whether Nightmare is gonna float your boat or cook your goose. If you're down the rabbit hole of cigarette ash, convolution, dames and inescapable fates, this film is absolute fucking funereal paradise.
What I hate about classically great filmmaking — built less on innovation and more on proven talent and forms — is that the slam dunks offer so little to extrapolate, and sometimes it's best to remain relatively laconic when quality speaks for itself. Nightmare Alley is a genre masterpiece and I can’t impart anything more than I loved it. This film has been unceremoniously ignored but I'd urge just about anyone to take a peek. Worst case scenario: you think it’s alright.
Let’s put a spotlight (or perhaps a rain-spotted, smoke-stained streetlight) on the lead and emphasize that Nightmare Alley is one of Guillermo del Toro’s best films, easily one of 2021’s brawniest efforts and among the surest straight-up noirs of modern times. That is to say, at least the kind rejecting the neo- quality the most, as this is but a notch below the authenticity of the Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There. If considered a remake, it’s already among the finest, but just like Spielberg doesn’t want you to think he just revised the 1961 Best Picture Winner, I’m sure Guillermo would rather have this deemed a new adaptation. If we’re comparing, this year's version is impossibly superior to 1947’s, which itself was a speedy turnaround of William Lindsay Gresham’s novel.
Like he followed some textbook law, del Toro found some crinkle in culture I wasn't at all familiar with, then made me familiar, appreciative and aware of all the improvements waiting in the wings to be made. As long as you’re doing it better, that’s how the coolest cinematic echo chambers keeps on pinging and a-panging — personally I just need a fifth, fitful adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Whether considered a new Gresham repurposing or the 75-year removed redo of the 1947 Edmund Goulding film, Nightmare Alley is masterfully lit, shot, acted, conceived and otherwise composed — the insane 65mm digital wide-angle cinematography, especially during the flawless tracking shots, is incredible, capturing more in every frame than seems physically feasible. Del Toro is a phenomenal master of color, which Nightmare Alley was stunningly designed for, HOWEVER, in beautifully converted B&W for the subtitular Vision in Darkness and Light, the film is nevertheless stunning stripped down to the more traditional chiaroscuro experience.
Though purists may differ, I found del Toro had more respect for the characters than the older take, digging and justifying a more tragic, honorably histrionic angle, as evidence by the time and attention devoted to special supporting players in Rooney Mara and David Strathairn’s roles. Taking a far broader, grander, emotionally heightened approach purifies the pulp simplicity of the story, even finding more concealed ways to poke at the dangerous tether between grief and belief, as well as smoothing out the original version’s interludes of narrower, religious directness.
It’s simply superb filmmaking, an inconspicuously towering achievement of shrewd, scintillating, spellbinding care and craft, quite untouched by flaw. The writing is sharper than you expect — even just the silly double entendre you might find in any noir is wittier, deeper than you bargain for. It may just be the better variation on the book, evoking the story’s cyclical, karmically balanced composite — this script by both del Toro and Kim Morgan has the themes down pat. This Nightmare Alley tries harder to conflate psychology, grifting, faith, as well as the nature of deception and self-deception, creating a genre epic relatively unmatched in its escalation of the traditional structure, thoroughly rounding out this tragedy's circular shape.
Thanks to Cate Blanchett’s head-hurdling femme fatale, we’re offered chilling moments of paradoxically dead-calm unease, capable of making your hairs stand up and your heart rate get real low. The mid-show confrontation, the lie detector test, the psychoanalysis — the film’s fantastic midsection is stuffed with goods equally edifying and mystifying. Is Blanchett the best actress alive? She might be, but speculative sensationalizing aside it was just great to watch her sleaze and seduce the shit out of her role, something she’s never been afforded with great purpose, other than maybe Steven Soderbergh's The Good German — she was also the only real acting happening in Don’t Look Up, except for Mark Rylance’s helium-toned hilarity. Bradley Cooper is also exceptional as our scummy, sagacious swindler; I don’t think I’ve seen him better in anything prior. With assists by Willem Dafoe, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins and a Guillermo-guaranteed Ron Perlman, altogether there are no weak links in this cinematic chain mail.
This year has been lined with disappointments big and small so thank you sir, Mr. del Toro sir, for a real goddamn winner. Nightmare Alley is his most consummately impressive creation since Pan’s Labyrinth, revealing an entire subset of Guillermo’s mind we've never seen, though he is still basically, metaphorically getting to play make-believe with his beloved monsters. While del Toro prefers something tasteful over pure shock value, Nightmare Alley is softly stunning before becoming startlingly, sporadically violent sans warning — yet the film stays subtle even at its most extravagant.
This is a brilliant, devoted exercise, a lovingly sublime movie in every measurable technical quality and yet the period psych-thriller could be a little whelming to the layman — if you’re not steeped in noir’s history, I couldn’t say whether Nightmare is gonna float your boat or cook your goose. If you're down the rabbit hole of cigarette ash, convolution, dames and inescapable fates, this film is absolute fucking funereal paradise.
What I hate about classically great filmmaking — built less on innovation and more on proven talent and forms — is that the slam dunks offer so little to extrapolate, and sometimes it's best to remain relatively laconic when quality speaks for itself. Nightmare Alley is a genre masterpiece and I can’t impart anything more than I loved it. This film has been unceremoniously ignored but I'd urge just about anyone to take a peek. Worst case scenario: you think it’s alright.
Spider-Man: No Way Home briefing
2 ½ (out of 4)
If I was 12 right now I’d be losing my shit. At more than twice that age, I don’t even know how to address this movie — as one fat slab of fan fiction that almost works, Spider-Man: No Way Home feels both contentedly wholesome and completely evil, like some young 21st century boy’s most wishful pop culture yearning come terribly true.
This is one I would’ve skipped seeing so early in theaters just to avoid the diehard crowds, since every Marvel movie for the past several years has been akin to some televised megachurch on Sunday morning, so I couldn’t be less surprised how into it people were. I was, however, pretty aghast at the extent to which I was won over. But then the façade wore off, and it appears that No Way Home is going to age like most of the MCU — inelegantly. But maybe I exaggerate, as it’s a helplessly acquiescent excuse for a cultural clusterfuck but a pretty fun fantasy at its core. Like I’ve said before, we’ve yet to see a real direction for Phase 4 but this is another instance of MCU leftovers in another hardly ideal search for shelf life. It’s just a cooperative corporate experiment that happened to go over extremely well, from the lips-sealed press tour to the strategic marketing culminating in a release that felt as eventful as an Avengers flick. Giving Endgame a run for its money is no small feat.
But the reason this film is a nearly unparalleled commercial juggernaut is not at all because of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. It’s funny, after he finally seemed to shake Robert Downey Jr.’s shadow after being stuck for two 'solo' rounds untrusted to carry a Spider-Man flick, the moviemaking powers that be really thought the lad should never be afforded his own moment in the sun and perpetually be better remembered for elevating Avengers/Avengers-like fare. On an unrelated note, is it in Holland’s contract that his left eyebrow must be disheveled? Maybe its something genealogical but it’s literally always askew.
Somehow No Way Home is a Holland-era best despite barely qualifying as its own movie, seeing as the entire structure is meant for nothing more than to scaffold the magnificently middling, pandering spell of fanatic-fondling that is this film’s overcommitted, irresponsibly indulgent final act. This is just MCU entertainment at its most serialized — two plot threads are introduced and resolved in the first 40 minutes, and I actually didn’t mind Peter Parker the pariah or college entry struggles. But whether it's disposable moments with Daredevil cameos, further upstaging thanks to Doctor Strange’s rap feature film-equivalent, poorly staged and acted villain roundups for those that never mattered — oh I really missed Electro, Lizard Guy and the complexity of Sandman — or Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire all providing the real reason to get butts in seats, this flick is never its own.
I didn’t care for Homecoming’s high school comedy carelessness, then Far From Home was just trapped in Endgame's aftermath; simply put both were just lame trifles. It was nice for Spidey to once again feel like an event picture — akin to Captain’s corner, I find his overstuffed third entry functioned more like memorable MCU entertainment, topping both The First Avengers’ advertisement-like acne and Winter Soldier’s overrated, silly-then-serious flimsiness.
But here we're dealing with a very direct sequel — almost all of Tom Holland’s era has taken place in this moment where the Avengers storyline has already come to a crescendo and by the time it’s all wrapping up the zoomer Spidey is starting out in 2017 with his chaperone-less stuff. He was so shoehorned into Infinity War at the last damn second (to great effect I must clarify) that it beckons consideration of so many other crazy timelines that could’ve come to be all depending on some measure of fiscal chance. It’s like Kevin Feige got jealous of 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse (and, ya know, the fact that it made his Spidey flicks look like trash) and decided a merger with Sony would mean real money.
Pivot here though — Aunt May’s death is so bad I could devote a whole graph to it. So for two film’s Marisa Tomei’s presence has been for sex appeal predominantly, and Disney never let you forget it. Her three-film 'arc' involves dating Happy and breaking up with him and… that’s it. Oh right I forgot, she cleaned Spider-Man’s outfit between the fanfare here, damn I’m really going to miss her. After disrespecting the role and actor at hand, only to then try to reach for such stirring second-act-turn emotions by knocking her off with a TV-tier parting — wherein its simple to stand and give a wisdom-passing final monologue while sporting fresh, mortal wounds — is insulting to all associated. Remember that incredibly moving, similarly placed speech in 2004's Spider-Man 2? It's almost as sad watching Holland tear his heart out to such weak material ("By the way, with great power comes great respons-ack!") scratching desperately to make these cheap ploys worth investing in. Garfield’s moment saving Zendaya's MJ is many times more satisfying in a reactive, character-confronting sense, though that moment is a fractured microcosm of the whole ordeal — a decent bit of crossover emotional closure preceded by awful, clearly rushed visual effects from the Disney factory.
Also how lazy are they now that post-credit scenes are just trailers for the next movie? The entire conceit of stingers is soulless to begin with and now you’ve corrupted the concept into something even more banal and benign, congrats. Zendaya is actually not so bad in this one, continuing her increased charm from the last one from when she was barely present in Homecoming. Ned (Jacob Batalon) is the same, whatever, no comment. Out of the returning figures, it's easily Garfield who miraculously boosts his image more than Holland could hope for with this and Uncharted put together.
This is one of those once-per-generation films that still amounts to freaking out over a fancy Nickelodeon special like The Jimmy Timmy/Power Hour or Batman meeting Scooby Doo. It exists to justify a compilation video’s worth of forced, not altogether fruitless fantasies, but at the end of the day the “good bits” ain’t great because they’re the best parts of an otherwise negligible feature film, like Rogue One with those Darth Vader excerpts that were only there to deceive fanboys and casuals alike into forgiving boring slop.
Jon Watts has barely known a life from behind the camera of something besides the webhead. He seems as yes-manned as any the Mouse has put through the wringer, save maybe for Ant-Man’s Peyton Reed who literally directed Yes Man — there’s no artistic voice to speak of. The villains of the last two Spidey flicks were the highlights, Michael Keaton’s Vulture and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio, but this one can only capitalize by aping on previously great, non-MCU villains — but of course No Way Home is coasting on the mystery box/event film setup and the sheer amount of bullshit Feige deemed fit to shove and cram and squeeze into this oh so profitable product of godly remunerations.
No Way Home is easy to enjoy yet proving difficult to love, offering everything you could possibly want and more, and speaking of which maybe we should go ahead and expect more? Anyway, I suppose, in the end, it was all worth it to see Tobey’s dumb, wonderful face. I've barely brought him up but he’s nothing less than a delight — even watching the legend spew out those infamously crappy Marvel quips still got me going. Maguire, like even the most disinterested of us, is just along for the ride.
If I was 12 right now I’d be losing my shit. At more than twice that age, I don’t even know how to address this movie — as one fat slab of fan fiction that almost works, Spider-Man: No Way Home feels both contentedly wholesome and completely evil, like some young 21st century boy’s most wishful pop culture yearning come terribly true.
This is one I would’ve skipped seeing so early in theaters just to avoid the diehard crowds, since every Marvel movie for the past several years has been akin to some televised megachurch on Sunday morning, so I couldn’t be less surprised how into it people were. I was, however, pretty aghast at the extent to which I was won over. But then the façade wore off, and it appears that No Way Home is going to age like most of the MCU — inelegantly. But maybe I exaggerate, as it’s a helplessly acquiescent excuse for a cultural clusterfuck but a pretty fun fantasy at its core. Like I’ve said before, we’ve yet to see a real direction for Phase 4 but this is another instance of MCU leftovers in another hardly ideal search for shelf life. It’s just a cooperative corporate experiment that happened to go over extremely well, from the lips-sealed press tour to the strategic marketing culminating in a release that felt as eventful as an Avengers flick. Giving Endgame a run for its money is no small feat.
But the reason this film is a nearly unparalleled commercial juggernaut is not at all because of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. It’s funny, after he finally seemed to shake Robert Downey Jr.’s shadow after being stuck for two 'solo' rounds untrusted to carry a Spider-Man flick, the moviemaking powers that be really thought the lad should never be afforded his own moment in the sun and perpetually be better remembered for elevating Avengers/Avengers-like fare. On an unrelated note, is it in Holland’s contract that his left eyebrow must be disheveled? Maybe its something genealogical but it’s literally always askew.
Somehow No Way Home is a Holland-era best despite barely qualifying as its own movie, seeing as the entire structure is meant for nothing more than to scaffold the magnificently middling, pandering spell of fanatic-fondling that is this film’s overcommitted, irresponsibly indulgent final act. This is just MCU entertainment at its most serialized — two plot threads are introduced and resolved in the first 40 minutes, and I actually didn’t mind Peter Parker the pariah or college entry struggles. But whether it's disposable moments with Daredevil cameos, further upstaging thanks to Doctor Strange’s rap feature film-equivalent, poorly staged and acted villain roundups for those that never mattered — oh I really missed Electro, Lizard Guy and the complexity of Sandman — or Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire all providing the real reason to get butts in seats, this flick is never its own.
I didn’t care for Homecoming’s high school comedy carelessness, then Far From Home was just trapped in Endgame's aftermath; simply put both were just lame trifles. It was nice for Spidey to once again feel like an event picture — akin to Captain’s corner, I find his overstuffed third entry functioned more like memorable MCU entertainment, topping both The First Avengers’ advertisement-like acne and Winter Soldier’s overrated, silly-then-serious flimsiness.
But here we're dealing with a very direct sequel — almost all of Tom Holland’s era has taken place in this moment where the Avengers storyline has already come to a crescendo and by the time it’s all wrapping up the zoomer Spidey is starting out in 2017 with his chaperone-less stuff. He was so shoehorned into Infinity War at the last damn second (to great effect I must clarify) that it beckons consideration of so many other crazy timelines that could’ve come to be all depending on some measure of fiscal chance. It’s like Kevin Feige got jealous of 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse (and, ya know, the fact that it made his Spidey flicks look like trash) and decided a merger with Sony would mean real money.
Pivot here though — Aunt May’s death is so bad I could devote a whole graph to it. So for two film’s Marisa Tomei’s presence has been for sex appeal predominantly, and Disney never let you forget it. Her three-film 'arc' involves dating Happy and breaking up with him and… that’s it. Oh right I forgot, she cleaned Spider-Man’s outfit between the fanfare here, damn I’m really going to miss her. After disrespecting the role and actor at hand, only to then try to reach for such stirring second-act-turn emotions by knocking her off with a TV-tier parting — wherein its simple to stand and give a wisdom-passing final monologue while sporting fresh, mortal wounds — is insulting to all associated. Remember that incredibly moving, similarly placed speech in 2004's Spider-Man 2? It's almost as sad watching Holland tear his heart out to such weak material ("By the way, with great power comes great respons-ack!") scratching desperately to make these cheap ploys worth investing in. Garfield’s moment saving Zendaya's MJ is many times more satisfying in a reactive, character-confronting sense, though that moment is a fractured microcosm of the whole ordeal — a decent bit of crossover emotional closure preceded by awful, clearly rushed visual effects from the Disney factory.
Also how lazy are they now that post-credit scenes are just trailers for the next movie? The entire conceit of stingers is soulless to begin with and now you’ve corrupted the concept into something even more banal and benign, congrats. Zendaya is actually not so bad in this one, continuing her increased charm from the last one from when she was barely present in Homecoming. Ned (Jacob Batalon) is the same, whatever, no comment. Out of the returning figures, it's easily Garfield who miraculously boosts his image more than Holland could hope for with this and Uncharted put together.
This is one of those once-per-generation films that still amounts to freaking out over a fancy Nickelodeon special like The Jimmy Timmy/Power Hour or Batman meeting Scooby Doo. It exists to justify a compilation video’s worth of forced, not altogether fruitless fantasies, but at the end of the day the “good bits” ain’t great because they’re the best parts of an otherwise negligible feature film, like Rogue One with those Darth Vader excerpts that were only there to deceive fanboys and casuals alike into forgiving boring slop.
Jon Watts has barely known a life from behind the camera of something besides the webhead. He seems as yes-manned as any the Mouse has put through the wringer, save maybe for Ant-Man’s Peyton Reed who literally directed Yes Man — there’s no artistic voice to speak of. The villains of the last two Spidey flicks were the highlights, Michael Keaton’s Vulture and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio, but this one can only capitalize by aping on previously great, non-MCU villains — but of course No Way Home is coasting on the mystery box/event film setup and the sheer amount of bullshit Feige deemed fit to shove and cram and squeeze into this oh so profitable product of godly remunerations.
No Way Home is easy to enjoy yet proving difficult to love, offering everything you could possibly want and more, and speaking of which maybe we should go ahead and expect more? Anyway, I suppose, in the end, it was all worth it to see Tobey’s dumb, wonderful face. I've barely brought him up but he’s nothing less than a delight — even watching the legend spew out those infamously crappy Marvel quips still got me going. Maguire, like even the most disinterested of us, is just along for the ride.
West Side Story briefing
3 (out of 4)
Steven Spielberg has nothing to prove and no hesitation proving he has nothing to prove. He and longtime cinematographic collaborator Janusz Kaminski are such a hallowed, heavenly pairing that the subject seldom matters — together they find the most instinctive way to keep the cuts low, the camera’s heart beating and the framing as sure, sensible and cinematic as effort affords.
I would love to say this new West Side Story supersedes the original outright but it just doesn’t. That said, that which Spielberg doesn’t outdo in regards to the 60-years-past iteration — based on the works of Leonard Bernstein and Steven Sondheim (an untimely RIP to the latter) and obviously inspired by Romeo and Juliet — is more than evenly offset by a respectable swathe of improvements. Spielberg has, most stringently, stripped the show’s staginess; whereas Robert Wise’s film is bright, colorful and clean, Spielberg’s vision is antithetically grimy, gritty and amped by aggressively animated direction.
But for all of Spielberg’s prodigious, indefatigable virtuoso strutting its stuff, West Side Story is somehow another one of his frustratingly near-great films post-2005 like The Adventures of Tintin and Lincoln that, while peerless in technical aptitude, still serve as pointed reminders that the pop-filmmaking God has been stranded in the shadow of his prime for some time. Tintin broke some ground in the mo-cap game and Lincoln is about the most elegant and exemplary Hollywood biopic/period flick you could ask for these days, but musicals are rare untapped ground for the illustrious jack of all trades, master of fun. Even pushing 80 Spielberg possesses the exuberance of a young, grasping filmmaker, though his age catches up with him once this feature gives way from fireworks to a finale of fizz. Where this Story most proudly stands apart from Wise’s Best Picture winner a lifetime ago is the Spielberg/Kaminski power couple of maximum cinematic velocity.
The agonizing precision in raw, restless camerawork is matched by genuinely devoted performances by the likes of the very untested Rachel Zegler as Maria, who easily outsteps the retrospective insensitivity of Natalie Wood’s casting, although the lady lead is still not played by a Puerto Rican (*gasp*) as Zegler is Columbian. There's also the sensational Adriana DeBose playing Anita (the former actress Rita Moreno has a new part in Valentina, a reconfiguration of the original adult counsel Doc), the Broadway-bespoke David Alvarez as Bernardo and a considerably charismatic Corey Stoll as Lieutenant Schrank. But the most lauding must be placed on the new Riff, Mike Haist, the overall standout in a completely commendable, all but flawless turn.
The elephant in the room is Ansel Elgort (gesundheit), who just can’t carry his own Side of the film’s emotional weight as Tony, even for as much as the movie attempts to add something to the character by drawing him more like a reformed rebel and less like a regular ol’ ex-gang member. Elgort does well for awhile, on all fronts earning sympathy whilst singing to satisfaction. But right before the credits he will make you miss Richard Beymer and his bleach-white, phony-ass smile — Ansel's reaction to Maria’s rumored death is so bad it brings the whole movie down a peg. By a sliver, Elgort ends up West Side’s Achilles Heel.
The choreography may be all new but the changes otherwise, while largely positive, are cosmetic ranging from inspired to trivial. You'll find, if nothing else, the environs have been updated whenever possible. "America" is now interactively moving through broad daylight, the polar opposite of the prior nighttime rooftop-stepping, the whole contour of "Cool Boy" has been altered in its new placement before the shiv-showdown, for much better as the lyrics willingly bend toward a fitting foreboding. "Somewhere" has been passed from a lover's desperate duo to a lonely lamentation as the now grandmotherly Moreno (her own 60-years removed double DeBose is so good she’s on her way to a likely Best Supporting Actress win) solemnly solos before she is surreally forced to essentially intervene in her former character's sexual assault. Otherwise the superficial alterations make for mostly minor advancements to the tale’s lasting impact. "I Feel Pretty," apparently to Sondheim's relief, finally follows the rumble as it did on the stage. Spielberg makes it his own at each and every chance, but you won’t find much new here besides the faces, framing, locales and a few numbers jostled smack dab in the middle of the two-day-long narrative scope. The only further fluctuation is that the film is excruciatingly well-tailored to Spanish speaking audiences — the subtitle exclusion was a wise move on Spielberg’s part that will elevate the movie for half the intended audience and hardly retracts any enjoyment from English-speakers.
This film premiered three days after Sondheim’s death, and the man’s own unadapted Merrily We Roll Along is early into its 20-year making by who other than the temporal tactician himself Richard Linklater. I bring this up only to emphasize how many chances have yet to be taken in pre-established classics of theater and, if Damien Chazelle’s La La Land can attest, what film-specific musicals alone can unearth and unlock. Regardless of everything done to sit apart from the earlier film adaptation, West Side Story circa 2021 strains in vain to substantiate its own existence, regardless of Spielberg’s many sublime passages of unmistakably vivaciousness. Despite its grandiloquence and persisting narrative relevance, I still don’t know if a late West Side Story was worth the trouble, since Stevie easily could’ve carved out a singular nook of film history (still no Western) rather than try outgun pre-established, stone-set legends. By the end I felt fine but not gay.
Steven Spielberg has nothing to prove and no hesitation proving he has nothing to prove. He and longtime cinematographic collaborator Janusz Kaminski are such a hallowed, heavenly pairing that the subject seldom matters — together they find the most instinctive way to keep the cuts low, the camera’s heart beating and the framing as sure, sensible and cinematic as effort affords.
I would love to say this new West Side Story supersedes the original outright but it just doesn’t. That said, that which Spielberg doesn’t outdo in regards to the 60-years-past iteration — based on the works of Leonard Bernstein and Steven Sondheim (an untimely RIP to the latter) and obviously inspired by Romeo and Juliet — is more than evenly offset by a respectable swathe of improvements. Spielberg has, most stringently, stripped the show’s staginess; whereas Robert Wise’s film is bright, colorful and clean, Spielberg’s vision is antithetically grimy, gritty and amped by aggressively animated direction.
But for all of Spielberg’s prodigious, indefatigable virtuoso strutting its stuff, West Side Story is somehow another one of his frustratingly near-great films post-2005 like The Adventures of Tintin and Lincoln that, while peerless in technical aptitude, still serve as pointed reminders that the pop-filmmaking God has been stranded in the shadow of his prime for some time. Tintin broke some ground in the mo-cap game and Lincoln is about the most elegant and exemplary Hollywood biopic/period flick you could ask for these days, but musicals are rare untapped ground for the illustrious jack of all trades, master of fun. Even pushing 80 Spielberg possesses the exuberance of a young, grasping filmmaker, though his age catches up with him once this feature gives way from fireworks to a finale of fizz. Where this Story most proudly stands apart from Wise’s Best Picture winner a lifetime ago is the Spielberg/Kaminski power couple of maximum cinematic velocity.
The agonizing precision in raw, restless camerawork is matched by genuinely devoted performances by the likes of the very untested Rachel Zegler as Maria, who easily outsteps the retrospective insensitivity of Natalie Wood’s casting, although the lady lead is still not played by a Puerto Rican (*gasp*) as Zegler is Columbian. There's also the sensational Adriana DeBose playing Anita (the former actress Rita Moreno has a new part in Valentina, a reconfiguration of the original adult counsel Doc), the Broadway-bespoke David Alvarez as Bernardo and a considerably charismatic Corey Stoll as Lieutenant Schrank. But the most lauding must be placed on the new Riff, Mike Haist, the overall standout in a completely commendable, all but flawless turn.
The elephant in the room is Ansel Elgort (gesundheit), who just can’t carry his own Side of the film’s emotional weight as Tony, even for as much as the movie attempts to add something to the character by drawing him more like a reformed rebel and less like a regular ol’ ex-gang member. Elgort does well for awhile, on all fronts earning sympathy whilst singing to satisfaction. But right before the credits he will make you miss Richard Beymer and his bleach-white, phony-ass smile — Ansel's reaction to Maria’s rumored death is so bad it brings the whole movie down a peg. By a sliver, Elgort ends up West Side’s Achilles Heel.
The choreography may be all new but the changes otherwise, while largely positive, are cosmetic ranging from inspired to trivial. You'll find, if nothing else, the environs have been updated whenever possible. "America" is now interactively moving through broad daylight, the polar opposite of the prior nighttime rooftop-stepping, the whole contour of "Cool Boy" has been altered in its new placement before the shiv-showdown, for much better as the lyrics willingly bend toward a fitting foreboding. "Somewhere" has been passed from a lover's desperate duo to a lonely lamentation as the now grandmotherly Moreno (her own 60-years removed double DeBose is so good she’s on her way to a likely Best Supporting Actress win) solemnly solos before she is surreally forced to essentially intervene in her former character's sexual assault. Otherwise the superficial alterations make for mostly minor advancements to the tale’s lasting impact. "I Feel Pretty," apparently to Sondheim's relief, finally follows the rumble as it did on the stage. Spielberg makes it his own at each and every chance, but you won’t find much new here besides the faces, framing, locales and a few numbers jostled smack dab in the middle of the two-day-long narrative scope. The only further fluctuation is that the film is excruciatingly well-tailored to Spanish speaking audiences — the subtitle exclusion was a wise move on Spielberg’s part that will elevate the movie for half the intended audience and hardly retracts any enjoyment from English-speakers.
This film premiered three days after Sondheim’s death, and the man’s own unadapted Merrily We Roll Along is early into its 20-year making by who other than the temporal tactician himself Richard Linklater. I bring this up only to emphasize how many chances have yet to be taken in pre-established classics of theater and, if Damien Chazelle’s La La Land can attest, what film-specific musicals alone can unearth and unlock. Regardless of everything done to sit apart from the earlier film adaptation, West Side Story circa 2021 strains in vain to substantiate its own existence, regardless of Spielberg’s many sublime passages of unmistakably vivaciousness. Despite its grandiloquence and persisting narrative relevance, I still don’t know if a late West Side Story was worth the trouble, since Stevie easily could’ve carved out a singular nook of film history (still no Western) rather than try outgun pre-established, stone-set legends. By the end I felt fine but not gay.
C'mon C'mon briefing
3 ½ (out of 4)
Mike Mills can’t help but be overlooked — he keeps it way too real for many to even register his mild, spotless filmography.
Though a contemporary or possible product of gentler filmmaking spirits like Alexander Payne, Jason Reitman and Noah Baumbach, his pensive naval-gazing never sinks to anything resembling schmaltz, pseudo-intellectualism or feelgood falsity. Mills' fourth film bears the semi-docu-framework of Reitman's Up in the Air, substituting interludes of actors improvising their reaction to blindsiding involuntary termination for actual, average, ordinary kids sitting in a comfortable NPR hot seat unraveling genuine responses to big questions. In his private, piquant, polished way Mills has carved out his own cinematic corner crowded with anthropological investigations of tenuous family tethers and the testy, often trite concerns of the unbearably broad 'human condition.’
C’mon C’mon is his third picture dialing in on the struggles of parenting during the tween times. Beginners is his most adorably packaged humanist affair, and perhaps the weakest for it only insomuch as it illustrates depression, melancholy and mourning in bright, twee shades. Thumbsucker is an undeclared coming-of-age classic with wonderful supporting turns by Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn, and 20th Century Woman is his most pronounced and most similar to the effort in question, marked by a set of interwoven cultural citations to make sure he’s not taking undue credit for exploring feminism and punk rock in the 80s or, in C’mon’s case, the state of today’s youth as dictated by a documentarian’s eye, kid’s lit and/or non-fiction dissecting motherhood.
The film uses the next generation pontificating their crystal-ball calculations to situate the story of an uncle (Joaquin Phoenix), a nephew (Woody Norman), a thinly-stretched mom (Gaby Hoffman) and a mentally unstable father (Scott McNairy), whose minor role as the absent composer allows the film to milk lovely classical arrangements in step with the arty A24 aesthetics. First-billed Phoenix modestly shows off the softer side of his incomparable range, coming off silver-foxy in the film’s casually monochromatic styling, which the film unconsciously, gingerly transcends regardless. The exceedingly unaffected and oppressively adorable Norman is even more of a lovely breakthrough newcomer cutie pie than the little lad from Belfast and Hoffman exudes some of Louie’s abrasive realness sans the nasty and the performances all around strike one unrehearsed and offhand.
I accept that C’mon C’mon could be written off as a disposable indie, and probably will be by both occasional viewers and cinephiles alike. It also may, ingeniously, make you cry, in spite of the way it sidesteps the typical Oscar-baity emotional blows, refusing to cash in on such treacle. It’s so much better than the happy-go-lucky-cum-tearjerker About a Boy aura the story beats and marketing may give off, nor could you reduce it to the Odd-Couple/road-movie bullshit that Mills’ premise cutely, woefully could’ve become. For as romantic and depressive as his films lean, Mills never strays outside of a believable framework and recognizable characters alongside truths and instances ripped from reality. His capacity for small observations and implied ironies is as pleasingly penetrative as the best writer-directors working today. Akin to Boyhood, for exemplar indiestream features to rely so little on plot development there is a sort of unmistakably discernible verisimilitude overcoming anything seemingly light, benign, semi-soapy or manipulative. Showing life for how it is can be torture (for some even when it’s good), whether in not-quite-there execution of dialogue, direction or acting, or the petty, ubiquitous subjects of life open for consideration. Mills is a talented tactician of the trivial who doesn’t foul up a good thing with Lifetime laziness, “awards moments” or spelled-out themes. A setup as simple as Uncle Joaquin playing surrogate father to his nephew while Mom attends to Dad's bipolar tribulations is the perfect playing ground for such sincere cinematic sensitivity.
C’mon C’mon burrows, charms, is coolly edited and shaped like Mills last and previous best, drawing figures so helplessly flawed and full they will, as the best film characters do, come off like someone you know, or at least someone you’ve interacted with. Like 20th Century Women this film is another small miracle stripped of every possible pretension. The nonetheless tonally complimentary B&W camerawork — which neatly renders any distinct metropolis into what could be any American city, be it Detroit, LA, NY or New Orleans — C’mon C’mon assuredly, stealthily, nigh invisibly steals a morsel of your heart. With skill, taste and quotidian beauty, this genuine gem truly makes the ‘mundane’ ‘immortal.’
Mike Mills can’t help but be overlooked — he keeps it way too real for many to even register his mild, spotless filmography.
Though a contemporary or possible product of gentler filmmaking spirits like Alexander Payne, Jason Reitman and Noah Baumbach, his pensive naval-gazing never sinks to anything resembling schmaltz, pseudo-intellectualism or feelgood falsity. Mills' fourth film bears the semi-docu-framework of Reitman's Up in the Air, substituting interludes of actors improvising their reaction to blindsiding involuntary termination for actual, average, ordinary kids sitting in a comfortable NPR hot seat unraveling genuine responses to big questions. In his private, piquant, polished way Mills has carved out his own cinematic corner crowded with anthropological investigations of tenuous family tethers and the testy, often trite concerns of the unbearably broad 'human condition.’
C’mon C’mon is his third picture dialing in on the struggles of parenting during the tween times. Beginners is his most adorably packaged humanist affair, and perhaps the weakest for it only insomuch as it illustrates depression, melancholy and mourning in bright, twee shades. Thumbsucker is an undeclared coming-of-age classic with wonderful supporting turns by Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn, and 20th Century Woman is his most pronounced and most similar to the effort in question, marked by a set of interwoven cultural citations to make sure he’s not taking undue credit for exploring feminism and punk rock in the 80s or, in C’mon’s case, the state of today’s youth as dictated by a documentarian’s eye, kid’s lit and/or non-fiction dissecting motherhood.
The film uses the next generation pontificating their crystal-ball calculations to situate the story of an uncle (Joaquin Phoenix), a nephew (Woody Norman), a thinly-stretched mom (Gaby Hoffman) and a mentally unstable father (Scott McNairy), whose minor role as the absent composer allows the film to milk lovely classical arrangements in step with the arty A24 aesthetics. First-billed Phoenix modestly shows off the softer side of his incomparable range, coming off silver-foxy in the film’s casually monochromatic styling, which the film unconsciously, gingerly transcends regardless. The exceedingly unaffected and oppressively adorable Norman is even more of a lovely breakthrough newcomer cutie pie than the little lad from Belfast and Hoffman exudes some of Louie’s abrasive realness sans the nasty and the performances all around strike one unrehearsed and offhand.
I accept that C’mon C’mon could be written off as a disposable indie, and probably will be by both occasional viewers and cinephiles alike. It also may, ingeniously, make you cry, in spite of the way it sidesteps the typical Oscar-baity emotional blows, refusing to cash in on such treacle. It’s so much better than the happy-go-lucky-cum-tearjerker About a Boy aura the story beats and marketing may give off, nor could you reduce it to the Odd-Couple/road-movie bullshit that Mills’ premise cutely, woefully could’ve become. For as romantic and depressive as his films lean, Mills never strays outside of a believable framework and recognizable characters alongside truths and instances ripped from reality. His capacity for small observations and implied ironies is as pleasingly penetrative as the best writer-directors working today. Akin to Boyhood, for exemplar indiestream features to rely so little on plot development there is a sort of unmistakably discernible verisimilitude overcoming anything seemingly light, benign, semi-soapy or manipulative. Showing life for how it is can be torture (for some even when it’s good), whether in not-quite-there execution of dialogue, direction or acting, or the petty, ubiquitous subjects of life open for consideration. Mills is a talented tactician of the trivial who doesn’t foul up a good thing with Lifetime laziness, “awards moments” or spelled-out themes. A setup as simple as Uncle Joaquin playing surrogate father to his nephew while Mom attends to Dad's bipolar tribulations is the perfect playing ground for such sincere cinematic sensitivity.
C’mon C’mon burrows, charms, is coolly edited and shaped like Mills last and previous best, drawing figures so helplessly flawed and full they will, as the best film characters do, come off like someone you know, or at least someone you’ve interacted with. Like 20th Century Women this film is another small miracle stripped of every possible pretension. The nonetheless tonally complimentary B&W camerawork — which neatly renders any distinct metropolis into what could be any American city, be it Detroit, LA, NY or New Orleans — C’mon C’mon assuredly, stealthily, nigh invisibly steals a morsel of your heart. With skill, taste and quotidian beauty, this genuine gem truly makes the ‘mundane’ ‘immortal.’
Ghostbusters: Afterlife briefing
2 (out of 4)
Um, bustin’ isn't making me feel so good, Mr. Reitman.
The best thing to happen to Ghostbusters since the 80s… is most definitely the sweded version from Michel Gondry’s unusual, unsung Be Kind, Rewind. Otherwise, this IP has been milked like if someone tried to reboot Back to the Future — God what an awful idea and far too kind a comparison for this crappy excuse for a franchise. Being more of an Up in the Air fella than a Meatballs man, I was entering Afterlife more as another notch in Jason Reitman’s filmography rather than another lazy soft reboot/remake attempt to cash in on a series with literally nowhere to go.
Why keep that Ghost Corps logo, to have me snickering to myself before the movie’s even started? I’ll admit I was strung along by Ghostbusters: Afterlife for damn near an hour and a half until the pandering that was only simmering in the background was promptly blasted to full boil for the pitiful, overblown, utterly embarrassing finale. However before I really berate, even at its bewildering worst this film is nowhere near as insufferable as the oversaturated and completely unfunny 2016 catastrophe. That said, this fourth film is still just another product of Sony’s proclivity for fashioning their media more like merchandise than movies.
Even without obvious sponsor plugs in that Walmart sequence, the last third of this film is a full unravel, the corporate equivalent to feeding the audience with a funnel, a strain so hard for unregistered emotion that it will only hit you correctly if you fall into the narrow demographic with deep nostalgia for GB and a stupid amount of respect for Harold Ramis — little did they know Ivan Reitman would soon after be passing on too. This is the second sour late sequel supposedly dedicated to the celebrated actor, writer and director that, I believe, would make Egon be more like “Egad!” Ramis has become just another late, permanent prisoner of the uncanny valley, digitally resurrected to give goobers some pretend closure regarding the notion that Ghostbusters 3 should have ever happened, let alone that it would be watchable (spoiler: it wouldn’t).
Also, I’ve had this feeling much more recently but I hate Bill Murray and his non-acting ass, The French Dispatch aiding the disdain. Ghostbusters was a prime example of his personality guiding a good comedy but here he, Ernie Hudson and Dan Aykroyd seem so pathetic in their egregious deus ex macameos. The movie almost bothers to create new characters worth my investment, but whether it's the small town 80s-fellatiating Stranger Things-vibes of its tone made most apparent from the presence of young Finn Wolfhard or Paul Rudd mirroring Murray’s cynical comedy guru pitfall of basically refusing to act when its not actually required of him, there’s always some repugnant reminiscent quality ruining the best of intentions.
The young protagonist McKenna Grace is very amiable and her friend Logan Kim as a baby podcaster is reliably amusing. Outside of this and some winsome attempts at romance coming at you from three heterosexual directions (did you miss the woke memo Sony?), the movie is 70% something decent to pass the time and ultimately an unpleasant, unbearable waste of any effort behind its concoction. It occasionally bothers to falsely presume itself scary but the humor is, ya know, actually part of the script and not the remnants of an excruciating spitball session left for an editor’s few months in hell (thanks for NOTHING Paul Feig) so at least there’s that. But I coulda used more of a Scooby Doo sort of charm than whatever kind of warm fuzzies the geniuses behind this suffocatingly sentimental, pseudo-Spielbergian service thought was worth imposing on us.
Um, bustin’ isn't making me feel so good, Mr. Reitman.
The best thing to happen to Ghostbusters since the 80s… is most definitely the sweded version from Michel Gondry’s unusual, unsung Be Kind, Rewind. Otherwise, this IP has been milked like if someone tried to reboot Back to the Future — God what an awful idea and far too kind a comparison for this crappy excuse for a franchise. Being more of an Up in the Air fella than a Meatballs man, I was entering Afterlife more as another notch in Jason Reitman’s filmography rather than another lazy soft reboot/remake attempt to cash in on a series with literally nowhere to go.
Why keep that Ghost Corps logo, to have me snickering to myself before the movie’s even started? I’ll admit I was strung along by Ghostbusters: Afterlife for damn near an hour and a half until the pandering that was only simmering in the background was promptly blasted to full boil for the pitiful, overblown, utterly embarrassing finale. However before I really berate, even at its bewildering worst this film is nowhere near as insufferable as the oversaturated and completely unfunny 2016 catastrophe. That said, this fourth film is still just another product of Sony’s proclivity for fashioning their media more like merchandise than movies.
Even without obvious sponsor plugs in that Walmart sequence, the last third of this film is a full unravel, the corporate equivalent to feeding the audience with a funnel, a strain so hard for unregistered emotion that it will only hit you correctly if you fall into the narrow demographic with deep nostalgia for GB and a stupid amount of respect for Harold Ramis — little did they know Ivan Reitman would soon after be passing on too. This is the second sour late sequel supposedly dedicated to the celebrated actor, writer and director that, I believe, would make Egon be more like “Egad!” Ramis has become just another late, permanent prisoner of the uncanny valley, digitally resurrected to give goobers some pretend closure regarding the notion that Ghostbusters 3 should have ever happened, let alone that it would be watchable (spoiler: it wouldn’t).
Also, I’ve had this feeling much more recently but I hate Bill Murray and his non-acting ass, The French Dispatch aiding the disdain. Ghostbusters was a prime example of his personality guiding a good comedy but here he, Ernie Hudson and Dan Aykroyd seem so pathetic in their egregious deus ex macameos. The movie almost bothers to create new characters worth my investment, but whether it's the small town 80s-fellatiating Stranger Things-vibes of its tone made most apparent from the presence of young Finn Wolfhard or Paul Rudd mirroring Murray’s cynical comedy guru pitfall of basically refusing to act when its not actually required of him, there’s always some repugnant reminiscent quality ruining the best of intentions.
The young protagonist McKenna Grace is very amiable and her friend Logan Kim as a baby podcaster is reliably amusing. Outside of this and some winsome attempts at romance coming at you from three heterosexual directions (did you miss the woke memo Sony?), the movie is 70% something decent to pass the time and ultimately an unpleasant, unbearable waste of any effort behind its concoction. It occasionally bothers to falsely presume itself scary but the humor is, ya know, actually part of the script and not the remnants of an excruciating spitball session left for an editor’s few months in hell (thanks for NOTHING Paul Feig) so at least there’s that. But I coulda used more of a Scooby Doo sort of charm than whatever kind of warm fuzzies the geniuses behind this suffocatingly sentimental, pseudo-Spielbergian service thought was worth imposing on us.
Belfast briefing
3 (out of 4)
Kenneth Branagh is a busy beaver with his next Poirot movie out in mere months and a Bee Gees biopic due in just a year’s time? Calm down you Shakespeare scholar, you overachieving dancing monkey.
But for now he’s dropped the ‘stache and the Bard to get all wistful and introspective on us. The palpably personal project almost feels risky when the more mature coming-of-age moments are well-scripted and the childhood perspective is realized by the wonderful, button-level-cute little newcomer Jude Hill. But even at its best moments, Belfast leave you longing for similar works of pensive preadolescence in Terrence Davies’ The Long Day Closes or that grim, nevertheless great trilogy by Bill Douglas (My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home). Lovingly labored over as Belfast is, the B&W aesthetic has been done better, as has communicating concoctions of innocent reminiscence and childhood trauma (Pan’s Labyrinth for a more off-kilter example, The 400 Blows for a plainly obvious one).
It’s winsome but often tonally screwy, like when a funeral reception becomes a musical number, or just that early one-shot rubs off like actors on the set of nostalgia-ville which quickly shifts to gangland as cozy childhood carelessness is interrupted by religious extremist turf wars between Catholics and Protestants, forcing our adorable central family into testing choices. Branagh’s stance is that home is transferable and the newfangled haze of youth will often outstay harrowing circumstance. I’m inclined to agree, and thankfully this movie amounts to more than its message, which is already a culturally specific, universally understandable vantage of the immigrant.
Ciarán Hinds is a phenomenal supporting player who easily puts forth the sort of small, sweet, wisdom-spouting role that usually comes with supporting actor nominations attached. But he has to earn our empathy since Grandpa coughs blood in his introduction, including something about him possibly checking with a doctor — for real? Hinds and Judi Dench are also too far apart in age for their roles. Meanwhile, performances by Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan as Ma and Pa are incredibly suited to elevate a screenplay written based on impressions of Branagh's memory, off the tip of the nostalgic tongue as it were.
The ensemble is sturdy, the sentiment is straightforward and the Oscar bait backing is built in pound for pound; considering the period piece trimmings, political commentary, myriad melodrama as well as reverence for classic film and the tradition of escapism… yeah this truly is a placeholder Academy Award honoree exemplified. Feel good, feel bad, Branagh might have wanted to resist overthinking this movie but it’s sensibly considered — Grandma-friendly but not too light, serious enough for topical, timeless consideration and triflingly entertaining to the casual viewer. I don’t know if it’s quite distinct enough to sneak into the lexicon of Ireland’s best offerings but Belfast possesses more purity than pandering.
Kenneth Branagh is a busy beaver with his next Poirot movie out in mere months and a Bee Gees biopic due in just a year’s time? Calm down you Shakespeare scholar, you overachieving dancing monkey.
But for now he’s dropped the ‘stache and the Bard to get all wistful and introspective on us. The palpably personal project almost feels risky when the more mature coming-of-age moments are well-scripted and the childhood perspective is realized by the wonderful, button-level-cute little newcomer Jude Hill. But even at its best moments, Belfast leave you longing for similar works of pensive preadolescence in Terrence Davies’ The Long Day Closes or that grim, nevertheless great trilogy by Bill Douglas (My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home). Lovingly labored over as Belfast is, the B&W aesthetic has been done better, as has communicating concoctions of innocent reminiscence and childhood trauma (Pan’s Labyrinth for a more off-kilter example, The 400 Blows for a plainly obvious one).
It’s winsome but often tonally screwy, like when a funeral reception becomes a musical number, or just that early one-shot rubs off like actors on the set of nostalgia-ville which quickly shifts to gangland as cozy childhood carelessness is interrupted by religious extremist turf wars between Catholics and Protestants, forcing our adorable central family into testing choices. Branagh’s stance is that home is transferable and the newfangled haze of youth will often outstay harrowing circumstance. I’m inclined to agree, and thankfully this movie amounts to more than its message, which is already a culturally specific, universally understandable vantage of the immigrant.
Ciarán Hinds is a phenomenal supporting player who easily puts forth the sort of small, sweet, wisdom-spouting role that usually comes with supporting actor nominations attached. But he has to earn our empathy since Grandpa coughs blood in his introduction, including something about him possibly checking with a doctor — for real? Hinds and Judi Dench are also too far apart in age for their roles. Meanwhile, performances by Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan as Ma and Pa are incredibly suited to elevate a screenplay written based on impressions of Branagh's memory, off the tip of the nostalgic tongue as it were.
The ensemble is sturdy, the sentiment is straightforward and the Oscar bait backing is built in pound for pound; considering the period piece trimmings, political commentary, myriad melodrama as well as reverence for classic film and the tradition of escapism… yeah this truly is a placeholder Academy Award honoree exemplified. Feel good, feel bad, Branagh might have wanted to resist overthinking this movie but it’s sensibly considered — Grandma-friendly but not too light, serious enough for topical, timeless consideration and triflingly entertaining to the casual viewer. I don’t know if it’s quite distinct enough to sneak into the lexicon of Ireland’s best offerings but Belfast possesses more purity than pandering.
Eternals briefing
3 (out of 4)
I’m more forgiving of the MCU, and most films, in the moment than in hindsight. But I do my best to never let a truly mediocre Marvel movie off without derision, though critics and myself are guilty of lending their blandest fare undue lenience. Why, then, does Eternals earn an exemption? In short, it actually tries to be better than it has to and sometimes succeeds, in sections sensationally so. This film has higher highs than almost any individual entry in this saturated, now sundered saga — Chloe Zhao’s take on supes is actualized by a rich, imagination-coaxing tone and scale, almost more intoxicating than Doctor Strange five years ago.
Eternals has been accused of having its swelling ambition thwarted by the constraint of Feige’s grip, but I don’t necessarily agree. This ‘prequel’ for the Universe isn’t some last-minute Captain Marvel retcon (though 'tis a retcon, let’s be honest) but a way to realistically reinvent the studio’s stomping ground given such staggeringly impactful cultural moments in the near-rear-view. Zhao’s work doesn’t feel very compromised even if it makes more sense that Wanda and Vision, Falcon and Winter Soldier and Loki’s many selves should’ve gotten some disposable installments in this waning film series and Eternals could've been more befitting on the small screen, better suited for some Disney+ torture in order to establish its multitude of characters, another easy criticism leveled at the film.
Despite having to introduce and develop so many first-time figures in condensed time, Zhao makes the most of 157 minutes, a generally fresh fantasy slate and relatively untethered blockbuster freedom. If she really did think Man of Steel’s trailer looked like Terrence Malick’s take on comics, then I find your already Terry-inspired tendencies to be perfectly matched with ages-old galactic marionettes and a more massive, primordial outlook on our modern myths. She also has both the restraint and the gusto to reject Snyder-style posturing and instead come away with something of a substantially spiritual superhero film.
Admittedly, here and there this is Marvel at its most phony and forced, particularly in packing in the pointless political agendas — but why deny that more than a handful of passing moments scaled seldom tread artistic heights for theses flicks and was exceedingly worthy of proper attention for long stretches? Next to even the franchise's slightly more sober, sincere entries (umm... Iron Man, Winter Soldier and those early Thor movies?) this is Marvel eeking out some full-force earnestness, intermittently soaring with the evocative cultural heft of a belly flop. A great deal of this film feels as transcendent as Zhao might have hoped, utilizing that Malick-mimicking, memory-induced editing to a few extraordinary juxtapositions. Eh, maybe I’m keen to defend a film that risks tons and ends up flawed through and through, or also get riled up about the quest for some kind of radical, corporate-antithetic beauty riddled with perfection and imperfection; what I like about Eternals is the great — yes, great — movie I see underneath the routine.
The biggest problem is definitely the first half, as the flashback/flash-forward rhythm can be annoyingly jumpy — maybe that’s why more critics than EVER BEFORE IN THE “MODERATELY FAVORABLE” MCU TIMES don’t like it. Many sequences were incredible feats for the studios VFX reels, and I hesitate writing that because a sizable portion also employs the familiar, terrible, sound-stagey fakery. But especially when the movie required locations, Chloe knocked it out of sight. The larger than life action-fantasy antics were pretty damn cool, and the romantic backstory becomes a solid investment in tragedy. If not for the first act’s herky-jerky narrative structure and occasionally clumsy character development, this film would not receive any of the hesitations critics are only NOW feeling toward the most overbearing and oversaturated series of the (post)modern age. Eternals challenges your notions of the groomed indie director's episodes in the saga — just because Marvel’s tested many creative strategies doesn’t mean Zhao can’t force it all a little closer to some more traditional, nobler, textured sense of significance. The staggering scene bridging the first two acts, explicating the Eternals' place in the cosmos, is the material Marvel should be after at any and all times, the stuff you hope Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is teeming with.
I anticipated little to no characterization but between the writing, performers and camaraderie, Eternals surprisingly manages to principally pull off its obligatory juggling act. Let's actually break down these new faces:
I enjoyed the Eternals' internal relationships, from Gilgamesh caring for Thena's occassional murderous possessions of the mind, to the cute mismatched friendship between Makkari and Druig, or the unrequited love of Ikarus from permanently prepubescent Sprite. And when the drama is engaging and the optics are regularly gorgeous, I'm moved to forgive the every so often gag-inducing corniness and corporate inserts. The exoskeletal Disney scrub and brand-reinforcing foolishness can't hold Zhao back from excavating big emotion from millennia-spanning cosmic melodrama.
Eternals' major selling point is it's vehement effort to be art, though, unavoidably, there are many passages of the film where this is a desperate endeavor. Otherwise if anyone was ever going to bring patience, piety and introspection to the all too material-minded MCU, it was Chloe and her serious inclinations toward this well-matched material. Now I can hear all the folks saying this was nothing compared to the “weird” entries of the MCU so far; sorry but the Guardians flicks are just imbecilic fodder for pseudo-intellectual Redditors who think they’ve found the exception to a cynical rule. This is the first genuine risk Marvel has taken in ages, and despite failing to meet every mark, Eternals is nevertheless comprised of sprawling, pathos-packed storytelling, enough to supersede a great deal of its lazier, lamer, far less inspired counterparts.
I’m more forgiving of the MCU, and most films, in the moment than in hindsight. But I do my best to never let a truly mediocre Marvel movie off without derision, though critics and myself are guilty of lending their blandest fare undue lenience. Why, then, does Eternals earn an exemption? In short, it actually tries to be better than it has to and sometimes succeeds, in sections sensationally so. This film has higher highs than almost any individual entry in this saturated, now sundered saga — Chloe Zhao’s take on supes is actualized by a rich, imagination-coaxing tone and scale, almost more intoxicating than Doctor Strange five years ago.
Eternals has been accused of having its swelling ambition thwarted by the constraint of Feige’s grip, but I don’t necessarily agree. This ‘prequel’ for the Universe isn’t some last-minute Captain Marvel retcon (though 'tis a retcon, let’s be honest) but a way to realistically reinvent the studio’s stomping ground given such staggeringly impactful cultural moments in the near-rear-view. Zhao’s work doesn’t feel very compromised even if it makes more sense that Wanda and Vision, Falcon and Winter Soldier and Loki’s many selves should’ve gotten some disposable installments in this waning film series and Eternals could've been more befitting on the small screen, better suited for some Disney+ torture in order to establish its multitude of characters, another easy criticism leveled at the film.
Despite having to introduce and develop so many first-time figures in condensed time, Zhao makes the most of 157 minutes, a generally fresh fantasy slate and relatively untethered blockbuster freedom. If she really did think Man of Steel’s trailer looked like Terrence Malick’s take on comics, then I find your already Terry-inspired tendencies to be perfectly matched with ages-old galactic marionettes and a more massive, primordial outlook on our modern myths. She also has both the restraint and the gusto to reject Snyder-style posturing and instead come away with something of a substantially spiritual superhero film.
Admittedly, here and there this is Marvel at its most phony and forced, particularly in packing in the pointless political agendas — but why deny that more than a handful of passing moments scaled seldom tread artistic heights for theses flicks and was exceedingly worthy of proper attention for long stretches? Next to even the franchise's slightly more sober, sincere entries (umm... Iron Man, Winter Soldier and those early Thor movies?) this is Marvel eeking out some full-force earnestness, intermittently soaring with the evocative cultural heft of a belly flop. A great deal of this film feels as transcendent as Zhao might have hoped, utilizing that Malick-mimicking, memory-induced editing to a few extraordinary juxtapositions. Eh, maybe I’m keen to defend a film that risks tons and ends up flawed through and through, or also get riled up about the quest for some kind of radical, corporate-antithetic beauty riddled with perfection and imperfection; what I like about Eternals is the great — yes, great — movie I see underneath the routine.
The biggest problem is definitely the first half, as the flashback/flash-forward rhythm can be annoyingly jumpy — maybe that’s why more critics than EVER BEFORE IN THE “MODERATELY FAVORABLE” MCU TIMES don’t like it. Many sequences were incredible feats for the studios VFX reels, and I hesitate writing that because a sizable portion also employs the familiar, terrible, sound-stagey fakery. But especially when the movie required locations, Chloe knocked it out of sight. The larger than life action-fantasy antics were pretty damn cool, and the romantic backstory becomes a solid investment in tragedy. If not for the first act’s herky-jerky narrative structure and occasionally clumsy character development, this film would not receive any of the hesitations critics are only NOW feeling toward the most overbearing and oversaturated series of the (post)modern age. Eternals challenges your notions of the groomed indie director's episodes in the saga — just because Marvel’s tested many creative strategies doesn’t mean Zhao can’t force it all a little closer to some more traditional, nobler, textured sense of significance. The staggering scene bridging the first two acts, explicating the Eternals' place in the cosmos, is the material Marvel should be after at any and all times, the stuff you hope Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is teeming with.
I anticipated little to no characterization but between the writing, performers and camaraderie, Eternals surprisingly manages to principally pull off its obligatory juggling act. Let's actually break down these new faces:
- Salma Hayek plays Ajak, the leader who is not very developed before her bizarrely edited death and... what were her powers again, besides being in charge? She's on the lower end of properly explored.
- Sersi (Gemma Chan) is our second consecutive mostly expressionless lead from Marvel after Shang-Chi, which was less a problem here within a legitimate ensemble film. Our rough protagonist probably should’ve been more interesting, though her matter-transforming powers had something.
- Ikarus (Richard Madden) is a decent surprise villain, selling his half of romance gone wrong until, in shame, he literally flies into the sun. For real? With Kit Harington starring as well there are Game of Thrones-adjacent things happening to the point where a musician shows in the movie for some reason (no reason more precisely) OMG IT'S HARRY STYLES!
- Brian Tyree Henry, as Phastos, was made to weep in a VR simulation of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima to explicate his assistance with humanity's technological progress. His gay embrace feels like pen placed against an empty, unchecked box — Henry is affable, but his sorry role is the face of this movie’s most abrasively forced excerpts.
- Sprite is just a little cuck, essentially Marvel’s Tinker Bell. Her ambiguity is poorly investigated but it’s still a nice, yearning performance by Lia McHugh nonetheless.
- Barry Koeghan plays fake-out defector Druig, with the comically far-reaching power to literally take over every human’s mind. Um, how does this help defend from DEVIANTS? The Irish character actor is reasonably motivated but underutilized.
- Thena is Angelina Jolie as a golden goddess once again except sans the 3D animation of Robert Zemeckis’ horniest visual effects artists. She too is yet another conflicted character we don’t have quite so much time for, but Jolie fills out her smaller part as the mightiest Eternal with more conviction than Hayek's lost leader.
- Don Lee as Gilgamesh is, hmm, also the mighty one? He dies early but sure is a charmer.
- Lauren Ridloff plays Makkari aka deaf lady Quiksilver, a supporting highlight and whose representation is more real and righteous for not shining a spotlight on it.
- Kumail Nanjiani as himself (Kingo) is a wise enough investment in reliable, unobtrusive comic relief. Though his butler's shenanigans get tired, Nanjiani's do not.
I enjoyed the Eternals' internal relationships, from Gilgamesh caring for Thena's occassional murderous possessions of the mind, to the cute mismatched friendship between Makkari and Druig, or the unrequited love of Ikarus from permanently prepubescent Sprite. And when the drama is engaging and the optics are regularly gorgeous, I'm moved to forgive the every so often gag-inducing corniness and corporate inserts. The exoskeletal Disney scrub and brand-reinforcing foolishness can't hold Zhao back from excavating big emotion from millennia-spanning cosmic melodrama.
Eternals' major selling point is it's vehement effort to be art, though, unavoidably, there are many passages of the film where this is a desperate endeavor. Otherwise if anyone was ever going to bring patience, piety and introspection to the all too material-minded MCU, it was Chloe and her serious inclinations toward this well-matched material. Now I can hear all the folks saying this was nothing compared to the “weird” entries of the MCU so far; sorry but the Guardians flicks are just imbecilic fodder for pseudo-intellectual Redditors who think they’ve found the exception to a cynical rule. This is the first genuine risk Marvel has taken in ages, and despite failing to meet every mark, Eternals is nevertheless comprised of sprawling, pathos-packed storytelling, enough to supersede a great deal of its lazier, lamer, far less inspired counterparts.
The French Dispatch and
Last Night in Soho briefings
The French Dispatch
2 ½ (out of 4)
He’s so formally uniform through and through that it’s important to remember how many times Wes Anderson hasn’t been so completely irresistible. For my money Rushmore is a little repellent, though it’s deemed one of his classics. The Life Aquatic is a meme, a shapeless strings of situations that can’t be redeemed by incredible set construction. The Darjeeling Limited is a minor work, but worthwhile. Isle of Dogs, his last, was feverishly forgettable, and a likely low point.
But before that recent, sure-footed step down he had hit three for three with Dogs' stop-motion precedent Fantastic Mr. Fox (Noah Baumbach seemed to lend more wit here than he mustered for Steve Zissou), his adorable, quaint, beguiling masterpiece Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel’s auteur-sealing display of Anderson’s fastidious predilections, his crowning affair with the populace if The Royal Tenenbaums’ melancholic exuberance doesn’t already steal that spot.
The French Dispatch is more of the same recipe and then some extra for good measure — rarely have I seen a movie at once so infuriating and yet so objectively worthy of revisitation and close scrutiny. This film tries to maximize Anderson’s penchant for cast collectives of a couple dozen real names (cycling through his host of regulars), cute tricks of old school filmmaking (including actors reciting breathlessly, a mile a minute) and the easy perfecting of mise-en-scène. But what amounts to Anderson’s anthology movie means The French Dispatch has little life as a whole even as it neatly notates the investigator's eye for art, politics and cuisine.
Where you might expect the hustling and/or bustling newsroom comic drama of something like His Girl Friday (or at least, uh... Anchorman?) instead the film captures the most grinding, unappealing aspect of journalism — getting caught up in an excess of additive info and burying your better points. I know after all this time Anderson loves to keep the pronounced whimsy frolicking along to an ultimately quieting, ironically tragic ending, but this movie earns none of the selective emotions Anderson occasionally employs, nor does it bear the comic sharpness of Budapest, Moonrise, Tenenbaums or, well, his best, at least past the first and strongest act of the film.
Frankly, when you can barely keep up with all the profuse minutiae not only in the typically meticulous visual conceit but just between the written, optical and verbal information Anderson feels the need to always deliver simultaneously, the enjoyment only comes when and if you’re willing to ingest the film more than once. If at first pass this movie doesn’t give you at least a mild migraine then maybe you have some special case of hipster’s synesthesia. The French Dispatch made my head hurt and kept my laughter largely at a standstill. Anderson furthers the way his movies feel like fashionable books come to life, but whereas Moonrise achieved this with incredible young performers and a perfect two-part structure and Grand Budapest did the same by way of expertly employing aspect ratios, multiple narrative frames and historically graphing the style of his atmosphere, Dispatch seldom comes to life like it promises in its literary, editorial or cinematic intentions.
This film is simply three short stories, narrated by experienced Wes players Anjelica Huston, Frances McDormand and (less so) Jeffrey Wright, so very loosely tied to what we were sold on in trailers. I don’t mind sneaky marketing if it pays off and I also don’t mind when films are disjointed ideas threaded by an auteur’s inflexible touch (Ophuls’ Le Plaisir, a few horror nuggets or Coen swan songs can be delightfully unpredictable in that way). Here each tale diminishes in passing. An exceptional first foray into art and muses and Adrien Brody all angry devolves into pubescent revolutions and finally a most convoluted tale of cooking and kidnapping. Bill Murray sleepwalks through another non-performance as the central publication's editor, using his name and reputation to slide by in the most deceptive “lead role” in some time. Remember how good Grand Budapest was simply because Ralph Fiennes absolutely murdered his character? Yeah imagine that but a sliver of the runtime or the exertion. Certain performers excel at Anderson’s robotic cheek (newcomer Timothee Chalamet is probably the best fresh to Wes), others don’t.
As an ode to writers, admittedly Anderson does have a way with language, if only he had a way with the craft of character like he used to. Regarding the writing, he has a real knack for vocabulary and appearing cultured or well-read simply based on his Shakespearean syntax. In this particular framework he’s allowed himself (or confined himself) to storytelling doubling as fictional feature writing — by which I mean he can overly obsess about details, details details and completely throw all other structural shaping to the curb. Again, normally this sounds fitted to my exact liking but The French Dispatch is as freewheeling as it is free of significance.
The French Dispatch is a rich, vibrant film that organizes, composes and plays with its eras, actors, satire and themes to Wes’s own escalatingly rigorous standard. I lament every time I hear anyone referring to any of his films as “the most Wes Anderson-y movie” but this one might take the cake, almost only to its detriment. The film is numbingly overbusy even for the hyperactive quirk-master of the century and justified with the typical disaffected pleasantries that interrupt sometimes even his finest films. At its most uninviting The French Dispatch is all stylistic icing and no cake (or a Christmas tree made only of ornaments, whichever metaphor suits better) leaving you to choke on the confectionery and confounding delivery of cinematic information.
At it’s most obnoxiously overwhelming, the film functions as if all of Royals was just Alec Baldwin narrating about the odd traits of the Tenenbaums… after twenty minutes your brain would start swallowing itself. Maybe next time he’ll muster up a substantial story built on more than fragments of the imagination. His unpredictable gimmickry, wonderful back and forth with color and some incredibly timed sequences somewhat save the film — if all three stories hit hard, this would be one of his most exemplary feature films. As it stands I’m content to say it confirms every morsel of his talent and also passes the time superbly once you know what all the ironically self-defeating stories lead to.
Last Night in Soho
2 ½ (out of 4)
After two peerless parody films, The World’s End rounded out the Cornetto trilogy and served as a maturation of Edgar Wright’s levelheaded, clear-eyed cinematic insanity. In-between he didn’t let up in the most rewardingly geek-nip (twink-bait) manga adaptation of Scott Pilgrim’s 8-bit, ecstatic electricity. Baby Driver seemed to step things back although it hammered home Wright’s own obsessive disposition for molding the matter of movies through their soundtracks.
Last Night in Soho, a most English Giallo, is a contorted, far less fun or philosophical Midnight in Paris, something like Vivre sa Vie in color plus some epic, evil twists, a De Palma-grade Hitchcockian affair primed with rug-pulling and doppelgänger action. Despite citations like Nicholas Roeg (Don’t Look Now) and Roman Polanski (Repulsion), the intelligently influenced film does the worst thing supernatural horror can offer: ignore the ways in which the ghostly garnishes should congeal with the corporeal narrative. The tail-end twist is so kooky it ends up as one of those sorry, oft-ambitious films where the man behind the curtain discredits half of what you’ve already seen, and not in a psychologically searing, loop-closing way like Scorsese’s Shutter Island. Even considering Wright’s talent for double entendre, this spectral horror-thriller is somehow only as much as meets the eyes and ears, its depth defined only by film history and cautionary themes on the negatives of nostalgia.
His skill for sensational style alone in Last Night in Soho perhaps reveals the lofty limitations of the Brit’s resolve. Mastery of genre alone doesn’t excuse Wright’s résumé of intensely, intently seamless writing that always handled setups, payoffs, comedy and horror with steady-handed, buoyantly inspired aplomb. Despite the nightmarish, sometimes beautifully rendered strains of classically Giallo filmmaking, Last Night in Soho suggests Wright is more of a theatrically-minded song and dance man out to make his features visually and sonically superb even if (for the first time) screenwriting is bumped to the backseat.
By the end, these components whither rather than mesh and shit just doesn’t add up, as much as a horror-primed subconscious willingly goes along for the ride. Wright is a deft marksman with the camera but Soho’s storytelling finesse is not in step with the visual pyrotechnics and necessarily reminiscent, finely-tailored soundtrack cuts. Mood over matter means Soho is both show-offy and a bit flat — I don’t know what to make of such a manipulative and cheap turn from a filmmaker that always prided himself on the little details. Accepting as I am of the marriage of the supernatural and psychological (The Shining is one of the great pieces of art of modern times), this movie plays fast and loose with its pointlessly repetitive spook house serenade. Repetitive is a keyword, because rearing a great setup is a cascade of meandering sequences to kill time until the skeletal story’s reveal.
Thomasin McKensie, I believe, is blossoming into one of her generation’s best, and Anya Taylor-Joy’s already been in enough to prove it, though she’s nearly irrelevant to Last Night by the finale. McKensie’s adorably accented timbre doesn’t get in the way of her agreeably filling in the frames of a stubbornly semi-feminist text that doesn’t really play with your head but tries to ultimately pry at your morals, unpersuasively so. The parting revelation doesn’t make you angry, but the tee-up and subsequent strike is testing insomuch as our protagonist Ellie’s recurring visions simply show us whatever the film needs at the moment, in themes or frights… the moral flip that’s supposed to make me somewhat sympathetic to a serial killer and warming up to the idea that any man who’s ever paid for sex deserves to die… eh, I don’t know if you've crafted the identifiable villain you may have imagined.
The supporting cast is also strangely soft — Ellie’s love interest (Michael Ajao) is so gratingly earnest (I can’t tell if it’s the writing, performer or both) that every scene he’s present could make you cringe. And the mean girls (mostly Synnøve Karlsen as Jocasta) would make Tina Fey go “OK that’s a little stereotypical.” I feel bad for McKensie because she half-asses nothing and yet so much of this film’s runtime is devoted to her haunted hallucinations in different locales, so regularly to the point where you wonder why the writer-director with some of the tightest editing of the last 20 years didn’t trim his most serious, unadorned creation thus far to a much slimmer runtime. This just comes off like an exercise rather than an endeavor — Wright almost feels held back by playing it straight.
Despite the scholarly impressions, Last Night in Soho has less of a grasp on steering its genre than even his underseen 90s debut, the silly send-up of Western clichés A Fistful of Fingers. I can’t believe I’m calling this Wright’s weakest link but that’s what it's looking like. For someone so intent on de-romanticizing the past, this personally produced murder mystery message movie is much less elegant than some similarly nostalgic 2021 auteur-detours.
2 ½ (out of 4)
He’s so formally uniform through and through that it’s important to remember how many times Wes Anderson hasn’t been so completely irresistible. For my money Rushmore is a little repellent, though it’s deemed one of his classics. The Life Aquatic is a meme, a shapeless strings of situations that can’t be redeemed by incredible set construction. The Darjeeling Limited is a minor work, but worthwhile. Isle of Dogs, his last, was feverishly forgettable, and a likely low point.
But before that recent, sure-footed step down he had hit three for three with Dogs' stop-motion precedent Fantastic Mr. Fox (Noah Baumbach seemed to lend more wit here than he mustered for Steve Zissou), his adorable, quaint, beguiling masterpiece Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel’s auteur-sealing display of Anderson’s fastidious predilections, his crowning affair with the populace if The Royal Tenenbaums’ melancholic exuberance doesn’t already steal that spot.
The French Dispatch is more of the same recipe and then some extra for good measure — rarely have I seen a movie at once so infuriating and yet so objectively worthy of revisitation and close scrutiny. This film tries to maximize Anderson’s penchant for cast collectives of a couple dozen real names (cycling through his host of regulars), cute tricks of old school filmmaking (including actors reciting breathlessly, a mile a minute) and the easy perfecting of mise-en-scène. But what amounts to Anderson’s anthology movie means The French Dispatch has little life as a whole even as it neatly notates the investigator's eye for art, politics and cuisine.
Where you might expect the hustling and/or bustling newsroom comic drama of something like His Girl Friday (or at least, uh... Anchorman?) instead the film captures the most grinding, unappealing aspect of journalism — getting caught up in an excess of additive info and burying your better points. I know after all this time Anderson loves to keep the pronounced whimsy frolicking along to an ultimately quieting, ironically tragic ending, but this movie earns none of the selective emotions Anderson occasionally employs, nor does it bear the comic sharpness of Budapest, Moonrise, Tenenbaums or, well, his best, at least past the first and strongest act of the film.
Frankly, when you can barely keep up with all the profuse minutiae not only in the typically meticulous visual conceit but just between the written, optical and verbal information Anderson feels the need to always deliver simultaneously, the enjoyment only comes when and if you’re willing to ingest the film more than once. If at first pass this movie doesn’t give you at least a mild migraine then maybe you have some special case of hipster’s synesthesia. The French Dispatch made my head hurt and kept my laughter largely at a standstill. Anderson furthers the way his movies feel like fashionable books come to life, but whereas Moonrise achieved this with incredible young performers and a perfect two-part structure and Grand Budapest did the same by way of expertly employing aspect ratios, multiple narrative frames and historically graphing the style of his atmosphere, Dispatch seldom comes to life like it promises in its literary, editorial or cinematic intentions.
This film is simply three short stories, narrated by experienced Wes players Anjelica Huston, Frances McDormand and (less so) Jeffrey Wright, so very loosely tied to what we were sold on in trailers. I don’t mind sneaky marketing if it pays off and I also don’t mind when films are disjointed ideas threaded by an auteur’s inflexible touch (Ophuls’ Le Plaisir, a few horror nuggets or Coen swan songs can be delightfully unpredictable in that way). Here each tale diminishes in passing. An exceptional first foray into art and muses and Adrien Brody all angry devolves into pubescent revolutions and finally a most convoluted tale of cooking and kidnapping. Bill Murray sleepwalks through another non-performance as the central publication's editor, using his name and reputation to slide by in the most deceptive “lead role” in some time. Remember how good Grand Budapest was simply because Ralph Fiennes absolutely murdered his character? Yeah imagine that but a sliver of the runtime or the exertion. Certain performers excel at Anderson’s robotic cheek (newcomer Timothee Chalamet is probably the best fresh to Wes), others don’t.
As an ode to writers, admittedly Anderson does have a way with language, if only he had a way with the craft of character like he used to. Regarding the writing, he has a real knack for vocabulary and appearing cultured or well-read simply based on his Shakespearean syntax. In this particular framework he’s allowed himself (or confined himself) to storytelling doubling as fictional feature writing — by which I mean he can overly obsess about details, details details and completely throw all other structural shaping to the curb. Again, normally this sounds fitted to my exact liking but The French Dispatch is as freewheeling as it is free of significance.
The French Dispatch is a rich, vibrant film that organizes, composes and plays with its eras, actors, satire and themes to Wes’s own escalatingly rigorous standard. I lament every time I hear anyone referring to any of his films as “the most Wes Anderson-y movie” but this one might take the cake, almost only to its detriment. The film is numbingly overbusy even for the hyperactive quirk-master of the century and justified with the typical disaffected pleasantries that interrupt sometimes even his finest films. At its most uninviting The French Dispatch is all stylistic icing and no cake (or a Christmas tree made only of ornaments, whichever metaphor suits better) leaving you to choke on the confectionery and confounding delivery of cinematic information.
At it’s most obnoxiously overwhelming, the film functions as if all of Royals was just Alec Baldwin narrating about the odd traits of the Tenenbaums… after twenty minutes your brain would start swallowing itself. Maybe next time he’ll muster up a substantial story built on more than fragments of the imagination. His unpredictable gimmickry, wonderful back and forth with color and some incredibly timed sequences somewhat save the film — if all three stories hit hard, this would be one of his most exemplary feature films. As it stands I’m content to say it confirms every morsel of his talent and also passes the time superbly once you know what all the ironically self-defeating stories lead to.
Last Night in Soho
2 ½ (out of 4)
After two peerless parody films, The World’s End rounded out the Cornetto trilogy and served as a maturation of Edgar Wright’s levelheaded, clear-eyed cinematic insanity. In-between he didn’t let up in the most rewardingly geek-nip (twink-bait) manga adaptation of Scott Pilgrim’s 8-bit, ecstatic electricity. Baby Driver seemed to step things back although it hammered home Wright’s own obsessive disposition for molding the matter of movies through their soundtracks.
Last Night in Soho, a most English Giallo, is a contorted, far less fun or philosophical Midnight in Paris, something like Vivre sa Vie in color plus some epic, evil twists, a De Palma-grade Hitchcockian affair primed with rug-pulling and doppelgänger action. Despite citations like Nicholas Roeg (Don’t Look Now) and Roman Polanski (Repulsion), the intelligently influenced film does the worst thing supernatural horror can offer: ignore the ways in which the ghostly garnishes should congeal with the corporeal narrative. The tail-end twist is so kooky it ends up as one of those sorry, oft-ambitious films where the man behind the curtain discredits half of what you’ve already seen, and not in a psychologically searing, loop-closing way like Scorsese’s Shutter Island. Even considering Wright’s talent for double entendre, this spectral horror-thriller is somehow only as much as meets the eyes and ears, its depth defined only by film history and cautionary themes on the negatives of nostalgia.
His skill for sensational style alone in Last Night in Soho perhaps reveals the lofty limitations of the Brit’s resolve. Mastery of genre alone doesn’t excuse Wright’s résumé of intensely, intently seamless writing that always handled setups, payoffs, comedy and horror with steady-handed, buoyantly inspired aplomb. Despite the nightmarish, sometimes beautifully rendered strains of classically Giallo filmmaking, Last Night in Soho suggests Wright is more of a theatrically-minded song and dance man out to make his features visually and sonically superb even if (for the first time) screenwriting is bumped to the backseat.
By the end, these components whither rather than mesh and shit just doesn’t add up, as much as a horror-primed subconscious willingly goes along for the ride. Wright is a deft marksman with the camera but Soho’s storytelling finesse is not in step with the visual pyrotechnics and necessarily reminiscent, finely-tailored soundtrack cuts. Mood over matter means Soho is both show-offy and a bit flat — I don’t know what to make of such a manipulative and cheap turn from a filmmaker that always prided himself on the little details. Accepting as I am of the marriage of the supernatural and psychological (The Shining is one of the great pieces of art of modern times), this movie plays fast and loose with its pointlessly repetitive spook house serenade. Repetitive is a keyword, because rearing a great setup is a cascade of meandering sequences to kill time until the skeletal story’s reveal.
Thomasin McKensie, I believe, is blossoming into one of her generation’s best, and Anya Taylor-Joy’s already been in enough to prove it, though she’s nearly irrelevant to Last Night by the finale. McKensie’s adorably accented timbre doesn’t get in the way of her agreeably filling in the frames of a stubbornly semi-feminist text that doesn’t really play with your head but tries to ultimately pry at your morals, unpersuasively so. The parting revelation doesn’t make you angry, but the tee-up and subsequent strike is testing insomuch as our protagonist Ellie’s recurring visions simply show us whatever the film needs at the moment, in themes or frights… the moral flip that’s supposed to make me somewhat sympathetic to a serial killer and warming up to the idea that any man who’s ever paid for sex deserves to die… eh, I don’t know if you've crafted the identifiable villain you may have imagined.
The supporting cast is also strangely soft — Ellie’s love interest (Michael Ajao) is so gratingly earnest (I can’t tell if it’s the writing, performer or both) that every scene he’s present could make you cringe. And the mean girls (mostly Synnøve Karlsen as Jocasta) would make Tina Fey go “OK that’s a little stereotypical.” I feel bad for McKensie because she half-asses nothing and yet so much of this film’s runtime is devoted to her haunted hallucinations in different locales, so regularly to the point where you wonder why the writer-director with some of the tightest editing of the last 20 years didn’t trim his most serious, unadorned creation thus far to a much slimmer runtime. This just comes off like an exercise rather than an endeavor — Wright almost feels held back by playing it straight.
Despite the scholarly impressions, Last Night in Soho has less of a grasp on steering its genre than even his underseen 90s debut, the silly send-up of Western clichés A Fistful of Fingers. I can’t believe I’m calling this Wright’s weakest link but that’s what it's looking like. For someone so intent on de-romanticizing the past, this personally produced murder mystery message movie is much less elegant than some similarly nostalgic 2021 auteur-detours.
Dune briefing
3 (out of 4)
I would have been looking forward to Dune more if I wasn’t speed-reading the novel just to be in a position to possess a more valuable opinion, or any opinion at all about something so foundational to science fiction literature yet oddly enclosed by cult.
But just as a movie, I couldn’t find myself to be taken by Dune even though I was partially unable to pick it apart top to bottom as a study in adaptation, particularly with David Lynch’s essentially disowned 1984 attempt to contrast and the looming mystique of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fabled, insanely ambitious and quickly scrapped vision. As much as I wanted to feel like I was so lucky to be alive watching the next Lord of the Rings or at least the next Star Wars in my time, the components of this movie, and the world of Dune at large, reminded me more of YA material than the result of a classic of its kind. But that’s all part of the abbreviation, abridgment and sacrifices rendered for stringent, in-motion storytelling.
The most specific comparison could be the other films of French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, like his gradually more high profile sci-fi releases in Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. But with that dreaded Part One underneath the title drop of Dune, all I can use as a true north comparison for Dune (2021) is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part One. And I hardly needed the messiah-like protagonist who has visions of current-near-future events and cunning, bald, pale villains hatching ghastly plans with his subservients to harp on the film’s unwieldy, traditionally unsatisfying film structure due to all momentum and no payoff. In Potter’s world, the foreboding, on-the-run thrills were an exciting time that became more introspective — Dune tries to give you the goods after true tragedy strikes.
Maybe I just needed something more from the film’s all-too monochromatic glaze. Though obviously consistently staggering, sometimes stupendous in scope, it’s not just the grading — or taking things dead seriously — that makes Dune feel more like a chore and less like an escape. Like a stillborn Nolan extravaganza (Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises), Dune possesses remarkable showmanship alongside depressing self-possession and a certain directionlessness, confusion or indecision within the screenwriting. The minimalist design is a sleek juxtaposition to the artistic choices of Arrival and Blade Runner but it consequently makes Dune Part One feel far closer to the year 2049 than 10,000whatever.
But I knew beyond doubt that Dune would sound superlative and Hans Zimmer or no (he’s definitely not slyly phoning it in like he just did in No Time to Die), there’s quite the eardrum-rumbling good fun to go with the muted, nevertheless marvelous visuals. The casting is also excellent, largely — Timothee Chalamet, Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson pull off their key roles as Paul, Duke Leto and Lady Jessica splendidly. Josh Brolin as Gurney, good for me. Zendaya as anyone, pass. Stellen Skarsgård should possess some more relish behind the supervillain scheming as Baron Harkonnen. Jason Mamoa is excellent at basically playing himself so I suppose Duncan Idaho is pretty cool. Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir is a strange pick for an aged Master of Assassins. Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Liet-Kynes ain’t no Max Von Sydow but I’ll get over it. David Dastmalchian (you know, Polka-Dot Man from THE Suicide Squad) is an evil mentat worthy of Grima Wormtongue.
I’m just disappointed that even with an extra film to let the story breathe, everything still feels so truncated. I needed a bit more than 30 minutes for teasing the Baron, laying down truckloads of exposition and getting my bearings of Paul’s day to day on Caladan — not to mention establishing/bonding with all these father figures in preparation for them all to perish. Oh yeah, a teenage lead character who can’t prevent his positive fatherly role models from dying left and right? Just another Potter parallel.
But then who could say just how good this adaptation is as of 2021? Who can really assess this film until Part Two has been consumed and digested like Sardukar by a sandworm sometime late in 2023? For the moment I’ll say that next to Lynch’s film, yes this movie is far more coherent and plausible but also less chancy, free-spirited and as committed to the internality of the books than Villeneuve’s muffled, mainstream vision. Denis is quoted as saying he wanted to make this his “best pop film” and another time refering to Dune as a “world of details,” and those sentiments rub up and chafe against one another in practice rather uncomfortably. Next to Villeneuve’s former work — his somber austerity worked to far more engaging ends with Prisoners and definitely Blade Runner 2049, which has modern classic running through its wired veins — this film combines the sparse, stripped sci-fi flavors of 2049 and Arrival, but I think the world of Dune was due a grander sense of the fantastic, even in a future that got over the whole thinking machines thing and resorted to feudalism, colonialism and Shakespearean backstabbery on a galactic scale.
Whereas Herbert’s part-textbook, part-pulp specificity provides an ample sense of humanity underneath the craziness and glossary worth of terminology, Villeneuve’s Dune applies far too much weight behind the typically utilitarian dialogue and furthermore strains for significance before leaving you less like Fellowship of the Ring and more like An Unexpected Journey. That’s a harsh parallel, but no matter which version you take, there are certain elements (the human-sifting and the hunter-seeker bit) that are tough as hell to inscript cinematically, as much as Villeneuve prevailed where he could. This still comes off like a superb set of SparkNotes rather than an event film meant to tickle the retinal teenage part of your mind.
Still the spice must flow and the sequel has the room to grow — but Zendaya is now the protagonist of Part Two? Good luck. Despite my relentless grievances 2021's Dune is still a creation of consummate, unmistakable talent.
I would have been looking forward to Dune more if I wasn’t speed-reading the novel just to be in a position to possess a more valuable opinion, or any opinion at all about something so foundational to science fiction literature yet oddly enclosed by cult.
But just as a movie, I couldn’t find myself to be taken by Dune even though I was partially unable to pick it apart top to bottom as a study in adaptation, particularly with David Lynch’s essentially disowned 1984 attempt to contrast and the looming mystique of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s fabled, insanely ambitious and quickly scrapped vision. As much as I wanted to feel like I was so lucky to be alive watching the next Lord of the Rings or at least the next Star Wars in my time, the components of this movie, and the world of Dune at large, reminded me more of YA material than the result of a classic of its kind. But that’s all part of the abbreviation, abridgment and sacrifices rendered for stringent, in-motion storytelling.
The most specific comparison could be the other films of French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, like his gradually more high profile sci-fi releases in Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. But with that dreaded Part One underneath the title drop of Dune, all I can use as a true north comparison for Dune (2021) is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part One. And I hardly needed the messiah-like protagonist who has visions of current-near-future events and cunning, bald, pale villains hatching ghastly plans with his subservients to harp on the film’s unwieldy, traditionally unsatisfying film structure due to all momentum and no payoff. In Potter’s world, the foreboding, on-the-run thrills were an exciting time that became more introspective — Dune tries to give you the goods after true tragedy strikes.
Maybe I just needed something more from the film’s all-too monochromatic glaze. Though obviously consistently staggering, sometimes stupendous in scope, it’s not just the grading — or taking things dead seriously — that makes Dune feel more like a chore and less like an escape. Like a stillborn Nolan extravaganza (Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises), Dune possesses remarkable showmanship alongside depressing self-possession and a certain directionlessness, confusion or indecision within the screenwriting. The minimalist design is a sleek juxtaposition to the artistic choices of Arrival and Blade Runner but it consequently makes Dune Part One feel far closer to the year 2049 than 10,000whatever.
But I knew beyond doubt that Dune would sound superlative and Hans Zimmer or no (he’s definitely not slyly phoning it in like he just did in No Time to Die), there’s quite the eardrum-rumbling good fun to go with the muted, nevertheless marvelous visuals. The casting is also excellent, largely — Timothee Chalamet, Oscar Isaac and Rebecca Ferguson pull off their key roles as Paul, Duke Leto and Lady Jessica splendidly. Josh Brolin as Gurney, good for me. Zendaya as anyone, pass. Stellen Skarsgård should possess some more relish behind the supervillain scheming as Baron Harkonnen. Jason Mamoa is excellent at basically playing himself so I suppose Duncan Idaho is pretty cool. Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir is a strange pick for an aged Master of Assassins. Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Liet-Kynes ain’t no Max Von Sydow but I’ll get over it. David Dastmalchian (you know, Polka-Dot Man from THE Suicide Squad) is an evil mentat worthy of Grima Wormtongue.
I’m just disappointed that even with an extra film to let the story breathe, everything still feels so truncated. I needed a bit more than 30 minutes for teasing the Baron, laying down truckloads of exposition and getting my bearings of Paul’s day to day on Caladan — not to mention establishing/bonding with all these father figures in preparation for them all to perish. Oh yeah, a teenage lead character who can’t prevent his positive fatherly role models from dying left and right? Just another Potter parallel.
But then who could say just how good this adaptation is as of 2021? Who can really assess this film until Part Two has been consumed and digested like Sardukar by a sandworm sometime late in 2023? For the moment I’ll say that next to Lynch’s film, yes this movie is far more coherent and plausible but also less chancy, free-spirited and as committed to the internality of the books than Villeneuve’s muffled, mainstream vision. Denis is quoted as saying he wanted to make this his “best pop film” and another time refering to Dune as a “world of details,” and those sentiments rub up and chafe against one another in practice rather uncomfortably. Next to Villeneuve’s former work — his somber austerity worked to far more engaging ends with Prisoners and definitely Blade Runner 2049, which has modern classic running through its wired veins — this film combines the sparse, stripped sci-fi flavors of 2049 and Arrival, but I think the world of Dune was due a grander sense of the fantastic, even in a future that got over the whole thinking machines thing and resorted to feudalism, colonialism and Shakespearean backstabbery on a galactic scale.
Whereas Herbert’s part-textbook, part-pulp specificity provides an ample sense of humanity underneath the craziness and glossary worth of terminology, Villeneuve’s Dune applies far too much weight behind the typically utilitarian dialogue and furthermore strains for significance before leaving you less like Fellowship of the Ring and more like An Unexpected Journey. That’s a harsh parallel, but no matter which version you take, there are certain elements (the human-sifting and the hunter-seeker bit) that are tough as hell to inscript cinematically, as much as Villeneuve prevailed where he could. This still comes off like a superb set of SparkNotes rather than an event film meant to tickle the retinal teenage part of your mind.
Still the spice must flow and the sequel has the room to grow — but Zendaya is now the protagonist of Part Two? Good luck. Despite my relentless grievances 2021's Dune is still a creation of consummate, unmistakable talent.
The Last Duel briefing
3 (out of 4)
Whenever you assume the historical epic is finally dead, Ridley Scott takes a second away from trying to ruin the Alien property further to proclaim “Nay!”
Gladiator was such a consummate cultural moment it had Scott seemingly forever chasing Maximus’s high henceforth, to less success than even I care to admit. Kingdom of Heaven is intermittently impressive but even the coveted Director’s Cut that supposedly clicks so correctly is something stodgy — Orlando Bloom should not be trusted to carry a martyr’s gravitas. 2010's Robin Hood is every medieval cliché come to life and will suck the merriment right out of you. His last go was with Exodus: Gods and Kings, which I must confess before the Lord himself is quite a spell of biblical blockbuster entertainment even if Cecil B. DeMille, were he alive, would lament Hollywood’s latest idea of the religious behemoth. With Wolfgang Petersen, Peter Weir and Oliver Stone out of the historically heightened mix, no one else is willing to exhaust the modern costume epic like David Lean by way of, well someone like Roland Emmerich or worse.
He’s skimmed through history many times but the adjacent neighbor to The Last Duel’s turn of the 15th century era is in the bluntly titled and admirably acceptable 1492: Conquest of Paradise, though Terrence Malick's The New World is an infinitely richer tale of discovery and dissolution. But ultimately Scott’s latest The Last Duel registers like some return to his roots (and possibly to form) seeing as his debut — before he peaked hard with Alien and Blade Runner — was 1977’s The Duellists’ analogous account of honor, justice, masculinity, morality and pointy stabby things gone afoul (this time at the edge of the 19th century) likewise featuring detestable, sparring lead figures. While considerably more modest, I feel The Duellists to be the more palatable, poignant, staggering, and not just because there’s more than one duel and 100% less rape.
The Last Duel — and the only duel; yes I know it was the last of its kind, though it never becomes relevant to the film at hand — is pretty much Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as envisioned through the mud and candlelight of a typically coldly edited, impressively produced and occasionally ravishingly shot Ridley epic. The rub is a script by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who star as well in their only written collaboration apart from Good Will Hunting almost 25 years prior. But they needed a female voice to round out the trio of perspectives, thus another screenwriter and producer credit belongs to Nicole Holofcener — something tells me the film about men being all kinds of shitty to women needed the female touch, even if ceremoniously so.
The three-part structure is clean, the film is handsomely constructed separate from the tidy historical narrative and the sneaky feminism does not feel like Scott adjusting to a more woke world but rather like one of his new efforts actually had some higher purpose. Promising Young Woman kinda rewrote the playbook on how to handle rape in cinema — with newly established standards it makes it even crazier that The Last Duel volunteers insight in sexual ethics, in addition to the fealty and competition of social status that his past films often communicate.
Serious as the subjects are, there are still comically unfeeling kings and stubbornly noble protagonists. However the way this film manages to sit you through endless drama with Scott’s ability to hit a fresh story beat every three minutes only to follow through with a truly satisfying climax (“CONFEEEEESS!” Damon demands with a sword about to close up Driver’s trap — what a finale). The Last Duel is a testament to the classical movements that Ridley returns to even in his most thematically prudent and doggedly cut picture — in many ways this project confirms Scott’s place as a purist unfazed by the mutating expectations of film entertainment.
The casting is surprisingly sensible — Adam Driver as a smooth talking, Latin-reciting mathematician, political favorite, rapist? I buy it. Damon as a quick-tempered, battle-hardened squire turned knight, lucky in marriage and betrayed and belittled by social circumstance, sure thing. Affleck as some bleached, smarmy Count, actually all good with me. But in the end it's TV actress Jodie Comer — who just made a splash in Free Guy, the sleeper hit of the past summer — that affirms the film’s humanity and feeling amongst a typically bloody, brusque, dour-spirited affair. Without her final frame of mind this film would become The Prestige without the magic or the rational vantage — just two assholes screwing each other while we're left wishing no one would win. Through her — we only watch her rape take place TWICE — we can root for Damon’s character who otherwise only becomes more contemptuous past the subjectivity of the first act account of the events. It’s a neat trick and a fine of instance of moral relativity as a means to not muddle but clarify an ‘honorable’ purpose. However, as many tricks of perspective the film wants to get away with, Scott does dampen its structure with an inflexible bias leaving little space for interpretation, rendering 90 minutes of story long enough to call “sprawling” or whatever.
Though a long ways from an outright triumph, The Last Duel is meat and potatoes genre cinema we only see once in a blue moon these days. The film skates along the edge of parody for damn near the entire blessed runtime and still ends up safe and sound, coming off only an iota as stupid as it appears on paper or out of context. Thankfully if I was ever chuckling out of turn its due to Scott’s bold, nonchalant need to keep any and all combat hard and brutal and the harsh melodrama as straight-faced as is feasible.
While The Last Duel’s found a new place as the butt of box office jokes, Scott’s gonna have to rely on the gays' reception of the oddly more Oscar-friendly House of Gucci (also starring Mr. Driver, released within a month or so of this film in a double-up of Spielberg proportions), to reaffirm any financial viability. But who cares about numbers when he's already secured this antiquated tradition and his near-future career with the Joaquin Phoenix-led Napoleon, a project the ghost of Kubrick will haunt, if any.
Whenever you assume the historical epic is finally dead, Ridley Scott takes a second away from trying to ruin the Alien property further to proclaim “Nay!”
Gladiator was such a consummate cultural moment it had Scott seemingly forever chasing Maximus’s high henceforth, to less success than even I care to admit. Kingdom of Heaven is intermittently impressive but even the coveted Director’s Cut that supposedly clicks so correctly is something stodgy — Orlando Bloom should not be trusted to carry a martyr’s gravitas. 2010's Robin Hood is every medieval cliché come to life and will suck the merriment right out of you. His last go was with Exodus: Gods and Kings, which I must confess before the Lord himself is quite a spell of biblical blockbuster entertainment even if Cecil B. DeMille, were he alive, would lament Hollywood’s latest idea of the religious behemoth. With Wolfgang Petersen, Peter Weir and Oliver Stone out of the historically heightened mix, no one else is willing to exhaust the modern costume epic like David Lean by way of, well someone like Roland Emmerich or worse.
He’s skimmed through history many times but the adjacent neighbor to The Last Duel’s turn of the 15th century era is in the bluntly titled and admirably acceptable 1492: Conquest of Paradise, though Terrence Malick's The New World is an infinitely richer tale of discovery and dissolution. But ultimately Scott’s latest The Last Duel registers like some return to his roots (and possibly to form) seeing as his debut — before he peaked hard with Alien and Blade Runner — was 1977’s The Duellists’ analogous account of honor, justice, masculinity, morality and pointy stabby things gone afoul (this time at the edge of the 19th century) likewise featuring detestable, sparring lead figures. While considerably more modest, I feel The Duellists to be the more palatable, poignant, staggering, and not just because there’s more than one duel and 100% less rape.
The Last Duel — and the only duel; yes I know it was the last of its kind, though it never becomes relevant to the film at hand — is pretty much Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as envisioned through the mud and candlelight of a typically coldly edited, impressively produced and occasionally ravishingly shot Ridley epic. The rub is a script by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, who star as well in their only written collaboration apart from Good Will Hunting almost 25 years prior. But they needed a female voice to round out the trio of perspectives, thus another screenwriter and producer credit belongs to Nicole Holofcener — something tells me the film about men being all kinds of shitty to women needed the female touch, even if ceremoniously so.
The three-part structure is clean, the film is handsomely constructed separate from the tidy historical narrative and the sneaky feminism does not feel like Scott adjusting to a more woke world but rather like one of his new efforts actually had some higher purpose. Promising Young Woman kinda rewrote the playbook on how to handle rape in cinema — with newly established standards it makes it even crazier that The Last Duel volunteers insight in sexual ethics, in addition to the fealty and competition of social status that his past films often communicate.
Serious as the subjects are, there are still comically unfeeling kings and stubbornly noble protagonists. However the way this film manages to sit you through endless drama with Scott’s ability to hit a fresh story beat every three minutes only to follow through with a truly satisfying climax (“CONFEEEEESS!” Damon demands with a sword about to close up Driver’s trap — what a finale). The Last Duel is a testament to the classical movements that Ridley returns to even in his most thematically prudent and doggedly cut picture — in many ways this project confirms Scott’s place as a purist unfazed by the mutating expectations of film entertainment.
The casting is surprisingly sensible — Adam Driver as a smooth talking, Latin-reciting mathematician, political favorite, rapist? I buy it. Damon as a quick-tempered, battle-hardened squire turned knight, lucky in marriage and betrayed and belittled by social circumstance, sure thing. Affleck as some bleached, smarmy Count, actually all good with me. But in the end it's TV actress Jodie Comer — who just made a splash in Free Guy, the sleeper hit of the past summer — that affirms the film’s humanity and feeling amongst a typically bloody, brusque, dour-spirited affair. Without her final frame of mind this film would become The Prestige without the magic or the rational vantage — just two assholes screwing each other while we're left wishing no one would win. Through her — we only watch her rape take place TWICE — we can root for Damon’s character who otherwise only becomes more contemptuous past the subjectivity of the first act account of the events. It’s a neat trick and a fine of instance of moral relativity as a means to not muddle but clarify an ‘honorable’ purpose. However, as many tricks of perspective the film wants to get away with, Scott does dampen its structure with an inflexible bias leaving little space for interpretation, rendering 90 minutes of story long enough to call “sprawling” or whatever.
Though a long ways from an outright triumph, The Last Duel is meat and potatoes genre cinema we only see once in a blue moon these days. The film skates along the edge of parody for damn near the entire blessed runtime and still ends up safe and sound, coming off only an iota as stupid as it appears on paper or out of context. Thankfully if I was ever chuckling out of turn its due to Scott’s bold, nonchalant need to keep any and all combat hard and brutal and the harsh melodrama as straight-faced as is feasible.
While The Last Duel’s found a new place as the butt of box office jokes, Scott’s gonna have to rely on the gays' reception of the oddly more Oscar-friendly House of Gucci (also starring Mr. Driver, released within a month or so of this film in a double-up of Spielberg proportions), to reaffirm any financial viability. But who cares about numbers when he's already secured this antiquated tradition and his near-future career with the Joaquin Phoenix-led Napoleon, a project the ghost of Kubrick will haunt, if any.
No Time to Die briefing
3 (out of 4)
“We make films,” replied Barbara Broccoli to the idea of a 007 television series in the wake of the Amazon swallowing up MGM. Why would these legacy producers settle for the small screen when they’re busy showrunning the granddaddy of film franchises, the boomer’s blockbuster, the regular cinematic sensation, the latest and greatest in action/adventure? It’s Bond, he’s back and he's determined to leave you in tears.
After every strut in the sights of a gun barrel, every big ol' opening set piece, every psychedelic title sequence in tune with a potentially iconic theme song, every gadget, girl, henchman and megalomaniacal villain, every stupid immortal line, every bit of product placement (Omega/Heineken anyone?), every face behind M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix and the man himself, there’s a mess of internal history and ever-compiling evidence of formula informing every Bond movie to come. But No Time to Die isn’t really about Bond, it’s about Daniel Craig.
Finally premiering six years post-Spectre — the longest gap between 007 films without a change in actor — the 25th Bond feature foremost feels like an encore for Daniel. His whole run has seemingly been to trace the ‘character’ (more a vessel for the collective scope of any middle-aged man’s daydreams) back to why he is who he is. But between Quantum and Skyfall, Craig’s iteration quickly went from youthful irascible bastard with lessons to learn to washed-up super-spy — and furthermore Spectre was not the way to get back to the drawing board when the recognizable pieces were neatly reset by Skyfall's end. Craig’s run has been arriving and departing in equal measure — similarly No Time to Die smacks of substantially purposeful finality but it’s only so justified.
His fifth outing begins with such promise — Craig’s films always seemed to peak in Act One, but this one really had me going. The start is the slowest release of action I've probably ever seen in one of these, getting around to those opening stunts when it damn well pleases and keeping story in check as it does. Ana de Armas is wonderful, however briefly, and her sequence in Cuba is a sore highlight. While we're gushing, cinematographer Linus Sandgren absolutely kills it — even at the script's sloppiest, Sandgren automatically augments No Time to Die to a sophisticated action spectacle; his images are indelible, leaving Bond looking like 35mm technicolor magic or at least as gorgeous as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, an influence in tragic tone and near-roadshow scope. The film’s action, colors and tasteful framing is iridescent, practiced, polished and better-looking than any Bond film before, Roger Deakins be damned. There are few moments where director Cary Joji Fukunaga tries to recreate the one-take goods that made season one of True Detective (episode 4 particularly, of course) so distinctive — however it could just be that someone really enjoyed Atomic Blonde. But Sandgren’s skill, carrying over from magnificent work with Damien Chazelle for La La Land and First Man, is a show-stealer, refining the film’s best and worst moments in tandem with the splendid, exhaustive production design.
Hans Zimmer drops the brass bombs when he’s able but otherwise you might mistake this for a Batman score (a franchise and role that has all but already become America’s Bond). Billie Ellish’s song is a strong one — it’s not ”Skyfall” but outside of Sam Smith’s embarrassing contribution, the Craig era has been one of the most exemplar for theme songs, and the opening credits themselves aren’t revolting J-porn or whatever the Spectre titles were. For being the most expensive Jimmy B. film yet and the longest (Spectre only just set both records) at least it’s picturesque as paradise but also about as eternal as hell.
Craig could’ve left quietly with four movies behind him that are a few steps ahead of Pierce Brosnan’s oeuvre, but is he even good in this one? Yeah, even without Spectre as contrast, he's trying with perceptible passion. Lashana Lynch and the whole 007 takeover was all just smoke and mirrors to piss off the purists. She’s also pretty good, with presence and charisma and just literally, utterly nothing to do — de Armas is infinitely more impressive in just 15 minutes because the script values (or at least utilizes) her more somehow. Even the wash of feminism — something built up in Craig movies (all but insultingly dispelled in Spectre) and back in full force here — can’t lighten Bond's heavy legacy of sexism and sadism.
After being so well-established and actively incorporated into Skyfall, the recast crew of Ralph Fiennes as M, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw as Q have been essentially discarded as deadweight reinventions with as little to do on the sidelines as the earlier incarnations of the characters. Meanwhile, Christoph Waltz really could’ve just been written out of this movie (the slim second act is nearly perfunctory) rather than given one overplayed interrogation scene before an awkward death, and the same goes double for the bitch-ass way Felix goes out. Léa Seydoux's return also offers no feeling despite a lame backstory with Rami Malek's purposely hammy, poorly motivated, rather boring bad guy.
I believe whatever auteur theory was applied to Sam Mendes and Deakins' work in Skyfall was undone by Spectre. James Bond movies have always had the same feel, with variations only really taking place in Craig’s era. It’s always about the performer, the locations and the quality of the script and skirmishes — the silly vs serious spectrum can honestly be ignored. If Craig’s movies have been a formal experiment, a Harry Potter-like stretch of varying cinematic, narrative and emotional approaches, you can consider it a defining if self-defeating era for basically the OG British superhero. Sometimes I need a midget sidekick named Nick Nack though.
At least the more streamlined last act keeps you going with riffs on classic villain lairs and plenty of spare bodies to shoot and architecture to explode, that is until Bond bleeds out and finds the time to, uh, perish. It’s a dark twist of fate from an average villain that leaves James helpless rather than riding high on a moment of righteous, memorable gallantry like one might expect from the rumor that BOND FUCKING DIES. For being dubbed a ‘sentimental sendoff’ by most critics, all this Bond picture does is go harder on the Lazenby stint of breathable (not bloated, Spectre) structure and lovey dovey melodramatics. I guess the big, reverent, histrionic ending should have me welling up but the film’s maudlin magnitude feels tired even if this is unprecedented morality/mortality-testing for both 007 movies and even Craig’s “human” era. No Time to Die is a Hail Mary for Bond's humanity, with paternal and tragic strains attempting to broach new or at least rare ground for the character with grander scale and soap opera pathos. It’s self-congratulatory yet half-earned, trying to give you the classic goods (most times succeeding sensationally) and tighten the more existential notches of Craig’s less untouchable spy fantastique.
At its best, No Time to Die has space for big, this-just-in spectacle moments, agreeable, grin-smacking Bond bits and the sort of frivolous, postured, tingly excitement only a satisfactory 007 movie can achieve. It’s exceedingly top-heavy but just as ambitious, nailing most of its lofty marks without getting too into Skyfall’s brand of nostalgia and series-encapsulating, compilation feel. It’s Bond on Bond, a broad, indulgent double album of a film with some killer tracks and some filler tracks too. Rarely have I wanted a film to turn out well (not even incredibly) — wouldn’t it be nice to know the James Bond of your time had favorable track record? 3 out of 5 ain’t bad, eh? He's had the longest tenure and the third-most films, so it's safe to say next to Connery and Moore, Craig has been burned into our collective, enduringly spy-salivating consciousness, now, thankfully, for the better.
Bond isn’t going anywhere, and even with Mission: Impossible showing MI6 how it's done this decade past, our appetite for snooping and shooting and something amazing is not going anywhere. Maybe it’s ingrained in culture or masculinity or both but this is a corner of escapism that has a much bigger window to burn out than Craig. Though far from an original suggestion, for Bond 26 let’s take the re-reboot back to the 60s — I don’t give a good god damn who plays the role next, but before we all get riled up about whatever poor, lucky bastard gets to be the 7th 007, let’s be grateful Craig left us with a few of the most radical, riveting passages of the franchise.
Good thing for Craig that he seemed to immortalize a brand new sleuth in 2019 — Knives Out’s Detective Le Blanc seemed to be the most fun Craig’s ever had, so watching him go all Holmes on us post-Bond with two big sequels courtesy of Netflix sounds like quite the afterlife to me.
“We make films,” replied Barbara Broccoli to the idea of a 007 television series in the wake of the Amazon swallowing up MGM. Why would these legacy producers settle for the small screen when they’re busy showrunning the granddaddy of film franchises, the boomer’s blockbuster, the regular cinematic sensation, the latest and greatest in action/adventure? It’s Bond, he’s back and he's determined to leave you in tears.
After every strut in the sights of a gun barrel, every big ol' opening set piece, every psychedelic title sequence in tune with a potentially iconic theme song, every gadget, girl, henchman and megalomaniacal villain, every stupid immortal line, every bit of product placement (Omega/Heineken anyone?), every face behind M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix and the man himself, there’s a mess of internal history and ever-compiling evidence of formula informing every Bond movie to come. But No Time to Die isn’t really about Bond, it’s about Daniel Craig.
Finally premiering six years post-Spectre — the longest gap between 007 films without a change in actor — the 25th Bond feature foremost feels like an encore for Daniel. His whole run has seemingly been to trace the ‘character’ (more a vessel for the collective scope of any middle-aged man’s daydreams) back to why he is who he is. But between Quantum and Skyfall, Craig’s iteration quickly went from youthful irascible bastard with lessons to learn to washed-up super-spy — and furthermore Spectre was not the way to get back to the drawing board when the recognizable pieces were neatly reset by Skyfall's end. Craig’s run has been arriving and departing in equal measure — similarly No Time to Die smacks of substantially purposeful finality but it’s only so justified.
His fifth outing begins with such promise — Craig’s films always seemed to peak in Act One, but this one really had me going. The start is the slowest release of action I've probably ever seen in one of these, getting around to those opening stunts when it damn well pleases and keeping story in check as it does. Ana de Armas is wonderful, however briefly, and her sequence in Cuba is a sore highlight. While we're gushing, cinematographer Linus Sandgren absolutely kills it — even at the script's sloppiest, Sandgren automatically augments No Time to Die to a sophisticated action spectacle; his images are indelible, leaving Bond looking like 35mm technicolor magic or at least as gorgeous as On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, an influence in tragic tone and near-roadshow scope. The film’s action, colors and tasteful framing is iridescent, practiced, polished and better-looking than any Bond film before, Roger Deakins be damned. There are few moments where director Cary Joji Fukunaga tries to recreate the one-take goods that made season one of True Detective (episode 4 particularly, of course) so distinctive — however it could just be that someone really enjoyed Atomic Blonde. But Sandgren’s skill, carrying over from magnificent work with Damien Chazelle for La La Land and First Man, is a show-stealer, refining the film’s best and worst moments in tandem with the splendid, exhaustive production design.
Hans Zimmer drops the brass bombs when he’s able but otherwise you might mistake this for a Batman score (a franchise and role that has all but already become America’s Bond). Billie Ellish’s song is a strong one — it’s not ”Skyfall” but outside of Sam Smith’s embarrassing contribution, the Craig era has been one of the most exemplar for theme songs, and the opening credits themselves aren’t revolting J-porn or whatever the Spectre titles were. For being the most expensive Jimmy B. film yet and the longest (Spectre only just set both records) at least it’s picturesque as paradise but also about as eternal as hell.
Craig could’ve left quietly with four movies behind him that are a few steps ahead of Pierce Brosnan’s oeuvre, but is he even good in this one? Yeah, even without Spectre as contrast, he's trying with perceptible passion. Lashana Lynch and the whole 007 takeover was all just smoke and mirrors to piss off the purists. She’s also pretty good, with presence and charisma and just literally, utterly nothing to do — de Armas is infinitely more impressive in just 15 minutes because the script values (or at least utilizes) her more somehow. Even the wash of feminism — something built up in Craig movies (all but insultingly dispelled in Spectre) and back in full force here — can’t lighten Bond's heavy legacy of sexism and sadism.
After being so well-established and actively incorporated into Skyfall, the recast crew of Ralph Fiennes as M, Naomie Harris as Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw as Q have been essentially discarded as deadweight reinventions with as little to do on the sidelines as the earlier incarnations of the characters. Meanwhile, Christoph Waltz really could’ve just been written out of this movie (the slim second act is nearly perfunctory) rather than given one overplayed interrogation scene before an awkward death, and the same goes double for the bitch-ass way Felix goes out. Léa Seydoux's return also offers no feeling despite a lame backstory with Rami Malek's purposely hammy, poorly motivated, rather boring bad guy.
I believe whatever auteur theory was applied to Sam Mendes and Deakins' work in Skyfall was undone by Spectre. James Bond movies have always had the same feel, with variations only really taking place in Craig’s era. It’s always about the performer, the locations and the quality of the script and skirmishes — the silly vs serious spectrum can honestly be ignored. If Craig’s movies have been a formal experiment, a Harry Potter-like stretch of varying cinematic, narrative and emotional approaches, you can consider it a defining if self-defeating era for basically the OG British superhero. Sometimes I need a midget sidekick named Nick Nack though.
At least the more streamlined last act keeps you going with riffs on classic villain lairs and plenty of spare bodies to shoot and architecture to explode, that is until Bond bleeds out and finds the time to, uh, perish. It’s a dark twist of fate from an average villain that leaves James helpless rather than riding high on a moment of righteous, memorable gallantry like one might expect from the rumor that BOND FUCKING DIES. For being dubbed a ‘sentimental sendoff’ by most critics, all this Bond picture does is go harder on the Lazenby stint of breathable (not bloated, Spectre) structure and lovey dovey melodramatics. I guess the big, reverent, histrionic ending should have me welling up but the film’s maudlin magnitude feels tired even if this is unprecedented morality/mortality-testing for both 007 movies and even Craig’s “human” era. No Time to Die is a Hail Mary for Bond's humanity, with paternal and tragic strains attempting to broach new or at least rare ground for the character with grander scale and soap opera pathos. It’s self-congratulatory yet half-earned, trying to give you the classic goods (most times succeeding sensationally) and tighten the more existential notches of Craig’s less untouchable spy fantastique.
At its best, No Time to Die has space for big, this-just-in spectacle moments, agreeable, grin-smacking Bond bits and the sort of frivolous, postured, tingly excitement only a satisfactory 007 movie can achieve. It’s exceedingly top-heavy but just as ambitious, nailing most of its lofty marks without getting too into Skyfall’s brand of nostalgia and series-encapsulating, compilation feel. It’s Bond on Bond, a broad, indulgent double album of a film with some killer tracks and some filler tracks too. Rarely have I wanted a film to turn out well (not even incredibly) — wouldn’t it be nice to know the James Bond of your time had favorable track record? 3 out of 5 ain’t bad, eh? He's had the longest tenure and the third-most films, so it's safe to say next to Connery and Moore, Craig has been burned into our collective, enduringly spy-salivating consciousness, now, thankfully, for the better.
Bond isn’t going anywhere, and even with Mission: Impossible showing MI6 how it's done this decade past, our appetite for snooping and shooting and something amazing is not going anywhere. Maybe it’s ingrained in culture or masculinity or both but this is a corner of escapism that has a much bigger window to burn out than Craig. Though far from an original suggestion, for Bond 26 let’s take the re-reboot back to the 60s — I don’t give a good god damn who plays the role next, but before we all get riled up about whatever poor, lucky bastard gets to be the 7th 007, let’s be grateful Craig left us with a few of the most radical, riveting passages of the franchise.
Good thing for Craig that he seemed to immortalize a brand new sleuth in 2019 — Knives Out’s Detective Le Blanc seemed to be the most fun Craig’s ever had, so watching him go all Holmes on us post-Bond with two big sequels courtesy of Netflix sounds like quite the afterlife to me.
Titane and Venom:
Let There Be Carnage briefings
Titane
3 (out of 4)
Jesus Christ Julie, what are you on about? So her debut Raw is the type of horror flick that sticks with you even outside of its stomach-churning, flesh-fetishizing particulars. What mattered was Julie Ducournau was using horror as any respectable woman should — to advance powerful thematics at the same time she sends your senses surging to panic mode.
I could handle hereditary cannibalism and the best bit of femininity/coming-of-age chills since Ginger Snaps, but Titane is pleased as punch to push every last one of your buttons after Ducournau shows off her capacity for movement and style in the early post-title one-shot. For a minute we’re treated to black comic serial killer gimmicks — Lord save my eardrums from our our leading lady’s weapon of choice: chopstick-sized hairpins — all before the film starts reconfiguring the mechanics of sexuality and gender without letting up for a moment. Once Titane goes from gonzo gross-out galore to the freakiest French forgery of 2012's documentary The Imposter you could fathom (for way longer than you’re prepared for I might add), you know this carnal Cronenberg concoction cares not for your expectations nor your tolerance. I’ve never felt so odd eating popcorn, content to view a film as entertainment even as the director tries really, really hard to get your body squirming and your comfort levels to the negatives — you don’t casually watch makeshift abortions.
Lead actress Agathe Rousselle truly gives her body and soul to this transformative, near-torturous display of unremitting talent, but with praise also comes pity, for it is a brutal, unthinkable role she inhabits. When you get to the point where her breasts start secreting oil — did I mention the crux of this story concerns a hard-headed showgirl becoming infatuated (if that’s what you call it) with motor vehicles, having sex with a car (don’t ask me how) in quite the case of objectaphilia and becoming pregnant with a half-titanium baby? — there’s nothing to do but see where this batshit train winds up.
The destination is almost excruciatingly sentimental — I’m reminded of Wetlands, the 2013 German film that also tried desperately to make you physically gag at every turn on-screen and nevertheless became sweet and winsome by the conclusion. That film was deliberately provocative, comic and romantic. Outside of her casual early murder spree, Titane is serious as cancer (or a chunk of metal in your skull) and so much stranger for it. For hipsters like me it's the superior 2021 WTF movie of the year to James Wan’s appreciably cuckoo Malignant. But only two features deep, the director of Cannes latest Palme d’Or winner likely has leagues to go before she’s touched on every taboo she hopes to handle.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
2 (out of 4)
Aye yai yai Andy Serkis, I wish I could sing the praises of your first mainstream creation but there’s no justification in this case of further kid-friendly karnage. Whatever knack Serkis has for personifying motion-capture miracles has hardly translated to an analogous directorial dexterity. While he was trying to touch up Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, Disney stole his thunder with 2016’s Jungle Book and now he once again finds himself at the mercy of the Mouse in the consequent MCU-crossover direction indicated by this Sony superhero film’s post-credit scene, which practically supersedes the entirety of this flat-out forgettable sequel. This third Holland Spider-Man better make good on all the fanfare.
While I enjoyed 2018’s Venom, much to my surprise, for turning a tonally testy superhero body horror show into a crafty, corny crowd-pleaser, the only thing still clicking in Let There Be Carnage is Venom’s commentary, all the comedy this all too obvious breakup movie parody can pretend is funny. Woody Harrelson can’t make a movie worse but he’s just the same as always: eating up his role with unflagging, pointed personality and nothing else. Tom Hardy is still a grubby, agreeable underdog and the misapplied Michelle Williams barely needed to show up.
The first Venom went to some length to see that its origin story had some sort of purpose in the sickly side of superhero follies, redemption arcs and buddy movie antics — its successor is as disposable as the candy wrappers tossed in your used popcorn bucket. Let There Be Carnage has its moments but it’s quick 'n' dirty and not always in the cheaply satisfying way it hopes to rub off. The revenge angle is worn — isn’t Naomi Harris tired of playing the abused supernatural flame of a villain who chokes people out with his additional appendages? Harrelson’s Carnage is no Davy Jones. The pathetic plot is moot and even the symbiotic action is out of step. When the Eddie-Venom antics work, both of these films find a genuine pleasure in the Odd Couple angle. But mostly Carnage (as much as a PG-13 rating can allow) is a hollow, hateful, trashy waste of time. It meets its climax before the story has even really begun — it’s not over-edited, just barely written.
Still, the biggest opening weekend of the pandemic (so far) is nothing to scoff at and clear evidence of the grimy appeal of Hardy’s time inside the space goop — although only behind Bane’s mask will his antihero assets be reasonably well-remembered.
3 (out of 4)
Jesus Christ Julie, what are you on about? So her debut Raw is the type of horror flick that sticks with you even outside of its stomach-churning, flesh-fetishizing particulars. What mattered was Julie Ducournau was using horror as any respectable woman should — to advance powerful thematics at the same time she sends your senses surging to panic mode.
I could handle hereditary cannibalism and the best bit of femininity/coming-of-age chills since Ginger Snaps, but Titane is pleased as punch to push every last one of your buttons after Ducournau shows off her capacity for movement and style in the early post-title one-shot. For a minute we’re treated to black comic serial killer gimmicks — Lord save my eardrums from our our leading lady’s weapon of choice: chopstick-sized hairpins — all before the film starts reconfiguring the mechanics of sexuality and gender without letting up for a moment. Once Titane goes from gonzo gross-out galore to the freakiest French forgery of 2012's documentary The Imposter you could fathom (for way longer than you’re prepared for I might add), you know this carnal Cronenberg concoction cares not for your expectations nor your tolerance. I’ve never felt so odd eating popcorn, content to view a film as entertainment even as the director tries really, really hard to get your body squirming and your comfort levels to the negatives — you don’t casually watch makeshift abortions.
Lead actress Agathe Rousselle truly gives her body and soul to this transformative, near-torturous display of unremitting talent, but with praise also comes pity, for it is a brutal, unthinkable role she inhabits. When you get to the point where her breasts start secreting oil — did I mention the crux of this story concerns a hard-headed showgirl becoming infatuated (if that’s what you call it) with motor vehicles, having sex with a car (don’t ask me how) in quite the case of objectaphilia and becoming pregnant with a half-titanium baby? — there’s nothing to do but see where this batshit train winds up.
The destination is almost excruciatingly sentimental — I’m reminded of Wetlands, the 2013 German film that also tried desperately to make you physically gag at every turn on-screen and nevertheless became sweet and winsome by the conclusion. That film was deliberately provocative, comic and romantic. Outside of her casual early murder spree, Titane is serious as cancer (or a chunk of metal in your skull) and so much stranger for it. For hipsters like me it's the superior 2021 WTF movie of the year to James Wan’s appreciably cuckoo Malignant. But only two features deep, the director of Cannes latest Palme d’Or winner likely has leagues to go before she’s touched on every taboo she hopes to handle.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
2 (out of 4)
Aye yai yai Andy Serkis, I wish I could sing the praises of your first mainstream creation but there’s no justification in this case of further kid-friendly karnage. Whatever knack Serkis has for personifying motion-capture miracles has hardly translated to an analogous directorial dexterity. While he was trying to touch up Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, Disney stole his thunder with 2016’s Jungle Book and now he once again finds himself at the mercy of the Mouse in the consequent MCU-crossover direction indicated by this Sony superhero film’s post-credit scene, which practically supersedes the entirety of this flat-out forgettable sequel. This third Holland Spider-Man better make good on all the fanfare.
While I enjoyed 2018’s Venom, much to my surprise, for turning a tonally testy superhero body horror show into a crafty, corny crowd-pleaser, the only thing still clicking in Let There Be Carnage is Venom’s commentary, all the comedy this all too obvious breakup movie parody can pretend is funny. Woody Harrelson can’t make a movie worse but he’s just the same as always: eating up his role with unflagging, pointed personality and nothing else. Tom Hardy is still a grubby, agreeable underdog and the misapplied Michelle Williams barely needed to show up.
The first Venom went to some length to see that its origin story had some sort of purpose in the sickly side of superhero follies, redemption arcs and buddy movie antics — its successor is as disposable as the candy wrappers tossed in your used popcorn bucket. Let There Be Carnage has its moments but it’s quick 'n' dirty and not always in the cheaply satisfying way it hopes to rub off. The revenge angle is worn — isn’t Naomi Harris tired of playing the abused supernatural flame of a villain who chokes people out with his additional appendages? Harrelson’s Carnage is no Davy Jones. The pathetic plot is moot and even the symbiotic action is out of step. When the Eddie-Venom antics work, both of these films find a genuine pleasure in the Odd Couple angle. But mostly Carnage (as much as a PG-13 rating can allow) is a hollow, hateful, trashy waste of time. It meets its climax before the story has even really begun — it’s not over-edited, just barely written.
Still, the biggest opening weekend of the pandemic (so far) is nothing to scoff at and clear evidence of the grimy appeal of Hardy’s time inside the space goop — although only behind Bane’s mask will his antihero assets be reasonably well-remembered.
Shang-Chi and
the Legend of the Ten Rings briefing
2 ½ (out of 4)
The Marvel motors keeps a-sputtering but it’s hard to maintain the same momentum when we’ve already seen where the rainbow ends. I’m not sure why fans and critics have fawned so much after this one but I'm more interested in how the executives perceive it. I remember resenting the idea of Kevin Feige treating Shang Chi as an “experiment," though considering this film is the first of many cinema-exclusive Disney features to come, I’m glad the hard numbers add up to some theatrical longevity.
As an action movie alone, this flick is most favorably tailored for popular tastes; as another instance of Americanized Asian fare that 2021 is choking on, its story is almost indistinguishably rudimentary: I can exclude Disney’s one-year-removed Mulan but that still leaves Raya and the Last Dragon, WB’s Mortal Kombat and Paramount’s Snake Eyes. As wuxia for the masses, mainstream martial arts entertainment, whatever, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a respectable respite — but if ass-kicking is what you’re after why would you settle for Marvel when you could have Kung Fu with actual punch courtesy of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, an appropriate Zhang Yimou movie, Once Upon a Time in China or, hell, even Kill Bill would be leagues more nourishing. The highlight spots of spectacle pack a wallop but even when Shang-Chi starts to tickle the imagination with disciplined, fantastical excitement supposedly stealing our breath away, everything we’re meant to suspend disbelief for simply urges us to thank a previsualization department for working so hard on unbroken CG shots that, while impressive, are just distractingly phony enough to dismiss. It’s only in the practical hand-to-hand combat that anything worthy of awe can be found and that bus sequence is early on and short-lived. Even as pure entertainment the film could be boiled down to its most tantalizing bits.
Otherwise, the 25th MCU installment is literally plucking jokes from The 40-Year Old Virgin, scenes from Rush Hour 2 and imitating the world of Pokémon (at least to my eye) for some wildly aggrandized battle extravaganza climax. The continual return to flashbacks is nothing but soapy, F9-tier “emotional” padding forming a crutch for lack of epic structure and faint follow through in character development. How has Marvel still not figured out when to quit, when to hold the drama and when to pause for a laugh? How do I feel so deflated while watching soul-sucking dragons fly around?
Lead Simu Liu is so goddamn uncharismatic and inexpressive, his everyman(ish) qualities doing little for him even though the former stuntman and primarily television actor proves his physical worth and then some. Awkwafina is just the opposite, an oversized load of try-hard comic relief antics sung by a woman with a froggy, two-packs-a-day voice. Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love, Hero, Infernal Affairs) is incredible even as he’s fed ceaselessly clichéd lines and Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is close behind. Their comparatively seasoned gravitas puts the shallow central performances to shame. They also bring back Ben Kingsley’s silly fake-out villain role from Iron Man 3 to compensate for any shortage of the typically free-spirited Marvel funnies (just kidding, I meant the horribly condescending humor). Amidst a story that comes relatively close to formulating an appreciable bit of Chinese myth-making, the jokes here feel more pronounced and tested than the movie around them deserves.
Did I mention I’ve gotten so sick of after credits sequences with no purpose? Gosh its almost like they never mattered to begin with. Shang-Chi has two and neither matters other than to keep the embers of die-hard interest smoldering and to ensure everyone that THIS IS ALREADY LEADING TO SOMETHING BIG OK?? I just don’t care anymore. If every former hero is going to end up in some pointless post-credits cameo, I’m going to start hemorrhaging in my red chair one of these times, be warned AMC. But in the case of Shang-Chi how could director Destin Daniel Cretton do without squeezing Brie Larson into basically every step of his career? I like Cretton — Short Term 12 is one of the best dramas of the last decade and Just Mercy was pretty good too, with The Glass Castle in between. The American filmmaker (with Japanese roots along with Slovak and Irish ones) has kept his concerns decidedly domestic. The Legend of the Ten Rings doesn’t really feel like Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station is also one of the best dramas of modern movies) pumping up Black Panther with style and cultural authenticity sure to inspire a generation — Shang-Chi is not some event worth outpacing Avengers films in revenue. It comes across like Disney snatched up another indiestream director who hits their diversity quota just so. I didn’t expect them to get Wong Kar-Wai to direct but Shang-Chi is as Chinese as my takeout.
I would have applauded the film for widely showcasing Asian culture if the content had any internal self-respect. I wanna locate Cretton’s instinctive emotionality and melodramatic finesse within the film’s 135 minutes (a third of which could’ve easily been axed) but there’s little going for Ten Rings outside of a highlight reel of sick fights and colorful set pieces. This is no flat out failure though — the film is still that annoyingly tolerable level of good fun shared with masterful manipulation by a corporate entertainment powerhouse. Its middle to bottom shelf on the MCU scale and infinitely disposable next to even Marvel’s most tepid successes but hey, its not as aggravating as the Holland Spider-Man flicks or as ill-calculated as, uh, Ant-Man and the Wasp, I guess?
The MCU fever has been reignited in me (i.e. a cynic) as well as a soggy match, or maybe that’s too harsh, like a lighter that’s nearly out of juice. Black Widow was an encore for the series we once knew and while I always champion something untried over something tired, at least the last flick had a host characters I actually cared about from scratch, whereas Shang-Chi wants to be taken as art whilst checking every last box of the MCU’s most directly consumeristic medleys. As much of a risk as this appears on the surface, Marvel can’t let their gambles go by without placating them with safety nets and pandering prerequisites — overt humor, inconsequential callbacks, decently developed villains and CGI-slathered third acts.
Iron Man began the original string of superhero suffocation with inconspicuous seriousness. Shang-Chi doesn’t stand apart because its the sort of film where the fans will be clamoring more for teasers for the future rather than new stories, new character or new films period. At this point I have more than a hunch Eternals will be far more extravagant and awe-inspiring fantasy fluff and Spider-Man: No Way Home, quality decidedly notwithstanding, will be miles more diverting.
The Marvel motors keeps a-sputtering but it’s hard to maintain the same momentum when we’ve already seen where the rainbow ends. I’m not sure why fans and critics have fawned so much after this one but I'm more interested in how the executives perceive it. I remember resenting the idea of Kevin Feige treating Shang Chi as an “experiment," though considering this film is the first of many cinema-exclusive Disney features to come, I’m glad the hard numbers add up to some theatrical longevity.
As an action movie alone, this flick is most favorably tailored for popular tastes; as another instance of Americanized Asian fare that 2021 is choking on, its story is almost indistinguishably rudimentary: I can exclude Disney’s one-year-removed Mulan but that still leaves Raya and the Last Dragon, WB’s Mortal Kombat and Paramount’s Snake Eyes. As wuxia for the masses, mainstream martial arts entertainment, whatever, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is a respectable respite — but if ass-kicking is what you’re after why would you settle for Marvel when you could have Kung Fu with actual punch courtesy of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan, an appropriate Zhang Yimou movie, Once Upon a Time in China or, hell, even Kill Bill would be leagues more nourishing. The highlight spots of spectacle pack a wallop but even when Shang-Chi starts to tickle the imagination with disciplined, fantastical excitement supposedly stealing our breath away, everything we’re meant to suspend disbelief for simply urges us to thank a previsualization department for working so hard on unbroken CG shots that, while impressive, are just distractingly phony enough to dismiss. It’s only in the practical hand-to-hand combat that anything worthy of awe can be found and that bus sequence is early on and short-lived. Even as pure entertainment the film could be boiled down to its most tantalizing bits.
Otherwise, the 25th MCU installment is literally plucking jokes from The 40-Year Old Virgin, scenes from Rush Hour 2 and imitating the world of Pokémon (at least to my eye) for some wildly aggrandized battle extravaganza climax. The continual return to flashbacks is nothing but soapy, F9-tier “emotional” padding forming a crutch for lack of epic structure and faint follow through in character development. How has Marvel still not figured out when to quit, when to hold the drama and when to pause for a laugh? How do I feel so deflated while watching soul-sucking dragons fly around?
Lead Simu Liu is so goddamn uncharismatic and inexpressive, his everyman(ish) qualities doing little for him even though the former stuntman and primarily television actor proves his physical worth and then some. Awkwafina is just the opposite, an oversized load of try-hard comic relief antics sung by a woman with a froggy, two-packs-a-day voice. Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love, Hero, Infernal Affairs) is incredible even as he’s fed ceaselessly clichéd lines and Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is close behind. Their comparatively seasoned gravitas puts the shallow central performances to shame. They also bring back Ben Kingsley’s silly fake-out villain role from Iron Man 3 to compensate for any shortage of the typically free-spirited Marvel funnies (just kidding, I meant the horribly condescending humor). Amidst a story that comes relatively close to formulating an appreciable bit of Chinese myth-making, the jokes here feel more pronounced and tested than the movie around them deserves.
Did I mention I’ve gotten so sick of after credits sequences with no purpose? Gosh its almost like they never mattered to begin with. Shang-Chi has two and neither matters other than to keep the embers of die-hard interest smoldering and to ensure everyone that THIS IS ALREADY LEADING TO SOMETHING BIG OK?? I just don’t care anymore. If every former hero is going to end up in some pointless post-credits cameo, I’m going to start hemorrhaging in my red chair one of these times, be warned AMC. But in the case of Shang-Chi how could director Destin Daniel Cretton do without squeezing Brie Larson into basically every step of his career? I like Cretton — Short Term 12 is one of the best dramas of the last decade and Just Mercy was pretty good too, with The Glass Castle in between. The American filmmaker (with Japanese roots along with Slovak and Irish ones) has kept his concerns decidedly domestic. The Legend of the Ten Rings doesn’t really feel like Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station is also one of the best dramas of modern movies) pumping up Black Panther with style and cultural authenticity sure to inspire a generation — Shang-Chi is not some event worth outpacing Avengers films in revenue. It comes across like Disney snatched up another indiestream director who hits their diversity quota just so. I didn’t expect them to get Wong Kar-Wai to direct but Shang-Chi is as Chinese as my takeout.
I would have applauded the film for widely showcasing Asian culture if the content had any internal self-respect. I wanna locate Cretton’s instinctive emotionality and melodramatic finesse within the film’s 135 minutes (a third of which could’ve easily been axed) but there’s little going for Ten Rings outside of a highlight reel of sick fights and colorful set pieces. This is no flat out failure though — the film is still that annoyingly tolerable level of good fun shared with masterful manipulation by a corporate entertainment powerhouse. Its middle to bottom shelf on the MCU scale and infinitely disposable next to even Marvel’s most tepid successes but hey, its not as aggravating as the Holland Spider-Man flicks or as ill-calculated as, uh, Ant-Man and the Wasp, I guess?
The MCU fever has been reignited in me (i.e. a cynic) as well as a soggy match, or maybe that’s too harsh, like a lighter that’s nearly out of juice. Black Widow was an encore for the series we once knew and while I always champion something untried over something tired, at least the last flick had a host characters I actually cared about from scratch, whereas Shang-Chi wants to be taken as art whilst checking every last box of the MCU’s most directly consumeristic medleys. As much of a risk as this appears on the surface, Marvel can’t let their gambles go by without placating them with safety nets and pandering prerequisites — overt humor, inconsequential callbacks, decently developed villains and CGI-slathered third acts.
Iron Man began the original string of superhero suffocation with inconspicuous seriousness. Shang-Chi doesn’t stand apart because its the sort of film where the fans will be clamoring more for teasers for the future rather than new stories, new character or new films period. At this point I have more than a hunch Eternals will be far more extravagant and awe-inspiring fantasy fluff and Spider-Man: No Way Home, quality decidedly notwithstanding, will be miles more diverting.
Candyman briefing
1 ½ (out of 4)
The practice of pretending to produce the genuine follow-up to a famous original horror film, all while bearing the same name and ignoring stretches of bad sequels, is a lazy, lingering tactic that needs to be stamped out and shunned. At least Predator and Final Destination switch up the grammar now and again but Halloween did the exact same thing two years ago (for the second time) and this trend effects damn near every manner of the medium including the Shaft series.
Candyman is nonetheless the one frightful franchise that might have more relevancy now than when the identically-titled cult classic came out nearly 30 years ago. The Halloween saga (also a Universal concoction) was worth planning a new trilogy around because why not make money for no reason? However Candyman’s developmental potential was never worth more than a shoddy sequel (1995’s Farewell to the Flesh) and a third installment (1999’s Day of the Dead) costing three million dollars and never even hitting theaters. 1992’s Candyman investigated urban legends and the subliminal effects of gentrification, leaving plenty of possibilities for this (in)direct sequel to fashion something similarly weighty and at least equally entertaining.
But, alas, there remains one good Candyman film. The idea of building something ‘new’ out of a name and reputation alone feels like the same shady, backhanded pilfering the original film was nudging at socioeconomically. While the first flick sidestepped irony and hypocrisy, this iteration lays out the invocations of Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” (the written inspiration) like some Red-Bull-fueled final college paper. Sadly Jordan Peele’s involvement here was merely as producer and co-screenwriter of the semi-soft reboot, which, uh, wasn’t quite enough — I can’t fathom him earnestly signing off on this. You know why Get Out and Us work so well? Because their commentary, pronounced as it may be, still has to be inferred, its meaning mined at least a little. Candyman (2021) has a fresh angle concerning the disingenuousness of the stuffiest stiffs in the art scene and the way in which the circumstantial aspects of an artist or their work can supersede anything they hope to communicate… almost like cult and mystique are all that people care about… kind of the same way this movie rides the coattails of its cinematic forebears while enforcing all the wearying wokeness the OG Candyman was chronologically oblivious too.
This script’s perspective acts as if it was a white woman as the original film’s protagonist (Virginia Madsen) that made the in-story legacy stick, when that was just the point — that some hapless thesis-writing college grad was out of her depth trying to deconstruct the collective pain and fears of African Americans. Other than hammering down on the “revenge on white folks” angle that, again, the 1992 film was too smart for, there’s no motivation here to be found, nor likable characters or any real story that amounts to more than one relevant, generational twist.
What does Candyman: A New Legacy really offer all its own other than the easy grab at political popularity? Mirrored opening logos? Expository shadow puppetry? I guess I like that the C-Man’s burn scars form a honeycomb pattern, that’s a sensible design choice — the general guise and pomp of the movie supposes something potent and pointed. The acting roster is far less insufferable than the former, ignored follow-up Farewell to the Flesh but otherwise this Candyman deeply aches at the absence of Phillip Glass’s mesmeric theme and haunting sonic backdrops and, most dearly, the gaping hole left by Tony Todd (also a staple of the Final Destination films), whose own performative power has been dampened by the new film’s historical string of other Candymen over the years — I appreciate the modern mythological riff on scary stories but this film’s lifeless idea of reincarnation denies us the sadistic, surreal invention of superb supernatural slashers (dare I compare this to Dream Warriors).
I enjoyed Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Trial of the Chicago 7 (though he’s got mighty, Laurence FIshburne-sized shoes to fill in Matrix Resurrections) but as a cursed painter he’s got nothing to work with and neither does Teyonah Parris as his character’s girlfriend. In reference to films that make do satirizing or finding the preternatural in the art world’s crowded scene, The Devil’s Candy is far more in tune with the ethereal nature of evil and Velvet Buzzsaw, pretentious as it is, is at least more aesthetically and idealogically provocative. Director Nia DaCosta has style to spare but her minimalism can’t make much out of the paltry plotting and crowbarred thematics of the scant, stretched, superficially substantial screenplay. Rearing her understated debut Little Woods — a little tale of abortion, feminism and financial desperation that rings truer about its convictions than even a second of this pseudo-art-horror wannabe-woke hogwash — DaCosta has been plucked by Disney’s ogligarchy for a Captain Marvel follow-up due in a year’s time.
It’s the best Candyman sequel we’ve seen and that status is worth absolutely nothing. As one of the last slasher icons to become rashly resurrected (Halloween obviously, with trifling Freddy and Jason remakes a decade ago), I thought this film had the right material to not only connect with new viewers but also make good on the kind of sickening-at-first-glance-yet-teeming-with-subtext Hollywood material that is rarer year by year. Candyman circa 2021 fortunately doesn’t feel like a carbon copy but neither does it feel like a risky, realized reimagining. It’s frustratingly average and frequently littered with moments that could burst forth into malevolent mayhem if not stifled by cliché and inconclusive expressions of what racial horror could convey.
It’s a variation barely worth a “whisper in the classroom” — the film forces police brutality into the equation no matter how awkwardly it fits the mythos. I don’t think I’ll be saying his name five times in the mirror anytime soon but if I did at least then I’d be conjuring literally any sense of dread or, ahem, reflection.
The practice of pretending to produce the genuine follow-up to a famous original horror film, all while bearing the same name and ignoring stretches of bad sequels, is a lazy, lingering tactic that needs to be stamped out and shunned. At least Predator and Final Destination switch up the grammar now and again but Halloween did the exact same thing two years ago (for the second time) and this trend effects damn near every manner of the medium including the Shaft series.
Candyman is nonetheless the one frightful franchise that might have more relevancy now than when the identically-titled cult classic came out nearly 30 years ago. The Halloween saga (also a Universal concoction) was worth planning a new trilogy around because why not make money for no reason? However Candyman’s developmental potential was never worth more than a shoddy sequel (1995’s Farewell to the Flesh) and a third installment (1999’s Day of the Dead) costing three million dollars and never even hitting theaters. 1992’s Candyman investigated urban legends and the subliminal effects of gentrification, leaving plenty of possibilities for this (in)direct sequel to fashion something similarly weighty and at least equally entertaining.
But, alas, there remains one good Candyman film. The idea of building something ‘new’ out of a name and reputation alone feels like the same shady, backhanded pilfering the original film was nudging at socioeconomically. While the first flick sidestepped irony and hypocrisy, this iteration lays out the invocations of Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden” (the written inspiration) like some Red-Bull-fueled final college paper. Sadly Jordan Peele’s involvement here was merely as producer and co-screenwriter of the semi-soft reboot, which, uh, wasn’t quite enough — I can’t fathom him earnestly signing off on this. You know why Get Out and Us work so well? Because their commentary, pronounced as it may be, still has to be inferred, its meaning mined at least a little. Candyman (2021) has a fresh angle concerning the disingenuousness of the stuffiest stiffs in the art scene and the way in which the circumstantial aspects of an artist or their work can supersede anything they hope to communicate… almost like cult and mystique are all that people care about… kind of the same way this movie rides the coattails of its cinematic forebears while enforcing all the wearying wokeness the OG Candyman was chronologically oblivious too.
This script’s perspective acts as if it was a white woman as the original film’s protagonist (Virginia Madsen) that made the in-story legacy stick, when that was just the point — that some hapless thesis-writing college grad was out of her depth trying to deconstruct the collective pain and fears of African Americans. Other than hammering down on the “revenge on white folks” angle that, again, the 1992 film was too smart for, there’s no motivation here to be found, nor likable characters or any real story that amounts to more than one relevant, generational twist.
What does Candyman: A New Legacy really offer all its own other than the easy grab at political popularity? Mirrored opening logos? Expository shadow puppetry? I guess I like that the C-Man’s burn scars form a honeycomb pattern, that’s a sensible design choice — the general guise and pomp of the movie supposes something potent and pointed. The acting roster is far less insufferable than the former, ignored follow-up Farewell to the Flesh but otherwise this Candyman deeply aches at the absence of Phillip Glass’s mesmeric theme and haunting sonic backdrops and, most dearly, the gaping hole left by Tony Todd (also a staple of the Final Destination films), whose own performative power has been dampened by the new film’s historical string of other Candymen over the years — I appreciate the modern mythological riff on scary stories but this film’s lifeless idea of reincarnation denies us the sadistic, surreal invention of superb supernatural slashers (dare I compare this to Dream Warriors).
I enjoyed Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Trial of the Chicago 7 (though he’s got mighty, Laurence FIshburne-sized shoes to fill in Matrix Resurrections) but as a cursed painter he’s got nothing to work with and neither does Teyonah Parris as his character’s girlfriend. In reference to films that make do satirizing or finding the preternatural in the art world’s crowded scene, The Devil’s Candy is far more in tune with the ethereal nature of evil and Velvet Buzzsaw, pretentious as it is, is at least more aesthetically and idealogically provocative. Director Nia DaCosta has style to spare but her minimalism can’t make much out of the paltry plotting and crowbarred thematics of the scant, stretched, superficially substantial screenplay. Rearing her understated debut Little Woods — a little tale of abortion, feminism and financial desperation that rings truer about its convictions than even a second of this pseudo-art-horror wannabe-woke hogwash — DaCosta has been plucked by Disney’s ogligarchy for a Captain Marvel follow-up due in a year’s time.
It’s the best Candyman sequel we’ve seen and that status is worth absolutely nothing. As one of the last slasher icons to become rashly resurrected (Halloween obviously, with trifling Freddy and Jason remakes a decade ago), I thought this film had the right material to not only connect with new viewers but also make good on the kind of sickening-at-first-glance-yet-teeming-with-subtext Hollywood material that is rarer year by year. Candyman circa 2021 fortunately doesn’t feel like a carbon copy but neither does it feel like a risky, realized reimagining. It’s frustratingly average and frequently littered with moments that could burst forth into malevolent mayhem if not stifled by cliché and inconclusive expressions of what racial horror could convey.
It’s a variation barely worth a “whisper in the classroom” — the film forces police brutality into the equation no matter how awkwardly it fits the mythos. I don’t think I’ll be saying his name five times in the mirror anytime soon but if I did at least then I’d be conjuring literally any sense of dread or, ahem, reflection.
Annette briefing
2 ½ (out of 4)
I like to believe I have an acute sense of which movies are destined to turn out spectacularly. From a distance, Annette appeared to be nothing less than a grand slam masterpiece in waiting — when its maker is responsible for only six movies in over 35 years, who would expect a decade-removed return to cinema after a film as free, freaky and fundamental to world cinema as Holy Motors would be so tame and within easy grasp. I couldn’t have foreseen such a whiff from the premise, those incredible trailers and especially the guidance of the fanciful French filmsmith Leos Carax. Although Annette begins with a good deal of promise and pleasure, the 140-minute love episode-cum-murder/exploitation saga is remarkably short on sensual substance and dynamic invention.
As more a rock opera than outright musical, there’s at least a tiny excuse as to why the many interludes, breakdowns and show-stoppers are light on ideas or, um I don’t know, MELODY. You’re undoubtedly better off with something like Phantom of the Paradise or The Rocky Horror Picture Show any night of the week — I normally wouldn’t measure some new picture against concrete classics if the fussy filmography of the man responsible wasn’t chock full of ‘em, like the back-to-back Juliette Binoche ventures Mauvais Sang and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Other than the main theme (cycling minor chords and the same lyrics “we love each other so much” ad infinitum) that becomes a haunting refrain, the majority of Annette’s music is flaccid, repetitive, underdeveloped and sonically sour. Both brothers of Sparks — the cult glam rock band and subjects of a recent Edgar Wright documentary — are screenwriters alongside Carax, which would lead you to believe they either squandered Carax’s original story rather than capitalizing on a firsthand formative influence, or vice versa. The odd collaboration is nonetheless faulty if fearless.
There are passages of visual sublimity and romantic resonance that are up to Carax’s poetic, provocative standard but with so much flexibility and funds at his disposal, it’s sad to think his considerably limited debut Boy Meets Girl is the more interesting, cinematically evocative film. Annette is at least nearly his weakest feature to date and there’s no excuse — Carax’s mania feels muzzled and his pretensions protrude more than they ever need to. Even if this were in French rather than his first English feature, his textbook showmanship would likely still feel uncommonly awkward if often optically resplendent. Carax shows his face in the opening scene just like Motors, strangely overseeing the film that’s about to unfold. Even with mysterious love-made marionettes and slights at celebrity culture, the film has no scopic sweep or meaningful blueprint. Its trivial flippancy is charming before quickly turning tiresome, like a music box someone won’t stop cranking.
Maybe Carax’s major collaborator and acting chameleon Denis Levant really is the magic ingredient that makes his films shine. But swap one of the most fascinating faces and performers in modern cinema for two others (Adam Driver and his excessively Roman features and Marion Cotillard with her winsome, otherworldly beauty) and somehow nothing’s happening. Driver is one of the best of his generation but that doesn’t mean his confessional karaoke capper in Marriage Story wasn’t more moving than any of the amateurish belting he does here. Cotillard is as good as ever but shortchanged by a script that mostly makes her don various wigs. On the other hand I’ve never seen Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory) so good in anything besides his bit part in the Coen brother’s A Serious Man.
Next to Cotillard’s opera sequences (actually the soprano voice of Catherine Trottmann), the early stand-up sets with Driver’s cocky comic character neatly contrast high and low art in terms of professional exertion and artistic interpretation. Sometimes when the film is steeped in cinema’s past with nods to Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, The Red Shoes, plus a touch of A Star Is Born, I can see the same Carax that’s always been so skilled at reshaping certain elements of Surrealist movements and the French New Wave to his own idiosyncratic liking. Otherwise I now know why the film didn’t win the Palme d’Or at Cannes despite its talk-of-the-town status prior to the opening night spotlight. I suppose the winner Titane — the fresher French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Raw — will be the more intoxicating test of arthouse’s fertility in 2021.
In a year stuffed to the brim with musicals, I would have bet one of my untrained lungs this would be the best, smoking Stephen Chbosky’s Dear Evan Hansen, Joe Wright’s Cyrano and even Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. But, unexpectedly, Annette’s already been upstaged by In the Heights, which is home to FAR more fetching musical numbers, connective narrative logic and romantic exhilaration. That film was the first Lin-Manuel Miranda movie to reach the silver screen and he’ll soon make his true directorial debut later this year adapting Jonathan Larson's tick, tick… BOOM! Back in June Heights brought me out of my cynical summer state and Annette just scared me back into my crusty, curmudgeonly shell.
I like to believe I have an acute sense of which movies are destined to turn out spectacularly. From a distance, Annette appeared to be nothing less than a grand slam masterpiece in waiting — when its maker is responsible for only six movies in over 35 years, who would expect a decade-removed return to cinema after a film as free, freaky and fundamental to world cinema as Holy Motors would be so tame and within easy grasp. I couldn’t have foreseen such a whiff from the premise, those incredible trailers and especially the guidance of the fanciful French filmsmith Leos Carax. Although Annette begins with a good deal of promise and pleasure, the 140-minute love episode-cum-murder/exploitation saga is remarkably short on sensual substance and dynamic invention.
As more a rock opera than outright musical, there’s at least a tiny excuse as to why the many interludes, breakdowns and show-stoppers are light on ideas or, um I don’t know, MELODY. You’re undoubtedly better off with something like Phantom of the Paradise or The Rocky Horror Picture Show any night of the week — I normally wouldn’t measure some new picture against concrete classics if the fussy filmography of the man responsible wasn’t chock full of ‘em, like the back-to-back Juliette Binoche ventures Mauvais Sang and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. Other than the main theme (cycling minor chords and the same lyrics “we love each other so much” ad infinitum) that becomes a haunting refrain, the majority of Annette’s music is flaccid, repetitive, underdeveloped and sonically sour. Both brothers of Sparks — the cult glam rock band and subjects of a recent Edgar Wright documentary — are screenwriters alongside Carax, which would lead you to believe they either squandered Carax’s original story rather than capitalizing on a firsthand formative influence, or vice versa. The odd collaboration is nonetheless faulty if fearless.
There are passages of visual sublimity and romantic resonance that are up to Carax’s poetic, provocative standard but with so much flexibility and funds at his disposal, it’s sad to think his considerably limited debut Boy Meets Girl is the more interesting, cinematically evocative film. Annette is at least nearly his weakest feature to date and there’s no excuse — Carax’s mania feels muzzled and his pretensions protrude more than they ever need to. Even if this were in French rather than his first English feature, his textbook showmanship would likely still feel uncommonly awkward if often optically resplendent. Carax shows his face in the opening scene just like Motors, strangely overseeing the film that’s about to unfold. Even with mysterious love-made marionettes and slights at celebrity culture, the film has no scopic sweep or meaningful blueprint. Its trivial flippancy is charming before quickly turning tiresome, like a music box someone won’t stop cranking.
Maybe Carax’s major collaborator and acting chameleon Denis Levant really is the magic ingredient that makes his films shine. But swap one of the most fascinating faces and performers in modern cinema for two others (Adam Driver and his excessively Roman features and Marion Cotillard with her winsome, otherworldly beauty) and somehow nothing’s happening. Driver is one of the best of his generation but that doesn’t mean his confessional karaoke capper in Marriage Story wasn’t more moving than any of the amateurish belting he does here. Cotillard is as good as ever but shortchanged by a script that mostly makes her don various wigs. On the other hand I’ve never seen Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory) so good in anything besides his bit part in the Coen brother’s A Serious Man.
Next to Cotillard’s opera sequences (actually the soprano voice of Catherine Trottmann), the early stand-up sets with Driver’s cocky comic character neatly contrast high and low art in terms of professional exertion and artistic interpretation. Sometimes when the film is steeped in cinema’s past with nods to Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, The Red Shoes, plus a touch of A Star Is Born, I can see the same Carax that’s always been so skilled at reshaping certain elements of Surrealist movements and the French New Wave to his own idiosyncratic liking. Otherwise I now know why the film didn’t win the Palme d’Or at Cannes despite its talk-of-the-town status prior to the opening night spotlight. I suppose the winner Titane — the fresher French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to Raw — will be the more intoxicating test of arthouse’s fertility in 2021.
In a year stuffed to the brim with musicals, I would have bet one of my untrained lungs this would be the best, smoking Stephen Chbosky’s Dear Evan Hansen, Joe Wright’s Cyrano and even Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. But, unexpectedly, Annette’s already been upstaged by In the Heights, which is home to FAR more fetching musical numbers, connective narrative logic and romantic exhilaration. That film was the first Lin-Manuel Miranda movie to reach the silver screen and he’ll soon make his true directorial debut later this year adapting Jonathan Larson's tick, tick… BOOM! Back in June Heights brought me out of my cynical summer state and Annette just scared me back into my crusty, curmudgeonly shell.
The Green Knight and Stillwater briefings
The Green Knight
3 (out of 4)
Director David Lowery hasn’t been able to back up his inherent airs, pomp, conceit, what have you, until now. The Green Knight is exactly the artsy fartsy revisionist medieval dark fantasy movie it looks like, I just never fathomed it to be worthy of Guillermo del Toro. The titular fellow himself (not Dev Patel mind you, who does a fine job as the weak-willed, honor-seeking Gawain) looks like he’s right out of Pan’s Labyrinth or that market in Hellboy II: The Golden Army — he’s as comforting, cunning, ominous and ethereal as the simple, enigmatic figure should be.
The Green Knight has a few too-cute ticks that make it a hipster’s Middle English epic rather than the next Excalibur like it very nearly could have been. The Wes Anderson-worthy chaptered intertitles, the almost greedily ambiguous string of false endings, monologues breaking down the color green and ponderous musings on decay and regeneration — it’s all about as heavy-handed as Lowery’s most overconfident iterations.
But the film has genuine, compactly epic beauty (maybe excusing the sidekick CGI fox), exciting if outlandish editing/atmospheric choices and performative moments that beguile as much as the landscapes. Patel is better than expected but Alicia Vikander is incredible in her dual role, exceeding the efforts of any other recognizable face in the cast like Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, Barry Keoghan and Kate Dickie. The Green Knight actually mystifies, bewilders, takes chances and makes the most of them — both the Knight’s entrance as well as Gawain’s encounter with the specter Winifred are wondrously, hauntingly realized. The stunning cinematography, tangible production design, the structure that doesn’t want to wrap things up — it’s all gratifyingly cinematic. Lowery might be far too coy regarding his feelings about tweaking laid-down legends but his alterations, while modified with maddening, possibly meaningless variations on the Arthurian poem, are nonetheless intriguing and largely understandable. Even that sultry sex scene has themes to reinforce.
His former career has been so unpredictable that, personally speaking, this film became a real wild card. His first collaboration with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara — his Southern crime-romance debut Ain’t Them Bodies Saints — was an authentic enough, solidly written tragedy. Then he quickly became a cuck for Disney beginning with his overrated Pete’s Dragon revamp, which was at least a more respectable example of what those hollow live action remakes could be — his current production of Peter Pan & Wendy doesn’t have me racked with many feelings besides worry. Then A Ghost Story became the crux of his critical and popular standing and there’s not much to say other than it’s just dreadful, the kind of pretend art the word pretentious was concocted for. It feigns understatement while bearing the guise of some meditative deep-thinker, provoking thought and emotion with all the gusto of well-directed TV ad — it’s a grossly pseudo-intellectual affair. Lowery’s previous best was his last, Robert Redford’s sendoff The Old Man and the Gun, which weighed time’s toll with more power than anything involving Affleck under a sheet.
My hatred of A Ghost Story is so vehement I was looking for any way to criticize an artistic gamble as considerable as The Green Knight. In the end I was happily entranced and transported. Even if the film didn’t inherit the humbling weight and sizable subtext of authorless 14th century storytelling, Lowery still would have a beautiful bore on his hands. His approachable slow cinema seems to have found its substantive suit in swapping a fairy tale for a cautionary one instead.
Stillwater
3 (out of 4)
Tom McCarthy directed the Best Picture winner Spotlight — he’s also responsible for The Cobbler. These are just indisputable facts. His latest, Stillwater, seemed slated for some Academy attention with a former November 2020 release last year before the scheduling setbacks of COVID. However long the journey to theaters, at its worst this film is a welcome return to drama after the director succumbed to slumming it slightly in the Disney+ feature Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made last year.
But in spite of the slightest prestige attached to his name, I did not expect Stillwater to resemble some cinematic powerhouse. Yes, this would-be softball Oscar bait turned random Matt Damon movie is inconspicuously devastating, about three times as potent and moving as you’d presume. Propped up by expertly employed exposition, a Trojan-horsed study in multicultural domestic bliss, natural, casually disarming humor, a wellspring of eventual emotional blows and the confident consideration of its morally troublesome true(ish) crime drama, this is McCarthy’s finest effort yet. The director doesn’t overstep his authorship or exaggerate the mechanics of the story with unnecessary melodramatic mush, unlike his most similar effort The Visitor. It’s as understated as Spotlight or his dandy debut The Station Agent and somehow even more purposeful and poignant.
When Stillwater drops the central premise of a stubbornly American quest for international justice for almost an act of outwardly developing its unaffected, full-bodied characters, there is no steam lost, just a span of cinema at its most irreproachably practical. Whether we’re in Marseilles or the Panhandle, the film has reverence for ordinary people and the costly mistakes and twists of misfortune seemingly shaping their fates. McCarthy could have easily slipped entirely into sentiment or carved out a path toward some kind of smarmy, misguided cultural satire. Instead he puts forth nothing more than tough, straightforward moviemaking that can poke a hole in your soul without making a big deal out of it.
Damon is just great — this could be his best performance ever, barring Mr. Ripley even. His main co-stars Camille Cottin and young Lilou Siauvaud are also nonchalantly, effortlessly superb but it’s the crucial supporting part of the phenomenally emotive Abigail Breslin that ties together the commendable ensemble. Amanda Knox's story of wrongful incarceration and eventual acquittal generally inspires Breslin's role as Allison Baker and serves as Stillwater’s loose narrative foundation. Knox has denounced the film, asserting that Damon and McCarthy are profiting off her plight, yet considering the sweeping fictionalization and ethically complex humanism the script affords this version of both her father and herself, it’s difficult to dismiss the movie as Hollywood hokum. She may feel like a victim of exploitation but Stillwater itself does not.
During an in-film stage rehearsal, Cottin’s French actress character Virginie recites, “There is no truth, there are only stories.” Right on, Tom.
3 (out of 4)
Director David Lowery hasn’t been able to back up his inherent airs, pomp, conceit, what have you, until now. The Green Knight is exactly the artsy fartsy revisionist medieval dark fantasy movie it looks like, I just never fathomed it to be worthy of Guillermo del Toro. The titular fellow himself (not Dev Patel mind you, who does a fine job as the weak-willed, honor-seeking Gawain) looks like he’s right out of Pan’s Labyrinth or that market in Hellboy II: The Golden Army — he’s as comforting, cunning, ominous and ethereal as the simple, enigmatic figure should be.
The Green Knight has a few too-cute ticks that make it a hipster’s Middle English epic rather than the next Excalibur like it very nearly could have been. The Wes Anderson-worthy chaptered intertitles, the almost greedily ambiguous string of false endings, monologues breaking down the color green and ponderous musings on decay and regeneration — it’s all about as heavy-handed as Lowery’s most overconfident iterations.
But the film has genuine, compactly epic beauty (maybe excusing the sidekick CGI fox), exciting if outlandish editing/atmospheric choices and performative moments that beguile as much as the landscapes. Patel is better than expected but Alicia Vikander is incredible in her dual role, exceeding the efforts of any other recognizable face in the cast like Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, Barry Keoghan and Kate Dickie. The Green Knight actually mystifies, bewilders, takes chances and makes the most of them — both the Knight’s entrance as well as Gawain’s encounter with the specter Winifred are wondrously, hauntingly realized. The stunning cinematography, tangible production design, the structure that doesn’t want to wrap things up — it’s all gratifyingly cinematic. Lowery might be far too coy regarding his feelings about tweaking laid-down legends but his alterations, while modified with maddening, possibly meaningless variations on the Arthurian poem, are nonetheless intriguing and largely understandable. Even that sultry sex scene has themes to reinforce.
His former career has been so unpredictable that, personally speaking, this film became a real wild card. His first collaboration with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara — his Southern crime-romance debut Ain’t Them Bodies Saints — was an authentic enough, solidly written tragedy. Then he quickly became a cuck for Disney beginning with his overrated Pete’s Dragon revamp, which was at least a more respectable example of what those hollow live action remakes could be — his current production of Peter Pan & Wendy doesn’t have me racked with many feelings besides worry. Then A Ghost Story became the crux of his critical and popular standing and there’s not much to say other than it’s just dreadful, the kind of pretend art the word pretentious was concocted for. It feigns understatement while bearing the guise of some meditative deep-thinker, provoking thought and emotion with all the gusto of well-directed TV ad — it’s a grossly pseudo-intellectual affair. Lowery’s previous best was his last, Robert Redford’s sendoff The Old Man and the Gun, which weighed time’s toll with more power than anything involving Affleck under a sheet.
My hatred of A Ghost Story is so vehement I was looking for any way to criticize an artistic gamble as considerable as The Green Knight. In the end I was happily entranced and transported. Even if the film didn’t inherit the humbling weight and sizable subtext of authorless 14th century storytelling, Lowery still would have a beautiful bore on his hands. His approachable slow cinema seems to have found its substantive suit in swapping a fairy tale for a cautionary one instead.
Stillwater
3 (out of 4)
Tom McCarthy directed the Best Picture winner Spotlight — he’s also responsible for The Cobbler. These are just indisputable facts. His latest, Stillwater, seemed slated for some Academy attention with a former November 2020 release last year before the scheduling setbacks of COVID. However long the journey to theaters, at its worst this film is a welcome return to drama after the director succumbed to slumming it slightly in the Disney+ feature Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made last year.
But in spite of the slightest prestige attached to his name, I did not expect Stillwater to resemble some cinematic powerhouse. Yes, this would-be softball Oscar bait turned random Matt Damon movie is inconspicuously devastating, about three times as potent and moving as you’d presume. Propped up by expertly employed exposition, a Trojan-horsed study in multicultural domestic bliss, natural, casually disarming humor, a wellspring of eventual emotional blows and the confident consideration of its morally troublesome true(ish) crime drama, this is McCarthy’s finest effort yet. The director doesn’t overstep his authorship or exaggerate the mechanics of the story with unnecessary melodramatic mush, unlike his most similar effort The Visitor. It’s as understated as Spotlight or his dandy debut The Station Agent and somehow even more purposeful and poignant.
When Stillwater drops the central premise of a stubbornly American quest for international justice for almost an act of outwardly developing its unaffected, full-bodied characters, there is no steam lost, just a span of cinema at its most irreproachably practical. Whether we’re in Marseilles or the Panhandle, the film has reverence for ordinary people and the costly mistakes and twists of misfortune seemingly shaping their fates. McCarthy could have easily slipped entirely into sentiment or carved out a path toward some kind of smarmy, misguided cultural satire. Instead he puts forth nothing more than tough, straightforward moviemaking that can poke a hole in your soul without making a big deal out of it.
Damon is just great — this could be his best performance ever, barring Mr. Ripley even. His main co-stars Camille Cottin and young Lilou Siauvaud are also nonchalantly, effortlessly superb but it’s the crucial supporting part of the phenomenally emotive Abigail Breslin that ties together the commendable ensemble. Amanda Knox's story of wrongful incarceration and eventual acquittal generally inspires Breslin's role as Allison Baker and serves as Stillwater’s loose narrative foundation. Knox has denounced the film, asserting that Damon and McCarthy are profiting off her plight, yet considering the sweeping fictionalization and ethically complex humanism the script affords this version of both her father and herself, it’s difficult to dismiss the movie as Hollywood hokum. She may feel like a victim of exploitation but Stillwater itself does not.
During an in-film stage rehearsal, Cottin’s French actress character Virginie recites, “There is no truth, there are only stories.” Right on, Tom.
Old briefing
1 ½ (out of 4)
Oh M. Night, is this honestly the best you’ve got? It’s easy to forget how long it’s been since Shyamalan fell off from respectability and remained barely a flicker above flatline. After descending from The Sixth Sense’s deserved distinction to smart follow-ups in Unbreakable and Signs, he finally arrived at a bona fide flub with The Village, which appeared to signify the bastardization of his stylistic bread and butter. Hence he was somewhat unfairly maligned for trying something new with Lady in the Water but then he earned every derision directed at him in the new low that was 2008’s The Happening. He further ruined many people’s summer matinees with back-to-back box office blunders The Last Airbender and After Earth. The Visit was his last decent one, a found footage film offering something resembling shrewdness before Split and Glass feebly aspired to make good on the promise of Unbreakable’s subdued supers.
Old appears to be in check with his former routine but even a film as half-witted as The Village has interesting mise-en-scène, a few credible performances and (*gasp*) more than a few trifling moments of tension. His role as auteur frequently rests on prudently pulling off risky concepts — unfortunately this film just feels like straight parody or some professional cringe compilation with no help at all from a Scary Movie sequel. I hate to be so harsh but I think Old fails as summer entertainment, horror and a slice of high-concept hijinks. For a film about time advancing at supernatural speed Old ironically trips over its own exponential entropy. I could have fast-forwarded through this thing and still felt ripped off.
The potential is there — I imagine when Christopher Nolan or Charlie Kaufman has a nightmare it goes something like this. Certain moments click, like the split decision surgery scene, using rust as a weapon and… gosh that’s about it. It tries and sporadically succeeds to fulfill a fascinating premise but I’ll be damned if this isn’t a dysfunctional, utterly inferior clone of any random Stephen King or Agatha Christie story. The movements of any respectable mystery movie should always attempt to align the interests and knowledge of the protagonists with that of the active audience, but whenever anyone opens their mouth its to enunciate exactly what we already see happening. Exposition hits you like hailstones and every blessed line is clunky.
It’s barely worth criticizing how little consistency there is in the time dilation when Shyamalan's most egregious shortcoming is character development. “What’s your name and occupation?” asks M. Night (indiscreetly through the youngest protagonist) to every supporting figure that might be relevant. If its themes ran more than wrinkle deep I could defend Old for being about something, maybe. Instead it’s just another indulgent, harebrained, what-were-you-thinking-level embarrassment from a mostly mediocre charlatan. This is basically a bottle film with hardly any psychological changes or narrative breaking points, which, I also hate so say, is very boring.
Gael García Bernal (Y tu Mamá También, Bad Education, The Science of Sleep) is as misused as his on-screen partner Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), meanwhile the burgeoning Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Jojo Rabbit) comes out remarkably unscathed career-wise and Alex Wolff (Hereditary) can’t keep it together (quick reminder to see Wolff actually act in Pig instead). Though the casting for the different developmental stages of the same players was strong, the characterization alone (like everyone's favorite fictional rapper Midsize Sedan) is alarmingly thoughtless. Even actors as serious as Rufus Sewell are fumbling through haphazard, half-baked writing, though Ken Leung was just dreadful, bad script or no.
Overwhelming hamminess aside, I was strung along by this adaptation of the French graphic novel Sandcastle — even during incredibly comical 'disturbing' sequences that would make the Wayans feel as if they've been upstaged — but the payoff (you can’t even really call it a twist) is just a big, easy-way-out sack of nothing. Old ultimately rubs off like a substandard Blumhouse horror flick, hardly some return to form for the self-appointed steward of “original thrillers.”
Oh M. Night, is this honestly the best you’ve got? It’s easy to forget how long it’s been since Shyamalan fell off from respectability and remained barely a flicker above flatline. After descending from The Sixth Sense’s deserved distinction to smart follow-ups in Unbreakable and Signs, he finally arrived at a bona fide flub with The Village, which appeared to signify the bastardization of his stylistic bread and butter. Hence he was somewhat unfairly maligned for trying something new with Lady in the Water but then he earned every derision directed at him in the new low that was 2008’s The Happening. He further ruined many people’s summer matinees with back-to-back box office blunders The Last Airbender and After Earth. The Visit was his last decent one, a found footage film offering something resembling shrewdness before Split and Glass feebly aspired to make good on the promise of Unbreakable’s subdued supers.
Old appears to be in check with his former routine but even a film as half-witted as The Village has interesting mise-en-scène, a few credible performances and (*gasp*) more than a few trifling moments of tension. His role as auteur frequently rests on prudently pulling off risky concepts — unfortunately this film just feels like straight parody or some professional cringe compilation with no help at all from a Scary Movie sequel. I hate to be so harsh but I think Old fails as summer entertainment, horror and a slice of high-concept hijinks. For a film about time advancing at supernatural speed Old ironically trips over its own exponential entropy. I could have fast-forwarded through this thing and still felt ripped off.
The potential is there — I imagine when Christopher Nolan or Charlie Kaufman has a nightmare it goes something like this. Certain moments click, like the split decision surgery scene, using rust as a weapon and… gosh that’s about it. It tries and sporadically succeeds to fulfill a fascinating premise but I’ll be damned if this isn’t a dysfunctional, utterly inferior clone of any random Stephen King or Agatha Christie story. The movements of any respectable mystery movie should always attempt to align the interests and knowledge of the protagonists with that of the active audience, but whenever anyone opens their mouth its to enunciate exactly what we already see happening. Exposition hits you like hailstones and every blessed line is clunky.
It’s barely worth criticizing how little consistency there is in the time dilation when Shyamalan's most egregious shortcoming is character development. “What’s your name and occupation?” asks M. Night (indiscreetly through the youngest protagonist) to every supporting figure that might be relevant. If its themes ran more than wrinkle deep I could defend Old for being about something, maybe. Instead it’s just another indulgent, harebrained, what-were-you-thinking-level embarrassment from a mostly mediocre charlatan. This is basically a bottle film with hardly any psychological changes or narrative breaking points, which, I also hate so say, is very boring.
Gael García Bernal (Y tu Mamá También, Bad Education, The Science of Sleep) is as misused as his on-screen partner Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), meanwhile the burgeoning Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Jojo Rabbit) comes out remarkably unscathed career-wise and Alex Wolff (Hereditary) can’t keep it together (quick reminder to see Wolff actually act in Pig instead). Though the casting for the different developmental stages of the same players was strong, the characterization alone (like everyone's favorite fictional rapper Midsize Sedan) is alarmingly thoughtless. Even actors as serious as Rufus Sewell are fumbling through haphazard, half-baked writing, though Ken Leung was just dreadful, bad script or no.
Overwhelming hamminess aside, I was strung along by this adaptation of the French graphic novel Sandcastle — even during incredibly comical 'disturbing' sequences that would make the Wayans feel as if they've been upstaged — but the payoff (you can’t even really call it a twist) is just a big, easy-way-out sack of nothing. Old ultimately rubs off like a substandard Blumhouse horror flick, hardly some return to form for the self-appointed steward of “original thrillers.”
Space Jam: A New Legacy briefing
1 ½ (out of 4)
In its few glimmers of actual adequacy, the most admirable thing in this paltry revamp of the 90s kids favorite is a message about the simple, nose-grinding process of greatness, plus some drivel about coming to terms with your gamin' offspring. LeBron James has the only career in recent NBA history worth measuring against Michael Jordan — that or he’s the next best thing in everyday name recognition. Fortunately James has some slight acting chops (don’t say Trainwreck was good for nothing) and a little less self-consciousness than his statistic-topping forebear, even if the movie’s just one colorful, numbing trip to the bank.
Look, there's no pretending the whole conceit of Space Jam: A New Legacy is anything other than one colossal corporate wank. At least the original Space Jam is, in fact, mostly what it's remembered as: a Looney Tunes basketball movie. When this two and half decade removed soft remake centers on the love of the game (basketball or vidya, pick your poison) there’s almost something here. If one were obligated to make a sequel to an elaborate Nike ad-inspiration from before the turn of the century, I can’t imagine it functioning much better.
But predominantly it’s one fat, stinky shill, a sickening, showboating sort of theatrical desensitization you thought only Disney could come up with, although both Wreck-It Ralph movies combined ain’t half as crude as this dreck. It’s a stifling digital brochure for all things Warner Bros media that makes the studio’s previous incarnation of the same patronizing, self-referential diarrhea (Ready Player One) appear vaguely tolerable and their first crack at these culture-snuffing cinematic advertisements (The LEGO Movie) look outright masterful. I honestly like Warner Brothers more than most (not as much now) but sweet Jesus the second act of this film is one ceaseless brand flex, and the endless "Easter eggs" are no fun to find.
Even if this commercial disguised as "content" perfectly tapped into my personal preferences with nothing but references to oldies, Blade Runner and Lord of the Rings (none of which are present by the way, so what if they reference Casablanca for one second?), the button-pushing would be no less egregious. Whereas the first film was less than 90 minutes, A New Legacy is almost TWO HOURS which means there's room for time-consuming asides to plug Harry Potter, Rick and Morty and plenty more — I hate to say they know their demographic a little too well. An early scene of self-awareness meant to validate this conglomerated cash-in is so hypocritical it hurts to think about. The animation is worse than it was 25 years ago and even the imitative beats are weak: a Michael B. Jordan joke cameo is no replacement for Bill Murray and Wayne Knight, and Don Cheadle's computerized antagonist hardly fills the silly shoes left by the Monstars. I’ll take a halftime segment with some "secret stuff" over Porky the Pig rap b-b-b-battles any and every day.
It strains much too hard to meet emotional requirements (meeting a few, miraculously), update the overall look (garbage, like if DreamWorks Animation's B-team made a Tron movie) and trivially refresh the stakes and your interest every twenty minutes. But at the end of the day A New Legacy will only fly if you've sworn some undying allegiance to all things WB or you have reverence for King James, though most fans could check out after the opening credits.
At times it's passably amusing but such an overtly hollow marketing mousetrap deadens the spirit even when it's bordering on pleasant. In 1996 Bugs and MJ set no film standards and yet that movie oozes soul next to this slavish IP procession. It was a privilege to own a VHS copy of the original film as a young one — now kids can stream any movie they can think of but do they even bother since social media has shriveled the collective attention span?
In its few glimmers of actual adequacy, the most admirable thing in this paltry revamp of the 90s kids favorite is a message about the simple, nose-grinding process of greatness, plus some drivel about coming to terms with your gamin' offspring. LeBron James has the only career in recent NBA history worth measuring against Michael Jordan — that or he’s the next best thing in everyday name recognition. Fortunately James has some slight acting chops (don’t say Trainwreck was good for nothing) and a little less self-consciousness than his statistic-topping forebear, even if the movie’s just one colorful, numbing trip to the bank.
Look, there's no pretending the whole conceit of Space Jam: A New Legacy is anything other than one colossal corporate wank. At least the original Space Jam is, in fact, mostly what it's remembered as: a Looney Tunes basketball movie. When this two and half decade removed soft remake centers on the love of the game (basketball or vidya, pick your poison) there’s almost something here. If one were obligated to make a sequel to an elaborate Nike ad-inspiration from before the turn of the century, I can’t imagine it functioning much better.
But predominantly it’s one fat, stinky shill, a sickening, showboating sort of theatrical desensitization you thought only Disney could come up with, although both Wreck-It Ralph movies combined ain’t half as crude as this dreck. It’s a stifling digital brochure for all things Warner Bros media that makes the studio’s previous incarnation of the same patronizing, self-referential diarrhea (Ready Player One) appear vaguely tolerable and their first crack at these culture-snuffing cinematic advertisements (The LEGO Movie) look outright masterful. I honestly like Warner Brothers more than most (not as much now) but sweet Jesus the second act of this film is one ceaseless brand flex, and the endless "Easter eggs" are no fun to find.
Even if this commercial disguised as "content" perfectly tapped into my personal preferences with nothing but references to oldies, Blade Runner and Lord of the Rings (none of which are present by the way, so what if they reference Casablanca for one second?), the button-pushing would be no less egregious. Whereas the first film was less than 90 minutes, A New Legacy is almost TWO HOURS which means there's room for time-consuming asides to plug Harry Potter, Rick and Morty and plenty more — I hate to say they know their demographic a little too well. An early scene of self-awareness meant to validate this conglomerated cash-in is so hypocritical it hurts to think about. The animation is worse than it was 25 years ago and even the imitative beats are weak: a Michael B. Jordan joke cameo is no replacement for Bill Murray and Wayne Knight, and Don Cheadle's computerized antagonist hardly fills the silly shoes left by the Monstars. I’ll take a halftime segment with some "secret stuff" over Porky the Pig rap b-b-b-battles any and every day.
It strains much too hard to meet emotional requirements (meeting a few, miraculously), update the overall look (garbage, like if DreamWorks Animation's B-team made a Tron movie) and trivially refresh the stakes and your interest every twenty minutes. But at the end of the day A New Legacy will only fly if you've sworn some undying allegiance to all things WB or you have reverence for King James, though most fans could check out after the opening credits.
At times it's passably amusing but such an overtly hollow marketing mousetrap deadens the spirit even when it's bordering on pleasant. In 1996 Bugs and MJ set no film standards and yet that movie oozes soul next to this slavish IP procession. It was a privilege to own a VHS copy of the original film as a young one — now kids can stream any movie they can think of but do they even bother since social media has shriveled the collective attention span?
Black Widow briefing
3 (out of 4)
God damn it Marvel, every time you lose me you manage to rope me right back in.
I guess I should mention I adamantly refuse to watch any of the television Disney has farted out to keep their streaming service at all relevant. “Oh, Loki’s pretty cool?” Yeah I don’t care, never will. Get outta here with the WandaVisions, the Falcon and Winter Soldiers and whatever tomfoolery is up next. It's a hard pass from me regarding pathetic spin-offs not even worthy of the silver screen.
The tube is not my bag, movies are, and after two years — decades by the count of Marvel soyboys — Phase Three gets one last encore with the inception of the fourth wave. The 24th MCU film tries to do right by one of its chief players in spectacularly underhanded, too-little-too-late fashion — ironically Black Widow was postponed multiple times (not by out of touch corporate executives this time) delaying ScarJo’s rightful day in the sun by 14 extra months as per COVID’s miserable cultural hiatus.
But while I was going to show up (not pay 30 dollars online, which Disney continues charging in order to stream their latest releases) and pick apart whatever anticipated mediocrity was in store, I was taken by Black Widow almost immediately. The film fills in a gap between Natasha Romanoff's appearances in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War and the semi-prequel, solo affair fortunately stands separate even if it's obligated to remind you of the bigger picture from time to time.
Something more than filler or brand remodeling, better yet Black Widow is an actual movie, not just, ya know, a 200 million dollar advertisement for the next team up. It flirts with the idea of becoming a legitimate spy film, tipping a hat to Bond while skillfully copying notes from the likes of The Bourne Ultimatum and Mission: Impossible – Fallout. If this baby actually acted like an enterprise in espionage past its first hour, Australian director Cate Shortland's feature would probably be a top 10 Marvel flick. But it stubbornly hovers around the average — let's say either Guardians and the early Thors by my metric — by functioning with relative earnestness, or at least letting emerging talents like Florence Pugh and David Harbour handle the unavoidable pause-for-laughter padding.
Johansson is as removed and businesslike as she's ever been. Regrettably Romanoff's unveiled backstory and the tangential Moore-era villainy don’t amount to much of interest or feeling. But if Black Widow has any traces of personality (the character is beyond development), I'm giving Shortland credit. The skilled, seldom seen filmmaker is not some hired hand/yes-man (or woman) regardless of second unit action directors and floors of visual effects departments. You can feel Shortland's touch — though the film is sensibly stripped of any real sexuality, there are hints at the caustic, steel blue coming-of-age feel of Somersault and the psychological anguish of Berlin Syndrome. There's a rare resistance to self-congratulation and imposed empowerment unlike Captain Marvel — that film's directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, had produced good movies like Half Nelson and Mississippi Grind yet none of their distinctions transferred. Surprisingly the emotional beats and exchanges are my favorite part of this standard Marvel movie and I don't think one of the studio's script doctors is the reason. Shortland's films were never achingly feminist and Black Widow is intrinsically better for its place in her filmography rather than a remnant of the MCU timeline.
At least Scarlett has been regularly less sexualized since her first peripheral appearance in Iron Man 2 just over a decade ago. Her striking sensuality wasn’t overlooked there, in The Avengers nor Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Only near the chronology where this movie falls (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Civil War) was she less an obvious figment of the male gaze. By herself Johansson doesn’t try to reinvent her stoic, haunted personality and she needn't bother since Pugh is the best reason to watch — she’s a fiery, emotive foil to ScarJo’s reservations. Harbour is a real charmer and Rachel Weisz doesn’t (or simply cannot) disappoint.
The mind-control rigmarole is recycled, the final climactic gotcha moments are a little screwy and Ray Winstone’s ambiguously accented bad guy is not one for books, but the action builds in some practical awe (plus a couple woeful, poorly animated 'splosions) and the choreography at times matches the series-best brawls of the Russo brothers’ Captain sequels.
As the first step past the old horizon, I was pleased to find this film rose above its tenuous cinematic connections while offering up a tart dessert for fans of the former MCU. Black Widow specifically reduces a great deal of the in-references and franchise ground-laying poisoning the lasting value of Disney/Marvel’s laziest cash-ins — the only patent shade of shilling the film gets away with is in the post-credits sequence where it can be tolerated.
From here Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings has to be more diverting (or at least discernible from) Snake Eyes, Eternals has to have the substance to back up its pomp and Spider-Man: No Way Home better get crazy with the generational collisions. I’m not happy they're still somehow cramming four comic book films into six months but if Black Widow is any indication, it might be a pleasure sifting through this stretch until the juicy bits — Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Madness by Sam Raimi, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder — are next in the queue. Maybe before then Disney can put more stock in the box office and release a theater exclusive film.
God damn it Marvel, every time you lose me you manage to rope me right back in.
I guess I should mention I adamantly refuse to watch any of the television Disney has farted out to keep their streaming service at all relevant. “Oh, Loki’s pretty cool?” Yeah I don’t care, never will. Get outta here with the WandaVisions, the Falcon and Winter Soldiers and whatever tomfoolery is up next. It's a hard pass from me regarding pathetic spin-offs not even worthy of the silver screen.
The tube is not my bag, movies are, and after two years — decades by the count of Marvel soyboys — Phase Three gets one last encore with the inception of the fourth wave. The 24th MCU film tries to do right by one of its chief players in spectacularly underhanded, too-little-too-late fashion — ironically Black Widow was postponed multiple times (not by out of touch corporate executives this time) delaying ScarJo’s rightful day in the sun by 14 extra months as per COVID’s miserable cultural hiatus.
But while I was going to show up (not pay 30 dollars online, which Disney continues charging in order to stream their latest releases) and pick apart whatever anticipated mediocrity was in store, I was taken by Black Widow almost immediately. The film fills in a gap between Natasha Romanoff's appearances in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War and the semi-prequel, solo affair fortunately stands separate even if it's obligated to remind you of the bigger picture from time to time.
Something more than filler or brand remodeling, better yet Black Widow is an actual movie, not just, ya know, a 200 million dollar advertisement for the next team up. It flirts with the idea of becoming a legitimate spy film, tipping a hat to Bond while skillfully copying notes from the likes of The Bourne Ultimatum and Mission: Impossible – Fallout. If this baby actually acted like an enterprise in espionage past its first hour, Australian director Cate Shortland's feature would probably be a top 10 Marvel flick. But it stubbornly hovers around the average — let's say either Guardians and the early Thors by my metric — by functioning with relative earnestness, or at least letting emerging talents like Florence Pugh and David Harbour handle the unavoidable pause-for-laughter padding.
Johansson is as removed and businesslike as she's ever been. Regrettably Romanoff's unveiled backstory and the tangential Moore-era villainy don’t amount to much of interest or feeling. But if Black Widow has any traces of personality (the character is beyond development), I'm giving Shortland credit. The skilled, seldom seen filmmaker is not some hired hand/yes-man (or woman) regardless of second unit action directors and floors of visual effects departments. You can feel Shortland's touch — though the film is sensibly stripped of any real sexuality, there are hints at the caustic, steel blue coming-of-age feel of Somersault and the psychological anguish of Berlin Syndrome. There's a rare resistance to self-congratulation and imposed empowerment unlike Captain Marvel — that film's directors, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, had produced good movies like Half Nelson and Mississippi Grind yet none of their distinctions transferred. Surprisingly the emotional beats and exchanges are my favorite part of this standard Marvel movie and I don't think one of the studio's script doctors is the reason. Shortland's films were never achingly feminist and Black Widow is intrinsically better for its place in her filmography rather than a remnant of the MCU timeline.
At least Scarlett has been regularly less sexualized since her first peripheral appearance in Iron Man 2 just over a decade ago. Her striking sensuality wasn’t overlooked there, in The Avengers nor Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Only near the chronology where this movie falls (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Civil War) was she less an obvious figment of the male gaze. By herself Johansson doesn’t try to reinvent her stoic, haunted personality and she needn't bother since Pugh is the best reason to watch — she’s a fiery, emotive foil to ScarJo’s reservations. Harbour is a real charmer and Rachel Weisz doesn’t (or simply cannot) disappoint.
The mind-control rigmarole is recycled, the final climactic gotcha moments are a little screwy and Ray Winstone’s ambiguously accented bad guy is not one for books, but the action builds in some practical awe (plus a couple woeful, poorly animated 'splosions) and the choreography at times matches the series-best brawls of the Russo brothers’ Captain sequels.
As the first step past the old horizon, I was pleased to find this film rose above its tenuous cinematic connections while offering up a tart dessert for fans of the former MCU. Black Widow specifically reduces a great deal of the in-references and franchise ground-laying poisoning the lasting value of Disney/Marvel’s laziest cash-ins — the only patent shade of shilling the film gets away with is in the post-credits sequence where it can be tolerated.
From here Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings has to be more diverting (or at least discernible from) Snake Eyes, Eternals has to have the substance to back up its pomp and Spider-Man: No Way Home better get crazy with the generational collisions. I’m not happy they're still somehow cramming four comic book films into six months but if Black Widow is any indication, it might be a pleasure sifting through this stretch until the juicy bits — Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Madness by Sam Raimi, Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder — are next in the queue. Maybe before then Disney can put more stock in the box office and release a theater exclusive film.
F9 briefing
2 (out of 4)
One last ride was like two movies ago and despite how Universal might want you to feel, the peaks of this series — both in sheer enjoyment and racked up ridiculousness — is really now in focus, all of it in the rear-view. In my detached consumption of the franchise up until now (at least 18 hours worth) there’s nothing to comment on other than an emerging rule of respective quality favoring the odd-numbered installments.
They're the only ones you can refer to with any sort of unfeigned respect. The original has the cast, the retrospective quaintness, the NOS. Tokyo Drift is the odd duck cult fave and better for it. Fast Five is the pivoting apex by most standards and my own, the first to feel and function like a blockbuster as well as ditch the subjection to street racing. And Furious 7 had James Wan killing it in the outrageous action direction and the bittersweet posthumous parting of Paul Walker. 2, 4, 6, 8 — all these flicks deserve is hate. 2 Fast 2 Furious, Fast & Furious, Fast & Furious 6 and The Fate of the Furious all range in their insulting, IQ-lowering ineptitude.
With this in mind I was hoping F9 would carry on an incidental pattern. However, when going to space is just a shrug-worthy subplot, maybe your franchise about motor vehicles should stay on the ground — then we can see giant freight trucks do magnet flips ("Yeah, bitch! Magnets!") and whatnot. I now realize that what I thought was neutral FF fodder (2019's spin-off Hobbs and Shaw) was actually the ninth half-decent entry I was looking for.
The cast is kind of sad at this point even if it looks full and functioning. With no Walker or fun adversary turned allies — John Cena is a tired substitute for The Rock and Jason Statham — they resurrect Han (Sung Kang), who died three movies ago, but hey, Michelle Rodriguez had the same fate long before. But other than Nathalie Emmanuel becoming the rotational fresh face on the team, the movie coasts on the two levels of wisecracking black sidekicks: the gratifyingly charming (Ludacris is one of the only usual suspects with a personality) and the unfailingly annoying (Tyrese Gibson was a flatline of funny from day one and his asinine meta humor is a new low). Vin Diesel and Rodriguez mope their way through every scene yet again and Jordana Brewster, after two movies on the sidelines, now knows kung fu or something. Plus you get pointless screen time for Charlize Theron's former villain and a spot of Helen Mirren — you entertained yet?
But do any fans care about character, some emotional center or even family for that matter when there's crashing and banging and exploding that could be happening instead? Despite the franchise ramping up the regularly two-hour-plus runtime, this film cheats its way to some sort of epic length by wasting a cumulative 45 minutes on flashbacks that read like some tacky telenovela — familiabros, I like soap operas about as much as the next hombre... It's less about building up a back-burned brotherly bond than it appears to be an elaborate delusion imposed by Diesel to pretend he was ever taller than Cena.
After all that hapless, bloated backstory twenty years deep into the franchise, there's only time for two show-stopping set pieces and they're mostly spoiled in the trailers. The action compensation is so important for enjoying trash but this film is concerningly slight considering Universal has to know audiences are expecting it to be overrun with kinetic nonsense, or at least moderately fast, damn, let alone furious. It should be illegal for a movie like this to be so boring.
F9 breaks its neck reinforcing those themes long ago beaten into the makeup of this superficial series — the underlying mechanics have always operated on crime movie melodramatics tethered to brutally bad characters. There’ve been jollies periodically but no real reason by now to anticipate any more defensible excuses for reaping billions from the vroom vrooms and the boom booms. When the best reason for a Cardi B cameo is more plot-patchwork for your lazy-ass writer, there are inherent mediocrities at play that don’t forgive your typical "leave your brain at the door" summer mentality.
One last ride was like two movies ago and despite how Universal might want you to feel, the peaks of this series — both in sheer enjoyment and racked up ridiculousness — is really now in focus, all of it in the rear-view. In my detached consumption of the franchise up until now (at least 18 hours worth) there’s nothing to comment on other than an emerging rule of respective quality favoring the odd-numbered installments.
They're the only ones you can refer to with any sort of unfeigned respect. The original has the cast, the retrospective quaintness, the NOS. Tokyo Drift is the odd duck cult fave and better for it. Fast Five is the pivoting apex by most standards and my own, the first to feel and function like a blockbuster as well as ditch the subjection to street racing. And Furious 7 had James Wan killing it in the outrageous action direction and the bittersweet posthumous parting of Paul Walker. 2, 4, 6, 8 — all these flicks deserve is hate. 2 Fast 2 Furious, Fast & Furious, Fast & Furious 6 and The Fate of the Furious all range in their insulting, IQ-lowering ineptitude.
With this in mind I was hoping F9 would carry on an incidental pattern. However, when going to space is just a shrug-worthy subplot, maybe your franchise about motor vehicles should stay on the ground — then we can see giant freight trucks do magnet flips ("Yeah, bitch! Magnets!") and whatnot. I now realize that what I thought was neutral FF fodder (2019's spin-off Hobbs and Shaw) was actually the ninth half-decent entry I was looking for.
The cast is kind of sad at this point even if it looks full and functioning. With no Walker or fun adversary turned allies — John Cena is a tired substitute for The Rock and Jason Statham — they resurrect Han (Sung Kang), who died three movies ago, but hey, Michelle Rodriguez had the same fate long before. But other than Nathalie Emmanuel becoming the rotational fresh face on the team, the movie coasts on the two levels of wisecracking black sidekicks: the gratifyingly charming (Ludacris is one of the only usual suspects with a personality) and the unfailingly annoying (Tyrese Gibson was a flatline of funny from day one and his asinine meta humor is a new low). Vin Diesel and Rodriguez mope their way through every scene yet again and Jordana Brewster, after two movies on the sidelines, now knows kung fu or something. Plus you get pointless screen time for Charlize Theron's former villain and a spot of Helen Mirren — you entertained yet?
But do any fans care about character, some emotional center or even family for that matter when there's crashing and banging and exploding that could be happening instead? Despite the franchise ramping up the regularly two-hour-plus runtime, this film cheats its way to some sort of epic length by wasting a cumulative 45 minutes on flashbacks that read like some tacky telenovela — familiabros, I like soap operas about as much as the next hombre... It's less about building up a back-burned brotherly bond than it appears to be an elaborate delusion imposed by Diesel to pretend he was ever taller than Cena.
After all that hapless, bloated backstory twenty years deep into the franchise, there's only time for two show-stopping set pieces and they're mostly spoiled in the trailers. The action compensation is so important for enjoying trash but this film is concerningly slight considering Universal has to know audiences are expecting it to be overrun with kinetic nonsense, or at least moderately fast, damn, let alone furious. It should be illegal for a movie like this to be so boring.
F9 breaks its neck reinforcing those themes long ago beaten into the makeup of this superficial series — the underlying mechanics have always operated on crime movie melodramatics tethered to brutally bad characters. There’ve been jollies periodically but no real reason by now to anticipate any more defensible excuses for reaping billions from the vroom vrooms and the boom booms. When the best reason for a Cardi B cameo is more plot-patchwork for your lazy-ass writer, there are inherent mediocrities at play that don’t forgive your typical "leave your brain at the door" summer mentality.
Luca briefing
3 (out of 4)
So, Disney doesn’t like making money on their only consistently laudable creations? I still don’t get it. You’ll charge 30 bucks online and average ticket prices on crap like Cruella but you let works of art like Soul and less significant creations like Luca go for free without even attempting to release them in theaters, ya know, the way most of us enjoyed watching Pixar films for the first time?
Luca is no cause for disappointment though — it's got the standard slew of Pixar strengths in airtight storytelling, rich characters and some stunning animation, though I may be over the studio seemingly running down a checklist of light cultural representation, progressive as it is. Sometimes it feels like we're Americanizing whatever fits first — Scottish society in Brave, Mexican lore for Coco, this film’s closest emotional companion. Like that 2017 Day of the Dead musical fantasy, Luca feels like the strongest suit of another studio rather than the middling work of the Western world’s foremost animation factory. This Italian rappresentazione here is a little more My Cousin Vinny than Moonstruck if you understand me, as in its efforts fall only so close to authentic. How often can characters drool over Vespas?
The story has pleasantly limited allegory refusing to give in to easy interpretation or clamor for political points, rather providing the most literal fish out of water story you could enjoy from pretty stock coming-of-age stuff — the merpeople details are also diverting, at least they'll be moreso than whatever waits for us in the new, perfectly pointless live action Little Mermaid.
The scenery and colors are to die for but by the look of its characters Luca could be mistaken for DreamWorks or even more secondary studios. Nonetheless the voice acting — carried by the tween talents of Jacob Tremblay (Room, The Good Boys) and Jack Dylan Grazer (It, Shazam!) — is better than adequate and the story has just enough to keep your attention pressed and your tears flowing on cue with the parting pathos. If we weren’t coming hot off Soul, I would say this film is an unqualified delight. In contrast I can see how far Pixar has fallen from their former reputation prior to Cars 2 exactly a decade ago. They can’t ever hurt us like that again but I don’t have faith they’ll ever be regularly scaling new heights like they always used to — only a perfect filmographic past could make respectable film fare like Luca seem so-so.
So, Disney doesn’t like making money on their only consistently laudable creations? I still don’t get it. You’ll charge 30 bucks online and average ticket prices on crap like Cruella but you let works of art like Soul and less significant creations like Luca go for free without even attempting to release them in theaters, ya know, the way most of us enjoyed watching Pixar films for the first time?
Luca is no cause for disappointment though — it's got the standard slew of Pixar strengths in airtight storytelling, rich characters and some stunning animation, though I may be over the studio seemingly running down a checklist of light cultural representation, progressive as it is. Sometimes it feels like we're Americanizing whatever fits first — Scottish society in Brave, Mexican lore for Coco, this film’s closest emotional companion. Like that 2017 Day of the Dead musical fantasy, Luca feels like the strongest suit of another studio rather than the middling work of the Western world’s foremost animation factory. This Italian rappresentazione here is a little more My Cousin Vinny than Moonstruck if you understand me, as in its efforts fall only so close to authentic. How often can characters drool over Vespas?
The story has pleasantly limited allegory refusing to give in to easy interpretation or clamor for political points, rather providing the most literal fish out of water story you could enjoy from pretty stock coming-of-age stuff — the merpeople details are also diverting, at least they'll be moreso than whatever waits for us in the new, perfectly pointless live action Little Mermaid.
The scenery and colors are to die for but by the look of its characters Luca could be mistaken for DreamWorks or even more secondary studios. Nonetheless the voice acting — carried by the tween talents of Jacob Tremblay (Room, The Good Boys) and Jack Dylan Grazer (It, Shazam!) — is better than adequate and the story has just enough to keep your attention pressed and your tears flowing on cue with the parting pathos. If we weren’t coming hot off Soul, I would say this film is an unqualified delight. In contrast I can see how far Pixar has fallen from their former reputation prior to Cars 2 exactly a decade ago. They can’t ever hurt us like that again but I don’t have faith they’ll ever be regularly scaling new heights like they always used to — only a perfect filmographic past could make respectable film fare like Luca seem so-so.
A Quiet Place Part II briefing
3 (out of 4)
I wrote three years back that A Quiet Place would have been tough one to bungle. The sequel was coyly prearranged for us already, though beyond that checkpoint this film doesn't write itself so easily. Part III is inevitable but this time I’m not sure how to capitalize on another ending that is nothing more than a climax, swell of music and cut to black. But whereas many horror follow-ups make more sense economically than narratively (don’t get me started on The Conjuring’s so-called shared universe), the A Quiet Place movies continue to leave themselves with a world still rife with potential to unsettle.
Part II is sparing and lean, lingering on its most suspenseful, dissonant moments with intuitive relish. The film refuses to get stuck cooking up some freshly foolish gimmick to make the sequel bigger and badder, aiming instead for a direct continuation light on story but levied by some rewarding character development and panicky action-horror sequences. This A Quiet Place actually uses sound and the lack thereof with some creativity whereas the original missed most opportunities for acoustic trickery. The deaf older daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is now the lead, not the more presumable Emily Blunt, who while given a nice midway moment to grieve mostly just takes care of her wounded boy (Noah Jupe) the whole film. Cillian Murphy — fan of the first film — continues to be the great leading man movies forgot as we settle for another swell turn by one of the finest supporting actors of the age.
Maybe I give this one an edge since it benefits from less of returning director John Krasinski’s smug mug — Blunt's husband makes a cameo in the film’s prologue, which is the closest A Quiet Place Part II comes to the Spielbergian energy it wants to elicit. Some of the long takes, not to mention all the fleeing and hiding from monsters you can shake an alien appendage at, remind one of Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds without coming close to such masterful simulations of total terror.
The locations are few, the setups for peril are many, actually too many — the mounting logical losses bothering your brain outside of a thrilling theater experience still serve as satisfactory support for potent post-apocalyptic/alien invasion horror scenarios. Speaking of which, until F9 (how do you pronounce that one?) rears its metal head, this is the closest thing to a blockbuster we’ve got, already a month into the typical summer season. Those near normal opening weekend earnings, surpassing the original, seem to signify some kind of comeback, though the year’s real players will be popping up in autumn.
A Quiet Place Part II had its world premiere about a week before shutdowns two Marches ago. The excitement, thank the Lord, is just the same if not greater now and the fact that the movie is a smidge better than its likewise solid, unfulfilled predecessor is enough to celebrate — it's intriguingly, competently developed, well acted and prudently edited. Popcorn movies are back, baby. I’ve never been so delighted to find my desired IMAX screening sold out.
I wrote three years back that A Quiet Place would have been tough one to bungle. The sequel was coyly prearranged for us already, though beyond that checkpoint this film doesn't write itself so easily. Part III is inevitable but this time I’m not sure how to capitalize on another ending that is nothing more than a climax, swell of music and cut to black. But whereas many horror follow-ups make more sense economically than narratively (don’t get me started on The Conjuring’s so-called shared universe), the A Quiet Place movies continue to leave themselves with a world still rife with potential to unsettle.
Part II is sparing and lean, lingering on its most suspenseful, dissonant moments with intuitive relish. The film refuses to get stuck cooking up some freshly foolish gimmick to make the sequel bigger and badder, aiming instead for a direct continuation light on story but levied by some rewarding character development and panicky action-horror sequences. This A Quiet Place actually uses sound and the lack thereof with some creativity whereas the original missed most opportunities for acoustic trickery. The deaf older daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is now the lead, not the more presumable Emily Blunt, who while given a nice midway moment to grieve mostly just takes care of her wounded boy (Noah Jupe) the whole film. Cillian Murphy — fan of the first film — continues to be the great leading man movies forgot as we settle for another swell turn by one of the finest supporting actors of the age.
Maybe I give this one an edge since it benefits from less of returning director John Krasinski’s smug mug — Blunt's husband makes a cameo in the film’s prologue, which is the closest A Quiet Place Part II comes to the Spielbergian energy it wants to elicit. Some of the long takes, not to mention all the fleeing and hiding from monsters you can shake an alien appendage at, remind one of Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds without coming close to such masterful simulations of total terror.
The locations are few, the setups for peril are many, actually too many — the mounting logical losses bothering your brain outside of a thrilling theater experience still serve as satisfactory support for potent post-apocalyptic/alien invasion horror scenarios. Speaking of which, until F9 (how do you pronounce that one?) rears its metal head, this is the closest thing to a blockbuster we’ve got, already a month into the typical summer season. Those near normal opening weekend earnings, surpassing the original, seem to signify some kind of comeback, though the year’s real players will be popping up in autumn.
A Quiet Place Part II had its world premiere about a week before shutdowns two Marches ago. The excitement, thank the Lord, is just the same if not greater now and the fact that the movie is a smidge better than its likewise solid, unfulfilled predecessor is enough to celebrate — it's intriguingly, competently developed, well acted and prudently edited. Popcorn movies are back, baby. I’ve never been so delighted to find my desired IMAX screening sold out.
Army of the Dead,
Those Who Wish Me Dead and
The Woman in the Window briefings
Army of the Dead
1 (out of 4)
Zack Snyder cycles back to his beginnings just as he comes to the end of his creative rope. His 2004 remake debut Dawn of the Dead was pretty lazy to my eye and I'm still lost on the cult of 300. I enjoy Watchmen quite a bit and Legend of the Guardians is so pleasantly unlike him, a movie for youngsters that he should follow up on instead of churning out garbage for teenagers.
Skimming past his other failures to the present one, you'd wager within two and half hours of genre-mashing, wildly varying performances and continually returning campiness there would be room somewhere for hunks of fun but you'd be thoroughly incorrect. Army of the Dead gives off the faintest impression of entertainment but it's actually all hollow hate-watch fodder — but even the phoniest, crappiest drinking movie doesn't ultimately sweep away and disregard every setup it wastes time teasing. I was prepared for this to be an overdone, overindulgent, downright grotesque mess but in actuality the film is even more exasperatingly low than you can imagine. The FPS plotting, unfinished green screen shots and pointless and/or unresolved story threads are all annoyingly trashy, especially when this story alone is so unreasonably defective.
Snyder thinks he can improve upon 65 plus years of zombie lore but George Romero he is not and while we're at it he certainly ain't Edgar Wright either. I’m fine with gratuitous gore especially if it's in the service of committed horror comedy — Shaun of the Dead is bettered by its few shocking moments, but Snyder can't help but broadly cross the line into sickening, excessive, borderline anti-art repulsiveness, even for him. Next to his typically crass indulgences (for my money his worst flicks are also the ones with a writing credit i.e. 300 and Sucker Punch) this is hardly an improvement on having recently taken superheroes to some bizarre melodramatic wavelength.
The needle drops suck (how many shitty pop covers can you include?), the humor is limp outside of Tig Notaro’s stitched-in pantomiming, the heist angle is trite and the zombie stuff has World War Z, Warm Bodies and especially 28 Days/Weeks Later looking like absolute opuses. The ensemble is collectively handled so poorly, like Ana de la Reguera's Maria who reveals a romantic interest in our gravitas-less lead Dave Bautista seconds before she has her head snapped backwards, not to mention the sexually confused laugh-vacuum safe-cracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) whose already got his own truly superfluous prequel movie in the works for Netflix (the streaming service/studio also thinks this universe is worth an anime series). Army of the Dead cashes in on every creative cliché it can and then has the gall to also pretend, with any seriousness, to retain political relevancy.
The most impressive thing about this movie is how Snyder still can employ his overzealous cinematic rapaciousness as he drops his signature maximalist visual mastery for minimal, nearly absent, depth of field. He's still goin' with slow motion to the ocean — but whatever way he makes his contemptible ideas a reality, Snyder seems incapable of imparting anything but ugliness no matter if we're talking style or substance. Maybe he should never step near the DoP chair ever again. Getting out of the writer's room would do him good too.
Those Who Wish Me Dead
3 (out of 4)
If I weren’t holding it up to Taylor Sheridan’s steep standard, Those Who Wish Me Dead would be most directors' ideal sophomore feature. The film is a punchy, ruthless white-knuckle thriller, a conspiracy Neo Western and a regular ol' redemption story all in a slender 90-minute bundle. Sheridan’s reputation for modern crime dramas with Revisionist Western sensibilities has informed each item on his distinct, impressive, albeit short résumé. Penning Sicario and Hell or High Water, as well as directing Wind River (one of 2017’s best), are no small doings.
Angelina Jolie hasn’t seemed so assured in a long while — alongside Changeling this is, almost by default, her strongest performance in 20 years. Nicholas Hoult is terrifying until the script needs his hired assassin to be dumb enough for a substandard climax — Aidan Gillen plays his equally lethal partner and both are fairly well drawn threats. Jon Bernthal fits Sheridan's temperament really well and, as the only carryover in acting support, he's an excellent collaborative choice.
Sheridan compels you to exhale sharply in tense anticipation over and over, all without coming too close to disrupting your disbelief. You can tell he’s using visual effects as little as humanly possible, though there's still CGI aplenty with forest fires as a principal obstacle, not to mention a little lightning. Some of the third act reminded me of the laughable climactic bits of The Day After Tomorrow but, ya know, in a good way.
If it was great instead of pretty good, I could lament WB shuffling it up their 2021 schedule to pad out the time between Mortal Kombat and a third Conjuring. Sheridan deserves better theatrical treatment — his subtle showmanship and consistency in fine-tuning genre and suspense is just shy of superb. Sometimes decades-old action tropes get in the way of the modern fledgling’s best impulses but, if nothing else, Those Who Wish Me Dead gives the disappearing mid-budget movie a recent reason to exist.
The Woman in the Window
2 (out of 4)
Director Joe Wright won’t be pinned down but I’m sure he’s hoping he won’t be remembered for this pulp. Tony Gilroy — you know, the Bourne screenwriter guy — had to do some last-minute redrafting of The Woman in the Window after filming had wrapped, since this thing was shot in 2018 when the novel it’s based on came out and, somehow, the film was greenlit even earlier. Weird how the publishing industry can instantaneously identify a would-be mediocre flick but the producers never realize until it's too late.
All I want to know is who is responsible for The Woman in the Window looking like a Giallo film. Is this Wright's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage? I'm surprised Dario Argento's debut wasn’t referenced since Wright’s film does not shy away from its debt to Rear Window and general Hitchcockian (or Stephen King-esque) flavors. It has plenty of classic background film-drops to lay on us (Laura, Gaslight, Spellbound) but this doesn’t make up for the fact that this bastard of 20th Century Fox turned Netflix-queue-filler plays out like Disturbia, just with worse writing than a teen-friendly slasher.
The script is so thin it makes Amy Adams look amateurish — now that takes considerable effort. Gary Oldman probably would’ve done anything for the spotty Brit after Wright’s Darkest Hour won him an overdue Oscar, but his faculties are wasted just as Julianne Moore's are. The Woman in the Window has the pedigree of prestige and not just because it's from the director of three stuffy Kiera Knightly movies (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina). After Disney swallowed up 20th Century Fox, this was one of the last things they had in store — the Mouse had no clue what to do with the Gone Girl/The Girl on the Train-esque fare and thus Netflix got ahold of a perfectly middling movie, the true ideal for their audience and reputation. Despite its winding journey to the small screen, the film is nonetheless dutifully digestible junk, sometimes lovingly shot but most times strung together like a movie of the week.
Wright’s been pretty unpredictable outside the masquerade of pomp. The Soloist is strange, aborted Oscar bait and Hanna is one of the most unexpectedly badass movies of our time — I can’t even bring myself to see how poorly Pan, uh, panned out. This is a teeny left turn within a random, flagging career and probably a flick worth eventually disowning. Wright's already got a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac due out by the end of the year, capping off a year bizarrely stuffed with song and dance.
I can’t help but keep my eye out for Joe, because there’s talent to spare even when the material is scant. But the guy behind this dime a dozen paperback posturing (one A. J. Finn) thought they were really clever. The final twist tries to alleviate the former familiarity but its far too late after 75 minutes of the most overused psychological thrills built on an unreliable protagonist, suppressed memories and hallucinatory shenanigans. Just go watch Shutter Island again.
1 (out of 4)
Zack Snyder cycles back to his beginnings just as he comes to the end of his creative rope. His 2004 remake debut Dawn of the Dead was pretty lazy to my eye and I'm still lost on the cult of 300. I enjoy Watchmen quite a bit and Legend of the Guardians is so pleasantly unlike him, a movie for youngsters that he should follow up on instead of churning out garbage for teenagers.
Skimming past his other failures to the present one, you'd wager within two and half hours of genre-mashing, wildly varying performances and continually returning campiness there would be room somewhere for hunks of fun but you'd be thoroughly incorrect. Army of the Dead gives off the faintest impression of entertainment but it's actually all hollow hate-watch fodder — but even the phoniest, crappiest drinking movie doesn't ultimately sweep away and disregard every setup it wastes time teasing. I was prepared for this to be an overdone, overindulgent, downright grotesque mess but in actuality the film is even more exasperatingly low than you can imagine. The FPS plotting, unfinished green screen shots and pointless and/or unresolved story threads are all annoyingly trashy, especially when this story alone is so unreasonably defective.
Snyder thinks he can improve upon 65 plus years of zombie lore but George Romero he is not and while we're at it he certainly ain't Edgar Wright either. I’m fine with gratuitous gore especially if it's in the service of committed horror comedy — Shaun of the Dead is bettered by its few shocking moments, but Snyder can't help but broadly cross the line into sickening, excessive, borderline anti-art repulsiveness, even for him. Next to his typically crass indulgences (for my money his worst flicks are also the ones with a writing credit i.e. 300 and Sucker Punch) this is hardly an improvement on having recently taken superheroes to some bizarre melodramatic wavelength.
The needle drops suck (how many shitty pop covers can you include?), the humor is limp outside of Tig Notaro’s stitched-in pantomiming, the heist angle is trite and the zombie stuff has World War Z, Warm Bodies and especially 28 Days/Weeks Later looking like absolute opuses. The ensemble is collectively handled so poorly, like Ana de la Reguera's Maria who reveals a romantic interest in our gravitas-less lead Dave Bautista seconds before she has her head snapped backwards, not to mention the sexually confused laugh-vacuum safe-cracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) whose already got his own truly superfluous prequel movie in the works for Netflix (the streaming service/studio also thinks this universe is worth an anime series). Army of the Dead cashes in on every creative cliché it can and then has the gall to also pretend, with any seriousness, to retain political relevancy.
The most impressive thing about this movie is how Snyder still can employ his overzealous cinematic rapaciousness as he drops his signature maximalist visual mastery for minimal, nearly absent, depth of field. He's still goin' with slow motion to the ocean — but whatever way he makes his contemptible ideas a reality, Snyder seems incapable of imparting anything but ugliness no matter if we're talking style or substance. Maybe he should never step near the DoP chair ever again. Getting out of the writer's room would do him good too.
Those Who Wish Me Dead
3 (out of 4)
If I weren’t holding it up to Taylor Sheridan’s steep standard, Those Who Wish Me Dead would be most directors' ideal sophomore feature. The film is a punchy, ruthless white-knuckle thriller, a conspiracy Neo Western and a regular ol' redemption story all in a slender 90-minute bundle. Sheridan’s reputation for modern crime dramas with Revisionist Western sensibilities has informed each item on his distinct, impressive, albeit short résumé. Penning Sicario and Hell or High Water, as well as directing Wind River (one of 2017’s best), are no small doings.
Angelina Jolie hasn’t seemed so assured in a long while — alongside Changeling this is, almost by default, her strongest performance in 20 years. Nicholas Hoult is terrifying until the script needs his hired assassin to be dumb enough for a substandard climax — Aidan Gillen plays his equally lethal partner and both are fairly well drawn threats. Jon Bernthal fits Sheridan's temperament really well and, as the only carryover in acting support, he's an excellent collaborative choice.
Sheridan compels you to exhale sharply in tense anticipation over and over, all without coming too close to disrupting your disbelief. You can tell he’s using visual effects as little as humanly possible, though there's still CGI aplenty with forest fires as a principal obstacle, not to mention a little lightning. Some of the third act reminded me of the laughable climactic bits of The Day After Tomorrow but, ya know, in a good way.
If it was great instead of pretty good, I could lament WB shuffling it up their 2021 schedule to pad out the time between Mortal Kombat and a third Conjuring. Sheridan deserves better theatrical treatment — his subtle showmanship and consistency in fine-tuning genre and suspense is just shy of superb. Sometimes decades-old action tropes get in the way of the modern fledgling’s best impulses but, if nothing else, Those Who Wish Me Dead gives the disappearing mid-budget movie a recent reason to exist.
The Woman in the Window
2 (out of 4)
Director Joe Wright won’t be pinned down but I’m sure he’s hoping he won’t be remembered for this pulp. Tony Gilroy — you know, the Bourne screenwriter guy — had to do some last-minute redrafting of The Woman in the Window after filming had wrapped, since this thing was shot in 2018 when the novel it’s based on came out and, somehow, the film was greenlit even earlier. Weird how the publishing industry can instantaneously identify a would-be mediocre flick but the producers never realize until it's too late.
All I want to know is who is responsible for The Woman in the Window looking like a Giallo film. Is this Wright's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage? I'm surprised Dario Argento's debut wasn’t referenced since Wright’s film does not shy away from its debt to Rear Window and general Hitchcockian (or Stephen King-esque) flavors. It has plenty of classic background film-drops to lay on us (Laura, Gaslight, Spellbound) but this doesn’t make up for the fact that this bastard of 20th Century Fox turned Netflix-queue-filler plays out like Disturbia, just with worse writing than a teen-friendly slasher.
The script is so thin it makes Amy Adams look amateurish — now that takes considerable effort. Gary Oldman probably would’ve done anything for the spotty Brit after Wright’s Darkest Hour won him an overdue Oscar, but his faculties are wasted just as Julianne Moore's are. The Woman in the Window has the pedigree of prestige and not just because it's from the director of three stuffy Kiera Knightly movies (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina). After Disney swallowed up 20th Century Fox, this was one of the last things they had in store — the Mouse had no clue what to do with the Gone Girl/The Girl on the Train-esque fare and thus Netflix got ahold of a perfectly middling movie, the true ideal for their audience and reputation. Despite its winding journey to the small screen, the film is nonetheless dutifully digestible junk, sometimes lovingly shot but most times strung together like a movie of the week.
Wright’s been pretty unpredictable outside the masquerade of pomp. The Soloist is strange, aborted Oscar bait and Hanna is one of the most unexpectedly badass movies of our time — I can’t even bring myself to see how poorly Pan, uh, panned out. This is a teeny left turn within a random, flagging career and probably a flick worth eventually disowning. Wright's already got a musical adaptation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac due out by the end of the year, capping off a year bizarrely stuffed with song and dance.
I can’t help but keep my eye out for Joe, because there’s talent to spare even when the material is scant. But the guy behind this dime a dozen paperback posturing (one A. J. Finn) thought they were really clever. The final twist tries to alleviate the former familiarity but its far too late after 75 minutes of the most overused psychological thrills built on an unreliable protagonist, suppressed memories and hallucinatory shenanigans. Just go watch Shutter Island again.
Godzilla vs. Kong briefing
2 ½ (out of 4)
One of these big guys better actually fall like the tagline promises or I smell a lawsuit. But the real lead here is that somehow, some way, preposterously, Warner Brothers had an easier time racking up the MonsterVerse than the DC Extended Universe. Just think about that for a second — the fighting kaiju flick that uses March Madness brackets for the opening titles was more dearly earned than the JUSTICE LEAGUE MOVIE. Et tu, WB?
Godzilla got two whole movies before this and Kong also got his own oversized solo round, though Skull Island's sickly camp has absolutely nothing on the classic, tactile grandeur of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Still, Godzilla vs. Kong is the kind of event film I wish WB had saved for May rather than shift it earlier to smooth over a dry spell in their bold dual-format 2021 schedule. However, while Disney scrounges for returns with steep rental fees on top of monthly services, this skirmish between leviathans is actually drawing people to the theater with the most promising box office numbers of the pandemic despite free access with an HBOMAX subscription or less kosher ways of acquiring digital media. Either they’re playing 4D economic chess or the studio has been very lucky breaking into a now partially vaccinated general public.
I’ve hated Gareth Edwards' entire career, though 2014's Godzilla was the least offensive facet of it — sometimes the Spielberg-thieving sense of scope helped craft specifically sensational sequences but his boredom-breeding sobriety and inability to implement watchable, interesting characters has ruined every picture he's backed. Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kong: Skull Island wasn't bad, bearing hilarity where needed most with a fine cast operating through agreeable schlock. Personally, with little knowledge of Godzilla’s absurdly gargantuan cinematic history apart from the classic 1954 original (I haven’t even seen Roland Emmerich’s 1998 take, let alone the dozens of authentic features scattered across multiple eras), all I can impart concerning the MonsterVerse or whatever is that Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a heightened spectacle that subsidized the ranging seriousness and silliness into straitlaced nonsense, setting the stage for the decent showdown we have before us rather than rushing into the goods after only one movie like Batman v Superman did.
King of the Monsters reduced the human characters to their minimum — apart from daft eco-terrorists for villains and Millie Bobby Brown gaping at amazing creatures, who needed anything more than kaiju kraziness? These just aren’t the movies that should get caught up in plot or realism, so KotM is top dog for me because there's considerable reverence and awe for the titans (particularly when Godzilla's the good guy) and there are simply more exhilarating excuses for on-screen happenings.
Rearing such non-stop hysteria, watching Godzilla vs. Kong you might be thinking "HEY GET TO THE MONKEY LIZARD FIGHTS ALREADY!" but this movie’s structure surprisingly leans less on the plot-action-plot-action formula of the last film. Before the film unveils a modern Mechagodzilla, the first act is too normal for its own good, allowing plot contradictions to pile up too faster for the story to outrun. This wouldn't be worth lamenting if the action was less sporadic — then again I wish they had space to expand the colorful Journey to the Center of the Earth segment, but we have to explore and experience the ancient behemoth rivalries in under two hours. As more of a doubled-down, tongue-in-cheek Skull Island sequel, at least the brawls you're there to see are well-staged and well-earned.
No main character exists just like the previous entries though newcomers Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall would be in the running. Between them, Brian Tyree Henry, Julian Dennison (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2) and the only real returning player Bobby Brown (I don't think Kyle Chandler's sad near-cameo counts), it's admittedly not the best ensemble we've seen. Regrettably, Godzilla vs. Kong is too embarrassed to let its titular foes turned friends be the actual protagonists — if the Planet of the Apes prequels could do it, why not this?
Still, whereas Christopher Nolan failed to read the collapsing societal landscape while pushing Tenet late last summer, this movie seems to have callously revived the box office from its slumber like rousing a comatose Zilla with a nuke. April has no big releases outside of Mortal Kombat so we'll have to wait till later for something to pass the baton of resurgence — maybe A Quiet Place Part II or Cruella, both due by May's end, collectively have what it takes. AQPII got completely screwed just over a year ago so it’d be poetic justice for the film to get summer pumping.
But this movie, in all its epic monster mash showdown disaster drapings, has enough to keep the cinemas alive, for now. It’s the kind of cogently, abominably dumb attraction that gives stupid flicks their rightful, fun-with-friends place in the mainstream as opposed to truly clumsy, ill-crafted crap like WW84, also courtesy of WB. For their small missteps, the significant studio has played their hand extremely prudently in these ludicrous times — likewise for all of GvK’s inanities, there’s no denying the movie's colossally simplistic giddiness, especially when the selective eye-popping excerpts exploit the premise for all its flabbergasting preposterousness.
One of these big guys better actually fall like the tagline promises or I smell a lawsuit. But the real lead here is that somehow, some way, preposterously, Warner Brothers had an easier time racking up the MonsterVerse than the DC Extended Universe. Just think about that for a second — the fighting kaiju flick that uses March Madness brackets for the opening titles was more dearly earned than the JUSTICE LEAGUE MOVIE. Et tu, WB?
Godzilla got two whole movies before this and Kong also got his own oversized solo round, though Skull Island's sickly camp has absolutely nothing on the classic, tactile grandeur of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. Still, Godzilla vs. Kong is the kind of event film I wish WB had saved for May rather than shift it earlier to smooth over a dry spell in their bold dual-format 2021 schedule. However, while Disney scrounges for returns with steep rental fees on top of monthly services, this skirmish between leviathans is actually drawing people to the theater with the most promising box office numbers of the pandemic despite free access with an HBOMAX subscription or less kosher ways of acquiring digital media. Either they’re playing 4D economic chess or the studio has been very lucky breaking into a now partially vaccinated general public.
I’ve hated Gareth Edwards' entire career, though 2014's Godzilla was the least offensive facet of it — sometimes the Spielberg-thieving sense of scope helped craft specifically sensational sequences but his boredom-breeding sobriety and inability to implement watchable, interesting characters has ruined every picture he's backed. Jordan Vogt-Roberts' Kong: Skull Island wasn't bad, bearing hilarity where needed most with a fine cast operating through agreeable schlock. Personally, with little knowledge of Godzilla’s absurdly gargantuan cinematic history apart from the classic 1954 original (I haven’t even seen Roland Emmerich’s 1998 take, let alone the dozens of authentic features scattered across multiple eras), all I can impart concerning the MonsterVerse or whatever is that Michael Dougherty's Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a heightened spectacle that subsidized the ranging seriousness and silliness into straitlaced nonsense, setting the stage for the decent showdown we have before us rather than rushing into the goods after only one movie like Batman v Superman did.
King of the Monsters reduced the human characters to their minimum — apart from daft eco-terrorists for villains and Millie Bobby Brown gaping at amazing creatures, who needed anything more than kaiju kraziness? These just aren’t the movies that should get caught up in plot or realism, so KotM is top dog for me because there's considerable reverence and awe for the titans (particularly when Godzilla's the good guy) and there are simply more exhilarating excuses for on-screen happenings.
Rearing such non-stop hysteria, watching Godzilla vs. Kong you might be thinking "HEY GET TO THE MONKEY LIZARD FIGHTS ALREADY!" but this movie’s structure surprisingly leans less on the plot-action-plot-action formula of the last film. Before the film unveils a modern Mechagodzilla, the first act is too normal for its own good, allowing plot contradictions to pile up too faster for the story to outrun. This wouldn't be worth lamenting if the action was less sporadic — then again I wish they had space to expand the colorful Journey to the Center of the Earth segment, but we have to explore and experience the ancient behemoth rivalries in under two hours. As more of a doubled-down, tongue-in-cheek Skull Island sequel, at least the brawls you're there to see are well-staged and well-earned.
No main character exists just like the previous entries though newcomers Alexander Skarsgård and Rebecca Hall would be in the running. Between them, Brian Tyree Henry, Julian Dennison (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Deadpool 2) and the only real returning player Bobby Brown (I don't think Kyle Chandler's sad near-cameo counts), it's admittedly not the best ensemble we've seen. Regrettably, Godzilla vs. Kong is too embarrassed to let its titular foes turned friends be the actual protagonists — if the Planet of the Apes prequels could do it, why not this?
Still, whereas Christopher Nolan failed to read the collapsing societal landscape while pushing Tenet late last summer, this movie seems to have callously revived the box office from its slumber like rousing a comatose Zilla with a nuke. April has no big releases outside of Mortal Kombat so we'll have to wait till later for something to pass the baton of resurgence — maybe A Quiet Place Part II or Cruella, both due by May's end, collectively have what it takes. AQPII got completely screwed just over a year ago so it’d be poetic justice for the film to get summer pumping.
But this movie, in all its epic monster mash showdown disaster drapings, has enough to keep the cinemas alive, for now. It’s the kind of cogently, abominably dumb attraction that gives stupid flicks their rightful, fun-with-friends place in the mainstream as opposed to truly clumsy, ill-crafted crap like WW84, also courtesy of WB. For their small missteps, the significant studio has played their hand extremely prudently in these ludicrous times — likewise for all of GvK’s inanities, there’s no denying the movie's colossally simplistic giddiness, especially when the selective eye-popping excerpts exploit the premise for all its flabbergasting preposterousness.
Zack Snyder's Justice League briefing
2 (out of 4)
The history of the Justice League movie is a sad, funny, neverending joke, and here's the punchline. There was the waning critical reception to Zack Snyder's films, Warner Brothers' constantly shifting plans and creative interference, his daughter's suicide, Snyder's departure, Joss Whedon's help and reshoots, Henry Cavill's mustache, the embarrassing final product, the laughs, the memes, the angry diehards, the stupid hashtags and ultimately, years later, millions more dollars pumped into a new auteur version that is less rightfully restored and more ridiculously reimagined.
Snyder is an abnormally divisive mainstream director written off by most circles yet deified by a loud, mostly moronic cult. Some of his more artistically full movies warrant some kind of critical reevaluation, like Watchmen (remember the value of flawed heroes?) or Legend of the Guardians: The Owl of Ga’Hoole (who could forget?). Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice have hordes of defenders but even upon lenient revisitation these films aren’t altogether good in spite of their glimmers of greatness — they're at least a hint more tolerable when you're able to break up the spatially challenged pacing and scissor-handed editing with bathroom breaks rather than take the muddled, effects-oozing extravaganzas in one numbing sit. Man of Steel has a great opening, a good score, fine actors and an agreeably granular look but absolutely no heart, nuance or smarts by its excessively dumb climax — dear LORD the airs Snyder puts on. BvS is superb hate-watch material whether you’ve got the merciful, somewhat inferior theatrical take or the three-hour time-waster, since both venture forty different directions to justify the linchpin fight only to go for MoS-identical, brain-scrambling idiocy by the overcooked finish.
The most important info in my mind approaching the Snyder Cut was the fact that, when Zack exited the director’s chair, he was still sitting behind a movie mostly fit to his liking as per Warner Brothers' narrow-minded checklist. By the time calls for the "original" cut came to be, the joke was already slowly growing into an unrelenting movement, the efforts of which are only now actualizing some three and a half years later. With 70 million dollars for quite the post-production and post-completion, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the most hallowed director’s cut since the Lord of the Rings extended editions — you don’t see the online film community set ablaze when Oliver Stone announces his fourth attempt to make Alexander work. And unlike some Ridley "which is the real version, man?" Scott ambiguity, this has to be one of film history's most stark disparities between a theatrical and unabridged interpretation. Why else would I waste my time rewatching mediocre capeshit and waste a briefing on a movie I technically already reviewed? Because that’s how much of a figure Snyder is, like some frattier George Lucas or James Cameron — a man who often finds himself behind critically controversial if technologically proficient features, his eccentricity matched only by his ego. Even that's too much praise; I’m with all the people saying he’s a notch or two above Michael Bay and I’ll leave it there.
But for Snyderbros March 18th, 2021 was like Christmas day — however you feel the new Justice League measures up to the theatrical mishmash, WB has done a lot for themselves, namely leading their audience to believe they have any feasible influence whatsoever. All the loudest #releasethesnydercut chanters may be patting themselves on the back at the thought of a major studio bending to public will but really all they did was assess a market and throw a bone. Newer cries to #restorethesnyderverse have been dismissed outright by WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar and considering how profitable their latest, steadily more separated solo movies have been, there’s no chance of risking future billions on a loony legion of avid, edgy nerds. Insanely, the Snyder Cut may have been better for HBOMAX than WW84, but ZSJL is nonetheless an exceptional, blue-moon freak incident of cinematic wish fulfillment.
What truly matters is the final product — it’s been confusing for me, since its impossible to ignore the fact that Snyder was already content helping WB shape a Justice League in under two hours. What we’re seeing may be close to the untrimmed, unfinished feature he let the suits see back in 2017, before he filmed new footage against their consent and ended up with a movie more likely to rile up rather than fully satisfy fans with teases of future Justice League films that are plainly never to be. Travesties of typical indulgence like epilogues concerning Martian Manhunter and future nightmare visions seriously soil this film in total. However, the way the film almost functions like the spiritual Cyborg movie, builds to a logical, climactic endpoint and lends itself to exhibitionist cinema (that miniseries structure almost works, especially in the elongated mythic backstory) are all easily identifiable pros.
And yet even with such unshackled breadth, this team-up is still rushed as far as the scope of the DCEU would have been at the moment. Most uncanny of all, the original's terrible jokes, the ones we assumed were solely Whedon's fault, are far more prevalent in this rendition than you might think, though there's at least one less "My man!" Even though 2017's Justice League had its own self-destructive problems, there are still myriad editing and soundtrack choices within the Snyder Cut that are marginally, borderline indefensibly worse, although the plot, without anything removed, flows to far less dysfunction.
Barry Allen’s introduction is much more interesting, making for one of Snyder's cooler slow-motion showoffs, though the appearance basically 90 minutes in makes The Flash as superficial to the action as the previous version — at least Ezra Miller's little remarks aren’t quite so obviously Marvel-esque this time. Jason Momoa’s Aquaman still has virtually nothing to do but this version has time for a never unwelcome Willem Dafoe, who would strengthen 2018's Aquaman, the DCEU's unsung best. Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman similarly receives little embellishment. Other than an obvious disparity in the eventually resurrected Superman ("whoa his costume is black, dude?!"), Ray Fisher's crucially expanded role as Cyborg is the only broad structural change and omission next to the Josstice League.
The funny thing is even this breathable, artistic, 'truer' Justice League still would’ve been served the same sour public reception as the butchered original. It’s a noted improvement solely for predictably self-serious reasons — the utterly pointless 4:3 aspect ratio sure ain't one of 'em — and, inevitably, an even bigger waste of time and effort. I'm not sure how to feel about the Nick Cave needle drops or the yodeling, shirt-sniffing Aquaman enthusiasts. But I do know if I heard another [ancient lamentation] I was gonna scream one of my own.
The history of the Justice League movie is a sad, funny, neverending joke, and here's the punchline. There was the waning critical reception to Zack Snyder's films, Warner Brothers' constantly shifting plans and creative interference, his daughter's suicide, Snyder's departure, Joss Whedon's help and reshoots, Henry Cavill's mustache, the embarrassing final product, the laughs, the memes, the angry diehards, the stupid hashtags and ultimately, years later, millions more dollars pumped into a new auteur version that is less rightfully restored and more ridiculously reimagined.
Snyder is an abnormally divisive mainstream director written off by most circles yet deified by a loud, mostly moronic cult. Some of his more artistically full movies warrant some kind of critical reevaluation, like Watchmen (remember the value of flawed heroes?) or Legend of the Guardians: The Owl of Ga’Hoole (who could forget?). Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice have hordes of defenders but even upon lenient revisitation these films aren’t altogether good in spite of their glimmers of greatness — they're at least a hint more tolerable when you're able to break up the spatially challenged pacing and scissor-handed editing with bathroom breaks rather than take the muddled, effects-oozing extravaganzas in one numbing sit. Man of Steel has a great opening, a good score, fine actors and an agreeably granular look but absolutely no heart, nuance or smarts by its excessively dumb climax — dear LORD the airs Snyder puts on. BvS is superb hate-watch material whether you’ve got the merciful, somewhat inferior theatrical take or the three-hour time-waster, since both venture forty different directions to justify the linchpin fight only to go for MoS-identical, brain-scrambling idiocy by the overcooked finish.
The most important info in my mind approaching the Snyder Cut was the fact that, when Zack exited the director’s chair, he was still sitting behind a movie mostly fit to his liking as per Warner Brothers' narrow-minded checklist. By the time calls for the "original" cut came to be, the joke was already slowly growing into an unrelenting movement, the efforts of which are only now actualizing some three and a half years later. With 70 million dollars for quite the post-production and post-completion, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the most hallowed director’s cut since the Lord of the Rings extended editions — you don’t see the online film community set ablaze when Oliver Stone announces his fourth attempt to make Alexander work. And unlike some Ridley "which is the real version, man?" Scott ambiguity, this has to be one of film history's most stark disparities between a theatrical and unabridged interpretation. Why else would I waste my time rewatching mediocre capeshit and waste a briefing on a movie I technically already reviewed? Because that’s how much of a figure Snyder is, like some frattier George Lucas or James Cameron — a man who often finds himself behind critically controversial if technologically proficient features, his eccentricity matched only by his ego. Even that's too much praise; I’m with all the people saying he’s a notch or two above Michael Bay and I’ll leave it there.
But for Snyderbros March 18th, 2021 was like Christmas day — however you feel the new Justice League measures up to the theatrical mishmash, WB has done a lot for themselves, namely leading their audience to believe they have any feasible influence whatsoever. All the loudest #releasethesnydercut chanters may be patting themselves on the back at the thought of a major studio bending to public will but really all they did was assess a market and throw a bone. Newer cries to #restorethesnyderverse have been dismissed outright by WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar and considering how profitable their latest, steadily more separated solo movies have been, there’s no chance of risking future billions on a loony legion of avid, edgy nerds. Insanely, the Snyder Cut may have been better for HBOMAX than WW84, but ZSJL is nonetheless an exceptional, blue-moon freak incident of cinematic wish fulfillment.
What truly matters is the final product — it’s been confusing for me, since its impossible to ignore the fact that Snyder was already content helping WB shape a Justice League in under two hours. What we’re seeing may be close to the untrimmed, unfinished feature he let the suits see back in 2017, before he filmed new footage against their consent and ended up with a movie more likely to rile up rather than fully satisfy fans with teases of future Justice League films that are plainly never to be. Travesties of typical indulgence like epilogues concerning Martian Manhunter and future nightmare visions seriously soil this film in total. However, the way the film almost functions like the spiritual Cyborg movie, builds to a logical, climactic endpoint and lends itself to exhibitionist cinema (that miniseries structure almost works, especially in the elongated mythic backstory) are all easily identifiable pros.
And yet even with such unshackled breadth, this team-up is still rushed as far as the scope of the DCEU would have been at the moment. Most uncanny of all, the original's terrible jokes, the ones we assumed were solely Whedon's fault, are far more prevalent in this rendition than you might think, though there's at least one less "My man!" Even though 2017's Justice League had its own self-destructive problems, there are still myriad editing and soundtrack choices within the Snyder Cut that are marginally, borderline indefensibly worse, although the plot, without anything removed, flows to far less dysfunction.
Barry Allen’s introduction is much more interesting, making for one of Snyder's cooler slow-motion showoffs, though the appearance basically 90 minutes in makes The Flash as superficial to the action as the previous version — at least Ezra Miller's little remarks aren’t quite so obviously Marvel-esque this time. Jason Momoa’s Aquaman still has virtually nothing to do but this version has time for a never unwelcome Willem Dafoe, who would strengthen 2018's Aquaman, the DCEU's unsung best. Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman similarly receives little embellishment. Other than an obvious disparity in the eventually resurrected Superman ("whoa his costume is black, dude?!"), Ray Fisher's crucially expanded role as Cyborg is the only broad structural change and omission next to the Josstice League.
The funny thing is even this breathable, artistic, 'truer' Justice League still would’ve been served the same sour public reception as the butchered original. It’s a noted improvement solely for predictably self-serious reasons — the utterly pointless 4:3 aspect ratio sure ain't one of 'em — and, inevitably, an even bigger waste of time and effort. I'm not sure how to feel about the Nick Cave needle drops or the yodeling, shirt-sniffing Aquaman enthusiasts. But I do know if I heard another [ancient lamentation] I was gonna scream one of my own.
Raya and the Last Dragon briefing
2 ½ (out of 4)
The latest Disney animated feature is an amalgamation of so many fantastical influences, gosh golly where to begin? There's the fundamental hero’s journey, the fractured ancient fantasy world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the cut and paste dragon tales of Eragon, the band of misfits/McGuffin mix-up of Guardians of the Galaxy, a bit of Dune's otherworldly Western flavor, the heists and booby traps of Indiana Jones — is that all?
Not so original but Raya and the Last Dragon is an entertaining diversion for small humans, bettered by inconspicuous feminism, intriguing worldbuilding and some beautiful individual moments. The film is dressed in the neatest universe of Disney’s 3D animated era but that nagging sense of the familiar infects damn near every scene thanks to the average adventure plotting. Raya ideally fits nicely alongside the new phase of 3D princesses (Tangled, Moana and the Frozen films) by playing to every audience and refusing to give in to stock romance, Rapunzel excluded — although, absent of any musical elements, The Last Dragon should have stood out against its company with more thoroughly detailed storying. But for Don Hall, the same co-director who helped provide the effortless joy of Big Hero 6, this is a remarkably underwhelming experience punctuated by regularly tangible, heartbreakingly unrealized promise.
Kelly Marie Tran — the unfortunate pariah of the Star Wars sequels — provides the titular Raya with an invisible grace, selling every line. Awkwafina, as the equally titular last dragon Sisu, is just the opposite — I respect the fresh actress in her element (damn she was good in The Farewell) but her character's first 20 minutes on-screen are agonizing. Are you actually cracking hair product and credit card jokes in a mythical realm? I can handle contemporary references in an ages-old setting if a legendary comedian like Robin Williams is the one doing the animated ad-libbing but Awkwafina has either been fed rubbish jokes from some wretched punch-up writer or was pitifully improvising on the spot. The humor seems inserted to let kids feel less intimidated by the various cultures, names and mythology that either might be a lot to keep up with or could very well keep them more interested.
If this were a DreamWorks movie (oh yeah, How to Train Your Dragon, there's another superior influence) we’d be surprised how decent it is. For Disney’s dependable Animation Studio, this one’s gorgeous and garden-variety, kinda like the new Mulan except this film could've actually used that pointless remakes’ ill-fitting solemnity. Frankly Croods: A New Age was far less exasperating and more readily fun, even if a fraction as ambitious.
Raya shouldn’t be so mediocre, especially upon earning a respectable climax and following through on themes balancing xenophobia and trust. If it weren’t so softened for children 10 and under this would be one to recommend, even remember, rather than forget about before your evening ends.
The latest Disney animated feature is an amalgamation of so many fantastical influences, gosh golly where to begin? There's the fundamental hero’s journey, the fractured ancient fantasy world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the cut and paste dragon tales of Eragon, the band of misfits/McGuffin mix-up of Guardians of the Galaxy, a bit of Dune's otherworldly Western flavor, the heists and booby traps of Indiana Jones — is that all?
Not so original but Raya and the Last Dragon is an entertaining diversion for small humans, bettered by inconspicuous feminism, intriguing worldbuilding and some beautiful individual moments. The film is dressed in the neatest universe of Disney’s 3D animated era but that nagging sense of the familiar infects damn near every scene thanks to the average adventure plotting. Raya ideally fits nicely alongside the new phase of 3D princesses (Tangled, Moana and the Frozen films) by playing to every audience and refusing to give in to stock romance, Rapunzel excluded — although, absent of any musical elements, The Last Dragon should have stood out against its company with more thoroughly detailed storying. But for Don Hall, the same co-director who helped provide the effortless joy of Big Hero 6, this is a remarkably underwhelming experience punctuated by regularly tangible, heartbreakingly unrealized promise.
Kelly Marie Tran — the unfortunate pariah of the Star Wars sequels — provides the titular Raya with an invisible grace, selling every line. Awkwafina, as the equally titular last dragon Sisu, is just the opposite — I respect the fresh actress in her element (damn she was good in The Farewell) but her character's first 20 minutes on-screen are agonizing. Are you actually cracking hair product and credit card jokes in a mythical realm? I can handle contemporary references in an ages-old setting if a legendary comedian like Robin Williams is the one doing the animated ad-libbing but Awkwafina has either been fed rubbish jokes from some wretched punch-up writer or was pitifully improvising on the spot. The humor seems inserted to let kids feel less intimidated by the various cultures, names and mythology that either might be a lot to keep up with or could very well keep them more interested.
If this were a DreamWorks movie (oh yeah, How to Train Your Dragon, there's another superior influence) we’d be surprised how decent it is. For Disney’s dependable Animation Studio, this one’s gorgeous and garden-variety, kinda like the new Mulan except this film could've actually used that pointless remakes’ ill-fitting solemnity. Frankly Croods: A New Age was far less exasperating and more readily fun, even if a fraction as ambitious.
Raya shouldn’t be so mediocre, especially upon earning a respectable climax and following through on themes balancing xenophobia and trust. If it weren’t so softened for children 10 and under this would be one to recommend, even remember, rather than forget about before your evening ends.
The United States vs. Billie Holiday briefing
2 ½ (out of 4)
It’s sad that The United States vs. Billie Holiday has to underscore the importance of "Strange Fruit" nearly more than the singer herself. Part of me wants to believe it's because the only thing the creators think millennials will recognize is the oblique sample to Kanye West’s "Blood on the Leaves" off Yeezus but maybe I'm cynically projecting. With Lady Sings the Blues set next to this take on Holiday’s life, there is reason enough to argue Lee Daniels has come away with not only one of his stronger pictures but a film narrowly exceeding Diana Ross in a quintessentially 70s take on what an Oscar-friendly biographical drama should be: a whole life arranged into linear acts, a big ol' runtime and melodrama abound.
Lincoln seems to be exemplar of how we like to do 'em nowadays — only the key moment in a crucial figure’s life should be explored to get the full picture. This particular music manifestation has problems like the misleading title, which prepares you for some righteous karaoke challenge courtroom drama you never heard about. The film doesn’t dwell on Holiday growing up in a brothel like the 1972 take nor does it paint her abusive husband Louis McKay with Billy Dee Williams' rock steady charm, so the space between ugly truths and shiny inspiration is roughly as clouded as it was almost 50 years ago. The United States vs. Billie Holiday takes the icon as she is by the late 30s and works through the peaks of her popularity, but for a more specific timeline this is still the boilerplate biopic goods.
The film almost has no thought-provoking place for the part of drug n' jazz hating Harry J. Anslinger (Garret Hedlund, whose written role is basically stock evil white man appearing and disappearing here and there) and the finale dives into momentary parody when Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight) as the nondescript love interest laughably spells out for us that racists are just mad that Billie is bold, beautiful and black — holy cow, so amazing and brave. Those excessive strokes of pandering are cringe distilled but, antithetically, fresh newbie Andra Day is a miracle of acting and vocal agility, a first-timer just like Ross who even moreso fits both Holiday’s profile and lighter-than-helium vocals, with her own raspy notes to make the performance rich with signature flourish rather than caricatured impressions. She’s honestly excellent and solely, securely holds the film together.
Daniels handles Holiday's heroin addiction — and boy, did she love heroin — in a more illustrative light; the central sequence of the film, a finally uninterrupted, hallucinatory performance of "Strange Fruit," is a strung-out, surreal, storyboarded standout. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is beautifully shot and bolstered by a stellar, star-making turn, but its exceptional assets don't drag it outside the confines of pedestrian life story annotations even as the movie faintly attempts to tie Holiday to drug wars and social movements.
Sam Cooke’s world feels fuller in Regina King's vibrant One Night in Miami and so does that film's disciplined, demystifying discourse on the responsibilities of the cultural role model. Ma Rainey is so unflattering that you just know it equates closer to historical reality than this, not to mention bearing a better ensemble to aid the plausibility. Soon there will be the Jennifer Hudson-led Respect taking on Aretha Franklin's legacy, though it'll be miraculous if that silhouette of soul forgoes formula.
We love the idea of the struggling starlet compulsively closing in on death and targeted by racial injustice while crooning about it all the same. I just wish US vs. BH didn't express its significance like some truncated 1940s news byline. Furthermore no movie about Lady Day will surpass the feeling of obediently shutting up and listening to Holiday belt "Don't Explain" or "I'll Be Seeing You."
It’s sad that The United States vs. Billie Holiday has to underscore the importance of "Strange Fruit" nearly more than the singer herself. Part of me wants to believe it's because the only thing the creators think millennials will recognize is the oblique sample to Kanye West’s "Blood on the Leaves" off Yeezus but maybe I'm cynically projecting. With Lady Sings the Blues set next to this take on Holiday’s life, there is reason enough to argue Lee Daniels has come away with not only one of his stronger pictures but a film narrowly exceeding Diana Ross in a quintessentially 70s take on what an Oscar-friendly biographical drama should be: a whole life arranged into linear acts, a big ol' runtime and melodrama abound.
Lincoln seems to be exemplar of how we like to do 'em nowadays — only the key moment in a crucial figure’s life should be explored to get the full picture. This particular music manifestation has problems like the misleading title, which prepares you for some righteous karaoke challenge courtroom drama you never heard about. The film doesn’t dwell on Holiday growing up in a brothel like the 1972 take nor does it paint her abusive husband Louis McKay with Billy Dee Williams' rock steady charm, so the space between ugly truths and shiny inspiration is roughly as clouded as it was almost 50 years ago. The United States vs. Billie Holiday takes the icon as she is by the late 30s and works through the peaks of her popularity, but for a more specific timeline this is still the boilerplate biopic goods.
The film almost has no thought-provoking place for the part of drug n' jazz hating Harry J. Anslinger (Garret Hedlund, whose written role is basically stock evil white man appearing and disappearing here and there) and the finale dives into momentary parody when Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight) as the nondescript love interest laughably spells out for us that racists are just mad that Billie is bold, beautiful and black — holy cow, so amazing and brave. Those excessive strokes of pandering are cringe distilled but, antithetically, fresh newbie Andra Day is a miracle of acting and vocal agility, a first-timer just like Ross who even moreso fits both Holiday’s profile and lighter-than-helium vocals, with her own raspy notes to make the performance rich with signature flourish rather than caricatured impressions. She’s honestly excellent and solely, securely holds the film together.
Daniels handles Holiday's heroin addiction — and boy, did she love heroin — in a more illustrative light; the central sequence of the film, a finally uninterrupted, hallucinatory performance of "Strange Fruit," is a strung-out, surreal, storyboarded standout. The United States vs. Billie Holiday is beautifully shot and bolstered by a stellar, star-making turn, but its exceptional assets don't drag it outside the confines of pedestrian life story annotations even as the movie faintly attempts to tie Holiday to drug wars and social movements.
Sam Cooke’s world feels fuller in Regina King's vibrant One Night in Miami and so does that film's disciplined, demystifying discourse on the responsibilities of the cultural role model. Ma Rainey is so unflattering that you just know it equates closer to historical reality than this, not to mention bearing a better ensemble to aid the plausibility. Soon there will be the Jennifer Hudson-led Respect taking on Aretha Franklin's legacy, though it'll be miraculous if that silhouette of soul forgoes formula.
We love the idea of the struggling starlet compulsively closing in on death and targeted by racial injustice while crooning about it all the same. I just wish US vs. BH didn't express its significance like some truncated 1940s news byline. Furthermore no movie about Lady Day will surpass the feeling of obediently shutting up and listening to Holiday belt "Don't Explain" or "I'll Be Seeing You."