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Cinema Briefing
Movie reviews by
Ian Flanagan
Ian Flanagan
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Gladiator II
2 (out of 4) They don’t make ‘em like they used to, even the guy that used to make ‘em. I like Ridley well enough, sure he’s made more than his share of blunders (Napoleon, Alien: Covenant, The Counselor, Body of Lies, Hannibal, etc.) but his best (Duellists-tier), near-best (American Gangster-tier), overrated 'classics' (Black Hawk Down, Thelma & Louise) and even some forgotten fare (All the Money in the World, Matchstick Men, 1492), namely White Squall, still endure real nice — from the cut of this boomer blockbuster he’s finally circled back to sailing: “OY what if the gladiator battle was on the WA-UH!” Yes it’s been long enough for Gladiator 1.5 aka Gladiator Reborn (with sharks this time!) — let’s not even think about how they transported those, I don’t think you could pay me enough danerii to catch a shark in 200 AD. The way this movie tries to both mimic Gladiator’s formula and outstrip it at the same time is confusing. Gladiator II is a legacyquel to its core, you can’t escape the gravity of ancestry and it’s almost as hard to sidestep the structural imitation — however, like the Hunger Games prequel (only so much worse), Scott thought he could give you the whole blood for sport revolt on fast forward, THEN try to get away with last minute character development out the door. It’s discomforting the way this movie’s blunt brevity softens the tragedy, the politics and even the spectacle of 2000’s brawny Best Picture winner, but just for mainstream entertainment, this is dumb as palm-rubbed dirt. There were only so many moments that actually convinced you of millennia-removed history made real — with something like 300 million dollars at hand, it really doesn’t come off like it. And what a shame since his films can be beautifully edited (this one’s like a best and worst of, ranging from judiciously airtight to just plain jenky), Ridley’s got long-tested skill with scale and LIGHTING, GOODNESS next to Wicked this is like a godsend, seeing composite CG shots where everything matches... he’s certainly not incapable of transporting you in passages DARN IT. Still, looks alone cannot counterweight a crumby script (and Wicked Part 1 basically has the inverse issue). They know they have to be a little different, so they sub early CRAAaaaAAAZY Joaquin for some actual irredeemable weirdos (siblings played by Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger) and revise the revenge so it’s aimed at someone who doesn’t deserve it, General Acacias as played by Pedro Pascal, channeling Eric Bana’s Hector from Troy with half the noble gravitas. This movie doesn’t have anything but recycled emotional investments, therefore a slightly variant shade of the stoic, scorned rage monster doesn’t suit Paul Mescal, he can't imbue Maximus Jr. (Lucius Vernus Aurelius, son to a murdered father) with the warm spark of his work in All of Us Strangers or channel the possessed mythic sadness on display in Aftersun. I really hate his character’s selective memories: “OH I have all these remote psychological imprints that would totally suggest that I have some trace of who I am but instead I’m gonna act like a stubborn little BITCH til the third act!” Finally the not so big twist basically borrowed from the Training Day playbook (1. let Denzel be Denzel until the script won’t have it anymore) isn’t a fresh step and leaves you bored after wearing you out. The original is like some Japanese fantasy movie, hardly more than a fun sword and sandals revenge flick, the linchpin of the 2000s wave of redacted, simplified, pop versions of the historical epic like Troy, Alexander and his own Kingdom of Heaven… and Gladiator II is the speedier, stupider version of THAT. This won’t save a fossilized genre, and I don’t think such decent box office numbers will secure the old man’s obsession with genre entertainment after all these years. Frankly even if this is technically better than Exodus: Gods and Kings or less pompous than The Last Duel, this might be the most broken yet of his big, brash windows to the past, though if you count it, I suppose this is a touch more tolerable than House of Gucci. Armed with his defiantly boyish instincts and sweaty, gritty knack, his shape jumps from eager and economical to sporadic, flimsy and fractured — and I thought Napoleon felt undeveloped, riddled by disinterest and primed with unnecessary appeal to modern audiences. I’d rather be watching GI Jane, or GI Jane II for the that matter, CAN'T WAIT TO SEE IT! Wicked 2 ½ (out of 4) Any upfront aversion to this ludicrously anticipated event film was less to do with Wicked itself and more uncertainty about director Jon M. Chu, even if In the Heights happens to slap. I was always indifferent to the idea of Oz-related media, but admit most of it is pretty good: The Wiz (a reasonably cool musical mutilated by Sidney Lumet's insistence on plopping you in the worst seat in the house, number after number), Return to Oz (a fever dream of 80s dark kids fantasy worthy of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth) and Sam Raimi’s underrated Oz the Great and Powerful are rarely punishing, in fact they’re peripheral pleasures. But Wicked was due eight years ago and has clearly been trapped in production purgatory (so much so that the Part 1 and Part 2 were there long before I could accuse them of cash-grabbery) after development began in 2010. Because of its tangential relation to the classic 30s flick, let alone Baum’s actual children’s book series, let’s forgive my plebeian theatre acumen, as well as how easily I gave up on consuming even half of Chu’s filmography — sorry I don’t have time for your debut (Step Up 2 the Streets) or even your follow-up, Step Up 3-D, sure I’ll watch a YouTube clip or two. But, uh, I would never, EVER touch your SET of Justin Bieber docu-tour-movies (2011’s Never Say Never and 2013’s Believe), and while we’re at it I also just can’t with G.I. Joe: Retaliation, no thanks, even if I did suffer through Rise of Cobra back when I was a dumb teen (and Snake Eyes as a dumb adult). I can’t believe I got swindled by Now You See Me 2 (like with G.I. Joe or Step Up, Chu appears to have had nothing to do with the original) and in between he spits out a low budget rendition of the 80s animated show Jem via Jem and the Holograms’ pauper to pop star fantasy-fulfillment. But this guy clearly only comes into his own when he helms the successful, historically significant (if not the best of his full frontal sense of entertainment) Crazy Rich Asians, the first Hollywood movie with an all-Asian cast since ’93 and clearly a step in the right direction, finally. Then, with a decent assist from Lin-Manuel Miranda, In the Heights blew me away a few summers back in 2021, and remains his most volatile, impressive film partly by default. As far as the source though, Baum didn’t want to impose moral lessons, akin to Oz’s overseas inspiration Alice in Wonderland — meanwhile Wicked scribe Gregory Maguire specifically sought big message-making apparently in honor of Dickens or something? For siphoning from prime American children’s fantasy and as the offspring of the wildly popular Broadway/touring musical incited in 2003, itself derived from Maguire’s saucy 560-page 1995 revisionist novel (praised and also criticized for turning Baum’s world upside down for the sake of moral relativism and pretty outlandish expansions on a Western wonderland setup) Wicked: Part 1 (2024) could be worse — at least kids are looking out for propaganda or something? It seems Baum wanted to end the books after six and they made him spit out 14, basically until he was dead! I’m sorry Hollywood where’s the fucking Nome King? OH RIGHT we only care about what we know well, since the wellspring for all this media is less Baum and really just Victor Fleming’s 1939 all ages musical spectacular, his crumby side project while he hammered out the forever and always popular domestic pinnacle of all cinematic offerings, Gone With the Wind, released the same year. ALL TO SAY, there was mostly reason to be concerned about the state of a two-part Wicked extravaganza, especially considering how awful and all-consuming the marketing has been. Plus, given that this first act totals 160 minutes while the full show on stage totals 165 (and looking at the story sum of Maguire’s novel, it would appear there wasn’t all too much borrowed) … my first feelings on this portion of the Wicked musical film adaption were exhaustion mixed with moderate enthrallment. As an unfamiliar I still couldn’t help but spot the original performers (Adena Menzel AND BLANKER) popping up to do a side by side piece with the new Galinda and Elphaba, but what makes this a natural rendition is how stupendously typecast and then impossibly well-met the performances by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande really are, they are just too suited it’s kind of freaky. Obviously in this big fat weekend with the most masculine of releases shadowed by the most feminine (Oppenheimer and Gladiator II dwarfed by Barbie and now Wicked) it’s a go-woke-go-broke-breaker, and yet, (UNLIKE BARBIE) this is one where all the politics of a supposedly very political book can’t be spotted past animal rights or ableism stuff (Barbie did indeed have wheelchairs working the dancefloor) — I guess I'm saying I always thought that Elphaba would be played by a black woman, why WOULDN’T she be? No offense to Menzel, obviously it’s just that the ‘race-swapping’ in this fantasy setting, for that particular character, isn’t only fine but recommended. Erivo, like Elphaba, is esoteric and vulnerable, and likewise the words blonde and vainglorious don’t NOT make you think of Ariana Grande, acting like Audrey Hepburn auditioning for Jane Austen’s Emma — but Cynthia outshines the doting thing’s falsetto at every turn though. With Chu’s flair for big ensemble numbers, effortless, whirlwind dance choreography, slick cameras moves and tricky editing particularly in the most comedic numbers, the middle of this movie is full on fun between the loathing, the life-lusting and that “Popular song,” all pretty joyous. All the two-handed competition was charming and the silent duet dance is a risky moment that really pays off — for awhile you’re sold you on why this story, and the arrangement of songs surrounding it, have become so ubiquitous with the cream of Broadway pageantry and passion. Next to The Lion King and Cats, what is there? It does its best to make good on giving you what you can’t travel to or afford, meeting the masses with what they’re missing (major theater is like what opera was, an exclusive medium for the privileged, if only geographically) but its a pretty phony excuse for a slice of the best modern musical theatre can offer notwithstanding — sure it’s a sight sweeter than Les Mis and Cats (EAT IT TOM HOOPER, seriously) but nowhere remotely close to a classic. For only half the story Wicked often overstays its welcome, yeah I know it ends with fan-favorite “Defying Gravity,” Lord knows how they flew like Spider-Man onstage considering it didn’t even look good in a shiny 150 million movie. All the CG looks expensive and terrible next to the plentiful amount of setwork (especially those rotating library shelves!) and often Wicked compensates its technical shortcomings with livewire breathlessness, the insurance of the songwriting and reasonably respectful, noteworthy performances by our leads. Still it’s crazy that the undoing of a movie with such goodwill is just crappy digital VFX, sickly, sourceless lighting and the overbusy, bloated way with which it has to extend the whole affair for the sake of milking Jeff Goldblum, cutesy cameos and nineteen added dramatic pauses to the far more fluid literal show-stopping climax of “Defying Gravity.” How can Universal smack of Disney so? How can anyone stand THAT CRINGIFYING LEWIS CARROLL VERNACULAR?? Maybe it’d all make more sense if I was gay.  2 (out of 4)
“Life-affirming scmife-affirming!” At first glance, Here functions as something of a 30-year reunion between director Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright of 1994’s dopey, darn good Forrest Gump. It’s even more similar than it looks, as both weave a broad, syrupy tapestry of 20th century history and pop culture pitstops, though Here has to cram and contain it all to a static view of a plot of land, the central living space of a sturdy colonial home changing hands through generations as the film’s grand timespan isn’t satisfied to move in a linear direction the way, uh, LIFE DOES. This dreamy-eyed boomer nostalgia montage just subs out the bookending CG feather for a fussy hummingbird. Two decades after his third pairing with Hanks for Zemeckis’ Polar Express, his inception into the foray of motion-capture, admittedly Here’s instantaneous de-aging technology is extraordinary magic. Maybe there’s an assist in makeup or post-production fine-tuning but there are stretches where the result is unnoticeable, roughly invisible as we long hoped it would be. From his other tech-testing 3D-animated features Beowulf and A Christmas Carol to other not-quite-there digital checkpoints like Joseph Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, film innovation has inched us closer to the cusp of the uncanny valley, and with Here you can literally see how they’re ALMOST OUT, spinning on rim’s edge like a freaking basketball! Sure, trying to revert the slowly advancing Wright and Hanks back into beaming teenagers is like a domestic video game cut scene, but otherwise this movie’s basically out of the past in this regard, and that’s without even mentioning they all but solved de-aging an actor’s voice as well, WOWZA what a time to be alive! And at least Robert’s heart is in the right place — a mixture of earnestness and brand-spanking-new film-form-futurism is what has made legends out of George Lucas and James Cameron, although somehow Zemeckis has always felt like if Cameron Crowe or James L. Brooks or some other comfortable, even more family friendly auteur got his hands dirty with all the envelope-pushing. It’s actually rare if Bobby Z. doesn’t pursue something testing the boundaries of visual effects, from the Back to the Future trilogy to Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Death Becomes Her to Gump and Contact, through the mo-cap era and into recent works that still insisted on innovations — Welcome to Marwen, The Witches and even his Pinocchio with Hanks (somehow not quite as nightmarish as you’d imagine) spell out a pretty lame leg of the late career, and aside from the decent Roald Dahl stint (don’t try to outdo Nicolas Roeg!), they’re all unremarkable excuses to go hogwild on the CGI. Even his autumnal epoch his pared down, more traditional and most appreciable films, his all too brief ‘mature’ era (Flight, The Walk, Allied), live and die by VFX. And speaking of retarded reasons to get all technical, Here has to maintain visual variety by insisting the film be littered with transitional frame-within-frames, rarely aligning any clever juxtapositions, just nonsense like a TV broadcasting The Beatles on Ed Sullivan while you jump back to the native American timeline, uh what? It’s as if you’ve found this on YouTube and pop-ups are constantly begging you to exit out of them. With more brutal editing (and obviously less of the expected, sugary, greeting card schmaltz) there could be some real existential nuggets to unearth from a film with as much in common with The Tree of Life and Boyhood as it has with Michael Snow (like Wavelength had a Lifetime movie inside) and genuine experimental film. Zemeckis, for all his zealous reaching, arrives somewhere eerily safe on the cinematic plane. The first moments mimic Terrence Malick’s return to the primordial shape of the earth, a preamble into what the idea of being alive meant to the cloistered, divinely gifted director. If this movie miraculously managed to take its many strands of the family tree to heart and didn’t use them as filling to space out the lives of the central mid-century couple, this could have been a remarkable exploration of ancestry, progeny, the idea of one’s individual relationship to civilization or any other naval-gazing notions that, when ineloquently communicated, make you want to gag but under the right conditions have you dying to figure out the scope of your own life. This must be based on a real lineage (why would you reference Lay Z Boy and Benjamin Franklin so much if not?), it’s just too specific and scatterbrained. The original graphic novel, I assume, has something that screams MOVING COLLAGE more than Robert’s granny flick for those who prefer their reality rose-tinted. But it really depends on who you are whether this movie will smack of honesty or just enlist cliché after cliché. Paul Bettany’s war vet alcoholic patriarch (played with so much dexterity it’s like he’s doing O’Neil) is the film’s surest acting asset — he understands the strange, living photo album theatricality that the world’s-a-stage gimmick has to offer. His character breaks down at Thanksgiving after his wife (an always welcome Kelly Reilly) has passed, and Wright’s own counterpart Margaret chokes up at her 50th birthday — OH GOD, SEIZE THE DAY, IT’S ALWAYS RIGHT NOW, TIME FLIES, GOLLY GEE — any more idioms and you won’t even have to make up any dialogue! The passing of ages, lifestyles and cultural concerns is such a weighty, cumbersome topic that Zemeckis is just too spineless to make the most of… Forrest Gump, for all the horrific manipulation of old footage, is a more bluntly tuned recollection of the recent chapters in America’s story — even when we’re honestly touching on divorce and disease and all the passed-down discomforts of life, Here is content to be recognizable but not relatable, too desperate and unfocused to weasel its way into your heart. This kind of philosophical filmmaking bets it all on the supplemental veracity, of which Here has a meager offering. Even the idea of a core memory is so treacly — the movie announces when an early moment will be called back to, and once the parting shot of the movie finally pushes the camera out of fixed place for the first time in 100 minutes simultaneously, it’s not exactly revelatory like Ozu working with a dolly. Between the maudlin melodramatics there are hints at what has made Zemeckis such a loud, often indisputably agreeable voice in pop filmmaking. But this was just baldfaced Oscar bait and a pretty poor showing of it too. If not for Bettany, this movie and the "It’s a Wonderful Life for Dummies" setup (OH GOD MY DREAMS ARE FALLING AT THE WAYSIDE FOR MONETARY CONCERNS… ain’t no somber reactions as train whistles blow, too subtle, and unlike Mary, Margaret wants anything other than to stay in the same crumby house) would be all too easy to dismiss — as it stands, Here is just a lofty, grandiloquent whiff. But if you live and breathe home decor this is the movie you’ve been waiting for!  3 ½ (out of 4)
At first brush, Sean Baker did not make a fan out of me. I love a good character you can hate and there few complaints more plebeian than “I can’t relate to this character” when “MAYBE YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO.” But in The Florida Project, that perfume-pawning excuse for a mother and her diabolical devil child couldn’t make me care too much, even if Willem Dafoe’s audience insert breaks down a bit. I’ve come around a bit since that 2017 film put Baker on the map in a real way (capitalizing on attention given to 2015’s Tangerine), but it was the next, his last, 2021’s Red Rocket, that spoke to me just as it seemed to place him back into cult obscurity. The horrifically hilarious humdinger about a groomer run amok was his best yet, with another (not so) tragic comeuppance he enjoys parceling out from all vantages and emotional gradients. But Anora is the real deal, Baker’s fringe filmography arriving at its most comfortable crowd pleaser, that Palme d’Or is nice and all… Sean’s features have never come off more visually, cinematically, existentially beautiful, nor have his characters been more uniformly fascinating (the man is one hell of a fearless, pitiless casting director, either intensely empathetic or not at all), his neorealist exploitation of the lives of sex workers never so damn strategically sad and funny. After a patterned row of subjects from 2012’s Starlet (porn star) to Tangerine (street prostitute), not to mention The Florida Project (the ex-stripper mom eventually evicted for sex solicitation) and the whole underage push into the porn industry for Red Rocket, this riff on Pretty Woman for film nerds is almost a little tame even if it has many hedonistic hexes to cast. Anora is his most epic feature yet, with gloriously precise editing, particularly in the movie’s mesmerizing, depraved honeymoon of a first act, the bracing blitz immediately met with some tests of patience and audience expectations, of which he has become a soothsayer. Even if you know exactly where Anora is heading, its sordid romanticism has that sweet and sour screwball hijinks that lets him unleash typically Harmony Korine-adjacent (like what if he wasn’t a Waters-wannabe douche) portraits of the “common (wo)man” without getting off to the so-called seedy underbelly of society and WHATNOT. Mikey Madison (free of any fires lit under her ass) can rightly take this career jumpstart wherever she’s destined for, apparently Sorkin’s Social Network sequel is first up? Unlike say Emma Stone in Poor Things last year, this is that sort of the arthouse erotica / distinguished dirty movie that doesn’t make such a spectacle of it, Baker’s practically unsimulated approach to demystifying sex rendered with far more humanity, intimacy and rewarding comedy than simply taking the piss just about all the time, eh Lanthimos? It’s one of those great warts and all female character studies (of course made by MEN) that spins you round, like A Woman Under the Influence, Safe, To Die For, Tár or even better…. There’s a clear distinction between feminism and fetishism but Baker is quick to discard either, instead choosing to take independent cinema and it’s host of hallmarks to the next level. As he effortlessly staging the necessary improvisational spirit Baker captures some shimmer of the “cultural zeitgeist” (whatever that means) in its sleaziest form with overlapping delivery, inexpensive chaos, jump cuts, non-diagetic music only and family actors (killing his largest role besides Prince of Broadway, as the desperate rich-kid-wrangler Toros, reliable Armenian actor Karren Karagulian appears in all eight of Baker’s pictures, usually as the gold-hearted asshole) . Baker has everyone’s attention, and the way this movie fucks you fast then slow, then challenges your every expectation move by move, it’s a damn fine, fidgety, many-splendored pleasure, a head-spinning kind of drug-bent love story turned tragicomic crime thriller with flavors of Coen irony and the freedom of French New Wave, yet Sean’s speaking a language all his own. From the indebted takeout cyclist to the shitty Jamaican Dad to the guilt-absolving adult film actress, backstabbing trans prostitutes to Florida’s worst white trash to aging, shameless porn actors/pedos, he has to balance the usual karma or moment of clarity, and Anora’s ingredients amount to something so subtle, strange and startling, made up of feelings you can barely keep up with, which is odd considering none of his former, brutally immediate features were ever allowed to breathe this much. Baker’s such a rascal, I don’t know how he can write and shoot these scenarios and not feel like he’s going to be arrested. And yet his kind of jaunty, Cassavetes-comparable camerawork and casualness keeps everything feeling not so creepy, and Mikey feels like a memorable muse to match Starlet’s fashion model blonde Dree Hemingway. If this can ride out critical contentment to a Best Picture win I’ll be pleased, this and Oppenheimer could redeem the decade and the actually phony, insincere poorsploitation dreck in Nomadland, not to mention disability checklist bait in the otherwise harmless CODA and of course the exasperating exuberance of Everything Everywhere All At Once and its baffling wacky win has quickly aged like day old dairy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was too transgressive to make it through to the end and I don’t care. Anora is a celebration of original filmmaking, proving there’s plenty of room between ‘sanitized’ and Showgirls (Baker’s a stable genius next to Paul Verhoeven in ’95) when it comes to sex in movies. Sean simply flexes his still-burgeoning, ever-consistent impulses and Anora inevitably becomes an honorable moment of topping yourself even as you’ve left behind hardly a miss, so long as you can really stand back far and appreciate The Florida Project (and even Tangerine) as the most abrasive of his service industry blues standards. Annie is one of his least deplorable subjects, and far and away the most arresting — she’s wholehearted and hard-skinned, no ditz, just a Jersey girl who bites and kicks, draws that vape pen like a cigarette and ends more than a few sentences with “motherfucker.” The story structure is so measured and deliberate, the Russian-American affair to remember sold with the peephole-like warped film lens carrying the masterful, manic montages and most desolate passages to similarly kaleidoscopic, precisely absurd movements of blissfully sobering guerrilla filmmaking fireworks. But it’s his opus so far even before you even consider his technical finesse, meaning Anora amounts to a very loud, vibrant movie by a rascally, albeit minor figure on the landscape, until now — man I can’t wait to see what’s next, experience shows it’ll be something to do with making sure those of the world’s oldest profession or thereabouts are taken even LESS for granted. More excavation of unseen transactional truths would be no bad thing, only putting his finest efforts in classic company abreast Nights of Cabiria, Belle du Jour, Street of Shame, maybe even Klute or Leaving Las Vegas, or one of my favorites, Jean-Luc Godard’s divine, stinging, sleek slicer of lifer Vivre sa Vie. Some say the best directors are the ones who make the same movie over and over… Do your thing Sean, please show us more of that euphoric, humbling, effusively entertaining all-you-can-eat Americana for the appropriately empathetic palette. |
Forthcoming:
Thoughts on Father Mother Sister Brother Marty Supreme Avatar: Fire and Ash Hamnet Zootopia 2 Wake Up Dead Man Sentimental Value The Running Man Jay Kelly Frankenstein Die My Love Bugonia A House of Dynamite Tron: Ares One Battle After Another Caught Stealing Weapons The Naked Gun The Fantastic Four: First Steps Eddington Superman Jurassic World: Rebirth F1 / M3GAN 2.0 28 Years Later / Elio Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning Final Destination: Bloodlines Sinners Snow White Black Bag Mickey 17 ... Follow me on Twitter @ newwavebiscuit To keep it brief...
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