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Cinema Briefing
Movie reviews by
Ian Flanagan
Ian Flanagan
 3 ½ (out of 4)
I’m not exactly the Nosferatu type — give me another essential F W Murnau any day. Faust is more transportive and ethereal, The Last Laugh more soul-shedding, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans more mournfully poetic. However, the Werner Herzog version of the cloistered Count? Now that’s some sublime stuff, taking the director’s coarse, natural matter-of-factness to stupefying shores. I know this has been the passion project of spooky auteur extraordinaire Robert Eggers dating back before The Witch and even earlier shorts suffused in Poe and Grimm — it would’ve been killer to witness the stage version he was conjuring up as a teen or thereabouts. I wonder if in blocking his new semi-remake that he felt stifled somewhat, unable to match a story adapted so much, including himself already, to a succinct, separate vision. He remains a sage of historical recreation, and knows how to draw these period performances that feel of the fashion of 1922 or thereabouts. Narratively, regardless of the modern measure of jump scares Universal/Focus Features insist upon, I dare you to find a significant way this stands apart from Murnau’s cornerstone (as I said, outside of some iconic imagery, not my cup of tea), Herzog’s humanist hallucinations, or most relevantly Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 feature which more or less closed the book on the Dracula story — given just how sexually charged Eggers chooses to be contrary to the German forebears, FFC’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula demands the closest comparison, despite the German renditions removing the suckubus concubines. Each version has some balance between the key players, the hand off from Jonathan Harker / Thomas Hutter and Dracula / Orlok to Van Helsing (von Franz/Bulwer) and Nina / Ellen (Herzog kept the Stoker names but called our fated heroine Lucy), with Knock or rather Renfield losing it in the background. No one dominates entirely, and usually there’s some weak links and here it may as well be Bill Skarsgård (following his brother Alexander’s own titular role in Eggers last, the vengeful viking saga The Northman) as the parasitic creature of the night and Lily Rose-Depp as the sacrificial lamb. Bill’s voice is fearsome, and Eggers is wise to consider him more beastly than human (particularly next to the elegance of Legosi or Lee), but Skars just isn’t the real life psycho Max Schrek from the original, nor is he as wearily sympathetic as Herzog’s muse Klaus Kinski, or as developed for love and loss on repeat as Gary Oldman’s awe-inspiring turn in Coppola’s affair. Likewise, from a performative angle this movie wanted to be The Exorcist when it pleased, and rather than take thoughtful consideration of how headstrong our leading lady Isabelle Adjani is in ’79, this one has her resistant in one scene and otherwise a rag doll, taking not from Nosferatu the Vampyre but clearly from Adjani’s feral, freaky performance of spiritual surrender in Zulawski’s Possession — Lily makes her way through some mad monologues but her flailing about feels occasionally forced, at least she’s more suited for role than Winona Ryder. Meanwhile Nicolas Hoult as hubby Hutter may be the best player overall, certainly a sight better than Keanu Reeves and the doofus from ’22 (Gustav von Wangenheim)... Even the great Willem Dafoe just isn’t quite Anthony Hopkins, or even Peter Cushing in the Hammer horror takes, in fact Dafoe’s best contribution to the NosferatUniverse is playing crazy pants actor / possible actual vampire Max S. In 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, about the making of Murnau’s classic. Lately vampire media has seen a cinematic resurrection after the movies seemed like an inhospitable resting place, roughly since Dracula Untold a decade ago, already after the Twilight craze had subsided. But just in the last year or so, they did up Dracula’s Daughter in Abigail, stretched the ever so vague central sea-journey for our shapeshifting stowaway into a whole feature (The Last Voyage of the Demeter) and, to squeeze the stories further, hey what if there was a modern Renfield standalone, wherein Nicolas Hoult got his beak wet with the material beside a Nic Cage Count D.? Eggers’ sincerity and seriousness transcends any trendiness (he doesn't continue to lean on fart jokes this time to tide you over such gloomy, melancholy moviemaking), and he spectacularly quells his desire to make a most authentically scripted affair as always, not to mention one that is actually scary — but Coppola’s visceral death-grip was tighter, as were his film’s technical touches via splendid in-camera visual effects and miraculous makeup/prosthetic work. It’s just odd — as his least original project by default and as a researcher of great appetite, Eggers should be keen enough to start from scratch and truly treat this stuff like it has never been done before, to try and outstep esteemed progenitors. Even as an artifice-actualizer of masterly proportions with filmmakers like Ophüls, Parajanov, Tarkovsky and Tarr in his visual language (and at his silliest, Burton) and despite essentially setting the standard for the quote unquote “slow burn” style of this last decade of “elevated horror,” Eggers ends up nonetheless getting swallowed by a thick shadows of his forebears. For as formally fussy and unfathomably textured as he’s always been, and the rotation of campfire folklore round every bend (tales of banished Puritans, saddled sailors, scorned princes and now the vampyric (with wolf cousins up next), it’s likely that regardless of Hollywood budget or A24 modesty he’s just going to make the most of things that don’t age in cinema — scrupulous writing, fluid takes always offset by often staggering stillness and painterly considerations, the dynamics of light and shadow and a transplendent sense of all the compositional possibilities of the craft. The perfectionism in his eye is often a wonder, his control just about as commanding as modern film allows, even if next to his best Eggers oscillates between workmanlike and straight up showing off. Outside of a most desperate attempt to redress then explicitly address the story's insistent sexuality and violence (the darn plague of rats always seemed the more mysterious narrative element/symbol), his juxtapositions would be regrettably obvious even if we were back in the 20s. I just resent Orlok’s fucking mustache — why would the most feral rendition of vampires groom themselves at all? Is this how your version is most definitively different? Why did they have promotional material with Bill in the classic hairless look? Why in spite of the bleak beauty is this film more obligatory than inspired? I digress — there are still dozens of breathtaking shots, overall an ensemble to die for in expelled talent, and epic gravitas that can shoo away the feeling of every parody and pathetic adaptation of Stoker that has ever been. It’s not Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire or Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In or Park-Chan Wook’s Thirst or Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive or Tony Scott’s The Hunger… For all his homework this is a stubbornly archetypal movie that almost can’t escape the elements of the original epistolary novel being just all too damn familiar. The Witch may feel unique, and although he straight up steals for The Lighthouse (1929’s The Lighthouse Keepers and all manner of influences Promethean, maritime and surreal) and The Northman (Conan for virgins), but this has to be his least lovable for all the ways it has to outshine some seriously considerable classics — for his weakest he still composed his own symphony of horror. Ironically, this Satanic showing for Christmas audiences is connecting rather well, undoing The Northman’s flop — it seems Eggers is free to do as he pleases, with his big one finally popped out of the arsenal… But I guess we’re going down the list of Universal monsters with Werwulf next? And you’ve already announced a Dafoe-as-Scrooge A Christmas Carol after (or will it be Labyrinth)? One step at a time big fella.  3 (out of 4)
It’s very well known the wheel is STILL in spin but I’ve got to finesse what I felt, say what I saw when witnessing the ever enigmatic, inscrutable, indefatigable Bob Dylan have his story fed into the Hollywood biopic machine to be leveled and laminated. Even had I never seen or loved Todd Haynes extraordinary collage of Dylan’s many modes, 2007’s radical, reflective I’m Not There — a film about the essence of an artist more than the chosen facts and figures filtered into a regimented narrative — I’d have been skeptical. Once the creators decide it’s gotta be some strain of simulacra, then you will be judged on the gaps between where your replica falls short of what was real, or sort of real. It's a different story when the mischievous 80-something Dylan himself is adding one “totally inaccurate” just to throw me off. I’m no poet (I am however an amateurish musician) but Bob Dylan has always been an artist I’ve admired. His words are keen and penetrating, almost seemingly channeled — from the most vividly vexing verses on something like "Visions of Johanna" to protest songs as hard and uncommercial as "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," he was and remains in many ways a songwriting virtuoso. He existed in a time when popularity was more likely to be a sign of ingenuity, even greatness, than it has in any decade that followed. Authenticity was more often cherished and celebrated just like change, even in the traditional mindset of the folk scene in New York’s Greenwich Village — between the beatniks and the weirdos, from Ginsberg and Kerouac to Hendrix and the Velvet Underground, it’s a lost world of shared ideas, like 20th Century America’s brief enlightenment era, a rough and rowdy renaissance. Despite the Swifties of today, if anything modern music has become even more cloistered and pocketed by increasingly tighter sets of fans and followers amidst an inaccessible ocean of explosive over-saturation. But the reason Dylan is relevant — at least to casuals and to director James Mangold (who must be something of a Dylanologist at the helm, especially for the first feature in 30 years and a dozen films for which he has the full control of directing, writing AND producing) — is he was a rebel, a ragged revolutionary, all the lionizing, hagiographic labels the world of music biopics love to lend mythic emphasis. They know some people only want that sweet cultural chafing, to laugh at the audiences of the past (“HA how could they not see the brilliance, the beauty of [insert artist here] for what they were? ON NO were I living back then I would’ve been WITH IT AND HIP!”) but unlike fucking Bohemian Rhapsody literally listing off quotes of out of touch critics, A Complete Unknown has to suffice by climaxing at the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival in which Bob notably got all electric on the most acoustic crowd there is. If you’re going to deify the early years as Dylan’s peak (I wouldn’t fault you, of course ’75-’76 seemed to be another ascension back to unshakable, undeniable formidability) it makes enough storytelling sense, even if I find the scope lacking Dylan’s wonderful, uncomfortably comic interactions with the press in ’65, the detour to the Deep South for the wild, thin mercury denouement in ’66, the motorcycle accident and retreat to the Basement with The Band, all before reemerging as a good ol’ country boy with a new, cleaner drawl… Look I get it, there’s only so much of the creative stew of the sixties fit for one movie, Dylan or no — but this guy was a lightning rod, seemingly absorbing the confusion and chaos of the time into the simplicity and certainty of folk music or his own beat poet’s folk rock. But, my God, this movie is all 1962 and 1965, like Freewheelin' was enough to cover the finger-pointing era, brushing over The Times They Are a-Changin’ (the album) and Another Side of Bob Dylan (he recorded it drunk in one night!!) just to get to the juicy rock’n’roll bits — make no mistake ’65 is a red letter calendar year, the axis of the world had shifted and Dylan was just a “song and dance man” making the most of it, but come on. Despite contemporary grossness, Mangold has the good faith to not make a mess of a choose-your-own-legacy kind of figure — despite containing multitudes, I know no one wants to dwell on the 80s Christian era, even Haynes only gave it a few moments. As much as the movie labels Bob an asshole, you know this one’s for the Dylan curious even if it wants to be for Dylan devotees — watching Timothée Chalamet in interviews say the movie is a springboard for the unfamiliar makes me laugh because that is exactly what I’m Not There was, Todd gave more insight into the breadth of his musical output, the changing personas and just his damn soul, but I can’t really imagine someone being so taken by A Complete Unknown they would want to go further with him. When the movie strains too hard for sentiment or obvious ideological observations, you can almost hear Heath Ledger’s slice of Dylan from ’07 in the audience whispering, “the more they tried to make it youthful, the more the images onscreen seemed out of date…” You never hear Dylan’s real voice in this, not once — they never utter his name in I’m Not There but you certainly get to enjoy his best cuts surrounding the diagetic jams. I applaud using live takes on set (usually saved for modern musicals) but my only proper gripe with the painfully capable acting of Chalamet is young Timothee’s voice is just too damn soft and sweet if you’re even vaguely familiar with the early sixties Dylan rasp, that nasally, harsh sound that made his lyrics sting all the more. Chalamet, however, even at his most uselessly imitative, does master Bob’s cadence and mannerisms. “I put myself in another place, but I’m a stranger there..." see THAT is an SNL parady moment sure, but the way Chalamet interprets his speaking voice (and most everything else) was quite convincing. Basically this movie usually sings when there ain’t none at all, eh maybe I bought it when he’s in harmony opposite Melissa Barrera in the Joan Baez duets, she has serious pipes, sounding “like a meadow lark” with impossible control, godDAMN those tremolos are so perfect they’re transportive, and make Chalamet’s meager miming seem pretty pedestrian. Regardless of Timmy’s uphill battles, the rest of the movie isn’t some stale floor seat at the “Impression Olympics” — Ed Norton’s Pete Seeger is, uh, decent as our most gentle-spirited villain (“fucking silent generation...”), and Elle Fanning as Sylvie (really Suze Rotolo) is hung out to dry, the real woman most famous for an appearance on the album cover of Freewheelin', and Fanning ably translates the heartbreak of being on Bob’s shoulder during his whirlwind ascent. That Johnny Cash player (Boyd Holbrook) was frickin’ spot on from face to function, he has Joaquin Phoenix looking like an imposter, since Mangold’s own Walk the Line set the standard we now live in, even if Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story poked too much fun for it to live forever — as a fairly recurring playing here the Cash character almost makes the two pictures feel like companion pieces, one way or the other. But the shadowed supporting heft comes from Scoot McNairy, who between his afflicted characters from Batman V Superman to C’mon C’mon is a perfect hospitalized, bedridden Woody Guthrie, and in an early highlight scene is the audience for Chalamet ably offering Dylan’s early original “Song for Woody” — the movie never quite matches the tingling warmth of that spark-catching, the joy of when this genre can actually steal every edge of you attention. But now I must say, given that I’ve seen my share of music biopics, despite my grievances at the thankless job of trying to capture someone who would never want to be reduced to some phony objectivity, this is how it’s done. You keep the dick-sucking to an absolute minimum even if the tone is more nostalgic than cynical. You avoid the “cradle to grave” arc, though next to no one does it now, Maestro is all I can think of offhand and is more youth to infirmary. But mostly you find some truth in your counterfeit concert film — lately from Respect (respectable enough, but generic) to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (total farce, but at least not masquerading as verifiable) to Elvis (mostly glitz and gaudy reverence) and Tick, Tick... Boom! (painfully emotional and using musicals to reveal itself), there’s always stuff like the Whitney Houston movie, the Amy Winehouse movie and the Bob Marley movie (and more tacky treatments in store for Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson), seemingly after the same thing — fans and casuals, people who do not like to get deep into research and discographies and anything remotely invested. This whole film genus thrives on ignorance, not that knowing that someone cried “Judas!” in London and not the ’65 Newport Festival will make you any wiser. The studio apparatus may have swallowed Bob but damn if his story isn’t a sight better than any of the most cloying and counterproductive vacuums of biography, cult and persona, all meant to talk down to the unfamiliar and offer good boy pats for those of us that know the basics of Dylan’s (or most other musician’s) most celebrated and carefully dissected era. Even with my own specific ignorance of this genre sloppiest cuts, I know enough to say A Complete Unknown is the most agreeable sort of sensationalism and celebrity worship, even as Mangold struggles to uncover something new concerning this totally known unknown. Mangold is at his best in pleasing the boomers, from Walk the Line to Ford v Ferrari to geriatric Wolverine (Logan) and Indiana Jones (Dial of Destiny), the man knows his way around the studio system, and isn’t incapable of great things, one-offs like the lovely time travel romance Kate & Leopold or the robust western remake 3:10 to Yuma. The man makes immersion effortless, doubtless, and between his modest camerawork and confident enough scripting between he and Jay Cocks (behind Scorsese heavy hitters like The Last Temptation of Christ, The Age of Innocence, Silence as well as biopic practice in the form of De-Lovely’s Cole Porter story), even when tackling Dylan off the record, this is a palpable false reality, one that isn’t timeless or universal but will make the time easy passin’. It was a good movie, an almost exceptional biopic — was it a great Bob Dylan movie? FUCK no, but “what does that even MEAN, man…” It’s alright for a constitutional replay of mass production — it’s Hollywood and Hollywood only.  3 (out of 4)
PUSH THE BUTTON I’ve purposely neglected to throw in my two cents about Sonic with each passing movie — the first was basically the last theatrical release to take the money and run right before the pandemic hit hard in 2020, and the second was one of the surest early signs that we’d come full circle around COVID in spring of 2022. Needless to say I consider myself a movie guy, not some video game NERD, and thus the new wave of more legitimate adaptations (finally not so frequently derided and ridiculed) has taken some time to reconcile with. In general Mortal Kombat has either some of the worst lines of the 90s or you’ve only seen the 2021 version, with a sequel due next year. I for one have never experienced the Resident Evil franchise but would probably enjoy it if I did — elsewhere I remember watching Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li because I heard just how laughably bad it was, and it didn’t disappoint (the 90s original can't be too far off). Silent Hill has only been followed by the likes of Five Nights at Freddy’s, Lord knows when horror gaming will be tapped for mucho moolah. But like, Gran Turismo? Need for Speed? Angry Birds and Assassin’s Creed? What could these amount to? Fuck I did review that Lara Croft reboot, 2018's Tomb Raider, what a forgettable flick. Back in the day I enjoyed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for what it was. Alas, as far as the most watched game adaptations, I skipped Warcraft, Uncharted and didn’t even know Rampage was one. I can say Detective Pikachu is the poorest excuse for a major live action Pokemon movie, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie was as good as it needed to be for its massive global audience. So you see, I barely know what I’m talking about. ANYWAY, Sonic has carried the torch on finding a real space for all this crap, and this third installment is a weirdly self-actualizing moment for both vidya at large and Sonic specifically. Finagling that detached yet sincere tone, measuring out the meta humor, and knowing how to tune out the human element without losing it altogether, director Jeff Fowler has been there for the whole hog thus far… all told Sonic the Hedgehog 3 isn’t too different from the last two, but it is more efficient, entertaining, stuffed with Jim Carrey jollies and naturally populated with its brightly feathered animated characters. If the first was a modest road tripper, the next some by-the-books action-adventure questing, then this is the real blockbuster of the series, one that can dunk on Disney while emulating exactly what Dreamworks wants to be every time they put out some franchise fodder. Paramount has slyly wielded Sonic to advance the art of irreverence to places where saying this is the best video game movie in forever, or the best movie you can take your kid to outside of The Wild Robot (i.e. NOTHING) is actually less than the regular ol’ praise this stupid, seriously slaphappy movie deserves. Carrey — now going all Eddie Murphy on us in a multiplied role, his first and only since A Christmas Carol, since the alter egos of The Mask and Batman Forever don't quite count — has made Robotnik the cornerstone of his late career, and he will pry at least five good laughs out of you before the curtains close, just above par with stellar supporting silliness throughout the trilogy. But by this point (or maybe for the first time), I can say Ben Schwartz IS Sonic, I’ve warmed up to a classic “grown lady pitches her voice to sound like a little boy” for Tails as well as Idris Elba’s ironic gravity as Knuckles. You even give enough of a shit about James Marsden despite this movie spending about ten minutes with any of those hominid, family film fools. Add the kind of tragic backstory this movie affords Keanu Reeves’ Shadow (improving on Knuckles' all too similar villain redemption arc last time) and you have a winter blockbuster teeming with fun and emotion and giggles — even the visual effects look less like the usual made-for-cheap skimping on the part of Paramount (whose pockets have been picked by Tom Cruise for a couple of the most expensive movies of all time). But it can't all be golden rings and loop-de-loops. Like its predecessors the jokes are hit and miss even if Carrey ably carries the team on his back, and as storytelling it’s inevitably somewhat stale, yet the third Sonic can’t help but put in the work between the plot, action and pauses to sort out how to be a real movie amidst all the ridiculous, rambunctious revelry. Now there’s a GIRL Hedgehog and a ROBOT Hedgehog, and the manic, mildly crude Hedgehog saga will soldier on — it seems Carrey will return from retirement every time, and until he phones it in my money's yours. I’m highlighting this flick over Barry Jenkins' Mufasa: The Lion King because frankly I couldn’t see a reason to invest in some cinematic world that has to steal its soul from other sources — Sonic 3 glides when you expect it to stumble. It's what Disney used to be, entertainment for the young and old, and until the Citizen Kane of video game feature films comes along (somehow I think A Minecraft Movie will keep us digging), I’ll keep rolling right along with this spiny blue smart-aleck.  1 ½ (out of 4)
For the vested Tolkien nerd, who could be anything but disappointed about what led to this empty, unhappy dud? Not until very close to the release of The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim did I wonder where the marketing was — I couldn’t be too surprised when the box office opening weekend was like seven million, especially you find out New Line Cinema was basically in the same situation as Sony when they clung to their Spider-Man rights by fast-tracking those Andrew Garfield reboots. The quality of The War of the Rohirrim has to be calibrated later since it’s all clouded by business decisions rather than clear creative spurs... at least in Sony’s case you have piles of comic books to flip through, meanwhile Peter Jackson’s best interns are working with about three or four pages from one of the appendices in the back of The Return of the King, and HECK I THOUGHT THE HOBBIT MOVIES WERE BLOATED! By the same math (in terms of butter being scraped over way too much bread) they could’ve split The Hobbit dozens of times instead of into infamously criticized thirds, just incalculable levels of milking that money machine bone dry! It didn’t do anything too drastic to violate those precious few pages at its disposal and anything directly lifted from those numerable paragraphs gets a pass. But note for note, The War of the Rohirrim is a never-ending ladder of pointlessness, fan or no. Even when you get to the cinematic story and the whole gun-to-your-head moviemaking arrangement, it’s just glorified, glossy fan-fiction — working with so little is like making a movie out of an illustration on the back of Reader’s Digest. For weird standalone spin-off movies I can’t help but think of Star Wars "Stories" and all those damn streaming shows… akin to Rogue One, this is based on the nugget of a nothing idea and, along with Solo, there’s an absurd amount of teased and reworked lines meant only to repeatedly reference The Two Towers and Return of the King’s Rohirric elements. You HAD to have Helm Hammerhand’s son Fréaláf kill a big ol’ war elephant Legolas-style, and screw it, why not shoehorn wizards and resurrect Christopher Lee’s voice from beyond the grave, for no reason! I’m vexed by vacuous lore media, I can’t decide whether it’s worse as an outsider or not, regardless I sure don’t need every other exchange to mirror or reconfigure the most throwaway lines in LOTR to some degree, no matter how faint — “we must be reminiscent at every POSSIBLE MOMENT, EVERY MOMENT can be a fan service moment!” Then you get to anime aspect, which from afar seemed benign enough, maybe even inspired, ’til you realize the studio just wanted costs minimized. Expensive things like sets, costumes, special effects and horse trainers weren't worth it to Warner Bros, and they were sadly, cynically right. Listen, I’ll not pretend I’m familiar with anime outside of basics like Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon, and I'm sure I've never touched a manga — ignorance aside this looked like Nausicaä in the worst way…. the integration of the backdrops and CGI flourishes (done beautifully like in Makoto Shinkai's works, most famously Your Name for instance) does nothing for this decades-dated, drab-ass accident of an anime. Despite a positive Japanese influence in reverence for the world, when it came to the fights this was certainly more a wuxia than English fantasy. As much as I can’t really compare it to much Eastern animation, I really don’t have to! The style is a facade, a distraction, for even at its most scenic and transporting, it’s just copy-pasted from the visual hallmarks of Jackson’s films, primarily manifested from the page to the palpable by illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, as well as WETA Workshop creative director Richard Taylor, all of whom return here to no artistic avail after translating so much of Tolkien’s visual ideas as we know them. Their brilliant old designs are recycled to almost exclusively showcase the Rohirrim, the least fantastical culture in all of Middle Earth no matter how many eagles and mûmakils you cram in there — I’m kinda shocked the ents didn’t cameo. This movie’s stately, pompous masquerade will have you longing for the daytime soap opera feel of the awful, overproduced Rings of Power show on Amazon Prime, picking your poison between serious sentimentality or absolute schlock. If you’re gonna fuck up Tolkien why not make it interesting? But LOTR adaptive scribe Philippa Boyens, now solely producing, has let the 'next generation' take a stab at Middle Earth, namely her untested daughter Phoebe Gittins, as well as collaborator Arty Papageorgiou, who both re-wrote the COVID script from another novice duo Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews. The four hacks stretch it as far as they can, sorry, what does that work out to, like a paragraph per person? The first act is full-scale nonsense aside from the inciting death-punch by King Hammerhand (Brian Cox) uppercutting his chubby, covetous brother Freca, leaving the fall of Edoras, its people’s exodus and the eventual siege at Helm’s Deep (including Helm slaying Dunlendings in the dead of night) by a vengeful progeny Wulf (Luke Pasqualino) to situate you’re remaining movie but JESUS, 133 minutes of this unceremonious excess? WOW a Watcher in the Water swallowed an oliphaunt… it’s all relatively inoffensive and simultaneously utterly insulting. You can see why Fran Walsh and Jackson sat on the sidelines rather than than go all in tricking us with shameless nostalgia and a fucking UNTOLD story that is just politically desperate. From square one Miranda Otto’s narration as Eowyn (nicely echoing Galadriel’s prologue in the original trilogy) tells us not to look for said tale in writings as “there are none,” (*TITLE DROPS*), as these New Zealanders try to frame business-dictated limitations with asspull, Princess-Peach-level girlboss feminism, all for a character with literally no name? “DON’T BOTHER, IT WASN’T RECORDED BECAUSE OF SEXISM OR SOMETHING.” Sure, yeah, Rohan’s historians are misogynists didn’t you know? And all this for what? To ensure the same hacks can help Jackson make two mother-fudging parts of The Hunt for Gollum, which will be more fan-fictiony than ever considering you’re working with ZERO PAGES IN THAT CASE RIGHT?? I hate the bitter irony of holding on to your precious piece of the IP to prevent the step-by-step dismantling of a wondrous legacy, Tolkien’s death by a thousand cuts, only to wield the knife yourself? And the Hobbit movies already drew a considerable amount of metaphorical blood. Maybe they’ve prevented Jeff Bezos from rebooting LOTR and I should actually be super grateful, not sure. But The War of the Rohirrim, Eru almighty it’s so useless I shouldn’t even be talking about it, it’s already forgotten. Like all box office failures of recent days, it was online within TWO WEEKS — just another Warner Brothers write-off, they didn’t even blink. |
Forthcoming:
Thoughts on Backrooms Obsession The Devil Wears Prada 2 The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Project Hail Mary Hoppers Scream 7 Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die Wuthering Heights Send Help Marty Supreme Avatar: Fire and Ash 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 The Naked Gun The Fantastic Four: First Steps Eddington Jurassic World: Rebirth 28 Years Later / Elio Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning Sinners ... Follow me on Twitter @ newwavebiscuit To keep it brief...
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December 2025
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