|
|
Cinema Briefing
Movie reviews by
Ian Flanagan
Ian Flanagan
 1 (out of 4)
“I’ve read so many stories where the prince saves the princess in the end — I think it’s time we change that ending” “NO, YOU’RE TRYING TO MESS WITH TRIED AND TRUE STORYTELLING, IT’S BEEN FOCUS GROUPED AND IT WORKS! JUST LET ME SAVE YOU!” If Disney’s dreaded remakes of their beloved original feature length films were a thing back in 2012, just before they began regularly re-adapting their 2D animated arsenal, it wouldn’t look too dissimilar to the cute, opulent revisionism of Mirror Mirror, especially when they had recently pushed something like 2007’s Enchanted. 13 years ago the not so modest Mouse certainly didn’t have the teeth for something like the LOTR-lifted dark fantasy grit of Snow White and the Huntsman, and since the twin film year has a third, a triplet in the Spanish silent homage Blancanieves, I'll say no recent inspiration comes close to that particularly magnificent little muted matador makeover. 2012 is really the cornucopia of Snow White media, since other than weird German sex parody flicks over the decades of the late 20th century (not that I’ve browsed) there’s only (one imagines) the more innocent 2007 version where Amanda Bynes goes to college, the crass but forgivable Sydney White. And these movies still managed to survive in a world where Shrek exists, having punctured the public’s mindset on princess fantasy in countless priceless ways, like Austin Powers all but forcing Bond to get Bourne serious. But even if none of the aforementioned forebears existed, Disney’s Snow White (2025) would still be the same stale, repulsive, untenable flavor of corporate-concocted filler film content, maybe the queasiest and most unpleasant of the 20ish they’ve pumped out since Kenneth Branagh’s standard by which they would be judged, 2015’s Cinderella. It’s one of only two Disney do-overs that have ever really been OK by me — as the relative first of its kind, ignoring the 90s and Maleficent and such, Branagh’s traditionalist taste wins you over. I was also late to realize how much Dumbo helped itself with histrionics, capitalizing on a tiny narrative and letting Tim Burton make amends for just how agonizing Alice in Wonderland can be. As far as the most covetous, vacuous of pop filmcraft goes, director Marc Webb’s only competition in captaining crap and shepherding sheer creative confusion is Robert Zemeckis and his wooden Pinocchio, as each exude that awful feeling from their perfunctory, primarily profit-pilfering purposes, corrupting Walt’s earliest masterpieces. So yeah, it’s one of those where every metric measures out a whopping failure — CG dwarves, abysmal, Broadway-brash musical numbers (/Waiting on a WiiiiIIIISHHH/) burying the tidy story, Gal Gadot’s arduous attempts at performance... Then there's Prince Charming, sorry I mean JONATHAN (Andrew Burnap) as discount Robin Hood and truly testing original songs (“Princess Problems”* is a special sort of smarmy torture) in addition to all the emotional and inspirational cues cribbed from (or just plain much worse than) those 2012 features that actually had reasonable respect for the balance between reinvention and reverence. For God’s sake they substitute “skin was white as snow” dealio via opening narration for some origin story about her birth the night of a snow storm, um WHAT? This shit was Grimm for sure — from the box office it had me hoping Snow White could be one of the last gasps of this godforsaken addendum to anti-art, ugh if not for Lilo & Stitch and the realization that time will no doubt bring about a live action Tangled, Frozen and probably Encanto, especially if they think they can force Moana’s practical redo only TEN YEARS OUT? Their pool will soon run dry (after Hercules and a few others) but not fast enough! Damn you Barry Jenkins! Hell, if Mufasa: The Lion King became a sleeper hit, maybe we’re stuck with this ever-stockpiling shitheap forever. I just couldn’t let this one go, stinker or no — it made me sit through basically all these damn live-action remakes save the Lady and the Tramp no one knew existed. 2025’s Snow White is ruthlessly mediocre and obscenely unnecessary… I hold the original 1937 film in a special place in my heart for the wonderful rotoscoped animation and all the terrifying aspects Disney has only softened over the years (the scary wooded hallucinations, the climax where the dwarves make sure the witch falls off a cliff with the freaking LIGHTNING) and the timeless amusement of incredible slapstick sequences, delicate comedy and amazing, trifling little songs that this new movie almost makes note of before ruining them all. Don’t expect any innocent, kinetic kids movie cogency here. How about two crappy villain songs, a cobbled screenplay and an ugly, lifeless palette? And despite promises to keep outmoded sexism of romance at bay, it's somehow even more pronounced than the original and inducing ALL of the cringe. “Weird. Weird!” Please stop fucking with real classics (or movies older than Iger) and you won’t end up with a 200 million dollar loss. This is Disney at its most disgraceful; what an overwhelmingly well-deserved flop! Of the live action redos, it's easily the most careless of them all, just kind of revolting, wretched and repugnant, dear Jesus this movie almost has an odor. But yeah I’ve only reviewed Mulan and Jungle Book I believe, and those impractical wastes of time and money still have this junk beat by miles. For Webb I’d rather watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and for Shrek 5 parody fodder, I suppose I had a decent laugh between the squirming and deep sighing.  3 ½ (out of 4)
After a soft return to theatrical experiences when he slipped back into director mode for the third Magic Mike (for XXL he was only executive producer, cinematographer and editor, lazybones), 2023’s Last Dance, Steven Soderbergh delivers one of his famous one-two punches in January’s Presence (paranormal in POV) and now Black Bag all of two months later. The twofer’s were never quite as exacting and elegant as a pair of distinctly different Best Picture nominees in 2000 with the masterful mosaic drug drama Traffic and the schmaltzy grassroots Julia Roberts show in Erin Brockovich. However 2025 finds the profoundly prolific director still dipping between his respective hipster selves, the fidgeting experimental guru and the less pretentious, pop-aspiring traditionalist. Though he would drop any distinct auteur trademarks as a writer after the 90s, the comprehensive realignment to editing and cinematography (usually under pseudonyms like Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard) meant he would become even more Spielbergian, a guy with command of craft (Soder sometimes loves imitating Kaminski’s haloed light sources) but not the pen. Anyway, here we are after a series of collabs in scripting from Scott Z Burns (The Informant!, Contagion, Side Effects) to Lem Dobbs (Kafka, The Limey, Haywire) and plenty in between but David Koepp (director/screenwriter known for penning stuff for Spielberg, De Palma, Fincher, Howard) has got to be the most royal of the frequent linkups so far. I’m ready to give Black Bag some due praise but it’s worth noting that before he penned Steven’s most recent two, he wrote the wicked thrills of Soderbergh’s straight to streaming affair Kimi, a film with which the fears of the technological spear of time are backdrop for the reliable satiation of conspiracy, surveillance and subdued spy stuff… Black Bag is like most Soderbergh pieces — it’s efficient, cleanly (if hazily) shot, edited, backdropped (by stellar Ocean’s scorer David Holmes, though the synth-savant Cliff Martinez is his usual suit), acted with class by players of pedigree new and old, and can be most accurately described as airtight, vacuum-sealed, crisp, calmly rapturous, essentially silk-fucking-smooth. Steven here particularly seems to have returned to the digital Fincher yellows of his 2010s renaissance, which saw sequential stretches of quality as assured as Haywire into Magic Mike into Behind the Candelabra into Side Effects, all in about two years. He’s a man who likes it lean and minimalist — Soderbergh can’t wait to start the dialogue before you see the conversation start, his art or his fancies subsisting on sustained low stakes despite his own scrupulousness, like he’s aiming for timelessness by composing pictures so breezy and at times convoluted (like The Informant!, No Sudden Move, OCEAN’S TWELVE) that the lasting power in the case of Black Bag will be more for the games of deception, Fassbender’s front and center fastidiousness and the film’s brave, winningly resistant urge for twists on twists in favor of a delightful nod to monogamy over the duplicitousness of a typical femme fatale, Allied-esque setup. The man is an unstoppable machine of chic, clinically modern stylization and well-curated sorta coffee table cinema that tells you to relax and let him do all the work. With spies some might expect Black Bag to fit closer to the art-action feel of Haywire, probably this movie’s closest companion given the related Fassbender role, as well as The Good German for Cate Blanchette and more noir nonsense to paint this whodunnit (her only other sus-seductress turn is Guillermo’s Nightmare Alley). But as mainstream media its a modest movie, another keyword for Soder — like many features outside of his hiatuses and threatened retirements and streaming deals, Black Bag could’ve premiered online and it wouldn’t be worth any less. Kimi alone was enough to say for once that a movie doesn’t need a theatrical release (NOT EVEN A FESTIVAL DEBUT MY WORD is this even a MOTION PICTURE?!) to be considered, well, considerable, boy that’s hard to type — but in the end filmmakers matter much more than the format, and Steven’s workmanlike dexterity continues to be all but untouchable in his corner of Gen X determination and detachment.  1 ½ (out of 4)
“Oh Mickey’s asinine, so asinine it blows my mind HEY MICKEY, BJH you icky!” Here I was thinking Bong Joon-Ho couldn’t possibly carry his bright, shiny, boundless clout into a dud or even something slightly underwhelming… Maybe he wanted to put together a movie so different from his history-making Best Picture winner Parasite that he had to produce a pile of shit! Five years waiting on where that once in a lifetime filmmaking prestige will inspire in him and it's a satire with nothing salient to impart, a sci-fi story with precisely zero contemplative wrinkles in theme or story, a caustic comedy built on broad, brainless caricatures and almost negative laughs. Mickey 17 is a textbook blank check movie and clearly WB had no clue how to market it, though I now see their task was impossible. Why not begin with the politics since they’re as conspicuous as possible. Bong’s third English language feature is seismic in its unsubtly, and the previous anti-capitalist/class crisis illustrations of Snowpiercer and the bleeding-heart animal rights anthem Okja had messages burned in floodlights. Obviously it doesn’t take political affiliation to be anti-corporation but this particular movie’s vendetta against Donald Trump is almost a surer smear than last year’s The Apprentice — it’s more difficult to locate the purpose of Mark Ruffalo’s false-toothed fucking-about than it was to unravel Pedro Pascal’s positively orange turn in Wonder Woman 1984. Poor Toni Collette, you know things are bad when she can’t make it look easy, even with all the Trump hate in Knives Out she still had a character to act out. But really Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up is probably this movie’s closest companion for dimwitted MSNBC outrage dressed up as a “sophisticated lampoon” and this movie’s floundered big-league sci-fi intentions are as if Alexander Payne’s Downsizing turned out even more embarrassing. Mickey 17 clearly borrows all of its anti-colonial space-traversing directly from Paul Verhoeven’s playbook for Starship Troopers, except in that Mickey feels more like a kids movie, full of banal, soapy moralizing and farcical villains — the issue is when you want to make your movie politics-forward, if you’re short of a film-school-rotation masterpiece you not only instantly age your current crap but you ultimately end up with something edgy yet totally safe, in this case a Sunday school lesson with cursing, gore and threesomes. Now’s as good a time as any to point out that the other internationally esteemed South Korean filmmaking force Park Chan-Wook (especially comparing this detritus to his last masterpiece Decision to Leave) leaves no room to believe Bong is the best import we have. Turn after turn Bong can’t match Park’s lethal cool — as evidenced by bold beauties like Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and The Handmaiden, Chan-wook has a preference for temperament and inference over plot and logic to go with the epic solemnity, disarming irony, and merry morbidity. For more seeing-double via clone wars, I feel like World of Tomorrow, Moon, The Prestige, The Substance and possibly Oblivion as well made better on their respective existential speculation and genre fun, Christ, even Gemini Man might have the upper hand… In his dual performance, Robert Pattinson is just too unfamiliar with comedy, or assuming multiple characters, or I’ll happily fault a garbage screenplay — I had a better time watching Ezra Miller play with himself in The Flash. Pattinson’s only ever flexed his funny bones incidentally through Twilight’s senseless sagas, or the Batman movie, or Remember Me, or more intentionally in bits of Tenet and The Lighthouse, listen I don’t deny his ability to delight. It’s just his character, the 17th Mickey Barnes, is boring as heck as a sort of everyman perspective on the future, and Mickey 18 is just angrier and laying off 17’s superficial higher pitch, a ridiculous point of contrast when they’re supposed to be IDENTICAL DAMMIT. It’s sad to watch him tread water when I know he could match Jake Gyllenhaal (Enemy), Jesse Eisenberg (The Double), maybe even Jeremy Irons (Dead Ringers) or Nicolas Cage (Adaptation) in the right doppelgänger scenario. There’s just little command of the craft on display. The only thing to even remotely compare to Parasite would be an epilogue that somehow outdoes the preceding images in some kind of lucid film poetry — here it’s like the possible-future-dream right out of Breaking Dawn Part Two, but given how much of Mickey’s 137 minutes test the cinematically stoic, anything to break from the lecturing and listless entertainment value is welcome even in the last five minutes. For the most Marxist filmmaker we’ve got this movie ain’t exactly a surprise but its certainly about as tone deaf and woefully misguided as I’ve ever seen leftist filmmaking get — at least Parasite keeps you glued and has artistry far beyond eat-the-rich bellyaching. But Jesus, there’s no excuse for a film this late in his career to look so much worse than The Host or Snowpiercer, and for that matter you can hardly believe this guy created something as akin to perfection as Memories of Murder, or a dark comedy debut as bright and bitter as Barking Dogs Never Bite. This dime-store dystopia aches for more inventive insight, actualized absurdity, more thematic layers, more organic tonal schizophrenia and more unusual universality. |
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...
Most recent review-less movie scores
If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You 3/4 K-Pop Demon Hunters 2 ½/4 Nouvelle Vague 3/4 Blue Moon 3/4 The Smashing Machine 2 ½/4 Good Boy 3/4 The Long Walk 3/4 Nobody 2 2 ½/4 Happy Gilmore 2 2 ½/4 The Life of Chuck 2/4 Drop 3/4 Presence 3/4 Months in movies
December 2025
Kino
|
RSS Feed