tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50314368770364551792024-03-17T14:40:45.290-04:00DirkFlixDirk watches movies. Then he writes about them.Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.comBlogger618125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-88765462083296569122024-03-10T15:55:00.002-04:002024-03-10T15:55:28.397-04:00Oscars 2024 Review Roundup & My Awards Picks<p>Tonight is the who careseth Academy Awards where Hollyweird gets together to conclude Awards Season with the biggest show of self congratulations. As I've done in recent years I attempted to watch as many of the nominees in the Best Picture, Best Director, and the two screenplay and four acting categories in what I've termed the Oscars Death March as there are frequently movies I had no interest in that, in the name of wanting to make informed judgements and know where Oscar blew it or got it right, I had to see.</p><p>This year with the fixed number of Best Picture contenders at 10 that meant there were 45 nominees to slog through and in my best ever performance, I saw 43 of them including ALL the Best Picture nominees AND managed to get reviews posted for all but one (<b>Barbie</b>) which I viewed too long ago to properly review and want to revisit to properly evaluate.</p><p>What follows is who I would've voted for if I had an Academy ballot. (In tribute to Siskel & Ebert's traditional "If We Picked The Winners" show.) I will count down from #10 to my ultimate vote getter (I think Oscar uses ranked voting, so this is the inverse of how they'd tally) and then run through the individual awards with comments.<br /></p><p>But enough of my yakking. Let's boogie!</p><p><b>#10 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2023/12/killers-of-flower-moon-4k-review.html" target="_blank">Killers of the Flower Moon</a></b> (Score: 3/10) - Martin Scorsese's interminable story of white oppression and murder of the Osage Indians in the 1920s was a team up with his two biggest muses, De Niro and DiCaprio, and it was 2 hours of movie dragged out for 3-1/2 hours. The only Skip It review of all nominees.</p><p><b>#9 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/02/the-zone-of-interest-review.html" target="_blank">The Zone of Interest</a> (5/10)</b> - The banality of evil gets an extended remix in this odd dry film about living next door to Auschwitz with the sounds and ashes of genocide wafting into a Nazi family's idyllic life. Great sound design, but drones on too long.</p><p><b>#8 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/02/part-lives-review.html" target="_blank">Past Lives</a> (6/10)</b> - One of three foreign language films and the smallest in scale that I have no idea why it's in the running with it's frustrating story of unrequited pining. Greta Lee deserved to be nominated Best Actress, though.</p><p><b>#7 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/02/oppenheimer-review.html" target="_blank">Oppenheimer</a> (6/10)</b> - The odds-on favorite to win big is Christopher Nolan's first movie that I haven't actively hated since Inception. Not that it's a particularly good movie as it manages to sound and fury the impression of something substantive for three hours while being maddeningly sparse. Congrats for not sucking, Chris. Enjoy your career makeup Oscars - this is your <b>The Departed</b>.</p><p><b>#6 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2023/12/maestro-4k-review.html" target="_blank">Maestro</a> (7/10)</b> - Bradley Cooper's Oscar bait tour de force has the look and performances, but is undercut by a screenplay that chooses to look at the periphery of the Leonard Bernstein's life thus requiring viewers to come in with too much knowledge of his music on their own. He should've been nominated for direction over screenwriting.</p><p><b>#5 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/01/anatomy-of-fall-review.html" target="_blank">Anatomy of a Fall</a></b> (7/10) - An interesting psychological legal drama that lands with a splat due to an ambiguous, choose-your-own-ending-and-meaning conclusion that leaves the viewer high and dry and unsatisfied.</p><p><b>#4 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/01/the-holdovers-4k-review.html" target="_blank">The Holdovers</a></b> (7/10) - An odd retro-styled throwback to the way movies were in the early-1970s with a somewhat shaggy story propelled by nuanced performances by Paul Giamatti and Da'Vine Joy Randolph. The script is somewhat unsatisfying in the end, but has a lot of rich moments throughout which liven up the stock plot.</p><p><b>#3 - Barbie</b> (7.5/10 pending review) - Considering the political firestorm around the blockbuster #1 movie of 2023 with one side calling it the greatest feminist triumph ever and the other calling it a misandrist hate crime and some contrary opinions in between, I was surprised that I mostly enjoyed Greta Gerwig's plastic fantastic toy commercial. While the score may change, the ranking is unlikely to move other than perhaps switching with <b>The Holdovers</b>.<br /></p><p><b>#2 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/03/poor-things-4k-review.html" target="_blank">Poor Things</a></b> (8.5/10) - Yorgos Lanthimos' absolutely bonkers take on <b>Frankenstein</b> is the year's most original movie, weird, wacky, wild and what movies are supposed to do: Show you people and places you've never seen. Emma Stone gives a career best performance and should win her second Oscar for it.</p><p>Which leaves us my vote for Best Picture....</p><p><b>#1 - <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/02/american-fiction-review.html" target="_blank">American Fiction</a></b> (9/10) - Lost behind the generic title (seriously, how many "America [Second Word]" movies are there? <b>American Psycho, American Sniper, American Gangster/Pie/Graffiti/Made/Beauty/Etc.</b>) is one of the sharpest satires in memory running along with a surprisingly layered and warm family drama that mocks white liberal racism while telling a story about people who are black, but not Hollyweird's stereotypical Magical Negro or Helpless Victim framing. Writer-Director Cord Jefferson has created something special and I hope he doesn't fall off like Jordan Peele did after <b>Get Out</b>. Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown are excellent.</p><p>This is the first Best Picture vote that I'd be enthused to cast in a long time as even the "best movies in past years were flawed like <b>Parasite</b> or <b>Nomadland</b>. It doesn't stand a chance this year - or any year - but at least it was nominated. Go watch it. (It's currently on Fubo and MGM+; hopefully it will migrate to a more common service.)<br /></p><p>And now onto the rest of the categories with my votes in bold and comments:<br /></p><p><b>BEST DIRECTOR:</b><br />Justine Triet - ANATOMY OF A FALL<br />Martin Scorsese - KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON<br />Christopher Nolan - OPPENHEIMER<br /><b>Yorgos Lanthimos - POOR THINGS</b><br />Jonathan Glazer - THE ZONE OF INTEREST</p><p>Nolan is going to win, but Lanthimos is the best director in a weak field where three of the nominees could've been replaced by others like Bradley Cooper or Greta Gerwig. He made the most original and stylistic film of the year. It's on Hulu now. Go watch it.<br /><br /><b>BEST ACTOR:</b><br />Bradley Cooper in MAESTRO<br />Colman Domingo in RUSTIN<br /><b>Paul Giamatti in THE HOLDOVERS</b><br />Cillian Murphy in OPPENHEIMER<br />Jeffrey Wright in AMERICAN FICTION</p><p>Giamatti gives his most Giamatti performance here, but it's not just more of the same. I just wish the script had resolved more satisfactorily. It's a toss-up between him and Murphy to win, but my 2nd choice would be Wright as he's been so good for so long and this is his first real leading showcase and he kills it.<br /></p><p>I didn't see Domingo in <b>Rustin</b> because the movie didn't interest me, the reviews were bad, and he wasn't going to win.<br /></p><p><b>BEST ACTRESS:</b><br />Annette Bening in NYAD<br />Lily Gladstone in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON<br />Sandra Hüller in ANATOMY OF A FALL<br />Carey Mulligan in MAESTRO<br /><b>Emma Stone in POOR THINGS</b><br /></p><p>Stone delivers the boldest and bravest performance of the year (and not just because she sailed into Mr. Skin's "Great Nudity" ranking with her overload of sex scenes here which weren't that sexy which was the point). She's always been a very subtle actor thanks to her giant Na'vi-sized eyes - just watch the audition scene in <b>La La Land</b> as she realizes they're not paying attention - but here she has to arc Bella from a toddler's mentality to a bright woman's with matching physicality and an English accent to boot.</p><p>If Gladstone beats her because the Academy wants to Make History, it'd be a traveshamockery. Greta Lee (<b>Past Lives</b>) should've been nominated over her and perhaps Hüller. <br /><br /><b>BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:</b><br />Sterling K. Brown in AMERICAN FICTION<br />Robert De Niro in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON<br /><b>Robert Downey Jr. in OPPENHEIMER</b><br />Ryan Gosling in BARBIE<br />Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS<br /><br />A stacked year with all deserving contenders that edged out some other good performances. Downey is going to win and should win both as a lifetime achievement award and being the only really recognizably human character in the clinical <b>Oppenheimer</b>. 2nd choice would be Brown or Gosling.</p><p><b>BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:</b><br />Emily Blunt in OPPENHEIMER<br />Danielle Brooks in THE COLOR PURPLE<br />America Ferrera in BARBIE<br />Jodie Foster in NYAD<br /><b>Da'Vine Joy Randolph in THE HOLDOVERS</b></p><p> The surest bet of the night and deservedly so as she had the most to do and nailed it. 2nd choice would probably be Foster who's making a comeback lately and this was far better than her turn in <b>True Detective: Night Country</b>. Ferrera is here solely because of her thesis statement rant about how persecuted women are which was pure agitprop and the worst moment in the movie.</p><p>Brooks was the only other performance I missed because I haven't seen the original <b>The Color Purple</b> since it was in theaters and I recently bought it in 4K and wanted to revisit that before watching the musical remake. As the sole nomination from the movie, she has no chance and was thus deprioritized, but I'll catch it eventually. <br /></p><p><b>BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:</b><br /><b>AMERICAN FICTION - Cord Jefferson</b><br />BARBIE - Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach<br />OPPENHEIMER - Christopher Nolan<br />POOR THINGS - Tony McNamara<br />THE ZONE OF INTEREST - Jonathan Glazer</p><p>Best pictures start with best screenplays, so this is the gimme. My 2nd pick would be <b>Barbie</b> because while it's stuck in the Adapted category due to it being based on the dolls, it's not as if there was a source book like every other nominee had to draw from and what Gerwig and Baumbach did was quite unique.</p><p><b>BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:</b><br />ANATOMY OF A FALL - Justine Triet and Arthur Harari<br /><b>THE HOLDOVERS - David Hemingson</b><br />MAESTRO - Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer<br />MAY DECEMBER - Screenplay by Samy Burch; Story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik<br />PAST LIVES - Celine Song<br />=======<br />As noted, <b>Barbie</b> should be here, and frankly I'm not super enthused about any of the nominees, so I'm going with <b>The Holdovers</b> for being the least flawed of the lot. Based on my issues with the rest, no 2nd pick. Weakest category of the Death March.</p><p>So that's it for this year's Oscars Death March other than catching <b>The Color Purple (2023)</b> and rewatching <b>Barbie</b>. With the exception of <b>Killers of the Flower Moon</b>, there weren't many movies that were too much of a chore to get through and for the most part the nominations and likely winners aren't worth burning a city down over. There could be a few upsets if the Academy decides to spread the wealth around as they've tended to do, but as long as Gladstone doesn't beat Stone (that would merit a small riot) I'll allow it.</p><p>What do you think? Leave a comment. <br /></p>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-31199591834888236872024-03-02T21:00:00.016-05:002024-03-05T21:56:47.793-05:00"Poor Things" 4K Review<p>The final film of this year's Oscars Death March (and the first time I've managed to see ALL the Best Picture nominees) is Yorgos Lanthimos's bonkers science fictiony fantasyish dark social comedy <b>Poor Things</b> which is the most original and outlandish movie of the year and makes <b>Barbie</b> look like a documentary about poverty and slums. It's nominated for 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Production and Costume Design and it'd better win several of them.<br /></p><p>Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a young woman in Victorian London who seems to have the mentality of a toddler probably due to her "father", Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whom she calls "God" for short, finding her freshly-dead body in the Thames after she committed suicide and removing her still-alive near-term baby and then transplanting the baby's brain into its mother's skull thus allowing him to observe the development of a new mind in a mature body. You could say he's a bit of a mad scientist.</p><p>He hires a student, Max (Ramy Youssef), from his medical school to be Bella's observer, documenting her development and when he detects affection between him and Bella, he suggests they marry to which Max agrees, basically selling his life into indentured servitude. The lawyer hired to draft the contract, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), wonders who is the woman that a man would want to sign his life away for and prowls the house looking for her and once he finds her, decides he wants her for himself, luring her away. While Max is horrified that his fiancee is being let go, Godwin decides it will help her development.</p><p>So Bella and Duncan set off for Lisbon then a cruise ship to Greece with plenty of "furious jumping", Bella's term for sex as she had discovered her happy spot and wants it stimulated. A lot. A task Duncan is happy to oblige. But less suitable to him is her intellectual evolution as she encounters new ideas and begins reading philosophy. But because she still is still literally an infant in some ways, she makes poor decisions leading to destitution for the pair and after he abandons her, she ends up working in a Parisian brothel for a looooong time with plenty of scenes of her at work with her clients. </p><p>While the underlying premise and commentary on how women weren't exactly allowed the most agency back in the bad old days is pretty standard stuff (oh no, the PATRIARCHY, <strike>Barbie</strike> Bella!), what makes that tangential is the world Lanthimos and company have constructed to tell the tale.</p><p>Clearly artificial and surreal, it feels like a cross between a Terry Gilliam and Luc Besson movie (<b>The Fifth Element</b> and <b>Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets</b> movies from the latter) with a dash of Wes Anderson and David Lynch on the side with fantastical cityscapes and impossible creatures like a dog with a goose's neck and head or a chicken body with a pig head. Filmed at times with extreme wide-angle and fisheye lenses, it looks out of this reality but without the digital fakeness many movies have despite using similar technology.<br /></p><p>But the style wouldn't matter without rooting the bizarre proceedings in across the board excellent performances beginning with Emma Stone's completely committed and unabashed performance. From the way Bella's walk develops from a wobbling toddler's to a confident woman's without falling into pratfall and the way her mental and personality development arcs, it's a triumph of a performance and the only thing that will prevent her willing her 2nd Oscar is if the Academy decides to make an affirmative action choice for Lily Gladstone. And the way she puts her body forth, well then. Let's say that this isn't your typical "stripper who doesn't get naked" deal. Nope. (If you wanted more than the one nipple she exposed in <b>The Favourite</b>, you get it in all the suits of the deck here.)</p><p>At first I didn't dig Ruffalo's performance as the caddish Duncan, but as time went on and his bragadocious front was stripped away (no thanks to Bella's actions), he becomes a pitiable figure. If I was handing out the nominations, I would've given his to Dafoe's Godwin. Buried under a four-hours-in-the-makeup-chair mask of scars and latex, it would've been easy to play it as an amoral mad scientist. But as details of his horrifying upbringing as his father's experimental test bed are revealed, the pathos of a man bent to a path which leads to questionable wonders comes through.</p><p>While <b>Poor Things</b> could've benefited from being 20 minutes shorter and trimmed back some of the brothel stuff, it still excels at doing what few movies these days seem to have had much interest in delivering, taking the viewer to see people and places they've never seen before and that makes it one of the best films of the year and my second place vote for Best Picture.</p><p>Exit Note: While discussing the film with the missus, she said that there was no way the Oscars would go for such a bizarre and sexual freak show of a movie. Then I reminded her, <i>"They gave Best Picture to a movie about a woman who f*cks the Creature from the Black Lagoon, so..."</i> (That's <b>The Shape of Water</b> - aka <b>Grinding Nemo</b> - in case you don't get the reference.)<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 8.5/10. Catch it on cable. (It comes to Hulu on March 7)</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RlbR5N6veqw?si=l6IENoI2mAAe1VZP" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-43219078228392425172024-03-01T01:00:00.076-05:002024-03-01T22:09:53.950-05:00"Nyad" 4K Review<p>Truth be told, I probably wouldn't have watched Netflix Original feature <b>Nyad</b> if not to check off a pair of items on my 2024 Oscars Death March watchlist, Annette Benning's Best Actress-nominated performance as marathon swimmer Diana Nyad and Jodie Foster's Best Supporting Actress-nominated turn as Bonnie Stoll, Nyad's best friend and trainer.</p><p>I'm not a fan of sports films and the trailer made it look like it was more interested in the LGBTQ+ angle Netflix tagged it as and even though <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svrkKNyRH8Y" target="_blank">Film Threat's review</a> debunked the latter, their praise seemed more about the sports aspect. When the Oscar nominations were announced, I figured Benning's was mostly due to the most braving and stun thing an actress can do in Hollyweird: Appear old on screen. (Why else did Patricia Arquette win an Oscar for her shrill performance in <b>Boyhood</b> - of as I call it, <b>Twelve Years A Movie</b> - other than she aged 12 years on screen?)</p><p>So I wasn't going into watching <b>Nyad</b> with much optimism, but fortunately the performances make the formulaic and thin story worth watching. If you like sports movies, you'll probably enjoy it more.</p><p>The movie opens with a montage of actually footage of the real Nyad summarizing her life and swimming achievements culminating in her failed attempt to swim the 103 miles between Havana, Cuba and Key West, Florida at age 28. Then we meet Benning's Nyad at age 60, who despite having a career as a commentator on ABC's Wide World of Sports, is plagued by her failure to achieve her dream of the Cuba swim. She decides she's going to try and do it and taps Bonnie as her trainer.</p><p>What follows is a condensed telling of her five attempts to make the crossing between 2011 and 2013. As much an obstacle of her age and the distance is the wildlife including sharks and jellyfish (the effects of a attempt-ending run-in with a box jellyfish are pretty gnarly and nearly fatal) and the rapid and changeable currents of the Gulf Stream which requires an expert navigator which she find in John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans). He tells her the reason she failed before was from incorrect navigation, but the way she butts head against him almost leads to disaster when storms strike while they're in mid-swim.<br /></p><p>And it's Nyad's obstinacy which overshadows her quest. Nyad is...let's go with "difficult" to get along with as she's intensely self-centered and focused on her dream, which makes her dismissive with those there to support her. At the birthday party, Bonnie tries to set her up with a woman, but when we finally see how she handles it by yammering on endlessly about herself while oblivious to the woman's increasing discomfort before finally asking the woman about herself sets up just what it's like to deal with Nyad. Naturally, this leads to everyone getting fed up with her crap and walking away after the fourth failure.<br /></p><p> Though it happened just a decade ago, I didn't remember whether Nyad actually succeeded in making the crossing (though they don't make many movies about people who fail, do they? SPOILER ALERT!) - I remembered her Carter-era try - so I was actually interested to see how it turned out.</p><p>First-time narrative film directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (who won a Best Documentary Oscar for <b>Free Solo</b>) do well with the training and swimming scenes as well as the dramatic beats between Nyad, Bonnie and John, but the flashbacks to her childhood with a broken home and sexual abuse from the swim coach she idolized are muddled and don't really seem relevant to the task at hand, but that's on the screenplay by rookie feature scribe Julia Cox, adapting one of Nyad's books, which is serviceable. The big finale is the most nail-biting moment of the film as you fear that all of Nyad's work could be for naught if an overexuberant onlooker touches her.<br /></p><p> But where it swims like a dolphin is in its trio of performances from Benning, Foster and Ifans. It's a fact that actresses like to get ugly for awards credibility whether imitating real people or not, but it's less a gimmick here than just what the role calls for. Nyad is a prickly personality and Benning isn't afraid to make her unlikeable while keeping us rooting for her to overcome the odds.</p><p>Foster is having a career resurgence suddenly between this and the just-concluded <b>True Detective: Night Country</b> after nearly two decades barely working in anything anyone has seen. (The last two movies of hers I'd seen were her odd role in the 2018 <b>John Wick</b> knockoff <b>Hotel Artemis</b> and 2013's <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2013/12/elysium-review.html" target="_blank"><b>Elysium</b> where she delivered the worst performance of her career</a>.) She's excellent in her supporting role and it's good to see the Academy understand that many great lead performances have equally critical supporting turns which deserve nomination. (How Christina Ricci was snubbed for her role in <b>Monster</b> which won Charlize Theron her Oscar is a perfect example of the Academy getting it wrong.) Here's to hoping she's looking to work more.<br /></p><p>As with all "based on a true story" movies there are some serious corners cut like reducing the size of the support team from multiple vessels and about 40 crew to a single ship and a handful of crew which begs the question how are they staying awake? The <a href="https://time.com/6330894/nyad-movie-true-story-netflix" target="_blank">controversy about the swim and how it was conducted </a>isn't addressed lest it detract from the desired narrative.</p><p>While <b>Nyad</b> doesn't really elevate the sports biopic form to new heights, it's a pleasant, well-acted couple of hours which show that dedication and determination can overcome conventional wisdom and common sense at times. Provided a box jellyfish doesn't sting you to death.</p><p>On the technical front, the Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation didn't really seem to add much to the experience, so if you're not shelling out for the $23 tier of Netflix (those greedy jerks) then you're not missing much.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3anCgVSQb3Q?si=oXDzzSza2nTVWT5x" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-58113678124906140982024-02-26T21:00:00.028-05:002024-02-28T21:37:13.268-05:00"Mean Girls" (2024) Review<p>Because entertainment is a flat circle and creativity is too risky for Hollyweird, 2004's <b>Mean Girls</b> which became a 2018 Broadway musical is now back as a film of the musicial based on the film, also named <b>Mean Girls</b>. Confused? Good. Updated by original screenwriter Tina Fey to reflect cultural changes - Tik Tok videos and a whole lot less white people - it's the same old story, but now with singing! (Though you wouldn't know it from its trailer which has about two seconds of footage from musical numbers, so if you hate musicals you're in for a bad time.)<br /></p><p>Angourie Rice (she played Betty Brandt in the MCU <b>Spider-Man</b> trilogy) stars as Cady Heron (originally played by Lindsay Lohan), a home-schooled girl raised by her anthropologist mother (Jenna Fischer, originally Ana Gasteyer) in Africa minus any mentioned father. Missing out on social contact, her mother takes a job back in America and Cady enrolls in North Shore High and gets a crash course in cliques. </p><p>She's initially befriended by race-swapped Janis (Auli'i Cravalho, originally Lizzy Caplan) and "too gay to function" Damian (Jaquel Spivey, orig. Daniel Franzese), snarky outcasts, but the focus changes when Janis encourages Cady to infiltrate the notorious "Plastics", the apex predators headed by Regina George (Reneé Rapp, orig. Rachel McAdams) with her sidekicks Gretchen (Bebe Wood, orig. Lacey Chabert) and airhead Karen (Avantica, orig. Amanda Seyfried). Regina takes Cady under her wing and elevates her style and status unaware of how Cady & Co. are conspiring against her. Of course, Cady loses the plot and loses her moral compass, same as last time.</p><p><b>Mean Girls</b> (2024) lives in a weird limbo as a hybrid of a musical and a rehashing of a movie that's never really left the collective cultural memory - there was a <b>Mean Girls</b>-themed Walmart Black Friday 2023 commercial campaign reuniting Lohan, Chabert, Seyfried and others - to the point where any new take couldn't help but be constantly held against the original. As a result, most of the time you're waiting to see how closely the new movie tracks with songs tossed in of varying effectiveness. While the songs are new, the closeness with which the plot beats are the same.<br /></p><p>This familiarity is confounded by the new cast being led by Rice whose voice is thin and passable, but she lacks the charisma and charm of Lohan. (Sidebar: It's hard to remember now, but in 2004 Lindsay Lohan was hot stuff coming off the tag team of the <b>Freaky Friday</b> remake and <b>Mean Girls</b>. She was poised for an interesting career, but went down in tabloid flames and the fact she's still alive at 37, recently married with a child in Dubai, and making rom-coms for Netflix a minor miracle.) Rice's Cady is a passive pawn of Janis and Regina's games to the point she's barely the protagonist. According to Wikipedia, 14 songs were cut from the show for the movie and a comparison of the track listings between Broadway cast and movie soundtracks show half of Cady's songs were cut. (Due to Rice's weak voice?)</p><p>That makes the stars of this show Rapp and Cravalho. Rapp is a bold brassy bodacious blonde who played Regina on Broadway and also contributed to co-writing new songs for the movie. (She also looks a lot like Busy Phillips so when Philips shows up as her mother, originally played by Amy Poehler, it wins the Most Obvious Casting Duh award.) Unlike McAdams, her presence is more dominating and menacing then hectoring.</p><p>Cravalho, who made her acting debut voicing <b>Moana</b>, is the real breakout star here with an effortless nuanced charm embracing her outsiderness and fronting the showstopper number "I'd Rather Be Me" which is shot in a single unbroken take as the camera (operated by Ari Robbins, listed as "Trinity Ninja" in the credits; Trinity being a brand of advanced camera stabilizing kit which is a Steadicam on steroids) races with her through the school in its own complex dance. However, when she suddenly shows up at the finale dance with a girl whom we've never seen before, it's another odd editorial moment.<br /></p><p>Rookie directors Arturo Perez Jr. and Samantha Jayne do a fine job staging the modern musical numbers, but they're hamstrung by the choices in the script adaptation by Fey, who returns as Ms. Norbury along with Tim Meadows' Principal Duvall. While the cast as been diversified, it's not woke racism as the underlying characters are the same (e.g. Indian Avantica manages to make Karen both have bigger boobs and be dumber than Seyfried).<br /></p><p>While slightly fresh, <b>Mean Girls</b> (which needs "<b>: The Musical</b>" appended) is a mostly redundant and superfluous revising of a teen movie classic. If you like musicals or wished the original wasn't so full of people of pallor, or just want to change up your revisiting North Shore High, this will suffice.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 6/10. Catch it on cable. (It will be coming soon to Paramount+)</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fFtdbEgnUOk?si=lC8aTaLUg6X4rs38" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-79379209860083389952024-02-22T22:00:00.008-05:002024-02-28T22:39:51.465-05:00"The Zone of Interest" Review<p>As we near the end of this year's Oscars Death March along with <b>Past Lives</b>, the other film nominated for Best Picture this year I had no freaking idea about was <b>The Zone of Interest</b>, which Google told me it was about the family of the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz living an idyllic life literally on the other side of the wall from the camp. Holocaust movies used to be a staple of Oscar, but they've fallen from favor post-<b>Schindler's List</b> as they've chosen to focus on more sexy topics like racism and LGBTQ+LMNOPWTFBBQ subjects. It's nominated for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Sound, and International Picture (representing Great Britain, though it's in German meaning subtitles).<br /></p><p>And that sentence describing the plot pretty much describes the entirety of the plot, such as it is, of the movie. Adapted from the Martin Amis novel, <b>The Zone of Interest</b> is about <span class="ILfuVd" lang="en"><span class="hgKElc">Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (</span></span>Sandra Hüller, also nominated for Best Actress in <b>Anatomy of a Fall</b>) and their five children (let's call them Greta, Helga, Groucho, Harpo, and Baby Jake) as they live a posh life in a nice house with gardens and a small pool and greenhouse. Hedwig models a nice fur coat courtesy of the Jewish woman who won't be needing it anymore. A worker in striped pajamas is glimpsed tending Rudolph's horse.<br /></p><p>Sure, there are the sounds of genocide wafting in - gunshots, screams, cries, dogs barking, the paranoia-inducing rumble of the machinery of death - and it's inconvenient when the winds shift and blow the odor and ashes of the exterminated onto the laundry on the lines or when a human jaw bumps into you while your fishing requiring yanking the children from the river and scrubbing them in the bath, but the bosses are impressed with Rudolph's efficiency and there's talk of promotion. Life is good.<br /></p><p>If this sounds glib and dismissive of the horrors of the Holocaust, it's intentional because writer-director Jonathan Glazer (whose 2004 film <b>Birth</b>, about Nicole Kidman believing a 10-year-old boy is her reincarnated dead husband, was just awful) has taken the concept of the banality of evil and stretched it out over 105 airless minutes where it begins to take on the aura of an Andy Kaufman bit where the utter lack of humor is what makes it funny.</p><p>From the four-minute "overture" which sounds like someone fell asleep on a keyboard triggering an ambient techno patch over a black screen to extended shots of the pale Aryan family enjoying a trip to the river then driving home for a loooong time then lots of watching the help hang the laundry, Glazer relies on locked down camera angles (he wired the house with a bunch of fixed digital cameras recording constantly so the actors didn't have crew disturbing them in what Glazer called, "Big Brother [the TV show] with Nazis") or very rigid tracking shots a la Stanley Kubrick which I suppose is meant to give the viewer a voyeuristic perspective, but it's comes off as self-consciously pretentious. This doesn't even include the bizarre interludes filmed with an infrared camera of a girl hiding fruits where prisoners would be laboring which look like black and white film negative. ( I had to look up a synopsis to find out who the girl was.)<br /></p><p> The way people blasely discuss things like when Hedwig's visiting mother muses whether the Jewish woman she worked for was over the wall in the camp getting what Jews had coming before grousing how she got outbid on some curtains of hers or the designers of a more efficient crematory design which will allow for maximum throughput of people needing incinerating, the Holocaust is portrayed as being thought of as dispassionately as a logistics puzzle or how much ash should be spread in the garden to nourish the crops with the ash coming from one the million-plus people next door.</p><p>The film ends with a bizarre flash-forward of workers dusting and sweeping Auschwitz as it is today, a tourist destination with exhibits of the piles of luggage and shoes arriving guests had confiscated as a reminder of one of humanity's darkest chapters.<br /></p><p>But does anyone really need to be told that the Holocaust was bad, mmmkay? Any irony that such monstrous deeds were perpetrated by people NOT acting like Hitler, barking in angry German as shown on newsreels, is ironically tempered now by the flood wealthy celebrities demanding that Israel, the Jewish state established in the wake of the Holocaust, stop protecting itself after the 10/7 Hamas attacks which killed over 1200 people solely for being Jewish in the worst day of mass murder since the Holocaust.</p><p>Are celebrities and the Academy aware of the disconnect between honoring this movie with awards while the members such as Best Supporting Actress nominee America Ferrera and two-time Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett demanding a ceasefire to save the attackers and preserve their ability to continue raining rockets down on civilian areas of Israel? Is the ruthless murder of Jews bad or not, Hollyweird?<br /></p><p>While smartly crafted and deliberately told, <b>The Zone of Interest</b> never really engages the viewer because nothing ever changes. No characters change; the way they are in the beginning is the way they are in the end. It's 1-3/4 hours of not much happening, though plus points for doing little in half the time <b>Killers of the Flower Moon</b> wasted. It's purely cerebral about something usual meant to be felt viscerally. Frankly, you'll learn more about <span class="ILfuVd" lang="en"><span class="hgKElc">Höss </span></span>in <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-history-behind-the-zone-of-interest-and-rudolf-hoss-180983531/" target="_blank">this Smithsonian magazine feature</a> released in conjunction with interest in the film.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 5/10. Catch it on cable.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/r-vfg3KkV54?si=zXF4PGyhT5QROVJh" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-77694842074271636192024-02-17T23:30:00.001-05:002024-02-19T21:01:46.429-05:00"Lover, Stalker, Killer" Review<p> If there's one thing Netflix seems able to consistently churn out it's entertaining true crime documentaries. Slickly produced and well told, they're usually short - running 90-120 minutes either as features or mini-series - for quick consumption. Recent winners have been <b>Bitconned</b> and the infuriating <b>American Nightmare</b> which exposed the police AND FBI has judgemental incompetents who seemed to base their "investigation" on watching Lifetime movies. New to Netflix is <b>Lover, Stalker, Killer</b>, another wildly bonkers true crime tale which still manages to surprise even when I was able to predict the twist really early on.<br /></p><p> It's the story of Dave Kroupa, a mechanic who relocated to Omaha, Nebraska to be close to his children after his marriage ended and his ex moved back home in 2012. Looking for love (or at least Miss Right Now), he signed up on a dating site and was matched with a woman named Liz Golyar, a divorcee with a couple of kids. Dave made it clear he was just looking for something casual and she was down for that and they had a great time together.</p><p>One day a woman named Cari Farver brought her car to his garage and he checked it out, but also took a liking to her and asked her out. A single mother, she also agreed to his no strings attached/friends with benefits arrangement and dated for a couple of weeks.</p><p>One night, while Cari was at Dave's place, Lisa showed up, ostensibly to retrieve something she'd left there. As Cari left, she and Lisa made eye contact for a few seconds, but nothing seemed amiss. But a couple of days later Cari texted Dave suggesting they'd move in together. Dave replied that he'd made clear that he wasn't looking for anything serious and it was way too soon to be playing house and she replied like a mature adult woman would: By swearing to destroy his life in every way possible.</p><p>Which she does with a constant barrage of texts and emails which then advance to vandalism against Lisa - keying her car, breaking into his apartment and slashing Lisa's clothes, eventually escalating to setting Lisa's house on fire, killing her pets, which prompted her to break off her relationship with Dave. When the threats extended to his ex-wife and children, they all had to move and change jobs to try and escape Cari's menace.</p><p>If you're wondering why the cops didn't step in to deal with Cari, it's because she had disappeared at the same time she began waging jihad against Dave, Lisa and their families. Cari's mother was looking after her young teenage son and her only contact with her daughter were cryptic text messages that she had moved to Kansas to sort things out in her life. Cari was bipolar and a search of her home found she hadn't taken her medicines with her, but also that she didn't appear to have taken anything with her as all her clothes and effects were still there.<br /></p><p> You can probably guess what was going on - I did - but the looooooong twisting road to get to the end is still fascinating stuff, especially the surprise connections between some parties are exposed or the lengths Cari goes to keep inflicting distress on Dave.<br /></p><p> If you like Netflix true crime docs, you'll like this, too.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 8/10. Catch it on Netflix. <br /></p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/46RuZLu6dso?si=xzE1SwE0_FeUbHW3" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-35187064978953906762024-02-16T21:00:00.000-05:002024-03-06T19:30:26.356-05:00"Oppenheimer" Review<p> Well, this was unexpected. Somehow after 13 years and four increasingly appallingly bad movies which had me repeatedly calling for the revocation of his filmmaking privileges, Christopher Nolan has finally made a movie that isn't absolute garbage.</p><p>His six films from 2000-2010 starting with <b>Memento</b> and ending with <b>Inception</b> were all very good to excellent (scores: 7-10), but starting with 2012's <b>The Dark Knight Reloaded</b> (as I will never stop calling it) thru 2020's <b>Tenet</b> (which got to hide its failure behind the Hot Fad Plague) have been one misbegotten self-absorbed steaming piles of manure after another (score: 2-4). He believed his hype from legions of fawning fans who have placed him in the same area as Martin Scorsese where they believe that because he made great movies in the past, that means everything he makes now is also great.</p><p>So it was with zero enthusiasm where I sat down for three hours of Nolan called <b>Oppenheimer</b>. I had skipped the whole "Barbenheimer" silliness last year and couldn't believe a long biopic about the Father of the Atomic Bomb would gross nearly one billion dollars with the general public who probably would've skipped it if not for the magic Nolan name. (But people think Train rocks, so...)<br /></p><p>But at the conclusion I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't want to beat anyone up for liking this, but quickly realized that what Nolan had done was somehow fill three hours with almost no content, obscuring it with flashy filmmaking and a manic score by Ludwig Göransson which keeps the viewer hyped and awake and feeling they're watching something meaningful. So, yay?<br /></p><p> Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer and in a return to Nolan's self-indulgent gimmick from <b>Dunkirk</b> the story is told via two interlaced timelines: one in color titled Fission, covering Oppie's life beginning as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge through the development of the A-bomb at Los Alamos in the context of a star chamber proceeding considering whether he should retain his security clearance in 1954; the other in black & white titled Fusion, which covers the Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) in 1959 and how he waged a vendetta against Oppenheimer over slights, petty and imagined. (Of course the later chronological scenes are in B&W because Nolan.)<br /></p><p> Along the way we're treated to a whirlwind of familiar names (if you're a nuclear science nerd like I was as a yoot) and faces as a legion of famous actors flow by so swiftly you don't really catch names, just roles. There's Florence Pugh as Jean, a Communist mistress of Oppie's (and features in the first sex scenes of Nolan's entire career) who he still sees after marrying Emily Blunt's Kitty and starting a family. Matt Damon as the general in charge of Manhattan Project; Josh Hartnett as Op's best friend who invented the cyclotron; Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Kenneth Branagh, David Krumholtz as scientists; Tom Conto as Albert Einstein. Casey Affleck, Dane DeHaan are military men; Jason Clarke, Tony Goldwyn, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Alden Ehrenreich and more are lawyers and politicos. Hey, it's Gary Oldman under a ton of makeup playing Harry S. Truman! A cast of many! </p><p>With so many people and places and events all jumbled together, the viewer is always scrambling to keep things straight and figure out what the connections are. While not utilizing the stock linear biopic template may've been an attempt to freshen the formula, the way Nolan jumps back and forth in order to hide the thin excuse motivating what Oppenheimer is subjected to until deep into its third hour results in an immediate feeling that you've witnessed something sprawling and epic, but the next day realizing nothing stuck with you because there was little substance there.</p><p>Here's what I recall about Oppenheimer: Hat, haunted stare, ummm, smart...that's about it. We don't get any feeling for his relationship with Kitty (a nominated Blunt, mostly for a couple of simmering scenes, but not much else) and why Janet was so important. We get a better sense of the rivalries and disputes between the founders of the Atomic Age and some of the moral qualms about the practical applications of their theoretical research. While there may be an intellectual kick to developing a bomb that could set off a chain reaction that would set the Earth's atmosphere on fire, killing everything on the planet, there is that whole ENDING THE WORLD side effect if someone used this invention.</p><p>Because quantum theory is so complicated to understand for non-Big Brain folks, Nolan attempts to present an impressionistic picture of the unimaginable (like the ridiculous 4D Magic Bookcase inside the black hole at the end of <b>Interstellar</b>), so he throws random whirring glowing things and macro photography left over from a Pink Floyd planetarium show and shots of Op tossing glasses into the corner of the room watching them shatter as if divining the Secrets of the Universe in the shards. I hated <b>A Beautiful Mind</b> and sold the DVD immediately after watching it (which is the ultimate rejection considering how much bad stuff I keep), but the way Ron Howard <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJS7Igvk6ZM" target="_blank">visualized game theory</a> and how John Nash viewed the world explained the arcane concept where Nolan doesn't even try, preferring to flash some lights and crank the score volume.</p><p>And speaking of flashing lights, much was made of Nolan's proclamation that he wouldn't use any CGI VFX to recreate the Trinity bomb test. The obvious joke was that he was going to set off an actual atomic bomb, but the absolutely underwhelming depiction of this explosion makes one wish he had done so as this explosion which they weren't 100% certain wouldn't set the atmosphere on fire is <a href="https://youtu.be/vPz4hqY8LVM?si=bp_kE0oYtFf4n_MT&t=199" target="_blank">nothing more than a big gasoline explosion</a> which looks nothing like an atomic bomb mushroom cloud. THE moment of the whole story is a damp squib.</p><p>But that test occurs about 2/3rds of the way through the three hour runtime leaving a whole hour of vamping to babystep to the only real conflict of the film, that the reason for the 1954 inquisition stemmed from Stauss' butthurt over being mocked at a hearing by Oppenheimer after the war and his imagining to be the subject of disrespect by him and Einstein when they meet in 1947 when Strauss was trying to get O.P.P. to set up at Princeton. When we finally realize why Opie was subjected to such suspicion it elicits the first real emotional reaction to the story, but it's too little, too late.</p><p>With such a stacked cast, there are no real weak performances, just performances set adrift by the sparsity of Nolan's everything everywhere all for three hours screenplay. Pugh gets naked and kills herself, but so what? Blunt is the stoic partner to a man whose attention was always elsewhere, but who cares? Damon is good, everyone's good, but they mostly come and go without a lasting impression. The big surprise was Hartnett, who looks different enough and his acting through his eyebrows for once.<br /></p><p>Cillian Murphy is a 50-50 favorite, along with Paul Giamatti, for Best Actor, but he is playing such an internally conflicted character whose actions are inscrutable - why exactly did he almost murder a professor? Seems a bit over-reactive - due to the Cliff's Notes script and Nolan's ADHD narrative that all that remains is the hat and the stare.</p><p>On the other hand, Downey Jr. is going to win for his portrayal of Strauss, a petty, vindictive man who put his pride before his fall. Strauss is the villain of the piece, leveraging Op's dalliances with Communism in the 1930s when everyone joined the Commies cuz it was the cool fad before it became a career liability in the 1950s (and ironically a career requirement for liberal politicians and entertainment folks now) into concerns over his loyalty to America. (That we repurposed a bunch of Nazi rocketeers for our space program goes unmentioned due to not being relevant.) Downey deserves to win as much for his performance as the lifetime achievement catch-all it will represent.</p><p>Which brings us back to Nolan himself and the personality cult that surrounds him and how he skates on so many flaws because he made <b>The Dark Knight</b>. His fetish for shooting on IMAX - Kodak had to invent a B&W IMAX film stock for this production - and making viewing <b>Oppenheimer</b> in 70mm a quest for his fans despite frequent technical problems in projecting a massive 11-mile-long, 600 lb. film print caused in the handful of theaters even capable of showing it, contributed to a Reality Distortion Field around the content of the film itself. He has gotten away with cranking up the sound so loud you can't hear the dialog and relying on the overwhelming impact of Cillian Murphy staring hauntedly at you six stories tall that the viewer gets bludgeoned into believing they're witnessing Something Really Important. (It made almost a billion bucks, so it clearly worked.)<br /></p><p>But if the test of a song is how it stands up to being performed on a guitar or piano with all the other 100 tracks of pop music production stripped away, then the quality of a film should hold up when viewed on a 55-65" HDTV. (No one should be watching movies on a phone or tablet. Let's not be stupid.) And without the kilotons of picture size and sound you get in the theater, the sparsity of the film is exposed. It's a two hour movie stuffed into a three hour sack with too much time spent on the superfluous at the expense of the interesting.</p><p>It's not to say there aren't some meaty thoughts rattling around, especially the ethics of these mega weapons and the risk of making something that really shouldn't be used, but if you don't have on hand to deter those with ill intents then may land on your head. But since the science itself is so arcane, that leaves vast voids of time where we see Oppenheimer rush around to meet names nerds only will recognize, but if they cut out half the cast would anyone have noticed. Pugh's character almost seems to exist solely to provide some skin, especially in a weird moment where Blunt imagines her nude and straddling a naked JRO during the trial. Huh?</p><p>If you're trying to figure out how this is the first movie of Nolan's I haven't hated yet I've got so little to praise it for, that's the conundrum of <b>Oppenheimer</b>. It's a Big Story about Important People doing Momentous Things that changed the world momentarily for the better, but will probably end us all in the long run told in a fast and furious manner and my praise is mostly due to making three hours sail by without feeling it drag much. (We only took one bathroom and beverage break.)</p><p>But the nagging feeling that all the timeline jumping, flashing forward and backward to obscure the payoff that petty small men do cruel things for selfish personal reasons makes the overpraise and likely Oscars gold feel hollow. It's like how the Academy finally noticed Martin Scorsese with <b>The Departed</b>, but then kept nominating his progressively more bloated and unengaging movies afterwards including this year's wretched <b>Killers of the Flower Moon</b>. <br /></p><p> Where does <b>Oppenheimer</b> land in the ranking of the 11 movies I've seen of Nolan's? At number 7 as more the best of his bad movies than the worst of his good ones. At least he's not going to get stroked by the Academy for something awful, but still.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 6/10. Catch it on cable. (It's on Peacock now.)</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uYPbbksJxIg?si=H1EEDy0Z94JhjPt4" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-75346272420639336842024-02-12T21:30:00.016-05:002024-02-14T15:22:52.069-05:00"Part Lives" Review<p> Tonight the Oscars Death March teed up what can be described as the Obligatory Asian Movie - up for Best Picture and Original Screenplay - <b>Past Lives</b>, a melancholic thwarted romance story for people who want to end up feeling worse than the characters themselves.<br /></p><p> It opens with an unseen couple observing a trio at a bar late one night consisting of an Asian man (Teo Yoo), an Asian woman (Greta Lee), and a white man (John Magaro). Are the woman and the white man a couple and who is the Asian man? Are the Asians together and who is the white guy? It ends with the woman looking into the camera from the distance.</p><p>Then a title card pops up - "24 Years Earlier" - and we're introduced to Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) and Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) the 12-year-old versions of the couple we saw in their native South Korea. They are classmates and Hae Sung is teasing her for doing better in their class grades as she's usually the top student. They like each other and their parents take them on a play date to the park, but there's little future for them because Na Young's family is emigrating to Canada for unspecified reasons.</p><p> Then we're told "12 Years Pass" and Na Young has changed her name to Nora Moon and lives in New York City pursuing her dreams of being a writer. One day while on the phone with her mother she's looking up random people from her past and decides to look up Hae Sung and discovers he had posted on her father's Facebook page (her father is a filmmaker) that he was looking for her, made difficult due to her name change.<br /></p><p>She sends him a Facebook friend request and they begin to have a series of Skype calls talking about nothing in particular, mostly what they're doing in their work lives. They talk about getting together sometime, but various commitments and the whole being on the opposite side of the world thing would make any such reunion something that would take 12-18 months to arrange. Abruptly, she announces that she wants to stop the calls because she's finding herself spending more time looking up flights to Korea than focusing on her goals. She says it won't be a long break, but we kinda know better.</p><p>She then goes to a writer's retreat on Montauk and meets Arthur, the third man from the opening scene, and they get very cozy. Meanwhile, Sung has gone to Shanghai for a Mandarin language program and meets someone. Then we're told another dozen years have passed and Sung is coming to NYC to visit Nora, who is now married to Arthur. (Ruh-roh.) He's a published author and she is having a production of one of her plays mounted, so things are going pretty well. Or are they?<br /></p><p> When they reunite, Nora can tell that Sung came more to see her than the sights of NYC. He has recently broken up with his girlfriend and feels his life is too ordinary to get someone to marry him despite being a handsome fellow. Nora goes on about the concept of in-yun, a Buddhist concept that every encounter between people no matter how incidental, like brushing past someone in a crowded room, is a connection which carries from our past lives to future incarnations and it takes 8000 layers of in-yun for two people to be together. Uh-huh.</p><p>Naturally, Arthur begins to feel a little threatened by this guy from his wife's past. Did they get together too quickly, shacking up to save on NYC rents, getting married because she needed a green card? She reassures him that she loves him, but will that be enough to hold off destiny?</p><p>OK, to be fair I'm wildly overselling the stakes here because <b>Past Lives</b> is (according to my missus whose seen more of these types of movies) like the romantic dramas by Wong Kar-wai (<b>In The Mood For Love, 2046</b>) or <b>The Age of Innocence</b> (which I saw when it came out) - feel bad romances where lovers never get together because it would be The Wrong Thing To Do because reasons and stuff. You intellectually understand why they're kept apart while cursing how you don't get a happy ending.</p><p>But my problem with <b>Past Lives</b> is that its entire premise is founding on a case of puppy love between a pair of pre-pubescent kids that reconstitutes itself into a crippling obsession on his part and I'm not quite sure what her angle is based on what we're given. Perhaps I'm undercounting the importance of the in-yun factor to Korean culture, but it seems more like a coping mechanism for dissatisfaction with one's life. <i>"If only me and so-and-so had brushed past each other 8000 times in past lives so we could be together now"</i> is just an exotic take on wishing you had handled your high school sweetheart relationship more maturely.</p><p>Are we supposed to root for Nora and Sung to finally achieve their romantic destiny after 24 years and some Skype sessions a decade earlier? Sorry, Arthur, but you were just Mr. Right Now - what they have is REAL LOVE because 8000 layers of Korean mythic stuff. Due to the sketchy nature of the narrative and massive time jumps which the viewer doesn't feel because for us those 12 year breaks occur in 10 seconds so we're still feeling what we felt 10 seconds ago, not what the ill-fated non-lovers have felt (or not) for the ensuing 12 years.</p><p>There's a subtle detail in how Nora's ambitions taper down as she grows older. When preparing to leave her homeland, she says that she has to move because you can't win a Nobel Prize for Literature in Korea. When they video call in their early-20s, her goal is now to win a Pulitzer Prize. But when they finally meet her prize is a Tony Award as a playwright. It's as if the more she accomplishes, the smaller her dreams get. Is this meant to be another admission that life's refusal to just serve up your dreams means you just lower your sight or is it a commentary that Hae Sung has never moved past his unattainable childish goal?</p><p>Writer-director Celine Song has made a semi-autobiographical debut film - she is originally South Korean, but emigrated to Canada, then went to Columbia University in NYC for a MFA in playwriting in 2014 - and while it's too slight & unsatisfying for my tastes, what nags more is how <b>Past Lives</b>, which was one of those "Sundance hits" feels like a beneficiary of the Academy Awards need to fetishize "diversity" and their need to fill a quota of non-American, non-male, non-white filmmakers.</p><p>First it was <b>Parasite</b> (which I liked) winning Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay AND International Feature (formerly Foreign Language); then it was Chloe Zhao winning Best Director for the Best Picture-winning <b>Nomadland</b> (it was OK, but should've been a documentary); then <b>Drive My Car</b> winning Best International Feature and nominated for Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, the Academy just loves slow, bordering on tedious Asian films - <b>Drive My Car</b> was three hours long and if I hadn't been able to speed watch it in just two hours, I would've given up - and <b>Past Lives</b> fits the bill, though thankfully it only spends 1h 45m going nowhere.</p><p>As far as the performances, I would've nominated Lee over Sandra Huller or Lily Gladstone as her performance is enigmatic. That there's any doubt as to how this story will go it's because she imbues Nora with an inner life that I don't think Song really put on the page for her. Yoo is less successful because his character is a one-note mopey puppy dog pining for this girl from so long ago. Song gives us scenes of him drinking with his buddies, but we never see his relationship(s?) and thus he seems to only exist to want Nora. Magaro draws the shortest straw as Arthur only exists to be a third wheel wondering if his wife is going to dash on their marriage for some childhood friend like he's Bill Pullman, who was that guy in so many 1990's romance films; the guy whose only flaw was not being exciting enough compared to the guy Sandra Bullock really has the hots for.</p><p>While discussing the movie, the missus suggested that perhaps the kids should've been older in the beginning, but my counterpoint was that if they had been hot and horny teens who'd lost their virginity to each other, for instance, then that would establish a more understandable basis for longing whereas by having it founded on what was really nothing but puppy love made the spiritual angle more relevant while also making it seem all the sillier that this is supposed to really matter. (I heckled as one of Sung's pals, <i>"Bro, you held hands when you were KIDS and you're still hung up on the bitch? You're 36 and have a career now. Move on!"</i> I am not a romantic man.) </p><p>If you're a fan of deliberately unsatisfying stories of doomed non-romance, you may enjoy <b>Past Lives</b> despite all my kicking at its shins. But even on its modest merits, it's yet another "not a Best Picture" film which sadly seems to account for so much of what gets nominated these days.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 6/10. Catch it on cable.</p><p>The trailer makes it look much more love triangle contentious than the actual film & downplays just how much subtitle-reading you'll be doing, which is about 80% of the film. <br /></p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kA244xewjcI?si=XOH8gPZjq_RtCjS0" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-11737599145465162732024-02-09T20:40:00.076-05:002024-02-29T22:30:58.777-05:00"American Fiction" Review<p>Let's not bury the lede here: Of the six 2024 Best Picture nominees I've seen so far (see update below), <b>American Fiction</b> is the one I would vote for if I could. After so much absolute garbage that has been lauded by the Academy for too long - though to be fair the last five Best Picture winners would've been my votes, but that doesn't mean I thought they were all classic movies - it's the first one I would've had nearly no reservations about. Of course it won't win a damn thing, most likely. Shame.</p><p>Nominated for Best Picture, Actor (Jeffrey Wright), Supporting Actor (Sterling K. Brown), Adapted Screenplay (Cord Jefferson), and Score (Laura Karpman), <b>American Fiction</b> (bland title aside) is a movie that I frankly can't believe exists because it punches hard to the Left at the condescension of liberal elites towards black people, a feat that's doubly surprising considering writer-director Jefferson is a former journalist for liberal trash sites like the Huffington Post and Gawker. But unlike overpopular agitprop like <b>Barbie</b>, it grinds its axes with precision and purpose.</p><p>Wright stars as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, an author and college professor in Los Angeles who we meet coping with a triggered snowflake white student with green hair offended that he had written a book title on the board with the N-word in it. Her po' widdle feewings were hurtied at having to see the word while in class and Monk has zero tolerance for her childish tantrum saying if he can deal with it as a black man, so can she. She can't even.<br /></p><p>She stomps out of class and the school tells him to take some time off and go to a scheduled book fair appearance in Boston, where he's originally from and in not much of a mood to see his family. His panel was poorly attended because it was scheduled across from an reading by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) where she talks about her career after graduating from snooty liberal arts college Oberlin and quickly landing a job at a New York publishing house then reads from her best-selling book We's Lives in Da Ghetto, which is nothing but the lowest stereotypical rendition of Ebonics-speaking ghetto folk.</p><p>Monk is disgusted by how well received such tripe is especially since his latest book has been rejected for not being "black" enough. This ghettoization of his work is illustrated by a scene where he goes to a chain bookstore looking for his books and finds them not in the Mythology section, but in the African-American Studies section even though they have nothing to do with that field.<br /></p><p> As for his personal life, he is first hit by the sudden death of his physician sister, Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross), then the realization that his mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams), is beginning to have Alzheimer's. His plastic surgeon brother, Cliff (Brown), is ill-equipped to help with her care because he lives in Tuscon and financially strapped after a messy divorce in the wake of his wife catching him in bed with a man.</p><p>Frustrated by the dumbed-down nature of literature and financially squeezed by Agnes' care bills, he decides to write a super black novel called My Pafology (sic) filled with drugs, fatherless men, gang violence, Ebonics - all the things publishers want. His agent, Arthur (John Ortiz), is terrified by Monk's joke, but agrees to send it out under his pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh (after the folk song "Stagger Lee"). Since this is the kind of movie this is, it immediately sells for $750,000 and millions more in film rights are in the offing.</p><p>Since Monk is already a published author and this is a gag that's gotten out of hand, he and Arthur construct the excuse that Stagg is a fugitive and thus most remain in hiding. Naturally, this only ups his mystique with the promo people on phone calls as as the erudite Monk struggles to sound street enough to maintain the ruse, not that these upper class twits could tell the difference, eagerly agreeing to his demand that the book be retitled Fuck.</p><p>And as a cherry on the top, Monk is asked to be a judge for New England Book Association's Literary Award only to find that his publisher has submitted Fuck to the competition and Sintara Golden is also a judge as part of the diversity emphasis along with the three white members of the panel. So Monk is judging a book he wrote as a reaction to what his fellow judge was cashing in on. Hijinks ensue!</p><p>What makes <b>American Fiction</b> ironically depressing is that it portrays something so alien to movies: Educated upper-middle class black professionals with messy family lives almost completely divorced from racial issues. (Television had <b>The Cosby Show</b> and <b>Black-ish</b>, which I guess was about trying to retain "black identity" - whatever that is - living amongst white people which isn't exactly like being a 1st Century Christian under Roman rule.) The family patriarch was a doctor, Monk's siblings are doctors making him the outcast for being an author/professor, the family home is a massive three-story house with a swimming pool and a housekeeper, Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor), and they have a beach house where Monk makes the acquaintance of the divorced lawyer, Coraline (Erika Alexander) across the street. The only hood for these folks are on their hoodies and isn't it sad that a movie about people who are black as opposed to Black People is so novel?<br /></p><p>If there's one word which sums up <b>American Fiction</b> it would be authenticity, specifically the characters struggles to be true to themselves in a world which may have other ideas about how people should be based on their color or sexual preference. This clicked when Monk and Cliff discuss whether their father knew if the latter was gay. Cliff says he wished he could've told his father before he died. But what if he rejected you, asks Monk, to which Cliff replies that at least he would've hated me for what I really was.</p><p> Monk is trapped in a situation of his own making where he tried to show up those who were demanding he deny his true self thus forcing a reckoning of how important is being true to one's self when there's a big pile of money waiting for those who play the game? This leads to a somewhat predictable conclusion as the meta joke somewhat stumbles on the landing, but it's not fatal and has it's own ironic charm.</p><p>Rooting the proceedings is Wright's tightly wound simmering performance as Monk. He's a serious man in an unserious world and while he's not a misanthrope, you get that he could be hard to love or live with. The friction with his family isn't overblown, but realistic for relatable reasons. He can be prickly, but he's not as off-putting as someone like Paul Giammati's teacher in <b>The Holdovers</b>, but while he bristles at being judged superficially, he's not above looking down his nose at other's tastes to his detriment.<br /></p><p> I've been a fan of Jeffrey Wright since his first starring role in <b>Basquiat</b> in 1996, several years before he caught more mainstream critics eyes as Peoples in 2000's Samuel L. Jackson topped <b>Shaft</b> (which also co-starred Christian Bale the same year he blew up with <b>American Psycho</b>). But despite having prominent supporting roles in the Daniel Craig James Bond films as Felix Leiter; Beetee in the three <b>The Hunger Games</b> sequels; HBO's <b>Westworld</b> series, and recently as Jim Gordon in <b>The Batman</b>, he's never really broken out and led a film and now that he's done so and snagged an Oscar nomination, hopefully he will get more opportunities.<br /></p><p> The rest of the cast is also top shelf, especially Brown who first popped on my radar in 2016's <b>American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson</b> playing Chris Darden right before everyone discovered him in <b>This Is Us</b> (which I never watched because I'm not an over-emotional suburban wine mom). He makes the most of his screen time delivering one of the biggest laughs in the movie (about drinking at 8 am) while portraying a man who is trying to live his truth (ugh, what a trite saying) as someone coming out in middle age and not always seeming happy being gay.</p><p>But none of the performances would've mattered if not for Jefferson's sharp screenplay adapted from Percival Everett's 2001 novel Erasure. By anchoring the satirical aspect of Monk's joke of a novel on the bedrock of a family drama it steers clear of being simplistic agitprop and racial grievance mongering. I normally don't approve of white people being lazily negatively portrayed (like how everyone Harold and Kumar meet on their odyssey to White Castle was a racist redneck), but here I'll allow it because it's the same sorts of folks as portrayed in <b>Get Out</b> who would've voted for Obama a third time getting shown up for their patronizing woke white liberal racism. I just hope that if he wins an Oscar for his script he doesn't immediately fall off like Jordan Peele has with everything since his smashing debut.</p><p>It's not often a movie comes along that really excites me intellectually, so (bland title aside; did you catch how many movies and shows use <b>American</b> in their titles?) <b>American Fiction</b> is a gift we should cherish and Cord Jefferson is a talent we must pray stays this sharp. Warm, funny, yet bitingly satirical, <b>American Fiction</b> is the triple truth, Ruth.</p><p>(Note: I'm finishing this review 20 days after viewing it and since the lede I've seen 9 of the 10 Best Pictures and my vote still stands. While the overrated <b>Oppenheimer</b> is going to win, breaking my streak of at least liking the winners, this is the best picture IMNSHO.)<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 9/10. Catch it on cable.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i0MbLCpYJPA?si=g2rT66Xtqb3UNNHy" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-90307905031716023612024-01-30T20:30:00.100-05:002024-01-31T21:29:24.383-05:00"The Beekeeper" 4K Review<p> I had no intention of watching Jason Statham's latest take butts and kick names action flick, <b>The Beekeeper</b>, until I watched <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51G6-mqAKK4" target="_blank">Dan Murrell's absolutely hilarious review</a> where he grappled with just how bonkers and simultaneously terrible AND awesome it was. He's usually pretty sober in his reviews, but when he said that <i>"It's the kind of movie that makes you feel insane while you're watching it....It's the kind of movie that should never come out and also be released five times a year. It is one of the worst movies that I will definitely watch 30 more times in my life." </i>I just had to see what made him give it a split score of Don't Bother AND Go See It! He seemed desperate to find others to discuss this thing with, so I volunteered as tribute along with the missus who has seen even more Statham movies than I have (she likes 'em gruff) and, well, it's certainly a movie alright.<br /></p><p>Statham is Adam Clay, a beekeeper who rents barn space from a widow, Eloise (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylicia_Rashad">Phylicia Rashad</a>), to process his hives' honey. After clearing a hornets nest from the barn, she invites him to dinner. Before dinner time, she gets on her laptop and it hit with ransomware warning her hard drive is infected and directing her to call a phone number which she does. (Uh-oh.) It connects her to an office which looks like a hybrid dance club and videogame LAN party where she is manipulated into installing a Trojan which immediately allows the hackers to zero out all her bank accounts including a charity fund with over $2 million in it.</p><p>Once she realizes she's been robbed, she immediately calls the bank to report it. Just kidding! No, she commits suicide. (Not kidding.) When Statham arrives for dinner, hearing the smoke alarm, he lets himself in and just as he's about to discover Eloise's body is caught by her FBI Agent daughter, Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman, <b>The Umbrella Academy</b>). (If you're wondering why she didn't call her law enforcer daughter instead of killing herself, this will not be the last basic details question you'll be asking along with why was the daughter there in the first place.)</p><p>After he is cleared of killing Eloise, he meets with Verona who says that these hackers have been known to the FBI for years, but they can't figure out who they are. Luckily for her, Adam is not just a beekeeper, but a retired Beekeeper, an elite agent of a spy program so secret that the CIA doesn't really know about them. He calls into his old work and immediately gets the number and location of the call center where Eloise called. He goes there with a pair of gas cans and torches the place on his way towards finding the kingpin of scammers, a weaselly tech bro, Derek (Josh Hutcherson, <b>The Hunger Games</b>), who is babysat as a favor to his mother by former CIA Director Wallace (Jeremy Irons) as director of corporate security.</p><p>As he closes in on his target, the levels of action and plot twists increase rapidly to the point where he's taking on FBI squads bare-handed and the revelation in the third act of who Derek's mother is cranks the bananas knob to 12.<br /></p><p> Statham has made so many of these action flicks that he can do them in his sleep and frankly for much of the movie, he is so low key in his performance as he mutters about "protecting the hive" - a metaphor for society itself - he may be sleepwalking through this performance. That's not to say he doesn't kick much butt, but that it's oddly subdued. <br /></p><p> Writer Kurt Wimmer (<b>Equilibrium, Salt, Total Recall (2012)</b>) and director David Ayer (<b>Fury, Suicide Squad</b> - the first one) have a lot of moderately crowd-pleasing pictures on their resume, so that <b>The Beekeeper</b> seems like a low budget knockoff of the movies they've made feels off.<br /></p><p> But what makes <b>The Beekeeper</b> watchable is just how bonkers it
gets at points. It makes one wish they'd gone even MORE over the top in
the action, though to be fair <b>John Wick</b> movies occupy so much mindshare for bar-raising action perhaps it's not worth trying to compete at that level. Even as you repeatedly wonder why no one seems to do a realistic thing in these situations - like why is an FBI Agent allowed to lead an investigation regarding a man whose rampage seems triggered by her mother's suicide or how come Minnie Driver is playing the current CIA Director, but for only two scenes? - there's some satisfyingly visceral kills and quips and to be honest, ransomware hackers who prey upon the technically naive deserve to get whupped down by a grouchy Jason Statham.</p><p>From a technical perspective, the 4K HDR presentation doesn't really do much to merit the upcharge, so watching in standard HD/Blu-ray is fine. <br /></p><p>I don't want to file<b> The Beekeeper</b> under the So Bad It's Good category. It's more like Ayer's cursed <b>Suicide Squad</b> - which to be fair was recut by a frightened studio into a mishmash (#ReleaseTheAyerCut) - which by all objective measures wasn't a very good movie, yet was watchable and entertaining and I don't just mean Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn hot pants outfit. Cable TV used to be filled with rainy weekend day action fluff like <b>The Beekeeper</b> and if you approach it expecting more fun than verisimilitude, you'll be fine.<br /> </p><p><b>Score:</b> 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SzINZZ6iqxY?si=8fiS-seF0Q16bKwm" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-33645184304403777732024-01-29T23:45:00.092-05:002024-01-31T22:53:18.158-05:00"The Greatest Night In Pop" Review<p>Ah, the 1980s - Reagan, MTV, leg warmers and torn sweatshirts, Tom Cruise beginning his 40-years-and-counting run of movie stardom, Generation X coming of age unaware that in four decades they would have a holy mandate to destroy all surrounding generations. But it was also the advent of massive charity records and concerts like Live Aid and Farm Aid.</p><p>While there had been charity concerts like Concerts for the People of Kampuchea (to raise funds for Cambodians post-Vietnam War) and No Nukes (to frighten people away from safe, clean nuclear energy), late-1984 through summer 1985 was put into Feed The World overdrive by the tag-team of singles "Do They Know It's Christmas (Feed The World)" by Band Aid, put together by Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof and Ultravox's Midge Ure, and "We Are The World" by USA For Africa, the recording of which is the subject of the brisk Netflix documentary <b>The Greatest Night In Pop</b>.<br /></p><p> Beginning with "Day-O" singer and activist Harry Belafonte taking note of Band-Aid and wondering why if white English people were trying to save black lives in Ethiopia, why weren't black artists trying to do the same, uber manager Ken Kragen tapped clients Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers to participate in the formless project. Rapidly, Michael Jackson - then the King of Pop in the wake of Thriller selling eleventy bazillion copies - and Thriller producer Quincy Jones were on board. Stevie Wonder was asked to co-write, but never returned their calls.</p><p>The logistics of gathering talent for the project were daunting until they realized that most of the people on their wish list would be in Los Angeles on January 28, 1985 for the American Music Awards which were coincidentally being hosted by Richie. If they could get the stars to head to a studio for an all-night session after the show, this could work. However, by having a hard deadline to record the song, Richie & Jackson were under the gun to actually write the song and only finished the rough draft (lyrics would be tweaked right up to the final session) a week before the date. The demo with guide vocals by the pair was recorded the next night and cassettes were FedExed to the vocalists in Jan. 25.<br /></p><p>Mixing footage from the epic recording session with new interviews with Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Smokey Robinson, Sheila E., Cyndi Lauper, Kenny Loggins, Dionne Warwick, and Huey Lewis (who inherited the bridge line slated for Prince, who was a no show) along with various production personnel, a cameraman, the session engineer, <b>The Greatest Night In Pop</b> gives a look at how the musical sausage was made beyond what was shown in <a href="https://youtu.be/9AjkUyX0rVw?si=JotWFM55jNBaZmJm" target="_blank">the music video</a>.</p><p>The role of Quincy Jones as simultaneous producer, conductor, traffic cop, psychiatrist cannot be understated as issues arose like Wonder, feeling left out of the writing, almost derailed the show by wanting to insert lyrics in Swahili (which isn't even spoken by Ethiopians) which would've burned already limited time teaching the chorus new lines. (While the documentary makes a big deal about Waylon Jennings saying, <i>"No good ol' boy ever sang Swahili,"</i> and walking out, he returned to the session, not that the filmmakers' desire to punch down at supposed redneck racism bothered to clarify.)</p><p>Richie's stamina also must be acknowledged because he'd arrived at the Shrine Auditorium to prepare hosting the AMAs at 8 am, hosted the telecast while performing twice during the show, then had to work over eight hours on "We Are The World." He doesn't say how long he slept after that day, but I'd be out for at least 12-16 hours if I'd run that hard. (The missus kept saying, <i>"Cocaine is a helluva drug."</i>)<br /></p><p>Being a music production nerd who was alive when these records happened, I'd known about some details shown like Lauper's costume jewelry picking up on the sensitive microphones and Wonder having to teach Bob Dylan how to sing (he looks so lost the whole time) by imitating him to his face, but never seen the footage shown here. Totally new was how Al Jarreau was so drunk that he kept blowing his line which led the soloists at the end of the line to complain that all the starts and stops for earlier mistakes were depriving them of a chance to work into the material and a request that they run through the entire song for each take then go back and punch in the problematic phrases.</p><p><b>The Greatest Night In Pop</b> is also an accidental time capsule of just how far we've come technologically because in 1985, cell phones were rare, there was no email, no Internet, no sending MP3s of demos - it was brute force analog life with cassette tapes sent by messenger or express mail, phone calls - they mention that Kragen would travel with a suitcase full of Rolodexes whose contents15 years later would fit in a Palm Pilot - and recording was done by extremely talented performers stepping up and delivering the goods when called upon without the safety nets of editing in ProTools (which first came out in 1991 and only recorded four tracks) or fixing with AutoTune (invented in 1997). The stress levels of the recording engineers and machine maintenance techs must've been sky high because any breakdown would be catastrophic. <br /></p><p> If there's a downside to <b>The Greatest Night In Pop</b> it will be that you will be earwormed by "We Are The World" for the foreseeable future after hearing it performed in bits for an hour over and over. Now where is the documentary about recording "Do They Know It's Christmas"?<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 8/10. Catch it on Netflix.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MD3oU1gowu4?si=zGoNT70MyFnVF5QC" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-475438024154360622024-01-29T20:30:00.002-05:002024-03-06T20:40:12.269-05:00"Anatomy of a Fall" Review<p><b>Anatomy of a Fall</b> first popped on my radar in November when an acquaintance raved about it after seeing it at a film festival. It won the Palm d'Or at Cannes and is now up for five Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actress, Original Screenplay, and Editing. In a controversial situation, it was <i>not</i> submitted by France for the Best International Film category, allegedly because the director, Justine Triet, criticized French President Macron for repressing protests. (Didn't she know she could protest Trump instead? /sarc)<br /></p><p>The premise is simple, Sandra (Sandra Hüller, who also co-stars in <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2024/02/the-zone-of-interest-review.html" target="_blank"><b>The Zone of Interest</b></a>) is being interviewed at her chalet outside Grenoble, France but the session has to be cut short because her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), is blasting obnoxious music while working in the attic and it'd be picked up on the recording. Their blind son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) goes for a walk with his dog Snoop (Messi), but returns to find his father's body laying in the snow outside the chalet.<br /></p><p> While Sandra believes Samuel fell out of the attic window, the presence of head trauma before he landed - one theory is he hit the shed roof, another that Sandra bludgeoned him and tossed him from a balcony - and Daniel's inconsistent recollection of events leads the police to charge her with his murder.</p><p>The bulk of the film is her trial which seems alien to American viewers because of the format of how the trial is conducted, especially regarding the defendant being able to sound off against the prosecutors directly during their presentation and other wrinkles. In typical legal trial story form, there are many revelations that recast what we think is going on including her affair with a woman a year before which may've fueled her husband's resentment of her flirting with the female interviewer, his previous suicide attempt and a secret recording of an argument that escalated into violence taped the day before his death.</p><p>While <b>Anatomy of a Fall</b> holds your interest through the trial because it seems to be building to something, it punks out at the end by not explaining what actually happened. There's a time and place on occasion for ambiguity in movies like whether Deckard is a replicant in <b>Blade Runner</b>, but whodunnit legal thrillers ain't one of those instances. When your first response to a movie is to immediately Google whether you missed the denouement somehow, that's not good. When you discover that the filmmaker deliberately wanted you to make up your own ending, that's bullsh*t. Imagine if <b>Titanic</b> wasn't told in flashback by Old Rose, but told linearly up to the part where Jack and Rose are in the water and it ended and the credits rolled without telling you if they survived or not. Not very satisfying, is it?<br /></p><p> Hüller's performance wasn't particularly impressive to me, partially because the nature of the character is meant to be possibly duplicitous and thus untrustworthy in a movie full of unreliable points of view. (Especially the blind kid.) Part of the trial is the alternate placing of the victim on trial along with the defendant while using non-murder-related aspects of her life like her writing (in a detail cribbed from <b>Basic Instinct</b>) or her sexual behavior to contend that if she's a plagiarizing bisexual wife, then surely she's a murderer, too. Since the mystery is whether she dunnit or didn't, her flat affect is appropriate, but I didn't read much inside to give much of a hint at the truth.</p><p>If it wasn't such a stacked year for Supporting Actor, it's likely Machado-Graner may've scored a nomination as well. (There's no one I'd bounce in favor of him, so just a tough break.</p><p>Justine Triet's screenplay, co-written with her partner/baby daddy (she's French, so is marriage still a thing there) Arthur Harari, is the film's foundational weakness because of its choice to tell 99% of the story and leave it to the viewer to fill in the last two pages with how they feel about it. Maybe it's a European art snob thing, but it undercuts the point of spending 2-1/2 hours watching the story, which is probably the point because European art snobbery. <br /></p><p>While the tone of this review seems negative, it's not a poorly made or told film; just an unsatisfying one. If you go in aware of how it will leave you hanging, perhaps the journey may be worth the time as long as you don't expect to arrive at a destination.</p><p>Note: While it's a French film, a hefty chunk is delivered in English for a weird reason relating to Sandra's German background versus her husband's linguistic capabilities. So it's about 60% subtitled.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FUXawkH-ONM?si=m7SOJ2TTpYyhB3iq" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-56853116042912535682024-01-28T23:45:00.008-05:002024-03-06T22:35:14.704-05:00"The Holdovers" 4K Review<p>Oscar darling Alexander Payne returns with <b>The Holdovers</b>, a retro-themed drama that so deliberately tries to feel like a movie from the time that the opening credits put the copyright date as 1971. It's nominated for Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, and Editing.<br /></p><p>Paul Giamatti stars as Paul Hunham, a misanthropic classics teacher at fictional Massachusetts boarding school Barton Academy. It's the last day before the Christmas break and he gets roped into babysitting the handful of students who won't be going home for the holidays including Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smartmouth teenager who was boasting about his plans for travel to the Caribbean before getting derailed by his mother and stepfather deciding wanted to go on their honeymoon despite having married earlier in the year. Also staying on is the school cafeteria manager, Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph, who along with Robert Downey, Jr. are the free spaces on your Oscar pool bets because she's an absolute lock to win), who is grieving her son's recent death in Vietnam.</p><p>Paul isn't liked by, well, mostly anyone because he's a strict disciplinarian who enforces the rules which puts him in bad favor with the school headmaster after flunking an alumni Senator's son, costing him a Princeton acceptance and the school a hefty donation. His students hate him for assigning a ton of reading for over the break as well.</p><p>After a few days, one of the other holdover's father arrives in a helicopter offering to take everyone to the ski resort he's taking his son to, but because Angus's folks can't be reached for permission, he can't leave so is again left behind with Paul and Mary. What follows is a fairly standard series of events of everyone getting on everyone else's nerves before eventually mellowing out and learning that everyone isn't so bad and have their reasons for how they are.</p><p>(It's ironic that major turning point in Paul's life involves a plagiarism scandal while attending Harvard when the unqualified diversity hire President of Harvard was forced from her position a few weeks earlier due to massive plagiarism in nearly everything she wrote being unearthed in the wake of a disastrous Congressional hearing appearance where she refused to condemn violent anti-Semitism at Harvard.)</p><p>With a not-particularly-original story, the weight of <b>The Holdovers</b> rests on the performances shoulders beginning with Giamatti's, which is why he's got a 50-50 shot (against <b>Oppenheimer</b>'s Cillian Murphy) to win Best Actor. While it seems like another Giamatti role where he's a frustrated downtrodden lumpen sad sack bubbling with subsumed rage, he is able to make Paul a man worthy of empathy because most of his life's choices have been more reactive than proactive. While responsible for the consequences, he didn't wake up as a child and decide he would spend his life at war with the world. He's a smart man dealt a bad hand which he plays aggressively and loses most of the time.</p><p>Due to her size, Randolph has been cast in "obese loud black woman" roles in series like <b>Only Murders In The Building</b> and <b>The Idol</b>, so it's quite a change to see her able to tap into her <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da%27Vine_Joy_Randolph#Early_life_and_education" target="_blank">surprisingly deep classically-trained theater background</a> to make Mary a stoic, but sad woman whose job is to feed others children while her only child is gone. She gets a couple of showcase scenes where her quiet pain and resilience are front and center. She's not having any of Paul's nonsense, but it's not cliched.</p><p>If there's weak leg to the tripod, it's Sessa, who is making his film debut here after being found in auditions held at his school which was serving as the shooting location. With a background on stage, his performance is a tad big for such an intimate film and Payne should've dialed him back because acting on camera works best when the actor isn't ACTING for the back of the theater. Angus is supposed to be a bit of a spoiled brat with a hurt soul, but it just doesn't gel as well as it should.</p><p>The screenplay debut by David Hemmingson after a quarter-century of television writing and producing is a mixed bag owing to the stock tropes of the characters and situation. What lets it down at the end is the weak conclusion which feels both rushed and incomplete and thus unsatisfactory.</p><p>Payne, whose first two movies - <b>Citizen Ruth</b> and <b>Election</b> - I enjoyed and then seemed to avoid everything since (other than the first 15 minutes or so of <b>The Descendants</b>) nails the vibe of a movie made in 1971 with long interludes of period appropriate needle drops over lengthy takes of people walking in bleak snowy environs with flat cinematography reminiscent of <b>Harold and Maude</b> which also came out in 1971. It also results in the movie feeling somewhat sluggish and overlong at 2h 13m. <br /></p><p></p><p></p><p>While not quite an unqualified success, <b>The Holdovers</b> is a refreshingly mature attempt at a character-driven drama where the special effects are the performances. </p><p>As for the 4K presentation, due to the flat look, it doesn't really benefit from it beyond enhanced detail and color depth.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 7/10. Catch it on cable. (Currently on Peacock.)</p><p>Note how the trailer continues the retro pastiche by having a narrator!<br /></p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NVa20liGRUM?si=1xTJF7H68SmZWx4V" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-40825493094498938182024-01-13T20:30:00.002-05:002024-01-14T15:56:55.751-05:00"Lift" 4K Review<p> Have you ever wished that someone would do a remake of <b>The Italian Job</b> but with fewer stars & a ludicrous plot slathered in CGI? Well, you're in luck because that film's director, F. Gary Gray (<b>The Fate of the Furious, Straight Outta Compton</b>) and Netflix have joined forces to give you <b>Lift</b>, a perfectly forgettable caper comedy starring Kevin Hart. Buckle up for adequacy!</p><p>Hart stars as Cyrus, the mastermind of a diverse crew of high-tech heisters who we meet executing a caper in Venice (same as in <b>The Italian Job</b>) involving the faked kidnapping of an artist to goose the value of an NFT (the hottest fad of 2022 when this project was probably greenlit) being sold at auction. But the true purpose of that caper was to distract from the actual theft of a Van Gogh, the pre-sale of which funded the NFT purchase and oh boy it's sure convenient how everything perfectly worked out, no?</p><p>Except it didn't. Somehow, it's never really explained, but the art thief part of the gang get busted by Interpol (the crime fighting outfit, not the band) and Agent Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, <b>Loki</b>) under orders from her boss, Huxley (Sam Worthington, <b>Avatar</b>), offers Cyrus amnesty for the team if they help Interpol by stealing a half-billion dollar shipment of gold being moved by a terrorism financier, Jorgenson (Jean Reno), who intends to pay a cyber hacker group to wreak havoc while he profits from the chaos which ensues. The catch is that the heist will have to occur while the plane is in midair.</p><p>So they come up with a wildly complicated scheme involving a experimental party plane converted into a stealth plane, drones and cloned transponders, laser safe cracking, and lurking underneath is the fact that Cyrus and Abby had a brief fling in the past. Gee, will those two crazy kids fall in love again? Will this complicated caper with zero room for error work out?<br /></p><p>While <b>Lift</b> is just another one of Netflix's disposable entertainment products like <b>Red Notice</b> or <b>Heart of Stone</b> - I defy you to tell me what either of those were about - the fact it's the director of <b>The Italian Job</b> doing an anemic knockoff of that movie 20 years later makes its deficiencies even more glaringly apparent, starting with the cast.</p><p><b>TIJ</b> had Marky Mark, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Edward Norton, Seth Green, Mos Def, and Donald Sutherland. <b>Lift</b> has Hart, Mbatha-Raw, Worthington, Vincent D'Onofrio as a bad "master of disguise", then some hot Spanish actress (Ursula Corbero) and a hot Korean actress (Kim Yun Jee) I've never heard of, a British Indian actor (Viveik Kalra) I've never heard of and some other white guy (Billy Magnussen) I've never heard of.</p><p>But being unknown wouldn't matter if screenwriter Daniel Kunka, whose only other credit is the 2009 John Cena vehicle <b>12 Rounds</b>, gave these characters something interesting about them. D'Onofrio's mediocre skills are given the most time, but never actually factor into any of the plan's elements. Compare that to the scene in <b>TIJ</b> where Charlize Theron's safecracker has to pose as a cable TV repair tech to case bad guy Edward Norton's mansion which was bought with the proceeds of the opening heist which led to his double-crossing the team and murdering her father. Or how Mos Def had a bad experience with dogs. Or the scene where Seth Green imagines Statham's conversation with a cable tech whose ID they need to steal for Theron's part.</p><p>But more critically is that with a few exceptions like can you really blow up an Los Angeles street to drop a armored truck down into a tunnel, much of what is shown in <b>TIJ</b> is technically possible and was done practically with Mini Coopers which could fit into hallways and storm sewer tunnels to haul the gold. (Even the target is the same!) <b>Lift</b> relies on CGI effects - many of which are pretty obvious, especially how exterior scenes were clearly shot on green screen stages - and almost none of it could really happen in real life and combined with the lack of danger to anyone (they should've killed one of the unknowns) means the stakes are nonexistent. <br /></p><p> For those shelling out the $23 for top tier Netflix service where the 4K content is reserved - Amazon Prime and Mouse+ don't charge extra for 4K, but Max (formerly Hobo Max) just pulled this crap on linear subscribers - get Dolby Vision & Dolby Atmos sound and it's shiny and bright, but lends to the disposable & plastic vibe of the whole endeavor.</p><p>While <b>Lift</b> isn't really a drag, it doesn't soar as we're supposed to believe. If you've run out of books to read and watched every other thing on Netflix, it suffices as something to look at, but if you're looking for a good caper flick with charismatic stars and plausible exciting action, stick with the original.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 5/10. Skip this & watch <b>The Italian Job</b> instead.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/m2L-Sa_6MU0?si=OzO88HRocZP-S7pb" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-43780411059923378672024-01-02T20:40:00.001-05:002024-01-03T20:35:06.643-05:00"Eileen" Review<p> Two days into the new year and we may already have our Worst Movie of 2024 winner identified with 364 days still to go. Take a bow, <b>Eileen</b>! You're terrible!</p><p>Thomasin McKenzie (<b>Jojo Rabbit</b>) stars as the titular Eileen, a 24-year-old woman who lives with her widowed alcoholic former police chief father, Jim (Shea Whigham, recently seen being Tom Cruise's frustrated pursuer in the latest <b>Mission: Impossible</b>), and works in a boys prison in a small Massachusetts town in the 1960s. Eileen is the type of girl who watches a couple making out in broad daylight in a car from her car and then grabs a handful of dirty snow to stuff down her skirt to chill her nethers. Then she fantasizes about acting out the Divinyls big hit song at work while looking at one of the guards. Swell gal.<br /></p><p>Into her humdrum world comes the new prison psychologist, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway aka Yummy Girl!), who we know is a change agent because she drives a red Thunderbird in a lot of neutral colored sedans, wears matching red leather gloves and has glamorous bleached blonde hair, literally standing out from the locals. She pays attention to Eileen and encourages her and Eileen begins to change in response.</p><p>Now you're probably thinking that this is leading to some sort of lesbian relationship and for the first hour the plot wades through molasses with hints and teases, but nothing particularly titillating. Then on Christmas Eve Rebecca invites Eileen over for drinks. She gets dressed up and goes over, but something seems off about things. Then Rebecca drops a bombshell which sends the story off on a bonkers tangent which actually got me interested in where this was going...before getting just stupid, unbelievable, then annoying as it ends on inconclusive notes which sent me looking up the source novel's synopsis.</p><p>The missus's immediate reaction was, <i>"How did this get made? Why did this get made?!?"</i> I knew almost nothing going in, but was leery of the spread between the 85% Rotten Tomatoes critics score vs a 57% audience score which is why people disregard critics, but that over half of the public thought this was good explains a lot of why our representative democracy is collapsing because if you think <b>Eileen</b> is good then you shouldn't be voting for anything more important than <b>American Idol</b>.<br /></p><p> Director William Oldroyd (<b>Lady Macbeth</b>) working from a script co-written by the novel's author, Ottessa Moshfegh, manages to make everything feel somnambulant with the 98-minute runtime feel much longer with little story or character to fill it. </p><p>The cast has dense Bawstan accents bordering on parody with the usually good Hathaway - who was one of the few bright spots in either of Christopher Nolan's awful <b>The Dark Knight <strike>Reloaded</strike> Rises</b> and <b>Interstellar</b> (where she somehow managed to make the ludicrous speech about how love is the 5th dimension not become the funnest moment of 2014) - sporting a persona on top of it suggesting she'd been given a note to play Rebecca as 1940s Lauren Bacall. From Bawstan.</p><p> McKenzie does a bit better, but as written she's such a cypher that it's hard to tell whether she's got issues or what's going on with her fantasies of suicide and murder. She's good at dreamer characters like she played in <b>Last Night in Soho</b>, but there's little substance to chew on here.<br /></p><p> All we wanted from<b> Eileen</b> was some soapy melodrama or some slap and tickle, but instead we got a maddeningly incomplete tale which could've risen a bit if it'd simply attempted to bite on the rich list of optional themes and plots. Gone all-in on something. <b>A Simple Favor</b> is a marvelously trashy movie that succeeds in its modern noir sensibility because it floors it where <b>Eileen</b> parks and suffocates on its own self-regard. <br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 2/10. Skip it.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/otDHCJcdN34?si=_2_sEO0a03KIKyO6" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-1625177446382285582023-12-30T21:45:00.002-05:002024-03-09T16:18:15.167-05:00"Maestro" 4K Review<p> It's Prestige Movie Season & Netflix's big Oscar-bait entry this year is <b>Maestro</b>, the biopic about legendary composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein that could've been titled <b>Bradley Cooper Demands You Give Him All The Oscars!</b> as the preposterously handsome & talented Cooper follows up his 2018 <b>A Star Is Born</b> re-re-remake with a checkbox-checking biopic that is highly likely to earn him four Oscar nominations personally for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Original Screenplay (with Josh Singer, <b>Spotlight</b>). (<b>UPDATE:</b> It didn't get Director, but it got the others as well as Best Actress, Cinematography, Makeup & Hairstyling, and Sound.)<br /></p><p> Told in three time periods (in a row after a brief late day prologue; not the jumbled cross-cutting Christopher Nolan relishes to his stories detriment) it opens in 1943 when a 25-year-old Bernstein gets the call to fill in for a New York Philharmonic performance, where he's an assistant conductor, after the guest conductor falls ill and the main man is out of town. Despite the no notice substitution, he becomes an instant star in a time when you could become a star for conducting. Since the performance isn't shown, we just have to take their word for it.</p><p>Elevated into society's upper echelons, Lenny meets Felicia (Carey Mulligan), an actress at a party and they become smitten with each other which is bad news for his boyfriend David (Matt Bomer). Being the 1940s when no one was openly gay, it was common for gay men to marry and have children, so Lenny and Felicia do just that, well aware of what he is.</p><p>The film then jumps ahead to the late-1950s where the couple are being interviewed for a television show and in sly Basil Exposition manner we're caught up on their career successes, especially Bernstein's in the wake of composing the score for <b>West Side Story</b>. But strain is showing in their marriage as his boozing and cruising begins to offend Felicia. As the story moves into the late-1960s, she gets very angry that the gay man she married is seeing men still and that the kids are beginning to catch wind of it, though he fends off his eldest daughter Jamie's (Maya Hawke) concerns by saying it's petty jealous of his unbearable talent.</p><p>Though their relationship turns cold, they remain married and he supports her through her losing battle with breast cancer, passing in 1978. The film then bounces to a coda in 1987 where we see him conducting, teaching, and dancing with men to the music of Tears For Fears.</p><p>Cooper attempts to do something different with the stock biopic template by dropping in to various waypoints of Bernstein's life as fame and recklessness test his marriage, but as a result almost all of what Bernstein is remembered for - the music - is curiously sideline with the exception of a showstopping recreation of the legendary performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony in 1973 which Cooper says he spent six years learning to mimic Bernstein's movements to actually lead the orchestra. [UPDATE: As John Mulaney joked at Cooper at the Oscars Governor's Awards ceremony he hosted, <i>"We wouldn't have known if you hadn't."</i>]</p><p>Ironically, he also doesn't really lean into the sexual aspects very explicitly which leaves us with a movie about a gay musician whom we don't really see making much music or being gay. Cooper said in an interview that he wanted to bring something more than the usual stuff of biopics and that audiences would be familiar with his music, so didn't need to see it rehashed. This is a tactical error of the screenplay because as hard as Cooper and Mulligan work to convey their underlying love even as their marriage disintegrates because, well, dude was gay (which wasn't a surprise), it always feels like we're denied seeing why he's legendary. Biopics shouldn't be deep cut trivia for superfans.</p><p>While the script is disappointing, Cooper's direction is superlative. [UPDATE: He deserved to be nominated over three of the actual nominees; the ones not named Nolan or Lanthimos.] He executes some location transitions in a fresh way such as when Lenny and Felicia race in from a patio, viewed from overhead, emerging in a theater balcony. He stages their courtship using the dancer sailors from <b>On The Town</b>, which he'd scored, as a backdrop.</p><p>But more than using aspect ratio changes and shifts from B&W to color - Matthew Libatique's cinematography is on point with early scenes a luminous 1.33:1 B&W to evoke the feel of old movies in the 1940s; later ones in color and 1.85:1 widescreen with addition color grading tweaks - which has been used by the likes of Christopher Nolan and Wes Anderson to indicate different time periods, Cooper calibrates the performances to mimic the style of acting in those eras. The 1940s scenes are enunciated crisply with rat-a-tat-tat Mid-Atlantic accents (even Sarah Silverman fits in as Bernstein's sister) then become more like Douglas Sirk in the Fifties and even more naturalistic in later times. I wonder how many people didn't even catch these subtle shifts?<br /></p><p>Mulligan is practically the lead as the long-suffering Felicia - she's top billed over Cooper - and she makes us understand why she persists in this partially sham marriage even when she could've walked out, though her bitterness at not wanting to tolerate what she tolerated for two decades is her own fault.</p><p>Cooper is also excellent. Like Brad Pitt, he's generally been underrated as an actor because he's so damn good looking and he's been nominated four times for acting [UPDATE: this is #5 for acting and he's up to 12 overall!] I'm generally down on imitation performances because there is so much reference footage to work up an impersonation from, but here he sidesteps it by omitting all the stuff there'd be footage to copy and he <i>almost</i> completely disappears underneath the makeup, mostly looking like himself in the early years, totally unrecognizable as the lifelong chain smoker with leathery skin in his later days.</p><p>About the makeup, because everything in this timeline is stupid and people just aren't happy unless they're outraged about something, there was some squawking about his prosthetic proboscis being anti-Semitic, playing off the "Jew nose" stereotype, but fercryingoutloud, Bernstein had a prominent honker and King of the WASPs Cooper doesn't. It's not a hate crime to look like the subject. (Was Gary Oldman buried under a fat suit and prosthetics to play Winston Churchill in his Oscar-winning role in <b>The Darkest Hours</b> "fat-shaming"?) <br /></p><p>While well-executed from performance to visuals to tone, <b>Maestro</b> feels more like a companion piece to a more factual documentary on Leonard Bernstein than a satisfying portrait of one of the 20th Century's leading classical lights.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 7/10. Catch it on Netflix.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gJP2QblqLA0?si=EUX7_2DMq0DG4456" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-39535502259277366442023-12-26T23:30:00.027-05:002023-12-28T00:11:17.082-05:00"Dream Scenario" Review<p>Sometimes a movie has an intriguing germ of an idea, but not enough of that idea to tell a satisfactory story and the latest example of that sort of thing is A24's <b>Dream Scenario</b> which takes a very good, restrained Nicolas Cage performance and an intriguing premise about as far as it can go before wandering off lost in the woods because there is no real point to be made.<br /></p><p> Cage stars as Paul Matthews, a college biology professor for whom the term "nondescript" implies much more pizazz than he exhibits. He's got a wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson, <b>Mare of Easttown</b>), and two teenage daughters, Hannah (Jessica Clement) and Sophie (Lily Bird) and lives in a very nice home, but his students don't really pay attention in class and he's feeling professionally disrespected, if not ripped off by a colleague who seems to be basing her work on his concepts. But being a dull man in an oversized parka with a fuzzy fur collar, who cares, right?<br /></p><p> Things get more interesting when he notices strangers looking at him more than seems called for even without the coat, but the reason isn't known until an old girlfriend of his, Claire (Marnie McPhail Diamond), approaches him and Janet after seeing a play, telling them that Paul as been appearing regularly in her dreams. She asks if she could write about this odd occurrence on her blog and he agrees, but wakes up shortly thereafter to have 100+ messages on FaceSpace from people who found his profile and shared that they too have been seeing him in their dreams.</p><p>Regardless of what the dreamer's scenario is - teeth falling out; being chased by a monster in a surreal landscape; trapped in an earthquake; holding a dying friend - the common element is that Paul appears, but says and does nothing and seems disconnected from the situation. Of course the media hops on this curiosity and Paul immediately goes viral.</p><p>However, sudden fame has its downsides as a mentally unbalanced man breaks into the family home and tries to kill the man from his dreams. Trying to make a produce stand out of these dreamy lemons, Paul takes a meeting with a branding marketing startup called Thoughts? run by Trent (Michael Cera, not at all like he used to be) who wants to use Paul's fame to influence dreamers into drinking Sprite. Paul wants a book deal, but for a hard science book, not some instant fame cash-in, so there's not much agreement to be found.<br /></p><p> After the meeting, he goes for drinks with Trent's assistant Molly (Dylan Gelula, who played Xanthippe, Jane Krakowski's hot surly daughter on <b>Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt</b>) who confides in him that she had a really hot sex dream with him and wants him to come over to reenact it. This goes about as well as you'd expect for a guy who wears that coat, but things in general take a very dark turn as the multitudes who have Paul in their dreams start to find him to be an increasingly hostile visitor and the backlash begins.</p><p>At the center of <b>Dream Scenario</b> is a very good performance from Cage who has been tinkering with the balance between paycheck gigs to actual acting roles lately with a wrongly Oscar-snubbed performance in <b>Pig</b> and his self-deprecating take on himself in <b>The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent</b>. With a male pattern baldness coif and those dad clothes, Cage's Paul is a decent, but weak man, who tries to ride out an increasingly bizarre situation that is wholly out of his control yet entirely not of his making. He didn't purposely intrude on people's dreams, he doesn't control what they experience, yet the whole world holds it against him.</p><p>There are several concepts that Norwegian writer-director-editor Kristoffer Borgli attempts to play with - the fleeting fickleness and shallowness vapidity of viral fame, the semi-emasculated condition of some men at the hands of conniving women, the way today's snowflake Zoomer generation can't cope with the slightest adversity - but he never plunges wholly into any of them with much teeth or gusto. If only he'd picked a topic nailed its absurdities.<br /></p><p>It doesn't help that when the dreams stop and the concept of a gizmo which allows people to enter other's dreams - BOUNDARIES, ANYONE?!? - which becomes just another influencer marketing racket (hot on the heels of the latest <b>South Park</b> episode mocking this), it all fizzles out into a underdeveloped last movement which reveals that Borgli had a good idea, but that idea just couldn't prop up a satisfying feature-length narrative. (It's like so many <b>Saturday Night Live</b> sketches which just trail off because they can't write a button for it.)<br /></p><p>Just as with Netflix's <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2023/12/leave-world-behind-4k-review.html" target="_blank"><b>Leave The World Behind</b></a> a few weeks ago which stretched a <b>Twilight Zone</b> episode's premise over a 400% longer runtime, <b>Dream Scenario</b> also feels like it would've been a good <b>Twilight Zone</b> episode in the 45-minute-long range. As it is, it's not a nightmare but just a dream that ends just as it could've gotten good.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/q3x9iUL-74w?si=fE-10vFzSrKgRThp" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-19362348630135616252023-12-26T20:00:00.019-05:002023-12-28T23:21:50.826-05:00"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" 4K Review<p>After <b>The Hunger Games</b> tetralogy (what <b>Alien</b> fans know as "quadrilogy" after that 4-film DVD release) wrapped up in 2015, it's been quiet in the young adult dystopian future business after the <b>Divergent</b> series flamed out one movie short of its conclusion. (<b>Divergent</b> was the GoBots of <b>Hunger Games</b> books/movies. I tried to read the first one and bailed halfway through because the writing was so bad.) So when the trailer for <b>The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes</b> dropped, my reaction was puzzlement as to where this came from and who exactly was asking for a prequel movie about President Snow, who was played by Donald Sutherland in the original series? Apparently series author Suzanne Collins had published this in 2020 and here we are.<br /></p><p> Set 64 years before the events of the first <b>Hunger Games</b> film, <b>BoS&S</b> (not typing that full title) tells the story of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blythe in a star-maker performance), the 18-year-old son of General Crassus Snow whose father was killed in the civil war between the Capitol of Panem and the Districts. He lives in poverty with his sister, Tigris (Hunter Schafer), and Grandma'am (Fionnula Flannagan) while attending the Academy, but any hopes of attending University ride on winning the Plinth Prize scholarship.</p><p>But on the day he expects to be named winner, a whammy is dealt in the form of an announcement by the Academy's dean and creator of the Hunger Games, Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage sporting a goatee that doubles his body mass), that the Plinth won't be awarded to the top student as Snow expected, but there would be an additional judging criteria, namely the 24 students would be assigned mentorship roles to one of the tributes from the Reaping for the upcoming 10th Hunger Games.</p><p>Adding to the pressure is the appearance of current Head Gamemaker, Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, eviling it up), who complains that the ratings are down and the citizens of Capitol are bored of the Games, so ideas for boosting ratings would be appreciated. Meanwhile, Highbottom has saddled Snow with the girl tribute from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a musician whose reaping may've been rigged by the Mayor of the District.<br /></p><p> Snow comes up with a proposal for people to sponsor the tributes and donate funds which could be used to supply food, water, medicine, etc. to those in the arena and visits Lucy at the zoo where the tributes are held prior to the Games. While visiting the arena to plan strategy, rebels set off bombs which kill several tributes and mortally wounds the President's son.</p><p>But the Games go on and while Highbottom instructs the mentors to concentrate on making their tributes entertaining, Snow wants to keep her alive, which he does by providing assistance which when discovered leads Highbottom to expel him from school and sentence him to 20 years as a Peacekeeper in a District. Initially assigned to District 8, he bribes someone to ship him to District 12 in hopes of finding Lucy.<br /></p><p> Which he does and begins to have a surreptitious relationship with her, but her possible involvements with the rebels along with his friend Sejanus (Josh Andres Rivera) seeming to go native to the cause puts Snow in a bind between friendship, love, duty, and wanting to get back to the Capitol or escape with Lucy to freedom in the wilds.</p><p><b>BoS&S</b> has an odd three-part, but not three-act, structure with each chapter given titles - The Mentor, The Prize, The Peacekeeper - and contributes to a 2h 37m runtime that feels like half of a sequel has been appended onto this prequel. Previous installments had structures with the first half leading up to the Games and the second showing the Games with the 2nd and 3rd films ending on cliffhangers to pique interest. I didn't note the time, but it felt like there was another 45-60 minutes of story after the Games conclude and what happens didn't really illuminate what turned Snow from an empathetic young man into the cruel monster Sutherland embodied.</p><p>The hook of the <b>Star Wars</b> prequels was we would learn how a little boy would grow up to be a Jedi Knight only to turn to the Dark Side of the Force and become Darth Vader. Since we know where he ends up, in an walking iron lung, the trip is everything as he is meant to be a tragic fallen hero. But we know he wasn't always bad because Obi-Wan Kenobi mentioned that Luke Skywalker's father was a good friend (while hiding the connection to Big Black Badness until <b>The Empire Strikes Back</b>) so we go in knowing we'll see a good guy break bad. What was the hint that President Snow had a softer side when he was young?</p><p>Still that we're even interested in this superfluous tale rests on the performance of Blyth who handles the spotty script's turns ably. The missus was taken by his resemblance to David Bowie, even calling out his closing costume as a direct homage to Station To Station-era photos - someone book the biopic stat! - while apparently the Internet found his buzzcut Peacekeeper look more Eminemesque. I have no idea if they're going to make more <b>Hunger Games</b> Snow Saga movies, but they've got the right guy for the job.</p><p>Zegler's performance is more problematic - not because of her off-camera antics being a spoiled brat and mouthing off so much about <b>Snow White</b> that she's cost Disney untold tens of millions of dollars to reshoot their cursed live-action remake to undo the damage caused by their woke take on the material and her unhelpful comments - but because she plays Lucy with a syrupy twang that sounds like a modern girl mocking Dolly Parton. She has a great singing voice - she was Maria in Steven Spielberg's unnecessary <b>West Side Story</b> remake - but Lucy is written too thinly and cryptically for her to embody what it is that makes Snow go to such lengths to save her then try to be with her only to, well, you'll see.<br /></p><p>Dinklage is money, as usual, making us wonder why he seems to have it in for Snow while constantly reminding us how he was his father's best friend. The revelation of just why he visits the sins of the father on the son is a twist at the end.</p><p>Davis chews the scenery as Dr. Gaul, reveling in the "muttations" she makes for the Games like the titular snakes and the living tape recorder jabberjays. It's a coin toss as to which villain Davis plays - Gaul or <b>Suicide Squad/Peacemaker</b> series' Amanda Waller (which is basically Oprah right down to the murdering) - is the bigger bad, but she's having a ball. </p><p>Honorable mention goes to Jason Schwartzman who plays "Lucky" Flickerman - presumably related to Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman in the original films - the weathercaster who also hosts the Games broadcast. He is our representative of the vacuity of Capitol's residents.<br /></p><p>Director Frances Lawrence, who directed the last three <b>Hunger Games</b> movies, does a good job with the material and it's interesting to see how modest the early Games were with combat in a rather small enclosed arena (not the massive outdoor environments we're accustomed to) and the tributes held in a zoo pen to be gawked at instead of styled and showcased like contestants on <b>Panem Idol</b> before being sent to die for the entertainment of the Capitol. But with small scale games and way too much intrigue in that third chapter, there's not much he can do for excitement.</p><p>While an odd cash grab telling an unneeded story, <b>The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes</b> isn't especially bad, but bloated and unfocused, paying too much attention to some things while short shrifting others. But if there was another installment, I'd give it a look, so we'll see if the franchise's odds are in their favor.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NxW_X4kzeus?si=UBSD43g7p4L5mT1f" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-65112662177860197222023-12-25T22:30:00.025-05:002023-12-27T19:10:38.680-05:00"Christmas Bloody Christmas" Review<p>For some reason the missus didn't want to watch any of the usual Christmas movie fare this year, but suggested the Shudder Original <b>Christmas Bloody Christmas</b> which was described as "robot Santa goes on killing spree on Christmas Eve." Not very reasony for the seasony, but OK.</p><p>Riley Dandy (Netflix's <b>That's Amor</b>, and reminds me of Gillian Jacobs) stars as Tori, the owner of an independent record store in a small California town. It's Christmas Eve and she's planning on a Tindr hookup, but is talked out of it by her employee Robbie (Sam Delich), who's attracted to her. He convinces her to go to the bar with him instead and on the way they stop at the toy store where their friends Jay (Jonah Ray) and Lahna (Dora Madison) work. </p><p>Also at the toy store is one of the robot Santas (Abraham Benrubi, <b>ER</b>) which an opening news report informs us are being recalled because there have been reports that they're reverting to their original firmware programming. Oh yeah, forgot to mention that these Santas were repurposed military combat droids - basically Terminators in red suits and white beards. What could go wrong? A: Everything, which is why we have this movie.<br /></p><p> While the overall production feels low budget from the occasionally questionable casting to the budget special makeup effects to the luridly lit cinematography which I mistook for cheap digital freaking out over all the red, green, and blue neon lights (it's actually film!), there's one aspect which elevated this basic story above your general slasher flick ilk: the writing. (No! Yes!)<br /></p><p> The banter between the characters, especially Tori and Robbie and their friends then later with a bartender, is elevated in a movie chatter style, but doesn't get into the "everyone talks like Kevin Smith and is an expert on comic books" territory. The characters are distinct and we get to know them beyond mere two-dimensional cartoon archetypes awaiting their inevitable slaughter so when they start getting whacked, he feel their loss.</p><p>The ending Final Girl vs. RoboSanta battle drags on a bit and the final shot is poorly considered and leaves the viewer on an unsatisfying note, but overall <b>Christmas Bloody Christmas</b> is a pleasantly surprising option for those unable to decide whether they want to watch a horror movie OR a Christmas movie. Why not both? <br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (It's on Shudder.)</p><p>This trailer pretty much gives away the whole movie, so skip it if you plan on watching the movie proper. <br /></p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fjLFSDCMuBM?si=TwNrK5uNqaLSIARS" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-30997429827751702932023-12-23T20:15:00.002-05:002023-12-24T15:20:26.265-05:00"Silent Night" Review<p> You probably didn't notice, but it's been 20 years since legendary Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo - who made his name with action-packed crime dramas like <b>A Better Tomorrow, The Killer</b>, and <b>Hard Boiled</b> then had a decent run in Hollywood with <b>Broken Arrow, Mission: Impossible II</b>, and the best, <b>Face/Off</b> - has made a Hollywood movie, 2003's <b>Paycheck</b>. He's been working back in China, most notable the two <b>Red Cliff</b> films, but now he's back with <b>Silent Night</b>, a unique premise for a Christmas-set movie that was met with middling reviews and audience disinterest, resulting in a rapid trip to streaming in a few weeks.<br /></p><p> <b>Silent Night</b> is about Brian (Joel Kinnaman), a grieving father whose son was killed by a stray bullet when a rolling gun battle between rival gangs passed their home. When he tried to chase down the participants, one gang banger, Playa (Harold Torres), who sports a questionable face tattoo choice shoots him in the throat, robbing him of his voice and providing the movie its hook: There is almost no dialogue spoken by anyone.<br /></p><p>After a month in the hospital, he returns home with his wife, Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno, <b>Maria Full of Grace</b>), where he becomes withdrawn, spending his days guzzling straight booze in the garage. After a few months of this, he decides to do something with his life. He gets a calendar, writes "KILL THEM ALL" on the block for December 24, the anniversary of his son's death, then gets down to training to do this. While in the beginning he can't do a single pull-up and seems to hit the ceiling of the range more than the target with his gun, as the deadline nears he gets ripped and on target.<br /></p><p> However, in one smart nod to reality, the first time he tries to use his new combat skills learned off YouTube against someone other than practice dummies, he is almost killed because someone is actually fighting back. He's not Rambo and theoretical practice only gets you so far. That said, his night of vengeance sees him up his game, especially driving and shooting, though never to <b>John Wick</b> level, naturally.<br /></p><p> At its core, <b>Silent Night</b> is a bog standard revenge flick which I'm normally friendly too, but here the conceit is the only distinguishing factor and the gimmick is distracting because it's so unnatural. Other than radios giving dates to mark the passage of time (as if the calendar couldn't provide that) or police chatter, there is no reason why no one else speaks other than the gimmick. This makes for a lot of free time for viewers watching at home to provide their own MST3K/Rifftrax commentary such as when Brian goes into his son's untouched bedroom with stuffed animals strewn on the floor and I cried, <i>"Oh no! No one fed the animals for four months and they starved!"</i> Yes, it undercuts the emotional intent of the scene, but we make our own fun at times.</p><p>Kinnaman has one gear for most of his performances - glowering - and he does that here as well with a side of grief. Moreno has little to do but grieve and Kid Cudi as the silent police detective who is peripherally involved does what he can with what little there is to do.</p><p>As for Woo, he still has it in his mid-70s and checks a couple of his signature move boxes (yes to shooting with two guns, but not while diving; yes to slow-motion donning of a coat; no to doves scattering in the middle of a gunfight) and there are a couple of really gnarly kills, but this all seems like an experiment which at 1h 44m is much too long for what it does. </p><p>If you want good vengeance, stick with the <b>John Wick</b> series. If you want a violent "Christmas" movie full of bloodshed, but you've seen <b>Elf</b> too many times, check out <b><a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2022/12/violent-night-review.html" target="_blank">Violent Night</a></b> (currently on Prime Video).<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 4/10. Skip it.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yBnTqn0lBDA?si=75cPt9kI6JB86Vul" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-7149577147554109742023-12-11T20:30:00.057-05:002023-12-12T22:24:27.093-05:00"Leave The World Behind" 4K Review<p> It's Prestige Movie Season which means Netflix is putting its big awards bait movies in theaters for brief runs before bringing them home to streaming. This week's arrival is the adaptation of a 2020 novel <b>Leave The World Behind</b> starring Oscar winners Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali, Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon in a film written and directed by <b>Mr. Robot</b> creator Sam Esmail. So prestige. Much stars. Wow.</p><p>Roberts is Amanda, a brittle misanthropic advertising exec who wakes up her college professor husband Clay (Hawke) one morning with news that she'd booked a rental of a luxurious home out on Long Island for them and their two kids - 16-year-old Archie (Charlie Evans, who looks like a more butch Timothee Chalamet) and 13-year-old Rose (Farrah Mackenzie). They head out and arrive and settle in before going to the beach where their sun and sand are interrupted by a massive oil tanker running aground right where they were sitting.<br /></p><p> Already rattled by that, the WiFi and cable TV at the house goes down and there's no cell service which really irritates Rose because she's been binging <b>Friends</b> and was about to watch the final episode and can't wait to learn what happens. (She gets off the plane, kid. SPOILER ALERT!) With little else to do, the kids turn in while their parents stay up when there's a knock at the door.</p><p>They find a talk black man in a tuxedo and a young woman in an evening dress and they claim they're G.H. (Ali), the owner of the house and his daughter, Ruth (Myha'la). They were in NYC for a Philharmonic concert, but there was a blackout and with G.H. unable to climb 14 floors of stairs to their Park Avenue Manhattan home, they decided to come to their Long Island place. Amanda is extremely suspicious, but with no way to bring up their emails and G.H. conveniently having left his wallet in his checked coat, there's no proof of their identity. (More on this later.) Ultimately, Amanda and Clay agree to let these folks stay in their own home, down in the basement in-law suite, after G.H. give them $1000 cash refund on their rental. <br /></p><p> The next day, there is still no communication with the outside world so Clay tries to go into town to get a newspaper and see if anyone knows anything while G.H. goes to a neighbor's a couple of miles away to see what they know and what they find is confusion and horror involving leaflet-dropping drones and crashing passenger planes. Meanwhile back at the ranch, animals are acting very weird and deafeningly loud noises which crack windows and tablet screen increase the feeling of unease.</p><p>While <b>Leave The World Behind</b> seems to be a decent premise (more on that later as well), its failing is due to too few details stretched out over a way too long runtime (2h 21m) with so many superfluous scenes and ultimately no point it's trying to make. Is it about racism as the wealthy white couple (who can afford $2000+ for a weekend lark) is suspicious of the even richer black people? Is it about our dependence on technology for everything and how the moment the system crashes, we can't survive such primitive lives like they were way back in, say 1995? Is it about some evil people triggering societal collapse for power? Is it about how we mistreat the environment? All or none of the above or somewhere in between?</p><p>The problems begin with Esmail's script. There are too many scenes which could've been cut without being missed beginning with an encounter Clay has with a Mexican woman who doesn't speak English and we spend a couple of minutes with her frantically speaking to his uncomprehending ears before he drives away. A scene where Archie tries to freak out Rose with the proposal someone was watching her room from a shed in the woods is more suited for a younger child and not a 13-year-old who watches <b>The West Wing</b> but <i>"only the Aaron Sorkin seasons."</i> And the scene where Amanda, who was being nasty to G.H. minutes before, and he dance to an R&B song culminating in their having to proclaim they love their spouses so this moment couldn't go on is both telegraphed and out of nowhere. </p><p>He never seems to want to land on a firm point either. With the film executive produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, you'd expect some heavy-handed moralizing about how extremely wealthy black people are the real victims here, but Esmail limits the race-baiting to some snark from Ruth. There's an irony that the one character the audience is supposed to see as a someone to look down on, G.H.'s contractor, Danny (Kevin Bacon), a Doomsday prepper stereotype who probably votes for not Democrats is the one they run to for help since he's exactly one of "those people" who can handle the end of the world. </p><p>But even more basically, it does what <b>The Walking Dead</b> always did to drag out tension and distrust which is to have people refuse to do or say basic things which would diffuse distrust. How many times on <b>TWD</b> did various groups fear each other because no one bothered to ask, <i>"Hey, what's your story?"</i> Nope, it was always six episodes of glowering and suspicion. Why didn't G.H. just say something like, <i>"In the music room is a wall of vinyl albums and on the leftmost column about eye level, in the Ds, is a copy of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew signed by Miles reading, 'Stay cool, G.H.'"</i> Because we would be denied 10 minutes of Amanda seeming racist or paranoid.<br /></p><p>Then there's Esmail's direction. While he uses a few of his <b>Mr. Robot</b> framing tropes, he seems to have watched David Fincher's <b>Panic Room</b> and decided to see how many impossible camera shots he could include as the camera moves through floors, walls and windows with the magic of CGI. When done properly, the viewer probably doesn't even notice the impossibility of a movie camera to pass between railing spindles or a coffee pot handle. </p><p>In Steven Spielberg's <b>War of the Worlds</b>, there's <a href="https://youtu.be/EUv7iRaWOOQ?si=iuLW6sIipEOuM_IS" target="_blank">a 2-1/2 minute scene where the camera follows a minivan careening down a highway</a> while the camera circles around and <i>through</i> the vehicle but the viewer is so riveted by the drama they may not realize what they saw was impossible to film as shown. Here Esmail <i>wants</i> the viewer to notice every time he uses these tricks like when the camera passes through a doorwall then the CGI glass appears then the reflection in the glass. Suddenly you're not paying attention to the story, you're distracted by the technical showoffery.</p><p>There's also a question of the geography of the location. Presumably they're in the semi-rural east end of Long Island, but everything seems to be more like farm country where houses are miles apart, except there's another mansion a short walk through the woods. But some shots towards the end make it look like they're just across a river from the City except you'd have to be on the west end where Brooklyn and Queens are. Everything is very close or extremely far at random.</p><p>The performances are solid across the small cast with Ali delivering his usually solid work as a man who gradually realizes he may've been more forewarned then he realized. Hawke is OK, but you pity that he's married to Robert's one-note harridan. There's a scene which tries to explain why she hates everyone, but it's like everything else, too little, too who cares?<br /></p><p>But the biggest problem is that pretty much the entire scenario was told in two whole fewer hours in a 1960 episode of <b>The Twilight Zone</b> entitled "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" (S1E22) which is about a cul-de-sac which experiences a power and communication outage and after a kid says he read in a comic book that aliens may be behind the event and that they send advance scouts who look human to blend into the neighborhood, everyone immediately goes DEFCON 1 and suspects each other with disastrous consequences. It's a very memorable episode and it only takes 25 minutes to tell its tale. (It's on Amazon Freevee if you'd like to watch it.)<br /></p><p> While I can't recommend <b>Leave The World Behind</b> it's probably the highest-scoring Skip It movie I can recall. Nothing about it is especially <i>bad<b>,</b></i> but it's simply not very good, especially at this runtime. Movies running too damn long is a chronic problem and it really needs to be addressed by Hollyweird. If it was chopped down to 100 minutes, it'd be far more effective by still be four times as long as <b>The Twilight Zone</b>'s version.</p><p>Technically, the Atmos sound mix (limited to those in the most expensive Premium tier) has some cool overhead effects with planes flying around and the positioning of sounds around the environment. Visually, the Dolby Vision doesn't offer much bright highlights, but helps with shadows and color.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 5/10. Skip it. Watch The Twilight Zone instead.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cMVBi_e8o-Y?si=g5KWw5qfnAXlV2ot" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-50861274332187395402023-12-10T23:45:00.002-05:002023-12-13T21:47:28.912-05:00"Bullet To The Head" Review<p> After the tedium & vacuity of <b>Killers of the Flower Moon</b>, we needed something less pretentious and quick, so it was time to catch up on <b>Bullet to the Head</b>, the 2013 Sylvester Stallone-topped crime drama which also co-starred Sung Kang (Han from the <b>Furry Fastness</b> series), Jason Momoa (<b>Broseidon</b>), and Sarah Shahi (<b>Sex/Life</b>).<br /></p><p> Sly is Jimmy Bobo, a career criminal and hitman whom we meet with his partner, Louie (Jon Seda), as they pose as cops to gain entry to a New Orleans hotel room where they execute their target, Greely (Holt McCallany). While checking for witnesses, Jimmy finds a hooker in the bathroom, but doesn't kill her because he's a nice hitman. They go to a noisy bar to have a post-murder drink, but when Jimmy goes to the bathroom, Keegan (Momoa), fatally stabs Louie and almost gets Jimmy, but since we're only a few minutes into a 91-minute movie, he survives and Keegan gets away.<br /></p><p> At the police station, Washington D.C. detective Taylor Kwan (Kang) arrives and announces he's interested in the hotel killing because Greely was his former partner, a cop gone bad and fired, but still his ex-partner. He learns that Jimmy was a known associate of Louie, a suspect in the Greely's death, so goes after him.</p><p>Meanwhile, Keegan, at the behest of the shady developer Morel (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Mr. Eko on <b>Lost</b>) and his lawyer Baptiste (Christian Slater aka Young Jack Nicholson in everything), is dispatched to retrieve the blackmail dossier Greely had passed to a local mobster and the scene where he does so while killing at least a dozen guys is some <b>John Wick</b>-grade stuff.</p><p>As for Kwon, he finds out the hard way that the Crescent City's cops aren't that honest and ends up with a bullet in his.....shoulder. Rescued by Jimmy, he's taken to Jimmy's daughter Lisa (Shahi), who runs a tattoo parlor and thanks to a convenient year of med school, can also patch bullet wounds. After fixing him up Kwon reluctantly agrees to team up with Jimmy as he tries to find out who set him up and is trying to kill Kwon. Buddy cop movie hijinx ensue.</p><p>There's not much to discuss with a movie like <b>Bullet in the Head</b>. There's lots of violence and, you know, bullets in heads, and Sly wisecracks in an over-it mumble. Kwon isn't as cool as Han, but Kang does with it what he can. Shahi is <a href="https://64.media.tumblr.com/f041882bebcdc94df78a3e505ad6f8d2/tumblr_p1rfj7GhQk1vew933o9_r1_400.gif" target="_blank">hot</a>. (Oink.) It's odd seeing Momoa as a clean-shaven babyface, but the missus likeyed.</p><p>Director Walter Hill (<b>The Warriors, 48 Hrs., Streets of Fire</b>) is an old hand at this hard-boiled tough guy buddy flick and he has a bit of <b>48 Hrs.</b> bickering between Jimmy and Kwon and echoes the bonkers sledgehammer fight of <b>Streets of Fire</b> with a climatic fireman's axe duel between Jimmy and Keegan, but he's hamstrung by a fairly rote screenplay by Alessandro Camon, who I was genuinely surprised to see shared a Best Original Screenplay nomination for his previous film, 2009's <b>The Messenger</b>. (He works mostly as a producer.) There are few surprises and while entertaining enough, it's no <b>John Wick</b>.<br /></p><p> <b>Bullet to the Head</b> falls into the "something to watch when there's nothing else on" category, but considering the excessively long run times of today's prestige flicks - you could watch this almost FOUR times in the time it takes to watch <b>Flowers of the Killer Moon</b> and <a href="https://www.dirkflix.com/2023/12/leave-world-behind-4k-review.html" target="_blank"><b>Leave The World Behind</b></a> once each - it now falls into the desperately needed "movies that don't require a nap and a large coffee to get through in one sitting" category. </p><p>Ultimately, it delivers what it says on the tin: Macho tough guy bluster and bullets to heads.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 6/10. Catch it on cable.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qGDyslD68as?si=79t3F-lX1xZWeAsu" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-57176128269088748222023-12-09T19:30:00.069-05:002024-03-10T13:57:32.330-04:00"Killers of the Flower Moon" 4K Review<p>Let's get something clear right now: It doesn't matter how good an artist WAS in the past or how large a legacy they've amassed if they're recent work is subpar. Too often, critics grade on a curve, transferring the greatness of the past to the mediocrity of the present to varying degrees. I've repeatedly called out the immunity Christopher Nolan has earned from his run from <b>Memento</b> to <b>Inception</b> which has allowed everything since to be hailed as yet another "masterpiece" from a "visionary filmmaker" when they've ranged from screamingly mediocre to "Why is anyone allowing this clown to make movies?" (I haven't seen <b>Oppenheimer</b> yet because I'm not in a rush to spend three hours checking in whether he still sucks. UPDATE: Saw it and it's OK. Not terrible, but not the masterpiece his simps feel it is.)</p><p>The desperate equivocation over <b>Tenet</b> nearly broke some critics as they attempted to justify that blazing dumpster fire by transferring the greatness of <b>The Dark Knight</b> and mumbling about how maybe it'd make sense after repeated viewings. (Note: If you need to watch a movie more than once to understand the plot, it's failed at basic storytelling.)<br /></p><p> Which brings us to Martin Scorsese who has made some all-time classics in his 50-year-long career, but has devolved into a purveyor of needlessly excessively long movies which rack up tons of Oscar nominations for the past decade-plus. His last four films - <b>The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman</b>, and <b>Killers of the Flower Moon</b> - have and an average running time of 3h 9m and <b>Killers</b> is 3h 26m of mercilessly boring nothingness that expects us to swoon because Marty is working with his two most famous muses, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. [UPDATE: It worked as it raked in 10 Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actress, Supporting Actor, Costume Design, Original Song, Original Score, Production Design, Editing, and Best Cinematography. Oy vey.]<br /></p><p> Set in 1919 Oklahoma we learn the Osage Indians on the land discovered oil some time before and as a result have become very wealthy, but because racism they are deemed "incompetent" and must have their finances and savings managed by a white court-appointed legal guardian. <br /></p><p> Into this frontier comes Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) who returns from World War I looking to live near and work for his uncle, William King Hale (De Nero). Given a job as a cab driver, he meets Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and becomes smitten with her, eventually marrying her and starting a family.</p><p>However, on the side Ernest has been also committing robberies against the Osage with his brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) and King has been ordering the murders of Mollie's family members because the headrights - the rights to the valuable minerals and oil under the land - would accrue to the remaining family, eventually meaning only Mollie survives and as a diabetic, Ernest is given poison to put in her insulin to further weaken and eventually kill her, leaving the rights to Ernest.</p><p>The Osage realize they're being knocked off, but with local law enforcement in King's pocket they attempt to hire a private investigator and seek help from the Federal government, but those efforts are thwarted. Only when Mollie makes a pilgrimage to Washington D.C. and pleads to President Calvin Coolidge which brings a BOI (the original name of the FBI) investigator, Thomas Bruce Wright Sr. (Jessie Plemons), to town where the conspiracy is unraveled and Ernest put on trial along with King.</p><p>There is so much wrong with <b>Killers of the Flower Moon</b> that it's hard to know where to start, but let's begin with the running time. This is a two-hour movie stuffed into a 3-1/2 hour sack. For comparison, <b>Taxi Driver </b>and <b>Raging Bull</b> ran 10 minutes under and over two hours; Scorsese's pity Oscar winner, <b>The Departed</b> was 2-1/2 hours. Even the bloated <b>Gangs of New York</b> was "only' three hours. There simply isn't enough story to justify the runtime. [UPDATE: How the great Thelma Schoonmaker gets nominated for editing a movie which appears to have just assembled everything they shot into something sequential is sad.]</p><p>Yes, the indigenous peoples of these lands got a raw deal and that's why liberals refuse to observe Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, but I agree with <a href="https://youtu.be/aRQFli6zMh4?si=ZU2-DkW4bazYh4fY" target="_blank">Spike's take on the subject</a> on <b>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</b> in that we get it, MOVE ON! But even as a liberal white self-loathing hairshirt worn by Hollywood to preen virtue it seems more interested in the bad white guys stories than the Indians other than their being the victims of white genocide/land theft.<br /></p><p>Then there's Leo's performance, if you can call grimacing as if he has a tummy ache for 3-1/2 hours a performance. [UPDATE: The fact that Leo was shut out for nominations by everyone while his co-stars were noted says it all as to how bad this is. When nominations are handed out like candy and he don't get none.] He's also a totally passive character, bossed around by King, doing as he's told even as it's harming the woman he supposedly loves. And he's simply waaaaaaaaay too old for the part. DiCaprio was 47 when filming this and he's looking his age. (Banging sub-25-year-old supermodels ages a man, I guess.) He simply doesn't read like a young man needed a job after a war.</p><p>Gladstone is OK as the suffering Mollie, though all she does is smile knowingly at Leo's flirting, be stoic, then spend hours crying and suffering. There's a lot of Oscar buzz around Gladstone, but sadly it seems mostly oriented about wanting to Make History and allow Hollyweird's liberal white guilt itch to be scratched by naming the first Native American Oscar winner now that they checked the First Asian Best Actress box last year with Michelle Yeoh. (It's racist and demeaning, but that's Hollyweird for you.) [UPDATE: While Emma Stone has been winning most of the awards for <b>Poor Things</b> as she should, Gladstone won the SAG Award and that may portend an upset at the Oscars. It would be another sad case of Hollyweird allowing their political preening to trump performance as when Sean Penn in <b>Milk</b> was gifted Best Actor over Mickey Rourke in <b>The Wrestler</b> in response to California voters atteHGmpting to codify opposite sex marriage in 2008. Penn's performance was excellent and was my runner-up pick, but even Penn knew he won because of politics.]<br /></p><p>The surprise performance is De Niro's. He's been phoning in his performances for ages, lazily relying on his tough guy persona and outdated reputation as America's Greatest Actor (when his last Oscar win was in 1980), but here he actually shows up ready to play, probably to show Scorsese and DiCaprio who the boss was. King could've been a one-note cartoon, but De Niro trims his portrayal with enough humanity and manipulative charisma that you'd believe an idiot like Ernest would obey.<br /></p><p>Part of the fawning over <b>Killers of the Flower Moon</b> is due to Scorsese's age (he's now 81) and how many more movies he has in him. (For comparison, Ridley Scott is 86 and currently making <b>Gladiator 2</b>.) But as I said at the beginning, past success is no excuse for current failure. If your favorite restaurant's quality has declined, would you keep going because it used to be good? Exactly. My favorite Scorsese movie is <b>After Hours</b> which was recently released by the Criterion Collection. That 1985 black comedy has a stacked cast, is simply bonkers in its storytelling, and clocks in at a brisk and satisfying 97 minutes. Scorsese should try telling meaningful stories in a concise manner because this does neither. <br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 3/10. Skip it.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EP34Yoxs3FQ?si=14OVUFeE6ZUV-z5D" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-83685165013956355952023-12-02T20:45:00.020-05:002023-12-03T18:53:06.491-05:00"Lady Ballers" Review<p> While there has been a recent resurgence in raunchy comedies in recent years, it seems to have been mostly limited to female-led films like <b>Girls Trip, Rough Night, Joy Ride, </b>and <b>No Hard Feelings</b>. Part of this trend is likely a <i>"Why not let the ladies be pigs?"</i> premise, but a lot of it is that comedy in general is crippled by fear and timidity due to the rampaging woke mobs who are seeking to be triggered and then cancel anyone who offends these snowflakes.</p><p>A movie like <b>Blazing Saddles</b> could NEVER be made today (and frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been ordered destroyed by the government for being all -ist and -phobic). When <b>Tropic Thunder</b> was in production, there was a minor freakout over Robert Downey Jr. being in "blackface", but when it came out it was hailed as a genius performance and even garnered an Oscar nomination. (He may've even won if not for his competition being Heath Ledger's Joker from <b>The Dark Knight</b>, which no one was going to not lose to.) Nowadays, the performance probably wouldn't be allowed in the first place and the movie protested at theaters because no humor is allowed in the world unless it's directed at the only permissible targets: straight white male Christians. You can beat those monsters up at will.</p><p>So into this environment comes the oddball sports comedy from conservative news and nascent entertainment producer Daily Wire, <b>Lady Ballers</b>, a mashup of sports comedies like <b>BASEketball</b> and <b>Dodgeball</b> with a dollop of withering social commentary about the current fad of cheering men beating the hell out of women in sports if they "identity" as female and has led to many female athletes having their sports dreams sacrificed on the altar of wokeness. (Sorry, ladies, men are just better women than you!) <br /></p><p> Director, co-writer, and lower-case G lower-case K god-king, co-founder and CEO of the Daily Wire Jeremy Borering stars as Coach Rob, a three-time Tennessee state high school basketball champion whose last victory was in 2008 and is currently reduced to attempting to get kids at a rec center to put down their phones and play sports and stop stealing the catalytic converter off his car. He's divorced and his hot ex-wife, Dharby (Lexie Contursi), is now shacked up with a weird hippie, Kris (Matt Walsh), who has put "In this house..." signs and rainbow flags all over.<br /></p><p> One day while picking up his 8-year-old daughter, Winnie (Rosie Seraphine Harper), from school, Rob is horrified to learn that a "girl" showed "her" penis to her in the bathroom and the other woke trash that kids are being indoctrinated in these days. He then goes to apply for a job at a place he used to work 25 years before and discovers that it has been turned into a restaurant where all the servers are men dressed in drag (take that, Hooters!) including a former player from the 2008 team, Alex (Daniel Considine). </p><p>When he realizes Alex still has good speed for his age, combined with Winnie's information about how men can be women, he decides to have Alex compete in a local women's sports competition to win the $5000 prize. Naturally, being a much larger and stronger man he mops the floor with the poor biological women and wins all his events, attracting the attention of a local reporter, Gwen (Billie Rae Brandt), who tells of this stunning and brave woman.</p><p>With a Global Games open competition coming, Rob and Alex decide to get the old team back together to enter as women. They then round up brawling brothers Jake and Blain Crain (hosts of Daily Wire's Crain & Co. sports talk show), center David Cone (who was a University of Michigan quarterback in real life and is also on Crain & Co.), and short team equipment manager/bullying target turned millionaire Felix (Tyler Fischer) and with Gwen handling the media exposure, march their way to the glory by walloping the female teams, garnering sponsorships from Bud Light (heh) and cosmetics companies and tons of social media followers. (Felix vlogging on her first day as a sports girl is wicked.)<br /></p><p> Evaluating <b>Lady Ballers</b> is a little complicated due to its origins and market targeting. At the most basic level does it do the core task of any comedy: Is it funny? Yes, it is, with many more laughs than the woeful <b>Freelance</b> (written by a Jimmy Kimmel Live writer, which explains the lack of funny) delivered. It mocks the sports movie tropes of inspirational speeches and montages set to cheesy power-rock tunes (by Will Borering, presumably a relative of the director) and the absurdity of big men clobbering women in sports to the cheers of people who either don't know this is ridiculous or are, more likely, too afraid to speak out against these travesties.</p><p>But while the liberal media is setting their hair on fire over <b>Lady Ballers</b>, falsely accusing it of being "transphobic" (really working hard there, hacks) and anti-Semitic (an absolute lie with the only trace of religion being noted Orthodox Jew Ben Shapiro wearing a kippeh during his cameo as a referee), their hysterical reaction only confirms the truth of the joke "<i>How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?" "THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!!"</i> Liberals are so humorless, uptight, miserable, and devoid of joy that they cannot allow themselves to laugh at anything, least of all themselves and their insipid woke ideology.</p><p>The joke of <b>Lady Ballers</b> isn't to mock those poor souls suffering from mental illnesses that cause them to reject their biology and seek comfort in mutilating their bodies to match their warped self-image, but to call out the inconvenient truth that the vast majority of "trans" athletes are men who can't compete against other men, so have invaded women's sports where even the top female athletes can't compete against the most mediocre men. William "Lia" Thomas was a mediocre men's swimmer until he declared he was a female and became the NCAA women's champion. (The fact that he has a fetish where he gets off walking around in front of women with a full erection of his lady penis and if the girls have a problem with it, they're the bigots, is just a bonus.) </p><p>So when a female wrestler is picked up and slammed to the mat by a guy a foot taller (yes, that wouldn't happen due to weight classes), it seems absurd, but it also comments on how there have been "trans" MMA fighters who have fractured the skulls of bio-female opponents and bio-female volleyball players with concussions from having a dude spike the ball in their face. </p><p>But off the court the mental pretzels people tie themselves into to go with the zeitgeist's demands that we applaud these men as braving and stun in dominating women is amusingly dealt with as we watch a pair of TV news anchors (Brett Cooper and Michael Knowles) go through so much sensitivity training that they transform into, well, you'll see. </p><p>But beyond the meta commentary on gender and sports, there's a good set of character arcs about the various men learning what it truly means to be a winner. The "guy who never stops talking about how he won the Big Game in high school" trope is a stock story element, but resolved nicely. While Gwen is openly aware that she is a shameless journalist who will drive a narrative for her own purposes, she also gives a telling mini-lecture about the damage divorce does to children concluding, <i>"Didn't you guys think to Google this before blowing the world your child lives on up?"</i> While it's mocking AND succumbing to the apropos of nothing soapbox moments many movies shoehorn in where someone randomly spews statistics about some pet liberal cause (<i>"Ma'am, this is a Wendy's."</i>) it's also unique in the message coming from the Right encouraging parents to think of the children for a change.</p><p>Which leads to the next odd element of <b>Lady Ballers</b>, the casting. When they say it's a Daily Wire+ film, they mean it literally in that nearly every role is played by Daily Wire show hosts with those not in main roles making cameos. Apparently, when Borering was casting the film, actors who'd previously expressed interest in being in DW projects or had been cancelled suddenly got cold feet at the subject matter (genuinely surprised Gina Carano and Rob Schneider, who voices the father on the Bentkey cartoon <b>Chilla Time</b> don't appear) so it was all staff on deck supplemented by actors who are sadly probably going to be blackballed by Hollyweird for leaving the plantation. <br /></p><p>But despite most of the lead cast (the Crain brothers, Cone, Walsh, Borering) not being actors, the performances are better than you'd expect, better say than the cast of <b>Clerks</b>. My girlfriend didn't recognize Borering from the <a href="https://youtu.be/s92UMJNjPIA?si=IT9pzJ9nHj2EefEc" target="_blank">classic Jeremy's Razors announce trailer</a> and thought he was just some indie actor and he does a fine job in the lead role as a man struggling with his mantra of <i>"Winners are just losers who win"</i> and disgusted with what he's done to win.</p><p>Also a standout is Brandt making her acting debut as the conniving reporter. She's got a Halston Sage/Scarlett Johansson vibe and should be able to have a career except she's probably on a blacklist somewhere because to those who control Hollyweird, working for THOSE PEOPLE is like appearing in something called <b>Why The KKK Is A-OK</b>. Contursi is hot as evidenced by her five episodes as a Laker Girl on <b>Winning Time</b>, but her career is also likely dead as are the guys who dared participate in what will be portrayed as a "transphobic cinematic hate crime" by liars who own the Criterion Blu-ray of <b>Some Like It Hot</b> and are so irony-deficient as to not see what they're doing.</p><p>Which leads to the final question: Who is <b>Lady Ballers</b> for? Apparently an attempt was made to put it in theaters and no one wanted to touch it. But considering half the fun is seeing Daily Wire personalities on screen (especially <b>What Is A Woman</b>'s Walsh as a hippie dippy twerp or Shapiro as a foul-mouthed over-it ref), would it land with as much with gen pop audiences? Probably, because it is funny enough and the total lack of familiar faces didn't damage <b>Clerks</b>. Also sports comedies, which were common in the 1990s and 2000s, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/list/ls003432175/" target="_blank">seemed to go extinct</a> after 2007's <b>Blades of Glory</b> (where Will Ferrell and Jon Heder became a male pairs figure skating team) so why wouldn't it be a potential modest box office success?</p><p>I have been critical of Daily Wire's strategy of confining their movies to the ghetto of their Daily Wire+ service because it allows the dominant liberal media to pigeonhole them as "trash for conservative rubes" and it puts content that politically agnostic audiences may enjoy behind a paywall that is too high for the meager movie offerings therein. Daily Wire is by its nature conservative-oriented and even though they have deliberately not made their movies particularly political - <b>Run Hide Fight</b> and <b>Shut In</b> were good small dramas; I wasn't very too fond of <b>The Hyperions</b> beyond its style - unless someone wants the video versions of their podcasts (which are available for free on X/Twitter) or the Jordan Peterson and Prager University stuff as well as the non-political Bentkey children's edutainment service (which was initially going to be called DW Kids until they realized the associating with the parent site would make it seem political), no one is paying for the handful of movies. (I just let my subscription run out because I never watched their content and their app didn't download podcasts, so what's the point?) If you know where to look online, you can find their movies (nudge wink), but why they aren't making them available to rent/buy on iTunes/Vudu/Amazon/YouTube remains a mystery. Disney just put out 4K discs of <b>WandaVision</b> and <b>Loki</b>, so don't tell me you can't sell streaming exclusives outside the platform.<br /></p><p>The fact that all these sidebars, explainers, and digressions which complicate what should be a straightforward review illustrates the actual "problem" <b>Lady Ballers</b> has: It's a funny-enough sports comedy (though a bit too long as everything is these days; anything over 90 minutes is suspect to me) with surprisingly good performances from its non-thespian cast; a good story with well-drawn characters (as far as these types of movies go) and something to say about masculinity, femininity, and how there doesn't need to be a war between the sexes - there's a great scene where Rob cheers up Winnie by explaining that while men will always be bigger and stronger, without the civilizing influence of women, there would be no civilization, so who is really the most powerful - while rightfully lampooning the woketarded political correctness which currently controls our culture to the point where you can't even laugh at it without being called a hater.</p><p>But the fact that the uptight Anti-Humor Police are openly lying about <b>Lady Ballers</b> is also the point. It doesn't "punch down at trans people" (who are not a thing), but punches up at the cultural Marxists who demand we play along with the Emperor's New Gender Politics OR ELSE! As Rush Limbaugh said, it illustrates absurdity by being absurd, but it never really mounts a soapbox to scold the audience and in fact one character who genuinely seems to be having struggles with his sexuality is treated compassionately. It tells its silly story - one player is holding a team mascot hostage due to his PTSD from a college game - with sufficient laughs and a lack of mean-spiritedness some comedies trade in.</p><p>Like all art forms, comedy is subjective. I have never been more stone-faced that the times I attempted to glean what people appreciated about <b>Modern Family</b> or <b>The Big Bang Theory</b> and my near-total boycott of Adam Sandler for the past quarter-century is legendary, so if one doesn't laugh at <b>Lady Ballers</b>, they're not necessarily wrong; different strokes and all. But anyone who likes sports comedies and isn't emotionally crippled by liberal media diktats should gave have a good time with <b>Lady Ballers</b>.<br /></p><p><b>Score:</b> 7/10. Watch it however you choose to access it.<br /></p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Py2MzGtmaJ0?si=LPUurx-dlGh-ItH7" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5031436877036455179.post-83390799780409113842023-12-01T22:30:00.011-05:002023-12-02T18:53:44.236-05:00"Freelance" Review<p> After the dour bummer of <b>May December</b> we were in the mood for something more entertaining and superfluous. Unfortunately, we chose <b>Freelance</b> as the follow-up.</p><p>Let's get this over with: Jon Cena stars as a former Special Forces operator Mason who was badly injured and half his squad killed when a mission to assassinate the dictator of fictional South American nation of Paladonia, Juan Venegas (Juan Pablo Raba), goes sideways after his chopper is shot down. Incapable of soldiering, he goes back to law school, marries Jenny (Alice Eve, playing mom roles already?), has an adorable little girl, and starts a small legal practice and generally hates his dull life. (Because being married to Alice Eve is a bummer?)<br /></p><p> One day, former Army buddy Sebastian (Christian Slater) shows up with a proposition. He's started a private military services company (read: mercenaries) and wants Mason to handle an easy personal protection gig for a reporter, Claire (Alison Brie), who is going to interview Venegas. Naturally, Mason isn't too warm on the idea of having to play nice with a man he blames for his lot in life, but with his marriage on shaky ground and Sebastian offering 20,000 reasons to take the gig, he reluctantly agrees.</p><p>Arriving in Paladonia, they are going to Venegas' ranch when they are attacked resulting in the dictator's men being killed and Mason killing all the attackers. A coup has been launched by Venegas' idiot nephew who's being puppeteered by Evil Corporate Forces after Paladonia's rich natural resources. Traveling on foot, Mason, Claire and Venagas have a series of wacky hijnks and near death scrapes.</p><p>The fundamental problem with <b>Freelance</b> begins (as usual) with a mediocre script by first-time writer Jacob Lentz (who was a writer for Jimmy Kimmel which explains why it's not funny) which doesn't know if it wants to be a bloody military action flick or a frothy bickering odd couple/fish out of water comedy. Compounding the tonal mess is the reliance on change-ups, double-crosses, sudden reveals and twists which get to the point where you don't care about the revelations because you expect another inversion to be right around the corner. The twists involving Venegas and the doomed mission and whether Sebastian was involved are also a mess. (I'm not even counting the silliness about how Claire was supposedly a disgraced journalist for not verifying what a source told her when the New York Times and Washington Post won and refused to return Pulitzer Prizes for their fictional reporting of the debunked Trump-Russia Collusion story.)<br /></p><p>While the major selling point is that it was directed by Pierre Morel (<b>Taken, District 13</b>), it looks cheap like an episode of <b>The A-Team</b> and he can't balance the tonal goulash and the action sequences are dull. With not much of a script to work with, the performances are passable. Cena glowers, Brie bubbles, Raba is a chipper despot, Eve looks tired. <br /></p><p>A more talented writer than Lentz may've been able to whip up a frothier adventure comedy - I kept rewriting scenes in my head as I watched - but we can only watch what they made and <b>Freelance</b> needs to be unemployed.</p><p><b>Score:</b> 3/10. Skip it.</p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kiON2PCrESY?si=KVFkxH9HqzWZGL6U" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>Dirk Belligerenthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389773359984582477noreply@blogger.com0