Greetings! Have you ever wondered if a movie's worth blowing the money on to see at the theater or what to add next to your NetFlix queue? Then you've come to the right place! Enjoy!
UPDATED 4/1/2025: Completely revised the When To See scale to reflect the extinction of rental stores and 2nd run dollar show theaters in today's streaming world. The original version of this can be visited here. -----------------
Oh, fercryingoutloud! ANOTHER movie review blog?!? Another guy who
thinks his opinion matters and wishes to inflict it on the overloaded
Information Superhighway? (What ever happened to that buzzword? Haven't
heard it in ages.) Why should we care?
A: Yes, yes, and why not?
The purpose of this blog when started after seeing Avatar in 2009 was to allow me to get back into the habit of
reviewing movies and DVDs like I used to between 2004-2008 for IGN and The Digital Bits before life stuff and editorial differences ended those associations.
Initially intended to not be 1000-2000 word chin-stroking
epics, but mostly a few
paragraphs about what I've been watching and whether they might be of
interest to you, I unfortunately got slack about actually writing anything. While I logged and scored everything I've seen, I didn't write reviews in a timely manner and after a while and a dozen intervening movies, I couldn't remember enough specifics to properly review them, so they remained unpublished.
Since fixing hundreds of unwritten reviews is impossible, I've dedicated myself to knuckling down this year (2025), and as of this revised update only a few reviews need to be finished off out of over 40 this year. I may also go back and start publishing older reviews, even if they're just scores; perhaps adding a sentence or two. Use the hashtag options and search box to see if I saw something in particular.
With movies even more outrageously expensive and even an all-you-can eat
service like Netflix and Amazon Prime can still cost you time (which is
worth more than money because you can't make more of it), I give
movies a numerical score (wow! original!) and how urgently it is for you to see it. Since the Hot Fad Plague of 2020-2022 completely upended going to the movies and everyone and their dog started subscription streaming services (as well as good old cable for Boomers), I have radically revised the When To See scale from six to basically three points:
1. Pay full/matinee price to see it at a theater. Pretty self-explanatory. The rare times I now go see a movie theatrically, I'll rate whether it's worth going to the show and how much you should pay.
2. Catch it on cable/streaming. This is the most common recommendation now because I see the overwhelming majority of movies at home, but also not every movie needs the theatrical experience. Whether you choose to wait for it to come to your streamer/cable channel of choice, rent or buy it digitally, or hoist the black flag to obtain it, is up to your budget and/or morals. Movies with this ranking are worth your time.
3. Skip it. Even for free, life's too short to waste on bad movies.
For Blu-ray/DVD reviews, I'll recommend whether they're worth buying since there's no rental options anymore now that Redbox has joined Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Family Video in oblivion. The quantity and quality of extras or the audio-visual quality factor heavily here.
As always, these reviews are just one lifelong movie fans opinions, except that unlike other critics & fans, mine is the only opinion that matters and all reviews are 100% correct in their judgements. If you disagree, that's fine, but understand that you are incorrect in your opinion. ;-)
Is there a rule that once you win an Oscar your next career move should be to make a silly action movie? After Angelina Jolie won, she made Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, launching her into a solid action flick career in between her serious gigs, and after Alicia Vikander won, she also made the third Tomb Raider movie.
So it wasn't a huge surprise when the trailer dropped for Love Hurts which stars Cinderella story hero Ke Huy Quan, fresh off his career-resurrecting win for Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Ariana DeBose, the actress from West Side Story who didn't go on to lose Disney hundreds of millions of dollars with her dumb mouth. Serious Actors getting paid and having fun? What could go wrong? Turns out plenty.
Quan is Marvin Gable, a successful Milwaukee real estate agent with a dark secret past (shades of Nobody) whose new life is upended by the arrival back in town of Rose (DeBose), a woman he was supposed to kill because she stole from the crime organization headed by his brother Knuckles (Daniel Wu, Into the Badlands).
Marvin has no idea why she's back, but Knuckles sends a bunch of colorfully quirky hitmen after Marvin to find out including a hulking wannabe poet, Raven (Mustafa Shakir, the live action Cowboy Bebop); Otis (André Eriksen, Vikings), a guy trying to save his troubled marriage and his sidekick, King (pro football player Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch), because everyone loved the guys in Bullet Train blathering about Thomas the Tank Engine characters. Meanwhile, Knuckles right hand man, Renny (Cam Gigandet, Burlesque), needs to find Rose for his own reasons related to why she why she was marked for deletion years before.
There is so much quirkiness crammed into the brief 83-minute runtime that anything resembling a coherent plot gets jettisoned. Marvin has a depressed assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton, formerly Analeigh - Crazy Stupid Love - who is now "queer and non-binary" but married to a man because "bisexual" is what old people were or something), who instantly falls in love with Raven, so we keep cutting back to those two. Same with Otis and King; who needs to understand Marvin and Rose when Otis needs to be seen beating up someone for a teddy bear to give his wife? Can't forget Knuckles and his love of boba tea either!
While all that superfluous drivel gets plenty of time, we never see why Marvin and Rose were in love. Frankly, it seems more like he was secretly pining for her, but the trio of inconsequential writers of no note focused on everything but the leads. Rose is barely a two-dimensional character, so we have no idea why Marvin swooned and defied his brother's kill order.
Compounding the derivative and thin script is the tone deaf direction by rookie helmer Jonathan Eusebio, a veteran stuntman with association with 87North Productions and who, like company co-founder David Leitch (Bullet Train, The Fall Guy, Deadpool 2), cannot balance tone and action to save his life. The action sequences are impressive and Quan does well in continuing Jackie Chan's signature style of using the environment's props in the fights, but they also get too brutal for a comedic film. The comic hijinks war with some dark undercurrents and in refusing to pick a lane, it rides the center line into oncoming traffic.
Sadly lost in the noise is Quan's performance where he somehow manages to imbue Marvin with waaaaaay more depth than the script provides, even making his return to being Knuckles' "monster" believable when he started as a goofy guy. (Quan's high-pitched accent is a problem for playing heavy drama at times.) During his hiatus from acting, he worked as a fight coordinator for the first X-Men movie as well as on Jet Li's The One, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised he has some fight moves.
Instead of watching this disappointing mess, I strongly recommend you seek out The Big Hit, starring Marky Mark as a hitman tasked with babysitting a young woman whose kidnapping he participated in. Everything Love Hurts does wrong with subplots and side characters works fabulously here and the chemistry between Marky and China Chow exists where DeBose just shows up and we're supposed to believe it. Seriously, watch The Big Hit. You're welcome.
Hot on the heels of last year's cult horror fave Longlegs (unreviewed, 5/10 score), writer-director Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins) is back with The Monkey, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story from his Skeleton Crew anthology about a cursed toy monkey that wreaks mayhem.
The tone is set immediately as an airline pilot played by Adam Scott (Severance) rushes into a pawn shop covered in blood seeking to get rid of a large toy monkey which bangs a drum triggering bad consequences as illustrated by the shop owner being killed by weird sequence of events. The pilot then disappears from his family's life.
Left behind are his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black) and their twin sons, Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth). Bill is three minutes older, so uses that to mercilessly bully Hal. They find the monkey in a box of their father's stuff and after turning the key, resulting in their babysitter being killed in a freak Japanese hibachi restaurant accident, Hal attempts to use it kill Bill, but instead his mother dies of an aneurysm. He dismembers the monkey and throws it away, but it reappears at the home of the aunt and uncle the twins were sent to. Bill tries to use the monkey to kill Hal, but their uncle dies. They then agree to throw it down a well where it can't harm anyone again.
25 years later, Hal (now played by Theo James, Divergent) is working as a store clerk and is estranged from Bill and his son, Petey (Colin O'Brien, Wonka), whom he only sees once a year to keep safe from the Monkey returning. During his annual visit, his ex-wife tells him her new husband, Ted (Elijah Wood, Sin City), plans on adopting Petey, cutting him completely from Hal's life.
When their aunt dies in a bizarre Final Destination-worthy manner, Bill reaches out to Hal and tells him that he needs to go to her house and check whether the Monkey has returned. The realtor tells Hal that there have been a rash of mysteriously weird deaths every day for the past week. That's right, someone's got the Monkey and is turning the key!
If you're a fan of over-the-top dark comedy-horror in the vein of Evil Dead II and it's sequels, then The Monkey is for you. The kills are so ridiculous that they prompt laughs more than ewwwws, but like Evil Dead movies/shows, not Terrifier movies. Final Destination kills are also a valid comparison.
I didn't really care for James' performance as the twins, but Convery is so good and the difference in appearance was enough that we were genuinely surprised it was one actor. (It probably helped that the Queen of Multiple Roles, Maslany, was his counterpart.)
Though a manageable 98-minutes long, the pacing does slack off
noticeably in the last act as Perkins drags things out; trimming 15-20
minutes would've helped. This is a common issue with Perkins as his Gretel & Hansel (5/10) was also empty and slow despite being visually sumptuous. He needs a co-writer and an editor to break out of his 5-6/10 rut.
Lost in the commotion of Will Smith's slapping of Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony was that Rock was presenting the Best Documentary Feature Oscar which was won by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson (producer & drummer for The Roots, which is The Tonight Show's house band) for Summer of Soul (which I haven't seen yet). Now Questlove is back with Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius about the rise, fall and legacy of Sylvester Stewart, bka Sly Stone of Sly and the Family Stone who played Woodstock and influenced legions of other artists with his blending of rock, funk, soul, and pop flavors.
Tracing his early career as a San Francisco radio DJ and record producer in the mid-Sixties (he produced the original version of "Someone To Love" for Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane band, The Great Society?!) to the formation of the band, SatFS were a unique mix of male, female, black, and white members - including his brother on guitar and sister on keys and vocals - and their sound straddled genres with Top 10 hits like such as "Dance to the Music", "Everyday People", and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." (The last of which served up the riff that drive Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation.")
But over time Sly fell prey to drugs and poor peer groups and began to show up late for shows when he bothered to show up at all. By the early-Seventies, the group's popularity plummeted as those inspired by them became competition and members began leaving because he was such a mess and he was recording the music himself.
With interviews with musicians like Andre 3000 (Outkast), D'Angelo, Chaka Khan, Q-Tip (A Tribe Called Quest), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (The Time and Janet Jackson's producers), George Clinton (Parliament/Funkadelic), as well as biographers and others, Questlove weaves a fast-moving and impressive recapitulation of Sly's career and legacy for the first half, but loses some speed when it shifts to Sly's self-destruction because how do you make a guy's life after he'd chosen to be a crackhead with Clinton and was almost a no-show to the group's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction interesting?
While the title hints at some woke posturing, it's interesting that many of the interviewees shy away from the "black genius" tag. One makes a valid point that there was no prior black Elvis or black Beatles for him to ask how to navigate such fame and the pressures he got from all sides, especially militants like the Black Panthers who wanted him to lean harder into racial division. While the 1971 album There's A Riot Going On (meant as a reply to Marvin Gaye's earlier-that-year title What's Going On?) was more political, he was still trying to stay above the divide.
Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius ends with Sly's rediscovery by hip-hop with samples powering songs like the aforementioned "Rhythm Nation" as well as LL Cool J's "Mama's Said Knock You Out" and Beastie Boys "Shadrach" and the revelation of his three children and their comments about their famous, mostly absent father. He's still alive at age 82, but didn't participate in this film.
I found Sly Lives! to be a solid and informative documentary with some surprising information for me, a musician who never really gave him and the band their due. Now I'll definitely get to watching Summer of Soul as well.
I'm calling it now: Martin Campbell needs to stop making movies. We can't keep letting him coast on his "director of GoldenEye and Casino Royale" credits any longer. His last decent movie was 2017's The Foreigner (didn't finish a review, but scored 7/10), but since then he's concentrated on spotty quality girlboss action movies like 2021's Maggie Q actioner The Protégé (6/10), last December's Dirty Angels (5/10), and the dreadful Liam Neeson remake Memory (3/10). He's 81 and after watching Cleaner, it's time for him to kick back and relax.
Daisy Ridley stars as Joey Locke, a young woman who has problems with authority and getting up for work on time. One day, on top of oversleeping, she is summoned to the facility where her autistic adult brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck, making his debut here and actually autistic), is being kicked out for hacking their records and leaking them online. He's been tossed from a series of homes, so now he's Joey's problem and she takes him to her work as a window cleaner.
That day the energy company that owns the office tower in London is holding a big party to celebrate their green energy bona fides, but as anyone who's seen Die Hard knows Rich Corporations + Office Tower + Party = Bad Guys Crashing and right on cue, a pack of eco-terrorists led by Cliver Owen's Marcus gas everyone in the building and take the corporate bosses hostage. He intends to coerce confessions of ecological damage while his hacker, Zee (Flavia Watson, who should be cast as Jodie Comer's sister yesterday), steals the evidence to leak and crash the value of the company's stock.
Things take a hard left turn when Marcus's lieutenant, Noah (Matthew Tuck, One Piece), who was working as a fellow window washer with Joey, kills him and has his loyalists kill the rest of the squad who aren't all-in with his even more radical beliefs that humanity is a virus that must be eradicated and thus intends to kill everyone, even himself, once the confessions are taped and the data stolen. Trapped outside of the building, Joey must find a way in and do the John McClane thing to save her brother and the day. Good thing she used to be in an elite military unit before quitting because reasons and stuff.
That the script by three undistinguished writers who I don't even care to shame is just a "Die Hard + Under Siege except Steven Segal is a chick" AI prompt isn't even the core problem, but that everything is so lackluster in execution starting with Joey. The movie opens with a 20 years prior flashback to her as a little girl responding to her father beat up her brother by climbing on wall shelves across the kitchen to not be heard, ending up sitting on the window ledge as the camera pulls back to reveal she's on the top floor of an apartment tower. Except the beginning of the scene shows a motorcycle in the living room begging the question of how the actual heck did it get up there and why can't she just tiptoe and hide? (Yes, to show she's always had the elite skills useful for window washing, but come on.)
Her military training is handled Basil Exposition style and barely factors into her fighting scenes. At least she gets beaten up when confronted by men larger than her. Unlike Hans Gruber, Noah is a psychopath whose "kill 'em all for Gaea" philosophy is extreme even for eco-terrorists these days who are now burning Teslas instead of demanding everyone buy one.
Then there's the problem of Ridley's performance or lack thereof. Despite the visibility boost being the main star of the benighted Disney Star Wars trilogy, her career outside those films (for which she wasn't to blame for the poor writing and lack of planning) has been underwhelming and Cleaner isn't going to help. I saw a critic bluntly observe that she's not beautiful enough to coast on looks nor talented enough to succeed being a good actress and sadly I have to agree. She's a cute girl, but her blank mien doesn't work in even this low-bar circumstance. She's Kiera Knightly without the sex appeal or thespian chops (two Oscar nominations so far).
As for Campbell, whom I kicked in the shins to open this review, being "workmanlike" is not how to spend your golden years. Bland scripts for action movies require more than he delivers here. There are a couple of brief fight scenes where Ridley's stuntwoman pulls some cool moves, but that's not a recommendation to watch a blah, mean-spirited, tonally off mess as this.
Score: 3/10. Skip it.
The trailer makes it look like there's way more action and Clive Owen than actually present. She spends almost the whole movie outside, not running around in the building, causing mischief a la Die Hard.
On May 22, 2011, a mile-wide EF5 tornado pretty much destroyed the town of Joplin, Missouri, killing 158, injuring over 1,100, and doing nearly $4 billlion in inflation-adjusted damage. The Netflix documentary The Twister: Caught in the Storm, uses interviews with several people who survived the tornado's 200+ mph winds, reinforced with various phone and security camera footage capturing the fury of the storm and the Apocalyptic aftermath as they attempted to find their homes and families.
Director Alexandra Lacey's selection of subjects seems to lean heavily on playing up the podunk town rural hick aspect - when the one woman with a pierced eyebrow filmed sitting in the back of a pickup truck reveals what her college degree is in, it was a surprise - and the obligatory gay guy who was stuck in this backwards homophobic Bible-thumper town. Another subject, who was sucked out of a vehicle when it was sent flying by the tornado then contracted a flesh-eating disease from dirt in the air and that damage rivals the destruction for ick factor.
With Twisters (7/10) currently on Netflix, The Twister: Caught in the Storm makes for a real-world counterpoint to the VFX-heavy adventure spin on tornadoes. It's decent, but not indispensable.
Because Hollyweird believes people don't want to watch documentaries about true events unless they're retold with movie stars we're constantly getting movies like Last Breath, a retelling of the 2019 documentary of the same name about the frantic scramble to save a lost diver in the North Sea.
Finn Cole (Peaky Blinders) stars as Chris Lemons, a saturation diver working out of Aberdeen, Scotland. He's engaged to Morag (Bobby Rainsbury, nothing you've heard of), who worries about his dangerous job (foreshadowing!), but he promises to come back to her (ruh-roh!). He sets out to sea with his teammates - Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson, Cheers), his good friend and mentor who's due to be forced into retirement after this rotation (if this was a cop movie...), and David Yuasa (Simu Liu, Shang-Chi), a no nonsense, stern pro who's leery of the less-experienced Finn.
Since their job is to repair pipeline equipment on the bottom of the sea at depths over 300 foot, their rotations last four weeks in which they live in a cramped tube, pressurized to the depths they'll work, and then at the end spend four days depressurizing to surface pressure. If they were to come up from the bottom directly to the surface, their cells would explode, so if anyone has an emergency, help is days away.
The crew head down to a gas manifold on the sea floor in a diving bell suspended from the mothership. From there, Chris and David are to dive to the work area tethered to umbilical hoses carrying air, heated water (it's nearly freezing down there), communications, and electricity (it's dark down there). Up on the surface, a large storm is battering the ship which normally wouldn't be a problem except the system that holds the ship on station with thruster motors totally fails, setting the ship adrift.
Knowing they're going to be swept along by their umbilicals, the divers scramble to get on top of the manifold, but Chris's gets snagged on the structure. With no slack to disentangle it, David realizes it's about to snap and orders Chris to switch to his backup air supply. The umbilical snaps and David is pulled away with the ship and Chris is left behind with only 10 minutes of air.
The race is then on to get back to rescue Chris before his air runs out and while the ship and dangling bell and diver are moving away, they are able to send a robot drone to the manifold where they find Chris, but he's unconscious and twitching involuntarily from oxygen deprivation. It then becomes a matter of if there is any point to retrieving him after he's been without air for as long as it's becoming.
Since we know Hollyweird wouldn't make a movie about a guy who died in a workplace accident, the tension of the situation is a bit diffused though it's still a harrowing ride to see just how inventive everyone got under pressure. If you liked Apollo 13 or The Martian and the whole "let's work the problem" mentality of those films, you'll appreciate what's shown here on a far smaller scale.
Co-writer/director Alex Parkinson directed the original documentary and this appears to be his first narrative feature. His familiarity with the event transfers to a feeling of verisimilitude (hi, RMB!) to the staging of this recreation. But even at a brief (for these days) 93 minutes, it feels padded and a bit flat with soap opera aspects.
The original documentary isn't streaming on any services now, so it's not available to compare, but for a small-scale, taut fight for survival flick, Last Breath may have you holding yours at times.
On October 21, 2021, Ukraine-born cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was accidentally shot and killed by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie Rust when a prop gun in which a live round had been loaded discharged. The film's writer & director, Joel Souza, was also wounded when the bullet struck him after passing through Hutchins. It spawned a media firestorm of interest and speculation for the following year-and-a-half as there were multiple lawsuits and criminal trials resulting in one conviction (of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed), one guilty plea (1st assistant director David Halls), and Baldwin skating free of judgement thanks to slick lawyering.
Now the events and aftermath are the subject of Hulu's original documentary, Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna, directed by her friend and filmmaker Rachel Mason. Using bodycam footage from first responders, tapes of the interviews at the sheriff's station, plus new interviews with Souza, cast members, and crew, a more comprehensive picture of what happened leading up to the accident and the aftermath then what was generally hyped up in the media and online chatter.
A picture of a stressed, chaotic production with not enough money and too much corner cutting emerges where safety concerns weren't addressed to the point where a good chunk of the camera crew quit. It was this short-handed situation which directly led to Hutchins and Souza being in the line of fire as there were no remote monitors - the "video village" most productions have where the director et al would look at what the camera is seeing - and thus were forced to use the monitor on the Steadicam to line up the shot. If they had video village, the bullet would've gone elsewhere, probably into a wall, not two humans.
The obvious culprit was Gutierrez, a then-24-year-old nepo baby (her stepfather is Thell Reed, a champion shooter and trainer of actors in cool gun use for movies) who was in charge of the guns and looks overwhelmed in the behind-the-scenes footage with her yellow and green hair. (It's amusing to see her post-accident in brown hair as her lawyer obviously told her to get a normal human hair color instead of looking like a Hot Topic clerk who shouldn't have been dealing with weapons.) But we learn that in addition to her armorer duties, she was working as a props assistant and getting pressure from producers that she's spending too much time on the guns and not these other duties. However, as messed up as that was, she barely registers any remorse as most Zoomer gen brats are trained to never be responsible.
As much as Baldwin has spent much of the past couple of decades being an absolute a-hole with clear rage issues, you can't help but feel his shock and horror when informed that Hutchins had died, captured on tape. If you were unsympathetic to his plight because of the way he did interviews to disavow any responsibility for the shooting, this shows he did have a human reaction. At first. Then when you see how he was able to get his case tossed on an irrelevant technicality, feel free to think poorly of him.
Eventually, after the trials, production on Rust resumed with a new cinematographer. Reaction to this was typical with online yakkers accusing the producers of ghoulish greed, but the case is made that the best way to honor Hutchins would be to get her final work seen. Her mother back in Ukraine is interviewed and supported this decision. It was screened last year at a Polish cinematography conference that Hutchins frequently attended and the glimpse we get show she was making some beautiful images and her loss to movies was great. (As of now, Rust still doesn't have distribution.)
While the title - Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna - implies more details about Hutchins' life, it's mostly about her tragic end. While more detail about how the producers penny-pinching led to crew mutinies and death would've been appreciated, overall Mason does a good job laying out what happened and what it means.
One poor choice, though, was the foolish decision to not credit people with their full names. At first when actors were being listed as "Josh" or "Devon", it seemed like they may've been extras or bit players, but when "Frances" is recognizably Frances Fisher (Unforgiven, Titanic) the silliness of this snapped into focus.
The greatest lesson taught by Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna - other than don't hire stupid young women to manage gun safety; in fact, one guy in another role here rattles off a very long list of background qualifications that had me literally yelling, "Why wasn't HE the armoror?!?" - is that just because the "news" media reports endlessly and breathlessly about a story, it doesn't mean you're getting all the details one needs to form an informed opinion.
Netflix recently jacked the price of their top tier service with 4K up to $25/month. Considering its virtual shelves seem crammed with nothing but foreign content (mostly undubbed now) to cater to every audience by English-speakers, the bulk of the money must've gone to acquiring the WWE RAW rights and giving the Russo Brothers, Anthony and Joe, over a half billion dollars to make a pair of movies - The Gray Man (which I remembered as being so-so, but while I never wrote a review, I did score it 8/10 so I must've liked it, though the fact I can't remember that isn't a good sign) and this week's delivery of Disposable Entertainment Content Media Thing, The Electric State, with a reported budget of $320 million dollars. Let's see what all that money bought.
Set in an alternate history 1990s, we're told in an introductory exposition dump about how robots invented by Walt Disney were used as slave labor until they got fed up and rebelled against humanity in the early-1990s. After a bloody war, a peace treaty was signed between President Bill Clinton and Planter's peanuts spokesbot Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson) with the robots exiled to the Exclusion Zone, an area in the Southwest desert.
Part of the key to victory over the robots was using soldier drones controlled by operators wearing a massive virtual reality headset called a Neurocaster, tech developed by Ethan Skate (Stanley Tucci), the CEO of SENTRE (pronounced "center"). After the war, the Neurocaster was repurposed into a wildly successful product that allows people to waste their lives online (shades of Ready Player One, from which much is borrowed here) while drones do their jobs.
In this dystopian world of 1994 is Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), an orphan whose parents and super genius brother, Chris (Woody Norman), were killed in an auto accident leaving her in the care of a slovenly foster father, Ted (Jason Alexander), who spends his days plugged in and buying contraband online. She struggles in school because she refuses to wear the headgear for virtual classes.
One night, a robot sneaks into the house looking for her. It looks like Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk), the main character of a cartoon she and Chris used to watch, and it speaks in fragments of catchphrases (hello, Bumblebee from Transformers) from the show, but it eventually convinces her that he is Chris's consciousness somehow and that she needs to come with him to find his body somewhere in the Exclusion Zone. Using a package of Ted's as a lead, they steal his car and head to the PO Box where the items from inside the "Ex" were shipped.
They stake out the box and see its owner, Keats (Chris Pratt), a former soldier introduced in the opening montage who is now a black marketeer dealing in Ex stuff with his robot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). They stow away on his semi truck and end up back at his base of operations just outside the Ex. What they don't know is that Skate has hired former Gen. Bradbury (Giancarlo Esposito) to hunt Cosmo down because he's crucial to SENTRE's operation.
Barely escaping into the Ex, the now-quartet head to where a Dr. Amherst (Ke Huy Quan) is who was at the hospital when the accident happened and had told Michelle that Chris had died. Along the way they end up at a shopping mall which is populated by various colorfully designed robots led by Mr. Peanut, who reluctantly agrees to help them find the doctor. Of course, things go badly because of course.
I've never read the 2018 graphic art book by Simon Stålenhag, but have seen some panels and have heard that it's basically a moody tone piece with only minimal narrative detail meaning screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who wrote six MCU movies including all the Captain America and the last two Avengers joints, had free reign to fill in a lot of the blanks and almost completely failed at the task.
While there are a handful of laughs, there are a whole lot more unanswered questions like why is Michelle wearing an ankle monitor? Does she have no other family she could've lived with after the accident? What is her aversion to the Neurocaster? She says she prefers reality, but other than a blink-and-miss-it glimpse, we don't know what this VR world that's so addicting is like. In Ready Player One, Spielberg swiftly paints the picture of people living in vertically stacked trailer parks, so why wouldn't you escape to the Oasis where you can be and do anything? (And her final monologue is totally ganked from RP1's finale.) At one point they see someone sprawled on the sidewalk with a headset on, connected to a public terminal, implying that it's an addiction, but how does this infrastructure of public terminals work?
How is Chris's brain making SENTRE work and how does he not simply die from never being able to rest? How is such a critical asset to Skate so vulnerable? Why are so many of the robots seemingly more like malfunctioning than sentient like the hairstyling robot constantly begging to cut Keats shaggy mop? I could drone on, but you get the point.
Performance wise, there's not much to write home about. Brown is still stuck in her Netflix cage where except for her forgettable turns in a couple of Godzilla movies after breaking out in Stranger Things, she has done nothing outside of Netflix for the past decade including two Enola Holmes movies (first one 7/10; didn't see the second) and last year's Damsel (6/10) and she's playing a thin character while looking too old when she was 18 when it was filmed.
Pratt just plays a variation of his Peter Quill Guardians of the Galaxy character here, a kinda dumb guy who fancies himself to be smarter than he is. It's been done before better. Tucci and Esposito are fine, but barely in it.
Which raises the most controversial aspect of The Electric State, its reported $320 million budget which is just mind-blowing considering what's actually on the screen. Sure, the VFX are extensive and impressive, but where else did all that money go? Certainly not to the cast because while Pratt may be able to demand $25M for a movie these days, Brown has no box office draw and as good as the supporting cast is generally, no one is racing out to see the new Stanley Tucci movie. Esposito's scenes could probably have been filmed in a few days, if that, as he's mostly present as a face on a drone's TV screen face. (Another "huh?" detail.)
Avengers: Endgame supposedly cost $350-$400 million, but that had a gigantic cast of stars who all headline their own solo franchises as well as the usual tons of VFX, but it went on to make almost $3 billion, and was the culmination of a decade-long shared universe series. While I wasn't as enthused for Anora and The Brutalist as many were, they earned a combined $100M worldwide on slender budgets of $16M and won 7 Oscars between them. Hollyweird could've funded FORTY movies with those budgets burned on The Electric State. Or 10 $32M or even just three $100M movies that went into theaters.
And the cost of VFX isn't an excuse because Godzilla Minus One won the Best Visual Effects Oscar and its entire budget was reported to be $15M, 1/20th of The Electric State. This year's Best Animated Feature, Flow, was made for just $4M. Hollyweird needs to stop substituting money for creativity.
While other reviews have been brutal, calling The Electric State soulless and empty, I found it to be just lackluster and marginally diverting. Some are beginning to panic for the MCU because the creative team is now making Avengers: Doomsday and while their post-MCU movies have all been disappointments, there may be enough structure at Marvel to steer things towards the old glories, not further failure. Maybe kids will like The Electric State more because robots are funny, but it's a tad grim. Another strike for not having their story together.
From an AV front, people paying for top-tier Netflix with good home theaters will get some bang for their buck with decent Dolby Vision and Atmos activity. Not demo material, but worth the upcharge.
What can be said about The Terminator? If you someone haven't seen the 1984 sci-fi action classic debut by James Cameron (no one counts Piranha II as a real debut, so stuff it, pedants) which elevated Arnold Schwarzenegger to even higher orbit of stardom and spawned five sequels, a TV series and an anime series, in the past 40 years, then I can't help your cultural deprivation much more than to say get on to watching it NOW.
If you need a recap, here's the expanded TV Guide listing: A cyborg from the future, the Terminator (Ahnuld), is sent back in time to find and kill a young waitress, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), because her yet-to-be-born son, John, will lead the human resistance against the machines. Kill her, no resistance. Also back from the future is a soldier, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), sent by John to protect his mother. Many chase hijinks ensue.
What could've been a disposable trash B-movie is elevated by Cameron's writing & sharp directorial chops. There's a reason Sarah Connor is in the Pantheon of Bad-Ass Movie Chicks along with Princess Leia and Ellen Ripley, who Cameron would further iconize in his next film, Aliens. While her evolution into her bad-ass final form would wait until 1991's Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the groundwork of this scared young woman facing down on unstoppable robot killing machine was laid here. We care about this girl and feel for the doomed soldier on a one-way mission to save the future.
The recent remastering of Cameron's catalog has been a source of great controversy among collectors and purists, triggering an uncalled for attack on them from Cameron himself. Just like George Lucas, Cameron has an issue with the technical limitations of how his movies were film, specifically the film grain of the Super 35 format. So he used Peter Jackson's Park Road Post and their AI-powered digital noise reduction and upscaling tech to remove much of the film grain and then restore lost details with AI which led to endless still frames where overly-sharpened and weird-looking faces and details being posted online.
When in motion these processes don't look as horribly bad as some have made out by the stills, but there is definitely a difference that sometimes isn't good. Adding insult was the fact that two of Cameron's movies, The Abyss and True Lies had never been even released in anamorphic DVD (the 16:9 "enhanced for widescreen TVs" format meaning that these movies on a modern TV, the movie play with black bars on all sides in low resolution), much less Blu-ray, so for the movies fans have been begging for two decades were finally here and adulterated.
While Terminator 2 is one of the worst 4K releases ever (I think I have every previous release of it and I refused to buy what should've been an instant "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!" sale), the general consensus has been that of the remasters, The Abyss fared best; Aliens is OK, but some caveats; and True Lies is very problematic especially with people looking waxy and rubbery due to DNR scrubbing away pore detail. This is why I decided to just go with $5 sale copies on digital 4K rather than the $40 disc releases when there aren't many new extras that we're out before.
Fortunately, The Terminator on iTunes 4K falls towards the good end of the transfer spectrum with clear details in hair and fabrics and the Dolby Vision grade offers some good pop for a film that mostly occurs at night. The clarity can emphasized the few ropy special effects shots like the obvious prosthetic head used when Termie cuts out his eye, exposing the camera underneath, but that's the source. The Atmos sound mix offers some good overhead usage when HKs and helicopters fly overhead, but the gunshot foley sound is canned and stock. Again, that's source related.
On the extras front, it's rather slim pickings though it includes a retrospective piece that was omitted from the physical release for some reason. There are a handful of deleted scenes which don't add too much, though one extends the scene where Sarah calls her mother (or so she thinks) then proposes to Reese that they go and blow up Cyberdyne Systems, an idea which would be revisited in T2. Biehn's acting is a little rough in one point and I can see why Cameron cut it to keep the action going.
Retrospective pieces from previous releases go into the VFX and score with their respective creators and has Cameron and Ahnuld kibitzing about how great it was to make the movie. Rounding things out are two Q&As taped in conjunction with 30th Anniversary screenings in 2014, one with Cameron alone and the other with his producer (and ex-wife) Gale Ann Hurd who at the time was heading into the fifth season of her show The Walking Dead.
There is some overlap between the two, but also a lot a great stories like how Roger Corman fired Cameron from a production design gig for working too hard on making the sets right before the crew arrived. The solo interview drifts somewhat into questions about Avatar, but it's fascinating to hear him discussing how he was handling the sequels at a point five years after the first one blew out the box office, yet still eight years before Avatar: The Way of Water would arrive.
Long review short, The Terminator is a seminal sci-fi/action classic that launched the career of one of the most successful filmmakers in history and with a good 4K transfer and sound, it's a bargain at twice the price (but still wait for it to go on sale for five bucks).
Documentarian Errol Morris has a reputation dating back to the 1980s when his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line resulted in the release of a wrongly-convicted man serving life in prison (his death sentence had been overturned and commuted to life). Since then, he's churned out many more documentaries including the 2003 Oscar-winning The Fog of War, but he's been off my radar for pretty much all of them. So I was surprised to see he was behind the new Netflix documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders, a subject so worn-out for Gen Xers like me that I probably would've skipped it if not for Morris' involvement. I should've skipped it anyway.
Morris is adapting Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and if you think that sounds like a buffet of conspiracy buff red meat, you are correct. It's got MKUltra, LSD, mind control, COINTELPRO, all the stuff that makes some people stock up on tinfoil. O'Neill's premise is that an MKUltra operative named Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, who was also the psychiatrist who evaluated Jack Ruby after he killed JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald somehow crossed paths with Charles Manson in San Francisco in the 1960s and trained him in the methods which would allow him to brainwash his Family of hippies to become assassins able to kill without compunction or memory of committing such deeds. Scenes from The Manchurian Candidate are interspersed to hammer the point.
He accuses prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi of fabricating the Tate-LaBianca cases against the Mason Family in order to write the book Helter Skelter which became a huge miniseries in the Seventies. (And pretty much doomed Steve Railsback's career.) Manson's constant ability to never get sent back to slam for infinite parole violations is deemed further proof that shenanigans were afoot. While amplifying these theories, Morris flat out tells O'Neill that he's not sure if he's buying all that he's selling.
The alternate viewpoint comes from Bobby Beausoleil, a former Family member who had been arrested the day before the Sharon Tate murders (which Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood invented a hilarious alternate outcome) and is heard in phone interviews for he's still in prison for murdering a drug dealer, who suggests a more plausible explanation: Everyone was stupid, crazy, on drugs, members of a cult, and the cops were bozos who screwed up constantly.
Sharon Tate, the Folger's coffee heiress and three others didn't die because of some CIA mind control plot, but because Manson was angry at a producer who failed to secure him a record deal and wanted him dead and sent his Family to kill him at the house he rented unaware that the producer had moved on and Roman Polanski and his wife were the current renters.
CHAOS: The Manson Murders purports to be raising serious questions and while they offer some head-scratching circumstantial evidence, Morris and O'Neill don't close any of the circles they begin to draw. And after nearly 60 years, does it even matter in the face of current governmental threats?
As for the Dolby Vision and Atmos presentation, there's nothing special about any of it. It's boxes checked with nothing in them. If you still want to watch this, the cheap tiers are fine.
Holiday themed horror movies have been a thing since Halloween. Even Valentine's Day has had Cupid, Valentine, and two versions of My Bloody Valentine. Now entering the chat is 2025's Heart Eyes, an odd mashup of rom-com and slasher flick which brings some levity to the murder movie game.
We open with a couple staging their proposal in a vineyard. It's so choreographed that she's mouthing his proposal along with his saying it. When their photographer hidden in the woods calls to say he didn't get the shot due to lens flares, they redo it. But then a masked killer kills them all and we're off to the races.
After a montage of news reports about the Heart Eyes Killer (named for the mask he wears) who has killed couples the previous two year in Boston and Philadelphia, we then meet Ally (Olivia Holt, Cloak & Dagger) who is waiting for her convoluted coffee order with her bestie, Monica (Gigi Zumbado, Bridge and Tunnel) at a Seattle coffee shop. There she meet cutes Jay (Mason Gooding, Cuba Jr.'s nepo baby, Scream 5 & 6), who drinks the same coffee order and they bump heads literally. Since she's hurting from a breakup, she's not looking for love.
She's also in trouble at work because her grim commercial concept for the Valentine's Day jewelry has caught backlash online, annoying her boss, Crystal Cane (Michaela Watkins, Casual). She's brought in a consultant to come up with new pitches and of course it's Jay. He invites her to dinner to discuss pitches and Monica takes Ally out to shop for clothes in a typical rom-com montage.
Naturally, dinner goes poorly because he's flirting with her and she doesn't believe in love and when they leave they run into her ex-boyfriend and his new girl. She kisses Jay and says they're dating because that's what you do in these movies. Watching them from a distance is Heart Eyes who somehow manages to beat them to her apartment and hide in her closet (spoiler alert!). They escape, but when the cops arrive at a nearby park where they fled, they arrest Jay as the killer.
To go further would spoil the twists and turns - some of which are too twisty turny for their own good - but Heart Eyes falls into the post-ironic territory that the Scream series has lived for three decades with the added element of borderline parodying rom-com tropes. It knows how dumb they are, thus embraces them with references to late-Nineties comedies like Romy & Michele's High School Reunion. Current pop culture also gets checked with a pair of detectives investigating the case named Hobbs and Shaw played by Devon Sawa (Idle Hands, Final Destination) and Jordana Brewster (the Furry Fastness series), prompting Ally to ask, "Like the movie?" and eliciting blank reactions from the cops.
Speaking of which, I know Seattle was big on the whole "Defund the Police" insanity, but a segment of the movie is set in the least-populated, dimmest-lit, large urban area police station ever. If these was Podunksburg, Nowhere, perhaps; but not a major city. And the obligatory bonus reveal scene is just being random while copying a movie or three any general horror movie fan will spot. Two of the writers wrote Freaky, the 2020 body switch horror-comedy where Vince Vaughn's serial killer soul was swapped with a teen girl's, which explains the humorous slant.
Overall, Heart Eyes is an amusing little romp that only bogs down when it's decides to be serious for a moment and while the weirdly small scale of the production at times is distracting, it's not fatal. While I liked the mashup of rom-com parody and slasher flick tropes, the horror fan missus (she's seen all three Terrifier movies) didn't care for it because "It didn't know what it was trying to be." She's wrong, of course, but including for balance.
Even though the Oscars ceremony was held earlier this evening, there are still a few stragglers left from the Oscars Death March so what better time to catch up with the last Best Original Screenplay nominee I hadn't seen, for a movie I'd never even heard of before the nominees were announced: September 5, a docudrama about the day Palestinian terrorists attacked the 1972 Munich Olympic Village, killing and taking hostage members of the Israeli team, ultimately resulting in the deaths of 11 athletes.
Beginning in the wee hours of the morning, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro, Silvio Dante in The Many Saints of Newark), the head of the control room is supervising maintenance while the top brass and talent go to rest. After a while, gunshots are heard from the nearby Village. When they realize there may be a hostage situation, they recall the crews to cover it and violate the no calls edict from ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard, Green Lantern) to bring him and head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin, The Thin Red Line) back to work. Their translator, Marianne (Leonie Benesch), is the glue holding the operation together as she monitors the police radio and German media.
What follows is a fascinating look at the challenges of covering a rapidly changing situation with technology that is positively primitive by modern standards. Whereas everyone can now livestream from their phones to the Internet, in 1972 the revolutionary new mobile cameras required massive transmitter backpacks and only had wide-angle lenses meaning that they had to push a massive studio camera outside in order to be able to zoom in on the housing unit where the attack was occurring which was near the broadcast studio.
Arledge had to negotiate with other networks to have their slots on the satellite. To superimpose text on a screen required sticking letters on a black board and shooting it with a camera. 16mm film requiring development and editing on flatbed editors like a movie meaning it could be a half-hour before anything gets on the air. Engineers soldering leads to a telephone in order to get audio into the mixer for broadcast.
Then there are the ethical conundrums - poncy reporter Peter Jennings (who'd later become the anchor of ABC News) worried that calling the terrorists "terrorists" would be unfair to their feelings (so the media has been garbage for a looooooooong time) - and the realization that the bad guys were watching the coverage and learning what the cops were planning to do. The fog of war and balancing whether to be right or to be first in reporting comes into play at the climax. There is even a telling detail involving forging an ID to get a courier into the Village which silently exposes how lax security was.
There used to be a time when movies about Heroic Journalists Bringing The Facts To The People were commonplace from All The President's Men (which is a lie because Woodward & Bernstein were basically handed the story by disgruntled FBI official Mark Felt - bka "Deep Throat" - out of a vendetta against Nixon) to the 2016 Best Picture Oscar-winning Spotlight, but as media became corrupted and politicized to the point where they became overt apparatchiks and propagandists to the Democrat Party, they have vaporized their credibility to the point where it's a safe bet to presume they're lying to us and a movie portraying them as heroes would be laughed off the screen.
This is why September 5 is kind of a unicorn in that it doesn't valorize these men as journalists per se, but portrays them as just hard-working professionals trying to get the facts out under extraordinary circumstances. Was Arledge hanging onto the story under ABC Sports purview rather than allow ABC News to take over for personal reasons? Probably, but he also knew that he could cover things better right there than reporters based in New York.
When compared to the other four Best Original Screenplay nominees, the work of director Tim Fehlbaum, Moritz Binder, and Alex David stands out by not having massive issues with the script. They trust the audience to keep up with what's happening and not needing it spoonfed to them by Basil Exposition. We don't get much of a sense of what everyone's lives are like outside of working at the Olympics and that's a good thing because the story here is the story of Munich and terror and trying to inform the audience.
I would probably have never watched September 5 if it hadn't been nominated and I endeavored to see all the nominees, but I'm glad the writer's branch bothered to nominate ONE script which wasn't a Swiss cheese of plot holes, weak characters, and muddled theses. I didn't want to vote for any other the other four options; I would've voted for this. And it's over two hours shorter than The Brutalist, so definitely cherkitert.
Paramount+ presents it in 4K Dolby Vision and if I hadn't checked I would've have known it was HDR because the gritty, period documentary-style cinematography doesn't look slick and shiny. There's nothing wrong with that, just that if you don't have a high-end TV or just want the Blu-ray, you're sacrificing nothing.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on Paramount+.)
With all the Best Picture/multi-nominee movies available exhausted, my last stop on this years's Oscars Death March is the almost certain Best Supporting Actor winner & highly-likely Best Screenplay winner, A Real Pain, whose title is figurative and metaphorical and part of its problems.
Kieran Culkin (Scott Pilgrim vs the World) is the titular pain (as indicated by the title card being flashed next to his face at the beginning AND end of the movie) in the form of Benji Kaplan, one of those free-wheeling guys who everyone seems to love despite being a, well, real pain at times. He and his cousin David (writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland) are using money left to them by their Holocaust survivor grandmother to take a Jewish heritage tour of Poland and visit her old home.
David is, of course, the uptight Felix Unger to Benji's Oscar Madison and suffers the indignity of watching Benji immediately become the life of the party with their tour group which includes a middle-aged divorcee (Jennifer Grey, Dirty Dancing), a Rwandan genocide survivor who converted to Judaism when he emigrated to America (Kurt Egyiawan, House of the Dragon), a older couple and is led by a non-Jewish English-Japanese tour guide, James (Will Sharpe, The White Lotus). He encourages them all to pose like the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes as David gets stuck with taking photos with their phones.
He also has dark moments like a freakout when he becomes outraged that they are riding in the first class section of the train when "80 years ago we would've been packed like cattle in the back," storming out of the car. He is also critical of the guide, getting in his face over how he conducts the tour. But after these dark moments, he sometimes acts as if he has no idea why people are looking at him warily.
The missus had tried to watch this previously and turned it off after 10 minutes and her advice to me was to do the same because "you'll get the gist of what it's about and Culkin's performance in that time." Since it's only 90 minutes long, I figured I could through it, but I will admit that I wanted to shut it off two or three times because I didn't find Benji's antics cute. I've known too many "a-holes everyone loves" in the real world.
About 50 minutes in David has an emotional monologue filling in some backstory and I decided to tough it out to the end and was disappointed to find that by the end nothing has really changed between David and Benji. There is no Big Moment of Understanding/Change/Acceptance. They go back to the lives they led before the trip, so what was the point?
If this wins Eisenberg a writing Oscar it will be because the Academy loves when actors write - past winners include Sarah Polley, Emma Thompson, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Billy Bob Thornton - and he gives most of the cast some good scenes to play and imbues them with more than just the cartoon outline too many movies settle for. It's too bad that the overarching narrative didn't match up to the details. His directorial eye is interesting and harkens back to an observational style from the 1970s and 1980s; I'll be interested to see more. The weakest leg of the tripod is his performance, which is your stock Jesse Eisenberg batch of tics.
Which leads to the biggest mistake Oscar made - a frequent criticism this year across several acting categories - which is putting Culkin in the Supporting Actor category. He is the titular character and clear protagonist (as well as antagonist), so the only reason he's in Supporting is because Eisenberg is the bigger star and it's his creation, but David is de facto the second banana here. As with Zoe Saldana with Emilia Perez, Culkin will win because he's a lead actor in a supporting category. (The Academy needs to stop this junk the same way the Emmys and Golden Globes desperately need to stop pretending The Bear is a comedy.)
Ultimately, A Real Pain is a minor letdown hampered by an undercooked narrative framework from which the moments are strung.
The last major nominee from this year's Oscars Death March is James Mangold's by-the-numbers Wikipedia-entry-but-less-detailed biopic of Voice of the Boomer Generation Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, named after a line from his song "Like A Rolling Stone." Nominated for eight Oscars - Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor & Actress, Sound, and Costume Design - it is a triumph of imitation performances & period detail fetishism and for anyone who wants to spend a couple of hours watching a famous person's life story without ever gleaning an insight about them, it doesn't get much more middling than this.
Nominated Timothée Chalamet stars as Dylan, a 19-year-old who has hitchhiked from Minnesota to New York City in 1961 to meet his idol, Commie folk singer Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy, Halt and Catch Fire). Learning that he's institutionalized with Huntington's disease, he treks to the hospital where he finds Guthrie being visited by Commie folk singer Pete Seeger (nominated Edward Norton, The Incredible Hulk). After introducing himself, Seeger notes Dylan's guitar case and encourages him to play them a song since he says he's so influenced by Guthrie.
Well, the song impresses Seeger so much be begins introducing him around the Greenwich Village folk scene where he immediately snags a Commie girlfriend, Sylvie (criminally UN-nominated Elle Fanning), a side romance with Commie folk singer Joan Baez (nominated Monica Barbero), a record deal, and within a few years is a massive star, chased by fans, picking up women right and left, and chafing at the rigid strictures of folk purists, broadens his sound culminating in the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival set where he "went electric" and won the crowd over with his boldness. Just kidding, they freaked out, booed him, and threw stuff at the stage, almost fomenting a riot because if there's anyone more violent than a methed-up speed metal crowd it's folkies.
All kidding aside, A Complete Unknown really should've been called Dylanmania (slogan: "Not Bob Dylan, but an incredible simulation.") as it's little more than a series of performances of early Dylan tunes loosely connected with the barest reeds of plot which provide no insight as to how he became a genius (if you buy into that stuff) he is regarded as. Sylvie (who is Suze Rotolo, who appeared with him on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, in all but name after Dylan requested they change that) sees his old school notebooks with his birth name, Robert Zimmerman, on them and complains that she feels she doesn't even know who he is. We're never told that "Dylan" was cribbed from poet Dylan Thomas because why should a biopic fill in the bio stuff?
Other than frustrations with his first album being all covers by mandate of the label and annoyance at the attention fame brings, he doesn't seem to have to overcome any obstacles. He shows up at a party at peak fame with a fashionable black girl with an English accent and after they hit the sidewalk, he leaves her there as he walks off. She's befuddled and says, "But, I love you," to which he replies, "I don't even know you." Who is she, where'd they meet, why'd he take her to the party, and why did she feel more of a connection to him than vice versa? No idea to all of the above. Bob's just a ladies man, we suppose.
So we're left with the lead actors very impressive performances where they do all their own playing and singing with the performances recorded live, not pre-taped, AutoTuned, then played back to lip-sync along to. Chalamet says it was a 5-1/2 year process to create his performance, learning to play guitar - he recently hosted Saturday Night Live and served as the musical guess as well, performing obscure Dylan tunes - and how you imagine a grumpy, introverted, young Bob Dylan would behave is precisely what Chalamet delivers. Norton and Barbero similarly nail their mimicry duties with the latter displaying an amazing simulation of Baez's crystal clear soprano. Imitating Dylan is always fun because no matter how caricatured you go, it's still in the ballpark. To his credit, Chalamet doesn't overdo it, but that's also the problem.
I have a MAJOR problem with how many Oscars have been won by actors doing what I've termed "imitation performances" where they have a huge leg up on crafting their performances by having massive amounts of reference footage to study and then are graded by how good an imitation they've done. found an out-of-date list at IMDB that listed 29 winners since 2000 and omitted recent winners such as Renee Zelwegger (as Judy Garland in Judy), Rami Malek (Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody), and Jessica Chastain (Tammy Faye Baker, The Eyes of Tammy Faye).
There have been 100 acting nominees since the turn of the millennium and one-third have won and many more have been nominated as with the three nominees. In 2015, the only Best Actor nominee who had to create an original character was Michael Keaton in Birdman. All the rest were imitations of Stephen Hawking, Chris Kyle, Alan Turing, and John du Pont. Of course, Eddie Redmayne won for sitting in a wheelchair with a frozen grin in The Theory of Everything, which I hated.
In a year where category fraud (putting actors playing lead roles in the supporting fields to boost victory chances) was rampant when they weren't flat out denying legitimate females a chance in order to virtue signal wokeness with a man in Best Actress, the Actor's Branch added to their shame by favoring Barbero's imitation over Fanning's subtle aching soulfulness which made her Sylvie the most human performance in a Madame Tussaud's wax museum. I've been a fan of hers since Super 8 - if he haven't seen it, watch it and keep in mind that she was only 12 when it was filmed - and here's to hoping she gets more showcases for her gifts and some acclaim.
Director/co-writer Mangold has done the biopic thing before with 2005's Johnny Cash story, Walk The Line - which won Reese Witherspoon an Oscar for imitating June Carter Cash and Joaquin Phoenix a nomination for imitation Johnny Cash - and directed the two good solo Wolverine movies with The Wolverine and Logan, but here it's flat and uninspired work, relying on the imitations to elevate the whole shebang.
While it mostly sounds like I've been hating on A Complete Unknown, it's not a bad movie, just a woefully underdone story which was overpraised by the Academy. Mangold's directorial nod should've gone to The Brutalist's Brody Corbet or Dune: Part Two's Denis Villeneuve as well as Barbero's going to Fanning. If you're a fan of Dylan, you'll like it; if you hate Dylan, it's tolerable; if you want to know more about the man, here's his Wikipedia page.
There is an immediate feeling after watching a nearly 3-1/2 hour-long movie packed with top-tier performances and strong imagery to feel like you've seen something of heft and substance. That's how I felt after watching The Brutalist - nominated for 10 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor & Actress, Cinematography, Editing, Production Design, and Original Score - but after some time to reflect on the experience, it turns out to be much sound and fury signifying little, but elevated on the back of Adrien Brody's performance.
Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who arrives in America in 1947. After a graphic visit to a prostitute to have his knob polished, he migrates to a small town in Pennsylvania where his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) has started a custom furniture business with his wife Audrey (Emma Laird). Attila has anglicized his name and converted to Catholicism, assimilating to American life. He gives László a bed in a store room and a job.
One day the son of a wealthy area tycoon, Harry (Joe Alwyn, best known as Taylor Swift's last ex-boyfriend) hires the store to revamp his father's study, building bookshelves, etc. as a surprise birthday gift from him and his twin sister X (Stacy Martin). László creates a stark modern space with shelves hidden behind swinging doors and having a sole lounge chair made of bent chrome tubing with straps for support - an arty lawn chair - as the centerpiece.
Daddy Harrison (Guy Pearce) comes home to find the workers in his home and blows a gasket, tossing them out and refusing to pay for the work or materials. Annoyed by Lászlo, Audrey suggests he find somewhere else to live and Attila accuses him of making a pass at his wife, which hadn't happened, so off László goes.
A few years later, he's working as a coal loader at a shipyard when Harrison appears to take him to lunch. The library he exploded over has become the subject of magazine profiles making him look like a bold patron of design. He looked into Lászlo's background and found he was a heralded architect back in his native Hungary and hires him to design a community center in honor of his mother with a budget of $850,000 ($11.2 million in today's debased currency).
Lászlo's concept is radical and inventive, but work begins and moves along until a train wreck bringing materials causes Harrison to explode again and shut down the project. Lászlo goes to New York City with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), a journalist who Harrison pulled strings to get her and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe, to work as a draftsman at an architectural firm. Due to famine, she is wheelchair-bound from osteoarthritis. After several years, a representative hunts Lászlo down to inform him the project is a go again and he is needed back.
The mercurial nature of Harrison's behavior is a constant source of tension which explodes in an out-of-nowhere moment which knocks the film off-kilter and raises questions of what overall points director/co-writer Brady Corbet is trying to make with his epic film? Is it that evil American rich people exploit immigrants while loathing them? Then why does Harrison seek out Lászlo to build this monument? Is it that America is rotten with anti-Semitism and Jews need to go to Israel. Considering the current politics & deep anti-Zionist (read: anti-Semitic) views of much of Hollyweird, that's some bad timing? Other than the vague sense of being an industrialist, we never really know where Harrison gets his wealth from.
The epilogue set in 1980 at a retrospective of Lászlo's career also explains the design of the center and what it represented to him and it smacks of telling, not showing, after 3-1/2 hours when there would've been plenty of opportunities to reveal these details.
But these are the questions that surface after watching The Brutalist. During the ride, it's stunning to realize that Corbet and company have made this 3h 35m period movie set between 1947-1958, filmed in VistaVision, a format which provides a big negative area and was last used for an American production in 1961(!), for a budget of under $10 million by filming in Hungary to represent Pennsylvania. It really shows that half of Hollyweird's financial woes are due to blowing massive sums of money on their projects rather than working lean.
The performances are solid & worthy of nomination across the board. As the missus says, Brody does suffering well. With his big eyes and awkward features, he is almost certain to win the same way he did nearly a quarter-century ago with The Pianist. Somehow Pearce has never been nominated before despite three decades in this business, and he would've had a good shot to win if not for Kieran Culkin's lead performance in A Real Pain being jammed into Supporting Actor. Jones is fine, though she's stuck with the Stoic Suffering Wife of the Tormented Genius role.
While I found my copy of the film on the high seas, the 4K 1.66:1 aspect image still retains the filmic grain look of the VistaVision source. Lol Crawley's nominated cinematography has a good shot in a tough field, especially with Conclave shamefully excluded in order to nominate Emilia Perez for everything. I'm sure the inevitable Criterion Collection release will look great, perhaps broken over two discs to match the two acts with intermission structure.
Corbet's previous film was the Natalie Portman-starring Vox Lux which I didn't write a review for, but logged it as a 3/10 Skip It score so while I can't remember what was bad about it, it was bad. He's definitely come up in the world, though according to this takedown - Why The Brutalist Is Brutal To Watch - which rakes it for getting pretty much everything wrong about the architecture and motivations of designers. While it's an easy path to call the runtime brutal, the cause of The Brutalist's woes started with the blueprints.
After enduring the stinky dumpster fire "musical" Emilia Pérez for this year's Oscars Death March, it's now time for the actual musical up for 10 Academy Awards - Best Picture, Actress, Supporting Actress, Costume Design, Editing, Makeup and Hairstyling, Original Score, Production Design, Sound, and Visual Effects - the long-anticipated adaptation of the first act of the 2003 Broadway hit Wicked, the prequel to The Wizard of Oz and revised origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West. The highest-grossing nominated movie nominated for Best Picture, just edging out Dune: Part Two, it's one of the token popular movies included to lure viewers into watching the telecast to see what movie the Normies haven't even heard of win.
We open a shot of the Witch's hat in a puddle of water while word spreads that some child from Kansas had killed her. News of her demise travels to Munchkinland and there is great celebration including a visit from Glinda (Ariana Grande, nominated for Supporting Actress). As she's about to float away in her bubble, a Munchkin asks if it's true Glinda knew the Wicked Witch? After a pause, she admits that she had crossed paths with her in school.
We flashback to see Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman) of Munchkinland, who loves his wife (Courtney-Mae Briggs) but as soon as he leaves for business, she welcomes in a stranger for hanky panky. (I haven't see the play, but I suspect by the way they never show her gentleman caller's face that he's the Wizard.) Nine months later she gives birth to a bouncing baby girl whose skin is green. The Governor is horrified and orders her taken away and the CGI bear who is the family nanny does so, but raises Elphaba (Karis Musongole as a child; Best Actress nominee Cynthia Erivo as an adult).
Later, the couple have another daughter, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who is in a wheelchair due to her premature birth. Because racism, Elphaba is bullied and when angered manifests powers like being able to levitate rocks and fling them. But her powers aren't controlled.
Years later, Governor Thropp takes Nessarose to attend Shiz University, which I gather is like Hogwarts without the pale English kids. When Elphaba accidentally unleashes her powers the courtyard, she is spotted by Shiz's Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), who offers to enroll Elphaba and privately tutor her in sorcery.
Also arriving is conceited brat pretty girl Galinda (Glinda's original name) with a massive wardrobe that runs hard into the pink spectrum. When she tries to kiss up to Morrible, it's interpreted as volunteering to share her private suite with Elphaba and she gets an unwanted roomie and the beginnings of a frenemyship begins. Adding to the tensions is the arrival of a conceited prince, Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton), who I found hard to read as to his intentions because I saw Frozen and know princes can be villains.
Running parallel is a subplot about animal persecution & bigotry as the last animal professor, the goat Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage), is first victimized with hateful comments on his blackboards then dismissed, with his replacement unveiling the Wizard's new invention, a cage which will hold animals and prevent their learning to speak. This outrages Elphaba and causes another display of her powers, earning her an invitation to go to the Emerald City and meet the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum, Death Wish) where she finds out what Dorothy will encounter was much more sinister in his younger days.
I'm a fan of musicals and I knew that it was considered shocking for the Broadway Wicked to lose Best Score, Book, and Musical to the bonkers Sesame Street-on-crack Avenue Q at the Tony Awards, but after watching Wicked: Part 1 I think that was the correct result. Read any of my musical reviews (click the hashtag up top) and I continually assert that musicals live or die on the quality of their songs and Avenue Q is wall-to-wall bangers (e.g. "The Internet Is For Porn", "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist", "It Sucks To Be Me", "My Girlfriend Who Lives In Canada") while, beyond the instant earworm & act-closing "Defying Gravity" and "Popular", the only other song that grabbed me was Fireyo's introductory "Dancing Through Life." To be fair, I've only heard the score once and I've downloaded the original cast album to give it another spin; this is my first impression.
More problematic is the excessive length of the movie which clocks in at 2h 32m without credits and, as the Part 1 indicates, only covers the first act of the show which minus intermission is 2h 30m long. The desire to wring twice as many ticket sales out of fans has led to a situation where what was 90 minutes on stage is padded by an hour and it makes it a slog to get through. The excuse that people can't sit through a three-hour movie is rebutted by the fact that the top four highest grossing movies are Avatar (162 mins theatrically), Avengers: Endgame (181 mins), Avatar: The Way of Water (192 mins), and Titanic (195 mins) and this year's The Brutalist is 202 mins. They just wanted to milk it.
Director Jon M. Chu is familiar with musicals and dance movies, beginning his career with Step Up 2: The Streets and Step Up 3D and, after his big breakthrough hit Crazy Rich Asians, directed the film of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In The Heights and while he stages some huge musical set pieces on expansive practical sets (enhanced and extended with CGI), they all feel kinda bland and flat.
Part of that is due to Wicked's controversial cinematography and color grading which I've seen at least two YouTube videos analyzing what's going on with it and why it looks washed out and blah compared to The Wizard of Oz's contrasty Technicolor imagery. They put in ridiculous amounts of work (the carpenters list in the credits is like VFX artist lists these days) to construct these elaborate sets - they planted 9 MILLION tulips for the opening shot of Munchkinland and extended those with CGI for only a few shots which most will think is all CGI - and detailed costumes only to make it look hazy.
Part of my ambivalence toward this movie stemmed from Erivo's hissy fit over a fan edit of the film's poster to resemble the Broadway show's key art which covered Elphaba's eyes. Erivo posted a statement to social media crying victim & feeling denied blah-blah-woof-woof, why don't you just call everyone RAAAAAAAAAACIST, Toots. She walked it back a bit after someone from the studio probably told her to get the [heck] over herself before she torpedoes the hundreds of millions of dollars investment the way Rachel Zegler has wrecked Disney's live-action Snow White cash grab. Erivo just comes off as mean in the media with a chip on her shoulder.
So it was a surprise and relief that she is quite appealing as Elphaba and has quite of set of pipes on her; the girl can SANG. It makes the abuse she's subjected to by the United Colors of Bigotry denizens of Oz even more annoying and serves as a reminder that Chronicle made clear: Bullying people with superpowers results in very bad things happening.
The bigger surprise is Grande who was a teen starlet on Nickelodeon's Victorious beginning when she was 16 before branching off to music pop stardom. She's basically making her feature film debut here and she kills it, making Galinda into the Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon's role in Election) if Hogwarts. She's vain, entitled, and everything her "Good Witch of the East" title covers up. It's not a one-note mean girl take on the character as she eventually begins to accept Elphaba. The most effective acting between the two is during a silent dance off during a school party which changes the dynamics between them and their classmates.
Yeoh and Goldblum are their usual selves, but SNL's Bowen Yang, as a gender-swapped Pfannee, is just doing his gay guy shtick from SNL and it's distracting.
While I didn't hate Wicked, I think it's badly flawed by its bloated length and washed-out visuals. I'm not holding my breath for the conclusion due in November, Wicked: For Good (bad title), but if you're a fan of the show and just gotta have it in your life, perhaps you'll be more entertained.
Score: 5/10. Catch on cable/streaming. (Coming to Peacock on March 21, 2025)
If it seems like the world has gone crazier than usual in recent years, let's add to the fun with a phrase even less plausible than "Super Bowl Champion Detroit Lions": Pamela Anderson gives an Oscar-worthy performance in The Last Showgirl.
No, I'm not kidding.
Anderson stars as Shelly Gardner, a....let's go with "mature" veteran of Le Razzle Dazzle, the last old-school Vegas revue show on the Strip. She's been with the show over 30 years and serves as a den mother to younger members Jodie (Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song, Dollface). Shelly truly believes in the show and what it represents while the girls just view it as a job, earning constant chiding from Shelly who doesn't care for the hyper-sexualized shows (a la Showgirls) or more spectacle-oriented presentations from Cirque de Soleil which have taken over Sin City.
However, all good things come to an end as stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista sporting long hair for the first time I can recall) announces that due to dwindling attendance, the casino management has decided to shutter Le Razzle Dazzle in favor of the "Dirty Circus" show which has already taken the prime nights in the showroom. The last performance will be in two weeks and the youngsters start going out for auditions.
Amidst this upheaval arrives Hannah (Billie Lourd, Scream Queens), Shelly's estranged daughter who doesn't respect her mother's life choices, complaining about how Shelly would leave her in the car with a GameBoy while she did two shows a night. She lived with family friends most of the time and is now a college student nearing graduation which is news to Shelly who gets her age wrong and asks if she's chosen a major.
On the other side of showgirling is Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis, leaning waaaay too hard into her current "I'm over 60 and going to be fat" shtick; have your True Lies and Trading Places scenes cued up as eye bleach), who left the show several years previously and is now a cocktail waitress struggling for shifts against younger women. Shelly's attempt at auditioning reveals that beyond her age (57), her chops aren't that great and she had coasted on youth and looks.
The terrific and sadly departed singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl had a song called "What Do Pretty Girls Do?" with lyrics that include:
She was a party girl, stayed up 'til the small hours Now she's embarrassing and everybody laughs At the girl with the face that could drive her baby wild Now wasn't she the child with everything?
You should have seen her with her head held high Now what do pretty girls do? She used to be the same as me or you Now what do pretty girls do?
Well they get older just like everybody else She never thought she'd have to take care of herself
The theme of what happens to attractive women as they age is a hot topic in the culture now especially with the wildly overrated The Substance likely to earn Demi Moore a Best Actress Oscar at age 62 for her gutsy full monty performance which has elevated her profile into Serious Actress territory after over 40 years in the business.
Anderson, to be kind, was starting in the sub-sub-sub-sub-basement of regard for her thespian abilities. Whether it's her Playboy centerfold origins to being a Baywatch beauty to her tabloid infamy as half of the couple that put the term "sex tape" into common vernacular with then-husband, Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, to her quickie marriage/divorce to Kid Rock, or the fact that her big attempt at crossing over the big screen from the boob tube (pun definitely intended) was 1996's Barb Wire, a movie only remembered (if that) for its credits where she dances around while being hosed down to a rocked-up cover of "Word Up" (very NSFW video), when she started going out in public without makeup, it was easy to see it as a cheap ploy to be taken seriously when "looking old" is a common gambit along with "imitating real people" or "get fat/ugly" to win gold.
Except here it serves a legitimately good performance, all the more shocking because there was NOTHING in the previous 35 years of ubiquitous fame hinting at the possibility of such a turn from her. She imbues Shelly with notes of pathos and naivete as someone who so devoted herself to the show that she cocooned herself from reality nor thought it could ever end. If suggesting to factory workers whose jobs were exported to the other side of the world that they "learn to code" seems glib and unrealistic if they were approaching retirement age, what's the career path for a AARP-eligible Vegas showgirl?
But Shelly isn't a passive victim here, she's responsible for her choices whether in not raising her daughter or preparing for the inevitable. And her lack of empathy at times is illustrated when one of the girls shows up at her place, upset that she may never be able to return home and Shelly blows her off because she doesn't want to make time for her. Anderson doesn't try to make Shelly into a porcelain doll and it's a brave choice which, while the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild nominated her and Curtis for, the Oscars snubbed her in favor of a man and virtue signalling. Of all the actresses who got shafted this year - Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Lily-Rose Depp - Anderson has the greatest right to feel ignored
The rest of the cast turns in good work ranging from Shipka's naive 19-year-old to Curtis's sun-baked senior citizen. (She looks like Lin Shaye's character in There's Something About Mary.) The only poor fit is Lourd who is a decade older than her role and looks it.
Director Gia Coppola (yes, of the Nepo Baby factory Coppola family; the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola) directs Kate Gersten's screenplay with a gritty style that mashes up semi-documentary realism with dreamy interludes of Shelly gazing at the Vegas skyline, the part that doesn't get seen in the movies. There is also a weird montage featuring a drunk Annette dancing on a platform that's a little too surreal.
The look of Autumn Cheyenne Durald Arkapaw's (Black Panther: Wakada Forever) cinematography, achieved by shooting on Super 16mm film with wild anamorphic lenses takes some getting used to as everything towards the sides of the frame is out-of-focus and distorted. (If I wasn't watching on a S-tier OLED TV, I'd complain to the projectionist.)
It's hard to tell whether The Last Showgirl will propel Anderson into a late-life career as an actual actress exhibiting range or this is just a one-off moment where the multiverse glitched and we glimpsed something previously unimaginable, but if you're into small indie character dramas with decent writing and good performances you should catch this show before it closes.
Showgirls. What is your reaction to that word and the 1995 trash cult classic movie of that name? Reviled in its time, it has undergone multiple reevaluations, reinterpretations and rehabilitations as it's become a queer camp icon with parody stage musicals, drag midnight screenings and more chin-stroking academic navel-gazing books than you'd think a movie about strippers would merit. Now all that retconning has its own documentary, You Don't Nomi. (A play on the main character's name, Nomi.)
Director-writer-editor-producer Jeffrey McHale presents the arguments of various authors and commentators, tracing the three stage Hegelian dialectic that regarded the film as initially a "Piece of Sh*t", then revised into a "Masterpiece", before post-ironically being deemed a "Masterpiece of Sh*t." He illustrates observations about director Paul Verhoeven's thematic repetitions throughout his oeuvre with clips from his early Dutch films like Spetters and Turkish Delight through his Hollywood hits like Total Recall and RoboCop concerning the media or women vomiting. (When cut together, it begins to look like a kink.)
The speakers are never shown in a variation of the usual talking head format allowing the viewer to focus on their words and what McHale juxtaposes underneath. A lot of the time I was thinking that a lot of people are really overthinking a dumb stripper melodrama whose greatest accomplishment was to put Gina Gershon onto my radar and guarantee I'd be seeing Bound the next year.
The third act also drags a bit while diverting into the story of April Kidwell, who was roofied and raped while a karaoke hostess in NYC and found her way back to empowerment by first playing Elizabeth Berkley's character, Jessie Spano, in Bayside! The Musical which spoofed Saved By The Bell, then playing Nomi in Showgirls: The Musical with all the nudity intact. (She's got the physique for it.)
Over a decade ago there was a documentary called Room 237 about the wild interpretations some folks with way too much free time on their hands had regarding Stanley Kubrick's The Shining; like how they believe some detail was his confession that he'd faked the Moon landing for NASA. You Don't Nomi is ultimately more entertaining because the fact so many people are overthinking Showgirls isn't much different than any movie with a big fandom where theories help keep the movie's world alive in their hearts. (And it has way more boobs to look at. Oink.)
