Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 132 - Anora

On this episode, Barry and I head to the strip club to talk all things Anora, the Academy Award nominated dramedy from director Sean Baker starring Mikey Madison. Topics discussed include a debate over screwball comedy - and whether this movie is one, the merits of the entire cast, and specifically Best Actress nominee Mikey Madison's performance and the undeniable magnetism of Best Supporting Actor nominee Yuri Borisov. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 132 - Anora

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Flow: A Review - The Cat's Meow

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A very compelling and unique animated feature that can be enjoyed by people of all ages on multiple levels.

Flow, written and directed by Gints Zilbalodis, is an arthouse, animated feature from Latvia that chronicles the journey of an unnamed dark grey cat.

The film, which is nominated for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards, is notable because it contains no dialogue and is completely rendered on the free and open-sourced software Blender.

When I was a kid, I had a dog…a great dog…named Scooter. He was a Gordon Setter/Bernese Mountain Dog/St. Bernard mix…an absolute behemoth and a complete and total gentle giant. The loveliest dog you ever could’ve had the pleasure to know and the best friend I’ve ever had.

I bring up Scooter because once as a little kid I decided to follow him for a day – this was back in olden times when people let their dogs - and their kids, run free and wild off of leashes. So I, by myself, followed Scooter as he made his daily rounds one afternoon. I kept a good distance from him so he didn’t know I was following him – or at least he let me think he didn’t know I was following him.

Scooter went on quite a journey that day, deep into the woods on a trek only he could understand, with little old me spying intently on him. We went into and out of the woods, across fields, over streams, through muck, mire, brush and construction sights. I don’t know how many miles we covered that day but it was a magical mystery tour for me and probably just another day at the dog office for Scooter.

Which brings me back to Flow…which essentially does the same thing I did with Scooter except with a cat and with much, much higher stakes.

Flow is a sort of wondrous movie. It is a simple film yet is filled with complexities. It is both an endearing dramatic tale of a cat and his friends and also a magical realist biblical mediation that is overflowing with profundities for those with the eyes to see them.

I watched the film with my young 9-year-old son and he posed lots of questions throughout…but was more saying these questions out loud to himself rather than expecting me to give him answers. The movie entertained him but it also really made him think. I was a very proud Papa indeed when he himself blurted out the biblical sub-text out loud to me before I ever articulated it…a sub-text to which many adults would be completely oblivious.

I bring up my son only because Flow is not the typical talking cat movie aimed at kids that you catch at the cineplex or on Disney +. In other words, Flow isn’t Garfield, but it is a film kids can still enjoy as a compelling animated movie without grasping its philosophical depths.

Adults can enjoy it too, but on a much deeper level, as the film touches upon a lot of pretty heavy philosophical ideas and leaves a good deal of room for interpretation. One of my favorite parts of the film was when it was over and me and my wife and son had a hearty discussion about it.

I’ve been intentionally vague about the plot, setting and characters in Flow because, as is my wont, I do not want to spoil the experience of watching the film for anyone who will give it a go. I knew nothing about the movie prior to watching and I think that ignorance was bliss and heightened my enjoyment.

I will note a couple things though.

First, the animation, which is done using Blender, a free and open-source software, is definitely uneven. The scenery and setting look gorgeous and are gloriously designed, but the animals are very hit or miss. Some animals look great and others look really cheap and shoddy.

Secondly, the film doesn’t entirely confine itself to the rules of the world it creates at its start – hence the magical realism aspect of the story. For example, and I won’t give specifics, the animals don’t always behave exactly as animals would behave – I’ll say no more than that. This is not a criticism per se, it is just something that knocked me off balance at first until I got on board with it.

Flow is still playing in some theatres, but it is also available on VOD, which is where I watched it. It cost something like $5.99 to rent, and we had three people watching so that’s a good deal.

The movie runs an hour and twenty-five minutes – and is captivating the entire run time…and an important note…stick around through the credits until the very end as the movie isn’t over until one small final scene plays out after the credits.

In conclusion, if you have kids, watch Flow with them. If you don’t have kids…watch Flow with another adult or by yourself. It isn’t the best film of the year, but it is the film this year that I’ve thought the most about after having watched it.

©2024

The Brutalist: A Review - American Dreams and Nightmares

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.  A dramatically uneven, cinematically stellar, ambitious movie about ambition that is not a great film but a film that wants to be great.

The Brutalist, written and directed by Brady Corbet, stars Adrien Brody as Laszlo Toth, a talented Jewish Hungarian architect who survives the Holocaust and comes to America to start a new life.

The film, which has garnered 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, is favored to dominate this year’s Oscars.

I have many thoughts on the philosophy and ideology expressed in The Brutalist, but will save that discussion for a second, more in-depth “analysis and commentary” article I will publish at a later date. For now, I will simply review the film.

The Brutalist is a film so cinematically ambitious as to be audacious. It is a film that asks a lot of big questions, and tackles a lot of big issues, and does so all on a miniscule $9 million budget, and a monumental three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute run time.

The film is exquisitely photographed using VistaVision, and has been released in both 35 mm and 70 mm. I watched it, twice, on a SAG screener in my house and was astonished at the cinematography by Lol Crawley – who is, in my mind, the undeniable star of the film.

Crawley’s camera movement, lighting and most of all his framing, are sublime. This is a small budget, arthouse film that looks and feels expansively epic, in both scope and scale, thanks to Crawley’s work.

The film is designed to question America and the American dream, and to give voice to not just the immigrant experience but the Jewish immigrant experience in particular. It deftly uses stock footage, newsreels and radio reports to set the stage and strengthen the not-so-subtle sub-text.

Writer/director/producer Brady Corbet has also spoken about the film being a metaphor for the filmmaking experience itself…which is plain to see. Filmmakers are, at least in some cases, artists who must navigate a cold and cruel capitalist system just to be able to make their art. Filmmakers aren’t painters who can buy a canvas and some paint and go to work. No, filmmakers need money to make their movie and therefore must get into bed with those that have it (in some cases…literally).

The same is true for architects like Laszlo Toth. An architect must have a benefactor…someone who has the desire to make a great building, the means to do so, but not the artistic vision and expertise to bring it to life.

The Brutalist as metaphor for the filmmaker’s plight is certainly insightful, if not a bit self-aggrandizing, and considering the film’s politics (which will be discussed in length in my second article) egregiously hypocritical.

Regardless of that, there can be no doubt that Brady Corbet had a big idea and was able to translate it onto the big screen. Kudos to him.

Not so good for him is that the film, which boasts a first half as good as any seen this year, stumbles badly in its heavy-handed second half. The film, which again, runs for three and a half hours, actually has an intermission…and it is after the intermission when it loses its grip on its narrative and its storytelling.

The biggest problem with The Brutalist is that it tries to do so much that it ends up doing not quite enough of anything.

For example, it is an immigrant story, an American capitalism story, a Jewish story, a Holocaust story, a love story, a sex story, an artist’s story and a drug addict’s story. The drug addict angle in particular is superfluous to the point of frivolous, as is the sex story, which does nothing to enhance the narrative but only confuse it.

A major problem for the film is the character of Erzsebet Toth, Laszlo’s wife who follows him to America. Erzsebet is played by the woefully miscast Felicity Jones, an actress I usually like quite a bit. Erzsebet’s arrival on the scene signals the end of the film’s tight grip on its drama, and the beginning of a rudderless wandering into the wasteland of dramatic doldrums.

The character of Erzsebet would have been better served never being seen, but rather as a sort of dream from Lazslo’s past never to be regained.

The rest of the cast are hit and miss.

Adrien Brody, who is nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his work as Laszlo – a fictional character by the way, is good in the film. He has a lot to do and he definitely does it. I didn’t think his performance was transcendent, but I thought he did an admirable job. Considering the last-time I saw Brody act was when I recently watched the series Peaky Blinders, where he played an Italian gangster from New York in the 1920s…and it was one of the worst, most embarrassingly awful pieces of acting I’ve ever witnessed, and now he is probably going to win his second Best Actor Oscar, speaks to how insane Hollywood can be.

Guy Pearce is very good as Harrison Van Buren, the rich American who becomes enamored with Laszlo’s talent and hires him to build his dream project. Pearce really sinks his teeth into the role and never relinquishes his steely grip, devouring every scene he inhabits.

Other performances, like that of Alessandro Nivola as Laszlo’s friend Attila, and Joe Alwyn as Harry Van Buren Jr, seem to disappear the moment they wander onto screen. They are so weightless as to be non-existent.

There’s one final performance that is worth mentioning…and that is of Raffey Cassidy as Zsofia, Laszlo’s niece. What struck me about Cassidy’s performance is that she looks remarkably like Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who plays Harry Potter. So much so that I literally was wondering if Daniel Radcliffe was playing Zsofia in drag in some sort of arthouse tomfoolery – amusingly I wrestled with this question for quite a while as I watched. What is even weirder is that Raffey Cassidy, in real life and even as Zsofia, is a truly beautiful woman…which left me very, very confused. The bottom line though is that Raffey Cassidy is NOT Daniel Radcliffe, and Daniel Radcliffe is NOT Zsofia. Mystery solved.

The Brutalist intentionally calls to mind other ambitious films that, ironically enough, are about ambition, like Godfather II and There Will Be Blood. Unfortunately, The Brutalist shrinks exponentially in comparison to such cinematic greatness as Godfather II and There Will Be Blood.

The Brutalist’s biggest flaw, besides its over-abundant narrative, is that it gets so heavy-handed with its not-so-subtle symbolism in the second half of the film that it loses a great deal of its credibility, coherence and artistic good will.

The bottom line is that I am glad The Brutalist exists, and I’m glad Brady Corbet is so ambitious as to make it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a great film.

I do not think The Brutalist is a great film, but I do believe it wants to be great, and is a great attempt to make a great film, and that makes it much more worthwhile than 99% of the garbage made nowadays.

If The Brutalist wins Best Picture at the Oscars I won’t be dismayed, even though I don’t think it’s the Best Picture I’ve seen this year. I will celebrate its win because hopefully it will allow for other filmmakers to take equally big swings when they get their turn at bat.

Brady Corbet took a big swing with The Brutalist and he flied out to right field just short of the warning track. No shame in that. Maybe the next guy, or maybe Brady Corbet the next time he gets up, will hit it out of the park, or off the wall, or into the gap for a double. Hell, at this point in cinema history I’d take a bloop single, a walk, or a hit by pitch over the strikes out that keep piling up.

Make no mistake…The Brutalist is infinitely better, and more worthwhile than recent Best Picture winners Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the god-awful CODA.

As for recommending this movie…I do recommend people give it a shot and watch it with an open mind. It will be, simply said, a bridge too far for most normal people. It’s expansive run time, challenging themes and numerous dramatic narratives, will be too much for normies to digest, especially since the film is not a cinematic classic like Godfather II or There Will Be Blood.

But just because I think most people won’t love it, or even like it, doesn’t mean I think people shouldn’t give it a shot. I didn’t love the film, but I admire its ambition, and I watched it twice.

So, if you have three and a half hours and want to wallow in lukewarm arthouse waters contained in a gloriously crafted, artisan bathtub, then give The Brutalist your attention. At the very least it will trigger discussions about both its quality and its philosophy/ideology…which are decidedly meaty topics for debate…and in my eyes a movie that triggers debate is definitely a movie worth watching.

©2025

A Different Man: A Review - The Elephant Man in the Room

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. This is definitely a flawed and uneven film, but it is also a film that features a fantastic performance from Sebastian Stan, so it’s worth giving it a shot on streaming.

A Different Man, starring Sebastian Stan, chronicles the travails of Edward (Stan), a man suffering from a severe case of neurofibromatosis, which gives him a grossly disfigured face and leaves him socially isolated.

I knew nothing about A Different Man before seeing it – didn’t know the plot, the genre, the purpose or meaning behind the film…and if I’m being honest, after having watched it, I still feel like I still don’t really know all that much about it.

A Different Man is not a terrible movie, not at all, in fact it has a lot going for it, not the least of which is a superb performance from its star Sebastian Stan, but it is a frustratingly uneven film.

I won’t give much of the film away…not even a whiff of spoilers here…but the first half of A Different Man is a really cinematically invigorating experience, as it sets itself up as a very vibrant drama accentuated by Stan’s terrific acting work.

But then about midway through, the film transforms and transitions from an intriguing drama to a rather farcical comedy. The tonal shift is jarring and, in my opinion, very unsatisfying.

The second half of the film is so tonally off-kilter to the first half that it feels frivolous and superfluous, two things which the first half most definitely is not.

That is not to say that the more comedic material falls flat…it doesn’t. There are some legitimately funny scenes and sequences in the second half of the film…like a discussion about JFK and Lincoln, it just feels out of place and like it should be in a different movie.

In fact, there are a few different movies struggling to break out in A Different Man but we don’t get to glimpse enough of any of them for this movie to truly shine.

For example, as previously stated this could’ve been a really gritty and gruesome character-study drama. Or it could have been a sort of absurdist, reality-bending psycho-dramedy. Or it could have been a flat-out farcical comedy. It ended up trying to be a bit of all of them and ending up being not quite enough of any of them.

This film is writer/director Adam Schimberg’s third feature, and interestingly enough, it is his second major feature dealing with physical, specifically facial, disfigurement.

Schimberg was born with a cleft-palate and brings a unique and very interesting perspective to the navigation of disfigurement issues from both sides of the coin.

He also brings a somewhat intriguing cinematic and narrative style. One can’t help but think that Schimberg has a great movie in him that he just hasn’t quite matured as a filmmaker enough to produce. I think once he figures out what exactly he wants to say and how exactly he wants to say it, he’ll be a powerful auteur.

The very best thing about A Different Man is Sebastian Stan as Edward. Stan gives a remarkably versatile performance which features existential drama, frantic comedy and everything in between.

Stan’s Edward, particularly in the first half of the film, is so well-done, and so specific and detailed, that it is actually shocking considering he is best known for playing Bucky Barnes in the Marvel movies.

Watching Stan flex his artistic acting muscles instead of his actual muscles was a joy to behold. Even after the shift in the second half of the film, Stan stays committed and keeps on crushing this role, showing a versatility and skill level that is astonishing.

Sebastian Stan was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar this year but it wasn’t for A Different Man, but rather for his work as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. I have not seen The Apprentice so I can’t speak to his work in it, but I will say that Stan definitely deserves a nomination for his work in A Different Man.

The rest of the cast do very good work as well, most notably Renate Reinsve as Ingrid and Adam Pearson as Oswald.

Reinsve is fantastic as Edward’s subtly seductive, arthouse, manic pixie dream girl, neighbor Ingrid. She is one of those actresses who so effortlessly commands your attention. She never pushes too hard and never gets lost in the lesser parts of the script.

Pearson, who plays Oswald – Edward’s sort of alter-ego, is a magnetic screen presence who has a such a vivid and visceral energy to him that he is undeniable.

Ultimately, A Different Man could have and maybe should have, been a different movie. But the movie that it is, I suppose, good enough…or at least interesting enough, to be worth watching.

The film is currently streaming on MAX, which is where I saw it, and although I think it has some flaws and some issues, I also think it is worth giving it a watch especially if you have MAX.

A Different Man is not a great film, or a particularly profound film, or a keenly insightful film, but it is a unique enough film, and better than most of the thoughtless junk out there, to be worthy of watching.  If you go in with tempered expectations you might come out feeling a bit more positive about it than I did. And regardless of whether you connect with the film or not, you will definitely leave it feeling a great deal more respect and admiration for Sebastian Stan as an actor and artist than you did going in.  

©2025

Sing Sing: A Review - Prison and the Power of Drama

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A simple movie, featuring a terrific performance from Colman Domingo, that is bursting with complexity and humanity.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” - Albert Camus

Sing Sing, written and directed by Greg Kwedar, tells the story of the prisoners who act in the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) drama program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

The film stars Academy Award Best Actor nominee Colman Domingo as well as a group of men who were actually incarcerated and part of the RTA, including Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin and Sean San Jose.

Sing Sing has been in very limited release in theatres since July of 2024, but I only saw it just this past week as I got a screener for it from the Screen Actors Guild….and I’m very glad that I did.

As an acting coach and actor, Sing Sing is right in my wheelhouse. It is a simple film bursting with complexity that celebrates the healing power of both drama and the art of acting. It is also a testament to the fragility, intricacy and complications of humanity.

Regardless of who the actor is, whether it’s Tom Cruise or the third spear-carrier from the left, in almost every case they have gotten into acting in order to try and resolve some trauma. The way they try and resolve it through acting can be different for each person. For example, some people try to become famous in order to find the love they feel they never received or to gain wealth and power to protect themselves or to the feed the ego that their trauma birthed. Or some will try and garner accolades to elevate their crippled self-esteem, or try to find respect by becoming an “artist” to show their commitment and purity to a higher cause. And some might do all of the above as the uses of acting to heal trauma are as diverse and vast as trauma itself, as I can attest from having worked with so many actors and actresses over the years.

What I loved about Sing Sing is that it does an admirable job of showing how acting (or any art) can, for those with the courage to dive in, cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter and the soul of the actor.

Colman Domingo, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar last year for Rustin and again this year for Sing Sing, is the heart and soul of this film. Domingo is utterly fantastic as John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate of some acclaim who has written books and plays while serving his time.

Domingo gives a subtle yet stirring performance that is filled with such complexity and humanity as to be a marvel. He is at once a saint, yet also crippled by his frailties, such as his ego and his fury at what he sees as an unjust system.

Colman Domingo probably won’t win Best Actor at the Oscars this year, but having seen all the nominated performances I can say unabashedly that he should.

Another stand out is Clarence Maclin who plays himself in the film. Maclin, a former real-life inmate and participant in the RTA, is a thug on the exterior but is a thoughtful, insightful and ambitious artist on the inside.

Maclin can mimic menace at the drop of a hat, but it is when he starts to push back against his “natural” instincts and actually becomes introspective that he comes to life and lights up the screen.

The rest of the real-life former inmates are very good in their roles because they seem like exactly what they are…real people who are kind of uncomfortable acting and being vulnerable in front of others. This discomfort, self-consciousness and amateurism is humanizing and extremely endearing…as well as very funny on a few occasions.

All of the real-life inmates give exceptional performances, but the most notable is Sean San Jose, who plays Mike Mike, a charismatic and charming inmate who is Divine G’s best friend.

Sing Sing has its flaws, and all those flaws fall on writer/director Greg Kwedar as they are structural in nature and diminish the film a bit, but it also has a dramatic vitality and tension to it that is uncommon, and that is to Kwedar’s credit.

Kwedar succinctly captures the prevailing sense of menace and peril of everyday life in prison as well as the suffocating sense of claustrophobia, and this imbues the film with a baseline of drama and a background of tension that befits a prison drama.

Kwedar also does a good job of showing just enough of the inmate’s performances without burdening the film with them. We get a taste and a taste is enough to maintain the spirit of the story without bogging it down in minutia.

It genuinely surprises me that Sing Sing is not nominated for Best Picture at this year's Oscars as it is a movie that would seem to be in the Academy’s sweet spot. But who knows what the Academy cares about anymore?

Regardless of what the Academy thinks, the truth is it is one of the very best films of the year and if you get a chance to see Sing Sing, whether in the theatre or on streaming/VOD, you really should. It isn’t the most deftly directed, or exquisitely acted film you’ll ever see, but it is a profound, efficient and extremely affecting one.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 131: A Real Pain

On this episode Barry and I mull over the Jesse Eisenberg directed arthouse darling A Real Pain, starring Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Kieran Culkin. Topics discussed include our happiness that the film exists, musings on the state of Kieran Culkin, and an examination of our mixed feelings on the film. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 131: A Real Pain

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Anora: A Review - 'Pretty Woman' for our Depraved, Disturbed, Dystopian Age

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A funny and forthcoming film about the fairy tale of the American dream that in reality is a soul-crushing nightmare.

Anora, written and directed by Sean Baker, is a dark dramedy that chronicles the whirlwind romance between a sex worker in New York and the son of a rich Russian oligarch.

The film, which stars Mikey Madison as the title character, was just nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Director, and in my opinion, very deservedly so, as it is one of the very best films of the year.

Anora is, essentially, a realistic Pretty Woman set in our dystopian times. It tells the story of Anora (Mikey Madison), a stripper and sometimes “escort” who yearns for the good life and will do most anything to get it…or at least to get some money. Then she meets Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the young party boy who is a Russian oligarch’s son, and the two fall headlong into an impetuous romance.  

What astonished me about Anora and the adoration it has received from the artistic community and Hollywood, was that it is subtly and surreptitiously, and maybe even unintentionally, a robust repudiation of modern feminism.

The film’s animating ideology is unquestionably a traditionalism that nowadays is considered subversive in an oddly counter culture kind of way.

Pretty Woman was the essential myth/fairy tale of the 80’s, with wealth being the symbol of happiness, wholeness and transcendence, and love being the conduit to get it. The only things that could’ve made Pretty Woman any more symbolic of the 80’s was if Julia Robert’s character falls head over heels for “greed is good” Gordon Gekko.

Anora as the myth/fairy tale of the 2020’s, is the anti-Pretty Woman, where love is non-existent and money is a toxic cancer that devours both those that have it in abundance and those so obsessed with it that they’ll sell their soul, and body, to get it.

Anora, who prefers to be called “Ani”, is the epitome of the modern woman as prostitution is empowerment. Ani controls her own body yet chooses to sell it, and more importantly her soul, for money. Sex for Ani is, always and every time, solely transactional. She may feel empowered as a modern woman, and she makes decent money selling herself, but her value and her worth diminish with every passing moment, which is why she’s so desperate to “bag a whale”…and Vanya represents her winning lottery ticket…her fairy tale come true.

I’ll refrain from going any further into the plot or twists and turns in the film so readers can enjoy it without knowing what comes next, just like I did.

I will say though that Anora is basically three films in one. The first section of it is the “modern day meet cute”…or “meet-not-so-cute” as the case may be. The second is a comedic road picture. And the third is the heart, soul and moral of the story. All three are exceedingly well-executed.

The biggest surprise for me regarding Anora was the blistering performance of Mikey Madison. Madison is not an actress I ever considered to be any good. I saw her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where she played one of Manson’s major minions, and thought she was actually kind of terrible. But here in Anora she is an absolute revelation.

Madison fully inhabits Anora and makes her a real, genuine human being that is so believable and so authentic I felt like I knew her from my own life…not because she’s a stripper you perverts…but because she is an archetype that so many local women in New York inhabit.  

Madison effortlessly floats in the film from the comedy to the drama and hits every note perfectly and with a gritty yet charming intensity and humanity that never wanders.

Madison is nominated for Best Actress at this year’s Academy Awards and while she probably won’t win, she definitely gives the best performance I’ve seen this year and is more than deserving of an Oscar.

The rest of the cast are fantastic as well.

Yura Borisov, who plays Igor, a Russian henchman, jumps off the screen from the get go. Borisov is nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and his soulful and still performance is stirring for any actors out there who are looking to break through in a smaller role. Borisov breaks through because he fills every moment of screen time he has with a very vivid and palpable inner life. You actually see his character thinking and gaming things out in real time, and it is compelling.

Another performance which I thought was terrific was Karren Karagulian as Toros, an Armenian handler hired by Vanya’s father to look after him. Karagulian is so good as Toros it made me giddy. He is so furious, frantic, frightened, formidable and funny that he chews through scenes like a tiger coming off a hunger strike.

Karagulian’s Toros gives a speech in a restaurant about two-thirds of the way through the film that brings the sub-text of the movie to light but it is the secondary focus of the scene and could’ve been a throwaway piece of work but Karagulian does it so well, and it feels so real and authentic that I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Writer/director Sean Baker, is not someone that I think of, or until now, think highly of. My introduction to Baker was his 2017 film The Florida Project, which was a very ambitious and effecting arthouse movie, but one that I ultimately couldn’t get a good grip on. His follow up film, Red Rocket (2021), was very well-received by most, and while I didn’t hate it I also I didn’t love it.

Anora is Baker showing himself to be a very confident craftsman and intellectually curious artist. His filmmaking and storytelling skills on Anora are top-notch. He paces the film well and fully fleshes out every character even with a minimum of screen time. Everything is shot to feel, if not real, then at least genuine.

As previously stated, Baker using his film to challenge the current liberal orthodoxy and the corrosive spiritual nihilism of modern feminism, shows he has artistic balls the size of watermelons…but his intentional or unintentional championing of the cause of traditionalism, inflates those balls to the size of Goodyear blimps.

Anora is currently in theatres and is available to stream VOD, and I highly recommend it to both cinephiles and scions of the cineplex. It is a funny and insightful film that never pulls its punches or plays games with its audience.

A bit of a warning though, the film does have nudity and sex scenes, although nothing is particularly graphic, but it might make the more prudish a bit uncomfortable.

In conclusion, just as Pretty Woman was a soulless selling of the corporate fairy tale of the Reagan 80’s, Anora is a soulful swallowing of the reality that the fairy tale of Reaganism in the 80’s has morphed into the nightmare of Trump, and just as importantly, the liberal feminist freakout to their nightmare of Trump, in the 2020’s. It’s an important movie not just to see, but to think about and to hopefully understand.

©2025

A Real Pain: A Review - On the Same Old Road Again

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.  A good but not great film that trods a well-worn path but features solid enough performances to be worth seeing.

A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, chronicles two adult cousins as they make a pilgrimage to Poland on a Holocaust tour to visit their late grandmother’s birthplace.

The film, which has a 90-minute run-time, had a limited theatrical release in November and is now available to stream on Hulu, which is where I watched it.  

A Real Pain has a lot going for it, and some things going against it.

The best thing about this movie is that it is the type of movie, a dialogue-driven ‘two-hander’ featuring two skilled actors, that doesn’t get made enough anymore but should.

A Real Pain cost $3 million to make and made $12 million at the box office, and while that won’t buy many beach houses it’s an even enough split to consider the movie well worthwhile.

In addition, the movie is adult fare, which is a rare species nowadays. It isn’t geared toward adolescents but rather toward adults, and adults who either act like adolescents or know other adults who act like adolescents.

And finally, the film features what is sure to be an Oscar nominated performance, and very likely an Oscar winning performance, from Kieran Culkin.

The film follows Eisenberg’s David and Culkin’s Benji, cousins who grew-up together but have grown apart in adulthood, as they fly from New York City to Poland and go on a Holocaust tour with a group of other Jews. There’s an older married couple, a middle-aged divorced woman, and a black African survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has converted to Judaism.

What makes the film compelling are both Culkin and Eisenberg’s performances…but what makes the film a grating experience, are the characters Culkin and Eisenberg play.

Benji is a ne’er do well narcissist and David is a neurotic nebbish, and neither of them are even remotely likable. This isn’t the fault of the actors, it’s just the reality of the characters….and I found them to be annoying as hell, which makes for a less than ideal viewing experience.

This is just me but I have never enjoyed watching Larry David or Woody Allen, and Benji and David are sort of like very, very distant cousins to Larry David and Woody Allen respectively (very, very, very distant…but relations nonetheless).

Culkin’s Benji is supposed to be charismatic in his own peculiar, truth-telling way, but I found him to be repulsive…your mileage may vary. I had no sympathy for him, or even empathy, I just wanted him to go away. David isn’t much better. He’s such a milquetoast, anxiety-ridden wet noodle that I wanted him to disappear too.

Again, and this is important to say, it’s nothing to do with the actors…both Culkin and Eisenberg deliver very solid performances. While Culkin is getting the awards mentions, Eisenberg does equally worthy, but more subtle, work.

The truth is, as good a performance as Culkin gives, there is an air of familiarity to it that feels a little shticky. Benji is, in many ways, just Culkin’s character from Succession, Roman, except Jewish and poor. Culkin’s Benji, like Roman, is quick-witted and snarky yet allegedly good-hearted and tormented. In this way, Culkin’s performance definitely feels like he’s just doing his same old shtick with minor external variances.

That said, it’s a showy, actory part, and he does it well, and I assume Culkin will win an Oscar for it…so good for him and all the more power to him.

Eisenberg has a less showy part, and as is usual with him, is much more internally focused, and he does it well. He has a monologue in a restaurant that is particularly well-done, and smart actors will use it in acting classes and auditions for the next few years.

Eisenberg also wrote and directed the film and he did well enough on both jobs. The script isn’t earth shattering but it is structured well-enough and gives some decent scenes to the actors.

The filmmaking is pretty standard as there’s nothing earth shattering visually, but the movie has a decent pace to it and feels professionally put together, so kudos to Eisenberg on his directorial debut.

Now on to a rather uncomfortable issue, and this is without question a very uncomfortable thing to feel and to discuss, and that is that A Real Pain seems like it’s yet another movie in the Holocaust Cinematic Universe.

Hollywood loves to make Holocaust movies, and that’s understandable as that vile, calamitous event is ripe with drama, but considering the times we live in, and the genocide being actively committed against Palestinians by Israeli ancestors of those who survived the Holocaust, this film’s entitled woe-is-me narrative feels painfully tone-deaf.

The tone-deafness is only accentuated by the film’s rather alarming and arrogant usurpation of the Rwandan genocide for the Jewish narrative, as if Jewishness can be the only home for suffering on such a grand scale. This is a morally insidious and ethically insipid position as it creates a self-righteousness immune from self-reflection – which is how we get an apartheid regime in Israel committing genocide, ethnic cleansing and a cavalcade of other war crimes all in the name of “Never Again” self-defense.

It would have been nice if A Real Pain had been self-aware enough to acknowledge the deeper more conflicted state of Jewishness in the world today rather retread the martyrdom narrative once again, but I suppose that is the safest and easiest path to tread, so I get it.

Despite the combustible moment in which we exist, and the film’s discomfort with this bloody moment (to be fair the film was shot before the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and start of the ensuing war), I thought A Real Pain was worth watching.

The film features solid performances across the board, and is geared toward adults, so that’s two wins right there.

If you have a chance check out A Real Pain on Hulu. It’s not the greatest movie you’ll ever see, and it won’t change your life, but it will hold your interest and maybe, if you get lucky, it’ll make you think just a little bit about things you don’t want to think about but should. And regardless of what conclusion you come to through this thinking, it is always good to think about things you don’t want to from time to time.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 129 - Nightbitch

On this episode Barry and I chase our own tails trying to find something nice to say about Amy Adams' new film Nightbitch, currently streaming on Hulu. Topics discussed include the multitude of bad decisions made by the writer/director Marielle Heller, Amy Adams' career decline, and the missed opportunity of a arthouse or body horror "mother" movie. 

And finally, stay 'til the end of the pod for a tribute to the great filmmaker David Lynch.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 129 - Nightbitch

Thanks for listening!

©2025

Nightbitch: A Review - This Mangy Dog Won't Hunt

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT POINTS AND MILD SPOILERS!! THEREFORE: THIS IS TECHNICALLY NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Flaccid and flavorless feminist gruel.

Nightbitch, starring Amy Adams, chronicles the weird and wild travails of a mother as she navigates raising a toddler, perimenopause and the modern world.

Nightbitch, which is written and directed by Marielle Heller and is adapted from the Rachel Yoder book of the same name, describes itself as a “black comedy horror” film. I take umbrage with that description since the movie is not funny, darkly or otherwise, nor is it horrifying….it’s just bad.

Nightbitch starts out in quite compelling fashion as Amy Adams’ character, simply named “mother”, struggles with the mind-numbing repetitiveness and inanity of raising a toddler, in this case her son, named, “baby”. Mother’s husband, who goes by the clever moniker “husband”, is away for work from Monday to Thursday so mother must do everything on her own.

A very interesting premise and a captivating first twenty minutes about the unique difficulties of raising a toddler quickly gets derailed when a tsunami of heavy-handed, insipid, intellectual and dramatic vapidity and vacuity around gender roles and modern-day feminism comes to the fore.

The movie shifts from arthouse realism into the mire of symbolism and surreality, as mother starts to show the early signs of morphing into a dog. Again, this could’ve been a nice segue into a “body-horror” type of cinematic exploration, but instead this metamorphosis ultimately is used just as “woman tapping into her primal power” symbolism, which is about as original, interesting and captivating as watching a dog take a shit on your lawn.

This movie could have, and frankly should have, been a serious and slightly comedic meditation on how devastatingly difficult it is for women to mother a toddler in the modern world. Or it could have, and should have, been a body horror film about a woman losing herself, physically, mentally, emotionally, and artistically to motherhood and menopause/middle-age. But it is neither…it is a pitiful and pedantic tantrum by a middle-aged woman angry at her intellectual and artistic impotence and her career and familial failures and needing to blame anyone but herself.

It is also so archetypally and mythologically obtuse and contrary to collective human consciousness and conditioning as to be astounding. For example, why is a woman seeking to connect with her primal power, morphing into a dog? Dogs are pack animals and are usually led by an alpha male…so even in this feminist fantasy film, the dream is of being a male instead of an empowered female. Odd.

Another issue is the tone deafness of the class politics of the film. Mother, and all the mothers in the movie by the way, live some of the most privileged lives imaginable. They are rich enough to be afforded the option of not working and staying home to raise their children. This used to be standard operating procedure here in America, but in the last fifty years it has become a sign of rare privilege and less and less likely.

Mother is completely unaware of how spoiled she is as she lives this extraordinarily privileged life and yet still manages to wallow in her narcissistic melancholy and navel-gazing ennui. She is, at a minimum, an upper-middle class woman who can afford to not have a job and stay at home and raise her one child. The child, by the way, is so well-behaved as to be absurd, and yet still she can’t handle it.

This flaccid film is so unconscionably blind to class politics because it is designed to be nothing more than a vehicle for some of the most-trite and laughably moronic modern feminist politics imaginable.

The eye-rolling level of cringe in this movie becomes nearly unavoidable as it rolls along. For example, mother is an artist…because of course she is since she’s never actually worked a day in her life…and she’s also a former Mennonite…because of course she is because she has to be connected to some weirdly archaic lifestyle and religious background. And of course her husband is one of those pussified eunuchs who lacks both balls and any semblance of muscle tone or masculinity, who serves little to no purpose in mother or baby’s life except for supplying food, clothing and shelter.

The relationship between mother and husband says a great deal about the film. When mother and husband argue it’s because he’s an idiot and thoughtless and selfish, not because she is spoiled and irrational (which she is).

Mother was an artist “in the city” but wanted to stay home with the baby and gave up her career to do so. Husband is the bread winner….as they both agreed upon prior to the baby being born. But now she regrets that decision and somehow it is all husband’s fault for not being able to both read her mind and see into the future.

Mother decides she is unhappy and it’s all husband’s fault because he gave her everything she ever wanted…but it wasn’t what she wanted. So, she says raising this child on her own is too difficult so she wants to get separated…which will really solve the issue of being overwhelmed by having to take care of a child by yourself by removing the other adult in the equation. Brilliant….or should I say “great idea stupid bitch”.

And then…for some strange reason because he’s the one who makes money and has always been the one making money and it’s his fucking house…he moves out into an apartment complex with all the other divorced/separated dads. How about this nightbitch…it’s his fucking house and you’re the one with the problem, so you get the fuck out…how does that sound you hairy fucking mongrel? But no, Mr. Limp Dick puts his tail between his legs and goes to sleep in his race car bed in his studio apartment with all the other sad sacks at the singles complex. Pathetic.

Mother then spends her time getting back in touch with her primal nature – morphing into a dog and hunting with the pack late at night. She also spends time with other moms who all agree that “women are gods” and that “women create life!” The funny thing about this sort of bumper sticker feminism is that it is so stupid it makes my teeth hurt. For example, women don’t create life…men AND women create life…women carry it in their bodies after men inseminate them. Sort of a big difference. Also…why do I have to explain 5th grade biology to this idiotic movie?

Mother, now free on the weekends because exceedingly well behaved baby is busy overwhelming incompetent husband at the single’s complex, creates a massive amount of art that celebrates the power of mothers, and she puts on a big art show and presents in the suburbs. The art mother makes is so laughably bad, pretentious, derivative and trite it makes a toddler’s play-dough snake look like Michelangelo. The banal atrocity that is mother’s art is obvious to everyone watching the movie but apparently no one involved in making the movie. But the lesson of all this nonsensical junk is that mother can only be her true goddess self without that useless husband around…and even more menacingly…without that annoying baby occupying her precious time too.

On the bright side, Nightbitch is a wonderful encapsulation of how modern feminism teaches women to be deathly allergic to responsibility and to blame others for their personal, political, artistic and financial failures.

The “patriarchy” that the nightbitches scapegoat are made up of the rough men they love to loathe, but these are the men who carved out a place for these feckless women to live their silly, mindless, meaningless lives the way they choose…and yet still, all they can do is bitch about it.

Writer/director Marielle Heller, is one of those less-than-talented people who somehow, almost magically, con people into thinking they have actual talent. Trust me, she doesn’t have an ounce of it.

Nightbitch fits right in with Heller’s flimsy filmography, which includes Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, because like all the other movies, it’s a mind-numbing, sub-mediocrity. It is poorly shot, poorly written, poorly executed and devoid of any real purpose or meaning except to pose as having a deep purpose or meaning.

Amy Adams is an actress I have always liked but she is on one hell of a streak of shitty movies. Her last decent movie was Arrival, and that was in 2016!

Adams dives right in to her role here as mother, and apparently gained weight for the role, which is ironic because the film is so philosophically and cinematically weightless.

She does the best she can with what she’s given but it never coalesces into a coherent or compelling performance. There is no arc, no insight, no genuine humanity or behavior. Everything feels like Amy Adams play-acting as a middle-aged feminist avatar.

Adams seems to be in a very disorienting career death spiral which started out with her aggressively attempting to finally win an Oscar after six nominations, and has morphed into her desperately flailing away in an attempt to save her moribund career.

Nightbitch was released into theatres on December 6th, which is ironic because that is one day before Pearl Harbor Day and this movie was a massive, massive bomb. The only difference between this movie and Pearl Harbor is that people paid attention to Pearl Harbor.

The film had a budget of $25 million and it made measly $170,000 at the box office. It didn’t make that its opening day, or even opening weekend, that’s how little it made in the entirety of its run. $170,000. YIKES!

A flop this bad and a box office bomb this big can be career death for a movie star and a moviemaker. Adams and Heller are on very thin ice going forward.

The film is now available to stream on Hulu…but as you may have guessed, you really don’t need to stream it. It’s stupid and even worse, it’s pointless AND gutless.

The topic of the struggle of motherhood in all its complexities is one ripe for exploration, but Nightbitch ain’t that. This movie is so toothless, so artless and so thoughtless, that it is anti-cinema made manifest. Avoid it at all costs.

©2025

A Complete Unknown: A Review - A Bob Dylan Bio-Pic Blowin' in the Wind

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A painfully formulaic music bio-pic, that features great music, but that refuses to do anything but paint-by-numbers. Skip it in the theatre and see it on streaming.

A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, chronicles Bob Dylan’s rise to fame from his beginnings in 1961 to his iconic performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

The film, which is directed by James Mangold and co-written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, opens with Dylan moving to New York City and making a pilgrimage to see the godfather of American folk music, Woody Guthrie, as he lay in dire straits in a hospital bed.

It is at the hospital that Dylan meets both the infirm Guthrie as well as his friend, esteemed folk musician Pete Seeger, and plays a song for them both which impresses them no end. And off to the races goes Bob Dylan’s career.

On the journey of this film, we get to see Bob mix and mingle with such musical stalwarts as Joan Baez and Johnny Cash as well as Seeger and Guthrie. We also get glimpses of his personal life and his relationships with both Baez and Sylvie Russo (in real life this character is Dylan’s girlfriend Suze Rotolo), and his struggle and sometimes delight in making it big.

We also get to the standard music biopic touchstones where a guy-writing-songs is interspersed with great historical moments of the time. So, there’s memory lane type moviemaking where Dylan writes this great song and everybody knowingly looks at each other, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis happens, and he writes another great song and everybody knowingly looks at each other, and then the JFK assassination happens and Dylan writes another great song and everybody knowingly looks at each other…and on and on and on.

What we don’t see in the film is any real glimpse of Bob Dylan behind the well-defined public persona. In public life Dylan has long been a distant, aloof, morose and surly entity…and he remains one throughout the entirety of this rigidly formulaic film.

The music bio-pic is such a standard of Hollywood that it feels like self-parody at this point, and A Complete Unknown adheres to the well-worn, paint-by-numbers music biopic approach from start to finish.

Are there bright spots in the film? Sure.

First off, while I am no superfan of Bob Dylan, I do like his music a great deal and the music in this movie is well executed and presented. You can’t help but tap your feet and nod along to the renditions of Dylan’s famous and fantastic songs…of which there are a shockingly high number.

Secondly, there are a few good performances in the movie. The most notable to me is a very nuanced and subtle performance from Edward Norton as Pete Seeger.

Norton’s Seeger is a gentle soul that conceals a fiery spirit with which Seeger is exceedingly uncomfortable. Norton gives Seeger a delicate touch but there is something in his gentility that is fierce and undeniable.

Norton gets overlooked a lot, and is widely considered a pain in the ass by the powers that be in Hollywood, but make no mistake, when he is locked-in he is a terrific actor, and he is locked-in here as Seeger.

Another bright spot is that Timothee Chalamet, to his great credit, actually plays guitar and sings for his performance as Dylan. Nothing would’ve been worse than to have a fake-nose wearing Chalamet lip-sync his way through Dylan’s early catalogue. Chalamet singing and playing gives the music a rawness that adds to the authenticity of an otherwise rather inauthentic movie.

To be clear, in terms of the acting, Chalamet does a good impression of Bob Dylan, but due to the limitations of the script, the performance never moves beyond imitation. He is restricted by the script from delving too deeply into Dylan as a human being, and is forced to stick with Dylan as musical genius.

Timothee Chalamet, or as I prefer to call him – “Little Timmy”, has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Critics and industry people fawn all over him like he’s the love child of James Dean and Leonardo DiCaprio. In my less than humble opinion, he’s never been very good in anything I’ve seen him do, with the lone exception of a commercial for Apple TV (in which he is excellent).

I assume Little Timmy will win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his work as Bob Dylan. It’s one of those roles that Hollywood loves to celebrate because it pays homage to an icon, Dylan, and gives praise to a young actor they want to turn into the next big movie star.

Little Timmy has definitely positioned himself well for the moment and in his career, and is poised in Hollywood eyes for winning an Oscar, but whether he’ll actually prove himself to be a great actor, or a great movie star, over the next decades, remains to be seen. Consider me skeptical.

The rest of the cast do decent enough work in rather thankless roles.

For example, the usually stellar Elle Fanning, who was so remarkable in the tv series The Great, is under-utilized and reduced to the one-dimensional girlfriend role of Sylvie. Fanning does what she can with the very little she’s given…but boy there’s not much for her to do.

The same is true of Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. Barbaro does do a good job singing in Baez’s beautiful style, but beyond that she is given gruel on which to feed.

Boyd Holbrook plays Johnny Cash, and he does well enough with very little. One of the funniest moments in the movie is when Holbrook’s Cash tries to move his car at the Newport Festival. If you’ll remember, director Mangold made the Johnny Cash bio-pic Walk the Line, which garnered Joaquin Phoenix a Best Actor nomination in 2005. (It would’ve been amusing to me if Mangold went full Mangold Music Bio-pic Cinematic Universe – MMBPCU - and had Phoenix play the small role of Johnny Cash in this movie.)

But even the bright spots of this film aren’t particularly bright, which is often an issue with a formulaic music bio-pic.

The bottom line regarding A Complete Unknown is that it is, as a cinematic venture, unlike Bob Dylan’s discography, pretty forgettable. But the reality is that most people will go and hear the great music and enjoy the movie for the mediocrity that it is…and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In my screening there were a bevy of people in Dylan’s age group (their 80s) who cheered rapturously when the movie ended…and who also spoke ridiculously loudly during the duration of the film. These folks don’t need the movie to be good or even interesting, they just need it to be a nostalgia delivery machine…and they got what they wanted.

Ultimately, I enjoyed listening to Bob Dylan’s music for a couple hours while a middling movie played out before me. I assume anyone who loves or even likes Bob Dylan’s music will feel the same way.

That said, the reality is that A Complete Unknown is a generic, safe and very middling affair that is buoyed by Bob Dylan’s musical brilliance. Because of that, I would say that if you want to see it, save your money and the annoyance of a theatre outing and wait until it hits a streaming service to watch it.

©2024

Nosferatu: A Review - Beautiful, Brilliant and Bloodthirsty

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A masterfully-made arthouse horror movie that features exquisite craftsmanship.

I went to a small arthouse theater here in flyover country last night to see Robert Eggers’ new film Nosferatu, which is a remake of the 1922 F.W. Murnau silent film classic of the same name.

My theater going experience was, to say the least, not very conducive to a positive cinematic experience. First off, the theater across the hall from my screening was playing the Bob Dylan bio-pic A Complete Unknown, and so my often-silent screening of Nosferatu many times had an unintentional bass line accompanying it courtesy of Mr. Dylan.

Secondly, despite being the only people in the theater at the start of the screening, my wife and I were soon joined by a cavalcade of dimwits and dipshits in our small screening room once the film began. A couple in their mid-60’s sat in the row in front of us off to the right and decided this theater was their living room and chatted freely and loudly. Another man, by himself, sat in the row in front of us to our left and after downing a bag of popcorn and drinking a canned iced tea, proceeded to sanitize his hands and compulsively rub them together literally every ten minutes for the duration of the film. The medicated stench of the sanitizer did not add to our enjoyment of the film.

And yet…despite all of the morons and miscreants around us and the uninvited bass line, I still found myself under the spell of the arthouse horror of Nosferatu as its the mesmerizing mastery played out before me.

The original Nosferatu is a truly staggering cinematic achievement. Director Murnau is one of the most influential filmmakers of the German Expressionist era. I saw Murnau’s Nosferatu for the first time in the early 1990’s and was blown away by it. It is essential viewing for anyone interesting in making, or understanding, cinema.

Robert Eggers’ remake is not as colossal a cinematic document as Murnau’s, but it is very impressive nonetheless. What is so remarkable about this new version is that Eggers’ Nosferatu is one of the most magnificently crafted films in recent memory.

The film is bursting with a bevy of extraordinary craftsmanship, from its cinematography to its costume and set design, that is exhilarating for a cinephile. Unfortunately, for whatever reason (and there are a myriad of them), craftsmanship of this level is rarely seen in films anymore.

Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is astonishing as the film is gorgeously photographed. His framing and composition, use of shadow and light, and deft camera movements make for a phenomenal visual feast of a film.

Robert Eggers’ and Blaschke’s clarity of vision, precision and attention to detail are extraordinary. The film is not black and white, like the original, but it is dark…but unlike so many modern movies, the darkness does not lack distinction. In other words, you can actually see despite – or in some cases – because, of the darkness.

Blaschke’s cinematography and muted color palette, combined with the locations, sets and costumes, along with Eggers’ gothic brilliance, set an unsettling mood for the movie which is more-creepy than it is scary.

If you know the original Nosferatu, or are familiar with the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, you’ll know the plot of this film, so there will be no twists or surprises, but thanks to Eggers’ mastery, you’ll still be compelled to watch.

The cast all acquit themselves well, but it is Lily Rose Depp (daughter of Johnny Depp) as Ellen, who stands above the rest with a truly superb performance. Depp is asked to do quite a bit and she is fearless in tackling all of the madness required of her. Depp is unleashed, physically, emotionally, artistically, and she devours the role with a ferocious aplomb.

Depp’s Ellen is the embodiment of repressed female sexuality in the Victorian era. The men in her life restrain her, numb her, drug her, chastise her, shame her and ignore her. But the sexual beast within her, which has called Nosferatu forth, simply cannot be denied.

Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas, Ellen’s husband, and he is fantastic as essentially the cuckold to Nosferatu. Thomas is afraid…of everything, and Hoult brings that fear to life in a captivating, and never mannered, way.

Thomas loves Ellen, of that there is no doubt, but he is rudderless when it comes to navigating the intricacies of the staid business world as well as his wife’s carnal needs.

Aaron Taylor Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe all give deliciously theatrical performances as Friedrich, Anna, and Dr. von Franz respectively.

Dafoe, if you’ll recall, starred as Max Shreck in Shadow of the Vampire back in 2000 – a fictional (and clever) re-telling of the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu. Now here he is playing a German version of Von Helsing in the remake. It never fails to amuse me that Willem Dafoe has become the go to eccentric character actor of our time…it also never fails to please me.

Bill Skarsgard plays Count Orlack/Nosferatu in all his grotesqueness and is magnificently menacing. Skarsgard’s voice is unnervingly demonic and matches his ungodly and ungainly physicality.

The vampire has long been a symbol of repressed sexual energy…which is why it was such a potent myth in Victorian era. Count Orlock/Nosferatu, is not a sexy and suave lady killer like Dracula, instead he is a demon and beast…a sub-conscious symbol of repressed sexuality.

Ellen’s sexual energy is stifled at an early age under the repressive mores of her time, but it is released when she calls forth the beast Nosferatu…a shadow creature who dwells in psychological darkness where unspoken and unacknowledged desires reside.

As Thomas says to Ellen after she speaks of her calling forth the demon in her youth – “let’s never speak of it again” – which of course leaves it in the psychological shadow which will only further empower the beastly demon.

Eggers’ re-telling of the Nosferatu/Dracula/vampire story goes, unsurprisingly, deep into the lore and the core of vampire mythology. Thanks to this much of the Hollywood stuff we’ve grown accustomed to is gone. For example, there are no wooden stakes or flying bats in Nosferatu…but there are rats…lots and lots and lots of rats.

Eggers is a filmmaker who has a distinct style that some consider an acquired taste. If that is true then I have, for the most part, acquired it. I was blown away by Eggers’ moody first film, The Witch, but was disappointed by his second effort, The Lighthouse, which just wasn’t for me.

I really enjoyed his third film The Northman, but the movie flopped and I was worried what he would or could do next to keep his artistry and his career afloat. Thankfully he’s now given us Nosferatu, which while it isn’t a truly great film, it is so exceptionally made and is doing well-enough at the box office, that Eggers will continue to do his cinematic thing for the foreseeable future, which makes me happy.  

Genuine auteurs are tough to find nowadays, and auteurs with exquisite artistic sensibilities and craftsmanship are even more rare. Eggers is all of the above, and when you consider his unique cinematic style and taste in projects, he really comes to the forefront as one of our treasured filmmakers…even if he isn’t blowing up the box office or winning Academy Awards.

In conclusion, Nosferatu may not interest normal people, or it may be too dark for the cineplex crowd, but it is a masterful piece of moviemaking that should be celebrated and encouraged.

Nosferatu was the best movie I’ve seen this year because it was the best made-movie I’ve seen this year. If you like cinematic excellence, even when it comes in the form of a remake of a one-hundred-year-old silent horror classic, then this movie is for you.

And finally, while I heartily recommend David Eggers’ new arthouse horror version of Nosferatu to those with the taste for it, I also highly recommend the original 1922 Nosferatu by F.W. Murnau, but that I recommend for everyone…as it’s something everybody needs to see at least once in their life (and it is streaming on Amazon Prime!!).

©2024

The Substance: A Review - Everything Old is New Again

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Be forewarned, this is a body horror movie with ample amounts of gooey gore, but it is also a well-executed and well-acted piece of social commentary that works quite well despite some major issues with its third act.

The Substance, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, is, almost despite itself, one of the more intriguing films of 2024.

The movie is a satirical body horror film that stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a once celebrated but now aging star who hosts an exercise show ala Jane Fonda in the 1980s.

On Elisabeth’s fiftieth birthday she connects with a mysterious company that sells “The Substance” – which is an injectable formula that creates a second, younger you. As The Substance company is quick to remind customers, this new version isn’t a different person from the original…the original and the newer version are one in the same.

A desperate and depressed Elisabeth ultimately chooses to take The Substance and the rest of the film involves Elisabeth and her younger new self, Sue - magnificently played by Margaret Qualley, trying to navigate their very unusual circumstances.

The Substance, which is available VOD or on the streaming service MUBI (you can get a free trial subscription for a week and then cancel – that’s what I did) is an undeniably clever movie that is well-executed enough to be elevated to an interesting and compelling piece of cinema. It masterfully and often hysterically comments on the long-running, rampant misogyny and ageism in Hollywood. Having worked with many women in the acting business over the years I can attest that it’s a young woman’s game, and hitting thirty, never mind forty or fifty, is often a death knell.

The Substance’s biggest issue as a film is that it is two-thirds of a very good one. Unfortunately, in the final act the story and the film’s internal logic and perspective, take a beating and the movie meanders aimlessly for about thirty minutes until finally settling on a less than satisfying conclusion.

French writer/director Fargeat seems like she didn’t know how, or when, to end her movie. In this way The Substance reminded me of another pretty good horror film in recent years, Barbarian, which was exquisite for its first two acts and then devolved into a bit of a derivative mess.

As poor as the final act of The Substance is, and it really is poor, the first two acts are really wonderful.

Demi Moore gives a brave performance as Elisabeth, doing a bevy of extended nude scenes – which are pivotal to the narrative and to the drama. An actress having the courage to bare her aging body on the big screen in age and perfection obsessed Hollywood is a courageous one indeed.

Casting Moore, whose career is vaguely similar to Elisabeth’s, is a meta-textual masterpiece, most of all because she gives a dynamic, nuanced and very vulnerable performance which elevates the film.

Margaret Qualley is an actress who I have noticed from the beginning of her career. I remember the first time I saw her was in a small film titled The Novitiate. I thought she was extremely good in that mostly forgettable movie as she displayed an undeniable charisma and magnetism…and thought she had a chance to have a big career in front of her. I didn’t even know she was Andie McDowell’s daughter at the time.

Qualley has proven me right with her work since then. She was spectacular in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and she is equally impressive here.

I was going to congratulate Qualley on her bravery as well for the numerous nude scenes and body shots on display in The Substance, but I was informed by a female “friend” that Qualley used a body double for her nude scenes. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I will say that whoever is baring their body as Sue in this film, be it Margaret Qualley or a body double, has my respect and gratitude.

Qualley is fantastic as Sue as she fills her with a verve and vitality that few can replicate on screen. Sue’s persistence, petulance and power are a combustible combination, and the film comes alive whenever Qualley as Sue is unleashed.

Another noteworthy performance comes from Dennis Quaid as pervert producer Harvey. Quaid goes all in on repugnancy and is such a repellent figure it is uncomfortably hysterical. That director Fargeat repeatedly shoots him in the most grotesque of close-ups only heightens Harvey’s repugnancy.

Despite the misstep that is the third act, there is no denying the great job writer/director Coralie Fageat did in the first two acts of The Substance.

The film is exquisitely shot and edited, and the costumes and sets are artistic perfection. There are little details throughout the film that are impressive to notice, such as all the cars parked in the street when Elisabeth is walking around town, are either, fancy sports cars or refurbished muscle cars – which is a subtle cinematic touch that is an indication of a quality director at the helm.

Recommending The Substance is a slightly tricky thing to do because as stated it is a body horror movie, so there are ample scenes of grotesque gore that, while well-executed, are pretty horrific. If you’re into that sort of thing I think you’ll definitely love this movie…even the third act.

If you’re not into that sort of thing, then this might be a tougher watch. I would recommend The Substance to the cavalcade of, dare I say it, older actresses I know (ducking to avoid the Manolo Blahnik being thrown at my head), because they will totally get the sentiment that drives this movie even if the body horror stuff is a turn off.

The truth is that in lesser hands, both in terms of the acting and the directing, The Substance could have been a real cringeworthy piece of feminist bitching, moaning and man-hating. But Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and director Coralie Fargeat make this satiric body horror story into a complex cinematic venture that, despite its massive third act issues, is an insightful, and thoughtful piece of work worth checking out.

The Substance resonates as a piece of art, and despite being a body horror film it really is at heart a European arthouse movie, because it exists in a world over-run by Instagram and Tik Tok influencers making a living off of exploiting their young, nubile bodies, and in which the public sphere and the entertainment industry have been pornified beyond belief.

The Substance doesn’t get everything right, but it gets enough right, particularly the performances of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, to be worth watching.

©2024

Blitz: A Review - Bombs Away!

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: ½ out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ill-conceived, poorly executed and outrageously awful movie.

If you’re yearning for a story about Nazi Germany’s brutal blitzkrieg bombing assault on London during World War II that is so pretentious and preposterous that it will have you rooting for the bad guys to go full on Enola Gay and Hiroshima the Brits into oblivion…have I got the movie for you.

Blitz, written and directed by acclaimed auteur Steve McQueen, tells the story of George, a young mixed-race boy, and his single white mother, Rita, who try to survive the chaos and calamity of the Blitz.

My wee Scottish grandmother, one of my all-time favorite people, lived in London during the Blitz and when I was a child would tell me stories of frantically running to the underground with her two horrified toddlers and one wailing infant (my uncles) in tow in order to survive the German bombing raids.

Her harrowing experience had me deeply interested in watching Blitz. As did the fact that one of my favorite actresses, Saoirse Ronan, stars in it, and that the film’s writer/director, Steve McQueen, was a once upon a time a filmmaker I revered for his artistic courage and vision.

Then I sat down and watched Blitz – which is streaming on Apple TV+…and holy shit balls is it egregiously, atrociously bad.

This movie is so ill-conceived, poorly designed, erroneously executed, didactic, patronizing, pedantic and pedestrian that it left me frustrated to the point of being furious. It is difficult to put into words how much I hated this movie…but I’ll try because I truly and absolutely despised it.

The film, which runs two-hours, makes the ludicrous decision to make the story of the Blitz, a terror bombing which killed 40,000 Brits – the overwhelming majority (literally 99%) of whom were white, about a little black-skinned boy suffering a bevy of racist micro-aggressions while on an odyssey through London. I shit you not.

It would be hard to misunderstand and misrepresent the meaning of the Blitz more than to use it as a weapon to bash the very people it brutalized. This movie is the equivalent of telling a story about the Holocaust and having it focus on a mixed-race Polish kid in Krakow bemoaning the Jewish racism he endured at the hands of the Jews being forced into the ghetto and onto the trains headed to Auschwitz.

The film’s pretentiousness and its patronizing tone are astonishing, and seemed designed to please a particularly putrid audience from our recent past.

This is one of those films that vacuous liberal white people would’ve exalted in the most glowing terms back in 2019, no doubt during breaks at their book club meetings where they self-righteously discussed the brilliance of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist and lamented how everyone else besides them is so racist.

This is the type of movie where the white people are almost unanimously atrocious and despicable villains, and minorities, be they Indian, Jewish or African, are noble saints with hearts of gold.

The heart of gold lineup includes but is not limited to…the Jew with a heart of gold who stands up to defend an Indian family – who also have hearts of gold. There’s a Nigerian nightwatchman with a heart so golden he is essentially Jesus Christ. Then there’s a communist midget…again I shit you not…with a heart of gold considerably bigger than his tiny little body. There’s also a black woman who is a criminal but she too ends up having, you guessed it…a heart of gold!

The Anglo-Saxon/white Brits on the other hand…well, they are, with the exception of Rita and her father, a vile, vindictive, violent, vicious and venomous bunch. Whether it’s the street criminal Albert, who seems like something out of a second-rate Dickens novel, or the bevy of pale civil servants tasked with public safety, or the white men in various positions of power, the white characters are a cruel and heartless bunch, that lie easily and incessantly. They are all filled to the brim with a savage and irrational hate for anyone not white that burns brighter and hotter than any Nazi fire bombing.

On top of the incomparably trite and passe agenda fueling the film, there’s the issue of the plot being so ludicrous and preposterous as to be incandescently stupid.

George’s odyssey is essentially like Pinocchio’s, as he goes from one inanity to the next, making awful, idiotic decisions every chance he gets. But, of course, because George is of mixed-race, he has a heart of gold and is outlandishly courageous and brave, while the white kids are just cruel and mean-spirited.

George’s odyssey is the main narrative in the film, and it is incessantly nonsensical and moronic. Elliot Heffernan, who plays George, is a stone-faced dullard who does nothing but grate and irritate viewers every second he’s on-screen. I’ve never wished for a child to be killed in a movie before…but this dope had me rooting for it.

The more interesting, but equally inane, narrative, is that of George’s mom, Rita. I love Saoirse Ronan, and she does the best she can with what’s she’s given, but Rita’s story, which is filled with a bevy of lifeless flashbacks, is so vapid it made my teeth hurt.  And, of course, it is filled with a cavalcade of loathsome white men and their unending racism and sexism and the like. Yawn.

Steve McQueen was once a filmmaker I deeply respected and admired. His first feature, Hunger (2008), which chronicles the struggle of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, is a masterful, exquisitely executed, immensely moving film. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

His next film, Shame (2011), is a shocking, vivid depiction of the chaotic life of a sex addict that is also well-crafted.  

His third film, 12 Years a Slave (2013), won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. It is a bit of a controversial pick in hindsight because apparently making slave movies is a no-no among the DEI sect nowadays. But back then, it was an impressive film that was very deftly put together, and I loved it then…and still do today.

Then things started to go off the rails for McQueen. His next movie, Widows (2018), was, frankly, a mess of a movie. It tried, and failed, to say a lot of things about a lot of subjects, and generally ended up being politically flaccid, dramatically incoherent and cinematically impotent.

Which brings us to Blitz. Blitz is proof of something that makes me quite unhappy, namely that Steve McQueen is not the noteworthy filmmaker I wished him to be, but rather a painfully pedestrian and banal artistic poseur devoid of any truly compelling or original vision.

The reality is that the brilliant Steve McQueen of Hunger is dead and buried, and all we have left is the man who made Blitz, a cloying, trite and treacly film that feels like a sub-par parody of one of those racially-motivated and quickly forgotten BBC movies of the week.

The bottom line is that Blitz is an embarrassingly bad, painfully pretentious and preposterous film that I cannot recommend to anyone at any time. This movie is an abject failure in every way and, like the vast majority of the films of Apple TV+, is a complete and total waste of time. Skip it…I know I wish I had.

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 126 - The Substance

On this episode, Barry and I dive head first into the fountain of youth to discuss the intriguing satirical body horror movie The Substance, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. Topics discussed include the clever premise of the film and it's quality execution, third act issues, and the stellar work of Moore and Qualley. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 126 - The Substance

Thanks for listening!!

©2024

Megalopolis: A Review - A Mega Mess

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a truly, truly awful movie in every single way. Poorly written, directed, acted and shot. It deserves zero stars but I gave it one star out of respect for Francis Ford Coppola and his stellar work in the 70s.

My favorite baseball player when I was a kid was Tom Seaver. Seaver was a pitcher for the New York Mets and for some reason, I just attached myself to his stardom when I was very young. I even had a tiny #41 Mets jersey and uniform that I wore every year for Halloween, even after it stopped fitting.

The Mets traded Tom Terrific in 1977 and I was a heartbroken and homeless baseball fan until I quickly latched onto the irascible Thurman Munson and the Yankees – which only led to its own heartbreak down the road…but that’s a story for another day.

The reason I bring up Seaver is that I always loved the guy, even after his Hall of Fame playing career came to an end. He was a phenomenal pitcher, but he was also a great guy and a class act.

So in my teens, when Seaver was forty-years-old, I made a pilgrimage to see him pitch in Fenway Park for the Chicago White Sox against the Boston Red Sox on July 30th, 1985. I assumed this would be my last chance to see him pitch live, and I was right.

Seaver was well past his prime and couldn’t throw his fastball with the savage velocity he used to, but he was still a master craftsman and could pitch his ass off. On this night he called on all his experience and mastery and pitched an absolute gem, throwing a complete game, 7-5 victory…the 299th win of his career. It was a joy to behold.

I thought of the old war horse Tom Seaver conjuring up some late career magic when I sat down to watch Megalopolis (now available to rent on VOD for $20), the new film from iconic, Academy Award winning auteur Francis Ford Coppola, who is now 85 years-old and well past his prime. But I hoped, like Seaver, Coppola would recapture some of that old magic just one more time.

Megalopolis, which is written and directed by Coppola, is a science fiction fable that chronicles the personal, political and cultural quest for power, purpose and meaning in an alternative, 21st-century, New York City named New Rome.

The film is an epic inspired by Greek and Roman classics, Roman history, and Shakespeare, and it is an outrageously ambitious and audacious cinematic venture.

I desperately wanted to like this movie, and desperately wanted it to work and I desperately wanted it to be good. Unfortunately, Megalopolis is a catastrophically, disastrously bad movie that doesn’t work in any way at all.

The film follows the story of Cesar Catalina, yes – that is his real name, a genius architect blessed with the ability to stop time. What does Mr. Catalina do with that ability? Nothing really.

Catalina is in a power struggle against Mayor Franklyn Cicero, and banking tycoon Hamilton Crassus, as well as both of their extended families.

He’s also in a tenuous and very shallow relationship with tv presenter and social climber Wow Platinum, yes – that is her real name, and also gets into a Romeo and Juliet type situation with the Mayor’s daughter, Julia.

Through all this Cesar Catalina is trying to rebuild New Rome into a utopia that will endure well beyond his and his direct descendant’s lifetimes and be a shining city on a hill through the ages.

If that plot and character description sounds like a lot, that’s because it is…and frankly, that’s not even the half of it.

The problems with Megalopolis are legion – pardon the pun. Coppola famously financed the film himself, all $130 million of it, and it’s easy to see why as no studio executive with half a brain in his head and any semblance of a survival instinct would attach themselves to this convoluted and incoherent mess of a movie.

Let’s start at the beginning. The casting for this movie is so egregiously awful that it beggars belief.

Adam Driver, or as I call him – the modern-day Elliot Gould (in case you’re wondering…that’s not a compliment), is the darling of the auteur sect at the moment, but he is unquestionably an atrocious actor and an even worse movie star, so his being cast as the lead Cesar Catalina is a major error.

Driver is an irredeemably impotent actor devoid of even a minimal amount of power, presence or gravitas, so he is incapable of carrying a gargantuan film of this magnitude.

Catalina is supposed to be this object of desire oozing with sex appeal and magnetism, but Driver is a doughy doofus and is so repellent as to be the walking embodiment of anti-sexual attraction.

Catalina is also supposed to be a genius, but Driver is a dim-witted, dead-eyed dullard who has no light in his eyes and comes across as a dumbass and dope, meathead and mope on-screen, which only makes his performance all the more infuriatingly flaccid.

In addition to the abysmal Driver, is the equally awful Shia LaBeouf, who is consistently terrible at everything he does.

LaBeouf plays Clodio, Cesar’s jealous cousin, and he does all the usual hackneyed, ham-fisted histrionics you’d expect from a minimally talented actor trying too hard to show everyone he’s acting.

The worst performance in the film, and that is saying something, comes from Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Julia Cicero. Emmanuel is a beautiful woman but she is such a lifeless and wooden actor that you’d be better served casting a cigar store wooden Indian than her. Emmanuel’s dismal line readings are so devoid of life I felt like I was watching her narrate her own autopsy.

The rest of the cast, which include Aubrey Plaza, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, are no walk in the park either. The main problem with the acting is that the performances are all over the place tonally. It’s like watching ten different actors working in ten different films all spliced together randomly. It’s bizarre.

The blame for the epic failure of the epic Megalopolis falls squarely on Francis Ford Coppola as he’s the one who cast these incompetent snores in the first place, and then failed to direct them adequately to present a unified tone.

I also blame Coppola for the film’s uninspired and amateurish cinematography. Scenes are consistently poorly designed, blocked and framed. The visual effects, the sets and the costumes all look unconscionably cheap and tawdry. Which begs the question…where did that $130 million go?

The theatricality of the film, in its writing, staging, acting, set design and costumes, doesn’t seem avant-garde but accidental, like a way to cut corners with unfinished ideas and unpolished set ups.

The script is an unmitigated disaster, like a glimpse into the mind of a narcissistic, drunk, manic depressive mad man having a break down while strapped to a chair in front of Fox News.

There’s a plethora of inane B-story lines about a virginal pop singer named Vesta Sweetwater, and yes that’s her real name, and a dangerously malfunctioning Soviet satellite falling to earth, and a populist politician’s quest for power and on and on and none of them mean much of anything in the big picture or come to any dramatically satisfying conclusion.

The film is just Coppola saying the world is a mess and only he understands it and only he can fix it. The problem with this is that the animating philosophy of the film is so trite as to be ludicrous.

As are the film’s heavy-handed and extraordinarily vacuous politics. For example, there’s actually a sign held up at a populist rally that says “Make New Rome Great Again”. Subtle.

Francis Ford Coppola has given us some of the very greatest films ever made, The Godfather I and II, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. But he hasn’t made a half way decent film, or been even remotely relevant as a filmmaker or artist, in over thirty years. In other words, he not only can’t throw his fastball anymore, he can barely throw a ball anymore.

It pained me to watch the mega-mess of Megalopolis because Coppola, like Scorsese and Kurosawa and Kubrick, is such a cornerstone to my love of cinema. But the cold and very hard reality is that Megalopolis is a film made by a man who shouldn’t be making films anymore.

Coppola no longer has the effortless talent, craft and skill he displayed during his heyday in the 1970’s. He is a man with lots of ideas but without the ability to convey them cinematically in a coherent and competent way. That is heart breaking for fans of cinema, like myself, and no doubt for Coppola, who still has a lot to say but is unable to adequately say it.

I wish Megalopolis was Coppola as Tom Seaver battling Red Sox batters for nine strong innings to get his 299th win. But it isn’t. It is Coppola as Seaver, a good man and once great pitcher, having to suffer the heartbreak and indignity of quitting his post-playing broadcasting job because he was suffering from dementia.

In this respect Megalopolis isn’t just a bad film, it is a gut-wrenching tragedy. Poorly considered, poorly crafted and poorly executed in every single way, it is better not that you don’t ever watch Megalopolis, but that you entirely forget it ever existed. That’s what I hope to do.

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 125 - Megalopolis

On this episode, Barry and I head to New Rome to discuss all things Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's newest film. Topics discussed include egregious casting errors, abysmal acting, incoherent script and subpar craftsmanship. But besides that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 125 - Megalopolis

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Conclave: A Review - Committing a Cinematic Cardinal Sin

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A well-crafted and well-acted film that ultimately condemns itself to hell with an inexcusable plot twist that is so inane as to be infuriating.

Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and written by Peter Straughan (adapted from Robert Harris’ book of the same name), tells the story of Cardinal Lawrence, a man struggling with his faith who must navigate palace intrigue in the Vatican as the College of Cardinals assembles to elect a new pope.

On the surface, Conclave has a lot going for it. For example, it stars a cavalcade of top-notch actors, with Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, Stanley Tucci as Cardinal Bellini, John Lithgow as Cardinal Tremblay and Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes among the cast.

In addition, it is directed by Edward Berger, whose last film, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), was a phenomenal, Academy Award nominated piece of work, my favorite of that year because it was so beautifully shot and masterfully executed.

On a personal note, as a Catholic myself (I’m not a good one…but I definitely am one) who has visited the Vatican on numerous occasions, I find the subject matter of a conclave in the wake of a Pope’s death, and the pomp and circumstance and politicization and jockeying for positioning that takes place, to be extraordinarily compelling.

And speaking of politics, in the wake of the US presidential election, Conclave is perfectly positioned to have something interesting to say about elections and liberals versus conservatives and the power of convictions and possibilities of backlash.

This is all to say that Conclave, which was released in the U.S. on October 25th and is still in theatres, had me in the palm of its hand even before I sat down in the theatre to watch it.

And yet…it failed to capitalize on all of its advantages and, in fact, alienated me in such a profound way with an excruciatingly egregious and inane plot twist, which I found to be a mortal moviemaking sin and entirely unforgivable.

In order to avoid spoilers, I will not reveal the specifics of the plot twist but will only say that it occurs in the final ten minutes or so of the film and is so contrived, bizarre, atrocious and appalling, and is such a grievous dramatic error, and so narratively unsound, that it ruined everything good about the film that led up to it and completely scuttled the good ship Conclave.

But besides that…how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? Truthfully, it was pretty good.

The film is well shot by cinematographer Stephane Fontaine, who uses a soft light and wonderful composition to often times create scenes reminiscent of Caravaggio’s great works.

Fontaine is aided by the spectacular work of the set and costume designers who masterfully recreate the distinct look and feel of the Vatican and the Cardinals’ outfits.

In addition, the entire cast all do tremendous work.

Ralph Fiennes in particular is outstanding. His Cardinal Lawrence is the Dean of the College of Cardinals and must wrangle the Cardinals to come together to vote for a pope and make sure everything is on the up and up…and it is never quite clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Fiennes is a supremely gifted technical actor whose skill is as good as anyone working today, and he brings all of those skills to bear as Cardinal Lawrence, a man who is struggling with his faith and his self.

An Oscar nomination, and even a win, could and should be in Fiennes future for his work in Conclave.

The supporting cast are also excellent.

Stanley Tucci is as reliable an actor as there is and he brings a subtle power to portrayal of liberal Cardinal Bellini that is enjoyable to behold. Tucci expertly embodies the illiberal liberal who is enthralled by himself more than humanity.

John Lithgow’s Cardinal Tremblay is a character that in lesser hands would’ve been forgettable, but here, Lithgow never breaks and lets the audience off the hook, so even after the film has ended, you’re still wondering if he’s a mistreated martyr or an exquisite liar.

And Isabella Rossellini has a small role as Sister Agnes, but every time she is on screen she crackles with an incandescent light and life that is undeniable.

But despite all of the magnificent artistry on display in the form of the acting, cinematography and costumes and set, Conclave commits too egregious a sin to ever be forgiven.

That sin, which is not venial sin but a mortal one, is the cheap, absurd and unearned plot twist that turns a compelling Catholic mystery and thriller into a pandering and pathetic cinematic exercise that feels like it deceived and betrayed you and stole two hours of your life.

For Catholics, Conclave will hold some appeal because it is a look behind the curtain of something familiar but still mysterious, namely the inner working of the Vatican and the conclave. In this way the film is compelling for Catholics…until the plot twist…which not just many, but I would say most, Catholics will find at best annoying, and at most infuriating (I’m in the infuriating camp).

Non-Catholics will find the majority of the film impenetrable for its disorienting maze of Catholic-ness. For example, I’m not even sure I can ask my podcast partner Barry, who is not Catholic, to watch this movie because he’s not going to know, or care, about all the Vatican and Catholic stuff that made at least the premise of the film interesting to me.

Regardless of all that, the bottom line is that I simply cannot, and will not, recommend Conclave to readers because the plot twist near the end eviscerates any artistic good the film achieved which led up to it.

If you’re interested in watching a challenging yet entertaining piece of Vatican/Pope artistry, I recommend you go back and watch The Young Pope (2014) series on HBO starring Jude Law. That overlooked, off-beat, exquisitely avant-garde series is very insightful and spiritually invigorating.

And if you’re just looking for a great story of Catholicism and Catholic priests, I highly recommend you check out Xavier Beavois’ 2010 film Of Gods and Men. It is a extraordinarily moving and spiritually insightful piece of work.

Both The Young Pope and Of Gods and Men are everything Conclave should be but ultimately isn’t. Go watch them, and skip Conclave…I certainly wish I had.

©2024

Halloween Viewer's Guide - A Horror Movie Round-Up for the Harrowing Holiday

Horror Movie Round-Up And Halloween Viewer’s Guide

It is Halloween week so I thought I’d put together a quick movie guide to help you set the tone for the spooky times ahead.

I love Halloween, always have, and have spent the last few weeks gearing up for the festivities by catching up on some of the horror films released this year, and the last few years, that I’ve missed.

Here are the films I watched for the first time in recent weeks (all rated on the “1 to 5 horror movie scale” not the “1 to 5 regular movie scale”).

MaXXXine (2024) - Available on Max: This is the third movie in Ti West’s trilogy – which began with X (2022), then Pearl (2022), and now MaXXine. MaXXXine is hands down the worst of the three films. X was terrific and Pearl was pretty good too, but MaXXXine is just an incoherent mess that never finds its footing or a distinct flavor. It’s a mish mash of 1980s nostalgia stuffed into a dour and dull narrative that doesn’t really know what it wants to be.

Yes, Mia Goth is an intriguing screen presence, but even she can’t overcome the flaccid and foolish script for this seriously sub-par film. Very disappointing and definitely not worth watching. 2 stars out of 5

Late Night with the Devil (2024) - Available on Hulu: An extremely clever and well-executed movie that deftly uses the medium of 1970’s late nite tv to plumb the depths of devilry and the demonic depravity of the ruling elite who sell their souls to the dark lord at Bohemian Grove.

David Dastmalchian gives a fantastic performance as a desperate late night talk show host trying to catch Carson in the ratings. A very effective and captivating film…especially if you lived through the 70s. 4 stars out of 5.

The First Omen (2024) - Available on Hulu: Speaking of the 70s!! The First Omen is a surprisingly well-made and executed prequel to the iconic 1976 film The Omen. The First Omen won’t change your life but it will keep you mildly entertained and reasonably spooked for its two-hour run time. 3 out of 5 stars.

Immaculate (2024) - Available on Hulu: This is a not great movie but serves as a decent enough vehicle for Sydney Sweeney to keep building the foundation to her movie stardom. A rather forgettable film with a tenuous premise but the luminous Sweeney, who still manages to be insanely sexy even in a nun’s habit, makes the most of it…especially in the final scene. 2.5 out of 5 stars

Doctor Sleep – Director’s Cut (2019) - Available on Amazon Prime: A shockingly well-made and completely compelling sequel to The Shining which, like Late Night with the Devil, casts a severely jaundiced eye toward the ruling elite and their demonic ways, which include feeding off of the pain and suffering of regular people, most notably children. It’s impossible to watch this movie and not think about the infamous pedophile rings involving people of power, including the Jeffrey Epstein ring, the P Diddy accusations and the horrific Franklin Affair…not to mention the wholesale sickening and senseless slaughter of children in Gaza by the Israelis.

Doctor Sleep features two great performances, the first by Ewan McGregor, who gives a subtle, layered and impressive performance as the adult Danny trying to navigate life after the horrors he endured in The Shining. The other by the absolutely luminous Rebecca Ferguson. Ferguson is so good, so charismatic, so gorgeous and so sexy in Doctor Sleep it is astonishing.

I completely skipped Doctor Sleep when it came out in 2019 because I thought “a sequel to The Shining? No thanks!”. To me The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies of all time…and to be clear Doctor Sleep is nowhere close to being an equal of The Shining in terms of the filmmaking or storytelling. But…it really is a fantastic horror movie.  In some ways I’m glad I missed it in the theatre though because my first watch of it was of the three-hour Director’s Cut which is available on Amazon Prime. I highly recommend you watch the director’s cut and not the theatrical release.

Know this going in though, Doctor Sleep – The Director’s Cut, has one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve seen in a film in a long time. It deeply disturbed and unnerved me – which may say more about me and my life’s circumstances, but still…this scene was tough to watch, but necessary to see. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Smile (2022) - Available on Hulu: Smile came out in 2022 and has a sequel out this month…but I never saw the original so I watched it last week. Smile is a decent enough piece of trauma porn horror movie making. It’s got some clever story lines and keeps you engaged through out. I thought Sosie Bacon did a solid job as the lead, and she had some very heavy lifting to do. In some ways Smile is a typical middle of the road horror movie, but to its credit, it works. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

As for the rest of a Halloween Movie Guide…

My usual go-to horror films are previously mentioned The Shining (1980), The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). They are, to me, the best horror films around and they never fail to scare the living shit out of me.

I also love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Wolf Man (1941) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Another old movie classic is F.W. Murnau’s masterful Nosferatu (1922), which is creepy as hell and well worth watching.  

Other less ancient notables would be most anything by David Cronenberg, his remake of The Fly (1986) is particularly fantastic and his films The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1983) and The Dead Zone (1983) are solid choices as well.  

You also can’t go wrong John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982), which are all time horror classics that never fail to frighten no matter how many times you’ve seen them.

More current horror films that are most worthy of a watch are Robert Eggers’ extremely eerie The Witch (2015), and Ari Aster’s formidably frightening and fearsome Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).

And finally, one movie which is not technically categorized as a horror film but which is as creepy, frightening, disturbing and unnerving as any movie out there, is David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). Zodiac is a great film that pulsates with a darkness of such depth that haunts you for days and weeks after after watching.

And thus ends the Halloween viewer’s guide!! I hope everybody has a Happy Halloween and gets a bevy of tricks AND treats!!

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 123 - Joker: Folie a Deux

On this episode, Barry and I don our comic greasepaint, clown nose and big shoes and belt out some American Standards as we debate the merits of Joker: Folie a Deux, the critically and commercially panned follow up to the Oscar nominated 2019 smash hit Joker. Topics discussed include the nearly universal negative response to the film, the blessing of seeing through the fog of it all, and director Todd Phillips as prophet of doom. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 123 - Joker: Folie a Deux

Thank you for listening!!

©2024