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

Wolf Man: A Review – A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A tepid horror tale that lacks bite. Horror aficionados can wait to watch it on streaming, everyone else can skip it altogether.

Wolf Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, chronicles the journey of a young family of three as they travel to a remote section of Oregon, where they try to stave off a werewolf attack.

Leigh Whannell had some success with his last film, The Invisible Man (2020), which was a modern re-telling of the 1933 Universal Film horror classic of the same name. This time out he attempts to do the same thing with the Wolf Man, a modern re-imagining the 1941 Universal classic The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jr.

While Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a box office smash, making $144 million off a $7 million budget, I found the film to be a bit too heavy-handed with its feminist politics…or to be more precise…it’s male-hating politics, which were quite en vogue at the time, the height of the Trump hysteria (or so we hope).

That said, Whannell, who made his bones writing the Saw movies, displayed some nice cinematic flourishes on ocassion in The Invisible Man, so I was intrigued to see what he could do with The Wolf Man without the burden of having to frantically push a cultural and political ideology.  

I was also interested in seeing Wolf Man because I just dig monster movies. I absolutely love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein, Dracula, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Wolf Man, and I’m always fantasizing about those movies being remade in the modern era but somehow being even better. I realize that is a pipe dream, but I dream it nonetheless.

Having recently seen Robert Eggers’ outstanding remake of Nosferatu, which is essentially my monster movie remake dream come to life, I found myself excited to see the new Wolf Man.

Having seen Wolf Man, I feel foolish for having been excited for it. The film isn’t awful, but it isn’t good either. It’s a rather tepid retelling that never really grabs you by the throat and sinks its teeth into you. Its biggest sin is that it is rather blasé and bland.

The film tells the tale of the Lovell family, Blake, Charlotte and their young daughter Ginger (I’d guess she is maybe 9 years old), who live cosmopolitan lives in San Francisco. But Blake grew up with a very strict father deep in the wilds of Oregon, amidst rumors of a beast in the woods that is half-man and half-animal, and he, and frankly the rest of his family, seem pretty unhappy in the city.

While trying to figure out the status of his rocky marriage to Charlotte, Blake gets the official, and apparently long-awaited, death certificate of his father along with keys to his house in remote Oregon. To try and save their marriage, the Lovell’s decide to make a road trip for the Summer up to the Oregon house….and so their tale begins.

As is my wont, I won’t give away any spoilers whatsoever…but instead will speak in generalities.

Here are some issues with the movie.

I recently heard a discussion about werewolves that wondered whether people liked their movie werewolves to be more human than wolf or more wolf than human. I am in the more wolf than human camp, but I understand the opposing argument.

Wolf Man is definitely a more human than wolf movie, and to me that translates into it looking often-times cheap and tawdry. It doesn’t help that the make-up and special effects are, at best, uneven.

There are some very cool effects, for example shots of hands morphing were particularly quite good, but I found the rest of it less than convincing and not the least bit frightening.

Another issue, and this may be a function of the shitty movie theatres we have nowadays, but I thought the film didn’t look very good. The inability for there to be a sharp, distinct contrast between shadow and light was grating, and undermined the effectiveness of the film a tremendous amount.

All of the darkness had a hazy, smoky hue to it, which again, may not be entirely on director Whannell and his cinematographer Stefan Duscio, it could be that the projector in my theatre sucked and the idiotic theatre owners refuse to turn the lights in the theatre down all the way – a never ending frustration for me. Regardless of why the film looked so bad, the bottom line is that it looked bad.

The film also fails to fully use its setting to its advantage. The house the family are trapped in is never turned into a claustrophobic hell, as it should have been. In fact, the house seems to get bigger and bigger somehow as the movie goes along. In addition, the film never fully utilizes the inherent horror of the vast forest, particularly at night. This should be an easy thing to do, as anyone who’s ever been in the woods at night can attest, but Whannell seems disinterested in utilizing setting for horrific effect. The inability to use setting for effect leads to a muting and dispersal of tension, which is never good for a horror film.

On the other hand, there were sequences in the film that I thought were very clever, original and worked incredibly well….namely when Whannell lets us see the world through the perspective of the wolf man. This works incredibly well and not only looks really cool (and is pulled off seamlessly) but adds a significant layer of depth and drama to the film.

The cast, which features Christopher Abbot as Blake, Julia Garner as Charlotte, and Matilda Firth as Ginger, are hamstrung by a script that feels rushed, not fully fleshed out and a tad shallow.

Garner is a remarkable actress as she well established in her Emmy-winning turn on Ozark, but here she feels criminally underused, and dare I say it, slightly miscast.

Matilda Firth does her best in the child role, but it’s a child role so the less we see of her the better.

The weakest link though is Christopher Abbot as Blake. Abbot has the most work to do in the film and frankly, he just isn’t up to it. He lacks the charisma, magnetism, vivid inner life, and the primal/paternal power that is necessary for him to thrive in the role.

Ultimately, Wolf Man is a pretty forgettable film that never fully fleshes out the glorious myth at its core or the horror in its heart yearning to break free.

If you’re a horror and/or monster movie fan, I think you can skip this one in the theatres and wait to watch it when it comes to streaming. Besides that, normal movie goers and cinephiles alike have no need to see this movie as it’s a toothless horror film that lacks any and all bite.

©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

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 127 - Juror #2

On this episode, Barry and I are judge, jury and executioner for Clint Eastwood's latest directorial effort, Juror #2, now streaming on Max. Topics discussed include Clint's laissez-faire approach with actors and his baffling filmography, Warner Brother's poor executive leadership, and the 30 Rock "Rural Juror" joke. Bonus segment at the end about the just-released trailer for James Gunn's new Superman movie. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 127 - Juror #2

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Juror No. 2: A Review - Guilty of Moviemaking Malpractice

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another in a long line of weak cinematic efforts from director Clint Eastwood. Shallow, vapid and lazy, this movie is a made-for-tv mistake.

In the first season of NBC’s acclaimed sitcom 30 Rock – which ran from 2007 to 2013, the character Jenna Maroney, a narcissistic, needy and aging actress, is excited to show her co-worker/friend Liz Lemon the new independent movie she is starring in, The Rural Juror, and gage Lemon’s opinion.

The title The Rural Juror elicits laughs because no one on 30 Rock can pronounce it properly…it just sounds like ruhhr-juhhr. It’s also amusing because it sounds like some generic Grisham-esque piece of courtroom garbage that Hollywood loves to churn out from time to time. Adding to the humor is the funny fact that The Rural Juror is actually based on a book written by Kevin Grisham – John Grisham’s brother.

On this episode of 30 Rock Lemon watches The Rural Juror and loathes it but spares Jenna the truth, which ultimately causes problems down the road between her and Jenna.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am no Liz Lemon – I’m much closer to Jack Donaghey and maybe Tracy Jordan, as I am not known for pulling punches when it comes to my opinions of film…or much else.

I kept thinking of The Rural Juror as I watched 94-year-old director Clint Eastwood’s new film, Juror No. 2, which is currently available on VOD and come December 20th will be available to stream on MAX.

Juror No.2 looks and feels like someone actually decided to make The Rural Juror…and not as a joke…despite it being unintentionally very funny. This movie has all the cinematic panache and dramatic power of a Lifetime movie you stumble across late at night and decide to use as a sleep aid.

The film, which stars Nicholas Hoult, with supporting turns from Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Leslie Bibb and Kiefer Sutherland, tells the preposterous story of Justin, a gentle juror in a Savannah, Georgia murder trial that may know more about the case than he lets on.

I will avoid spoilers as a courtesy in order to keep potential viewer’s pure of mind before watching this movie, but I’ll only say this, the premise of this movie is completely devoid of dramatic tension – at least for me. The bottom line is that Juror No. 2 asks viewers to choose “the right thing to do” in a specific scenario and the answer to that question is painfully obvious to me…so much so that I was utterly devoid of any moral qualms about what I would do. Maybe that means I’m a psychopath…who knows?

Others may find the premise more intriguing and engaging than I did, but I found it to be ethically obtuse and dramatically anemic.

Eastwood is one of the more-odd directors of the 21st century. He is going strong and consistently making movies well into his nineties, which is a great credit to him. Because he is so old, and let’s be frank, so close to death, critics and Hollywood tend to treat him with kid gloves, so he gets undeserved glowing reviews and awards consideration (and even wins), but the reality is his movies are, for the most part, awful to the point of being embarrassing.

In the last twenty years Eastwood has made 17 movies…which is extraordinary…but unfortunately none of the movies are anywhere near extraordinary. I would argue that maybe two of them rise to the level of being “just ok” (Richard Jewell and Gran Torino) and even those are pretty suspect.

Juror No. 2 has all the distinct trademarks of a late Eastwood era movie. It is allergic to detail, its visuals are dull and flat, the script is trite, the dialogue atrocious, and the acting is stilted and often-times amateurish – thanks to Clint’s hands-off/minimal takes approach.

Eastwood’s ability to entice decent and even very good actors into giving abysmal performances, is front and center in Juror No. 2. For example, J.K. Simmons, someone I deeply respect, plays a juror and is unable to make his decrepit dialogue make the least bit of sense or sound remotely human.

Toni Collette is a terrific actress and here she is essentially just a caricature throwing around a bad southern accent and painting by numbers.

Nicholas Hoult is an actor I really think highly of - I thought he was brilliant in the wonderful Hulu series The Great, but here he is handcuffed by the poor script and uneven pacing and tone of the entire cinematic venture.

Bad actors, and Eastwood employs a lot of them, are painfully exposed by Eastwood’s laissez-faire directing approach.

For instance, Chris Messina, whose career is a mystery to me, gives a lifeless, uneven and thoughtless performance as an attorney in this movie. As does Kiefer Sutherland, who does his best wooden Indian imitation throughout.

As bad as Messina and Sutherland are, Adrienne C. Moore and Cedric Yarbrough, who play jurors, are so bad they make Messina and Sutherland look like Sir Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. Yikes.

Juror No. 2 runs for two hours…and it is a long two-hours. While watching with my wife I paused the movie to go to the bathroom let out an audible groan when I saw that only 50 minutes had passed…it felt like we were on hour three of this son of a bitch.

Juror No. 2 is The Rural Juror. In other words, it is a joke but no one is allowed to laugh. That said, I literally did laugh out loud on numerous occasions while watching this thing as it got more and more inane as it unfolded.

Look, I like Clint Eastwood. He was a fantastic movie star. I also think he used to make very good and sometimes great movies. For example, Unforgiven is an absolute masterpiece, as is The Outlaw Josey Wales. High Plains Drifter and The Pale Rider are top notch. Everything else, including his Oscar-winning movies Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, are, at best, middling movies.

The truth is that because I like the guy I’d like to think that Clint has one more Unforgiven in him even at age 94. After watching the moviemaking malpractice that is Juror No. 2, the fantasy of a Clint return to greatness isn’t just dying on the vine, it is as dead as a door nail…and there is no mystery as to who committed the murder.

©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

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

Joker: Folie a Deux - A Review: It’s a Mad, Mad World

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. But be forewarned, this is an aggressively arthouse movie that will be very unappealing to those seeking comic book entertainment.  

 Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Philips’ sequel to his controversial, billion-dollar blockbuster Joker (2019), and features Joaquin Phoenix reprising his iconic, Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck aka Joker, but this time he’s joined by Lady Gaga as his love interest Harley Quinn.

Joker was, and still is, an extraordinarily polarizing film. Back in the hyper-politicized year of 2019, Joker was instantly reviled by weak-kneed critics who labeled Phoenix’s Fleck/Joker as the “patron saint of incels”, and the film vile and potentially violence inducing because it captured the anger and resentment boiling just under the surface of America.

Despite the cavalcade of establishment media fear and loathing of Joker, the film still managed to make gobs of money and garner eleven Academy Award nominations and two wins (Best Actor and Best Original Score).

Unfortunately, no one need fear Joker: Folie a Deux becoming a blockbuster or hording trophies at the Academy Awards. Joker: Folie a Deux is going to be a certified box office bomb and is despised by critics and fans alike.

I try to quarantine myself from reviews and criticisms of a film before seeing it, but with Joker Folie a Deux it was impossible to avoid the overwhelming hate the film was receiving. Some of the most animated vitriol toward the film was coming from people who, like me, loved the original movie.

So when I strolled into an empty Sunday afternoon screening of Joker: Folie a Deux, I was mentally sharpening my knives in order to be able to properly and precisely eviscerate the shitshow I was about to watch.

But then I watched it…and maybe it was because I went in with such low expectations, but not only did I like Joker: Folie a Deux, I thought it was, in a way, much like the first film, bleak but utterly and absolutely brilliant.

The film opens with a Looney Tunes style cartoon which features Arthur Fleck and his literal and figurative shadow, Joker. This opening gives the perfect psychological backdrop for Fleck/Joker and buttresses my Jungian shadow thesis regarding Joker where Arthur Fleck is a Christ-figure and Joker is the anti-Christ/Satan figure.

The film then goes to live action and the story begins where Joker left off, with the now famous Arthur Fleck sitting in Arkham Asylum awaiting his trial for murder.

Over time the film descends into the madness of Arthur Fleck…and uses the genre of a jukebox musical as a manifestation of that madness. So as reality and fantasy blend together in Arthur’s mind, he and his friend Lee Quinzel – aka Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, sing a bevy of American Standards…it’s sort of like a grotesque fever dream/nightmare version of La La Land.

But make absolutely no mistake, Joker: Folie a Deux is not, and is not meant to be, “entertaining”, not in the traditional sense, but it is most certainly enlightening and insightful, something which is exceedingly rare in cinema nowadays, most especially in Hollywood films in general, and franchise movies in particular.  

Joker: Folie a Deux is a work of art, which is a jarring and frustrating thing for viewers to experience when they head into the cinema expecting a franchise film piece of pop entertainment. This subverting of expectation, signified in the film with the recurring theme of “That’s Entertainment!”, is no doubt responsible for the film’s very poor reception among audiences and critics that have been conditioned by Marvel’s mindless money-making machine movies over the last 16 years…and to a lesser extent DC’s too, to expect a certain kind of pre-teen drivel as comic book cinema.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not that, instead it is a relentlessly bleak and brutal film. It is grungy, gruesome and glorious. It may make you angry, it may make you anxious, it may make you bored. But whatever your reaction to it is, that says infinitely more about you than about it, because this movie is a mirror held up to our insane, inane, indecent cancer of a culture and the vicious and vacuous world we all inhabit. Your reaction to Joker: Folkie a Deux, is your reaction to the madness of our broken and fallen world.

It seems obvious to me that Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Phillips’ giant middle-finger to the people who hated the first movie…and to those that loved it too. I never would’ve guessed that Todd Phillips of all people – the guy who made the Hangover trilogy, would be the auteur with balls the size of Hindenbergs who morphs into his main character, lights the match and watches the whole shithouse go up in flames. But here we are…and I’m glad to be here.

The animating characteristic of Joker: Folie a Deux is despair. Phillips’ Gotham is a hellscape…literally. For not only is it filled with vile, venal and loathsome creatures, but it is entirely devoid of any love. In a world devoid of love, despair rules the day because hope is replaced by delusion.

Arthur Fleck is, as a Christ figure, an open wound, a raw nerve, and it isn’t the hate of this world that affects him so greatly, but rather the complete absence of love.

Joker, on the other hand, as the devil, thrives in this hell for the exact reason that it cripples Arthur.

Many critics and hipsters hated the first Joker movie because Arthur Fleck was a white guy. This sort of shallow, identity driven thinking is all too common in our current age, and it reduces otherwise smart people into myopic fools unable to see the forest for the trees.

Arthur Fleck isn’t a symbol of white disenfrachisement…he is a symbol of the forgotten, the downtrodden, the outcast, and the loser of all colors, creeds and genders.

Arthur Fleck is the shaking, orphaned child in Gaza surviving in the rubble. He is the Palestinian prisoner gang-raped by his Israeli guards. He is the gay man thrown from a roof in Saudi Arabia. He is the teenage girl in Kabul beaten for showing her face. He is the black boy abused and neglected by an overwhelmed foster care system. He is Kelly Thomas, the mentally ill homeless man beaten to death by police in California. He is Ethan Saylor, the young man with Down’s Syndrome who died when Maryland cops kneeled on his neck in a movie theatre. Arthur Fleck is the helpless and the hopeless, the weak, the sick and the old…and critics and audiences who see him as a threat or a symbol of the oppressor simply due to the color of his skin and his gender are the ones who make this world the cruel, inhumane and uninhabitable shithole that it is.  

Joker is Arthur’s shadow…he is his vengeance and justice. Joker is the Hamas member slaughtering Israeli men, women and children at a desert rave. Joker is the Israeli soldier executing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. Joker is the cop killing pets in front of children. Joker is the school-shooter settling scores for social slights. Joker is the mayhem, murder and madness unleashed by those who feel fueled by righteousness.

Joker is the king of this fallen world…and Arthur Fleck is its victim.

Joaquin Phoenix is once again fantastic as Arthur and the Joker. Phoenix is a fragile yet forceful screen presence. His transformations throughout Joker: Folie a Deux are subtle and simply spectacular. I doubt Phoenix will be considered for any awards since Joker: Folie a Deux is so hated, but he is more than worthy of accolades.

Lady Gaga is an actress I have never been able to tolerate. I despised the trite and treacly A Star is Born and found her distractingly bad in House of Gucci.  But here in Joker: Folie a Deux I finally got to understand her appeal. There really is just something about her that is magnetic and undeniable, at least in this movie. I found her character arc to be somewhat poorly executed, but I thought her performance was quite good.

Brendan Gleeson plays a prison guard and is an ominous presence whenever he graces the screen, most particularly when he isn’t being menacing. Gleeson is, like Phoenix, one of the best actors on the planet, and he never fails to elevate any scene he inhabits.

And finally, Leigh Gill, who plays Gary Puddles, is fantastic in his lone scene. This scene, which features Puddles being questioned on the stand in court, is extraordinarily moving, and exquisitely captures the deeper meaning and purpose of the film.

Cinematographer Lawrence Sher, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Joker, once again does phenomenal work on Joker: Folie a Deux. Sher shoots the film with a distinct 1970’s grittiness and grime. He turns multiple musical numbers into uncomfortable flashbacks to Sonny and Cher episodes or other seventies type showcases and does so with a cinematic aplomb.

Hildur Guonadottir, who won an Oscar for her original score on Joker, is back on this film and once again sets the scene with an uncomfortably menacing and ominous score that drives the emotional narrative.

As for Todd Phillips, as I previously said, it’s astonishing the balls on this guy. He is basically saying “fuck you” to critics and fans alike. It’s tough to imagine him bouncing back and being allowed to do a worthwhile film after having a critical and commercial flop like this. That’s a shame though because he has proven his worth as an artist with Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux.

Phillips is a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad, but one thing that he has been in recent years…is right.

It’s always struck me that no one (except me) seemed to notice that Joker accurately diagnosed the incandescent anger and fury that was boiling just beneath the surface of America back in 2019. I wrote about this profoundly disturbing anger prior to Joker, but Joker showed it to mainstream audiences, and elite coastal critics were so horrified by it that they blamed the film rather than the country and culture it revealed.

Joker was proven right though as less than nine months after its release that volcano of anger erupted in Joker-esque fashion with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots and chaotic violence in the streets of American cities…just like in Joker.

The Joker was every BLM rioter, and every opportunistic looter and arsonist in America’s summer of rage in 2020…just like he was every flag-waving MAGA moron on January 7th, 2021, who stormed the Capitol looking to “Save Democracy”.

That Joker was correct has never been admitted by the coastal elites who hated the movie. That Joker: Folie a Deux is also correct in diagnosing the unremitting cruelty, malignant madness and incessant insanity of our culture and country will also go unnoticed by those who are too offended, or bored or angry or inhumane to care or notice.

Joker: Folie a Deux is not a polarizing film like Joker. The consensus is that it is awful to the point of being an abomination. But I am here to tell you that Joker: Folie a Deux is a brutal, ballsy and brilliant film. It is, like Oliver Stone’s manic and maniacal 1994 masterpiece Natural Born Killers, well ahead of the curve, and will only get its due when the history of this era is written and the ugly truth of our current time fully revealed.

If you have the fortitude for it, and the philosophical, political and psychological mind for it, and the ability to tolerate the arthouse in your comic book cinema, then Joker: Folie a Deux is not the steaming pile of shit that critics and audiences claim it to be, but rather a startling revelation. And like most revelations it is reviled in its own time because it tells the unvarnished and unabashedly ugly truth that no one wants to see or hear because it’s too painful to ever acknowledge.

©2024

Rebel Ridge: A Review - Where's Rambo When You Need Him?

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An action thriller with little action and no thrills.

Rebel Ridge, written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, is a Netflix original action thriller that tells the story of Terry Richmond, a former Marine who is wronged by a small-town police force in the deep south, and seeks justice.

At first glance Rebel Ridge looks like a First Blood rip-off/homage with Aaron Pierre’s Terry the stand-in for Sly Stallone’s John Rambo. But that impression is the wrong one.

Rebel Ridge is not First Blood, not by a long shot. The movie is an action thriller that is short on action and devoid of thrills. Its biggest problem is that it simply refuses to satiate the audience’s bloodlust, which ultimately makes the film deeply unsatisfying.

The premise is simple enough - a guy gets mistreated by police in a small southern town and fights back (sounds just like First Blood). In this case the cops use civil asset forfeiture laws to confiscate Terry’s life savings which he planned to use to start a new life with his troubled cousin. The local cops are, of course, both corrupt and racist, and their criminality leads to deeply dire consequences for the people Terry cares about.

But as simple as this premise is, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier makes the unfortunate choice to make the plot a long and winding tale that is much more complicated and convoluted than it needs to be, and ultimately less gripping than it should be.

The issue of civil asset forfeiture is a compelling one to spotlight, but Rebel Ridge fails to stay focused on that issue and instead gets lost with sidetracks into other topics, among them structural racism, the confederacy, the patriarchy, and the opioid epidemic, not to mention the budget crises of rural governments in America. All of these side issues end up burying the lede, which is the innate injustice of civil asset forfeiture laws, and that is disappointing.

Adding to the problems is the fact that for an alleged action movie there is a paucity of action, and what action there is, is quite mundane and poorly executed.

Rebel Ridge is no First Blood mostly because there is so little blood on display. The actual first blood in the film isn’t spilled until very late in the festivities and even then, it’s pretty tepid.

The reason for this is that the most distinct character trait of Terry, a martial arts expert, is that he refuses to use a weapon or kill anyone, which neuters Rebel Ridge from the get go, and this impotence only makes the film more flaccid as time goes by.

This lack of a killer instinct from Terry is not only boring to watch, it is taken to such extremes that it removes any sense of reality from the movie, thus making it all seem silly. I mean, I get not wanting to kill anyone, but when you are surrounded by bloodthirsty racist cops who are all shooting at you and you disarm every gun you touch and refuse to actually shoot back, then the suspension of disbelief goes right out the window along with Terry’s instinct for self-preservation.

The fact of the matter is that violence should’ve been the centerpiece of the film, but Rebel Ridge uses only the threat of violence as its centerpiece, which isn’t exactly cinematically compelling.

On the bright side, Aaron Pierre, who stars as Terry Richmond, proves himself a very worthy lead. Pierre’s performance is minimalist and isn’t so much dynamic as it is magnetic.

Pierre has a fine mastery of stillness – a skill lacking in so many of our current crop of actors, and exudes an undeniable power through minimal movement. Pierre never reverts to histrionics or hysteria, but instead is a picture of control while maintaining a vivid and vibrant inner life.

Action stars are hard to come by and Hollywood is desperate for them, so I hope Pierre gets more opportunities based upon his intriguing and often impressive performance in Rebel Ridge.

The rest of the cast, for the most part, fall short of Pierre’s work.

Don Johnson plays the local police chief Sandy Burnne, and he restrains himself from going full caricature but only barely. Johnson gives a paint by numbers performance that underwhelms.

AnnaSophia Robb plays Summer, a court clerk sympathetic to Terry’s plight. Robb acquits herself well in the poorly written role by bringing a nervous energy and palpable fragility to the character.

Emory Cohen’s Steve, a local bad guy cop, is a mindless caricature and dull as doornails, as is James Cromwell’s local judge character.

To top it all off the film lacks a distinct visual style that is most notable in the poorly choreographed and executed fight scenes. The whole movie looks like a second-rate television show…which is not a compliment.

Rebel Ridge has gotten good reviews and is doing robust streaming numbers, so it seems I am in the minority with my mostly negative feelings about the movie. I simply cannot understand why anyone would be exhilarated by this film. I understand the excitement over Pierre, who seems like a good find, but the rest of the film really flounders.

The bottom line is that Rebel Ridge feels like an action movie for people who don’t like action movies and but who want to say they like action movies. Therefore, I cannot recommend Rebel Ridge, but I’m hoping that Aaron Pierre’s next movie is a better one, since he shows great promise as a lead actor.

©2024

Deadpool and Wolverine: A Review - Shticking and Screaming

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

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Rating: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you like Ryan Reynolds’ shtick, you’ll like this movie. If you don’t, you definitely won’t.

Deadpool and Wolverine, the third film in the Deadpool franchise and the…God help us…34th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hit theatres on July 26th, and I just got a chance to see it.

The film, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, has made over $800 million dollars in just two weeks of release, and seems poised to cross the billion-dollar threshold. That is an impressive haul even considering the film’s $200 million budget.

One of the more intriguing things about Deadpool and Wolverine is that Deadpool is the first of the 20th Century Fox cinematic comic book characters to have his own movie since Disney purchased Fox back in 2019. The first two Deadpool movies, as well as all of the X-Men and X-Men adjacent movies like Wolverine and Logan, and the Fantastic Four movies, were all Fox properties. Now Disney owns those characters and has to figure out a way to use them to save their floundering Cinematic Universe, which has fallen off a cliff in terms of box office and cultural relevance in since the high point of Endgame in 2019.

Deadpool is an interesting character to debut the Fox and friends comic book heroes in Disney’s family friendly realm because he is a self-aware, cynical and sarcastic symbol of Generation X and believes in absolutely nothing but snark and raunch.

In Deadpool and Wolverine Ryan Reynold’s signature snark is certainly turned up to 11, but the raunch is reduced to a Disney-friendly 4, with Deadpool’s usual sexual antics, like getting pegged, being only spoken about but never shown. Walt Disney is no doubt looking up from hell quite pleased.

The Deadpool franchise has always relied entirely upon the comedic stylings of its star Ryan Reynolds, and thus far has done so to great success. But at the moment it’s not just Deadpool but the entirety of the MCU that is relying on the Reynold’s singular self-aware superhero snark…and while I am a fan of Reynolds as Deadpool, his shtick is definitely starting to wear thin…frankly bit too thin to sustain any dreams of carrying the MCU on his back.

The first Deadpool movie was an exhilarating breath of fresh air, and Reynolds was perfectly suited and situated to pull it off. Deadpool lampooned the superhero genre at the height of its success, while also being a top-notch superhero movie in its own right, no easy task.

The second Deadpool film was less successful mostly because the first film had been so successful, and so expectations were high. Deadpool 2 was still very funny, but it got caught up adoring itself a little bit too much to work as well as the original.

Deadpool and Wolverine, which is Deadpool 3, is the least successful film in the franchise, at least in terms of comedy, drama and action, but looks like it will be the most financially successful as it hurtles toward the billion-dollar mark heading into its third week of release. And so it goes here in Hollywood.

Deadpool and Wolverine is essentially an odd couple-comedy-road movie, with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine playing a short-tempered, violent Bing Crosby (not unlike Bing Crosby in real-life) to Ryan Reynold’s foul-mouthed, violent Bob Hope.

The movie definitely made me laugh out loud a couple times, and I noticed about midway through that I had a stupid smirk stuck on my face the entire time I watched. These accomplishments are not to be taken lightly as I am notorious difficult to please when it comes to comedy.

Yes, there is a plot in the film, sort of, but it’s not worth getting into at all because it is not only moronic but basically inconsequential, which is not a great thing in terms of storytelling…but it is what it is.

Yes, there’s a cornucopia of cameos, none of which really work beyond a momentary nod of recognition, but superhero fans will adore them.

Yes, there’s a villain, Cassandra Nova, who is almost instantly forgettable and is played with a rather remarkable lack of verve and panache by Emma Corin.

Yes, there are action sequences, some of which are fun and some of which are bland and derivative.

The cinematography is often painfully dull and devoid of the vibrant colors of the first two Deadpool movies. The film looks flat and uninspired. Not a shock that it is directed by Shawn Levy, whose signature style is flat and uninspired.

The best things about Deadpool and Wolverine though are, not surprisingly, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.

I’ve never been a huge Hugh Jackman fan, and thought his being cast as Wolverine – one of the greatest comic book characters of all-time, back in 2000 was a let-down, especially when Russell Crowe was allegedly the first choice. But I readily admit after having watched all of the X-Men and Wolverine movies, the fantastic Logan in particular, that Jackman is a terrific Wolverine.

Logan was a great way to end his run as the iconic character, and Deadpool and Wolverine feels a little disappointing in that regard as it diminishes the impact and accomplishment of Logan, one of the best comic book films ever made, but in Hollywood in general, and Disney in particular, money talks and artistic bullshit walks…so here we are.

Deadpool has always worked because it is essentially a self-aware parody of not just superhero movies but the superhero movie industry. It spotlights and skewers all of that genre’s flaws, most notably its absurdities, inanities and insanities.

But the real reason the Deadpool movies work is because of Ryan Reynolds and his singular comedic style which is a magnetic mix of manic, foul-mouthed and insecure fandom in character form.

The reality is that if you like Ryan Reynolds you’ll love all of the Deadpool movies, Deadpool and Wolverine included. Reynold’s humor is only heightened when matched with Jackman’s brooding Wolverine, which is a shockingly powerful piece of acting considering the silliness that surrounds it.

If you like Ryan Reynold’s and his usual shtick, you’ll like Deadpool and Wolverine. I like Ryan Reynold’s shtick and that’s why I liked Deadpool and Wolverine. Is it a good movie? No, not really. Is it a well-made movie? No, not really. Is it a fun and ultimately instantly forgettable summer movie you can mindlessly chuckle at and never really consider ever again? Yes…yes it is.

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 121 - The Bikeriders

On this episode, Barry and I hop aboard our Harleys and discuss The Bikeriders, the biker gang movie starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy. Topics discussed include Barry's undying love for Austin Butler, the unsexing of Jodie Comer and the yearning for decent, mid-budget adult dramas. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 121 - The Bikeriders

Thanks for listening!

©2024

The Bikeriders: A Review - Foundational Flaws Make 'The Bikeriders' an Uneasy Rider

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A flawed movie that could’ve been great but ended up being just average.

The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy, chronicles the trials and tribulations of a Chicago-area motorcycle club from its benign founding in the early 1960’s to its malignant expansion throughout the 70s.

The film, which is inspired by Danny Lyon’s photo-book of the same name and is written and directed by Jeff Nichols, opened nationwide in theatres last weekend.

The Bikeriders has a lot going for it, like an appealing aesthetic, a banger of a soundtrack and three solid, attractive actors atop the cast list. And yet, the film struggles to captivate because it is fundamentally at cross-purposes with itself.

On one hand it wants to be a gritty, Goodfellas-esque, guys being guys motorcycle movie/crime drama (in fact an early sequence in the film is an homage to Goodfellas), and then on the other hand it wants to be a rather safe, cinematically antiseptic Hollywood movie and star making vehicle.

These differing desires are never more apparent as when comparing the performance styles of the two lead actors, Austin Butler and Jodie Comer, who play Benny and Kathy, the couple at the center of the drama.

Jodie Comer is a very, very pretty woman, but she’s not nearly as pretty in The Bikeriders as the beautiful Austin Butler, whose Benny is the brooding, blue-eyed, bad boy biker with the perfectly tussled hair who is the object of everyone’s desire.

The Bikeriders is a star-maker for Butler, as his job is to show up and pose and preen his way through a role without actually doing much heavy lifting. That he can be little more than a mannequin in this movie and women will still go absolutely bananas for him and dudes will still want to be him, is a testament to his innate star potential.

In contrast, Jodie Comer plays Kathy and has been unsexed to such a staggering degree as to be astonishing considering her preternatural allure. Adding to her unsexing is the fact that she’s doing a deeply studied performance which features a spot-on, but still grating, Chicago accent, and her wardrobe seems designed to eliminate any possible feminine appeal.

In terms of acting style, Comer is doing 1970’s Meryl Streep method acting and Butler is doing an Armani photo-shoot, and the clash of styles is not only cinematically confounding but also greatly diminishes the drama.

For example, Kathy and Benny, whose attraction/relationship is the center piece of the narrative, are completely devoid of any sizzle. There is not one iota of chemistry between Butler and Comer. Adding to the frigidity is that they never kiss, not even once, in the entire film. In fact, I don’t recall seeing the two of them ever touch…and not even in a sensual or romantic way, but at all. How can you have two ridiculously gorgeous people play a couple in a movie and never once show them kiss?

Now, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal except it undermines the narrative and dramatic premise of the entire project. Benny is allegedly torn between the motorcycle club and Kathy, but he doesn’t seem all that interested in Kathy, and frankly, Kathy doesn’t seem all that interested in him, which makes the whole thing dramatically incoherent.

What Kathy and Benny need is uncontrollable, blood-pumping, frantic passion, which would give Benny a reason to keep coming back and, more importantly, Kathy a reason to do EVERY SINGLE THING SHE DOES. But it has none of that and thus the drama of the film is neutered.

To be clear, I didn’t hate The Bikeriders. In general, I dig motorcycle movies (or car movies) and the film looks good, is aesthetically pleasing and stylistically intriguing, and it has a cast of solid actors.

For instance, Tom Hardy does a good job as Johnny, the founder of the Vandals, the fictional motorcycle club at the heart of the movie. Hardy splits the difference between Comer and Butler’ acting styles by giving a half method/half Hollywood performance, and it actually works.

The collection of actors in the motorcycle club, guys like the always reliable Michael Shannon, as well as Damon Herriman, Norman Reedus and Boyd Holbrooke, all do solid supporting work and make for believable bikers.

The costumes work as well, and the cinematography by Adam Stone is pretty standard but well executed.

Ultimately, The Bikeriders is one of those movies that could have been great but which never figured out what it wanted to be and more importantly, how it wanted to be or why it wanted to be.

The film could’ve been a steamy star-vehicle with Butler and Comer being their beautiful selves and lighting up the screen with a scintillating and sexy love story.

Or it could have been a gritty crime drama, with Benny and Kathy as the Henry Hill and Karen in a Goodfellas style tale.

But instead, the film tries to be both and ends up being neither.

One can’t help but wish that director Jeff Nichols could have had a more clear, coherent and concise vision for The Bikeriders, and a more-deft artistic, dramatic and cinematic touch in order to make the most of the tantalizing story hinted at in Lyon’s compelling photo-book of the same name.

The Bikeriders could have been extraordinary, but due to a lack of narrative and dramatic clarity, it’s just ordinary. Which is disappointing, but nowadays, not all that surprising.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

@2024

The Acolyte: TV Review (Three Episodes) - In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...the Same Old Culture Wars

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

The Acolyte, the new Star Wars series streaming on Disney +, tells the story of a murder mystery and intrigue involving the Jedi during the High Republic era a hundred years before the Skywalker saga begins.

The series’ first two episodes premiered on June 4th and a third episode was released this week, with a new episode releasing once a week for the next five weeks.

The Acolyte has generated a great deal of conversation online because, according to its detractors, it shatters the lore upon which the Star Wars franchise is built and is copiously filled with an over-abundance of token diversity. In contrast, the show’s adherents cheer the show exactly because of its diversity and covert socio-political agenda.

While I have enjoyed, to varying degrees, the Star Wars franchise over the years, I’ve never been a super fan and so I really don’t have a dog in the fight between the old traditionalist Star Wars fans and the new progressive Star Wars fans. All I want is for Disney to produce good Star Wars series and films.

Disney’s track record on Star Wars, particularly the shows, is not great. On the bright side, The Mandalorian seasons one and two, and Andor, were phenomenal.

On the down side, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi Wan Kenobi, season three of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka were absolute trash.

After having watched the first three episodes of the 8-episode season of The Acolyte, I can objectively report that the show is a dull disappointment that dwells among the latter rather than the former.

The Acolyte is a perfect embodiment of everything that is wrong with Disney’s Star Wars output. The writing is egregiously bad, the staging, cinematography, fight choreography, production design, directing and acting are so sub-par as to be astonishing and outright embarrassing.

The show is created by Leslye Headland, whose previous claim to fame is the series Russian Doll and having been Harvey Weinstein’s assistant (yikes!).

Headland’s visual style is one of claustrophobia, as nearly every shot and every set is cramped and confined. The resulting affect isn’t one of dramatic intensity but of artistic bankruptcy.

Headland’s story, at least what is seen through three episodes, is completely ignorant of the power of myth and archetype, dramatically inert and narratively adolescent. The dialogue, in particular, is so puerile as to be painful.

Adding to the issues of Headland’s extremely limited artistry and stunted creativity is the fact that this show, which boasts an enormous $180 million budget, looks unconscionably cheap. The sets look like something borrowed from a drama school stage play and the costumes and makeup fare no better, as everything feels thrown together and lacks definition and detail.

One of the biggest issues with The Acolyte is the poor casting and consistently abysmal acting.

Amandla Stenberg stars as two characters, twins Osha and Mae, and she is truly terrible in both roles. She is awkward, unskilled and unathletic, and is so devoid of charisma and screen presence she’s as compelling as a dog turd baking in the hot sun.

Stenberg fails to make any distinction between her portrayals of Osha and Mae and thus you’re never sure who you’re watching in any given scene…which doesn’t add to the drama but only confuses it.

Stenberg isn’t helped by the childish script – which has her waking up breathless no fewer than three times in the span of about fifteen minutes or so, but Stenberg certainly isn’t ready to carry a series on her diminutive shoulders with her exceedingly minimal talent.

Lee Jung-Jae, who recently starred in The Squid Game, fares no better with the script. Lee, who learned to speak English specifically for this role, struggles to speak with any cadence or rhythm, and thus brings every scene he inhabits to a grinding halt.

The rest of the cast are equally incompetent, most notably the two actresses playing Osha and Mae as children. I know it’s difficult to find child actors but good lord these two kids are a train-wreck.

The one bright spot in the cast is Jodie Turner-Smith who plays a witch who is the “mother” to the young Osha and Mae. Turner-Smith is the only actor on the series who fills her character with an inner life and whose eyes project a dramatic meaning and purpose. While everyone else is play-acting, Jodie Turner-Smith actually IS acting.

Disney’s marketing plan for its Star Wars (and Marvel) franchise projects is to be aggressive in turning these traditionally male myths into female led stories chock full of diversity with minimal white male presence. Or as South Park so expertly said in its evisceration of Star Wars production chief Kathleen Kennedy and Disney, “put a chick in it and make it lame and gay”. Mission accomplished, Ms. Kennedy.

The reason for this “chick/lame/gay” approach is that Disney wants to politicize their franchise projects by turning them into referendums on culture war issues. This is meant to aggravate and alienate traditionalist fans (mostly straight white men), and arouse progressive non-fans (women, LGBTQ etc.) in the hopes of turning them into loyal fans. The idea being that the original fans will never leave, even if it means they hate watch, and new progressive fans will watch out of political loyalty turned into brand loyalty, rather than due to unabashed fandom.

When the traditionalists cry foul over a show or movie with a female lead or color-filled cast, the progressives, most notably in the media, will reflexively and instinctively rush to defend the show because if the “bad people” (white men) are against it…then it must be good. And even if it isn’t good, it must be defended because the fight really isn’t over the quality of the show but rather over the importance of the diversity on display.

The Acolyte, which has a gay non-binary woman of color as its lead, and which features – and this is no joke – a coven of lesbian witches who create human life without males (and this coven is involved in one of the worst scenes in any Star Wars venture – it’s during a ritual and it is like something you’d see at a junior high school drama club production at an all-girls school), and which is created by a lesbian (Headland) who has openly stated the series is the gayest Star Wars show ever, is the perfect example of Disney’s divide and conquer culture war approach.

The results are as you’d expect…critics from the establishment media adore the show, giving it a robust 85% rating. Meanwhile, audiences despise it having given it a 20% rating. Of course, the critics counter that the series is being “review bombed” by disingenuous audience members who they claim are “racist, sexist and homophobic”.

What the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Uber Alles brigade fail to recognize is that while the audience score may be a result of “review bombing” by a handful of troglodyte ne’er do wells, the critical score is also likely a result of “review bombing” by shameless shills and socio-political sycophants among the media establishment.

What is always amusing to me is that months after having rabidly defended the latest Star Wars or Marvel atrocity and having praised it for its daring diversity and inclusion these same critics will usually, and sheepishly, admit that the show or film actually really does suck but that it was still “important” because of its diversity and inclusion.

I have long said I don’t give a flying funnel cake about diversity and inclusion, my only priority is quality. Make a good show and it makes no difference to me who wrote it, directed it or starred in it.

For example, you never heard anybody bitching about Andor being led by a Mexican (Diego Luna) and being filled with a plethora of female characters. You know why? Because it was fantastic. That show was so expertly written and exquisitely executed that troglodyte trads didn’t bitch about diversity and critics didn’t have to lie about its quality. The female characters in Andor weren’t girl power tokens, they were complex creations with specific intentions and purpose, and are among the very best ever created in the history of the Star Wars franchise.

In comparison, The Acolyte, which by the way is a great name for a show – too bad it’s ruined on this piece of poop, is so atrociously made as to be criminal. The characters are paper-thin, the acting abysmal, the plot inane and the production astonishingly sub-par. And it’s because it’s so bad that’s why Disney and its media minions have turned it into ground zero for the culture war.

I, for one, am so tired of the endless and fruitless culture war, and by extension Star Wars and Marvel and the rest of our lazy and disingenuous pop culture, that I want to gouge my eyes out and light my brain on fire. And yet…here I am, once again, bitching about the same old culture war issues in a galaxy far, far away, that makes our own galaxy such a very unpleasant one.

The bottom line regarding The Acolyte, at least through the first three episodes, is that this show isn’t worth fighting over as it is simply bad television. I have no idea if it violates and upends the foundations of Star Wars lore and mythology, I just know it fails to reach even the most rudimentary level in regards to entertainment and storytelling.

If you’re a huge Star Wars fan you’ll probably watch the show because you watch everything Star Wars, and you’ll probably dislike it but not enough to break your addiction to all things Star Wars. If, like me, you’re a fair-weather fan, then you can definitely skip The Acolyte...because, to paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, “this is not the Star Wars you’re looking for.”

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Hollywood's Self-Inflicted Box Office Problems

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

There’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth in recent weeks because the box office has been so sluggish, most notably the failures of The Fall Guy and Furiosa, which both painfully underperformed in their opening weekends and beyond.

The Fall Guy had such bad box office numbers it actually went to VOD 17 days after premiering in theatres. Not good for a movie boasting two “movie stars” and a gigantic marketing push.

If one were to look at the dismal box office results this Spring and come away thinking the sky is falling, that would be understandable.

Ever the optimist, let me put your mind at ease though regarding the sky is falling pessimism. The sky isn’t falling regarding the movie business…because it’s already fallen. Many will point to last year’s duel strikes as a reason for this year’s box office gully…but that misses the big picture.

The movie business, like American empire, is a dead man walking. That doesn’t mean it’ll vanish off the face of the earth and never be seen again…no, it just means that it will continue its descent into irrelevancy year after year after year until a giant asteroid comes and wipes us off the earth.

The reasons for this are numerous but here are a few of the major ones. 

The corporatization of Hollywood that began in the Reagan years is now complete. The corporate mindset has destroyed the mid-level budgeted movie in favor of blockbuster hunting, and that has led to bloated budgets, and bad movies. The stark decrease in the quality of cinema is pretty dramatic (with notable exceptions).

Another issue is that movie theatres and the theatre-going experience are both abominable. Theatres throughout the country, thanks again to corporate short-sightedness, are equipped with sub-par projectors which result in a greatly diminished viewing experience. Why go to the theatre and pay all that money when you can have a better visual experience at home on your big screen tv in a darkened living room?

As Sartre once taught us…hell is other people…and that is never more apparent than when you go to the movies. Dipshits and dumbasses talking and looking at their phone throughout a screening makes for a very tense and distracting movie going experience….another issue that is resolved by watching a movie at home.

Add to this that very, very few movies are so culturally compelling that people NEED to see them right away in order to stay in the loop. Barbie and Oppenheimer filled that bill last Summer, but those are definitely outliers. For example, would you be “out of the cultural loop” if you didn’t see Dune II in theatres this winter? It’s now streaming on Max just a few short months after premiering in theatres and you can watch it without all the bullshit of theatres, in the comfort of your own home…and go to the bathroom when you want without missing anything and not have to tell people to shut the fuck up or put their phones away. Will a big budget film like Dune II be diminished at a home theatre? One would expect the answer is ‘yes’ as it was made to be seen on a big screen…but considering when I saw it at a movie theatre I felt like I was watching it under three feet of water because the projector sucked so bad, my answer would be no.

The same is true of Furiosa. I like the Mad Max movies, but I’m not itching to go see Furiosa in the theatre because it isn’t mandatory in order to stay current culturally. So, I’ll see it when it comes to Max in a few months…or sooner.

The same is true for the glut of Marvel movies. For the longest time Marvel movies were must-see because everyone was talking about them….and now they’re not. Marvel movies ran its course but Disney keeps cramming them down our throat expecting the same results. I’m sorry but The Marvels isn’t moving the needle. No one cares.

Speaking of Marvel and Disney, another issue is that the massive success of the Marvel movies pre-2020 totally skewed the expectation IN HOLLYWOOD for what constitutes a successful movie.

Marvel movies routinely hit the billion-dollar mark and that became the standard for success. But that was then and this is now and studios and analysts are delusional about the box office potential for most movies. And that delusion gets baked into the cake regarding the budget for films.

Once again Barbie and Oppenheimer were outliers in this regard, and ironically have done more harm than good in regards to setting expectations for studio executives (and the general public).

For example, spending over $300 million to make a new Indiana Jones movie or Mission Impossible movie, is frankly nuts since neither of those creaky franchises are going to generate the kind of interest that will satiate a billion-dollar box office yearning.

The same is true for the new Marvel movies, as the stars of that franchise and the characters they played, are gone. Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is not walking through that door…and I’m sorry but Brie Larson isn’t going to fill that void.

The solution to the Hollywood problem is to change the corporate strategy, and instead of trying to make a billion dollars with a single blockbuster that costs at a minimum $250-300 million to make and another$150-250 million to market, is to make six or seven medium budget films for $50 million or less each with a focus on quality, in the hopes that one of those movies will hit big and fill the coffers.

Examples of what I’m talking about are movies like Parasite, which costs $15 million to make and brought in $262 million at the box office. I understand that Parasite is a remarkable movie from a brilliant filmmaker, but it shows what is possible.

The same is true of movies like Spotlight, which had a $20 million budget and made $98 million. Or even Good Will Hunting, which starred nobodies (Affleck and Damon) and was directed by a non-mainstream guy (Gus Van Sant) on a $10 million budget and raked in $225 million.

The key of course is that the movies have to be good and they have to avoid bloated budgets. The other benefit of making good movies is that more often than not if you make a good movie, it will get Oscar recognition and thus free marketing and a second life at the box office.

It goes without saying that Hollywood will not change its approach if for no other reason than corporations are allergic to actually thinking. And so, the studios will continue to relentlessly bang their heads against the bank vault door in the hopes one of these times it’ll open, even if just for a moment…like it did with Barbie and Oppenheimer, but if Barbie and Oppenheimer type success only comes along every five years or so, that won’t work as a business model.

The bottom line is that Hollywood fucked up their business and fucked up movies in the process…and we are all paying for it and will continue to pay for it for years to come. As a cinephile it gives me no pleasure in saying this but movies, much like popular music, is essentially dying as an artform and is too beholden to corporate interests to be able to save itself.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: A Review - Middling Monkey Business

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This flawed film is the worst of the fantastic recent reboot franchise, but it’s decent enough for Planet of the Apes fanatics despite its very pronounced flaws.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth film in the Planet of the Apes franchise reboot (and the ninth in the overall franchise), hit theatres this past weekend and handily won the box office by raking in $129 million.

The film, written by Josh Friedman and directed by Wes Ball, is set many generations after the events of its tremendous predecessor, War for the Planet of the Apes, which dramatized Caesar, the patriarch of the intelligent apes, delivering the first generation of said apes to the promised land.

In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the memory of the founding father Caesar is long forgotten by many tribes of apes living in isolated enclaves. One of these tribes is an eagle collecting group of apes, among them a young chimp named Noa (Owen Teague).

Noa accidentally stumbles upon another group of apes who not only remember the history of Caesar, but exploit it for nefarious, authoritarian means. This group, led by Proximus Caesar and his henchman gorilla Sylva, go on a rampage of conquest in order to Make Planet of the Apes Great Again….and Noa and his peaceful tribe bear the brunt of their ambition.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes has Sasquatchian-sized shoes to fill considering the brilliance of its three predecessors Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes, and, to be frank, it never even approaches adequately filling them. To be clear, the film isn’t bad, but it also isn’t the least bit great, and it is easily the worst of the four films in the rebooted franchise.

Planet of the Apes films, even in the original franchise of the late 1960s and early 1970s, have always been great ideas with social issues embedded deep within the sci-fi splendor.

The same is true of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as it explores authoritarianism, exploitation, manipulation and other social issues. But just like the flawed early 1970’s sequels, Kingdom is much better as an idea than it is in execution.

The biggest issue with Kingdom is that none of its characters are even remotely compelling. The protagonist, Noa (Owen Teague), is no Caesar. He’s a rather dull and disinteresting chimp surrounded by equally dull chimps, like his friends Soona and Anaya. It also doesn’t help that it’s very difficult to tell the chimps apart as they – excuse my chimp racism – all look alike.

The uniformity of Noa’s tribe is further hampered by the flatness of each character. None stand out and none are fully fleshed out. As a result, none of their relationships are developed to the point where they’d be meaningful, never mind captivating.

The humans don’t fare any better. Nova (Freya Allen) is a mysterious human woman who isn’t that mysterious nor interesting. We never truly understand where she comes from or what motivates her. Trevathan (William H. Macy), is a human who works with apes and his story might’ve been pretty interesting but we never get to see it so we’ll never know.

Besides the lackluster characters, the film also suffers due to a lack of narrative clarity and visual crispness. Both of these shortcomings fall in the lap of director Wes Ball. Ball’s previous films include the Maze Runner trilogy, which isn’t exactly the pinnacle of cinematic experience. Watching Ball’s Planet of the Apes movie only increases Matt Reeves standing, as he directed the stellar Dawn and War films and has now graduated to the Batman franchise.

Kingdom’s plot jumps around from a coming-of-age story to a road picture to a fight-the-power narrative, but by trying to be all of these things it ends up being none of them.

Yes, Kingdom does nicely pay homage to the original 1968 film, particularly in one section with its distinct visual style and signature music, and it also gives adequate depth to the franchise’s mythology and archetypes, like having Noa (the biblical Noah – get it?) survive a flood of monkey shit both figuratively and sort of literally. But the movie never grabs you by the throat and makes you pay attention. It never makes you care much about the characters you’re supposed to care about, and never hate the characters you’re supposed to hate.

The best character in the entire film is without question Raka (Peter Macon), a monastic Orangutan who is keeping the gospel of Caesar and his sacred sayings alive, even if it is just to himself. But even Raka is not as good as say Maurice, the stunning orangutan from the previous trilogy.

That said, Raka has far too little screen time, and would be very well served with a Disney + mini-series (as would the entirety of the Orangutan class in the Planet of the Apes universe – give us a Dr. Zaius series!!), which I would voraciously watch. But instead, he’s given short shrift and the film suffers because of it.

The same is true of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the villainous chimp leader of a powerful group of apes, and his number one general Sylva (Eka Darville), a rough and tumble lowland gorilla.

The origin story of Proximus and Sylva too would make an interesting mini-series or feature film, no doubt more compelling than the rather tepid adventures of Noa, the good-hearted country ape forced to face the big, bad world. But instead Proximus and Sylva are rather thin characters despite there being a lot of meat left on those bones.

As far as the visuals of the film go, cinematographer Gyula Pados never paints with much flair, unlike his predecessors in the reboot trilogy. The film looks fine, but in comparison to the luscious visual feast of War for the Planet of the Apes for instance, Kingdom falls flat. The same is true of the action sequences, as the fight scenes, most notably the climactic battle, are dramatically underwhelming and poorly designed.

In addition, the CGI, for some reason, looks a little bit off compared to the previous films, or maybe it was just the lack of unique and compelling characters that made the visuals seem less than. For example, there is no character in this entire film that looks as good as say Koba or Maurice from the three previous films.

Another issue is the acting. Despite it being motion-capture acting, it is still acting, and the cast of the previous three films, most notably Andy Serkis as Caesar and Toby Kebbell as Koba, showed audiences the brilliance possible while acting through technology. Nothing in this film even comes close the stellar work of the cast in the previous films.

For example, Kevin Durand gives a rather trite and predictable performance as the villain Proximus. His bluster and big voice are routine for any first-time actor trying to play the heavy.

Owen Teague as Noa never lives up to the work Serkis did as Caesar, which to be fair, is an impossible task as Andy Serkis is the Marlon Brando of motion-capture acting….but still, the drop-off is notable and uncomfortable.

Now, with all of that bitching and moaning aside…I still have to admit that I liked Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes mostly because the original Planet of the Apes movies were my favorite film franchise of all-time and the reboot trilogy has only made the franchise in total even greater as they were sensational. Kingdom definitely has massive flaws – as explained above, but on the bright side, unlike Tim Burton’s shitty 2001 Apes movie, this is a real film and is passable entertainment. While not great, it is not an embarrassment to the franchise or the rich mythology of the franchise.

If, like me, you love the Planet of the Apes in general, you’ll like this movie well enough. It isn’t anywhere near as good as the previous three films, but it isn’t catastrophically bad either. But the bottom line is…Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a professionally made movie about talking monkeys plotting against and beating the hell out of each other…what’s not to like?

That said, one can only hope that the next Planet of the Apes film is a step up from Kingdom, or at least a step in the right direction, and this extraordinarily long-running, high-quality, fascinating franchise finds better footing moving forward.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Shogun (Hulu): TV Review - A Leafless Branch

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A beautiful but dramatically and emotionally empty series that features quality craftsmanship across the board yet never rises to become must-see.

Shogun, the highly-acclaimed ten-episode mini-series based on the James Clavell book of the same name, just finished its original run on the streaming service Hulu…and I have some thoughts.

The series, which began streaming on February 27th and concluded on April 23rd, was created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks and stars Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis.

Shogun tells the fictional tale of John Blackthorne (Jarvis), an English sailor marooned in 1600s Japan, who must navigate the customs and culture of his new land and serve as an advisor/political pawn to Lord Taranaga (Sanada), the powerful lord of Kanto. A critical side story involves Blackthorne falling in love with his translator Lady Mariko (Sawai).

Shogun is a strange series in that I watched each episode as it rolled out weekly and yet never thought about the show for a single second when it wasn’t playing in front of me. I never once mused or anticipated about what would come in the following episode and very often entirely forgot what had happened in the episode I had just watched. For example, I watched the final episode five days ago and cannot remember much of anything from it.

In this way Shogun is like so much of tv in this bloated streaming era, in that it is eye-candy that comes and goes without the slightest impact one way or the other.

Another show I watched recently, Netflix’s Three Body Problem, was similar in that it generated lots of manufactured light, especially in terms of cultural discission, but exactly zero heat. The big difference between though Three Body Problem and Shogun though is that Three Body Problem was a thoroughly second-rate production that looked unconscionably cheap…whereas Shogun is undeniably a top-notch production that looks more expansive than it probably was.

Shogun is a beautiful production that is exquisitely shot, professionally acted, and boasts superb production design and costumes…and yet…as good as the show looks and all the pieces are near perfect, it still seems oddly forgettable, or better yet – irrelevant, as a whole.

To the show’s credit, it does believably transport you back to 1600’s Japan, and that can be enjoyable, but it never rouses enough interest in its characters to cross the threshold from interesting to emotionally or dramatically impactful.

The thing that struck me most about Shogun was that it was, much to its credit, shot and framed like a feature film. Rarely were objects of interest set center frame, which was a refreshing change since center-framing has become standard, particularly in television, in our wholly unfortunate era of Tik Tok. So often nowadays television cinematography has all the skill and artistry of a grandmother using a disposable instamatic on a family trip to Disney. Thankfully, Shogun never suffers from this lack of attention or visual care.

Also compelling are many of the performances.

Anna Sawai, in particular, is quite good as Lady Mariko, the tormented translator who must contain her emotions and control Blackthorne. I last saw Sawai in the Apple TV series Monarch, and thought she wasn’t quite yet ready for prime time, but here she is sharp and sexy…a luminous and alluring presence filled with a vivid and visceral inner life she masterfully fights to contain.

Hiroyuki Sanada too does solid work as the scheming Taranaga. Sanada is so unrelenting in his performance that it is actually surprising when Taranaga isn’t quite as smart as you believe he is.

Cosmo Jarvis as Blackthorne gives an intriguing performance, as he at once feels out of place yet also somewhat magnetic. Jarvis never quite earns the emotional arc his character takes, but to his credit he is game and never shies from the challenge or the camera.

The CGI used in Shogun is worth mentioning as well as the wide shots of Osaka are obviously fake but still impressive to behold. As are the fight sequences – with a few notable exceptions…like when Lady Mariko morphs into a girl power goddess and slays some samurai.

Despite all of the positive attributes present in Shogun, it just never grips you by the heart or throat and forces you to care. Ultimately, I didn’t actually care about any of the characters in Shogun…not really. And the usual cultural storytelling instincts we have become accustomed to are not satisfied in the story because it ends not with a compelling climax but with understated subtlety.

I have never read Clavell’s book, nor have I watched the 1980 mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain and the great Toshiro Mifune. Maybe if I had I would have more attachment to the characters and investment in the story. But I didn’t and I don’t.

At the end of the day Shogun is a beautiful but forgettable piece of television that I desperately wanted to love because of the subject matter, but never did. The series is simply something to watch to pass the time, and requires little emotional investment and negligible dramatic payoff.

I didn’t hate Shogun, not at all, but I didn’t love it either. It’s an impressive piece of television solely for the craft on display, but in my opinion is not compelling enough to be considered must-see.

I respect the craftsmanship on display in Shogun enough that my recommendation is to watch the first episode and see if it grabs you, and then proceed accordingly.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024