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Reviews
Challengers (2024)
Standing Still
I have one rule for "sports" movies: the camera has to capture the actors moving their feet. Unless you're making a golf movie, pro-athletes become pro-athletes because they move their feet. This seems to confound directors who need to desperately capture the actors' faces to really get at the emotional resolution of a scene. "Challengers" features a lot of actors standing still, pretending to be in motion, wincing and reacting like actors. Tennis stars who stand in one spot and hit the perfect CGI shot over and over again, then explode with emotion. Cut to the fist pump with feet in motion or the smashing of a racquet. The "sports" here is all droll metaphor, see. Three self-obsessed twentysomethings flirt and fight about how best to document the drying of their emotional paint. In the end, I noticed the product placement more than the story. No individual in the trio has much zip, so the whole movie succeeds or fails on whether or not the chemistry between the actors justifies the 130 minute run time. There's a lot of standing still with little to talk about. This movie could take place anywhere with any number of perfectly boring people, but what matters here is that the volley symbolizes the soul. That's not deep or entertaining. In fact, it's kinda sleepy, and no amount of tease, throbbing soundtrack, or whipping camera and flashy editing can really make this film any more interesting.
Stunningly average, this is an undercooked celebration of a director and actors whom we're told are good even when the screen tells us otherwise.
All of Us Strangers (2023)
Stunningly Bad
Unearthing endless tropes that, one might guess, is the scope of the screenplay that Adam is writing, "All of Us Strangers" is a dopey, magical realist fable that occasionally goes so far as to mock its own pretensions, only to snap them back in favor of another sappy, wink-wink tearjerking moment. Yes, Adam is writing bad screenplay - a tribute to the dead spirits that make up all of his personality. We never get to know much about Adam, his parents, or the apparition of Harry - the doe-eyed Paul Mescal, now the apparent Universal Depressive of his generation - but the film insists that we should care about all of them because they are lonely, broken, wholly imperfect. But conversations with dead people doesn't really amount to much here, what with the pat hallucinogenic denouement and the countless train-and-Erasure montages pounding home how SERIOUS this film is about its pain. There isn't an ounce of humor, save for maybe the paint-by-numbers homosexual love story that seems torn from the imagination of the dimmest straight person alive. "All of Us Strangers" fizzles about midway, even sooner if you see the ending coming on like the train, the drunken accident, the teary goodbyes, the nonsensical spiritualism. If its a film about grief, suicide, depression, or maybe just plain ole screenwriting, it accomplishes very little beyond sustaining its one note from opening scene to the closing, chuckle-inducing Frankie Goes to Hollywood snuggle.
These actors deserved better.
Madame Web (2024)
Deliciously Awful
It is impossible to purposefully make a film this bad. A mess of this proportions takes a legion of deluded, overeager corporate morons and just as many willing participants. There is no way this amateurish script "looked good on paper," but undoubtedly, it looks much worse in the harsh light of day. All of the actors here are plastic and awkward, the action completely incomprehensible, and the unintentional camp dialed up to eleven. To say that Madame Web demonstrates that the superhero genre is running on fumes presupposes that this film had anything in the tank to begin with. Rooted in a minor comics afterthought, itself designed to cash in on unwitting passerby, Madame Web wants to think it's audience is in on the joke, exploiting the conventions of the genre to skimp on just about anything that might make the threadbare connective tissues compelling. The result is something even Joel and the Bots would have difficulty finishing - a truly ridiculous, utterly inane belly flop whose bloat and bluster amounts to little more than a silent fart.
Game of Thrones: Beyond the Wall (2017)
The very moment GOT became a joke
Mapping the decline of Game of Thrones is tricky. Much of Season 7 feels sped up and sloppy. Every character gets dumber as the spectacle gets bigger. But "Beyond the Wall" just feels cheap and silly. It begins with that map - the opening credits that girmly establishes distance and geographic features. Many episodes leading up to this point play loose with geography. Somehow Dany manages to raise a Dothraki army across the span to ambush Jamie's returning army in mere minutes of screentime while acknowledging that Casterly Rock can't be maintained...yet instead of wiping out the siege party mere miles away, they return to Dragonstone.
Episode 7 has a team of superhero show favorites trekking past the Wall to collect a Wight to prove to Dany and Cersei that the Others exist (never supposing this magical creature may not be able to make the journey south). Dany doesn't believe, yet she's the one to deliver escape. We have no idea how far North Jon's party has gone, yet they are close enough that a man can run back to the Wall, send a raven, rally a woman who has said no to every plea so that she can fly three times the distance to an undisclosed location beyond the Wall to save Jon.
This is a pretty clear illustration of a writer's room gone mad. The drive to make TV overwhelming any ounce of narrative integrity established in previous seasons. The lesson of GOT has always been that the game isn't fair. Heroes die despite their virtues. Villains die despite their cunning. But if it serves the script, a doubting dragon can fly a thousand miles in a day to rescue a guy a conquest-hungry queen just met a few days earlier.
But corny CGI snow battles aren't even the silliest example of bad writing. Multiple episodes have been devoted to illuminating how much everyone distrusts Littlefinger, yet he manages to fool all of Winterfell with next to no effort.
These are the only two plotlines in the whole episode and yet both of them are laughably weak. Everything that follows from this moment forward pretty much outlines why George RR Martin can't be bothered to finish his own series. He saw what its biggest fans wanted from it and how the TV adaptation bent over backward to deliver it...so he moved on to the prequel. GOT was always written like a soap opera with violence and nudity, but this episode plays like the worst 1980s action B-movie.
The Acolyte: Lost/Found (2024)
More of the Same
Star Wars seems to get more embarrassing as it ages, mostly because Star Wars creators and writers don't seem to know what to do with the old-fashioned silliness of the original trilogy. George Lucas's invention was intentionally broad and romantic. In the 70s and 80s, that meant monochromatic, action-driven fantasy that just happened to exist in space. But 50 years later, space isn't quite so romantic and contemporary ennui insists that every story for every audience is littered with shades of gray. It isn't enough that a story be entertaining; now every series has to have enough wrinkles that it might take forever to unravel. It's the curse of franchise mentality.
Star Wars should be a limitless world. It literally takes place in a fantasy human past where all things are possible but yet nothing really ever happens. The Star Wars world has some 500 years of canonized mythology now, yet most of that is remarkably linear. There are Jedis. Always Jedis. Scads of them. They all seem to talk the same, walk the same, think the same and fail the same. In a world of infinite possibilities, the stars of the show are actually pretty damn boring.
Star Wars Acolyte goes a long way to proving that Jedis are exactly nothing special. In fact, they're downright aggravating. This is a detective show with space wizards at best. At worst, it's an autocorrection of all of George Lucas's sins of nostalgia. The cast and writing are largely unremarkable, doing an average job with painfully average material. There are wild leaps in logic here and hilarious inconsistencies, so much so that it's hard to take any of it as seriously as the average Star Wars fan might.
The mystery isn't much of a mystery after one episode. Every narrative twist could have been solved had this hyper-evolved world of technological miracles installed a few CCTV cameras. Sometimes the Jedis can read minds, even control minds, except when they can't for whatever reason. It's the small details that make the wooden acting all the more embarrassing. And why should we care? Because they are Jedi, which should mean something special after having now seen hundreds of Jedi characters in the Star Wars universe?
So it isn't an action series or much of a mystery. It's jam-packed with clichés and redundancy. While Acolyte suggests "something we haven't seen before", it sure feels familiar, with or without the Star Wars trappings.
To note: there are plenty of wild accusations against Disney and its supposed agenda. But the really laughable concession here is that the show isn't too female or too minority, it just looks like cosplay. It looks cheap, the actors are flat, and the tone is just off. It's then that you notice how forced (no pun intended) it all feels. There's no magic here and that means detractors are going to blame the multicultural motifs of the show. This is hardly Acolyte's biggest problem.
The Creator (2023)
Completely Empty
The Creator isn't very good. It isn't smart. It isn't exciting. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and there are next to no emotional entanglements that can justify its 140 minutes of screentime. It's not just that everything in The Creator has been done before and done better, its that Gareth Edwards seems to believe that the juxtaposition of stunning vistas and floating machinery merits a pass on intellectual and interpersonal banality. The actors feel robotic - especially the humans and especially John David Robinson - and the set pieces repetitive and predictable. It's an extended chase scene that sprinkles its shoot-em-ups with visions of synthetic humans being tortured. We're told that this has consequences but none of them are detectible onscreen. Everyone here is just going through the motions as if preprogrammed by an AI to deliver the bare minimum action film experience.
What's alarming is that this is an amalgamation of Edwards' films into a single thematic unit that isn't worthy of any of its disparate parts. There are plenty of rebel politics, third-world exploitation, and monsters, but not an once of soul. While Monsters and Rogue One both had momentum and curiosity, Creator is closer in form and execution to the clunky, uneven Godzilla and less satisfying. Given an $80mil budget and a 2 hour cut, we see the strain of self-importance everywhere - an insistence that big themes are being explored. But all things being precious isn't a particularly compelling philosophical argument when every creature living and synthetic is designed as a weapon. Remove the fancy window dressing and The Creator is about as complex of a machine as a pulley. There are plot holes here that suggest the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to even read their own script.
Fallout (2024)
Everything Clever About This is Dumb
Based on a video game? Never would have guessed. This seems exactly like the kind of clever noise a few dozen up-and-coming TV producers at Amazon might come up with when their job is on the line. "Bring me something violent and fun that will cost a lot of money and grab the attention of the unwashed masses. Preferably the unwashed gamer masses. Something like 'Last of Us', but with zingers. One-liners and more explosions. Maybe some CGI bugs? A cute girl or two? And how about a semi-famous co-star who always plays the semi-famous co-star? Make sure there's at least one lowly underdog we can hire a minority actor for, but make them comedy relief with a heart. Robots and zombies if possible."
If it were any fun at all, Fallout would be a low-stakes delight. Beautiful production design and game actors, a pedigree and a budget. But it's all so instantly dumb. Badly written, choppy, and nonsensical, Fallout's attention span is shorter than the ads that precede it. Action comedy is hard to land. Both have to be tight - the filmmakers have to establish tone. Fallout insists on being taken seriously all the while slapping the audience with vaudeville-level pratfalls and gags. It's more fun watching real-life 'fail' vids than a team of artists trying to recreate them.
The Menu (2022)
Leftovers of 3 Star Meal
The Menu isn't particularly good. Certain courses are lean and tasty, but as a whole, Mylod's film isn't much more than a reheated satire that shifts a little too quickly from icy comeuppance to a milquetoast lecture on class and capitalist culture. While The Menu flirts with self-awareness, it's also guilty of the same arrogant detachment it accuses its victims of embodying. The film suggests a body count but what's supposed to matter is the sense of dread that comes with each progressively clever course, a set-up that loses its irony as soon as we see our first drop of blood. Each of the diners at this exquisite charade is a broad type and a simplistic target. From philandering philanthropist to haughty restaurant critic to empty influencer, each represents a bare-bones assumption of corruption and delusion, but the screenplay can't be bothered to play by its own rules (John Leguizamo's gregarious actor's crime? Making a disappointing lowbrow movie - wink wink). Once the sacrifice begins, every single actor on screen becomes a concept the movie can't be bothered to serve. At a certain point, the line between dread and dark comedy doesn't blur exactly the way the filmmakers intend. Whereas, say, Rian Johnson's Knives Out (obviously an influence here) presented a wide array of types inside a theme and managed to deliver interesting wrinkles, everyone in The Menu is just waiting around to die. It's in the film's preachier moments that we realize that the offenders may not really be so bad as their supposed crimes. That makes Ralph Fiennes ennui-packed performance seem just a little less menacing. He's mugging afterall, just like Anna Taylor Joy's "Margot" is earmarked from the first scene as our inevitable Final Girl. The menu of The Menu isn't exclusive or refined, just expensive. And if you revel in its many carnal delights, there's a pretty good chance you'll feel full only to find yourself going through the drive-thru on your way home.
I tried to cram in as many eye-rolling allusions as possible when writing this review. Unfortunately, that seems to be what Mylod's team did here as well.
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Half a film
The Xenomorph is gonna do what the Xenomorph is gonna do, so the only metric for quality in an Alien movie is the relative aptitude of the lambs to the slaughter. Alien: Covenant is populated with non-characters, the most annoying of which is the wan "religious" captain played by Billy Crudup. He's meant to be a mirror to the ethical emptiness of the film's true villain, who it turns out - quite unsurprisingly- to not be the eponymous Alien but a member of the crew. So the noise that gets us from Point A to Point B is just more of the same; a waiting game to see who meets their end and who gets a fanciful monologue. It's no surprise that Fassbender gets the majority of the play here. He's the only star capable of bringing life to such thin writing.
This is a shame because Covenant is, superficially, some of the best directing Scott has done in years. The first half of the film manages to extend the foreboding greyness that similarly made one half of Prometheus so effective. But like that film, Covenant can't translate the inevitable violence into existential gravity. None of the characters register as sympathetic or even interesting which places the emphasis on a dull AI parable about finding meaning without human agency. It's a Kubrickian trick buried deep in braindead pandering so that no plot ever really emerges. It just sits there, and Scott can't be bothered to give any satisfactory answers for the multitude of mysteries he's created.
The movies are filled with splatter horror; we all know where to find it. But after Cameron's Aliens, we know that we should expect a little more from this particular blend of action and horror. And after six or so films, we really deserve a better hint at the answers Prometheus was supposed to provide. If the Xenomorphs in your film are a yawn and their creators unworthy of deeper exploration, we need a little more than a double-crossing robot to carry 2+ hours. And that runtime feels extra long when the story and the third ending all fail to congeal into the release the first half builds toward.
There's a muddled explanation as to what planet the Prometheus survivors crashed onto and why and how it went wrong, but really, it's the only thing we want to know. That the film ignores all of that to deliver exactly the same droll clichés of it's forefathers is damning. It turns out that the franchise can't even be saved by its own father - and that's a weird mirror into the Covenant's emptiness.
The Red King (2024)
Staggeringly banal, hilariously lowbrow
"The Red King" is generic in just about every way that matters. It's loaded with tropes - some very old and some very new - and all of them are bad. From the self-righteous cop fallen from grace and excised to a podunk assignment to the lavish conspiracy so obvious that the reveal is actually stunningly simplistic, Red King has next-to-no original thoughts and few compelling performances.
Red King seems to think that its audience hasn't seen Wicker Man or Midsommar, nor has read any British poetry or folklore. It also assumes that if you have, you're going to find a pub called "John Barleycorn" a snapping allusion. It's all quite embarrassing.
Marc Warren is serviceable the grieving drunk father and Mark Lewis gets to play his typical round-faced racist, but the problem lies in Anjli Mohindra's sergeant. We never quite get a beat on who she's supposed to be or why. It's not the actress's fault, but rather the scattered, threadbare characterization. And the script fails pretty much everyone.
In the end, it doesn't really matter who was murdered and why. It's all setup for an elaborately stupid gotcha that doesn't tickle the heart or the brain. It just lies there, stupid, on the rug, desperately wanting to be petted.
Babylon Berlin (2017)
Diminishing returns
Babylon Berlin manages to keep all of its absurdities swirling about in such a self-serious manner that you barely have time to catch your breath and realize how hokey it all is. When the momentum stalls -especially after the crescendo of the first novel and the closing of the second season - the show just kinda floats away into nothing, dangling Nazis, fake deaths, and labyrinthine conspiracies as a smoke screen for logical storytelling. The noir tropes tend to overtake the gritty realism of much of the narrative and what you're left with is an unsatisfying porridge - warming, but it's all a little too wet.
When the show concerns itself with the harsh realities of German poverty, Weimar decadence, and the subtleties of government and social politics that would lead to Nazism, it's all fascinatingly heady and inspired. The production design is simply the best television has seen with period detail, costuming, and impeccable cinematography and editing. But too often, Babylon Berlin's technical prowess can't justify its wild narrative business and convoluted subplots. It's easy to get lost or to care at all about many of the intertwining double-crosses and shady deals. Each season seems desperate to populate the Berlin underworld with broad clowns and eccentric kingpins whose only purpose is to wind up inside of a chalk outline.
The cast is superb even though the scripts are often repetitive in tone. The women get the worst of it, though one of Babylon Berlin's off-kilter strengths is how it melds perversity and sexual freedom into the paradoxes of the conservative state. Much of the bare flesh onscreen is more about tone than purpose; often that means the female characters are punished for their indiscretions and transactional sensuality. At times, it's downright sticky, especially when, y'know, National Socialism is involved. Babylon Berlin has no problem with killing off a character the second they've had a moment's grace.
The author of the books wants to push the series right up to 1938, meaning there could a lot more of the show to explore, but by Season 4 the formula is showing signs of exhaustion. The Macguffin cases that prop up two or three characters at a time have often killed the flow and the seasons get long. That's when the show's pretentious flourishes - seamlessly executed in the early episodes - become real points of contention. As the bodies pile up, the musical numbers get dreadfully dull, no matter how exquisite the costuming may be.
Widows (2018)
A Distilled Mess
Steve McQueen is known for icy detachment and pretension. Gillian Flynn is known for bombast and snarky genre reversals. It's an unlikely pairing, and it looks like everyone wants to come out to play. The film is packed with Grade-A actors. But what do any of them have to do? True to genre, the film uses bursts of violence to suggest stakes. This is, in theory, a heist movie. But "Widows" wants to be more, and the heist takes a backseat to nearly two hours of swamp. "Widows" wants to insist it's "about something", dragging the audience through empty melodrama and papery political nonsense to arrive a convoluted nothing. Its snail's-pace gaslighting; a beautifully photographed, laughably fragile farce of girl-power that for all if its portentous trappings reduces its characters down to neat tropes. After all, it's a heist movie. But the more these characters talk the more we realize we know nothing about them aside from their victimhood. "Widows" wants to imagine a handful of Carmela Sopranos as avenging ronin who light candles for the dead - virgin wh*res complicit in their husband's crimes and doomed to fulfill their dreadful mission, but the film seems to be all window-dressing. There's nothing behind the curtain to suggest this movie learned much from its obvious model - Mann's "Heat."
True Detective: Night Country: Part 6 (2024)
Silence of the Lame
You'd have to be a true detective to get to the bottom of how this garbage got the greenlight. After a laughably pretentious and garbled build up, TD4 just dissolves into something truly despicable - a whimper inside of a whimper. By now, we understand that the True Detective formula is all macguffin - a murder mystery that explores the "thin blue line" between justice and obsession. The cops are always antiheroes, the villains always surprisingly banal in the end. TD4 seems intent on exploiting that formula to its logical limit and then some. And then some more. Not only is the finale absurd, it's downright insulting - scotch-taping a tongue-firmly-in-cheek explanation to the icy shenanigans that ends up implicating evil corporations, ancient bacterium, ghosts, daddy-issues and abused housewives.
"There is something out there calling me," says an "actor" while shivering in the dark and you just know it's all going to get much much worse. The finale grasps so hard for emotional resonance that it just makes you realize how little investment we've placed in these characters. It's one thing to write unlikeable, morally complicated roles, but these are cardboard clichés upon which auteur Lopez drapes her toothless pseudo-spiritualism. They open their mouths and dead air comes out. It's written that way, it's a ted that way, and it's all stunningly racist, sexist, and silly, leaning hard on the abuse of women, native identity and violence as justifications for its many jumbled messages.
I feel like I was the real victim of True Detective 4. I held out hope for at least 2 episodes that it could redeem its shaky first steps. It's not a good thing when you genuinely do not care to watch the last forty minutes of a "murder mystery", but ultimately, I got a couple of real belly-laughs out of the resolution.
"Shake it up baby, twist and shout." There really is no bottom for Issa Lopez and her insulting butchery of this franchise. Just plain awful.
True Detective: Night Country: Part 5 (2024)
Corporations Are Bad and Other Deep Thoughts by Issa Lopez
"It's over! Just let it go! It's time," she says.
Oh, if only. Put it out of its misery.
Season 4 has been a formless, tasteless mess, but Episode 5 sinks to new lows. It's a belly-flop; the weakest writing of the season desperately trying to piece together a story out of the breadcrumbs of non sequiturs that came before. Drenched in hackneyed cliché and pretentious muck, Lopez trades in the D-grade horror tropes for more music-video montages, laborious sound editing, and cheap, violent twists. The episode devolves into corporate cover-ups, police lies, and nonsensical showdowns all of which amounts to exactly nothing. Witness our flawed heroes as they brave the cold night to...well, we don't know. Some people live and some people die. Some people make bad cop shows with CGI polar bears and ghosts.
Someone please explain to me what Jodie Foster saw in this trash?
True Detective: Night Country: Part 3 (2024)
The Dregs
Mulder and Scully travel to the Black Lodge to find a guy who can't be found with any computer, Rook. Stupid kid. You think cases get solved by po-leese work? Nope. You wanna crack this case? Try talking to the dead.
There are heaps of clichés and head scratchers here, but I have to admit to being hooked by the show's central conceit: how the hell is Lopez going to come to any logical dénouement? If ep 2 hinted at bare-bones police melodrama, ep3 shows you exactly how tiresome this genre can be. Essentially the whole episode is a series of the cops answering phones, badly interviewing people they know are lying to them, and storming off to question more liars. Oh, and occasionally there are ghosts.
The eyerolls get deeper, piling on body horror instead of plot, clumsy character slog instead of depth. By the time the episode creaks to his ludicrous (and ludicrously convenient) climax, we recognize an unfortunate new wrinkle in this disastrous season that maybe we were in denial about in previous episodes: TD4 is deeply racist. This season plays mysticism as a central theme yet can never be bothered to actually make any connections to or explanations of its Native context. Nor is there really any subtext. We see people praying, we hear dialogue about pollution and abuse, we see tribal markings and tattoos, but every single detail is in service to the "you wouldn't understand" trope.
You're right: we wouldn't understand. So when big revelations come in the form of "you wouldn't understand" one just accepts that really, there's nothing to understand. This is all just a device. Just a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the story - that the central mystery - is really quite dull, and ice zombies and one-eyed CGI polar bears don't really add much to the intrigue.
So what is TD4 thus far? Marginalized people need to stick together? Except that seems to be exactly the very concept the facts tell us is ridiculous and untenable. While Season 1-3 often used cop-show clichés to examine the personal psychology of their tortured detectives, Season 4 seems content to just say "they're women, isn't that enough of a character trait for you?"
Verdens verste menneske (2021)
A very small world
It never seems to occur to anyone in "Worst Person In the World" that a different Oslo may exist. This is a day-glo version of the universe where everyone's pithy soul-searching is inseparably synced to their privilege. Julie is worthy of our interest but not our judgement, and if you accept that, you've passed a certain cinematic purity test and get to playfully wallow in life's hard lessons.
As a result, Ari Kaurismaki's Oslo simply doesn't exist. It can't. Then life would be icky and unfair and good people would live quiet, desperate lives.
I thought more about that other cinematic universe than I did Julie's in Trier's long, often mannered film, mostly because these very aloof characters are generally busy obsessing over cartoon buttholes and the gentlest subversion of the rom-com standards to really warrant much consideration on their own. While that may give them the aura of "authentic", no one is particularly likable. Nor should we expect them to be. But investing in Trier's universe also means that you have to care more about cocktail dresses and the drunken whims of a self-serious, twenty-something chameleon who supposedly finds equal merit in surgery, psychology, and fine art. Meeting Julie, I ain't buyin' it, and one wonders why the cynical artist and supportive shadow-mother don't just turn away like her callous father has.
I mention Kaurismaki not because his should be the only Olso narrative to exist but because his is so very unique and suggests a world that is simultaneously more mundane and fascinatingly deeper than Julie's bourgeois existence. In his films, morose types struggle with identity and disappointment in equally specific ways. They rarely speak to their own fugue states but we understand them with laser focus. "TWPITW" has a slew of narrators, none more grating than the actual voiceover who tells us exactly what we should know about Julie when the film needs to hone in on one of it's many writerly ironies. In Triers world, class certainly exists, but only insofar as it serves Julie's next act of alienation.
I wish I found any of these characters as interesting as every other critic seems to have, but by the time "TWPITW" is rushing toward its conveniently syrupy Cancer Year revelations I was actively rooting for a hard comeuppance. We know all along that Julie will succeed because there is never a second's doubt. Everyone wants her to win because otherwise the film wouldn't exist at all.
Bottoms (2023)
Strangers With Superbad
Seligman and Sennot's "Shiva Baby" was housed in such a specific, empathetic world that at first "Bottoms" absurdist satire is extremely jarring. This is a world where, instead of cringey mitsvah angst the whip-smart humor is centered around horny pansexual adults-playing-teens and grunting, perfectly manicured footballers who never change out of their pads and tights. It's a satire of less-competent satires - a female fisheye of how clumsily Hollywood handles teens, sex, and gender and how so often the story is little more than titillation with emotions sharpied on a piece of cardboard. Juxtaposed with "Barbie" (which was lauded for its game actors and prescient writing), "Bottoms" feels a whole lot sharper in both the targets it chooses and the sincerity of its nastiness. Rather than attempt to dramatize the complexities of sex and gender politics, "Bottoms" explodes them, unconcerned with good taste or the audiences it might inadvertently offend. "Bottoms" owes a lot to "Strangers With Candy" and it's every bit as vicious and hilarious, unapologetically willing to try anything for a laugh. If you're willing to plumb the depths of teen sex comedies and real-life tragedy (guns, rape, and violent depression are all fully lampooned here), Seligman is happy to provide some truly inspired schtick. And just like "Barbie", the flashiest male role ironically steals the show from protagonists charged with heavier lifting - Marshawn Lynch playing the girls' divorcé advisor is genuinely hilarious, displaying a comic timing and deadpan delivery that puts many trained actors to shame. Plenty of scenes are stolen by Lynch, idly standing by, simply nodding his head to the chaos unfolding.
Saint Omer (2022)
A light-touch masterpiece
Saint Omer isn't flashy melodrama. In fact, it's barely a story. Rather, this is a delicate, complex parable about motherhood, identity, and history that uses race and sensationalist underpinnings to arrive at something astonishingly humane. The most fascinating thing about Saint Omer is that there are stories within stories within stories, and rather than tell (as so much dumbed-down contemporary cinema insists upon), director Diop patiently shows. It's a masterclass in suggestion, unreliable narrators, and family politics framed inside of linear courtroom drama. Saint Omer not only posits the question of how we frame literature and media into a self-narrative, but how in doing so one often conveniently obscures very specific truths about themselves and why they relate to the material. In the end, Diop's protagonist - a successful intellectual mother-to-be - comes face to face with her own expectations. The moment of realization is subtle, the conclusions so moving that the film silently screams it's hard-won message, leading the viewer to a conclusion as sublime and challenging as the myths of Medea it frequently references. Why would a woman kill her own child? Diop suggests that we all know the answer, we simply can't speak it out loud.
Brilliant, sophisticated, brutally intelligent and self-aware. This is top-tier filmmaking.
True Detective: Night Country: Part 2 (2024)
Don't confuse the spirit world with mental health issues
Bad Writing, meet your friend Bad Acting. Mix in a few Native clichés and you got some of Qavviks homebrew. Ennis comes alive!
It's Season 4 of True Detective. Everyone is having sex with everyone else and now we know why they hate the Beatles. Sure, there's now the bare bones of an actual cop procedural, but don't be fooled. This is a show where sisters have intimate conversations about mental health in the grocery store so that everyone in the small town can listen in and cold cases are solved by ghosts and convenient phone videos.
Truly Netflix-level stuff. Not a hint of the True Detective brand. And that's a problem because what distinguished TD from the gazillion other cop shows was airtight direction, great set design and fabulous acting. Too much of Season 4 is bad soap opera logic piled on top of head-scratchers like "why is there conveniently no ice on that window?" and "do people really talk like that?"
Can't wait for Jody Foster to pull the mask off the phantom to see who he really is...
True Detective: Night Country: Part 1 (2024)
True Detective: the Real Ghost Hunters of Alaska
Do you remember that sinking feeling you got halfway through the pilot of True Detective 2? That feeling that "oh my, something is missing here. Somebody didn't take the time to really read this one through"? Similarly, True Detective 4 leaps out of the gate with a disastrous, groan-inducing slog of a first episode.
Life on the Rez is a popular trope these days and TD4 wastes no time establishing two very tired, very exploitative clichés - almost a dozen before the opening credits (here tracked by Billie Eilish, joining the ranks The Handsome Family, Leonard Cohen, and Cassandra Wilson, our second indication that TD4 wants very badly to be an outlier in this stoic brand). Some bad-CGI elk commit suicide and we're off, a clumsy, irritating hour of police procedural by way of Twin Peaks. But it looks and feels a lot more like a slew of its own weak competitors like Dark Winds and the truly abysmal Two Pines - ham-fisting Native issues of depression, poverty, mental illness and a mess of sudsy mysticism and hokum down the viewer's throat in a predictable po-leece package.
The real problem is that Issa Lopez's take on the TD formula seems to want to blend a healthy dose of campy horror on top of the campy Native clichés, ala The Terror, or, y'know, Twin Peaks. The show winks hard at a dozen reference points, notably The Thing and every horror movie of the last 20 years. I suspect if this series holds out long enough we can all look forward to Ari Aster's Beau solving beheadings in a Navajo casino. Laugh, but it's likely in development.
TD4, or "Night Country" is desperately seeking vampires to help flow some blood to its small brain. It's the kind of bad script that delivers character-point lines like "I hate the Beatles" and "my dad would kill me if he found out" as both developments and cliffhangers. I feel bad for Jodie Foster and John Hawkes trapped in this dismal affair of cops who are too-committed/not-at-all-committed to what is obviously a terrible job. Moreover, the script offers no relief from the offensively droll "if the victim were white" trope, given that the show has done absolutely nothing to establish the relationships in this small town between the indigenous and the white. Why are any of them there? What do they do for jobs? How do some of them magically have cell phone service while others do not? How can a murder go unsolved when, in fact, that is the whole point of the series?
If these were the only problems with Lopez's script and direction, one could be convinced to stick around. But all of the jump scares and quirky exposition become even more grating when the show leans into its "detective" work. This town has resources: both local and state police plus helicopters for a population that seems to number in the dozens. And because its always night here on the Arctic Circle, no one ever sleeps. Instead, they solve cases by looking at pictures (what detective show worth its weight doesn't have at least one scene of grisly-victim photos or A Beautiful Mind-connect-the-dots overheads?) and begrudgingly acknowledging each other as human beings.
For better or worse, the True Detective franchise has pedigree. Even when it misses the mark (like the slogging Season 2) it manages to present a crime worth solving. For Lopez and Night Country, we're presented with Jeffery's ear from "Blue Velvet", announcing that just under the surface of this quaint, cheerful sunless depression hole at the top of the world, things are so bad that elk kill themselves. And elk aren't the only awkward CGI animals to show up. It's all laughably racist and tired. It just doesn't work.
Beau Is Afraid (2023)
Aster in Aspic
There's a pretty good chance I simply do not like Ari Aster, but I beg you please, please tell me if there is anything redeemable about this endless and endlessly grating film. Maybe it's Amy Ryan? Parker Posey? Or Richard Kind? Or the sheer ballsiness of convincing a studio to fund a three hour drug-paranoia-therapy-mommy joke? Truly, some brave people decided to go ahead and let Aster be Aster. But as witnessed in the third acts of his two previous films, this director has no ability to control his own worst impulses, and Aster's worst impulse is to bludgeon his audience.
After a while, the line between tragedy and bad joke becomes nonexistent and one begins to wonder if Aster has a single ounce of compassion for any of his topics, characters, or - again - for the poor sods that continue to believe in him and fund his off-kilter horror-comedy yawns. But what's more nauseous about "Beau Is Afraid" than the actual movie itself is what it says about this new rank of auteurs - the supposed mavericks like Aster, Chazelle, and Jordan Peele - who seem to think that obscure Twilight Zone parables, slick production design, and throw-it-at-the-wall shock theater is a cinematic voice. At a certain point, "Beau" isn't clever or cruel or compassionate, but constipated - three hours of a director tugging at our sleeve and asking "do you see how cool I am?"
The Last of Us (2023)
Pretty worn out stuff
Confused by all of the praise heaped on this shockingly standard zombie apocalypse story? Well, that makes at least two of us. There is nothing original here to note and nothing that hasn't been done better in the countless Romero knock-offs that have seem to have infected everyone's taste lately. I assume much of the appeal comes from the gun-crazy survivalist camp that know nothing about "Lone Wolf and Cub" and have no patience to read "The Road." "LOU" isn't as good as either, nor is it really even a mediocre Romero clone. There's some nice window dressing - particularly an unmasked Pascal, a tragic arcade date, and a brief Offerman interlude - but if "The Walking Dead" hadn't already exhausted these already exhausted storylines it might be easier to overlook the show's frequent reliance on genre tropes. It's sincere enough, and somehow that makes it all the more cynical.
Babylon (2022)
BabylYawn
"Babylon" wants to big, bad, and bold, but it only ever really achieves bad. Now, I have 512 characters to fill here, so I'll do what Damien Chazelle did: boobsdrugsboobsorgycelebritycameocelebrityslummingboobsdrugsdepressiondepressiondepressionboobs. Cameoboobsdrugscomedydepressionboobsorgybutstuffdrugsdepression. Drugsorgydepressiondepressionboobsviolencedepressiondrugsboobs, Chazelleboobsdrugs tongue-in-cheek insight into Old Hollywood emphasized by thoroughly modern trappings to express exactly nothing. This is drudgery, really. The horse is dead 20minutes in and there's two hours and fifty minutes to go, all to arrive at an offensively glib happy ending.
Truly awful in a way only Damien Chazelle can achieve.
Elvis (2022)
Ain't never caught a rabbit.
You expect plastic junk from Baz Luhrmann, but "Elvis" plays like a feature-length commercial for the latest reboot of Zima. It's staggeringly offensive - so much so that its genuinely difficult to get a beat on exactly what its intentions might be. Is "Elvis" meant to be a satire? And if it's not a comedy, what in fact does Luhrmann think is so riotously hilarious about his characters and scenarios? No, "Elvis" is next-level exploitation trash - wholly unconcerned with anything but spectacle and suggesting that Elvis Presley himself was no deeper than the murky imagination of Colonel Tom Parker.
Woe the embarrassing performance by Tom Hanks, here donning a Corman-calibur cheese monger costume that feels more like audition takes subbed in after an actor dies midway through production. There's a whiff of 70s William Holden, but a stronger smell of sulphur. The makeup is dreadful, the accent is dreadful - and that's the best thing about the performance. The pap and crap ultimately distracts from just how lousy and erroneous the script often is, with Hanks milling his flabby, two-bit Mephistopheles act about as far as humanly possible.
Colonel Tom is the real protagonist here. The film can't be bothered to let Elvis finish a song. Mostly, we just get a sweaty Austin Butler who seems just about as naive and silly as the movie wants us to believe the real Elvis must have been. It's all a little difficult to stomach if you have any knowledge of Elvis's career or any fondness for human emotion.
What's more troubling is the film's insistence on platforming the film's message on America's deep and complex racial history. Luhrmann doesn't have much use historical accuracy unless he can chop up the bits for use in yet another nonsensical montage. Sure, he name-checks Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard, but one gets the sense that Luhrmann can't really tell them apart. Elvis Presley was one of the most complex artists of the 20th century, but Luhrmann keeps him well-contained - caged in by the excesses which, after twenty or so minutes of screentime, become exceedingly tedious and shrill.
John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)
They Fight.
Somebody thought it was a good idea to wedge some painfully dull melodrama in between the violence. What's with all this talking? This upsets me, because - simply put - every line of dialogue just means one less killshot to the head. The idea that these cardboard characters supposedly have "inner lives" is hilarious. The only "inner" I care about is their CGI blood.
Honestly, I didn't really watch this movie, or any of the John Wick movies. I'm sure they exist, but nothing here registers in the permanent memory. I think a guy fell down some steps. Mostly they play in the background while I go about thinking on better movies and not killing people. But I thought it important to add a review here because I was astounded at how this artfully dumb and endlessly repetitive series continues to justify incredibly long screen times. Donnie Yen talks a bit. Ian McShane phones in his McShaneiest version of McShane. Is that Clancy Brown? He seems to be doing something. Oh, a fight scene! But 3 hours of this?
My question for the John Wick universe is why? Video games already exist, and you get to control the character. Isn't that more fun than three hours of bladder-control tedium?
Hey look, Donnie Yen's not dead yet! What hour is this?