Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 29 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

Eddington

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Comedy, Thriller

Director:  Ari Aster

Starring:  Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Michael Ward

I don't know why Ari Aster made the pivot from making thematic horror movies to satirical cringe comedies, but whatever works for him, I guess.  All I'm saying is that he was clearly better at one over the other.  And I say this as someone who generally liked Beau Is Afraid.  It's themes were interesting, even if it became overlong and tiresome by the end.  But I could also say the same about Midsommar, so maybe it's an Aster thing.  And, to a lesser extent, I can say the same thing about Eddington.  Eddington is just more inconsistent about it before going completely haywire in its finale.

Eddington centers around a small town in New Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic, where Joaquin Phoenix plays a right-wing sheriff who is at odds with liberal mayor Pedro Pascal, mostly because he doesn't like the mask mandates that are being enforced.  In retaliation, Phoenix decides to run for mayor against Pascal, and soon finds both his campaign and his life spiraling.  Thematically, the movie is about how politicized news outlets and social media can radicalize those who are obsessed with it, and to Aster's credit, he has very keen observations on the subject.  But his attempts to be a "both sides" satire can grow tiresome and inconsistent.  Austin Butler's role as a media personality that is assimilating easily outraged right-wing followers is understandable in concept, but the movie doesn't actually make a point worth making with it.  There are interesting scenes of Caucasian protesters hassling a Black cop at a Black Lives Matter rally, trying to rashly explain to him about the things he should be outraged about, which is a smart parody, but the film also never fleshes out the police officer enough as anything more than a prop for scenes like this.  But as muddled as the movie can be, Aster's message is clear enough to resonate as easily as it frustrates.  The movie is not only frustrating because Aster wants it to be frustrating, but unfortunately also because it deals with a lot of garbage that most audience members (or maybe I'm speaking for myself) have moved past and have zero desire to revisit, even in artistic form.  But the movie takes a turn for the more demented in the second-half, as Aster's flair for keeping the audience guessing where he's going finally kicks in.  The first turn is more than enough, but Aster insists on going further, rolling the dice on an absolutely bonkers finale that probably sounded fun on paper but feels misguided in practice.  The finale cements that the movie never overcomes its shortcomings and ensures that the audience leaves with a bitter taste in their mouths, remembering the film not for the thought-provocation that it's going for, but rather the feeling that Ari Aster was running at you, flailing his arms and screaming.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Horror, Mystery

Director:  Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

Starring:  Madelyn Cline, Chase Sui Wonders, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Jonah Hauer-King, Tyriq Withers, Sarah Pidgeon, Billy Campbell, Gabbriette Bechtel, Austin Nichols

I Know What You Did Last Summer is probably one of the weirder horror franchises to have had any sort of impact.  Its origins date back to 1973, when Lois Duncan released the original young adult novel, which centered on a group of friends who were involved in a hit-and-run accident, only to recieve mysterious messages a year later.  In the 90's, screenwriter Kevin Williamson used the rather tame mystery novel as the basis for a slasher movie screenplay, which was far removed from what its source material was.  Williamson also wrote another slasher movie around the same time called Scream, which took off, and I Know What You Did Last Summer was put into production to capitalize off of Williamson's success.  The movie is stylish, but pretty mid, with a lot of nonsensical plot details that fail to make sense.  Still, the movie was a success.  It was the right mixture of high-concept premise aimed at teenagers presented by the who's who of late-90's teen heartthrobs, including (Munchie's own) Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, and Gellar's eventual husband, Freddie Prinze Jr.  Like all great/mediocre slasher movies, it spawned an immediate sequel a year later, which was so bad that the parody film Scary Movie wasted an entire joke to just tear it down (especially roasting Jack Black's slight role, who was an unknown at the time). Also like all the best slasher franchises, it also eventually went direct to video, with a threequel which everyone immediately forgot existed.  It is the only film thusfar without the involvement of Hewitt and Prinze, instead starring a handful of unknowns and Z-listers, the nost notable being Animorphs star Brooke Nevin and Chicago Med's Torrey DeVitto, while the Fisherman was played by former Michael Myers maskwearer Don Shanks of Halloween 5.  The series was effectively dead until Amazon Prime ordered a moderately entertaining TV series reinvention a few years ago, which gets so increasingly off-the-rails that I have no choice but to recommend it because it needs to be seen to be believed.  It was canceled after one season, ending on a bizarre cliffhanger where the main final girl, played by Jumanji's Madison Iseman, begins a lesbian love affair with the mystery killer and runs off into the sunset with her, pinning the blame on the guy who was set up to be her love interest throughout the season.  Best ending ever.  10/10.  No notes.

And now, I Know What You Did Last Summer has been pegged to do what the Scream franchise has affectionately called a "re-quel," a film that effectively remakes the original film but brings back legacy characters to keep it in canon to the previous films.  My only question is whether or not it was still canon to the third film, which was already a re-quel in its own right, and had built up to a mystery reveal where they discovered the identity of the killer, only for the reveal to be that it was the OG Fisherman who had come back as a zombie who exclusively murders teenagers a year after they accidentally kill people on the Fourth of July.  If the same thing happened in this movie, I'd be ecstatic.

Or the return of the lesbian runaways from the TV show.  Whatever works.

True to form for a I Know What You Did Last Summer movie, the new one starts with a group of friends involved in an accident that leaves someone dead.  One year later, they begin receiving notes from someone who knows what they did and begins murdering them one-by-one.  If one has a fondness for the original, this new film is probably a must-watch, because it's the closest the series has gotten to hitting the same notes that made it such a Gen-X/Millennial classic.  This could even arguably be the best one.  It's still aggressively stupid, but it wears it better than the other movies.  Mileage may very as it gets into the grind, because the film's murder spree tends to feel soulless after a while and the finale killer reveal starts off underwhelming before taking a huge swing that is ballsy but arguably the wrong move to make.  But the killer reveal in each Last Summer movie has always been kinda dumb and eyebrow raising, as opposed to Scream reveals which invite rewatches just to see what the killer is doing in any given scene.  The value in Last Summer has always been about guilt and karma, which the film delivers on...though, like other films in the series, the killer seems to have no problem with offing innocent bystanders to avenge the murder of an innocent bystander.  I always have to level criticisms like that with a wave of a hand in a "doesn't matter" motion.  These are just traits that this franchise has always had.  If the movie's biggest crime is that it recreates the experience of the original that thoroughly, then maybe it got the job done.

Smurfs

⭐️1/2

Genre:  Comedy, Fantasy, Musical

Director:  Chris Miller

Starring:  Rhianna, John Goodman, James Corden, Nick Offerman, Kurt Russell, J.P. Karliak

Sony made Smurf movies for a while.  A couple of them made money, but I honestly can't think of a single person who has seen them, let alone liked them.  But the first two had Hank Azaria in them.  Good for them!  Anyway, Sony let the rights to the little blue freaks lapse and Paramount quickly nabbed them up, thinking "Fuck yeah, now we can make the Smurfs movie the world has demanded."

There's this old Don Adams bit where he plays a defense attorney which has one of the funniest line deliveries I've ever heard in my entire life:  "Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, for the last twenty minutes I have sat idly by while my opponent, the prosecuting attorney, has stood up here and made a complete jackass out of himself.  Now, it's my turn."  This feels like this is what Paramount just did.

Now, I haven't seen anything Smurf related since I was in the single-digits, so I'm going to try and keep up with the dense Smurf lore the best I can.  This new Smurfs movie sees evil wizard Gargamel's brother Razamel searching for a magic book that has been hidden in Smurf Village for a century, and kidnaps Papa Smurf trying to find it.  A group of Smurfs then venture out of Smurf Village to find Papa Smurf's brother Ken and rescue Papa.  I guess this is an okay enough story for a Smurfs movie, though it never feels to me as if the Smurfs could adequately carry a feature film.  A group of cutesy characters who are defined by simplistic personality traits work best in small doses on television, and venturing into feature film territory overwhelms them.  But then again, there are four Smurfs movies, so maybe I'm wrong about that.  This new Smurfs movie doesn't convince me of that, though.  I'm not trying to be Smurfist, but the inherent problem with doing a Smurf movie with a dozen protagonists is that most of the Smurfs look alike, and the main Smurf's defining trait is that he has no defining trait.  The main protagonist is called "No Name" and his character arc is that he doesn't have "a thing."  This leads to the film's central moral for children about finding out who you are in your own time, but it's really hard to grasp onto a main character who isn't actually a character when he's surrounded by other character models that are exactly the same as his.  Humor-wise, the movie is stylized like a comic strip, with a lot of gags that are amusing in panel form but fall flat as they try to pull them off in motion.  It doesn't really hit the same, though very young children might be amused.  Otherwise, the movie just sets itself to a pop soundtrack that allows its blue heroes to just do a little dance when they can't think of anything else that's funny to do.  The movie isn't much, though it might be tempting to throw it on streaming to keep children occupied while you leave the room and do something else.  I can't promise those children won't get bored, find you, and request that you change it, though.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

28 Years Later... ⭐️⭐️

Abraham's Boys ⭐️⭐️1/2

Elio ⭐️⭐️1/2

F1 ⭐️⭐️

How to Train Your Dragon ⭐️

Jurassic World:  Rebirth ⭐️1/2

Lilo & Stitch ⭐️⭐️

Mission:  Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two ⭐️⭐️1/2

Superman ⭐️⭐️⭐️

New To Digital

Bride Hard ⭐️

How to Train Your Dragon ⭐️

M3GAN 2.0 ⭐️⭐️

New To Physical

The Surfer ⭐️⭐️1/2

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 28 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

Abraham's Boys

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Drama, Horror

Director:  Natasha Kermani

Starring:  Titus Welliver, Brady Hepner, Judah Mackey, Jocelin Donahue, Aurora Perrineau

Abraham Van Helsing (yes, that Abraham Van Helsing) moves to the Californian countryside with his wife Mina (yes, that Mina) to raise their children.  As the boys grow older, they become more curious about their father's continued work, which stems from, you know, that story.  This high-concept sequel story to the famed Bram Stoker novel, Abraham's Boys is less of a horror movie than it is a macabre, psychological drama.  The big catch to its take is conveying Van Helsing as an obsessed extremist, wanting the audience to wonder if he really was the hero who overcame Dracula or if he was a madman who created a tale of nosferatu in his head and had just killed a bunch of people (or maybe it actually happened and he continues to kill people because he sees vampires everywhere now).  The story is told through the eyes of two innocents who have little context for their father's past, wanting to believe him but finding flaws in his story.  It's an interesting take, but it was done much better in 2002 when it was called Frailty and starred Bill Paxton.  The movie is slow by design, uncovering the plot as the two boys begin to learn and question more.  I found that the movie was increasingly becoming reliant on what it was building toward, and if it didn't stick the landing then it's meandering nature wasn't going to be worth it.  And the ending doesn't hit the way you would hope, leaving me appreciating what the movie was going for but wanting it to go much further with it.

Superman

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Superhero, Fantasy, Action, Science Fiction

Director:  James Gunn

Starring:  David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabella Merced, Skylar Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Wendell Pierce, María Gabriela de Fería, Frank Grillo

Stop me if you've heard this one, DC wants its own cinematic universe, so they start by rebooting Superman from scratch.  Actually, if we're going to be frank, this would actually be DC's third attempt at a cinematic universe, but people just choose not to talk about the first one because it was Green Lantern, it was bad, and it bombed.  Then was Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, which wasn't more than an effort to "Do a Superman version of Batman Begins" during filming but spawned the DCEU because the first Avengers came out before release and DC needed something.  Then the production woes on Justice League happened, and the franchise just never recovered.  A couple of good movies came out of it (you can pry Wonder Woman and Shazam! out of my cold dead hands), but the DC brand became synonymous with inconsistency and most people just decided "Eh, I'll watch it on streaming."  This is why nobody saw The Flash no matter how much Tom Cruise tried to gaslight them.

Of course, Marvel is fighting the same thing right now.  Thunderbolts, which is inarguably the best superhero movie of the year so far, underperformed because most people spent their dollar on Captain America:  Brave New World and thought to themselves "Maybe I'm just not into this anymore."

Now, James Gunn is running the show over at DC, deciding the last effort was a mess (and who can blame him?) and just dumps the whole thing and asks for a do-over.  Because he's a lovable little scamp, we're going to let him.  He's already played with the toys at Marvel and DC, bringing about Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad (the good one, not the other one), and Peacemaker, while also having made several superhero parodies in his early days, The Specials and Super.  His first priority:  Superman.  This is the right path, because half of understanding the DC universe is understanding Superman.  If you can nail him, the rest will more easily fall into place.  At long last, we have the opening entry in James Gunn's newly christened DC Studios, and anybody who loves the genre has been waiting with baited breath for it.  The result is a bit of a Rorschach test, as the movie is pretty solid, while reactions are stemming from "Reignites the superhero genre" to "Should effectively kill it."  The movie isn't really either of these things, and more of just a goofy romp that some people are going to love more than others. Watching James Gunn's Superman is like listening to a kid with ADHD describe his idea for a Saturday morning cartoon.  It moves a hundred miles per hour, parts of it don't make sense, a lot of it is really fun and silly, and it's undeniably imaginative.

The film starts in the aftermath of Superman interfering in a potential invasion of fictional country "Bovaria" (which may or may not have parallels to certain world events of the last few years), where his intervention in world conflict brings both political and public scrutiny.  It's an idea that Zack Snyder tried to do in Batman v Superman, but opted to do mini-montages of Superman being treated like a messiah instead of commentary.  Meanwhile, Gunn raises the question of what are the ramifications of a being as powerful as Superman taking a side in foreign policy or war (I always did wonder why the Soviets just stepped aside and allowed Superman to take its nuclear arsenal in The Quest for Peace).  But I'm not giving Gunn a total free pass on this either, because he chooses not to actually show it, instead starting with Superman being retaliated against.  That scene of Superman having had the shit kicked out of him and being dragged home by Krypto?  The one that was in all the trailers and feels like it should be the start of the third act?  That's the first scene in the movie.  I'm not really sold on it being the big reintroduction of this character (especially since Krypto is practically a new character to most audiences), but it certainly was a bold choice.  But the incident puts Superman into conflict with Lex Luthor, who puts together his own group of planetary protectors known as "Planet Watch," led by the Engineer and Ultraman (not Tsuburaya's Ultraman, DC's Ultraman, which is also kind of a spoiler if you know who DC's Ultraman is, but don't make me go down this rabbit hole) and have deemed Superman a threat.  Meanwhile, Superman also has professional tension with a fellow group of defenders called "The Justice Gang," featuring Green Lantern (Guy Gardner version), Mister Terrific, and Hawkgirl, while also navigating a complicated romantic relationship with Lois Lane after they have their first fight.

As you can see, the movie's story is a bit all over the map, and this isn't even all of it.  I think what Gunn is going for is that we've been interjected into the daily life of Superman going about his business and we're just watching it as it plays out.  There are pros and cons to this.  A lot of the positives lie in that it really allows this world and these characters to feel lived in.  The problem that hits the most is that it seems like there is something massive trying to crush Metropolis every few days, so when the third act hits and the city is being torn apart, the sense of urgency just doesn't land because this shit has happened at least three times during the duration of this movie.  It's great spectacle, but it's just not very exciting.  But the idea is actually really funny, that situations where the city is under attack are so normalized and Superman usually takes care of it, so people just go about their business.  If this were Power Rangers, I'd call it "Angel Grove Syndrome."

The unconventional narrative also hinders the movie's pacing.  There's a lot happening in the movie, but it rushes the viewer in choice moments, making it feel like Homer Simpson running a marathon.  It'll run, walk, sit down, try to run again, take a nap, and, eventually, go home.  I think it works for this particular movie, because the plot is just "Superman does Superman things" and the movie is never not entertaining, but people wanting a story might leave disappointed.  This movie isn't really a story, it's a character-piece and a mood-setter, a giant simulation room for what it would be like to live in Metropolis and, oh look, there's a flying man over there.  The movie's ambitions are a complicated delivery of simple.  That's almost admirable.

But I'm always happy to see a good Superman movie.  This one's not my favorite, not by a long shot (I still go to bat for the first two Christopher Reeve films), but this one did things differently and I'll give it respect for that.  Without Superman, DC comics likely wouldn't exist today and he deserves all the flowers.  Marvel is giving their own makeover to the characters they owe their own existence to, the Fantastic Four, in a few weeks.  I might be a little more invested in that, because the Fantastic Four need a win far more desperately than Superman does (did you even see their last movie?), but Gunn does succeed in giving DC fans hope for the future.  That's something we haven't felt since our hearts sank while watching the theatrical cut of Justice League.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

28 Years Later... ⭐️⭐️

Elio ⭐️⭐️1/2

F1 ⭐️⭐️

How to Train Your Dragon ⭐️

Jurassic World:  Rebirth ⭐️1/2

Lilo & Stitch ⭐️⭐️

M3GAN 2.0 ⭐️⭐️

Materialists ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mission:  Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two ⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Digital

Karate Kid:  Legends ⭐️⭐️

New To Physical

The Amateur ⭐️⭐️1/2

Hell of a Summer ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Legend of Ochi ⭐️⭐️

The Rule of Jenny Pen ⭐️⭐️

Shadow Force ⭐️1/2

Sinners ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Until Dawn ⭐️1/2

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 27 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

Jurassic World:  Rebirth

⭐️1/2

Genre:  Adventure, Science Fiction

Director:  Gareth Edwards

Starring:  Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ed Skrein, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda

From my experience, I find that the best question to ask when presented with any piece of entertainment media is "What is the goal of this story?"  Sometimes the answer is as simple as "We're going to contrive a reason to get people on an island so they can run from dinosaurs."  Having a reason that meager isn't a bad thing, as simple stories bring simple joys, but when you can't decide what your contrived reason to have people run from dinosaurs actually is, being simple entertainment doesn't become simple anymore.  Jurassic Park III, for example, is a simple movie that brings simple pleasures.  It also has a simple story of "Go to island to rescue someone...uh oh, there are dinosaurs!"  It's a messy movie, but one that focuses on its very small goal.  To be honest, after how nonsensical the last Jurassic World movie was by overthinking its premise, something that simple would be welcome.  Jurassic World:  Rebirth, unfortunately, is not that.  It's like taking the Jurassic Park III level of simple story and layering a weird pharmaceutical plot on top of it with an evil man who wants money, while also juggling the idea of genetic mutations without actually doing anything within its premise to support them.  It's a messy movie with no focus, creating a bigger mess as it stumbles around.  Ian Malcolm would be proud to know that, after all those "Chaos Theory" speeches he gave, the Jurassic Park/World movies eventually descended into being nothing but chaos.

The latest film in the nostalgic series stars Scarlet Johansson escorting a group of researchers to find three species of dinosaurs and extract samples of them to create a miracle cure for heart disease.  It would be perfectly fine if that's all it was, but then it crashes into a secondary story about a family getting shipwrecked and trapped in the same area, which is fighting for attention.  The film's weird plotting works against it as the main story and subplot clash tonally.  It's like watching King Kong on TV and switching to random episodes of Land of the Lost during commercial break.  And for the grand finale, you get bored with both and decide to watch the third act of Alien:  Resurrection instead.  The movie does introduce the concept of mutations in the opening, but they aren't really relevant to the actual story and only exist to serve as a finale complication, where a big bad "Distortus Rex" comes out of the woodwork to chase them down, looking and acting like the Rancor from Return of the Jedi.  The movie doesn't treat the creature as anything major, nor really all that drastic a plot turn for the franchise, which has been toying with mutations for a while now.  It's just present for the sake of being present, which accounts for a lot of what's going on in the film.

It's a shame that the movie just doesn't have its act together, because you can definitely see that if you gave Gareth Edwards a Jurassic Park movie and just let him cook, he might eventually deliver something special.  From my understanding, Jurassic World:  Rebirth was a case where he was handed a script and a release date and told "You've got a year."  Edwards is a talented visualist, but he can only iron out so many kinks with his smooth filmmaking style if the foundation of his film is faulty.  To be fair to him, when he's allowed to propell adventure, he does it masterfully, because action sequences are pretty exciting, with the highlight being a river raft scene with a T-Rex that was inspired directly from the original Michael Crichton novel.  The best thing about Edwards' approach to these sequences is that he's really the first filmmaker in a good long while to show off the big beasts and portray them as animals, as opposed to Colin Trevarrow's alternation of depicting them as monsters or rock stars, depending on what reaction he wanted to manipulate out of the audience.  The problem with what Edwards is doing is that his setpieces wind up being moderately exciting, but toothless, as the threat of big bad dinos giving out consequences for the main crew is largely treated as an afterthought.  Several heavies playing hollow characters are not long for this world, but their deaths are both sudden and weightless.  It might be momentarily noticed when there is a death, but quickly forgotten.  And it's usually awkwardly placed, only given because people getting eaten is expected in this franchise.  Jurassic Park III had this problem too, but its setpieces were more frequent and exhilarating.

So what was the goal of this story?  To be frank, in putting this up against the other Jurassic movies, there doesn't really seem to be one.  The honest to god truth is that this movie doesn't build on the previous films, as we were supposed to be in an "exciting new direction" for this franchise when they introduced dinosaurs onto the mainland, only for the sixth movie to go "It's fine, actually; here are some locusts" and this one to go "Nevermind, there's a third island now."  The movie could have been an opportunity to open up its own new direction for the franchise, but it doesn't even seem to do that either, opting for that Jurassic Park III inconsequential, but hopefully entertaining, one-off approach.  So I have to conclude that the goal of this story is to just put out a reliable franchise movie to make quick cash while figuring out what exactly the future of Jurassic Park/World might actually be.  It's not the first time Jurassic Park/World has done this (there's a reason why I keep bringing up Jurassic Park III), and it might not be the last.  I'd have hoped that in this simplistic ambition they'd at least create something more fun than this, because if they hammer us with movies this broken, it's only going to destroy our enthusiasm for the franchise in the first place.

Netflix & Chill

Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado

⭐️⭐️1/2

Streaming On:  Paramount+

Genre:  Comedy, Adventure

Director:  Alberto Belli

Starring:  Samantha Lorraine, Jacob Rodriguez, Daniella Pineda, Gabriel Iglesias, María Cecilia Botero, Mariana Garzón Toro, Acston Luca Porto

If you actually gave the movie the time of day, you'd probably know that one of the most surprising movies of the last decade was Dora and the Lost City of Gold, an adaptation of Dora the Explorer, a popular edutainment show for preschoolers, that reinvented it as Indiana Jones for kids who are on the cusp of turning tweens.  It's a movie that should not have worked that was surprisingly heartfelt and endearing, while also working as something of a Brady Bunch Movie style parody of the franchise that spawned it.  I wasn't under the impression that they were making a Dora sequel, mostly because Isabella Merced, who played the title character in the previous movie, is now all grown up and gone on to bigger things (including playing Hawkgirl in the new Superman movie next week).  Then this movie popped up on Paramount+ rather unexpectedly.  I wasn't sure what to make of a direct-to-streaming sequel, not even knowing if it was supposed to be a sequel or not.  I like the last movie just enough to say "I'll give it ten minutes, and if it's a pain in the ass, I'll turn it off."

More of a soft reboot than a Lost City of Gold sequel, Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado sees the teenaged adventurer lose her prized map of the jungle, leaving her to have a crisis of purpose.  She and her cousin Diego then find a magic bracelet that will lead to an Aztec protected fallen star called Sol Dorado, which will give the person who seeks it out a magic wish.  The major hurdle I had to jump across with this movie lies with my desire that Search for Sol Dorado had more of Lost City of Gold's most charming aspects.  Search for Sol Dorado keeps the cheek of Lost City of Gold but whittles it down to a basic quippy played-up camp adventure aimed at youngsters, who probably don't have the media literacy development to read between the lines of the last movie.  Like Lost City of Gold, Sol Dorado still pokes fun at its namesake franchise while earnestly portraying it, but it does so in a broader, less intelligent way.  Some of it is still pretty funny, but the movie plays best if you inhabit the mindset of an eight-year-old.  Once I accepted that this was what the movie was going to be, I was more acceptable to what it had to offer.  Search for Sol Dorado is simple and goofy, with ham fully embraced to entertain the wee ones.  I suspect that it's a much cheaper and quicker production than the last Dora movie, coming up with a cost-effective method of delivering something in this franchise that tykes who grew up with Dora can still enjoy when they grow out of shouting newly-learned Spanish at the TV to "help Dora with her adventure."  That being said, the production design still charms with its playful detail.  The closest thing to a big star that the movie has (other than comedian Gabriel Iglesias, who voices Dora's monkey pal Boots) is established actress Daniella Pineda, who plays the antagonist role of Dora's former role model who has gone slightly bitchier over the years.  Pineda plays the role exceptionally, almost as if she's what Dora would turn into as a jaded adult.  This being a kids movie, the movie also gives her a redemption arc that allows her to reattain the joy of discovery through Dora herself.

If all of this sounds childish, that's because it is.  The movie is for kids.  And unlike most losers on the internet, I have better things to do with my time than to try and outsmart a movie made for children.  As a kids movie, Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado is a snappy and playful ninety minutes.  The worst that can be said of it is that is doesn't play its cards as well as the previous film and instead delivers a movie that is more in line with what you probably expected that movie to be in the first place.  Plus, you get to see Dora get hit in the face with a churro, which is much funnier than it has any right to be.  It's no "poo hole song," but it's unfair to ask it to equal cinematic perfection.

Heads of State

⭐️⭐️1/2

Streaming On:  Prime

Genre:  Comedy, Action

Director:  Ilya Naishuller

Starring:  Idris Elba, John Cena, Priyanka Chopra, Carla Gugino, Jack Quaid, Stephen Root, Paddy Considine

Contrary to what you might believe by reading the title, Heads of State isn't the Aliens-style sequel to the Chris Rock comedy where he becomes President of the United States.  But it is another comedy centering on POTUS, though this time it's John Cena's turn to take office.  Effectively serving as a parody of the Ronald Reagan era of politicians who were elected because they have Hollywood charisma, Cena hypothetically answers the question of "What if Arnold Schwarzenegger became President?" by playing an action star who was elected into the highest office in the land.  He and Prime Minister of England, Idris Elba, survive an attack on Air Force One and venture back though parades of bad guys to a NATO summit and hold alliances intact.  Common sense and gut reaction may go to war while watching Heads of State, because it's stupid as fuck and doesn't care whether people see it as so.  The buddy action/comedy vibe suits leads Cena and Elba quite well, though.  The comedy isn't always great, as there are run-on gags about "fish 'n' chips" and "sheep nipples" that the movie thinks are funnier than they actually are, but when the movie does successfully land a joke, it succeeds in getting a vocal laugh.  People who appreciate more animated comedies that you're likely to see from Saturday Night Live alumni will get the most out of this movie, while action fans will get their kicks from some fun setpieces playing against choice needledrops.  Heads of State is a movie that probably destined to have reactions fall both ways in the positive and negative camps, but a good time is to be had if it suits what you're seeking out of it.

Long Distance

⭐️⭐️

Streaming On:  Hulu

Genre:  Science Fiction

Director:  Josh Gordon, Will Speck

Starring:  Anthony Ramos, Naomi Scott, Zachary Quinto, Kristofer Hivju

While looking for streaming alternatives to beef up the column for this week, this movie that I never heard of was shadow-dropped on Hulu.  Evidently, it was filmed a while ago under the title "Distant" and shelved.  Now, it was dumped on streaming with a title change, and I'm looking at the cast going "Anthony Ramos?  Naomi Scott?  What the hell is this?"  Maybe it was my desire to watch something that wasn't The Old Guard 2 talking, but I decided to throw it on and give it a shot.  And no, I didn't watch The Old Guard 2.  Not because it's bad, which I hear it is, but because the first one was boring and I didn't want to watch it.  If I need to beef up next week's column, which might happen, then I'll groan and throw it on.

Anyway, I'm ignoring this movie that's already been ignored enough.  To be frank, Long Distance isn't the worst thing I've ever seen, but I think I see why it was shelved.

The film centers on space miner Anthony Ramos getting shipwrecked on a planet after his mothership goes down during cryosleep.  Low on oxygen, he is forced to choose between seeking safety in the main ship or setting out on a hostile world to rescue an injured survivor, played by former Power Ranger Naomi Scott.  The film's premise is simple, but it lets the viewer down by only doing the bare minimum of what is asked of it, because the film has the plotting of a Disney Channel movie.  Ramos is told of how dangerous the environment is but manages to trek it heroicly relatively quickly.  In the meantime, Ramos and Scott communicate rather basely through their comm systems, which could provide intimate character development, but the film rarely takes advantage of it.  Sadly, Scott's vocal performance betrays the urgency of the film, as she converses with Ramos like a telemarketer rather than a desperate person in a dire situation.  Ramos stumbles around like a charming ninny who doesn't know what he's doing while searching for her, which is a little more engaging.  Once the pair unite, Scott's injuries matter very little, and the duo run, dodge, and hide from alien spiders.  There's also an alluded romance between the two, which is weird when you consider that they've only known each other for a few hours, but maybe forgivable when you account for the idea that, best case scenario, they're going to be stuck on this planet for a couple of years by their lonesome.  It's kind of a "last man on Earth" scenario, so it's just a matter of time before they either get really drunk or really horny.  Probably not this fast, though.  There's not much to the movie, and one can easily see the methods that would have made the movie more interesting.  It's okay enough for a low-demanding, eighty-minute evening watch, though seasoned sci-fi fans would know that episodes of Star Trek have used this exact same plot and done so with more intrigue.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

28 Years Later... ⭐️⭐️

Ballerina ⭐️⭐️1/2

Elio ⭐️⭐️1/2

F1 ⭐️⭐️

How to Train Your Dragon ⭐️

The Life of Chuck ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Lilo & Stitch ⭐️⭐️

M3GAN 2.0 ⭐️⭐️

Materialists ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mission:  Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Phoenician Scheme ⭐️⭐️1/2

Thunderbolts ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Digital

Ballerina ⭐️⭐️1/2

Bring Her Back ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thunderbolts ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Physical

Death of a Unicorn ⭐️⭐️1/2

Warfare ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 26 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

F1

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Sports

Director:  Joseph Kosinski

Starring:  Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Javier Bardem

Joseph Kosinski continues to try and become the Tony Scott of this generation by following up a Top Gun movie by trying to do Top Gun with race cars.  F1 proves to be more like original Top Gun than the more invigorating Top Gun:  Maverick, as aged racer Brad Pitt hits the Formula One grand prix to help bring wins under a struggling team's belt.  Sports movies are usually ride-or-die on their home-grown charisma.  F1 theorizes that the definition of charisma is Brad Pitt's smile.  It's not entirely wrong, but it can only help the movie so much when the rest is dull melodrama set to a banger soundtrack.  The movie just isn't much of anything.  The drama is uninspired, coasting on well-liked cast (in addition to Pitt, we have Kerry Condon and Javier Bardem), but all seem to be cast based on how well they smile into the camera and scream into a void victoriously.  The film gives little context to how well their racers are doing outside of these reaction shots and victory spoils, leaving it feeling like the entire enterprise has been coasting in neutral, despite the kinetic racing visuals that Kosinski brings to the table and a few intriguing dives into Formula One team strategy.  That's about all the entertainment value the film has, so if you're in for the racing, you'll get the racing, albeit mostly in choppy montages.  It's hard for me to picture returning to this movie when Ford v Ferrari exists and did many of the things this movie does better.

Hot Milk

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Drama

Director:  Rebecca Lenkiewicz

Starring:  Emma Mackey, Fiona Shaw, Vicky Krieps

Emma Mackey escorts mother, Fiona Shaw, to a Spanish clinic for her cancer.  Mackey increasingly feels pinned down by the demands of her ill mother, seeking refuge in romantic liaisons with seamstress Vicky Krieps.  This can only lead to one thing:  hot arthouse drama lesbian sex!  It's actually more heavy petting and make-out sessions than anything intense, so for those who want their queer love stories steaming and with a lot of oh-face, Hot Milk is not quite that, basking in afterglow rather than intercourse.  The movie is more about the main character's emotional state than any love story she seeks out, because the camera loves to focus squarely on Emma Mackey and lets her emote.  Mackey is great at glowering.  Her chiseled, angular face offers great expression for the intense looks the movie asks her to do.  She can look extremely pissed off and still be radiant.  Most of the movie relies on her emotive range because she needs to be a boiling pot at risk of swelling over.  The movie is very good at subtly conveying someone who feels trapped and desperately seeks comfort, which has a lot to do with the work Mackey does.  Sometimes the rest of the movie feels like it's rushing to catch up with her, up-to-and-including an ambiguous ending.  It's an ending that is certainly a choice, though the longer I sit with it, it does feel like it matches the theme of a person resenting the cage she feels she is locked up in.  Hot Milk eventually ends up being an interesting movie.  Not interesting at all times during its duration, but if you think about it long enough, it can make you wonder a little more about it's more curious corners.

M3GAN 2.0

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Comedy, Action, Science Fiction, Thriller

Director:  Gerard Johnstone

Starring:  Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Amie Donald, Jenna Davis, Ivanna Sakhno, Jemaine Clement

To quote a classic tagline of yesteryear, the bitch is back.  The base model and source code to killer robot toy M3GAN has been used for a government prototype named AMELIA, who has gone rouge and deadly in a decidedly M3GAN-type fashion.  The surviving M3GAN A.I. (hiding in the household wi-fi for the last two years) convinces her previously terrorized host family of Gemma and Cady to rebuild her body to help protect them from the upgraded android.  M3GAN 2.0 seeks to be the Terminator 2 in comparison to its original.  It accidentally stumbles into being Iron Man 2 instead, doubling down on everything people liked about the last one but leading them in a more less interesting direction.  It's bigger, bolder, and quippier, and M3GAN sings and dances some more, though it has half the heart.  Or, at the very least, the heart it chose to have is put to a more pandering use.  This movie has a very distinctly kitschy vibe, and it's actually different than the one that is on display in the trailers where it's just a silly sci-fi action/comedy.  The movie is actually a recreation of a very niche genre of "kids bond with something grotesque/scary that becomes savior against similar things that are less friendly" type of storytelling that was mostly predominant in the 80s and 90s (Terminator 2 is kinda one of these movies, also).  Meanwhile, the film also approaches a Chopping Mall level of camp in its over-the-top action.  I'm of two minds on the result.  Half of this movie is the funniest comedy and the coolest action movie I've seen thus far this year.  The other half is needlessly overblown.  What makes M3GAN 2.0 a conflicting watch is that it seemingly thinks the latter is what creates the former.

The movie's storyline is large and convoluted while its humor can be big swings that result in moderate amusement.  Most of the movie's charisma kicks into high-gear when M3GAN is back into the picture, still being the absolute queen that she has always been.  Vocalist Jenna Davis and physical actor Amie Donald slip back into the role with ease, though M3GAN is allowed to mature just a slight bit as they are neither the little girls they were when they filmed the first movie.  But there would be little point in making a second M3GAN movie if we didn't keep them, because a good chunk of the first film's popularity stems from what they brought to the table in the title role (yes, including the endlessly memeified "M3GAN dance").  Ivanna Sakhno is solid as her antagonist AMELIA, though she is given less character by design.  The choreographed action scenes between the two steal the show, ensuring that even if the movie is a misfire in plotting, it brings the thunder in its most important moments.  This movie even has a really fun car chase with M3GAN at the wheel, which was something I didn't see coming.

There are things about this movie that I know I can tear into, because it could be so much better than it is if full sections of it were overhauled.  I'm going to refrain from doing so because, deep down, I do see what this movie thought it was doing and am tickled that it even tried it.  In some ways, M3GAN 2.0 is my biggest disappointment of the year, but it also did it in a way that makes me shrug and say "But I had fun anyway."  M3GAN is probably the most charming horror icon we've had in a while, and 2.0's efforts to turn her into a lovably violent anti-hero are done with good intentions.  If a third movie ever happens (or if, god forbid, they ever do the Chucky "versus" movie that has been floating around), I'll be first in line.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

28 Years Later... ⭐️⭐️

Ballerina ⭐️⭐️1/2

Bride Hard ⭐️

Bring Her Back ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Elio ⭐️⭐️1/2

How to Train Your Dragon ⭐️

The Life of Chuck ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Lilo & Stitch ⭐️⭐️

Materialists ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mission:  Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Phoenician Scheme ⭐️⭐️1/2

Thunderbolts ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Digital

The Last Rodeo ⭐️⭐️

The Ritual ⭐️1/2

New To Physical

A Minecraft Movie ⭐️⭐️

The Monkey ⭐️⭐️1/2

Novocaine ⭐️⭐️1/2

Snow White ⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 25 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

28 Years Later...

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Thriller

Director:  Danny Boyle

Starring:  Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Jodie Comer, Alfie Williams, Jack O'Connell

To be bluntly honest, I watched the original 28 Days Later once when it first came out, and I don't remember what I thought about it, if anything.  I remember vague superficial things about it, including that it was probably the first time I saw a dick in a movie, but I think that movie came out during my "Fuck yeah, zombie movie" teenager phase and unless it was something that really kicked ass or was hilariously stupid, it was unlikely to leave a full impression on me.  Never saw the second one.  I considered watching both leading up to 28 Years Later, but ran out of time.  So, while I'm not entirely novice on this franchise, I'm not entirely versed upon it.

28 Years Later takes place, ya'know, 28 years later, after a weird "rage virus" took over a portion of Europe.  It focuses on a small little refuge in the danger zone, where a young boy seeks out a doctor to diagnose his ill mother.  The film's story is a very low-stakes, personal tale a kid playing in the dystopia, caring for his mother and occasionally coming across a giant screaming naked man who is hung like a horse.  The evolution of the infected is something that is stumbled across, expositioning when needed to explain why some are fat, some are pregnant, and some are enormous and semi-sentient.  Meanwhile, Danny Boyle gives the film an evolved style over the first film, that makes for a slightly tilted experiend.  But stylish as it may be, 28 Years Later at times comes off as a dull YA spin-off of the original rather than a serious continuation.  The fact that it hamfistedly sets up a sequel doesn't help shake that vibe.  I understand the story Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland are trying to tell, which is that of a kid coping with the eventual fate of his mother, and it even ends on a note that's poignant enough.  I even understand why this story of accepting mortality would resonate strongly with viewers.  I struggle with the film dwelling too much within a story that feels like the world around them is an annoyance, meanwhile it's very clear from the symptoms on display that the chance that there will be a happy outcome to this is very slim, meanwhile the thriller elements are flavorless garnish.  It thinks it's more gripping than it is, and it even devotes its climax to emotional resolution rather than a resolution to any sort of conflict.  This only partially satisfying, because it feels as if the movie just kind of whiffs and wanders off, leaving me shrugging my shoulders and thinking "That was it?"  But the movie reminds you before the end credits roll that 28 Years Later isn't just one sequel, but a trilogy of sequels that were all in simultanious production.  That promise of "The real story is just beginning" doesn't really hit when the first movie barely had a story to tell.

Bride Hard

⭐️

Genre:  Comedy, Action

Director:  Simon West

Starring:  Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Anna Chlumsky, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Gigi Zumbado, Stephen Dorff, Justin Hartley, Stephanie Hsu

Rebel Wilson is a secret agent (which are six words I never thought I'd say in sequential order) in this action/comedy from the director of Con Air (though you wouldn't know it by watching it).  She's also really bad at lying and keeping secrets, so I'm not sure how that works.  Anyway, as you can probably guess from the title, the movie forces Wilson into a Die Hard scenario at a wedding, where a group of mercenaries take everyone hostage while Wilson stirs up trouble on the outskirts.  As a high-concept vehicle for a well-liked performer like Rebel Wilson, there is probably promise somewhere within Bride Hard.  I don't hate the concept of this movie.  If you workshopped it a little (okay, maybe a lot), there is probably something much more enjoyable here.  This movie only barely has a screenplay, seemingly wanting to coast on performer charisma.  There are plenty of talented people on display, but they all are directionless in a movie that is mostly cheese and chaos.  The action is okay enough for a goofball movie like this, but the comedy is hammy and performative, like an anxious child who is desperate to be liked.  Da'Vine Joy Randolph comes closest to actually pulling it off, but even she succumbs to how lost the movie gets in its noise.  When your biggest asset looks like she's close to throwing up her hands and leaving, that's probably a sign that your movie needs a page-one rewrite.

Elio

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre:  Comedy, Science Fiction

Director:  Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina

Starring:  Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldaña, Reny Edgerly, Brandon Moon, Brad Garrett, Jameela Jamil

Pixar's latest sees an orphaned boy named Elio wishing to escape to the stars to get away from his pain, not unlike Starlord.  Also like Starlord, he is pretty swiftly abducted by actual aliens.  Unlike Starlord, Elio is mistaken for an actual leader on Earth and is sent to negotiate peace with a deadly race of warrior silkworms.  One would be forgiven if it felt like Disney was trying to bury Elio because the marketing push for the film feels negligible.  I'm mostly convinced this was because Disney opted for a huge campaign for Lilo & Stitch and Elio's close release date got eclipsed by it.  Elio is a better movie than Lilo & Stitch but it's also one of Pixar's more humdrum releases, probably missing out on being the company's low-hanging fruit if only because The Good Dinosaur exists.  Pixar has struggled to reignite the imaginative sense of wonder that has dominated its early efforts for a while now, the last to convincingly hit that note being Coco in 2017, with only a couple of bright spots since.  Elio feels like it's willing to settle for being earnest and cute instead of enchanting and meaningful.  The themes its playing with are obviously about familial bonds but it often overrides them for the sake of silliness.  It does pick up the slack in production design, which is delightful.  It also successfully stirs some emotions up at the end, typical for a Pixar film, but they're muddied in a messy conclusion which is underdeveloped and arguably unearned.  The movie winds up being fine, and it's a good rental for family movie night.  I can't quite get enthusiastic about it, though.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

Ballerina ⭐️⭐️1/2

Bring Her Back ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Final Destination:  Bloodlines ⭐️1/2

How to Train Your Dragon ⭐️

Karate Kid:  Legends ⭐️⭐️

The Last Rodeo ⭐️⭐️

The Life of Chuck ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Lilo & Stitch ⭐️⭐️

Materialists ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Mission:  Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Phoenician Scheme ⭐️⭐️1/2

Thunderbolts ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

The Unholy Trinity ⭐️⭐️

New To Digital

Final Destination:  Bloodlines ⭐️1/2

Fight or Flight ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Friendship ⭐️⭐️⭐️

New To Physical

A Different Man ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 24 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

How to Train Your Dragon

⭐️

Genre:  Fantasy, Adventure

Director:  Dean DeBlois

Starring:  Gerard Butler, Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gabriel Howell, Julien Dennison, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Nick Frost, Peter Serafinowicz

I'm not one to be so arrogant as to say when a movie shouldn't have been made.  However, I am adept at figuring out when a movie was made for all the wrong reasons, purposefully refusing to acknowledge the things that could have made it something interesting, opting to be creatively inert because it makes them more money.  That doesn't necessarily make a bad movie, because I love quite a few films that were only made to turn a profit.  What makes a bad movie is when even the movie itself doesn't seem to care, which is the experience of watching the remake of How to Train Your Dragon.  Granted, the movie sometimes goes to great lengths to capture the same beats as the first film, but at the expense of putting actual heart in its own production.  It's an apallingly lazy movie, with the only ambition being to cozy up to the safest possible course to make sure they don't put off anybody who already likes this series.  That is, unless you liked this series because of how creative, touching, adventurous, and fun it is.  If so, this new film will absolutely turn you off, because its about as anti-creative as it can be while not alive enough to be recreate the emotion and excitement of the previous films.  It's an assembly line production waiting for you to hand it money.  I kept waiting for this movie to give me just one reason to justify coming to the theater and watching it instead of staying home and watching the original.  In response, it kept asking me if it could borrow five dollars.

But let's just take a moment and pretend the original doesn't exist and look at it from a production standpoint.  How to Train Your Dragon is loosely based on the children's book series, telling of a Viking boy named Hiccup who is taught to hate and fear dragons by his village.  One day, he captures a Night Fury dragon that he names Toothless, who he is unable to kill.  The two become friends, learning to trust each other while overcoming the fear between the two species.  It's a good script, and we know this because they already made a good movie out of it.  Using it a second time seems to be a safe bet, at first.  Plays can do multiple productions based on one script, and they are often worth seeing.  Some can crash and burn with that exact same script, too.  In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, a lot of what this script was was based on the fact that it was written specifically for animation, and trying to adapt these lines and gestures into live-action requires some sort of effort.  The movie doesn't put this effort forth, often reciting the script word-for-word because it worked the first time.  This leads to a lot of stilted delivery, as actors all recite their lines in a way that makes it sound phonetically rather than organic.  The performances in this movie are trash.  The drama doesn't take hold because nobody feels authentic, and the levity humor doesn't land because the movie just delivers it incorrectly (the new moment of "Thanks for nothing, you useless reptile." is quite possibly the worst line-delivery I've heard all year).  Even Gerard Butler, who is reprising a role he played in the original, looks like he is performing in two separate movies.  One where he is fierce and humorless, and another where he is jolly and whimsical.  On a brighter note, I have slight praise for Nico Parker and Harry Tavaldwyn, who both seem to at least have some vision of adequately adapting their respective characters of Astrid and Tuffnut to a live-action setting.

And while I can lay some of this at the performers' feet, the truth is that a lot of the movie's problems are a production issue.  To be frank, none of the actors look as if they're occupying the same space as the CGI dragons, looking like they are glancing at harmless ping-pong balls rather than the fierce firebreathers that they should be afraid of.  Bringing up the dragons, some of them look fine, while some of them are off-putting, because the film takes the original designs and is afraid to change them.  This hurts Toothless the most, because the movie wants him to be recognizable for marketing and merchandising, but they are taking a design that was specifically designed to fit the aesthetic of the animated movies and tossing it into a completely different aesthetic entirely.  Toothless looks odd and out-of-place, looking like an overly textured cartoon character.  If the movie were more stylized, like a Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro movie, maybe this could have worked (the word "maybe" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there).  This is the first live-action movie from Dean DeBlois, who directed the previous three How to Train Your Dragon movies, so we know there is talent there.  These production faults fall squarely on him, because everything about this film hurts from inexperience in a format.  There is no comfort in what he is doing, hoping just trying a rough equivalence will make things balance out, but instead everything bursts into flames.

Am I being harsh on this movie?  Is the truth really that it's not that bad?  Possibly.  The truth is that I don't much care.  I had a miserable time watching this and I hated just about every minute of it.  If the ambition of this movie was to take a great script that already made a great movie and make something that wasn't fun in the slightest, then all I can say is mission fucking accomplished.

The Life of Chuck

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Fantasy

Director:  Mike Flanagan

Starring:  Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Mia Sara, Carl Lumbly, Benjamin Pajak, Jacob Tremblay, Mark Hamill

Mike Flanagan's first non-thriller movie, though he does jump into the well of horror maestro Stephen King's infinite stories to find it.  The Life of Chuck is Flanagan's third King adaptation, following Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, and he is already in production of his fourth, a miniseries adaptation of Carrie.  The Life of Chuck sees Flanagan trying to emulate that of Frank Darabont when he brought The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile to the big screen.  Life of Chuck feels probably closer to Forrest Gump with how schmaltzy it is, so be warned that it's not exactly an apple-to-apples comparison.  As to what the movie is about, it feels like it's more about the discovery of what it's story is than an actual story that can be summed up.  If anything, the film's story is more metaphor than narrative, with the titular Chuck being a stand-in for anyone who walks this earth.  Chuck is a man with dreams and passions who lives to be an adult who had to let them slip away.  Mortality is a presence in the movie, as it is contemplative of the ultimate abrupt end while bellowing an idea above it to live life without being haunted by it.  The movie is abstract and sentimental, sometimes to its detrement, but it's destined to be on someone's all-time favorite list based on its fearless face.  It's going to inspire someone, despite its imperfections.  That someone is going to do great things.

Materialists

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Drama, Romance

Director:  Celine Song

Starring:  Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal

Dakota Johnson has to deal with the impossible task of choosing between a hot wealthy man who looks like Pedro Pascal and a hot struggling theater performer who looks like Chris Evans in the sophomore film of Past Lives director Celine Song.  Johnson plays a New York matchmaker for a very picky clientele, and is probably the best at her job.  But her mathematics at matchmaking are put to the test as she starts a relationship with rich dreamboat Pascal and old flame Evans stumbles back into her life.  Materialists is another analysis of romance by Song, simultaneously more upbeat than Past Lives but also just as bittersweet, in its own way.  Materialists isn't as interesting as Past Lives, which was a deeper and more nuanced movie.  Materialists does find value in a scathing analysis of dating practices, standards, and the presentation of human beings as products to be purchased, equating marriage as a business arrangement instead of a symbolic gesture of affection.  It puts on display the risks and fears of putting yourself on the market, both in the small and the extreme.  There is a lot of poetic dialogue in the film, some of which is probably too on-the-nose, but it's a passionate cry of geniuneness in an artificial climate.  At the same time, it doesn't judge or shame the struggling lonelyhearts, though it will occasionally mock those with unrealistic or trashy standards and point and laugh.  It's a smart and smooth movie that is a joy to watch.  Some storytellers run out of things to say after one all-encompassing effort but are forced into another because of success.  What's impressive about Celine Song is that she finds new things to say about love even after pouring her soul into Past Lives.  If she continues, she might become the defining romantic voice of this generation.  If she branches out away from that, I'm sure she'll succeed as long as her stories stay this distinct.

The Unholy Trinity

⭐️⭐️

Genre:  Western

Director:  Richard Gray

Starring:  Pierce Brosnan, Samuel L. Jackson, Brandon Lessard, Veronica Ferres, Q'orianka Kilcher, David Arquette, Ethan Peck, Tim Daly

Sins of the father and all that jazz in this western that sees a boy traveling to a town named Trinity to avenge his father only to find all the trouble he was neck deep in.  The movie is haunted by overbearing theatrics and haphazard plot points, but Pierce Brosnan is locked-in and Samuel L. Jackson is having the time of his life.  There's not much else to say about the movie, but it's also a movie that I don't feel was specifically made to leave an impression.  I suspect it was just a western that was made for the sake of making a western.  It can fluff itself with some star power in Brosnan and Jackson, some character actors on the side, and a few fun shootouts and be a passable time waster for people who keep Gunsmoke and The Rifleman on as background noise as they go on about their lives.  There is also a hooker who shows more balls and humanity than the rest of the cast.  She dies in about five minutes because of course she does, the best characters always die in westerns.  That's about the only impact it will have on me as it comes and goes from theaters, never to be thought of again.  Movies without a particular story to tell will do that to you.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater

Ballerina ⭐️⭐️1/2

Bring Her Back ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Dangerous Animals ⭐️⭐️1/2

Final Destination:  Bloodlines ⭐️1/2

Friendship ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Karate Kid:  Legends ⭐️⭐️

The Last Rodeo ⭐️⭐️

Lilo & Stitch ⭐️⭐️

Mission:  Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two ⭐️⭐️1/2

The Phoenician Scheme ⭐️⭐️1/2

Thunderbolts ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Digital

The Amateur ⭐️⭐️1/2

Clown in a Cornfield ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Things Like This ⭐️

New To Physical

Drop ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Friend ⭐️⭐️⭐️

In the Lost Lands ⭐️⭐️

A Working Man ⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!