Multiplex Madness
Bottoms
⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Comedy
Director: Emma Seligman
Starring: Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri, Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Nicholas Galitzine, Miles Fowler, Dagmara Dominczyk, Marshawn Lynch
The high school sex comedy continues to try to make a comeback with Bottoms, which features a pair of unpopular lesbians who start a self-defense class/fight club as a means to get close to the popular cheerleaders they crush on/want to have sex with. To describe Bottoms is almost an impossible task, because the movie isn't really a cohesive whole but rather a string of comedic chaos. The movie seems to only have a premise accidentally, as its starts out with its anarchic characters and just lets them steamroll through every situation, which often leads to an anarchic conclusion that leads into the next scene. I felt a bit lost in the wind a few times, not understanding how the movie got to most of its plot points, trying to backtrack in my head what it's trail was, before giving up and just accepting that this is where we're at now. It's one of those movies that is more about its vibe than its story, being an animated throwback to teen comedies that the people who made it most likely watched in the 90's and early 2000's. It's like if 10 Things I Hate About You were as raunchy as American Pie and as flamboyant as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back as told by someone who watches a lot of Seth MacFarlane cartoons, also underlined with a subtext of feminism which is never clearly explored but richly fuels its DNA. But the film is so scatterbrained that it's probably a good thing it didn't dive head first into deeper territory. The movie is kind of a hot mess, but it's a weirdly appetizing hot mess made by people who were jazzed to be there every single day. Its very funny in its own destructive way, and when it's over you won't know what hit you because the movie kept punching you in the face while screaming "GET REKT!" You just might also feel that uneasy sense of "That was weird, but I was kinda into it?"
The Equalizer 3
⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Action
Director: Antoine Fuqua
Starring: Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, David Denman, Sonia Ammar, Remo Girone
Denzel Washington is back and doing some Equalizing in Italy, where he finds himself injured. Now healing in a town on the coast, he witnesses a chokehold the local drugrunners have on the innocents, and realizes his Equalizing isn't done yet. What I like about the Equalizer franchise is how it takes that patented weekly TV drama presentation of the wandering vagrant who accidentally gets into people's business and changes things for the better, then leaves for the next town and does it all over again and just does that but as a series of movies. Watching one of these movies is like a cozy memory of watching The Fugitive, The Incredible Hulk, The A-Team, Quantum Leap, and yes, obviously The Equalizer. The Equalizer 3 won't impress most looking for a storytelling experience because it doesn't really have a story. Denzel Washington sees bad people doing bad things and then kills them all, that's about it. Even the film's opening plot point of him being injured in action doesn't serve to complicate the plot or his actions, like it would be used in a more developed film, and is instead just used as an excuse to keep him in one place long enough to see bad guys preying upon people. And the poster's promise of "The Final Chapter" is overselling it, because there is no plot element that says this man is ever going to stop. This is not a smartly told movie, but what occured to me while watching it is that those who are invested in an Equalizer film aren't necessarily here for it being compelling. They want a reverse-Friday the 13th experience, as if Jason stopped killing college students and started going after mobsters. It's all about bad people getting what's coming to them. It's a simple ambition, but it succeeds at what it sets out to do. I think the first movie did it the best, because it really went all-out on the idea of a dangerous man living in plain sight acting as a guardian angel to a community he had grown fond of, while the sequels act as redundancies of the same idea. But there are still plenty of baddies left to be taught a lesson.
The Good Mother
⭐1/2
Genre: Thriller
Director: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte
Starring: Hillary Swank, Olivia Cooke, Jack Reynor
Hillary Swank stars as a grieving mother who investigates the murder of her junkie son with his pregnant girlfriend and finds that what she uncovers may destroy what's left of her family in this thriller that doesn't quite know how to thrill. To be a slow burner is one thing, but one does need to maintain interest even as it builds. The Good Mother has trouble finding what plot point to build momentum from and constantly hesitates, biding its time to the point where it becomes boring. I can't fully say there is nothing here with promise, because once you get to the third act you can see what the movie is going for and delivers a few competently tense scenes. But it doesn't amount to a proper movie. The movie is full of elements that are functional but never rise above being merely functional. The whole affair feels deflated, like it's so depressed about its story that it has given up on trying to be any good. But special props to Hillary Swank and Olivia Cooke, who are great actresses who give the performances the movie needs, but they're trusting the filmmakers to construct something as good as they are around them. They're left giving it their all for a movie that doesn't know what to do with them.
Never Give Up
⭐
Genre: Drama, Sports
Director: Fred Loos
Starring: Harrison Stone
Boy, if I gave extra credit for good intentions, Never Give Up could potentially be a four star movie. But it's not and and it's a thorough pain in the ass to watch. Wanting to be the inspirational story of deaf tennis player Brad Mins and goes through his life story while he's playing the big game of his career, the movie is is a shockwave of shoddiness, as it's poorly written through schmaltz monologues and presented so slightly that even Leave It To Beaver would look at it and say "This is way too quaint." All of the actors look overwhelmed by the dialogue they are given, trapped in an Sunday school play pretending to be a movie and given words in a vacuum that explain what the audience is supposed to feel in any given scene rather that conveying real people. Meanwhile, almost every scene in the movie feels like it was filmed in a warehouse, because they couldn't afford to go anywhere. It's the most fake looking movie that's based on a true story I've ever seen. I guess you could call the movie ambitious based on having an idea bigger than its capabilities, but even taking that into account, its joyless attempt at exploiting this story to tug at heartstrings comes off as cynical. I'm not entirely sure if it has cynical ambitions or if it was just made by people who just tried to make something from nothing (the real life Brad Mins comes on-camera and give the audience a speech at the end, which makes me lean toward the latter), but it takes this story of a man succeeding in spite of his his disability and turns it into something hollow and plastic. Cheap filmmaking I can forgive, but that just makes me resent it. I was tempted to just not review it at all and just link to a Rick Roll, because Never
Art Attack
⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Drama
Director: Mikhaël Hers
Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Quito Rayon-Richter, Noée Abita, Megan Northam, Thibault Vinçon, Emmanuelle Béart, Laurent Poitrenaux, Didire Sandre
After several weeks on the down low, Art Attack is back as my local arthouse brings in more indie and foreign cinema after jumping on board the Barbenheimer train. It seems a little out of character for them until you remember those movies were directed by indie darling Greta Gerwig and the largest scale blockbuster auteur working today, Christopher Nolan. I hope they made enough money to keep the lights on during these dark times, because they deserve it.
They also had Indiana Jones during this period, but I don't think that panned out like they hoped it would.
Anyway, let's get Frenched! This film takes place in Paris, as a woman takes in a homeless girl off the streets who is invested in the warmth of the familial relationship she shares with the family, but also keeps them at arms length. We never learn too much about this homeless girl, who is mostly a quiet presence who wants to be there while also not becoming too involved. There are little contextual facts about her that we discover, like her being a junkie, she likes movies because she can lose herself in them, and she fears attachment, either because of traumatic issues stemming from her true family history or because of depressive issues where she envisions herself as a poison to the things that she loves. Either way, she is an embodiment of the theme of the movie, which is about solitude and longing for connection. Most characters in this film are a form of loneliness, as the mother is a middle-aged woman going through a divorce battling self-esteem issues and the teenage son is grappling with the longing for a romantic connection and is coming to terms with the fact that his first love is a homeless girl that he wants to be close to but she won't let him. It becomes the story of a girl who crashes into their lives and disappears on her whim, afraid of the idea that someone might eventually care.
Faults of the film include that the film consists of two segments four years apart that almost feel too much in a vacuum. I had the same criticism of Past Lives, but one thing Past Lives had going for it is that the characters didn't feel like they were in a standstill in between time jumps. Passengers of the Night struggles with that much harder than Past Lives did, so I really need to call it out on it. Also, the film is a period piece in the 80's, and uses a lot of archive footage for its establishing shots to ease up period piece costs. It's certainly...a choice. Ultimately I found the shifting footage quality and reality against filmed fiction to be a distraction. Fortunately the movie is a bit too lovely to be hurt too much by it.
Netflix & Chill
Perpetrator
⭐
Streaming On: Shudder
Genre: Horror, Thriller, Fantasy
Director: Jennifer Reeder
Starring: Kiah McKirnon, Alicia Silverstone, Melonie Liburd, Ireon Roach, Casimere Jollette, Tim Hopper, Josh Bywater, Chris Lowell
As we enter the autumn road to Halloween, Shudder is starting to amp up its content offerings for genre enthusiasts. They're not exactly putting their best foot forward to start out here. Ambitious to a fault, Perpetrator is a bit of a dumpster fire concoction of tween targeted storytelling methods crossbred with horror scenarios resulting in convoluted nonsense. The premise is a fairly basic idea that you'd see in a bad young adult novel, as a girl comes of age and discovers she has some weird superpower that is explained by a distant relative who suddenly becomes their closest family. What is her superpower? I have no idea. It's some vague possession shapeshifting witchcraft that's just an excuse for her to pull new abilities out of her ass to get out of corners as the film goes on. As the plot gets further into motion, it starts to feel like a CW pilot, as she uses her gifts to solve the mystery of disappearing girls who have been serial kidnapped by some dude who is harvesting their blood and organs. This movie probably would have been better if it kept it as simple as just being a young adult show about a witch's coven that solves mysteries, but this movie is building its own mythology and juggling it with its masked stalker subplot and both feel shortchanged because I have no idea what's going on in either of them. The movie is somewhat stylish in how it tries to seduce its viewer through its gory mayhem though, which is lightly charming. I just feel like I would trade that for coherence.
Movies Still Playing At My Theater
Golda ⭐⭐
Gran Turismo ⭐⭐1/2
The Hill ⭐1/2
Jurassic Park ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Little Mermaid ⭐⭐1/2
Oppenheimer ⭐⭐⭐
Retribution ⭐1/2
Strays ⭐⭐1/2
Talk to Me ⭐⭐⭐⭐
New To Digital
The Boogeyman ⭐⭐1/2
New To Physical
The Flash ⭐⭐1/2
Coming Soon!
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