Multiplex Madness
Dicks: The Musical
⭐⭐1/2
Genre: Comedy, Musical
Director: Larry Charles
Starring: Aaron Jackson, Josh Sharp, Megan Mullally, Nathan Lane, Megan Thee Stallion, Bowen Yang
Two identical twins who were separated at birth rediscover each other and conspire to get their parents back together in this zany musical-comedy based on an off-Broadway production. Those who love the vulgar musical sensibility that Matt Stone and Trey Parker infused into South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut will probably love the similarly styled Dicks: The Musical, but with more of a queer flamboyance. It's one of those movies that when you watch it, you'll know if you love it or not, but those who aren't into it will hate you forever for subjecting them to it. Its a production that gets away with a lot based on its gay-coded charisma, which is infectious even as it faults. Its cast is great, and every production from a queer creator either needs either Nathan Lane or at least one cast-member from Will & Grace. Dicks: The Musical has both. It's a good time for those that love cult, underground LGBTQ+ cinema. Personally, I think the film's ending is a miscalculation, because while it fits the excessive depravity of the entire film, the seemingly good-natured "love is love" message in this context is one that can very easily be distorted, twisted, and weaponized by the worst possible viewer. That's not the movie's fault, and chances are people who are likely going to take the wrong message from this movie likely won't make it that far into it, but the embracement of its own bizarreness could come back to bite both it and its community in the ass one day.
Killers of the Flower Moon
⭐⭐⭐1/2
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro
Martin Scorsese took complaints that The Irishman was too long to heart and decided to make his next movie a full three minutes shorter. Only for this one you have to sit in uncomfortable theater seats instead of watching at home either barrelled down on your couch with a bag of Doritos on your chest or vaguely paying attention while playing on your phone, so it feels longer. Killers of the Flower Moon tells the true story of a group of wealthy Native Americans who struck oil, which in turn finds greedy white people cozying up to them and slowly killing them off to inherit their wealth over time. It's a fascinating story, one that can hold interest over it's three-and-a-half hour runtime, and the film is well constructed by a director with a rhythmic vision for it and a group of actors who are prepared to act their butts off in front of a camera, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, who has sad-clown-face the entire movie. If I find myself at issue with it, it's that while there are very few scenes that are irrelevant enough to trim out, the film feels like it's repeating itself quite a bit as it goes on. It's trying to be a rolling ball of evolving tension, but it felt that it also laid all its cards on the table early on and it has nothing left. The film's sudden abrupt blurts of violence stop being effective after five minutes and it all blurs together after a while, because after you've suddenly shot a mother in front of a baby in your opening scene, it's hard to go anywhere from there. I was almost more jarred when scenes didn't have people abruptly getting shot in the head. The concluding investigation and trial is a welcome change of pace, bringing about both John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser out of nowhere to just show up for Marty Scorsese cred. The movie is an interesting watch in spite of its intimidating girth that does threaten to derail, telling a frustrating story of a well-off minority group that still finds itself preyed upon and marginalized by the greed of rich white men. I liked a lot of what Scorsese did with it. Just buckle up, because it also demands you spend a sixth of your day with it. I mean, you could watch Dicks: The Musical twice instead and it'll probably be more enjoyable.
The Other Zoey
⭐⭐
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Director: Sara Zandieh
Starring: Josephine Langford, Drew Starkey, Archie Renaux, Mallori Johnson, Andie MacDowell, Patrick Fabian, Heather Graham
Have romcoms developed a post-Scream meta that horror movies developed in the late-90s, where the only way for it to be okay that you're making a horror movie is if you point out how stupid horror movies are while doing it? I don't know, it seems like a lot of romcoms lately play this card, where they establish that romcoms suck by the main character then go through the motions of a romcoms...for irony...I...guess?
Anyway, The Other Zoey is one of those. A woman who thinks traditional romance is nonsense finds herself the cause of a soccer player's accident which leaves him with partial amnesia...and he believes her to be his girlfriend, because she has the same name as her. Not wanting to shock him because of his concussion, she plans to come clean to his family, until she finds herself attracted to his cousin and continues the ruse to get closer to him. This being a meta-romcom, I'll leave it to you to guess who she falls in love with halfway through. The premise is really, really dumb, something that's needlessly complicated from the getgo simply because one person stutters with honesty and constantly makes bad choices. Like a lot of bad choices. Like so many bad choices that even of they aren't intentionally malicious, they most certainly are. And while farce comedy often does rely on a character who is dishonest to a degree, to work they need to also be a whirlwind of event that makes honesty not that simple. The Other Zoey never finds that. The title Zoey continues on the journey of this movie that she always has a backdoor out of, and she has nobody to blame but herself. She's a character who absolutely does not deserve the romcom "just kiss" happy ending, because while she shows remorse foe her actions, she doesn't actually have a repercussion for them. But logic doesn't always apply to romcoms, which sometimes just exist to be a series of awkward moments of sexual tension. There is a cuteness to the movie that's hard to deny, but the main conflict is so disdainful that it sours it. If the film had found a way to make it less driven by greed and lust, and something more beyond her control to make her actions less vain and terrible. Cute can only go so far if it's not likeable.
Soul Mates
⭐⭐
Genre: Thriller, Romance
Director: Mark Gantt
Starring: Annie Ilonzeh, Charlie Weber, Neal McDonough
It's Love Connection meets Saw in this odd thriller that wants you to fall in love or die. Two strangers find themselves chained together in a labyrinth of love and death, as they go from one game to another designed as some satanic dating game, led through each by a mysterious Chuck Woolrey type host played by Neal McDonough, who I'm sure was well paid for a day's worth of work. There are a lot of moving parts in this movie designed to jolt and shock, but the movie is a puzzle that never quite comes together trying to barrel through its runtime to mask how little everything makes sense as it goes. The thing about a Saw movie is that the rules are sometimes cryptic but they're there. In Soul Mates, they're obtuse to the point that when each round ends, I'm still questioning exactly what exactly the characters were supposed to do. And even if you see the bonding experience that the movie is going for, the events are just so unfair that even if these two did fall in love, they'd just wind up bitter toward each other for the rest of their lives because of this bullshit. Like decades of couples counseling that doesn't work leading up to the bitterest divorce you can imagine. The movie does the whole "explaining the entire plot" climax, but it still doesn't fix the aesthetic choices. Soul Mates might have been better served if it went lighter, less visceral and maybe a bit cheesier, utilizing the romance angle for a frillier production design that fits the "dating" theme. Something to give it a personality, because all the basement corridors and cobwebs aren't doing it any favors. Maybe if it were less influenced by Saw and more by Escape Room, pushing less gory death for nameless characters that we know next to nothing about and concentrated on death traps that centered on the characters this story revolves around, it might have worked. But there is a quirkiness to the story that might create a cult following for it, but it doesn't work well enough to break free into a wider audience.
Netflix & Chill
Night of the Hunted
⭐1/2
Streaming On: Shudder
Genre: Thriller
Director: Franck Khalfoun
Starring: Camille Rowe
You know why Michael Myers is a great antagonist? Because he has no motivation. He just is. He has a thing that he does and he doesn't talk so he can't catfish people into the question of why. Night of the Hunted is a movie that is fascinated with both a motivation of a killer and the lack of motivation being apparent, intertwining it so thematically within its story that it suffers because of it.
The film feels like a movie made by people who had access to a gas station convenience store and decided to film a movie in it, but since Kevin Smith already made Clerks, they decided to do a thriller instead (possibly a decision made while high and watching Phone Booth). So they made a movie about a woman trapped in a convenience store with a sniper outside. The movie starts so well, with some interesting character moments and shock sequences, with cute little touches such as a billboard outside that says "GodIsNowHere," all as one word so it can also be read as "God Is Nowhere" if you look at it differently. The movie gets significantly weaker the moment it gives the sniper dialogue, who communicates with the lead via walkie talkie, who comes off as a redneck so drunk that he probably couldn't see straight enough to fire a sniper rifle adequately. He does not shut up during the entire movie, tossing around so much pissant word salad "philosophy" that it turns the mind into Jell-O. And she has conversations with him that are seemingly meant to be meaningful, but I'm like stop. Why are you saying anything to this jackass? The only words that need to be said to him are "Fuck you," because it doesn't matter why he's doing this, he's just an asshole.
And the weird thing is...I think the movie agrees with me...maybe? The ending is interesting, because the movie seems to leave the viewer with the message that it doesn't matter why people do horrific things. All that matters is that they've done horrific things, and that's contemptible. It's not wrong, but this wasn't the way to deliver that message. A better option might have been to have the lead to try and talk him down and try to understand him, only to receive minimal in return. Instead it's a movie that keeps yammering pseudo-babble that just wears the viewer down when it should be ramping up excitement. If the people who made it had trimmed the fat and made a simple short film with this concept, this probably could have been pretty good. Padded up with this crap just makes its good points paltry.
Movies Still Playing At My Theater
Barbie ⭐⭐⭐1/2
The Creator ⭐⭐⭐1/2
Dumb Money ⭐⭐⭐
The Equalizer 3 ⭐⭐⭐
The Nightmare Before Christmas ⭐⭐⭐1/2
Oppenheimer ⭐⭐⭐
Saw X ⭐⭐⭐
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (probably)
New To Digital
Saw X ⭐⭐⭐
New To Physical
Barbie ⭐⭐⭐1/2
EO ⭐⭐⭐
No Bears ⭐⭐⭐
Shortcomings ⭐⭐⭐
Coming Soon!
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