Multiplex Madness
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy
Director: Nisha Ganatra
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons, Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon
Truth-be-told, I haven't seen Freaky Friday. Neither the original with Jodie Foster nor the more currently relevant remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan. It's like Mean Girls, where it was a cultural phenomenon for Millennials that came out when I had just barely grown out of that demographic, and I always assumed that the movie was exactly what I imagined it to be, so I never felt the urge to catch up. I have, however, seen the horror parody Freaky and the Netflix knock-off Family Switch. I don't know if that means anything, but those are things that happened.
Taking place several decades after the previous film, Lindsay Lohan is now a mom herself, raising her own teenage hellian in Julia Butters. Lohan then falls in love with the father of Butters' high school rival, Sophia Hammons, and they become engaged, meaning the two girls with a turmoltuous relationship will soon be stepsisters. One wacky comedic hex later, Butters and Hammons swap bodies with mommy Lohan and grandmother Jamie Lee Curtis. How Curtis got sucked up into this and why one of them needed to be the grandmother, I'm not certain. If I'm being honest, she seems entirely irrelevant to the story and is only here because she was in the first movie. That's probably the primary takeaway from this movie, in that it plays like a TV reunion movie. It feels more like a play for nostalgic love from Millennial fans of the previous film rather than trying to work up new fans in Gen Z or Alpha. It might succeed at that modest ambition, but it also seems hopelessly stuck in the past. When the movie switches Lohan and Curtis's personalities into younger bodies, it doesn't really have very much for the younger actresses to actually do, they just spend their time joyriding. The teenagers trapped in the older bodies are more relevant to the story the movie is trying to tell, as the girls call a truce to try and prevent Lohan's pending marriage from going forward. The children are the only ones with an actual arc in the movie, while the elders stuck in youthful bodies are only in this movie to be like "Being young is awesome!" This keeps Lohan and Curtis center-stage but it's at the cost of giving actual relevance to their own characters.
Some of the gagwork is pretty funny, so those coming for the comedy won't be disappointed. I quite liked Vanessa Bayer as the fortune teller. There's an immigration interview where that teen-swapped Lohan tries to sabotage that is probably the highlight of the movie. But they are countered by other gags that are more oddity. A teenager stuck in Lindsay Lohan's body awkwardly trying to flirt doesn't seem like proper generational gap humor to me, but I'm assuming the people who made this movie watched Karen Gillan in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and decided all body swap movies are the same and nobody would notice if they stole her bit. I also think it's odd that Curtis didn't adopt a British accent when she swapped with Hammons, as the accent just stays put with the body. An accent isn't a physical attribute but rather an acquired reflexive memory based on teaching and environment, so the stepdaughter character losing her British accent after becoming Jamie Lee Curtis makes zero sense. The movie is so aloof that it probably doesn't matter. I suppose what's disappointing is that the movie aims for not mattering. If you're a fan of the original, this is probably worth a look because it's just more of it. Bonus points for that.
My Mother's Wedding
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Drama
Director: Kristen Scott Thomas
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller, Emily Beecham, Kristen Scott Thomas, Freida Pinto, Thibault de Montalembert
Actress Kristen Scott Thomas makes her directorial debut with My Mother's Wedding, a sentimental family drama that is pretty much what you'd assume it is based on the title, chronicling three adult daughters coping with the fact that their widowed mother is remarrying. Scott Thomas wants to recreate the lost art of those calm chick flicks about sisters that moms would rent from the video store while dads picked up Lethal Weapon and kids watched Toy Story for the billionth time. I think she has done so adequately, even if My Mother's Wedding doesn't prove itself to be anything particularly memorable. Scott Thomas does have some interesting flourishes that she provides, including using sketchy animation for flashback sequences. It's actually pretty smart, because it saves from casting new actors for vintage scenes and allows the film to be just that much sweeter to its target audience. The movie is just so willowy and awkward, though. Half the cast is American pretending to be British, and Scarlett Johansson's accent is so forced that it sounds like she's openly mocking her castmates. It's an unusually bad performance from a usually dependable actress. It's plot progression can be odd, including unfaithful spouses being unveiled (in a scene that I think is supposed to be funny for some reason?) and Johansson's girlfriend who doing a weird secretive artificial insemination and thought that would convince Johansson to marry her or something (this is the type of ass-backwards thinking that only happens when you're in a relationship and you're trying to do a big romantic gesture, only for your partner to look at you like you're insane and go "wut? but why tho?"). It's trying to be flowery life drama comfort food and commits to the bit, but it just blows out air and flutters away like a deflating balloon.
Sketch
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Fantasy
Director: Seth Worley
Starring: Tony Hale, D'Arcy Carden, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalon Kox
What the fuck? An Angel Studios film that isn't dumpster-diving faith pandering? And it's actually legitimately fun and charming? This has to be fever-induced death hallucination. Anybody who has ever heard me talk about movies for the last few years has undoubtedly heard me pummel the small company that specializes in Christian media. I have held nothing back as I've sat through waves of their filmmaking that are not just outside my demographic but a failure at even being a quality option for their own audience. If Angel Studios wants to make faith and life-affirming dramas, power to them. Could they at least make them good?
I need people to know my stance on this so they know that I fully mean it when I say Sketch is actually kind of awesome.
Sketch centers on a young girl coping with the death of her mother, drawing sketches of monsters in her notebook as as outlet for her depression and anger. In true family fantasy movie fashion, her brother finds a magic pond in the woods that somehow rejuvenates things and her notebook falls into it, bringing all of her sketches to life. And since they all come from a dark mindset, this is bad. The movie has a lot to say about depression and mourning, as well as the mentality of young children who are looking for ways to channel their emotions and don't always have the support they need to do so. Because of that, the movie goes to some dark and deep places. It centers on ideas that if they had come from a different production of this same studio, it would have only skimmed the surface with the message of "Bad feelings bad, try having good feelings instead." Instead, the characters are three-dimensional, each with reasons for withdrawing and mourning the way they have chosen to do so. The father has chosen "We don't talk about this because it hurts too much" and his children have to stew and nobody to really confide their own emotions in. The sister has her notebook, while her brother takes their mother's ashes and tries to bring her back to life in the magic pond, only to be stopped when giant monsters are brought to life. But one does wonder what would have happened if he had succeeded.
This movie could have been Pet Sematary so easily.
But as deep as the movie can be, it is very wondrous and funny as well. The movie understands the sense of magic a movie like this should have, which was astoundingly absent from How to Train Your Dragon a few months ago. And it's pretty well made, too. I knew this was going to be Angel's best movie early on when I saw the cinematography and thought "Oh my god, this actually looks like a real movie and not a rough approximation of one." This is so not Angel's style that I'm assuming this movie had to have been an acquisition rather than anything they put money into, but it just so-happens to be a sweet family-centered movie that is pretty clean-minded save for a few jokes about butts, so it would understandably play well with their demographic. The humor of the picture is reasonably simple, but it's always based on characterization and the dynamic of everyone's relationship. Because of that, the movie is full of heartwarming chuckles that one might relate to their own personal bonds. Add in the fact that the movie's imaginative creature design creates beings that are all constantly interesting to look at, both cute and a little scary at the same time. It all gels together beautifully. Compare this to a similar "art comes to life" family film from last year, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Sketch is a similar concept that succeeds in being a fully-fledged movie rather than an empty showcase of special effects.
The one thing that is a little off-putting about this movie is that most of the beasties that come to life are meant to be avatars for harming people and objects, and they do seem to be widespread and viciously attacking throughout the movie. The movie has no interest in being a horror movie, but it tip-toes too much around how dangerous they actually are to anybody. It never confirms nor denies whether people are getting hurt, even though common sense dictates that there should be. That's probably the downside of being in a studio that demands squeaky-clean kids movies, though I imagine that if this movie were made in the 80's, we would have seen much more fucked up shit. At the same time, Sketch reminds me a lot of the type of rambunctious fantasy movies that came out of that era and it's on the right path of recreating them. It's so adventurous, enchanting, and sweet that I can't help but fall under its spell. I would have loved this movie if I were nine-years-old, and I would have watched it over and over again until my parents yelled at me to find something else. That tells me that this movie did damn near everything right.
Strange Harvest
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Horror, Mockumentary
Director: Stuart Ortiz
Starring: Peter Zizzo, Terri Apple, Andy Lauer, Matthew Peschio
I think we've all seen a movie where we all respond "I see what you want to do. This ain't it, but you tried." If only we gave out rewards for understanding intentions, but if we did that, then I would have rated that War of the Worlds movie higher last week. I didn't, it was bad, and the people who made it need to know it's bad so they never do it again. Strange Harvest is a better movie, but it's also a movie that fumbles the ball when it comes to achieving its own goals. This movie is a occult slasher movie presented as a true crime mockumentary, documenting the murders of mysterious serial killer "Mr. Shiny" and the strange occurrences surrounding them. At the movie's best moments, it's easy to get sucked into the presentation, but occasionally it will slip up in its framing device to make you go "Oh, this kinda sucks, actually." It happens early on, when an interviewee refers to her deceased friend as a "dope-ass bitch" but says the term of endearment in a way that makes it clear she has never said those words in that order in her life, at which point I sighed and thought "Okay, so that's how it's going to be." To be fair, when it gets into the grisly details, the movie can successfully be unsettling, but the film's inconsistent talking head performances range from mildly boring to improvizational nightmare. It's just not an effective storytelling device because it never sells the people relating the story. The movie's high points come when it finally gives us Mr. Shiny footage, which the filmmakers seem to realize because they put all that they had into the trailers. There's a rawness to the filmed murder sequences that breathes life into the movie when it desperately needs it, but even then it can't quite shake it's feeling of being completely staged. It's just kind of weirdly inconsistent with itself, with little things like the film saying he doesn't leave fingerprints behind but the footage showing that he never wears gloves. Then there are the larger picture details, because the movie shows the aftermath of a lot of decomposing corpses, including children, but then it gets to a dog that happened to be killed along the way and it chooses to censor it. I know killing animals and pets is a sort of taboo in movies, but it's such a strange choice that it almost accidentally becomes funny. Strange Harvest is so focused on feeling real that when it feels fake (which is quite often) it almost seems like it's betraying the audience. Honestly, I think the film only failed itself.
Weapons
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Zach Cregger
Starring: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Cary Christopher, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams, Benedict Wong, Amy Madigan
Following up a breakout success can be daunting for a filmmaker. The one thing you don't want to become is M. Night Shyamalan, who was told he was good at something that one time and spent his entire career afterward seemingly trying to prove the people who praised him wrong. Zach Cregger is in a similar position, where he had a below-the-radar career in comedy that went nowhere, decided to make a horror movie, and the feedback was "This fucking rocks. What else you got?" Cregger doubling down on being a "horror master" can either prove Barbarian a fluke and go the way of Shyamalan or unearth the diamond in the rough and put him on the same pedestal as Jordan Peele. Weapons shows enough promise in Cregger being someone to keep an eye on, though I found my response to be more subdued than Barbarian.
As one can gleen from the trailer, Weapons is the story of a town in turmoil, trying to solve the mystery of seventeen vanished children from the same classroom who all mysteriously fled from their houses in the middle of the night. Discovering where it goes from there is part of the experience, so I'll refrain from saying more than that. Without getting too spoiler-heavy, Weapons is one of those movies that is presented like a set of short films, similar to Pulp Ficton or, more horror relevant, Ju-On. Each segment centers on a character seeing the events play out from their perspective, providing a little more context and even more questions as it goes. Some segments are more interesting than others, and I'd even argue that Alden Ehrenreich's could have been cut entirely because it adds almost nothing. This segment highlights the film beginning to have a struggle with pacing, because it's constantly tip-toeing around it's mystery while saving everything for a climactic info-dump, and that info-dump takes so long that it's practically tension-free. Like Barbarian, the film is written to subvert expectations as to what's around the next corner, but where we're heading begins to feel stagnant after a while because all clues are leading to the same place and we're just waiting for other characters to catch up. What I will say about the mystery as it's uncovered is that the big reveal is actually spoiled in the title card if you bother to notice a little flourish in it. But even if you do get what the movie is aggressively hinting at, there's still the mystery of its source, so it's not too problematic.
But, as a fan of Barbarian, I had a pretty good time watching this. Cregger has this trolling aspect to his direction where he will linger on certain things long enough to create discomfort, then reveal the one thing that makes it even more stressful, only to linger and create more discomfort. That's how I'd describe Weapons, a discomforting horror movie rather than a scary one. But I think that's part of his horror appeal, because he has this Sam Raimi-like tendency to fuck with his audience like that. If Cregger is an artist of anything, it's waiting for the reveal, because he knows when his audience is anxious and he looks at any given scene and goes "lol, no, hold on, just a second more." He's a tease. If I had one issue with Weapons, it would be that he concentrates too much on foreplay and the film never seems to get to the main event that we're all revving up for. That's just more of an observation than anything that genuinely hurts the film, because it certainly hits the right spot in the heat of thr moment.
Movies Still Playing At My Theater
The Bad Guys 2 ⭐️⭐️1/2
F1 ⭐️⭐️
The Fantastic 4: First Steps ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Jurassic World: Rebirth ⭐️1/2
The Naked Gun ⭐️⭐️⭐️
She Rides Shotgun ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Superman ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Together ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Digital
The Accountant² ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Jurassic World: Rebirth ⭐️1/2
Sorry, Baby ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
New To Physical
Friendship ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Coming Soon!
