Multiplex Madness
Kiss of the Spider Woman
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Musical
Director: Bill Condon
Starring: Jennifer Lopez, Gabriel Luna, Tonatiuh
It's a long lineage to track for Kiss of the Spider Woman. The story originated as a novel published in 1976, which in turn was adapted into a film from 1985 starring William Hurt and Raul Julia. Like all great stories, from Phantom of the Opera to Chicago (or Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, and Mean Girls), it was eventually turned into a stage musical, and that version also got turned into a feature film. I'm still waiting for my movie version of Evil Dead: The Musical. Just sayin'.
Kiss of the Spider Woman features a pair of Argentinian prisoners who share a cell together. One chooses to pass the time by describing to his stoic political prisoner cellmate the plot of his favorite movie musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman. This movie takes place over the course of a few weeks. Why it takes so long to describe a single movie, I'm not certain. These must be some heavily elaborate descriptions, relaying each celuloid frame with distinct detail. As a musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman feels like it's more fun on stage than on film. Most of the dialogue and staging feels very particular to that format and director Bill Condon seems disinterested in adapting for success. His film prioritizes blocking, choreography, and set design over natural flow. The dialogue is so rapid and drama so rushed that it feels like everyone is bored with the movie they're making and rushing to the next number. But even so, it feels like this story can only work so well in this format and it's hard to take seriously. Unfortunately, a tale of political prisoners in a dangerous climate should probably be taken seriously. However, the ending to the movie leaves me puzzled because it plays it as if it dealt us a passionate tearjerker. Passion was minimal and tears were nonexistent, though I confess that a story of prisoners escaping into a fantasy is promising. I don't think this is the most compelling possible version of this story.
Roofman
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Comedy
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Peter Dinklage, Ben Mendelsohn, LaKieth Stanfield, Juno Temple, Uzo Aduba, Lily Collias, Jimmy O. Yang
Channing Tatum plays with toys more than any movie he's featured in except maybe G.I. Joe in this film based on the true story of Jeffrey Manchester, an escaped convict who hid out in a local Toys "R" Us for several months in 2004. During this period he begins a relationship with employee Kirsten Dunst and grows closer to her family which conflicts with his need to make his getaway before the authorities find him. The movie is much cuter than I would anticipated a movie based on this story would be. Roofman probably has all the ingredients and inspiration to make an interesting black comedy but it chooses to lean into making the story as huggable as possible. The movie is pretty solid in spite of this, still bringing out laughs quite reliably, even if its tone feels like a slight miscalculation. It's almost as if the movie is shooting for being a non-conventional holiday movie with a bad boy protagonist who just happens to rob people and bond with a family simultaneously. But it feels conflicting sympathizing with Tatum's character no matter how "nice guy" he may be because he does some pretty shitty stuff during the duration of this movie. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the movie that was chosen to relate to this story but I'm willing to give it a recommendation based on the fact that it is an agreeable movie that I feel a lot of people will enjoy.
Soul on Fire
⭐️
Genre: Drama
Director: Sean McNamara
Starring: Joel Courtney, John Corbett, Stéphanie Szostak, Masey McLain, DeVon Franklin, William H. Macy
MY SOUL! IT BURNS!
Suddenly my criticisms of a movie like The Unbreakable Boy seem petty and minor now that I've seen Soul on Fire, one of the most disastrous inspirational dramas I've ever had the misfortune of sitting through. The film tells the true story of John O'Leary, who survived a house fire as a child, leaving him scarred and without fingers. O'Leary grows up with his disfigurments and disability, aiming for normalcy and eventually becoming a inspirational speaker.
Sounds like a great drama right? It should be a wonderful story. Soul on Fire soils it in so many ways that you can count the things it gets right on one hand. I'm sure there are some to count. They're just not coming to me right now. I just remember getting so irritated at it. Right out the gate, the movie is just off-putting. The film opens with O'Leary in a classroom talking to students and telling his story. After he tells them of the fire when he was a child, one of them raises their hand and asks "Would you do it over again?"
Wha...why would he do it again? What kind of question is that? What kind of writing is this?
It's such a small moment to bring up but it kind of defines the production, where it's dealing with a story rooting in a harrowing experience but undercutting it with a playful attitude that refuses to acknowledge the horror of it, even aiming to not disturb when it comes to relating the event itself because it's so afraid of souring the audience and bumming them out. I am shocked and a little appalled that the movie's optimistic tone is so sitcom-esque that even the movie's attempt at portraying the fire that disfigured its protagonist is being portrayed with such sterile, crass, and cutesy schmaltz that it conflicts with the horror it's trying to portray. When the movie actually tries to take issue of it seriously, it comes up with hamfisted melodrama like O'Leary learning his fingers have been removed asking the doctors around him, in a purely Homer Simpson trapped in a vending machine moment, asks "They'll grow back, right?" Then gets a whole angry-at-the-world scene of screaming "HOW DO YOU KNOW THEY WON'T GROW BACK?" It's such an absurd scene that is meant to provoke a soft pity but is almost oddly comical in how much they're overplaying the sappy drama.
That's just an example of how much ham and cheese the drama eats. The movie just goes on like that, stumbling across a plastic love story and him just kind of accidentally falling into his profession. The asthetics complete the look, as very little in the movie looks genuine. The body mold for O'Leary's scars looks like Freddy Krueger make-up that was rejected for looking rubbery, made softer to make sure the audience that sympathizes also isn't too put-off by seeing too much abnormality because just because they're sympathetic to the plight doesn't mean they've stopped being judgemental. Then there is William H. Macy, who is wearing the silliest Joe Biden wig I've ever seen. Every time he's onscreen I just want to smack that stupid thing off his head. The movie has trouble aging O'Leary as well, as many decades pass but he always looks and acts like a grinning child, as if the film only took place in the span of a week. All of these production flaws and uniformly poor performances that can only be concluded to be the result of "We were told to do it this way," which leads me to believe most of the film's faults are at the hands of director Sean McNamara, who seems to cave a rudimentary understanding of how to present drama. This is the third of his films I've seen, after The King's Daughter and Reagan, and it genuinely seems as if he barely knows how to construct a movie.
To make things completely clear, I do not object to the movie's message or its story. The problem I have with this movie is that it's just shoddy and presented in a way that makes it feel like its assuming the audience has the IQ of a goldfish. Everything about this movie fails the story it's trying to tell. The ham-fisted acting, the schmaltzy directing, the cluttered editing, the script with the ill-advised non-linear storytelling, the soft cinematography...this movie is irrevocably broken. Which is a travesty because it's telling the story of a person who feels broken learning to feel complete again.
Tron: Ares
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Science Fiction
Director: Jaochim Rønning
Starring: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges
Disney has tried Tron twice already, and upon release they were met with a resounding "Nobody fucking cares." It took twenty-eight years to make one Tron sequel and another fifteen to make this one. I'm sure Tron 4 will hit in a couple of decades and 5 after I have left this mortal coil, as some executive greenlights it thinking "Was this a thing? I can't remember." Tron was the story of Jeff Bridges injecting himself into a computer, where he discovered that programming is actually a "digital world" called "The Grid." The movie was very hard to make and was very unique and groundbreaking at the time, which makes it a little sad to admit how quaint it looks today. Some may want to say it's the Matrix of its day but it probably has more in common with Gridman/Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad. Things got flashier in Tron: Legacy, directed by a little novice named Joseph Kosinski, who went on to make a name for himself with a humble movie called Top Gun: Maverick. The visuals kicked ass, Daft Punk conducted a banger soundtrack, and Olivia Wilde rocked that wig she was wearing. It was just Tron again but cooler. Now we have Tron: Ares, where Disney is still trying to figure out if people like this franchise and is hoping to make it more popular by putting Jared Leto in it.
Yeah, I'm not sure that was the play you thought it was.
Leto plays Ares, a digital soldier that has been 3D printed into the real world to do real world violence instead of pixel violence. The problem is that he can only hold form for twenty-nine minutes. The only person with the knowledge of a "permanence code" to keep his form is Greta Lee, so bad boy businessman Evan Peters sends Ares and other digi-badasses out to retrieve her. So now we have Tron visuals in a real city setting, which is more humdrum than you might think it is because it just looks like an average alien invasion movie at best and the Adam Sandler movie Pixels at worst. Seeing Tron tech in the real world looks cool in a trailer shot. Seeing it play out in a narrative feels like it's sucking the joy out of the entire concept. It's like doing a He-Man movie and setting it in California. Nobody should even consider it and yet, it happened. Tron: Ares is the most fun for its few action sequences where it's back in the Grid. Maybe it's just more of the things that we've already seen Tron do but the Grid's atmosphere is just more interesting for the action on display.
Otherwise, Tron: Ares wallows in its own self-serious, visually stunning mediocrity. Which is to say that it's definitely a Tron movie. As much work as has been put into the action and visuals of this movie, it's probably the least interesting Tron movie. The original has the novelty of being unique in a time period where no movies were being made like it and nobody would even try to do it again for over a decade. Legacy showed off what all the advancements the original made led to in modern Hollywood with spectacular visuals, Jeff Bridges horrific floating CGI face notwithstanding. Ares is a couple bells and whistles but its novelty is very small in comparison to the previous films, and there isn't a lot of story to progress in the first place, so I can't say I'm invested in where a Tron franchise might go. Tron has always been a sound and light show and not a story. Both the sound and light in Tron: Ares are top notch. Tron fans should be pleased with that. Those hoping a hidden gem will be awakened by dusting this franchise off will leave empty handed.
But the question everyone wants answered is whether or not Nine Inch Nails tops Daft Punk's score to Legacy. The answer is no but it still rocks.
Netflix & Chill
The Woman in Cabin 10
⭐️⭐️
Streaming On: Netflix
Genre: Thriller
Director: Simon Stone
Starring: Keira Knightley, Guy Pierce, David Ajala, Art Malik, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings, Hannah Waddingham
I love Alfred Hitchcock movies, and one of my favorites is The Lady Vanishes. Maybe it's just the echoes of Lady Vanishes flowing through the veins of The Woman in Cabin 10 that drew me to it but somehow I found myself watching this curious mixture of melodrama and thrills as Keira Knightley witnesses a woman thrown overboard on a cruise ship and is determined to find out who it is, only to be doubted by everyone when the woman she's looking for never seemed to have existed. Movies like this are highly dependent on their resolution to their mystery, as they seek to bring a seemingly impossible scenario down to earth with a logic that explains everything. Simple explanations work best so you don't run into convolution. The Lady Vanishes had a simple explanation. The Woman in Cabin 10 does not. The conclusive resolve is very out there, and would require a lot of jumping through hoops, as well as good ol' fashioned finger-crossing, to actually be plausible. The journey until then is Keira Knightley running around on a boat trying to convince people that she's not crazy and she does this as well as can be expected. The movie has some fun value until it becomes unreasonable. Ridiculous movie. Didn't hate it.
Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2
Good Boy ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Long Walk ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Lost Bus ⭐️⭐️⭐️
One Battle After Another ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Smashing Machine ⭐️⭐️1/2
New To Digital
Freakier Friday ⭐️⭐️1/2
Him ⭐️
Traumatika ⭐️1/2
New To Physical
The Bad Guys 2 ⭐️⭐️1/2
Dangerous Animals ⭐️⭐️1/2
F1 ⭐️⭐️
The Last Rodeo ⭐️⭐️
Nobody 2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Coming Soon!
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