MST3K, RiffTrax, and Beyond: Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 49 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness

100 Nights of Hero

⭐️⭐️

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Director: Julia Jackman

Starring: Emma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Maika Monroe, Amir El-Masry, Charlie XCX, Richard E. Grant, Felicity Jones

Strange little artsy metaphor movie about girl power takes place in some sort of fantasy world with three moons, where Maika Monroe is in hot water with her patriarchal in-laws for not producing an heir for her husband, who refuses to have sex with her. Why doesn't he have sex with her? The movie can't be bothered to answer that. I was under the idea that it might be repressed homosexuality but the movie never even addresses it. He just doesn't. That's kinda of a weird plot point to jump off of but we just have to run with it. Maybe he just watched It Follows and doesn't want Monroe's monster cooties. Yeah, let's go with that. Anyway, she is given a hundred days to get pregnant and, instead of doing it and/or her himself, her husband just up and leaves her with his handsome friend. Does he want the friend to get her pregnant for him? Doesn't seem like it. In fact, the husband holds no interest in getting her pregnant at all and they both make a bet that she won't sleep with the friend after a hundred days and if she does, they'll have her executed.

What even is this story?

It turns out the actual story the movie wants to tell has very little to do with the main storyline. The movie is thematically about oppressed women who want their voices to be heard, mostly taking the form of Emma Corrin's servant girl character, who tells stories of the women who wish to also tell stories and are punished for it. What does any of this have to do with the pregnancy plotline? Nothing, really. It's an overcomplicated and underdeveloped metaphor about a group of men keeping Monroe subservient to them. And that's what makes this movie so frustrating to watch, because it functions as an ode to the power of the storyteller but betrays its own message because its own story is barren and incomplete. That feels very unforgivable, which is a shame, because the movie otherwise feels like it was made with vision. The movie is a quirky little slice of idiosyncrasy. It's like if Edgar Wright and Wes Anderson collaborated to make a Yorgos Lanthamos homage. It's narrative is just jerky and rapid fire to the point that it feels like aimless jabbering rather than anything meaningful. It does have a good message at its center, though. Those who resonate with it could very well be more forgiving of this movie's flaws. It's a well-intended mess.

Fackham Hall

⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre: Comedy, Mystery

Director: Jim O'Hanlon

Starring: Katherine Waterston, Thomasin McKenzie, Tom Felton, Emma Laird, Tom Goodman-Hill, Anna Maxwell Martin, Sue Johnston, Damian Lewis

Hot off the heels of the Naked Gun reboot is a brand new spoof film, this time taking aim at historical British aristocracy dramas and murder mysteries. Thomasin McKenzie plays a rich entitled girl who is lined up to marry a cousin, like the rest of her family, but falls in love with newly hired servant Ben Radcliffe. When father Damian Lewis is murdered, all of Fackham Hall is under investigation, potentially exposing their affair. The primary joke of the movie is the prim properness contrasting with the lowbrow humor that is rising around them. If Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and the Farrelly Brothers collaborated on a reboot of Downton Abbey, it would be Fackham Hall. The movie is a tender homage to those types of films with hints of other comedic stylings, including Blake Edwards' Pink Panther films, Abbott and Costello, and a dash of Monty Python. The movie is probably too hammy with some of its gags to hit the highs of its many influences, but this is also a movie that could have easily have been a disaster. The film's excellent cast of talents fully committing to the bit makes it a charming and amusing, even when it misses the mark on its ambition of hilarity. Katherine Waterston is my personal MVP for this movie, because she's an actress who absolutely would star in the type of drama this movie is mocking, but has the comedic chops the pull off everything the film desires of its cast. It's that sort of confidence that the rest of the movie needs, though it works well enough as is.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2

⭐️

Genre: Horror

Director: Emma Tammi

Starring: Josh Hutchinson, Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Freddy Carter, Wayne Knight, Mckenna Grace, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard

Calling the first Five Nights at Freddy's mediocre was generous. Calling the sequel boring is an understatement. The latest video game adaptation sees a vengeful spirit haunting a marionette puppet at a completely different Freddy's restaurant. Through the power of contrivance, she winds up in the lives of the same family as the first movie and...does things. It's a bunch of crap that the first film already did and did better, and when I can say the original Five Nights at Freddy's did things better, that's when you know you're in for a bad time. Ultimately, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 might have some minor junk value if we weren't just stuck with these boring protagonists that these movies feel invested in, for some reason, trying to add more layers to their trauma that link straight to the stupid restaurant. The problem with doubling down on the character arcs from the first film is that those arcs were dull and inane. Taking them to the next level just turns the franchise's awful character-driven focus into mundanity pretending to be a freak show. The main villain is at least somewhat creepy looking and worth a couple of jump scares, and its habit of possessing characters gives some actors a little bit of spice to their roles. This is the only reason I can think of as to why Mckenna Grace is in this movie, who gets a sequence where she's allowed to be a possessed villain and she's actually quite good at it, even if it's only for a couple of minutes. Other than that, she's just here to be here and is tossed aside when the movie is done with her. I'm sure she got paid well, so I won't say she completely wasted her time. I wish I could say the same for myself.

Hamnet

⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Genre: Drama

Director: Chloé Zhao

Starring: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn

This year's festival darling has entered the award season chat, becoming what most assume to be the third "lock" for a Best Picture Oscar nomination, following Sinners (which I'm rooting for) and One Battle After Another (which is this year's pattented "movie I can't stand that is probably going to win" entry). This film adaptation of the Maggie O'Ferrell novel, Hamnet tells a dramatization of the love story and family of Willaim Shakespeare and Anne "Agnes" Hathaway. Details about Shakespeare's life, especially as it related to his family, are sketchy at best, so the best we can hope for is an interpretation based on the few facts that we know about the time, period, and people. Jessie Buckley plays Agnes, an outsider with a knack for medicine (which has most accusing her of witchcraft) who finds herself being wooed by a Latin tutor (guess who) played by Paul Mescal. The two eventually marry and raise three children, including a twin boy named Hamnet, who's ill fate inspires his father to write a little play called First Action Hero AKA Hamlet.

Not a lot is known about the real life Hamnet Shakespeare, including how he died or what influence his father might have actually had taken from him in writing the play. It's pretty much a forgone certainty that the Hamlet play was titled after him. Hamnet as a story is a speculation of what might have been the purpose of this play and what deeper meaning it might have had to Shakespeare. The Hamnet novel is a very interesting book because it's almost one of those dramatic interpretations of historic stories that Shakespeare would write himself, filling in the gaps of unknown details with internal monologues and plot beats written through poetry rather than realism. It's like "The Tragedy of William Shakespeare" as told by William Shakespeare. There are, of course, a couple of more modern flourishes that Shakespeare wouldn't have done, such as its nonlinear presentation and the fact that the book deliberately avoids saying the name "William Shakespeare" out loud to not distract from the tale of Agnes and Hamnet, but it feels like it's a work Shakespeare would have understood if he had a chance to read it. Or he would have objected to the anacronisms and inaccuracies. But if he were to to do that, we should ask him to hand his Julius Caesar play to the actual Caesar and see if his reaction is anything but "What the fuck?" It's a great book, probably one of the best I've read in recent years. If the movie were half as good, I'd be a very happy camper.

The adaptation is brought to us by Nomadland director Chloé Zhao, with a screenplay by Zhao and O'Ferrell, and is a pretty faithful work, if simplified. There are aspects of the movie that feel dumbed down, with Agnes's outsider stature being much weightier in the novel and Hamnet having a more present role. The presentation is also streamlined, opting for a chronological narrative, which is probably not something I would have done. The film's ditching of the novel's nonlinear structure makes the plotting feel jumpy, though not without redemption. Passionate performances by Buckley and Mescal underlined by Zhao's fierce direction counter it back to dramatic magnificence. The movie is very pretty, very emotionally charged, and very sad, which is what the story demands of it. Buckley has to carry most of the film on her own shoulders, empathically trying to translate her emotions into the audience. She's just good enough an actress to actually enchant such a spell. Probably the biggest hurdle that Zhao faces as the director is that sometimes her take on the story is too on-the-nose. There's a scene where Mescal is standing on a ledge over a steep cape whispering the "To be or not to be" speech which is probably the most obvious thing she could have done in this movie. Mescal makes the trite scene workable, but it might be a hair too much. The movie isn't as powerful as the book because of things like this, but it's a very strong work of its own. Like its source, the film is a story of the influence of love, using it to inspire creativity, and using that creativity as therapy for a broken heart. It's a beautiful movie, which is what a beautiful story asks for.

But it still can't top the greatest Shakespeare production of all time...