Multiplex Madness
April X
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Science Fiction, Noir
Director: Michel K. Parandi
Starring: Connor Storrie, Lilly Krug
In a vague future city, a man goes into heavy debt with mobsters and his sister goes missing. He proceeds to spend years paying off his debt and searching for his lost sibling, eventually linking her disappearance to a cloning prostitution ring. The neo noir aspect of this movie is very 1940's, wandering around in alleys with an inner monologue decorating all the brooding. The movie wants to compel with its introspection and mystery, but it seems disinterested in both the world it created and its story in favor of just wanting to look cool among its peers. The movie becomes a lot of ideas and concepts, seemingly wanting to be a low-budget Blade Runner. It never achieves this because it never intrigues with anything it throws out there. But I admire its ambitious spirit. And Lilly Krug gets to wear a lot of wigs. That's fun.
Beware Boiúna
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Mike P. Nelson (NOT THAT MIKE NELSON)
Starring: Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe, Logan Marshall-Green
In case you were disappointed that last year's Anaconda reboot was a parody, here's a comparable adequate giant snake movie to fill that void in your life. In Beware Boiúna, a group of humanitarians are providing medical services in the Amazon, only to find out that the local legend of "Boiúna," a giant serpent that protects the rainforest, might actually be real. Boiúna is based on actual myths from South America, so that's fun. What's less fun is the lackluster journey it takes to get to its monster mayhem. Doing a giant snake movie is going to draw immediate comparisons to Anaconda (and I'm referring to the original right now and not last year's equally mediocre Jack Black movie), and while Anaconda is not a great movie, it is a very zippy movie. That movie whizzes by at a clip, and Beware Boiúna is a more of a casual story with less colorful characters. It takes a really long time to get to the snake, and when we finally get there, the movie doesn't seem to have any energy to make it exciting. In fact, most of the characters that we've been following are killed pretty instantly once we enter Boiúna's turf, leaving only a handful trying to escape. Because of that, the movie doesn't even have that simple slasher appeal of "Who's dying next?" because the movie has almost no characters left during the meat of the horror. A couple of the suspense sequences are well done, including a scene in quicksand that is pretty well played. The movie is easily skippable though, because it's just not exciting.
Digger
⭐️
Genre: Comedy
Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Starring: Tom Cruise at his most insufferable, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessie Plemons
I remember the first trailer to this movie, which mostly consisted of clips of previous Tom Cruise movies and just showing off Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise. I had no idea what this was, wondering why I was watching something that was aggressively selling me the concept of Tom Cruise like some sort of lifestyle brand. Then it crashed into a scene where Tom Cruise was in terrible old man make-up and a cowboy hat, yelling "BANG BANG BANG!" This trailer made an impression on me because it's not every day I see an advertisement that seems to be actively trying to get me to boycott its product. I wish I had listened.
What we're actually getting from Digger is probably more than a short trailer can explain. The Tom Cruise of this movie is a throwback to the experimental, arthouse Tom Cruise that made Eyes Wide Shut and Vanilla Sky. It's the type of Tom Cruise we haven't seen in a while. And now that he's in his sixties and hasn't died from doing eight Mission: Impossible movies, maybe it's time to go back to that. In Digger, he plays an oil tycoon who's operation in Greenland blows up, accidentally creating a global catastrophe. Cruise then conspires with U.S. President John Goodman to try and spin the global destruction positively for them.
I kinda love this idea. I didn't love this movie. I actually thought it was pretty miserable. Digger is a movie with clear, focused, and virtuous ambitions of being a modern Dr. Strangelove that is drowned in self-absorbed obnoxiousness. I admired almost everything this movie tried to do, and I also hated every goddamn second of it and am bitter that I even wasted my time on it. Ten minutes into the movie, I felt like I had been sitting there for two hours, indulging the movie in its quirks, waiting for it to feel inspired and not have the desperate attention-seeking bravado of a seven-year-old boy who is running around in his underpants, screaming, with the sole ambition of just getting all the adults in the room to pay attention to him. Any actual point the movie was trying to make was drowned out by the fact that I could feel the spittle of the movie directly shouting in my face.
And that's just the primary narrative. Things get more odd when the movie layers a meta on top of itself. I won't spoil it, but it actually explains a lot about the movie's presentation, including the curious choice of casting Tom Cruise in this role when he's just acting like a hammy Tom Cruise in bad make-up. The meta doesn't improve the movie, though. The intent doesn't become clear until the final shot, where it seems the message is that civilization needs to actually address global crises and not just acknowledge them through the media they consume and immediately ignore them once it's over. This is another idea I liked, but was already off-board with it because of how little slack the movie was giving with the meta subplot until this point. I spent the entire movie trying to figure out what purpose the movie's twist added to the movie. The movie kept giving nothing to work with until the third act, where it it info dumps a lot and also stops to explain the concept of satire to the audience. At that point, it was hard to think anything other than that the filmmakers thought that the high-brow, award season audience that it was made to directly appeal to is too stupid to understand the concept of subtext. After that, I was just done with this movie, feeling like I was trapped in a narrative without end.
Digger will undoubtedly find an audience, likely with fans of Alejandro G. Iñárritu who don't mind it when he's gone full insanity. That's probably what they want. It worked out for Birdman, which I remember liking quite a bit. With Digger, I just could not get on board. I liked the messages and there is an idea here. It has just gotten far too out of hand. The people who really need to hear what this movie has to say will likely turn it off, either because the movie is talking down at them (at everyone, really) or because the film is too strange and inaccessible. So, it occupies this strange corner where the only people who will watch it are the people who already agree with it and decided they already loved it before watching it, while those who might actually benefit from what the movie is trying to say aren't going to bother. Congratulations on creating a movie that will have zero impact.
I have considered that I'm being hard on this movie. Then I remember practically anything in it and think to myself no. Fuck this movie.
The Influencer Project
⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Mike Nybroe
Starring: Chiara King
Cinemas have been littered with horror movies from YouTubers for the last few years. Now it's Instagram's turn, I guess. Real life social media influencer Chiara King plays herself in this movie that was "influenced by actual events." That's a cute pun, but I can find very little information on what this "actual events" thing is referring to unless it just means Chiara King is a real person and maybe this could happen to her. Maybe she had a cyberstalker that got under her skin and she decided to make a slasher movie out of it? That's the basic movie in a nutshell, as King visits Copenhagen with a documentary crew in tow, only to have a cyberstalker begin threatening her.
If I were to hazard a guess as to what King is hoping this project will achieve, I would assume that she's trying to start a conversation about how vulnerable influencers are. She occupies a space where she has to put herself into public eye every day, which attracts different kinds of attention. Some of which can be dangerous, and they're not always equipped to handle an unhealthy obsession. There is also a light social commentary that seems to be on the tip of the movie's tongue about how an influencer's audience only views them as entertainment and doesn't actually care about their well-being, being willing to watch their deaths if it's good content. This sounds like it would be amazing introspective on King's part for participating in this film, but if she actually had that introspective, chances are she would quit being online. Which she hasn't. The ideas the movie is playing with are scary, but while The Influencer Project wants to be provocative, it's not very interesting as a movie. A lot of the movie has King glued to her phone, looking worried. When it goes for big scares, it'll shake the camera around with a big screeching noise on the soundtrack. The film is remarkably ineffective, which compounds when it's also this thinly written. Frankly, the movie is just boring. I had an internal debate of whether the boredom equated being bad, but the boredom was a result of the movie failing to execute its idea. The movie is just a failure at all its ambitions and it comes off as just something made without a completed story idea that only crossed the finish line because King is a notable online presence. It reminded me of last year's House on Eden, which was made by YouTuber KallMeKris. That movie wasn't good either, but it had an aura of just being the result of friends and amateur filmmakers who were just bullshitting around and made whatever-the-fuck, so it had minor amusement value. The Influencer Project is taking itself more seriously and is failing at what themes it's attempting, which is why I can't give it the same leeway that I gave House on Eden.
But if you want a good influencer based horror movie, log into Shudder and watch Influencer. Excellent watch, and it had a pretty solid sequel, too.
Rolling Loud: The Movie
⭐️1/2
Genre: Comedy
Director: Jeremy Garelick
Starring: Owen Wilson, Matt Rife, Christine Ko, Christian Convery, Henry Winkler, Jolene Blalock, Travis Scott
Rolling Loud is an annual hip-hop music festival, and apparently they filmed a movie at the latest one. Owen Wilson sneaks his thirteen-year-old son into the event, who swiftly gets lost in the crowd. Wilson begins a frantic search of the grounds while trying to avoid security, picking up a few quirky sidekicks and bumping elbows with music superstars along the way. The film acts as an appendum to the festival itself that fans may be able to enjoy year-round, while also being something of an advertisement for it. I'm not sure how well that latter ambition is, because showing off an awkward, middle-aged man who doesn't listen to hip-hop wandering around and being inconvenienced by the event isn't actually a compelling argument to attend. I don't think the film has very high ambitions, as it's just Wilson going on misadventures with the festival as a backdrop. Sometimes it's amusing, and sometimes it's just dumb. I like little moments of it. I like that he picks up goofball characters who try to help him as he goes. One of them has the funniest line in the movie, as Wilson finally finds his son in the climax, and he just says "I've seen that kid like twenty times today."
There are a few things that are off with the movie. A few punchlines feel rushed into, which might be an editing failure that hurts the comedic timing of the film. Or it could just be that the movie isn't very funny and they're trying to rush through it. I dunno. Parts of it made me snort, but it also felt like most of the time the comedy was just a gag that existed to be present because nothing else was actually happening or some bullshit vignette was taking too long. The movie is not really anything, but it's also hard to actively dislike because that feels like that would take too much effort to think about than this movie deserves.
As a minor sidenote, Jolene Blalock is in this movie. She also produced it. The Star Trek: Enterprise actress has been retired from acting for about a decade now, returning for an episode of Lower Decks and now this. She's also credited on Nimrods from last month, which I didn't clock at the time, but that was also a music industry self-promotion film (and was also much better than this one). I don't know why this is her thing now, but welcome back, queen.
Verity
⭐️
Genre: Thriller
Director: Michael Showalter
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Brady Wagner
It seems to me that I'm talking more about Colleen Hoover's work more than I ever intended to in my lifetime just by going to the movies and seeing whatever is there. But Hollywood keeps buying her books and making movies out of them, like they did with John Grisham way back in the day. Unlike most Hoover adaptations, I actually listened to the audiobook on Verity. I figured it would probably hold my attention better than her other books. It's not a mopey love story about depressed people learning to love while remaining sad. This one is much smuttier. If I'm going to read sex fiction, I want it to be suitably trashy, thank you. Or for it to be a pornographic How to Train Your Dragon knock-off. That might seem like a weirdly specific demand, but I've always been haunted by that time I listened to the audiobook of The Fourth Wing thinking it was going to be dumb YA fantasy, not knowing what kind of book it was, and getting to a certain chapter, listening to the explicit details of its brand of horny, and going "Oh.........okay then."
True story. I was at work when this happened. If you've never read this series, the one thing I'll tell you is that ain't nobody reading The Fourth Wing for the dragons. Whew boy. Makes A Game of Thrones read like Jane Austen. But I digress.
In this movie, Dakota Johnson plays a small-time author who is hired by Josh Hartnett to finish a book series that was started by his wife, Anne Hathaway, who was left in a crippled state by a car accident. While searching through Hathaway's notes, Johnson finds a manuscript for an autobiography that reveals Hathaway's sinister thoughts and dark secrets. The movie is mostly faithful to the lay-out of the book, with a few simplifications. If one loves Hoover's book, this will be an adequate representation of it. That also means that if you're like me, you'll think just as highly of it as the book, which wasn't very high. Despite a promising set-up, the story grows more senseless as it goes. As my questions about the story grew to a head, the climax offered to bring resolution with the twist ending and answers all of them by assuring the audience that nothing makes any goddamn sense. The feature film version is true to that, but it waters down the books eroticism and makes some choices that make the twist at the end even dumber.
It's possible that if you don't think about the story, it plays out better. Then the fault of the movie starts turning to the melodrama that it has chosen to make thicker. The acting in this movie is that style of acting from early M. Night Shamaylan movies where everyone looks sleepy and whispers all their lines, which personally drives me up a wall. It especially hurts Dakota Johnson. I like Johnson, but she seems very disassociated with this movie. I think it's intentional because she's playing an introverted character, and she even jokes that people tell her that she has "resting bored face." But I think back to a scene where she mentions "Instagram," but she says the like it's a completely alien concept that she has never heard of.
It was hard for me to really connect with the movie's "sit at home and watch while eating ice cream" ambition because it never leaned into any of its spice. It seemed uncomfortable with being sexy, it had no interest in thrilling, and everyone just looked bored. I almost started yearning for the one-note sadness of Hoover's Reminders of Him. At least that movie was interested in what it was.
Art Attack
The Incomer
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Comedy
Director: Louis Paxton
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O'Rourke, Emun Elliott, Michelle Gomez, John Hannah
Domhnall Gleeson arrives on a remote island to evict the sole inhabitants, a brother and sister who have been living in isolation for thirty years. Gleeson is labeled an "incomer," a stranger from the unknown mainland, and is kidnapped by the duo. He slowly begins to gain their trust over the course of days, and they begin to accept him as being one of their own. The movie plays a lot with introversion and social awkwardness, utilizing a "stranger in a strange land" scenario as a showcase for oddballs who have rarely communicated with anyone. It's comedic in how weird their personalized culture is, and it's often swift to point out being an outsider isn't a bad thing. And curiosity about cultural differences is more helpful than fear of it. The comedy is mostly dry Brittish wit intermingled with off-the-wall nuttiness. It proves to be an excellent showcase for Gayle Rankin, who gives an overwhelming performance as the abrassive and protective older sister, who is also more interested in mainland culture than she lets on, and her sexual repression leads to romantic curiosity about Gleeson. The role asks a lot of her and she gets into the weeds with it. The film is a delight, a lot of fun, and full of heart.
Forgotten Island ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Heart of the Beast ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Practical Magic 2 ⭐️⭐️
Primetime ⭐️⭐️1/2
Resident Evil ⭐️⭐️
Spider-Man: Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Stunt Driver ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Digital
Coyote vs. Acme ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Idiots ⭐️⭐️1/2
Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Uprising ⭐️⭐️1/2
Coming Soon!
