Welcome to my blog dedicated to movie riffing! Here we will journey through the many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the files of RiffTrax, the DVDs of Cinematic Titanic, and hopefully many others.
Join me, won't you?
Starring: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, Norman Reedus
Loosely based upon the nonfiction book of the same name, this fictionalized take sees a motorcycle club started by Tom Hardy deteriorate over the years into degenerate violence. Most of the movie is narrated by Jodie Comer, doing her best Laverne DeFazio impression, telling of her relationship to her bikeriding husband Austin Butler. The Bikeriders is an interesting piece of character evolution, though it's a story told via a group of rambling characters who tend to trail off, so their is a requisite in bearing with it when it flies off with incomplete thoughts. The cast is uniformly fantastic, acting like they're only here to hang out rather than to make a movie (Norman Reedus feels like he's just here because he wants to be). It's a good movie that's a bit of a basic slowrider. But any motorcycle film without sidehacking loses any cool points it tries to achieve. I'm sorry, that's just how it is.
The Exorcism
⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Joshua John Miller
Starring: Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington, Chloe Bailey, Adam Goldberg, Adrian Pasdar, David Hyde Pierce
What if spooky stuff happened on the set of The Exorcist? I don't know the answer to that, but I imagine it would have been a lot more interesting than this. The Excorcism is a meta horror in the tradition of New Nightmare or Shadow of the Vampire where the supernatural element of the movie seems to also be haunting the set. In this case, it's an exorcism movie starring Russell Crowe where Russell Crowe starts to act possessed. The movie mixes its meta with an allegory for repressed trauma, alcoholism, and emotional abuse, which feels like a step too far because it's never quite clear whether the the meta or the allegory takes priority when they begin to clash with each other. They both wind up feeling half-assed in the end, with the meta aspect never really taking shape and the film's thematic value never feeling fleshed out enough to become sufficient. The movie feels incomplete, having a rough idea of what it wants to be about but feels at a loss of how to actually turn it into a story. Instead, it just vomits up something boring and atrocious on the screen. I sat there for so long waiting for the movie to actually try to be something, but it never worked up the energy.
Thelma
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Comedy, Adventure
Director: Josh Margolin
Starring: June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell
In what I can only assume is a tribute to all our beloved grandmas everywhere, Thelma sees a 90-year-old woman get scammed over the phone. Rather than accept she's out ten grand, she instead hits the road to hunt down the people who stole her money. It's a rather flavorful little road movie featuring June Squibb in the title role and the late Richard Roundtree as her sidekick, getting into mischief while a family is left behind worried sick about their frail family member. And frail she might be, but she's also determined. The primary source of humor falls with the stubbornness of those set in their ways while also navigating through a world that is more advanced than their normal perception anymore. Traditional and recognizable elderly jokes do ensue, including technology incomprehension, rambling tendencies, and reduced mobility, but while the movie leans into these qualities, it also never fails to make Thelma sharp and self-dependent, making her a heroine worth rooting for as opposed to a walking joke. It's a delightfully silly hoot of a movie that never succumbs to mocking its subject matter.
Starring: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Liza Lipera, Tony Hale, Ayo Edebiri, Kensington Tallman
The original Inside Out is my favorite Pixar movie, one of my favorite animated movies, and a contender for best movie of the last ten years. That's where I stand going into Inside Out 2: with impossible expectations. But Pixar has turned unlikely sequel potential into pure ugly-cry fuel before. Just look at every Toy Story movie. Except maybe Lightyear.
We venture back into Riley's head, as we see her emotions manifest as living beings once more. Now hitting puberty, several new emotions join the group in Riley's mind, led by Anxiety, who could lead Riley down a worse path. Inside Out 2 does a good job continuing the themes of emotional balance of the previous film, and the concentrated depictions of anxiety are strong and the center of the film's emotional weight. I find myself more subdued on it over the first film because it just never hits nearly as hard. It has good moments of emotional vulnerability and a strong core, but it lacks the heaviness and imagination of the first film. A lot of its settings and landscapes are things we've already seen, and while there are a couple of new offerings, there isn't anything that equals the pure creative playfulness that we got previously. But it's almost unfair to ask a movie to play at such a high standard, even if it is a direct follow-up. Inside Out 2 is a movie that works, and fans of the first film will likely respond to it and possibly hold it to high regard. Inside Out 2 isn't nearly as effortlessly beautiful and poetic as the first film, but as a high-concept comedy, it's still a splendid entertainer that is both funny and heartfelt.
Latency
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Science Fiction, Horror
Director: James Croke
Starring: Shasha Luss, Alexis Ren
This tech-based supernatural horror sees a professional gamer named Hana using an experimental neural device to win a video game competition, only to begin seeing ghostly apparitions in her apartment. Hana suffers from agoraphobia, but also has workout montages to make sure the viewer knows that despite her anxieties, she is still hot. She is emo, young-adult drama pretty and somehow has more video games in her early-thirties than Angry Video Game Nerd in his entire career (she still has a functioning Game Boy that she plays daily, which, by itself, is impressive). Sasha Luss gives an almost good performance, but her main problem is that she slips in and out of her natural Russian accent that she's trying desperately to downplay. Premise-wise, the movie is a surreal allegory for feeling trapped in one's own personal space by one's phobias, while the tech and gamer twist adds a bonus theme of technology addiction. They do a lot with the confines of its one set, and it's almost inspiring. There are some solid spook scenes where we see ghosts fade in and out of mundane backgrounds, though it tends to get undercut by the fact that most of its big scares is just screaming at the audience. But the movie acknowledges this, see, because Hana's screenname is "Banshee" and she's being haunted by an actual banshee. The moments of inspiration feel gutted by the film's slip into delusion, as the third act is reality-bending chaos that works overtime to feed its allegory rather than come together in a sensible way. There is a swing here of making something high-concept with a thin budget, but it's not paying off. While the movie isn't all that good, I like its plucky spirit.
Tuesday
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Director: Daina O. Pusić
Starring: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, Leah Harvey, Arinzé Kene
It might look like one of those super weird experimental movies that A24 likes to distribute (if nothing else, advertisements often reminded me of the movie Lamb), but Tuesday is a far more straightforward movie than one might assume. The film sees a girl who is about to succumb to her terminal illness, only to make friends with Death himself as he is about to take her. She asks to see her mother, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one last time, who complicates the situation by refusing to let Death take her. The movie is a contemporary version of one of those fables where a person has a conversation with death, just with a giant parrot representing the supernatural being. The movie's primarily a look at looming mortality and grief, though it tends to be too on-the-nose to be a genuine allegory. Writer/director Daina O. Pusić steps up to the plate with big ideas conveying personal stakes. These ideas can overwhelm her, sometimes causing the movie to ramble and ponder when only a few words would suffice. Tuesday isn't a movie that breaks new ground on the "Yup, we're all gonna die some day" corner of arthouse cinema, but it's a well-made and passionate entry into it.
Treasure
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Director: Julia von Heinz
Starring: Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Zbigniew Zamachowski
Based on the 1999 novel Too Many Men, Treasure sees Lena Dunham attempting to take a trip to Poland to see locales of her family's history, only to be accompanied by her father, Stephen Fry, at his insistence. Dunham and Fry hit the road as a uniquely awkward pairing, and a lot the film's humor comes Fry's abrasive nature steering Dunham's deadpan calmness through an environment that she's unfamiliar with. The drama, on the other hand, plays into Fry's repressed trauma, as Dunham desires to understand her history while they're visiting sites that unpack a heavy load of memories that Fry would rather forget, many of which are Holocaust related. The movie is quite touching and heavy at the best of times, and endearingly funny as well. It also tends to meander and sometimes lacks a forward sense of momentum to really keep the audience invested. Dunham and Fry are excellent, regardless, and the material can give them the strength to overcome that. One just wishes it was more consistent and providing that for them.
Starring: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Jacob Scipio, Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Núñez, Eric Dane, Ioan Gruffudd, Rhea Seehorn, Melanie Liburd, Tasha Smith, Tiffany Haddish, Joe Pantoliano
Every action fan has a favorite buddy cop movie or series. I have fondness for 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, and Rush Hour, myself. And yes, I quite enjoy the Bad Boys movies. The first two are more audacious flicks that push their own extremity to limits that certain audiences might be turned off by (especially the second one), but that's kind of what makes them a kick of over-the-top nonsense. The new wave of Bad Boys movies are more mellow and subdued, which seems to have made them more palatable to critics and general audiences, propelling the third film to series-best reviews, while also becoming the biggest hit of 2020 (which happened by default, but it does carry the title).
The fourth film follows where the last one left off, which sees Will Smith and Martin Lawrence untangle a frame-up of the recently deceased Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano returns in a cameo), only to get swept up in the conspiracy and go on the run. The movie plays out about as you'd expect, with predictable twists and obvious bad guys eventually unveiling themselves. There's also an underdeveloped subplot of Captain Howard's U.S. Marshall daughter out for revenge against Will Smith's son, but it amounts to so little screentime and has so little to do with anything that it might as well not be here. This, like a lot of Ride or Die's story elements, is fairly half-baked, and if the movie dwells on it too long, it starts to become tired. But when it focuses on the action, it gets wired. The movie is full of the reckless disregard for human life that defines the series. We're largely here for the Smith and Lawrence banter and all the guns blazing. Audience members following the series will get more of that, more of them with their AMMO sidekicks from the previous one, and everyone's favorite character, Reggie, finally getting his time to shine in one glorious setpiece. That's all I ever wanted.
The Watchers
⭐️
Genre: Horror, Thriller
Director: Ishana Night Shyamalan
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan
Oh dear. We have a Night Shyamalan dynasty now. M. Night Shyamalan's daughter, Ishana, makes her directroial debut, and we can only hope her career has more ups than her father's. If The Watchers is any indication, it's going to be mostly the same. Large concepts that never go beyond concepts, padded up with heavy, monotonous melodrama from bored-looking actors, wasting what probably could have been a good movie at some point if there was a collaboration to help meat it up. But auteurism, I guess.
The Watchers has Dakota Fanning getting lost in the woods and coming across a group that lock themselves in a little window box overnight where mysterious creatures just like to look at them overnight. It sounds creepy. It probably could have been if there was anywhere compelling to go with it. The Watchers just fizzles with its lack of any sort of story to go with this idea. It's an undercooked, go-nowhere bleak fairytale full of characters who exist to give stilted exposition while wearing an uncomfortable expression that says "My underpants are on backwards." Shyamalan adds a lot of atmosphere and visual style to lend the film, but there is nothing to pull us into the movie and embrace the high-concept scenario of being cornered in the woods. There is no emotional heft to it, and the characterization is so dead-eyed that the audience will write-off getting invested in it early on. Like her father, Shyamalan isn't entirely void of directorial talent. Also like her father, she needs to learn one lesson that will improve their movies significantly: there is a major difference between milking a concept and telling a story. Big Daddy Shyamalan has gone a quarter of a century without confronting that, but I hope she is more receptive to it.
The last time I saw an auteur movie about hitmen on Netflix it was that lame duck of a David Fincher movie. Surely Richard Linklater won't make anything near as bullshit as that, can he? At any rate, Hit Man (they added that space in the title so you don't think it's a sequel to the video game movie franchise and it absolutely doesn't work) sees Glen Powell playing a fake hitman who catfishes potential buyers into incriminating themselves for the police to arrest. One mark is actually a super hot lady, so naturally she's the one he talks out of it instead of leading on. He then begins a sexual relationship with her, who still believes him to be a hitman, which leads to intense complications.
Hit Man boasts being "inspired" by a true story, in that there was actually a guy who played a fake hitman for cops that led to dozens of convictions. A lot of it is embellished, though I hope the attempted murder rate was. I'm concerned with how many people want to hire a hitman in this city within the few months that this movie took place. I'd probably think about moving. The opening half-hour is this extended montage of Powell just catching a bunch of potential clients. It's probably the part of the movie that needs the most trimming, because it's pretty much the same joke told over and over, just with different tones. It really slows the movie out the gate, adds practically nothing, and exhausts the movie's charm early on. After that point, the movie gets more interesting, because the relationship built on lies between Powell and Adria Arjona is interesting. It takes too long to get to the spice of the movie, but the spice does uptick the interest level. I feel like the movie often often bakes with a simple recipe and then overcooks it, as periods of it feel like compounded problems that are waved away with simple outs. The film would often come up with a thriller twist, but solve it with a anticlimactic comedic punchline, as there was more than one scene where I was like "That's a cool twist, I can't wait to see where this goes" and it just dies. It also just throws a lot of complexities into the characterization that don't really go anywhere, like Powell being both this fake hitman and a college professor, which I believe is taken straight from the reality that this was based on, but this movie is already just a fantasy scenario based on the mere idea of this guy, and the more of reality you try and add to it, the more it clutters it up. It leads to a climax that doesn't really feel like a climax. There are still a few lingering questions I had, but the movie just decides it's done.
Those are all my nitpicks, which makes for some hefty reading and probably giving a false impression of the film, which is mostly solid. Hit Man is primarily a saucy romcom with sexy leads where one of them is lying to the other and it's just a ticking time bomb of when the truth hits, and I was swept up in it, for the most part. Powell is great in it and I enjoyed seeing Adria Arjona, because I worship the entire cast of Morbius (except Jared Leto, fuck Jared Leto). Hit Man is a more enjoyable evening watch than most romcoms you'd find on Netflix, though I found it more bloated and clumsy than I would have liked. It struggles to find its own rhythm, and that's a shame, because I was ready to dance with it.
Under Paris
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Streaming On: Netflix
Genre: Thriller
Director: Xavier Gens
Starring: Bérénice Bejo, Nassim Lyes, Léa Léviant
It doesn't matter what Netflix store-bought auteur movie came out this weekend. It doesn't change the fact that they also put on a brand new SHARK MOVIE the same werk, so forgive me if I'm much more excited for that. It's been a while since we've had a genuinely good one. Some might say The Shallows, but I'd argue that The Shallows was just a glossy, hyperactive retread of The Reef and isn't even as good. And even if you're fond of the Meg movies, it's probably because you're in love with how stupid they are. The exciting thing about Under Paris is that it is a genuine attempt at a shark thriller that goes for that raw Jaws excitement.
The film sees a breed of Mako shark adapted to freshwater, infesting the flooded catacombs of Paris and preying on those who happen to stumble upon them. Forgiving the preposterous credibility of a freshwater Mako shark, because I'm not trying to project my intellect over a monster movie, Under Paris works hard to maintain tension throughout, genuinely going for excitement over scares. It tends to lose its grip as it goes on and shoots for more extravagance, becoming almost a cartoon, clashing with the grit that it's trying to project. In one scene it can give us the harrowing image of a woman trampled to death in a panic to get out of the water and also give us a goofy ariel shot of the shark jumping out of the water and swallowing someone else whole. The seesaw in its tone does succeed in giving the movie a bit of character, though sometimes its drama doesn't always land. The movie has two human antagonists, one is a copy of the Jaws mayor, who wants to keep the water open because money, and the other is an environmentalist, who goes to sometimes absurd lengths to make sure the deadly shark isn't killed by the evil human beings. They're not great characters, though I did enjoy the protagonist played by Bérénice Bejo (Oscar enthusiests might recall her as Peppy from The Artist). It all leads to a climax that is total carnage, some of which is just amplified by things that are coincidentally happening at the same time and lead to an open-ended conclusion. It's not a well-plotted movie, but I got a kick out of watching it. It does something a lot of shark movies don't and just tries to do a serious shark thriller without a hint of irony or its tongue in its cheek, making something that's not Jaws, just different. It's about time.
Starring: Vicky Krieps, Viggo Mortensen, Solly McLeod, Garrett Dillahunt, Colin Morgan, Ray McKinnon, Luke Reilly, Atlas Green, Danny Huston
Viggo Mortensen writes, directs, and stars in this western where he falls in love with a French woman, who is left behind to fend for herself as he enlists in the Civil War. The Dead Don't Hurt is more Vicky Krieps' movie than Mortensen's, as the lengthiest portion of the movie has her living by herself in a desert landscape and dealing with complications that arise from being around lawless characters in an isolated area. Mortensen takes control of the film during intermittent epilogue portions, where he puts the spotlight on himself to deal with conflicts in the aftermath. There are elements to this movie that are very lovely, though I tend to hold myself at bay from overly praising it as Mortensen falls back on tropey conflicts of a woman dealing with animalistic masculinity. He could keep the story the same but flesh it out more and the film would be richer for it. As is, it's a story of a woman living within her own feminine victimhood and while inspiring a tale of her man's rage. The movie isn't entirely void of Krieps' emotional state, though it cries for more complexity when she just quietly subjugates to it. It's a neat idea for a western, there are just little ways it could reach its potential that it chooses not to reach for.
Ezra
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Director: Tony Goldwyn
Starring: Bobby Cannavale, William Fitzgerald, Rose Byrne, Robert DeNiro, Whoopi Goldberg, Rainn Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Tony Goldwyn
The Ezra Miller Story?!?! NOOOOOOOOO!
Oh good, it's just about an autistic child. That I can handle.
This movie has Bobby Cannavale playing a stand-up comic with an autistic son, who he kidnaps after being put on questionable medication, and they go on a road trip across the country to film a stand-up spot on Jimmy Kimmel. I'm curious about how he stayed booked on Kimmel if he was constantly on the news for kidnapping his son, but movie magic, I suppose. Ezra has good intentions, as Cannavale wrote the film basing it on his relationship with his own son. There are genuinely endearing moments in it, though it tends to struggle with its schmaltzy side, suddenly shifting its tone to less subtle melodrama. But the movie handles Ezra's own extra needs in an exceptional way, showing the ways in which his autism commands his life but also journeying into growing past it in his own way, beyond what his parents can offer them. It's a solid feel-good movie.
In a Violent Nature
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Chris Nash
Starring: Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley, Liam Leone, Charlotte Creaghan, Léa Rose Sebastianis, Sam Roulston, Alexander Oliver
It's not often that slasher movies go arthouse. One can argue for the artistic merits of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, or Scream (though, more successfully, you could put up Psycho), but when one comes up that really deconstructs and reassembles the genre, it's time to sit down and pay attention. In a Violent Nature is a movie that takes a slasher movie premise but sets its camera with the killer instead of the victims. With that, the movie doesn't have much of a plot. It's just a slasher movie. A very bad slasher movie, judging by the context clues we're given. A group of partying friends accidentally disturb the grave of a campfire story serial killer, who hunts them down one by one. For a while, the film's experimental artistic gimmick works beautifully, creating a rather base scenario seen through an uneasy new lens. When it comes to maintaining it, the movie struggles more than I was comfortable with. Halfway through the film is one of the film's most elaborate and showstopping death scenes, but it also marks a downturn in quality. It's likely one made to get horror fans buzzing, but it's set up too poorly for it to hit as hard as it wants to, primarily because the victim just freezes in place and lets it happen, with no actual reaction or survival instinct. After this point the movie never regains its footing, because it seems to be sliding further into being its meta-sidestory of a bad horror movie with hollow characters rather than the fresh outlook on the genre that it wants to be. However, rather than ending with an action set piece, it chooses to halt all proceedings and climax with a cameo that slasher fans might recognize, who gives a monologue about the animalistic nature of violence. It's not an uninteresting gesture, but it's longwinded and on-the-nose to the point that it is just exhausting. I don't think the second half kills the movie necessarily, but it does hinder it from delivering something fantastic.
Diane Keaton, Kathy Bates, and Alfre Woodard play three childhood friends who attend a summer camp reunion and try to relive their past in this strained comedy. I feel like I've watched more Diane Keaton nostalgia comedies over the last few years than I've seen actual Diane Keaton movies from her prime. This is probably some sort of penance for something, but I also can't help but notice that this is the second movie in a month that've seen that has had Nicole Richie in it and I'm starting to get concerned that I am legitimately being punished. Summer Camp is like a Nickelodeon TV movie directed at middle-aged women. The movie does try to be poignant for its audience, but its juvenile nature undercuts everything it tries to do. I get that it's about women trying to relive their youth, but it seems extreme to crossbreed child-friendly slapstick comedy in search of a laughtrack with jokes about vibrators and vaginas. The movie is mostly an excuse to set jukebox tunes to pratfalling, and it even does that poorly, as the music in the movie lacks a consistent era for its pandering, mixing golden oldies like Bad Moon Rising with more modern jams like Handclap, which makes the movie feel even more tonally confused. This is such a bizarre movie that seems to be exactly what it wants to be, but what it wants to be is just a confused mess.
Young Woman and the Sea
⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Drama, Sports
Director: Joachim Rønning
Starring: Daisy Ridley, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Stephen Graham, Kim Bodnia, Christopher Eccleston, Glenn Fleshler
Based on the true story of Gertrude Ederle, this film tells the story of how she aspired to become a championship swimmer and became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. Ederle is played with endearment by Daisy Ridley, who puts on that million-dollar smile of hers and wins over the audience's graces. I've always liked Daisy Ridley. I felt like, even as a newcomer, she brought more charisma to Star Wars than you'd expect from a non-Harrison Ford performer in that series (until Rise of Skywalker seemed to wear her down, that is). Young Woman and the Sea is a film that is more dependent on that charisma than a film about space lasers. In lesser hands, this is a movie that could run into the same pitfalls as last week's Sight, because it's reliant on schmaltz for its ambitions to inspire the audience. Young Woman and the Sea benefits from finding an inspiring narrative, which is something Sight didn't do. But it's still schmaltzy, no question about that. The movie is so earnestly sincere, wanting to be viewed without cynicism nor irony. Not everyone will abide by its wishes, but it's likely to be a movie that will mean a lot to young girls who might view it. The theme of the movie is female empowerment, underlining the unfair treatment of women in its time period and telling the story of a woman who set out to prove that anything a man could do was something she could do just as well, if not better. It most certainly is that, and it has no intention of being subtle about it, but it also want to be literate to children, so that's passible. I think it will inspire, and those who it does inspire will hold it in high regard.
