Multiplex Madness
Bonjour Tristesse
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama
Director: Durga Chew-Bose
Starring: Lily McInerny, Chloë Sevigny, Clays Bang, Aliocha Schneider, Naïlia Harzoune
There was actually a surprising amount of movies filling up the spare theaters this weekend, but very few of which I've actually heard of. Usually even the little movies are ducking out of the way of Marvel anda surprise hit like Sinners, so let's find out what these movies are. The first is an indie adaptation of the novel of the same name, a story of an eighteen-year-old spending the summer in the south of France, lamenting that her time there, and her youth, is almost at an end. Meanwhile, she also struggles with the evolving nature of her father's love life, which she tries to manipulate back into what she wants it to be. Bonjour Tristesse is a coming-of-age story that tackles that timely issue of fear of change, though it's inconsistent in how it goes about it. Director Durga Chew-Bose spends a lot of time lingering on quiet shots, as if she's trying to tell a story without words, then blankets them with awkward ADR of conversations explaining the story out loud, stepping on the visual storytelling's feet. Then she'll spend other lengthy periods just shooting the characters doing mundane things, like buttering toast or reading a newspaper, over-embelishing what should be establishing shots. I'm pretty sure I understand the movie's lived-in-the-moment ambitions, but it also succumbs to a lack of efficiency. And despite the film's meandering nature, some plot points still feel underdeveloped and unearned, which is quite an impressive feat in a bizarre way. There are times where the film seemingly skips the emotional change of a character, sometimes outbursting with a sudden dynamic shift out of nowhere. I rather like the story it's trying to tell, enough to say that it's probably worth seeking out in spite of its worst tendencies. The movie is more frustrating than it is satisfying, though.
Raising the Bar: The Alma Richards Story
⭐️
Genre: Drama, Sports
Director: T.C. Christensen
Starring: Paul Wuthrich
Earnest, if dimwitted, biopic tells the story of Alma Richards, a farm boy from Utah who went on to win the gold medal in High Jump at the 1912 Olympics. If only the movie that honored him had Olympic ambitions, but instead shoots for that "participant" trophy. You get a rough idea of just how good this movie is going to be early on when it portrays Richards as a little boy and depicts him getting into a corral with a cow (that doesn't even have horns) as an act of bravery and ambition, trying to grab his sister's wicker basket. He then proceeds to antagonize the cow until it chases him like he's a matador, even though if he really did live on a farm like the movie depicts, he would know that cows generally ignore people when they're in the same space, if not outright running from them. He could have just hopped in and grabbed it without making an ass out of himself. But the movie wants to be wholesome and life-affirming, not necessarily realistic, even though that seems a disservice to someone who lived in reality. There's a certain flavor to this movie, like it's stylized itself after the type of sporty filmmaking you'd see in the 1930's, not far removed from when the film takes place. Some of those films have aged better than others, but filmmaking styles evolve for a reason. If the only ambition of a film is to be cheese-ball, I'd appreciate it more if it at least had a personality. It would also benefit from having a main character who wasn't stagnant, only doing things to move the plot because someone tells him to and, in a good-ol'-boy fashion, just says "okie dokie." Richards is basically the same character at the end of this movie that he is when it begins, learning very little except that he's good at jumping. He has zero flaws except the people around him, who often resent his existence for no reason. I suppose the movie is trying to portray him as the element that changes the environment around him and inspires people, but everyone in the movie is so stubborn that character change fails to happen until someone flips a switch and they suddenly decide to be better people because the script says so.
All of this is without mentioning the goofy little details of this movie that keep piling up and making the entire experience just plain weird. Every time Richards is about to do a big jump, he's accompanied by a music cue that seems stolen from that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is playing baseball and he has a "magic bat" called "Wonderbat." There is also a lady secretary late in the film and it is implied that she might be a love interest, but she has almost no dialogue and has no conversation with Richards himself other than exchanging dove eyes and being unable to just stop staring at each other. The actual Olympics sequence is off-putting once you realize the background is full of a bunch of stationary blurry bodies that are obviously inserted by a computer. Nobody moves in the slightest, until people start cheering, while most of them start clapping without actually looking in the direction of what's going on. I'm not even sure this movie had the budget for digital mock-ups like this, which leads me to believe that these were either cheap stock CGI figures or there's a very real chance that this movie was completed with A.I. If it's the latter, that undercuts what should be a story of human achievement and makes the entire movie even worse. And it was already terrible to begin with.
Rosario
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Felipe Vargas
Starring: Emeraude Toubia, David Dastmalchian, José Zúñiga, Paul Ben-Victor
The titular Rosario is a successful investment banker whose estranged grandmother has passed away. She spends the night with the body waiting for the ambulance to take it away, only for supernatural occurrences to happen in the apartment, seemingly revolving around her grandmother's corpse. It's a little bit Autopsy of Jane Doe but with a Latin America flavor. The film seems to be a horror movie made by the Latinx community specifically for the Latinx community, though whether or not it will be warmly received there is something I cannot attest to. As a horror movie, it's not without its effective moments, though the scares tend to be cheap shock edits and just an all-around ick factor. The movie ramps up some worthwhile creep-value in its third act, but it even loses a little bit of slack for piling on one climax too many. The movie does make up some ground with some interesting themes, such as familial bonds, the lives of the generations before you, and the sacrifices one makes for their children. The movie is not bad, and with some fine-tuning, it probably could be something special. It's a flat experience in its current state, though.
The Surfer
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Thriller
Director: Lorcan Finnegan
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak
Nicolas Cage just wants to go surfing. Why won't you let him go surfing? Pushed off the beach by elitist locals, Cage descends into madness while everything in his life crumbles around him as he stares longingly at the ocean. The film is a very particular type of psychological thriller, likely designed to play better with some audiences better than others. Those who just want Cage to get unhinged and seek vengeance on his tormentors are looking at the wrong movie. Cage gets unhinged, sure enough. Quite a bit. The entire focus of the film is just how unhinged he is. It has little gaze for anything else. The film plays with interesting themes, such as masculine identity and the fragility of modern convenience, and it's all done in the style of a 70's grindhouse indie thriller. All of those aspects work in its favor, it just never really gives us a reason for why Cage is here. I get that he wants to go surfing, I get the unfair circumstances that he doesn't want to cave into, but several of his more extreme problems would be solved if he just went home, at least for a couple of hours, even to just charge his goddamn phone. But the film wants to get into the psychology of those who feel helpless at the unfair circumstances surrounding them. To that end, it's a success. It doesn't really aim all that high in doing so, but it's a minor victory.
Thunderbolts
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Action, Superhero
Director: Jake Schreier
Starring: Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, Lewis Pullman, Olga Kurelenko, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Geraldine Viswanathan
I know that it's becoming more in-trend to hate on the MCU, though I'm not sure how much of it is because the MCU has been less consistent as of late (which is true) and how much of it is because they now have poorly recieved movies under their belt and now there is blood in the water, which the social media feeding frenzy shows signs of engagement sharks looking for easy click farming. But it is fair to note that Marvel isn't the brand that it was pre-pandemic. You can point to Deadpool & Wolverine as a sign that it never really left, but that film was the exception to the rule, as it was more of a nostalgia power play to Deadpool lovers, Hugh Jackman fans, and people with fond memories of Fox's X-Men franchise than an actual MCU movie. And, to be quite frank, Captain America: Brave New World was just disheartening to watch and easily voided whatever accomplishment Deadpool & Wolverine had. Conclusion: The MCU does need a jolt to the cajones. Is Thunderbolts it? Marvel's issues right now are deeper than "Just make a good movie." If anything, they need to lure wandering eyeballs back. Just being a good movie might be too humble an accomplishment to do that, but it's a start. And Thunderbolts is a really good movie. Hopefully a few eyes will see that it's worth a look.
The comic Thunderbolts were a team of villians and anti-heros, which the film stays true to by casting a bunch of morally shady characters, some of which were antagonistic in previous appearances, but are mostly just down-on-their-luck losers. Thunderbolts uses this to its thematic advantage to tell a tale of broken people who struggle to find a reason to get out of bed every day. The team is brought together by a government official who thinks of them as expendable, and they journey from being thrown in the garbage to proving to themselves that maybe there is something worthy inside of them to keep fighting for. An internal battle, not a physical battle. That physical battle also happens. The heroes include Yelana Belova (see: Black Widow, Hawkeye), adopted sister of Natasha Romanoff and fellow Black Widow; Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (see: Black Widow), the Russian attempt to create their own Captain America; John Walker/U.S. Agent (see: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), America's own failed attempt to replace Captain America; and Ava Starr/Ghost (see: Ant-Man and the Wasp), a lady who can phase her body through solid objects. Also, MCU mainstay Bucky is here, because we all love Bucky. They form a unit in the loosest sense of the word, because they all are bitter people stuck with other people who are just as bitter as they are, creating a humorous personality clash. It becomes more evident that the story of the movie relies on the age-old idea of "misery loves company," as they become unexpectedly reliant on each other by film's end. Who else is going to have your back if it's not someone who understands what you're going through?
The climax of the movie compounds its themes, and we are thrust in a situation that the main characters can't punch in the face, no matter how much they want to. The movie takes a cerebral turn, as the characters battle a state-of-mind rather than a physical entity, and it's something that feeds on aggression and grows weaker with outside support. It's a spectacle in its own way, and those who need top-to-bottom fisticuffs in their action adventures might be disappointed in it. The right people will understand it. The right people will identify with it. A Marvel movie has been made where the solution isn't kicking really hard or blowing something up. A Marvel movie has been made with a thematic climax of therapeutic embrace and support, promising that one might be the sum of their worst mistakes, but a real hero lives with them and moves forward. Without spoiling anything, I love the fate of the film's antagonist, because it's such a hopeful outcome for such a dark storyline.
Gripes can only be minor. The movie's break neck pace is a bit of a disservice to some elements, and the quips sometimes fly at awkward times and fail to land. Also, one character in particular is done so dirty in this movie, and I am kinda peeved about it. It doesn't off-set what is a mostly spectacular experience, which is destined to be in a rotation of superhero comfort watches. It's the most entertaining MCU film since Multiverse of Madness, the most thematically resonate one since Wakanda Forever, and probably my favorite one since Infinity War. It's presumptuous to say "Marvel is BACK!," but I'm always pleased to know that they can still create a good time.
Until Dawn ⭐️1/2
Warfare ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Digital
Day of Reckoning ⭐️⭐️1/2
Death of a Unicorn ⭐️⭐️1/2
Drop ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Physical
Anora ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Last Breath ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Paddington in Peru ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Star Trek: Section 31 ⭐️1/2
Coming Soon!
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