Monday, October 27, 2025

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 43 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness


Blue Moon
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Richard Linklater
Starring:  Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott


Blue Moon is a single-set performance and monologue drama that centers on Lorenz Hart, the former partner of Richard Rodgers before his teaming up with Oscar Hammerstein II for a very illustrious career, who helped Rodgers write songs like My Funny Valentine, Manhattan, and, of course, Blue Moon.  The film sees Hart months before his death, hanging around a hotel bar and discussing life, sex, and his faltering career with the people who come and go, while his partner is celebrating the release of Oklahoma!, the greatest success of his career.  The movie is largely an excuse for Ethan Hawke to disappear into his role and try to turn heads during award season.  Hawke is really good here, playing Hart with flaming flamboyance, being a petty little bitch with criticism, performativly positive when he needs to be, acting like a desperate dumped girlfriend when he's around his former partner, and fawning over newfound muse Margaret Qualley (can relate).  If there is any fault to the production it's that it's fully transparent that it's a one man show and there is little room for anybody else to shine.  Occasionally, someone gets an amusing one-liner and Qualley is in full heartbreaker mode (which I feel comes naturally to her), but Hawke kind of bullies everyone else off-screen with his presence.  Because of that, the movie has little value outside of admiring Hawke, but it's a good showcase for a quality performance.


Frankenstein
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Horror, Science Fiction
Director:  Guillermo del Toro
Starring:  Oscar Issac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christopher Waltz, Charles Dance


If you were to ask me what my favorite novel was, I'd probably say Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.  This might have less to do with the text itself, as the book is little more a lengthy rant from the main character about his inner guilt and turmoil in ways that are more apt in poetry and theatricality.  Despite this, the story being told touches me emotionally in ways very few other stories do.  Because of that, I hold a lot of endearment for the text and probably will gleefully sit down for any film based upon it that gets made.  The most beloved adaptations are James Whale's 1931 film and his nutty 1935 sequel, the latter of which adapted unused portions of the book to almost create a two-part production of the novel, and the 1957 Terrence Fisher film The Curse of Frankenstein, which jumpstarted Hammer Films' reign of horror films for several decades (which included their own takes on Dracula, The Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde).  The most faithful adaptation of the book that I've personally seen is a 2004 Hallmark miniseries with Donald Sutherland, William Hurt, Luke Goss and a young, pre-Downton Abbey Dan Stevens (and, of MST3K note, it was directed by The Land That Time Forgot and At the Earth's Core director Kevin Connor).  It's very much a Hallmark production, taking both the positive and negative of that, but if you want something that hits close to every beat of the source material (if embellished, as the book is limited to very few perspectives and they had to fill four hours of airtime), this is the one to watch.  The most faithful that was actually a theatrical movie was Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is a much more grandiose production in Branagh's go-big-or-go-home style.  He certainly went for it.  I choose not to comment on whether he succeeded, though I confess a soft spot for the large-and-in-charge grotesque Shakespearian tragedy take.  Say what you will about this movie, Branagh didn't half-ass a single second of it.


But most people these days probably just watch Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein and call it good.  I don't blame them, because that movie is great, though that film is a parody of a very specific Frankenstein movie, 1939's Son of Frankenstein, so you're missing out on half the jokes if you haven't at least seen the Karloff films.  And just the tip of the iceberg if we're discussing comedies based on the story, from Abbott and Costello
Meet Frankenstein to Frankenhooker, right up to last year's Lisa Frankenstein.  It's a rich film history based on this one little story a woman wrote on a dare two hundred years ago.

And now, Guillermo del Toro is directing one.  Hook this movie into my veins right fucking now.

Del Toro is one of the most unique monster movie filmmakers to have ever graced this planet, taking the framing device of a strange, violent creature's personal history of tragedy and taking it to its maximum level of sympathetic light, turning the grotesque and strange into something sad and beautiful.  This framing device that he has spent decades mastering is absolutely perfect for the story of Frankenstein, which has always been a story of a monster that was created through the cruelty of the world around him.  My one hesitance about letting him go wild with the story is that this seems to be a passion project for him and, from my experience, I should always be weary of that.  That last time a monster story I cared about was handed to a big director for a "passion project" was Peter Jackson's King Kong, which was a lot of muchness to the point that, while it's technically good, I actually began to find it somewhat obnoxious while watching it.  I don't think there was a movie this year that I was rooting for harder than this movie.  I wanted Del Toro and Frankenstein to be an absolute perfect marriage.

I will settle for imperfection, especially if the experience is this exquisite.  While flawed, Del Toro's Frankenstein is a rousing, haunting, beautiful success that reinforces how much I love this story.

Those expecting a true adaptation of the novel will leave disappointed.  Del Toro took the basic synopsis but spun it in his own web.  I could list numerous differences from the book, a lot of which I don't think are necessarily improvements but are certainly interesting takes on this oft-told material.  To be frank, both James Whale and Terrence Fisher's productions were also loose adaptations and have both gone on to be classics that stand on their own.  I'm perfectly willing to accept Del Toro's movie on its own terms because he has his own sensibilities.  It's clear very early on that Del Toro wants to tell a story where Victor is the clear-cut villain of the movie, while nearly every vicious decision the Monster does in his rage has been excised.  That goes back to Del Toro's tendency to sympathize with the monsters in his movies, wanting to double down on the story being the tragic tale of an abused child who just wanted to be loved.  He also romanticizes the Monster.  Not to the extent that he does in The Shape of Water, but he has a slight romance with Elizabeth that was not on my Bingo card for this movie.  Traditionally, Elizabeth doesn't meet the Monster until her final scene, while in Del Toro's version, she helps care for him while Victor is failing to be patient with him.  I found this romantic idea a little off-putting, if I'm being honest, because Elizabeth and the Monster's early scenes seem maternal, as if Elizabeth is evoking the role of Victor's loving mother from the prologue while Victor is becoming cold and harsh like his own father.  Underlining a romantic undercurrent between the two seems like it's recontextualizing those scenes in a way that hurts the film.

Bringing up both book divergence and Elizabeth, her role in the story is entirely re-written.  I suppose this doesn't matter.  Elizabeth is traditionally something of a generic fretting love interest who meets a fate that furthers Victor's guilt and sorrow, and by completely reinventing her they give her more power and control over the story.  Additionally, Victor's brother William is entirely re-written alongside her, no longer a child that is murdered by the Monster, becoming Elizabeth's fiancée while Victor is too obsessed with his work to get laid.  Victor does become infatuated with Elizabeth, though it proves to be one-sided, making this quite possibly the only adaptation where Elizabeth hates Victor.

Additionally, minor roles like Henry and Justine were eliminated entirely.  Since Del Toro has shed most of the Monster's personal guilty deeds in the story, they really had no role left to play, so I suppose this is understandable.  Justine, in particular, has practically zero relevance on the remodeled story since William's character has been changed so drastically.  One character has been added in their stead, Henrich Harlander, played by Christoph Waltz.  I will be honest, while Waltz is good here, he is a bit underutilized.  Henrich's character mostly exists to be a benefactor for Victor, explaining his resources for the creation of the Monster.  Once his role in story is fulfilled, he is swiftly discarded because there is nothing left for him to do.  There have been similar characters that have filled a sort of "Doctor Pretorius" role for Victor across many adaptations.  Most find ways to keep them relevant until the end of the story.  This version just kind of tosses him in the garbage can.  I did find it kind of funny that his ultimate goal was the same as Ygor's goal in 1942's Ghost of Frankenstein, but that's about the most that I took from the role.  Between that and the weak romance, those are the biggest knocks I have on the movie.

Del Toro is most in his element when the focus of the movie is on the Monster.  When it comes time to tell the creature's tale away from Victor, hidden in the wilderness and befriending a blind man, the movie is touching and breathtaking, with some of the best sequences in any movie this year.  Del Toro's tender touch for the shunned outsider is exquisite and heart-wrenching.  Victor's side of the story feels like it suffers because Del Toro's take on the character is so reviling and Victor is so singular-minded with little connection to any other character that the film can be frustrating to watch, by design.  We're supposed to want to be with the Monster because Victor is the larger evil:  a man of reckless ambition who refused responsibility of his endeavors and what spawned from them.  Also known as a shit father.  Is this movie about daddy issues?  Maybe.  But maybe all Frankenstein stories are about daddy issues.

Since this is a Del Toro production, there are technical details that should go without saying.  The set design is outstanding.  The costumes are gorgeous.  The cinematography is some of the most breathtaking you'll ever see.  Alexandre Desplat's score is a wonderful accompaniment.  As a work of art, the movie is a visual stimulus.

I think the stories of both Dracula and Frankenstein have both achieved this status where every generation deserves their own definitive film adaptations, like a Gothic A Star Is Born.  Ideally, they come in pairs, like in the 1930's, 50's, and 90's, though there doesn't seem like there's a Dracula movie on the horizon anytime soon.  However, we did have Nosferatu last year, which is pretty much just Dracula with all the names scratched out, so we can just count that as this generation's Dracula adaptation to pair with Del Toro's Frankenstein.  This won't be the last Frankenstein movie, and Nosferatu won't be the last Dracula movie.  I look forward to seeing what filmmakers in thirty years time will bring to both these stories.  In the meantime, I'm happy to see my favorite novel brought to life by one of my favorite filmmakers.  But I am fortuitous in that this book has has so many talents that took such an interest in it, from Whale to Fisher and, yes, even Branagh.  Hell, even Ishiro Honda made a Frankenstein movie.  In that one, the Monster fought a giant firebreathing dinosaur.  There's nothing in Del Toro's movie that is as awesome as that, but it's pretty good, I guess.


Last Days
⭐️
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Justin Lin
Starring:  Sky Yang, Radhika Apte, Ken Leung, Toby Wallace, Naveen Andrews


Justin Lin wasn't always an action movie director.  He initially made a name for himself with a critically acclaimed crime drama called Better Luck Tomorrow, and he just kinda got cornered by the Fast & Furious franchise for most of his remaining career.  Now he tries to return to his roots with a drama called Last Days, chronicling the true story of John Allen Chau, a mercenary who died trying to bring Christianity to the isolated tribe of North Sentinel islanders.  I have a soft spot for Justin Lin, if for no other reason than I think both Fast & Furious 6 and Star Trek Beyond are ridiculously entertaining.  Watching him drown in melodrama with Last Days is really testing that.  Ultimately, Lin is telling an subjective story that's trying to humanize someone who made a series of rash, delusional decisions that cost him his own life.  The story being told is hard to sympathize with, as much as Lin tries to empathize Chau.  The more the movie tries to rationalize him, the worse his choices seem.  Furthermore, ignoring the questionable story, Last Days isn't a very compellingly told drama.  It's dreary and melancholy, also weirdly sentimental at times, as if Lin finds this story inspirational, somehow.  The mishmash tone is odd and off-putting.  But then again, the story is odd and off-putting.  Comparatively, last week we had the movie Urchin, which was a story of someone who was in a self-induced spiral being portrayed through a neutral observer lens.  That was more compelling because the main character was a subject of study that we were to try to understand, not get emotionally connected to.  It's not easy to make a movie based on someone who made terrible life decisions and treat it with full reverence.  Unfortunately, Lin proves that you probably shouldn't.


Regretting You
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Drama, Romance
Director:  Josh Boone
Starring:  Allison Williams, Mckenna Grace, Dave Franco, Mason Thames, Scott Eastwood, Willa Fitzgerald, Clancy Brown


Fuck yeah!  It's a Colleen Hoover novel adaptation!  The last time this happened, everyone involved wound up suing each other and we ended up with hot tabloid goss for an entire year!  By all means, let's do another one!

Thoroughly for Hoover fans and romcom enthusiasts (of which I am neither, but will try to stay as neutral as possible), Regretting You centers on Allison Williams, who finds out her sister and husband were having an affair after they have both been killed in a car accident.  She tries to keep the newfound information from spoiling daughter Mckenna Grace's perfect image of her aunt, who wrestles with the aftermath while finding a relationship blossoming with classmate Mason Thames, who may or may not be with his on-and-off girlfriend (who is never present in the movie, for some weird reason).  Meanwhile, Williams' emotions become even more complicated as she confronts her feelings for her sister's husband, Dave Franco, who is the romantic partner she felt she missed out on.  That's a lot of love triangles for one movie.  I'm sure its core audience is more than satisfied by that.  The very base ambition that the movie shoots for is to turn summer beach reading soap operatics into something housewives cuddle up in a blanket and watch when their husband is working late.  It's not much, but to say it doesn't succeed at that is a filthy lie.  If I can say anything about this movie, it would be that it's a more even production than last year's It Ends with Us.  Regretting You has (mostly) better acting and some of its levity is more than welcome.  Williams and Grace by themselves have more charisma than anybody in It Ends with Us, if I'm laying all cards on the table.  I watched the movie just fine and didn't hate it, even if I'll be more than okay with never watching it again.  There are certainly things in the movie that don't work.  The CGI de-aging is horrifically smooth in the flashbacks and everyone looks like a doll.  Mason Thames' character often reacts to situations that don't seem like default human reactions.  Dave Franco struggles hard to deliver his melodrama with any believability.  Hell, there's even a running joke with a "city limits" sign that is just dumb.  It's certainly a jumbled movie of ups and downs.  It was made for very specific people and the question is whether or not it's a quality option for them.  The answer is that quality was likely never on the menu, but that doesn't mean it won't get the job done.


Shelby Oaks
⭐️1/2
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Chris Stuckmann
Starring:  Camille Sullivan


Shelby Oaks is the long-awaited film debut of popular YouTube film critic Chris Stuckmann.  Unfortunately for Stuckmann, it's not the first horror movie by a YouTuber we've seen this year.  Hell, it's not even the second.  Not only did KallMeKris make her directorial debut with House on Eden a few months ago, we also saw the guys from RackaRacka continue their dynamite horror career with their second movie, Bring Her Back.  Consider Stuckmann's thunder officially stolen.  But Stuckmann is actually one of the least toxic, most digestable voices in the compost heap that is YouTube film discussion, and he is a noted horror film buff with some wordy, specific, and sometimes stubbornly biased and opinionated ideas of what makes a quality horror movie that he has repeated over the years.  Shelby Oaks is his chance to prove he knows what he's talking about.  After all, House on Eden was a horror movie made by a couple of people who were fucking around and just made a goofy homage movie.  Stuckmann wants Shelby Oaks to be the first step of a long-term career shift.  All I'll say is that anyone who loves M. Night Shyamalan as much as he does is someone I probably will never see eye-to-eye with on what constitutes "good horror filmmaking," but I'll hear him out.  All I need to do is enter the theater and "Get Stuckmann-ized," whatever the fuck that means.

Maybe getting "Stuckmann-ized" is being befuddled and a little bored.  If it is, I am thoroughly Stuckmann-ized right now.

Shelby Oaks starts out similarly to another horror film from a few months ago called Strange Harvest, where it seems to be setting up a documentary format of collected found footage, chronicling a group of paranormal investigator YouTubers who went missing.  This is a mislead, because it eventually cuts off as new footage is uncovered that sends the sister of one of them trying to follow the trail and find out what happened.  If I were to be frank, the premise of this movie feels like Stuckmann trying to do the sequel to The Blair Witch Project that Adam Wingard thought he was making in 2016, with family members following the lead of the infamous found footage and entering into the horror themselves.  This is also kinda what happens in Book of Shadows:  Blair Witch 2 where it's a bunch of kids who saw the movie and go where it took place where spooky shit happens.  Stuckmann takes this idea that Blair Witch has been struggling with and strips it down and tries to personalize it with a single main protagonist, which is very efficient of him.  Everything else he does doesn't live up to the same efficiency.

Stuckmann has a very clear idea in his head of what he wants certain visuals to look like, so much so that it feels like he cares little for what strings them together.  Occasionally, he'll offer a shot that feels striking in a vacuum but, within the context of the movie, there is so much mundanity about how we got to this visual that it loses all effectiveness.  Writing seems a very low secondary to directing here, which is a problem if you're both the writer and the director.  So much of this movie rides on star Camille Sullivan's shoulders because we're solely focused on her but when it comes to actually giving her a character, all we really have to go on is a motive.  Otherwise, the only thing Stuckmann asks Sullivan to do is look into darkness and do shuddered breathing noises.  Stuckmann really loves shots of her looking at the camera and doing shuddered breathing noises.  It starts to feel like a fetish at some point.  And she's the most fleshed-out character.  Everyone else, and I mean everyone, is just a person for her to have a slight, melancholy exchange with for some exposition.  Her husband comes off the worst because he doesn't do anything in this movie except to sit in place with a grimace that makes him look like he has soiled himself.  He's a fucking NPC in a goddamn movie and, I gotta be honest, that's kind of unforgivable.  If your writing is so barren that you're including non-characters like this that are supposed to be an important part of your protagonist's life, you need a new draft.

This isn't even getting to the mystery that unfolds, which is just not anything worth watching.  Sullivan finds locations on her tape and she travels to them, where she stands in place and stares into darkness.  This isn't a properly functioning narrative.  Sullivan just stumbles into new settings and, instead of finding anything new, it feels like she encounters the same shit:  a void of darkness for her to shudder into, a pair of sparkly demon eyes, and sometimes a CGI wolf, for some reason.  The experience of the story of this movie is that of a free demo horror game on Steam where it's just the player wandering around in the woods with a flashlight waiting for Slender Man to pop out and stare at them.

Then there is the finale, which Stuckmann seems to be getting the most flack for.  Honestly, I think the movie has bigger problems than this but it is a bit underwhelming.  Shelby Oaks seemingly wants to end both ambiguously and with finality at the same time.  If nothing else, I admire that the movie wants to bring about closure to its narrative with a dreadful openness to the bigger picture, not unlike The Omen.  I think the problem is that there is such a vagueness still hanging over to what is actually happening that certain plot threads don't feel paid off and the movie almost seems in a panic as to what to conclude and what to leave up in the air.  It feels clunky and you almost wish the movie would just stop for a second, take a breath, and regroup, think this shit out.  Instead, it just jumps out of a window and screams on the way down.  Both figuratively and literally.

These are all the functional flaws that were bothering me about this movie.  I could do a deep dive on nit-picks of certain little touches that make the movie feel artificial and lifeless.  To be honest, I already feel like I've spent way too much time thinking about this movie and I could be talking about Frankenstein some more instead.  I'm just going to throw my hands up and say "Didn't like it."  The sad truth is that of all the horror movies made by YouTubers this year, even though we can all agree that Bring Her Back was easily the best (even Stuckmann is probably nodding his head), I might have actually enjoyed House on Eden more than Shelby Oaks.  Shelby Oaks takes more swings but, as little ambition as House on Eden had, it barely met its low goals.  Shelby Oaks is a lot of high hopes for shooting in the dark.

Stuckmann has a loyal following that has already generated a decent amount of homebrew hype around the movie, to the point that even the lukewarm reviews seem to be trying to declare him an "exciting new voice in horror" even if they didn't care for the movie.  I have a hard time believing this would be the case if he weren't already an internet petsonality.  I have nothing against Stuckmann but it's more productive to not kiss his ass and tell him my genuine thoughts about the movie he made.  And, frankly, Shelby Oaks is the same type of horror film I've seen from many directors who cut their teeth on the genre and disappear into the night without making an impact.  And I don't want to say this because I was genuinely hoping this movie would work out for him.  It seemed like it would have been a nice, inspiring end to his unique personal journey.  But I've seen Stuckmann videos where he has savaged movies for making less than half the mistakes he makes here, and I want to chalk this up to amateur status but that makes it sound like has learned nothing from the film criticism he has performed for over a decade.  I am honestly shocked that this specific journey resulted in this specific movie.  The more I think about Stuckmann's journey to this point, the more it seems like the lesson to be taken from it is that it's easy to criticize art but it's hard to make it.  That's not me being a shit, that's just me trying to wrap my head around how this movie exists as it is coming from this specific artist.  If anything, I sympathize with it as someone who dabs in writing and also puts my thoughts of films onto the internet.

Here's the thing, though:  as belittling as all of this might sound, Stuckmann did take the leap, got his movie funded, and made it.  He is now a director, and a negative response to his first movie isn't going to change that.  What I want right now is to see him make another one and change my mind.  I hope he does.


Springsteen:  Deliver Me from Nowhere
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Scott Cooper
Starring:  Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Odessa Young


Oh boy.  It's time for the annual award season biopic based on a musician.  Couldn't we just pretend Blue Moon was it?  But I guess we need this year's Oscar nominee for cowards, where someone like Timothée Chalamet straps a guitar to his back and puts on a forced voice so assholes in their seventies stand up and cheer "BRILLIANT!"

Yes, I have a chip on my shoulder about nothing performances like that pushing out actual resonating performers every year.  I will die on this hill.

I'm going to do the same song and dance I do every time a biopic like this comes out.  I don't know music.  I've heard the name Bruce Springsteen, but I don't know nor care what songs I've heard that he has written and/or performed, so I'm not familiar with any of this.  The chosen one for this biopic that is hoping for Oscar contention is Jeremy Allen White, who most everybody knows from The Bear.  I love The Bear and quite like Allen White.  While he plays Springsteen with intensity, I don't think there is enough here for anybody to take notice of him.  He commits to the film but he very much just looks like Carmy from The Bear in Springsteen cosplay.  But overall, the acting is good, but the story feels fragmented.  I never felt like I was witnessing a whole movie, just flash cards with pictures on them being drawn and set on a table.  The movie will depict one thing, then forget about it for a while with no clear fluidity of how its relevant, then switch to something entirely different and do the same thing.  The connective tissue is Springsteen struggling through a creative process, which is an okay throughline but also creatively frustrating itself.  The major theme is Springsteen sinking into depression, letting it affect his work and relationships, intermixed with slight flashbacks of a drunk father which feel like they could have come from any movie.  The film's final message is "Men need therapy."  I don't disagree.  Maybe some Springsteen fans need therapy.  I hope this movie helps them with that.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater
After the Hunt ⭐️⭐️
Black Phone 2 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Corpse Bride ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Good Boy ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Good Fortune ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The Long Walk ⭐️⭐️⭐️
One Battle After Another ⭐️⭐️1/2
Pets on a Train ⭐️⭐️
Roofman ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Truth & Treason ⭐️⭐️1/2
Tron:  Ares ⭐️⭐️

New To Digital
Afterburn ⭐️⭐️1/2
Dead of Winter ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Good Boy ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Long Walk ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Roses ⭐️⭐️⭐️

New To Physical
Eddington ⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!

Monday, October 20, 2025

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 42 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness


After the Hunt
⭐️⭐️
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Luca Guadagnino
Starring:  Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny


Luca Guadagnino is back and this time he's mad at zoomers, maybe.  It's hard to tell, really.  After the Hunt is a drama about shifting generational sensibilities, told from the perspective of Gen Z representative Ayo Edebiri, resident Millennial Andrew Garfield, and Gen X princess Julia Roberts.  Edebiri is a college student who is sexually assaulted by Garfield.  She tries to confide in Roberts, who isn't as sympathetic to her plight as she assumed she would be.  This mostly comes in the form of Roberts having conversations of "You kids today with your trauma and nonbinaries.  Back in my day, we took our molestation in stride and bore our cleavage with pride."  To be fair, I don't think this movie wants to be a film making fun of a more "snowflake" next generation but rather a film that looks at the feminist struggle in a patriarchy from across a generational gap from Gen X to Z.  Roberts' character comes from a generation of feminism that won small victories, lived her life in a far harsher climate, and worked hard to make something of herself in it, while Edebiri is from one that wants the world to be more balanced, which Roberts might feel belittled by so she feels the need to belittle Edebiri for having it easy in a world her generation's feminism built.  That's what I think the movie is supposed to be.  It's just kind of bitchy and whiney.  The movie wants to be topical and cutting edge but it's doing it through stale talking points picked up from social media and pretending they're the pinnacle of academic debate.  A lot of presented dialogue is rage-baiting and lamenting that the next generation has different sensibilities.  Basically, this is a movie about being pissed about change in a package that's trying to be a hot button discussion piece.  I don't really have much to discuss about it, unless we want to talk about how underwhelming and tacked on that ending was.


Black Phone 2
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Scott Derrekson
Starring:  Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Demián Bichir


Any jackass can make a cheap horror movie and churn a profit, but you know your horror movie has struck a chord if it becomes a sleeper hit, opening well and having continued business as word of mouth spreads.  A decent example of these sleeper movies was 2021's The Black Phone, which became a beloved minor gem in horror circles almost instantly.  Despite that film feeling like it had reached a definitive end, Black Phone 2 does the thing all horror sequels do best and resurrects a dead antagonist.  This time young spiritual psychic Gwen begins dreaming of the Grabber, who kidnapped and tried to murder her brother Finney.  Finney uses his own unique psychic gifts of conversing with the other side to communicate with the Grabber through a telephone, who threatens to murder his sister in her dreams.  It's hard not to make comparisons with the classic Nightmare on Elm Street franchise with a premise like this, so much so that it's very risky to march forward with this idea when such a bar already exists.  Black Phone 2 is no Nightmare on Elm Street, though it can be considered better than a sizable chunk of Elm Street sequels.  I'm going to call that a win.

The original Black Phone has the better story but the second might be the creepier movie.  It features more stylistic flourishes, more macabre setpieces, and is rooted in an unsettling idea that was layered underneath the traumatic ripples of a premise that seemed pretty singular at the time.  I won't lie, I kinda needed to be convinced that Black Phone 2 wasn't just a cash grab.  For the most part, they found a logical continuation of this story that even enhances the first film in retrospect, which is what a good sequel will do.  The movie is a much more stylish endeavor, especially during Gwen's dream sequences, which shifts to a much grainer, more sixteen millimeter type of film stock for a spooky effect that imitates the vibe of watching the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Evil Dead on a ratty, old VHS.  I'd say it's like handing the camera to the cinematographer of Skinamarink but this camera actually focuses on the actors and not some random wall.  The first film was more story focused, while the second seems built around setpieces of creative violence and spooks, leading up to a climax that kicks all kinds of ass.  It's a movie for those who like to revel in the grime of the horror genre, while keeping just enough of the original's heart to be called worthy of it.  That's a solid accomplishment.


Good Fortune
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Comedy, Fantasy
Director:  Aziz Ansari
Starring:  Keanu Reeves, Aziz Ansari, Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer, Sandra Oh


Aziz Ansari licks his wounds after the unfortunate collapse of what was supposed to be his directorial debut, Being Mortal, after a complaint about co-star Bill Murray's behavior caused the film to get shut down and unfinished.  Ansari starts from scratch with a different movie where he puts his own spin on the age-old It's a Wonderful Life story of devine intervention showing you that you should be thankful for what you have instead of being bitter about what you don't.  I've probably seen the trailer for Good Fortune a hundred times at the theater and I had no idea if this movie was going to be any good, but what I can tell you is that Keanu Reeves and Sandra Oh's exchange of "I tried to show him that money wouldn't solve all his problems."/"And?"/"It seems to have solved most of his problems." is probably the hardest I've laughed at any dialogue this year.

Good Fortune sees Ansari taking the main role of Arj, who is struggling to get by and questioning if his life is worth living.  A low-level angel named Gabriel, played by Keanu Reeves, sees his opportunity to make a difference in someone's life and decides to show him the stress of the wealthy by having Arj switch places with his rich former employer Jeff, played by Seth Rogen.  Things don't pan out the way Gabriel hopes and Arj doesn't learn the lesson of thankfulness he intended as Arj refuses to change reality back, leaving Jeff stuck working low-income jobs and living out of Arj's car, while Gabriel is kicked out of Heaven, forced to be bunkmates with Jeff.  As you can tell by reading that, the message of this movie isn't subtle, as the movie is basically an outcry of Millennial frustration of Reaganomics creating a monster out of American capitalism that fuels the rich and crushes the working class, while the continued shift to automation eliminates jobs that people rely on.  The movie might as well come with a bumper sticker that says "Trickle Down, my ass."

Even Gabriel the angel isn't free from his own working class reality, as he makes a play for the type of job he wants and is basically fired for not staying in his own lane.  Granted, Gabriel fucked things up royally, but he was also in a position of mundanity that had little opportunity to genuinely ascend to a higher calling that he felt he had and took a shot because he had no other promising openings.  I love Keanu Reeves' performance in this because it seems like he was sucked out of an entirely different movie, playing his role like a stage actor who specializes in hokey melodrama who wandered onto the set of an outrage comedy and is both uncomfortable and enthusiastic about it.  Ansari and Rogan are good partners for him, as he's basically a straight man for their comedy rantings who is allowed to tangent into his own separated shtick when his storyline takes precedence.

While it's easy to see what the movie is portraying, what the movie wants the audience to take away feels a little defeatist, which is the movie's most unattractive quality.  Basically, the only conclusion the movie has to any of this is that the one-percent need to stop being dicks and employees really can't do a lot about it, needing to go about their business and just hope for the best as we head toward an inevitable economic crisis.  This isn't exactly an untrue observation, just an anticlimactic one when most who empathize with this plight who might watch this movie would be desperate for more enlightenment to ease such a burdon.  There's not a very resonate moral to this movie, it's just screaming into the void.  But it's screaming a truth and it's doing so in a way that's often very funny, which makes it forgivable.


Pets on a Train
⭐️⭐️
Genre:  Comedy, Action, Adventure
Director:  Benoît Daffis, Jean-Christian Tassy
Starring:  (English dub) Marc Weiner, Sasha Toro, Lisa Ortiz


Speed meets Over the Hedge in this French animated comedy that was originally released overseas as Falcon Express.  I guess they thought American children need a more exact description of what they're getting, but then again Frozen wasn't titled "Magic Princess in an Ice Castle," so I'm not sure what the title change accomplishes.  A thief racoon jumps on-board a train for the heist of his lifetime, only to be betrayed by his badger partner who traps him on a runaway train.  His only hope is to team up with a police dog and the train's cargo of housepets to stop the train and reach safety.  I think the movie is meant to be Die Hard for kids.  Our main racoon character even has a moment that echoes Bruce Willis's iconic "Come on out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs..." line, and the movie also features a bad guy named "Hans," which feels like it can't be a coincidence.  It doesn't achieve its ambition because the attempts at exhilarating action are hampered by limited animation that can't make the scenario exciting enough to pay off its premise.  Additionally, the comedy is more rambunctious than actually funny, not helped by a mediocre dub that feels emotionally detached from the actual movie that's playing.  With the two primary elements failing to take hold, the film is not a particularly investing watch, even if it is harmless and safe to watch with very young children.  I doubt the film will be one they watch over and over again, though.  But, if you're a parent, that might be a blessing in disguise.


Truth & Treason
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Matt Whitaker
Starring:  Ewan Horrocks, Ferdinand McKay, Daf Thomas, Nye Occomore, Rupert Evans


Goddammit.  It's an Angel Studios film.  Will anybody blame me if I skip this one?  I already watched Soul on Fire last week.  Granted, that was a Sony movie, but it was so much out of Angel Studios' textbook that I don't think I can do this crap two weeks in a row.  But, I reluctantly sat and watched Truth & Treason and was pleased to see it was an agreeable production.  Between this and Sketch, which is still the only good movie they've made, there might be hope yet for the company of pandering garbage.

Taking place in 1941 Germany, the film primarily centers on a German writer.  After one of his friends is taken by the Nazis for having Jewish lineage, he begins a secretive protest by leaving leaflets across Hamburg to combat Hitler's propaganda.  It's a story that could probably inspire a much better movie than this but given the sensibilities of the film's producers, it's surprising that it didn't come out worse.  The drama ebbs and flows, given that there are certain things that Angel Studios will shy away from to not be off-putting to its prudish fanbase who want a Schindler's List that doesn't make them upset.  Nazi Germany requires discomfort, though, and this feels sterile.  It's not without its moments of exception, where the danger of their actions finally takes shape, though the film's tone of naughty kids doing shenanigans does a disservice to it.  I wish the movie leaned more into environmental tension and played deeper into a surrounding paranoia of what their actions could bring about.  The movie's sole ambition is to depict a brave voice in the midst of an aggressive surrounding, and it does lean into its most schmaltzy tendencies of hero worship at the most cringe times.  That's just to be expected, given the people who made this, but they could have overloaded this movie with that and they didn't.  I appreciate the restraint.  Truth & Treason is one of Angel Studios' better offerings, truth be told.  It seems like it has more of an idea that drama requires actual psychological development and not just looking sad at the camera.  It's still not a great movie by any means, but if they build off the right foundations on movies like this, actually implimenting filmmaking craft instead of putting on cinematic community theater productions that are slapped together and declared "good enough," they might produce big kid movies one day.


Urchin
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Harris Dickinson
Starring:  Frank Dillane, Megan Northam, Karyna Khymchuk, Sonagh Marie. Amr Waked


This BBC production features Fear the Walking Dead's Frank Dillane as a homeless drug addict who is arrested for assault.  Upon leaving prison, Dillane begins the journey to turn his life around by keeping away from substance, getting a job, and working on his mental health, which proves to be more easily said than done.  For a while the movie feels like a sturdy inspirational climb before unraveling its real story halfway through, as Dillane begins a decline back into the person he was.  First in slight ways, such as showing little remorse for his actions, and eventually in escalation, such losing his job with little care and jumping back into a drug habit at the first opportunity.  Urchin is basically a life spiral simulator, showing the audience what it's like to try and kick the bad habits but, through both environment and self choice, becoming even more dependent on them.  The film is a solid psychological drama, only slightly missing the mark based on the fact that the psychological insight to Dillane's character isn't always apparent.  We witness him make his choices, and we understand them, mostly, though Dillane is a bit of an enigma himself.  There's not much reason to his actions except it's just what he does, and he's likely doomed to repeat this cycle more than once.  It's frustrating to watch him descend, but we're kept at arm's length and we can't help him.  If only he could help himself.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater
Casper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Good Boy ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Long Walk ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Lost Bus ⭐️⭐️⭐️
One Battle After Another ⭐️⭐️1/2
Roofman ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Smashing Machine ⭐️⭐️1/2
Tron:  Ares ⭐️⭐️

New To Digital
The Senior ⭐️⭐️

New To Physical
The Fantastic 4:  First Steps ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Weapons ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Monday, October 13, 2025

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 41 (My Cinema Playground)

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.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater
Anemone ⭐️⭐️1/2
Bone Lake ⭐️⭐️1/2
Casper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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!

Monday, October 6, 2025

Cinema Playground Journal 2025: Week 40 (My Cinema Playground)

Multiplex Madness


Anemone
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Drama
Director:  Ronan Day-Lewis
Starring:  Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton


Daniel Day-Lewis returns to the screen after a brief retirement due to good ol' fashioned nepotism, headlining this movie directed by his son, Ronan, while also helping him with the screenplay.  That screenplay sees Sean Bean raising the abandoned son of Daniel Day-Lewis, who has been living as a hermit in the Irish wilderness.  As the now teenage boy begins to lash out, Bean travels to Day-Lewis's spot in the woods to convince him to come back and see his son.  The movie is a very old fashioned stage drama made of a series of scenes of characters bitching about their trauma in closed settings.  Ronan Day-Lewis tries to make it feel bigger with directorial flair and a manipulative score that hammers the viewer psychologically, but that only makes the movie louder and more melodramatic.  It's script is an old-fashioned play to give the leads as many dramatic monologues as possible while all the added flourishes just make the film feel drawn out, which makes it also come off as a work of indulgence by two talents that are too lost in their own self-adoration to realize they've overdone it.  The thing the film is missing is that it doesn't feel like it was made for a story, it feels like it was made to spit out chewed-up drama and maybe a story, a theme, an insight, or something might happen by happenstance.  Despite this, I didn't hate it.  The idea it's trying to sell is interesting enough that even though my attention span was taking a beating, I actually maintained interest just fine.  If the movie didn't stretch itself out as much as it does, I might even have considered it a good movie.  It's well-acted and quite striking most of the time.  There are individual things about this movie that are excellent.  It's just easy to get tired of it.


Bone Lake
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Thriller
Director:  Mercedes Bryce Morgan
Starring:  Maddie Hasson, Alex Roe, Andra Nechita, Marco Pigossi


The double entendre is both intentional and very much appreciated in Bone Lake, evoking the horror fanatic's love of violence and sex all in two words.  The film sees a couple heading off to a romantic vacation at a giant rental home at Bone Lake for some down time and sexy time.  Things get upended when another couple shows up with the claim that they have booked the house, and the pair share the space, which grows more tense as the other couple's behavior starts to become out-of-line.  It took me a while to figure out why Bone Lake felt so familiar to me.  Obviously, the first thing that came to mind was Barbarian, as the set-up is very similar but Bone Lake takes the more tried path instead of upending expectations.  I also had some echoes of Heart Eyes, but I can't explain why without getting into spoilers for both movies.  Eventually, I realized that the movie was reminding me of a nearly forgotten thriller from Pitch Black director David Twohy called A Perfect Getaway, starring Timothy Olyphant and Milla Jovovich, which has some parallels.  Now, I'm not accusing Bone Lake of ripping off A Perfect Getaway because A Perfect Getaway barely made a blip on anybody's radar and it's probably unlikely that very many associated with Bone Lake have even heard of it.  I'm not even certain that A Perfect Getaway was all that original with the two couples pitted against each other narrative and there is probably another movie that did it earlier and better.  All I know is A Perfect Getaway played its reveals much better than Bone Lake.

Bone Lake wants to be a mind trip of psychological tension but it doesn't quite achieve it.  The mind games feel diluted because they're obvious from minute one.  The aggressors are very clear in this movie and the film holds no pretense of hiding it, so it becomes frustrating waiting for the protagonists to catch up with the clues that are right out in the open and a solution that should be right in front of them.  The one thing about Bone Lake is that it successfully balances both a cynicism and an optimism for romantic relationships, as our main couple are in a rut that feels like is driving them apart but as the story progresses they do lay out that they have a foundation for a healthy and trusting relationship.  But those doubts and mundanity are present and that is preyed upon, almost in a Jigsaw way to prove that their love is not "true love" by an antagonist with a chip on their shoulder.  It's a question of which aspect wins out that drives the main plot of the story and that is an exceptional idea.  It's just kind of flacid where it promises to be orgasmic.  For a movie that advertises itself as a sex-fueled thrill ride, both the sex and the thrills are surprisingly negligible.  It's fun enough, if uninspired.  But I guess not everybody gets lucky at Bone Lake.


Coyotes
⭐️⭐️
Genre:  Horror, Comedy
Director:  Colin Miniham
Starring:  Justin Long, Kate Bosworth, Mila Harris, Katherine McNamera, Brittany Allen, Kier O'Donnell, Norbet Leo Butz


Nature battles white privilege in this black comedy where a pack of coyotes descends on Hollywood Hills and begins to eat the spoiled inhabitants alive.  Off-beat horror movie mainstay Justin Long hunkers down with wife Kate Bosworth, daughter Mila Harris, and prostitute Brittany Allen to fend off the blood-thirsty beasts.  Of the things you can probably say about this movie, you can't claim that it's not handing out exactly what its selling.  The movie is primarily gore and giggles in a low budget package.  The premise largely squeezes amusement out of the idea of pampered rich people stumbling through a night of survival, though the laughs can be inconsistent.  The comedy of the movie is a mixture between rambunctious silliness, macabre black humor, and cringe awkwardness.  It almost feels as if the movie was put on by an amateur improv group.  Some of it is really funny but most of it feels like filling time however possible.  The titular coyotes themselves look fine for the most part, but they often feel too static to be a threat, which is due to the low budget limitation of barely being onscreen with any of the cast.  The movie tries to frame them as intensely as possible but they feel like they were duct taped in from a reel of stock effects footage.  Horror hounds who enjoy a little humor with their frights will find it of interest, though both the scares and the laughs feel a little half-hearted.


Good Boy
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Ben Leon berger
Starring:  PUPPY!  HE'S SUCH A GOOD BOY!


Another inspired take on the haunted house genre hits the cinema, as Presence told the movie from the ghost's perspective and now we has Good Boy, which tells a ghost story from a dog's perspective.  The film was shot in small chunks over four hundred days, working with the director's own dog, Indy, hoping they'd get a workable reaction from him.  Patience is a virtue, and Good Boy is a success.  The film follows Indy as he plays the dog of a man with a chronic illness who moves out to his grandfather's "haunted house" for some peace and quiet.  Days pass by as shadowy entities begin appearing, which only Indy seems to notice.  Good Boy is a passable haunting tale with some decent shocker sequences, though it's the clever framing of Indy that cranks it up to a higher level than it would have achieved otherwise.  The film reminds me quite a bit of last year's In a Violent Nature, which took a cliched story and framed it away from where the focus would normally be.  Like In a Violent Nature, some of the exposition also suffers in Good Boy but it more successfully maintains its gimmick.  The focus being on Indy does cause the performances of its human characters to suffer, as the film is obviously ADR'd most of the time (most of the filmmaking was an effort to get the dog to do what he was supposed to do with human performance added later) and the dubbed line-reads are quite mood-draining.  Good Boy hits enough highs in the face of the faults that stem from its limitations to make it one of the more interesting movies of the year.


The Smashing Machine
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre:  Drama, Sports
Director:  Benny Sadfie
Starring:  Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, Oleksandr Usyk


The Jungle Cruise reunion we've all been demanding, sadly in a package that is not Jungle Cruise 2.  Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays real life UFC fighter Mark Kerr and Emily Blunt as his girlfriend.  He fights in the ring, they fight in the house.  He does drugs, eventually kicks them.  Comeback to glory?  Not really.  For a good deal of The Smashing Machine I was struggling with why Mark Kerr demanded a biopic.  The only conclusion I could make is that Dwayne Johnson's agent was desperate to find him a dramatic role and this was better than nothing.  It's not particularly inspiring nor did he seem to live a very interesting life.  The Smashing Machine is more-or-less about a guy who did a thing for a little while and was stressed the fuck out.  There's not really much of a story here, though there is an interesting framing device late in the movie where the film chooses to close on a shot of modern day Mark Kerr in a grocery store, living a mundane life.  Maybe it's just a story of fleeting fame, about someone who became decently known for a little bit but eventually just became a regular dude.  That's nice.  The movie still isn't much of anything, even if Johnson and Blunt are pretty good in it.  I do find it mildly amusing that Johnson is cast as Kerr in his prime thirty years ago when present day Johnson and Kerr are around the same age.  I feel that there is probably some sort of irony in ageless superstar playing an aging has-been.  I don't think the movie was smart enough to see that, though.

Netflix & Chill


V/H/S/Halloween
⭐️⭐️
Streaming On:  Shudder
Genre:  Horror, Anthology
Director:  Bryan M. Ferguson, Casper Kelly, Micheline Pitt-Norman, R.H. Norman, Alex Ross Perry, Paco Plaza, Anna Zlokovic
Starring:  David Haydn, Samantha Cochran, Natalia Montgomery, Teo Planell, María Romanilos, Ismael Martínez, Lawson Greyson, Riley Nottingham, Jenna Hogan, Jake Ellsworth, Stephen Gurewitz, Carl William Garrison, Jeff Harms, Noah Diamond, Sarah Nicklin, Rick Baker


To paraphrase that tagline that Lionsgate used to remind the world that they were milking a franchise, "If it's Halloween, it must be V/H/S."  Shudder has now released five V/H/S films annually every October since 2021, bringing the found footage anthology's total to eight films, ten if you include spin-off films, and will be twelve in a few weeks if you include the Black Phone movies, which are unofficially considered "same universe" as Scott Derrickson's V/H/S/85 segment.  This year's offering tasks its staff of horror filmmakers to create short films that fall on everyone's favorite night of fright, Halloween.  The only established horror name of note in the pool this time is Paco Plaza, who directed the first three [REC] films and was arguably someone who utilized found footage more effectively than any other filmmaker back in the day.  However, the most prolific filmmaker on the team is Alex Ross Perry, who is best known for indie dramas and documentaries.  I don't know what convinced him to play in V/H/S/land but the more the merrier.

A lot of the segments this year are more off-beat than horrifying.  The only ones that seem to aim to disturb are the offerings of Plaza and Perry, the former telling a Spanish tale of a police investigation of a teenage Halloween party gone horribly wrong and the latter about a mysterious child murderer who may be on the prowl on Halloween night.  Perry's sketch might be the best made of the bunch, though I'd consider the most entertaining to be a goofy tale about "too old for this" trick-'r-treaters who don't adhere to "One Per Person" sign and get locked in a factory that threatens to chop them all up into candy.  Admittedly, this segment is probably too similar to the opener, which sees another group of teenage candy-snatchers that get trapped into a spooky house with a scary mother and her creepy children.  This one has some kickass imagery in it, though I'll admit that the premise drifts into a strange lore territory that doesn't hit for me.  It does, however, house the most curious line of the film, where they wander into the dilapidated house and one of the girls growls "This is a health hazard!  You're going to get another fungal infection!"  The remaining segment is the closer, which is more carnage than story, as people put on a haunted house only to get stuck in a horror labyrinth that kills everyone in gruesome ways.  Even the children get on-screen, gory fatalities in this one.  The wraparound are about a cola company testing out a new beverage, which kills people in horrific ways.

V/H/S has never been the most consistent horror franchise, which is probably natural as it's just a series of small productions that have been stitched together and they're always going to vary in quality, pacing, and even tone.  But that's always the exciting thing about anthologies as they're always something new every twenty minutes.  V/H/S/Halloween is probably the weakest of Shudder's exclusive run with the series, though it is still a step above the original trilogy weak link, V/H/S:  Viral, so take comfort in knowing that this group of okay offerings probably won't kill the series.  It's unfortunate that the idealized holiday didn't bring about more inspiration, which makes this one feel a bit more of a letdown, though entertainment value does surface.

Movies Still Playing At My Theater
Avatar:  The Way of Water ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Casper ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Dead of Winter ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Long Walk ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Lost Bus ⭐️⭐️⭐️
One Battle After Another ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Senior ⭐️⭐️

New To Digital
Caught Stealing ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Primitive War ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Threesome ⭐️⭐️1/2
The Toxic Avenger ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Twinless ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

New To Physical
The Life of Chuck ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Coming Soon!