Multiplex Madness
Insidious: Out of the Further
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Horror
Director: Jacob Chase
Starring: Amelia Eve, Brandon Perea, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Lin Shaye
My confession is that I hadn't seen all the Insidious movies until this week. I tried to grind them when the fifth one came out, but only had time for the first two. Well, most of the first two. I didn't finish the second one, but I got ten minutes away from the end and just ran out of time. I'm pretty sure I could guess how it ended, though. But this time I was determined to finish the Insidious journey and watched the third and fourth movies, which I did complete. And yet, I still haven't watched the last ten minutes of the second one. It's always nagged at me that I never watched this series in full, because I legitimately always thought the first one was pretty good. Then sequels came out and they just slipped my mind. My conclusive thoughts on the Insidious series is that it's surprisingly melodramatic, especially when you get to the ones where Lin Shaye is the headliner. Shaye is a good actress, but the movies always give her big walls of dialogue for her to deliver with theatrical sadness in her eyes. This is especially true of the fourth movie, which feels like it was written around monologues that they wanted to give her. The horror elements are usually creative and fun enough to counter, but this franchise is usually a weird mixture of playfulness and a stone face.
But, long story short, I missed out on the Insidious series for all these years. Turns out I didn't miss much.
Anyway, this sixth film revolves around a dentist who finds that she has a special link to "the Further," that spiritual realm where all the scary spooks live in. There is also a malevolent force inside it that wishes to use her connection to help all the ghost people escape into the real world and create havoc. I like this story. At the heart of it is that theme of paternal bonds that all the Insidious movies have, even if its themes of generational trauma echo the fourth film more than I think it realizes, but it's a solid and sturdy script. It's pretty definitively the best Insidious movie since the first one. It has the best balance between the horror story and the personal drama, without falling into the familiar traps of being too convoluted for the former and too overbearing on the latter. These things especially hurt the last two movies in this series.
The one let down is that the movie isn't as "scary" as the other films in the franchise. There are scenes of discomfort, and one lengthy scene that has the sole aim of just being gross, but it's not as creative as the other films in this series when it comes to trying to unsettle the audience. For a good long while, this movie doesn't have a big suspense setpiece that makes you lean forward in anticipation. In the home stretch, it starts to fuse typical Insidious spookies with Evil Dead insanity, causing one to wonder where this spirit was the whole time. I'm going to forgive this because I think, as a whole, this movie has more going for it than the other sequels, but the original is still the only film in this series that got the balance right.
The Magic Faraway Tree
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Fantasy
Director: Ben Gregor
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Nonso Anozie, Nicola Coughlan, Jessica Gunning, Jennifer Saunders, Rebecca Ferguson
Based on the classic children's book series, Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy play a pair of unemployed parents who take their family out to the countryside to start a tomato farm. As their trio of city kids adjust to the simple life, they discover a tree in the woods that leads to a magical lands in the sky. The Magic Faraway Tree is pure flamboyant British whimsy, with little reason to be purely cinematic cotton candy other than because it can and you're powerless to stop it. All the set-design is sumptuous and all the costumes look ridiculous, while both are fulfilled by a game cast who are ready to fill the screen with their over-the-top, giggling personas. The moral of the story is basically escaping the bubble of indoor tech and learning to play outside, which is both simple and obvious. It delivers it with warmth and cheer, making this a quality option for any family.
Mutiny
⭐️1/2
Genre: Action
Director: Jean-François Richet
Starring: Jason Statham, Annabelle Wallis, Roland Møller, Adrian Lester
Traditionally, a mutiny takes place when a crew strips command away from their ranking officer and takes a station or vessel for their own intent. That doesn't happen in this movie. I'm not sure if the people who made it thought a mutiny was just taking over a boat, but it takes balls to make a movie called "Mutiny" that doesn't actually have a mutiny. What actually does happen in this movie is that Statham is framed for murder, and his search for answers leads to a container ship, where he does Jason Statham things to bad people who are human trafficking. If one wants to get into the minor details, Annabelle Wallis is a person in the command chain on the ship and she helps Statham, so technically she's committing mutiny, but it's also kind of a paltry mutiny. Statham's the one doing most of the work.
But we all come to a Jason Statham movie to see Jason Statham bruise some balls. Can the action in Mutiny save the fact that it's a conceptual mishap? Mutiny is pretty bottom-tier Statham. The plot is meandering and clumsy, as Statham just runs around saving people, abandoning them, saving them again, abandoning them again, only to save them fully in the climax. It's not a thrilling story by any means. The action is pretty solid when the movie decides to get dirty, and Statham doesn't disappoint. You get to see him pick up an ax, a crate hook, and harpoon gun, and that's when you know you're about to see some quality violence. But for a movie with a script this thin, there needs to be more. This needs to go full Die Hard (or even Under Seige) to make it exciting. There is not enough event on that boat to film a whole movie around, which makes you wonder why they didn't just actually make a movie about a mutiny.
Spa Weekend
⭐️1/2
Genre: Comedy
Director: Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
Starring: Leslie Mann, Isla Fisher, Michelle Buteau, Anna Faris, Adam Demos
Hoping to attract all the ladies having a girl's night this week is Spa Weekend, a comedy featuring a group of lifelong besties hoping to relax on a weekend that becomes more chaotic as their one friend who doesn't have her shit together shows up. While I was open to letting this movie just do its thing, ultimately Spa Weekend was a bit of a drag. Nothing about it has any flow to it, and most of its plot beats feel performative and manufactured, right down to our lead having a love interest whose only personality is to be generic perfect guy. Even the comedy suffers because of this. There is a very plastic way all the jokes are delivered in this movie and it stresses me out. Spa weekends shouldn't raise my blood pressure. Everyone is doing their best in trying to improve their script by improvising most of their lines, but editing them all together is a janky experience of people saying weird dialogue in a vacuum. But if I were to give credit to one performer, it would be Isla Fisher. She storms in with a Peg Bundy wardrobe and plays every scene way larger than she needs to. Sometimes she overwhelms the movie, but a lot of the scenes she's in kinda need a big presence like hers to kick it in the ass. There's a scene where she disrupts a group meditation that is pretty fun. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it's easily the best scene in the movie. The movie is painless fluff, but it's not the joyful good time it wants to be. One scenery-chewing performance can't overturn such a flimsy production.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Starring: Hannah Einbinder, Gillian Anderson, Jack Haven, Patrick Fischler
I had to play a Where's Waldo? game to find this movie in my area. My normal theater has been advertising it extensively, but that doesn't always mean they're showing smaller movies like this. Sometimes they pick them up a week or two later to fill screens, but it also isn't a guarantee. This might be partially because Spider-Man is still a guaranteed theater filler, but I'd rather blame a bad movie than a good one. My theater played that stupid Elijah Peel movie last week but they wouldn't put up Camp Miasma. That's bullshit.
From I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is yet another allegorical queer film meshed with meta homage to the type of media they consumed during their formative years. This one is inspired by 80's slasher movies, mostly the Friday the 13th franchise and a dash of Sleepaway Camp, telling the story of a young director hired to helm a reboot of the fictional Camp Miasma franchise. Her quest for a new approach to the tired slasher story leads her to the doorstep of the original "final girl" star of the first film, played by Gillian Anderson. And no, the fact that Anderson is in this film while her series The X-Files was obviously a strong influence on I Saw the TV Glow was not lost on me.
The film is another tour of the psychological effect media has on those who view it during their formative years, and, as the title implies, this one is more specifically focused on sexuality. And what a better way to express sexuality than what Joe Bob Briggs refers to the "blood, breasts, and beasts" of 80's horror. A lot of 80's teen sexuality is linked to that culture, from making out in a theater to watching people do it on-screen before they get killed, and bringing it all together as a bizarre sexual awakening. The killer's name in the Camp Miasma franchise is "Little Death," which is derived from a French nickname for an orgasm. This is very intentional, becoming a heavy metaphor that drives the third act of the film.
As smart and as interesting as this film can get, it never replicates that crawling-into-your skin energy of I Saw the TV Glow. But it's also very clearly the same creative force pushing for something equally provocative. The movie is a very specific expression from a very specific artist, albeit one that has less power behind it than their previous film. The film is flooded with an LGBTQ identity, and even a good chunk of the film's cast identify as queer in one way or another. Gillian Anderson is also having the time of her life performing in this movie that drives itself against the grain of the hetero-normative cinema experience, and she spends most of the movie overwhelming it with her character. Sometimes it struggles infusing that queer identity into its homage of Friday the 13th, as the queer Sleepaway Camp elements don't blend seamlessly with the more popular slasher franchise. It's doesn't resonate with me as strongly as Schoenbrun's previous film, but it's one that is still worth combing through to see what you can find in it. And it would probably make an interesting double feature with fellow slasher deconstruction In a Violent Nature, if one were so inclined.
I also felt like lighting a cigarette when it was done with me, so it did something right.
Tony
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Drama
Director: Matt Johnson
Starring: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Dagmara Domińcyk, Rich Sommer, Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall
Popular chef and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain is the subject of this latest biodrama, which sees a young and petulant failed writer named "Tony" following a girl to Massachusetts, only to become stranded there. With few options, he becomes a dishwasher in a restaurant ran by Antonio Banderas, who eventually allows him to work with the food, igniting his passion for cooking. The movie feels like a good serving of a story about figuring out what one's purpose in life is, though I feel it's a bit too casual to actually hit. While we do spend a lot of time with these characters, sometimes it feels like their development happens off-camera. The movie wants us to read the eyes of the actors more than it wants to tell us what their thinking, which can be virtuous when it when it doesn't stumble upon expressing that adequately. Still, it's an interesting biopic, and it will be of interest to kitchen-philes. Bourdain was an interesting guy, though this movie is only just a taste of what made him worth knowing about.
Movies Still Playing At My Theater
The Brink of War ⭐️⭐️
The End of Oak Street ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Fast and the Furious ⭐️1/2
The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2
Spider-Man: Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Digital
Toy Story 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
New To Physical
Backrooms ⭐️⭐️
Coming Soon!
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