Multiplex Madness
Crawlers
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Horror
Director: Angel Gómez Hernández
Starring: Matilda Lutz, Gregg Sulkin, William Miller, Melina Matthews
If one is looking for a killer spider movie, Crawlers is at least a better watch than last month's Don't Move. This time, the creepy crawlies take over an apartment building, preying on the people inside. There's not much more to it than that, as the characters have very limited roles and the cause of sudden spider population is left unexplored. With such an empty script, Crawlers can come off as a themed demo reel for its filmmakers. It's a good-looking movie that seems written only to enhance visual ideas. One could argue that Sam Raimi did that with Evil Dead, though Evil Dead was at least something that was successfully unhinged and unnerving. Crawlers is a more chaotic experience. It will try to strike a nerve and stop abruptly, sometimes feeling like pieces are missing in the narrative. Meanwhile, the spiders are plentiful, if inconsistent, acting differently based on what the scene wants them to do. They'll attack slowly if the film wants suspense, they'll attack quickly if the movie just wants to move on, sometimes they'll ignore people for no reason, and sometimes they cluster up and create tidal waves of their bodies, like an arachnid World War Z. The film has no interest in characterization, which will either be a detraction or a virtue, depending on how you like your monster movies. Humans are either cowardly screaming victims or our lead heroine, who gets to spend the climax in S&M latex for protection. This is either something the director thought looked cool or is a thinly disguised fetish. I'm not sure which. If Crawlers were a more interesting movie, I'd probably have a bolder take on that.
Sense and Sensibility
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama, Romance
Director: Georgia Oakley
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esmé Creed-Miles, Caitríona Balfe, Frank Dillane, Herbert Nordrum, George Mackay, Fiona Shaw
Hot off of last year's surprising anti-Jane Austen tirade with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life and Jane Austen's Period Drama (briefly interrupted by a Pride & Prejudice re-release) comes a brand new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Sense and Sensibility has had some loose adaptations over the years but the last time it was given a straight adaptation for theaters was in an Oscar winning film made by Ang Lee and Emma Thompson in 1995. While it has been a while, that also means the bar is pretty high for this one.
This story centers on a group of sisters forced out of their home and relocated to a cottage, where the elder sisters have traditional Jane Austen romantic complications of liking boys but getting mixed signals as to whether they are liked back, sometimes resulting public humiliation and/or a good cry. This version of Sense and Sensibility is an Austen adaptation made for the Downton Abbey audience. It doesn't do much more than a base, romantic historical piece. It's relaxing in how it doesn't try to overthink what a Jane Austen audience wants from a Jane Austen movie. That also means the movie has little zest to it, not wanting to get too fancy but accidentally skirting the edge of getting too vanilla. I wish the movie had just a little more ambition. It feels like it's trying the echo historical dramas like Hamnet with its very earthy color palette, but there feels like there is a disconnect between the source material and the film's vibe. The movie's best aspect is that it keeps its lady leads lively and witty. It helps the movie from straying into being a melodramatic self-parody. The movie's big dialogue scenes can come off as overwhelming, but tall talk about love and engagement is what the audience is here for. It's what they get.
Street Fighter
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Action, Comedy
Director: Kitao Sakurai
Starring: Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Callina Liang, Joe "Roman Reigns" Anoa'i, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Eric André, Andrew Schulz, Vidyut Jammwal, Orville Peck, Don Lee, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, Jason Momoa
This is the third attempt at a live-action Street Fighter movie, so forgive me when I say "Round Three...FIGHT!" because I can't resist. This isn't including the Japanese anime movie from 1994, which I have not seen in its entirety but heard is the best of the lot by quite a long shot. The best known one is the Jean Claude Van Damme camp classic that I quite enjoy because that flick is always a good laugh. There is also The Legend of Chun-Li, starring Smallville's Kristen Kreuk as the title character, which is a genuine contender for worst video game adaptation ever made. That is not an easy achievement because there are so many challengers. Whatever failures any potential film franchise might have, Street Fighter II is one of my favorite video games of all time. I spent hours upon hours playing that game as a child, not knowing if there was ever a Street Fighter 1 or if there would ever be a Street Fighter III and when there was a Street Fighter III, I just kept playing Street Fighter II. That assures that I will always be in attendance when a new Street Fighter movie comes out. I also played a lot of Street Fighter 6 leading up to this movie's release (my Lily will destroy you) just to make sure I was very much in a Street Fighter mood for this movie. Sadly, I have many lukewarm things to say about it. This is a movie that feels like it was given to a director who understood the assignment but also to writers who weren't told what the assignment was.
Everyone knows the story of Street Fighter. That's because Street Fighter has no story. The film lives up to this by not having a story either. There is a lot of crap in this movie. It's an assembly of a hundred plotlines strung together and bursting the seams, spilling out onto the floor in a hundred different directions. I don't think I've seen a movie have so much plot that it accidentally has no plot. There is a "World Warrior" tournament that everyone wants to partake in, but it actually doesn't matter because it's barely in the movie. Everyone is actually doing street fighting outside the tournament while almost no tournament fighting is shown at all. Ryu and Ken have a fued. M. Bison wants to steal Ryu's "Hadouken" powers so he can also have powers. Akuma is a shadow man that pops up and just wants to fight whoever wins World Warrior tournaments. Chun-Li is on a secret mission to kill M. Bison that is adjacent all of the other bullshit that is happening. Guile, Dhalsim, Dan, E. Honda, Zangeif, and Balrog are here but don't have any bearing on anything. Blanka, Cammy, and Vega do help push the movie forward in non-significant ways, but the movie is too crowded for them and they just have to make room. I long for this movie to be simpler. If they had just done a Bloodsport type movie about colorful characters in a tournament, they probably could have had something here, because a lot of the film's chosen aesthetic is on the right track. They just went way too big.
While I acknowledge that the film is a mess, I admire the hyperreality that it's trying to create. The film is a satirical parody of a Saturday morning cartoon mixed with loving homage to cinema's rich and pungent history of martial arts movies, both the best and the worst. And when I say worst, I mean bottom-of-the-barrel trash. The end result is the kitschiest, most absurd movie of the year, for better and for worse. The action scenes are very kinetic and energized. The problem is that a lot of them don't mean anything. They're just two characters in the same vicinity punching each other, and not even for a paltry reason like tournament clout. It's just action breaking up bizarre cartoon character monologues about backstories and motivation. The movie also opens with an anime prologue, which is pretty fun. It gets the movie off on the right foot before it blows out its tires and continues to floor it. I like this movie's spirit, and if it had a screenplay that supported the vibes it's throwing down, this movie could have been spectacular. Instead, it's hurtles itself off a cliff just to see if it can survive the fall. This is a fun movie to watch, it's just not a fun movie to follow.
Trust Me, I'm a Doctor
⭐️
Genre: Comedy
Director: Thane Economou
Starring: Kal Penn, Linda Hamilton, David Julian Hirsch, Abbie Cornish
To be frank, even when I was a horny teenager, I wasn't nearly as interested in Anna Nicole Smith as everyone else was. That whole airy, wistful "I'm just a girl" Barbie doll thing wears me down, no matter how shapely the body is. When she was a sex symbol, I thought nothing of her, yet she was everywhere. When she died, I felt bad for her and her family, but I still had to hear about it for years because nobody would let it be. Paparazzi was determined to wring as much coverage and scandal out of her as possible. Trust Me, I'm a Doctor reopens that wound, dramatizing the memoir of Sandeep Kapoor, who was briefly her doctor and used as a scapegoat after her death.
This movie has a lot of committed actors trying to elevate an uninteresting screenplay written with clumsy wit that's undercutting the dour story it's telling. I wish I had watched the movie the cast thought they were making because this movie is very off-putting. I don't understand why this movie is a comedy. It's a true life story of a woman who died from an overdose and the people who might be culpable deflecting blame, and the movie wants me to think this is funny. I think the movie's tone is trying to match the circus that surrounded Anna Nicole's media coverage and subsequent trial over her death, but the entire movie acts like a circus, even when it wants to be taken seriously. Maybe if the movie was a fictional black comedy satire it could get away with this. The key word there being "fictional," which this isn't. In some fairness, the movie never plays any of the tragedy it surrounds as a source of mockery, but the whole "Oopsiedoodle" tone of Kapoor's life turn in its aftermath leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. This is just the wrong story told in the wrong way, and it's hard to make anything out of that.
Whalefall
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Thriller
Director: Brian Duffield
Starring: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy, Emily Rudd
For the last month, online personalities have been telling me that I should be celebrating Austin Abrams, and I'm not quite at that level. I liked him in Weapons despite being highlighted during the most boring portions of the movie, his role in Resident Evil was stunningly ill-concieved (which wasn't his fault), and I don't watch Euphoria because nobody can adequately explain what the fuck it is to me. I'm not going to tear him down but I also haven't seen anything from him that left an impression on me. In Whalefall, he grunts a lot and mumbles to himself, so I still won't find myself thinking about him more than I need to. The film features him scuba diving, searching for the body of his deceased father, and accidentally being swallowed by a Sperm Whale because of bad luck.
It's an interesting premise brought to us by a promising filmmaker in Brian Duffield, whose last film brought a pantomime story to life though visual cues. Surely, he could do the same for a man trapped by himself in an enclosed area, right? Duffield wielded simplicity to an artform in No One Will Save You. It feels like that instinct is being trusted inconsistently in Whalefall, as it can show a visual story, but it will also not trust the audience enough to understand the movie without explaining inner dialogue to them out loud. Austin Abrams performance isn't bad, it's just awkward. Almost nobody could pull off a role where they blow exposition through a breathing tube and not look like an idiot. The film also tends to lean into melodrama in flashback as scenes with Josh Brolin slowly morphs into him being a vocal representative of the whale, and it just becomes a bit much. But it's an interesting little thriller, even though the cinematography keeps the film from being as harrowing as it wants to be. It's understandably murky because of its environment, but it's littered with nonstop zooms and flashcuts, making it even harder to comprehend what we're supposed to be looking at. It is successfully claustrophobic, which makes up for that, but all these tiny flaws stack up to make a watchable, if mild, experience.
You Can See Everything
⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Documentary
Director: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim
Starring: Elizabeth Holmes, Nathan Fielder, Billy Evans
I saw dong in this movie. When they said "you can see everything," I didn't expect us to actually see everything.
This documentary is probably more interesting than you'd expect at first glance, because it meanders for a while with tiny aspects that are slightly off-putting that you can't put your finger on. When the movie finally acknowledges that something is indeed not right, that is when what the documentary is actually doing finally clicks into place. The film opens on the pretense of being about disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes as she lives with her family in her final month before her prison sentence for defrauding investors. This is very uneventful, and one wouldn't be blamed for sitting through an hour-and-a-half of this movie to ask oneself "Why am I here?" Not only that, there is something very plastic about it, as Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, profess her innocence while Holmes discusses her business affairs in vague and distant ways. I don't know much about Holmes's story. I remember her being in the news and people being big mad. I don't know what her invention was or why it didn't work. It was all rich people dealing with rich people problems. This movie didn't answer any of my questions about it as it went and I was getting frustrated with it. Add in that Holmes's body language in this movie is very performative. She always has a look in her eyes that never matches her facial expression (they basically used this as the poster). I couldn't figure out why that was. One theory could have been that she was "fake smiling" her way through a hard point in her life, knowing she'd have to go to jail very soon, and the look in her eyes was actually fear. Another was that this was a business woman's fake public persona and she was trying to put on a show of innocence for the public to convince them that she was "one of them." This portion of the movie seems to want us to believe that she doesn't communicate like other people and she both talks and acts this way because that's how her brain and personality function. And considering how sociopathic some billionaires' personalities are, I was almost willing to believe it. That being said, Holmes can sometimes come off so childlike that one wonders that if this were her genuine personality, how would she have achieved the pedestal that she received.
But as the film moves past Holmes going to jail, the movie starts to explore itself three-dimensionally. Not only does this examine the questionable ways that Holmes and Evans presented themselves, it begins to reveal certain aspects of the production that weren't caught on film and how the project came together that might surprise you or shock you. The film also calls in some surprise guests to help them sort through this and try and figure out what portrait the documentary was making. It's fascinating stuff and it made me want to watch the first ninety minutes again through a different lens.
The one nagging thought I had is that, throughout the film, I felt like I was being heavily manipulated. At first I thought it was by Holmes and Evans, and I have no doubt that I was being manipulated by them, but I also have questions about the documentary as a project. A lot of the close-ups, camera angles, and music choices seem to be pushing me into feeling I'm watching something unhinged and uncomfortable. I'm not convinced it was, and I do admit that I suspect that dramatic license was used for a performative piece on the filmmakers part, as well. And considering the film does cross into a scripted territory toward the end, I can't help but ask questions about the reality being portrayed. The documentary is well worth watching just to see what your takeaway is, though you might leave with more questions than answers.
Netflix & Chill
Hallowarrior
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Streaming On: Shudder
Genre: Horror
Director: Ben Sottak
Starring: Milly Shapiro, Shannyn Sossamon
Hereditary's Milly Shapiro is back and this time she gets to keep her head. Shapiro plays "Pumpkin," a girl who survived the apocalypse and lives all alone in her deceased family's farmhouse. The situation turns from I Am Legend to The Purge to Home Alone as she soon finds her lonely life invaded by malicious strangers and she tries to defend her home with nothing but a couple of weapons and some candy. Deliciously simple, Hallowarrior is a kick of home invasion chills and post-apocalyptic thrills with some fun action and gory kills. Stylized as a grindhouse splatter treat, the film doesn't wear out its welcome at seventy minutes. Those seeking something quick and fun for the Halloween season might want to check out this child vs. the harsh world fantasy, as those with a Shudder account are likely already in tune with the vibe it presents and will find it to be a good time.
Movies Still Playing At My Theater
Digger ⭐️
Forgotten Island ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Heart of the Beast ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Odyssey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Other Mommy ⭐️1/2
Practical Magic 2 ⭐️⭐️
Primetime ⭐️⭐️1/2
Resident Evil ⭐️⭐️
The Social Reckoning ⭐️⭐️1/2
Spider-Man: Brand New Day ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Verity ⭐️
New To Digital
Buddy ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
The Fix ⭐️
Practical Magic 2 ⭐️⭐️
Runner ⭐️1/2
Coming Soon!
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