Alas, poor Redbox…

And so another era has come to an end. The final years of Redbox are reaching their final stretch. The service officially announced its closure the other day, after a disastrous ownership changeover a few years ago wrecked the remainder of the business, one of the last bastions of physical media, much less the last holdout of the rental market.

Surprisingly, I only got into Redbox circa 2016, when I accidentally rented, instead of bought, the trio of Passengers, The Magnificent Seven, and Fences (although later I did make up for that). I used to rent movies all the time, even worked at a video store, which was how I caught up on the vast chunk of movie history that served as the foundation for my appreciation of the medium. By the time Redbox was the last of the rental services, I was buying outright in stores any movie (new and used) that interested me. But once I understood that Redbox sold used movies at a considerable discount, I started buying at their kiosks at a decent clip.

I found a lot of interesting movies through them, some mainstream that I had skipped and probably would never have seen without such an opportunity, some obscure movies that I would almost certainly have never even heard of and was glad of the chance to discover them, and sure, a lot of movies that weren’t really worth the time or scant money it took to spend on them.

I was very much aware that the market was skipping along to digital and streaming as outright replacement. I didn’t care. 

2020 was the breaking point for Redbox. Disney stopped shipping new MCU titles that year, possibly in the interests of shoring up their streaming service, suddenly so crucial even to them, when I really would’ve preferred to catch those releases without investing too much in them. I still haven’t seen Shang-Chi or Eternals, and I might never at this point. But otherwise new releases continued to populate. 

That was also the year the market started to cut loose from physical media in general, which again, was an obvious side effect of the pandemic. 

Eventually Redbox started to more heavily feature B- and C-level movies in the purchase tab, since they were receiving fewer mainstream movies as they lost business from major studios. The listings started stretching out with slower turnover rates for new titles. 

The last major, and almost the only major, release last year was Barbie. But this was one miracle Barbie couldn’t pull off.

The “coming soon” tab was deactivated. Then it became clear that there weren’t new movies populating at all, and some of us wondered if there could possibly be a turnaround. But it wasn’t to be.

On Friday I attempted to scoop up a few titles still of some interest from the purchase tab, but the box shut down in the effort. I tried again an hour or so ago, and it was functioning again. What Redbox does with all the inventory that wasn’t for sale previously, if they’re listed for purchase at some point, who knows?

I may have just bought my last movies from Redbox. It was a fruitful time.

Revisiting Dune: Part Two, and Excalibur

A few weeks back I did another rewatch of Excalibur, the movie I compared Dune: Part Two with in an unofficial (read: not a review) take, and then yesterday I did a rewatch of Dune: Part Two itself.

Let's start with Excalibur.  I'm still not writing reviews of either.  They're complicated, in much the same way Peter Jackson's second and third Lord of the Rings films are for me, or 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Some critics would list, say, Heaven's Gate in this kind of category, a production they could only ever hate for the kind of arrogance artwork on display.

I've been trying to watch Excalibur more some twenty-five years.  I find it very easy to fall asleep watching anything (in fact I can't offer a review of Dune: Part Two since that's exactly what I did for a large chunk of it yesterday, missing among other scenes Austin Butler's gladiatorial debut, which was a highlight the first time around).  For me it's not an indictment, it's just a fact of life.  In past attempts I slept through much of Excalibur's excess, its inability to tell the difference between art and artifice.  This time I found myself suitably amused by Nicol Williamson's irreverent Merlin, likely a response to Empire Strikes Back's Yoda, while everyone else struts to the pomp, even wasting the young Liam Neeson, not to mention Patrick Stewart, allowing Nigel Terry to ineffectually carry the load as King Arthur (surely one of the worst casting jobs in the history of film).  Yet the grandeur is there.  It justifies the Lady of the Lake as the truly indelible visual of the film, the only element to truly rise to the occasion.

Dune: Part Two is almost a complete visual affair.  It struts its actors as they chew the scenery in amusing ways (although this is probably Javier Bardem's second best Hollywood role, the Alec Guinness who relishes the old believer role previously occupied by Laurence Fishburne, having the chance to nail the exact act in a second film entry as few enough viewers have credited Fishburne; Josh Brolin is the only other member of the ensemble allowed complete dignity, but then he's been a pro at that since before he was taken seriously).

But this is still Villeneuve, one of the best directors working today, and there are echoes of Arrival, here, which I imagine is what drew him to the project in the first place, that and the prospect of reviving another 1980s sci-fi relic looking for redemption, and he comes closer to the mark in making a statement this time than in the first act.  My disappointment is mostly that he dithers on a desert world rather than plunges into something more meaningful, but that's why I'll continue giving the results further chances, more than I ever will Peter Jackson, or Excalibur, why I'll more happily recommend Villeneuve's work to those looking for something meaningful in Hollywood's yearning for greatness in genre material than its nearest competitors.  

Anyway, it's a long game.   

Beauty and the Beast (2017) Review

rating: ***

summary: Belle meets and falls in love with a beast.

review: These Disney live action remakes have been such hit-and-miss affairs, it always depends on how much the director really wants to revisit the material.  Beauty and the Beast is at once a worthwhile and listless effort in the series.

It's a constant struggle to breathe free from its confines, to be the lively kind of movie it wants to be and hopelessly devoted to play-acting the animated film it's based on.  If this had been made, say, fifteen years earlier, it would've fit right alongside the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  At heart that's what it desperately wants to be.  Obviously having to be a musical puts a damper on such ambitions.  Bill Condon, who staged such a brilliant adaptation of Chicago, seems incapable of bridging the divide, staging a series of karaoke scenes instead, the songs lost to the soundtrack as they seem stubbornly unmoored from the screen material.  It begins to feel more like a tribute than anything.

One of the great signifiers of all this is Josh Gad, not because of his overblown gay element, but that he can't compete, in live action, with the voice work did as Olaf in Frozen.  Luke Evans, if he didn't have to sing, might be able to sell his part, too.  If it had been Russell Crowe (how interesting would that have been!), no critic would've thought twice to mention it (although Crowe almost certainly has more credentials than Evans on every score).  Evans is constantly being undercut by the material he chooses; in most other eras besides the ones he keeps popping up in, he'd have been a much bigger deal.

I'd be lying if I said I decided to watch for any other reason, really, than seeing Emma Watson in another big story and a role other than Hermione Granger, but she'd swallowed whole, too, by the intended pomp, and like Evans has no answer to the jukebox playing around her.  Dan Stevens plays well as the Beast, but as the Prince isn't given anything at all to work with, the very embodiment of how hollow all this is.  Ewan McGregor is barely recognizable either in voice or when we finally see him, a wasted opportunity.  Emma Thompson, let's face it, is no Angela Lansbury (although the kid voicing Chip is great, even if he doesn't get much to do, and once transformed back into a human is thoroughly undermined by the production).

The two shining lights are Kevin Kline reimagining the father and Ian McKellen as Cogsworth.  McKellen's career has been one constant string of frustration for anyone expecting any kind of consistent interest from the industry.  For every Gandalf or Magneto or Da Vinci Code, there's really almost total silence, which is a terrible shame, even when he makes it clear he outclasses everyone and thing around him in something like this.  

Stanley Tucci and Gugu Mbatha-Raw show up in undercooked supporting roles, more examples of what might have been.  I guess they can't all be David Lowery's masterful Pete's Dragon.  Well, I suppose, of course not...

Archive (2020) Review

rating: ****

summary: In the near future, memory can be downloaded in an archive for loved ones.

review: Sometimes you just don't know what's worth discovering, since these days there's very little interest in collating these things beyond "everyone seems to like it" or "everyone seems to hate it," which also demolishes the old model of cult discoveries, since you never really know if the people who hate something or love something are themselves a cult , especially if it doesn't have obvious metrics like box office results behind it.  Archive might be the last interesting find I discover on Redbox (which seems to be in death throws after a seemingly-in-hindsight ill-advised sale to new owners a few years back, not necessarily just because its model still relies on physical media).  It's the kind of movie I probably would have had no idea even existed if it weren't for Redbox or, say, the credits of an actor or two I might browse absently (Theo James, from the Divergent movies, or Rhona Mitra).  The fact that it was released in the dead zone of the pandemic in 2020 would also help account for this, although in earlier years it might've been able to enjoy a little more publicity.

Director Gavin Rothery came up with the idea when he was in the production pool for Moon, one of the great it's-probably-at-least-a-cult-classic-but-it-really-doesn't-get-enough-attention movies of the past dozen years or so, and visually it's really not much of a surprise, another lone science type trying to unravel what increasingly seems like a conspiracy against him.  There's a considerable twist at the end about just what the circumstances really are, and robot companions who are responsible for filling out the atmosphere, but Archive depends much more than Moon did on the lead character's greater narrative than just the story playing out on the screen.  He's trying to download his dead wife into a robot capable of more or less helping her live again.  His third attempts seems like it'll work out, but all three are basically incapable of reconciling to new circumstances, so it's really how any of them are willing to cope with the results.

James is in a much more mature mode than the Divergent films; this is the first time, I think, I've seen him outside of them, so it's a good way to confirm he has some actual worth as an actor, although depressingly he doesn't seem to have become any casting director's favorite.  Toby Jones, one of film's great character faces this era, shows up, Mitra, Stacie Martin as the wife.  It's immediately apparent that Rothery is more than competent directing all this.  With Redbox you just never know.  Much of it is dreck with no discerning ability to know what good filmmaking looks like.  He has yet to tackle a follow-up, but I'd certainly be interested.

A great discovery.

A little about Dune: Part Two

I’m not calling this a review, since I don’t want to get a lot into the film itself, but this is more to say I can’t understand how everyone is so effusive about it. I’m going to call it the Excalibur effect. Excalibur was the 1981 grandiose take on King Arthur. Clearly a result of studios trying to figure out why Star Wars was such a hit, where a lot of other films chased, desperately and without any of the technical finesse or storytelling flare, what George Lucas did, in the genre he did it, Excalibur went in another direction, far into literary history, for another saga involving grand destinies, the sad stories of fathers and sons, and, well, swordplay. And it did it straight, no studio meddling to broaden the audience (which usually means adding in some comedic elements), full fantasy, and it’s been a cult classic ever since.

The Excalibur effect is perhaps better known, today, through Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, filled with the same purposeful earnestness (with some comedic elements), but otherwise embraced with extravagant praise, from the start, by critics and viewers, to a greater extent than Excalibur itself, thanks to its unusual, to this day, strategy of releasing three films in three years, and telling fans they were all shot simultaneously, the MCU before the MCU of getting ahead of the curve and getting to ride it the whole way.

I don’t think any of these movies, with the exception of Fellowship of the Ring, deserves the amount of praise they get. I find them to be highly indulgent, from the entirety Excalibur to how Gollum is depicted in the second and third Rings. When you go grand you have to earn it with truly great filmmaking.

Denis Villeneuve is a great filmmaker, but he’s driving himself to distraction with how long he stays on Arrakis. Here I’m specifically addressing the length of these films. If he were packing them with the kind of gripping drama or subtle intrigue of his best films, that would be one thing. But Dune: Part Two is packed mostly with dithering. Pretty dithering, but mostly an internal battle Paul Atreides fights over a destiny we’re supposed to question. It’s the whole point. But instead we’re led to hero-worship him, like everyone else. 

So it’s a movie no one else could have made. I get that. No one else has. But sometimes no one should. Maybe it’s because I’m impatient for Villeneuve to work on some of his own material. People say they love this now, but will they follow him the way they have Christopher Nolan? Nolan had his Batman films, but he always balanced them with other work. I get that Villeneuve was probably happy he got to make a second one at all, and he was rewarded for it. There’s more praise and attention this time than with the first one. 

I just wish he could have made his point better, I guess, and not worried so much that it looked good regardless. Sometimes that’s not actually the only thing you need to worry about. Some people just can’t tell the difference. It’s the Excalibur effect. But it’s the substance that really counts. Extremely competent filmmaking still needs excellent storytelling.

2023 Movies Viewed/ Ranked

Viewed/Ranked

1. Oppenheimer 
2. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant 
3. Asteroid City
4. The Creator
5. Napoleon 
6. The Flash
7. Beau Is Afraid
8. Knock at the Cabin
9. 65
10. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
11. The Equalizer 3
12. The Holdovers
13. Paint
14. American Fiction
15. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
16. Polite Society 
17. John Wick IV
18. Poor Things
19. Killers of the Flower Moon
20. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
21. The Iron Claw
22. Master Gardener
23. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
24. Barbie
25. A Good Person
26. Magic Mike’s Last Dance
27. Blue Beetle
28. Marlowe
29. The Super Mario Brothers Movie
30. Sound of Freedom
31. Fast X
32. A Haunting in Venice
33. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
34. Sisu
35. Ant- Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
36. Sweetwater
37. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
38. Chevalier
39. Renfield
40. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
41. The Pope’s Exorcist 
42. Creed III
43. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
44. Ruby Gilman, Teenage Kraken
45. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
46. Haunted Mansion
47. 80 for Brady
48. Butcher’s Crossing
49. Plane
50. Cocaine Bear

Other Notable Releases

Air

Anyone But You

The Boy and the Heron

The Boys in the Boat

Dream Scenario 

Elemental

Expend4bles

Ferrari

Godzilla Minus One

The Little Mermaid

The Marsh King’s Daughter

The Marvels

Meg 2: The Trench

M3GAN

Migration

Next Goal Wins

No Hard Feelings

Past Lives

Priscilla 

Saltburn

Saw X

Scream VI

Strays

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

The Wandering Earth II

Wish

Wonka

The Creator (2023) review

rating: ****

the story: A vet in plunged into the endgame of a war between humanity and AI.

the review: Here's another movie I have no clue hasn't had far more praise than it's received.  It's damn near a work of genius.  It's close to a masterpiece.

I'm starting to implicitly trust John David Washington's instincts.  He's had a whole string of fascinating projects under his belt in recent years (Tenet, Amsterdam, and now The Creator), pushed himself well beyond dad Denzel Washington's shadow, and establishing his own definitive screen presence, not the calm cool of dad, not necessarily capable of more, but very much his own, and with the capability to fit in effortlessly into sweeping situations without being lost in them.

The Creator is more than Washington, of course.  It's Gareth Edwards' directorial follow-up to Rogue One, which is the leading candidate for Star Wars fans as best of the current cinematic era.  I personally was not a fan of Rogue One.  No, I was very much the opposite.  In context, now, however, it makes a lot more sense, since in a lot of ways The Creator is a response to and continuation of its ideas, which makes much more sense, to me, in this context.  The Creator itself also serves as that elusive concept Hollywood chased for years after 1977, a movie that evokes Star Wars without buckling horribly under the pressure, a thing that was almost impossible for twenty years.  (Incredibly, although I have no idea when I myself will be able to consider the results, 2023 potentially gave us two such movies, with Rebel Moon also clearly envisioned from the bones of Star Wars.)

This is familiar territory, whether you consider the classic I, Robot stories, the movie that eventually resulted from it, the Terminator franchise, the Matrix movies, or even current fears of emerging AI prominence (although The Creator features traditional robots, its was heavily marketed with the concerns sweeping through the culture at the moment, and viewed from that light by critics and likely audiences).  It doesn't matter.  You've never seen anything like this.

I even say this as someone who loved Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen's Descender/Ascender comics, which have a number of parallels to The Creator, including a child robot destined to play a climactic role in events desperately sought by numerous figures.  Doesn't matter.  Visually the results are astonishing, exactly what modern filmmaking should be accomplishing (and not just an endless stream of superhero movies), but narratively, the results are equally assured, deliberate, and where all the critics complaining otherwise are coming from, I haven't a clue, since the central message is as relevant as it's ever been: the oppressed just don't want to be oppressed anymore, they just want to be free to live.

And that's really what's so great about The Creator, that it finally boils the robot story to what it really always was.  We keep dreading the robot apocalypse, and yet...why?  Why assume they're just gonna want to annihilate us?  When do we figure out the best solution will always be the one that benefits everyone?  That's what intelligence tells us, and the "i" in "AI" literally means "intelligence," so again...why?  

That's what The Creator answers.  That's what pushes it toward greatness.  

Along with Washington are a few name actors, Allison Janney representing the humans and Ken Watanabe the robots.  Isn't the presence of Watanabe itself an indication of quality?  He's another actor who's consistently selected great material, always unfailingly delivering quality performances in roles intriguing and relevant to the success of the films around them.

Trust Ken Watanabe.  Trust John David Washington.  There are built-in moments just waiting to be enshrined in the pop canon.  Help make The Creator a cult sensation at the very least!