Saturday, November 16, 2024

Theater visits so far 2024...

 Since I've done such a horrible job of blogging here at Film Fan this year, let's have a look at what I've seen in theaters so far this year, possibly because I wanna spend some time talking about one movie in particular...

Argylle I found entertaining in its several layers, reminiscent of Lost City but certainly its own distinct flavor.  Sam Rockwell I'd basically follow anywhere and is alone worth the price of admission.  Funny, too, since there's a book based on it, since like Lost City it follows an author thrust into an adventure straight out of her books.  By the third act it makes more sense but rests on a less convincing lead performance than its predecessor.

American Fiction was something I needed to catch up on from last year, and I'm glad I did (the author of the book it's based on, Percivall Everett, has been getting better notices on his newest book, James, but as far as I can tell, not a large amount of additional sales), although it seems a little more focused on elites having elites problems than a real connection to the black experience it's technically about.  But I'd follow Jeffrey Wright anywhere, and am glad he got a spotlight like this.

The Beekeeper was instantly my favorite Jason Statham movie ever, and I realize I'm fairly late to the party, but interestingly, for me, it was a marked counterpoint to the elitism I found troubling in American Fiction, in that Statham's rampage is against the unchecked nature it currently enjoys.

Dune: Part Two I've certainly already written about, here, and how it's a technical achievement I find difficult to engage with emotionally, which is odd, since I had a very different reaction to Arrival, where both states existed so exquisitely well together.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is, like Beekeeper, a violent delight, featuring a pitch perfect ensemble cast, and has been since release one of my leading contenders for best of the year.

Sasquatch Sunset falls short of its intended mark, spending too much time in silent wonder at its strange world only for a last minute reveal at a deeper layer.  Even if we never see humanity, it would've been worth seeing more of what these creatures are living in the margins of in order to appreciate some actual context.  Instead it's just a curiosity.

Civil War is fascinating and horrifying at the same time.  Most of the film is fascinating, a glimpse at journalism in its rawest form.  Then it has to go ahead and let everyone, including the journalists, just watch as a president is assassinated.  It's a terrible, off-note ending that all but spoils the preceding pleasures.

Horizon: An American Saga, since I grew up on Westerns, was very much another welcome homecoming, a splendid tapestry that looks past pretty much the remaining romanticism still lingering in the genre.  But the release schedule was far too optimistic, and if anything scared more viewers away than the typically long running time of the modern historical blockbuster (which, while pursuing what streaming services can't, has yet to produce a winner at the box office).

Daddio is one of my favorite random discoveries, an intimate conversation between strangers exploring relationships and modern life.  Dakota Johnson I'm happy to enjoy in something other than the sitcom I first saw her in, and Sean Penn, it's the first time in a long time I've just gotten to enjoy one of his performances after years of burying his talent behind Hollywood hype (which I trace back to Mystic River), which drive even him away for years.

The Bikeriders is another leading contender for best of the year, easily.  Just perfect, a throwback to a bygone era, much like everything else I've loved this year, which is clearly the running theme of an industry trying desperately to justify itself while also looking for things that aren't packed with CGI.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is another steady entry in the franchise, practically a sequel to the last one.  It's just wild that Will Smith actually survived that Oscars slap.

Deadpool & Wolverine, since I was always more interested in Wolverine than Deadpool, was a wild ride of a return engagement, for both, the first time Ryan Reynolds had an actual story to tell and somehow the juiciest turn Hugh Jackman has gotten, in a role that has been determined to pump in melodrama from the very start.

Trap is another classic work of M. Night Shyamalan filmmaking.

Borderlands, of which I am the only one who actually enjoyed it.  Too many times fans of things have absolutely no perspective.  Nobody outside of them holds the games to be a sacred cow.  If the movie fails, no one is going to rush to revive popular interest.  The thing will die on the vine.  And once again, this is what happened.  If you liked the recent Jumanji movies, there's no discernable reason you wouldn't like this, too.  If you liked the recent Dungeon & Dragons movie, this is right up your alley.  

Conclave is hugely compelling for a Catholic, great drama ending on a curious note that kind of fiddles with its conclusions, wondering if the Church is somehow ready for a woman (in effect) in the papacy.  I don't really see how that was necessary, but I'm not going to quibble.  On the whole, another of the shining notes of the year.

Venom: The Last Dance kind of forgets that this is the final film in a trilogy for most of its runtime, finding a villain from the comics to close out the story but then getting lost in trying to explain how, since by the end we're left with the villain still out there, no other film forthcoming (and highly unlikely to be revisited), and only the sad goodbye between Eddie Brock and the symbiote.  But spending most of it just watching Eddie trying to survive despite nothing sticking to put him at risk, just kind of stumbling along, with a random off-the-maps family continually intersecting in his efforts.

We Live In Time is a fine little relationship drama.  Still kind of shocked it happened at all, much less in regular theaters (recently the domain of streaming services, such as A Marriage Story).

Joker: Folie a Deux has gotten so much exposure, and not a bit of it good, of course it's the one I was talking about at the start of this.  I have no idea what happened here, who mailed everyone excrement to provoke such a reaction.  This is exactly the second part of what happened in the first film.  Exactly.  Same flights of fancy, just with added song, since for the first and only time in his life, Arthur Fleck has an actual dance partner.  What some people seem to have considered, this isn't a movie about the Joker, but a Joker.  We've reached a point where The Dark Knight is far enough in the past that people are forgetting what exactly made Heath Ledger's Joker so great, that this second of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies is beginning to be lumped anonymously as just one of the three that resulted.  And so of course we're now at the point where another Joker is just another Joker.  Critics of the first one really just wanted to dismiss it as Taxi Driver cosplay, just as many viewers of Joker really just saw it as Ledger cosplay.  They just couldn't distinguish or analyze the first one for its own achievements.  It's no surprise, then, that neither has made heads or tails of the follow-up.  If you're looking for a classic predecessor to this one, that would be One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, mixed up with, I don't know, A Star is Born.  But ultimately this one can't help but fail to connect with audiences since it's another, along with most of Sony's Spider-Man villain movies (including, of course, the Venom movies, of which this last one was easiest to lump in).  Most critics don't understand superhero movies, and most fans don't understand supervillain movies.  This Joker was never really a hero (despite the first movie's ending), and he was never really a villain.  He was always a victim.  Just try finding sympathy for those, unless they're faceless.

Saturday, July 13, 2024

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.

Saturday, May 25, 2024

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.   

Saturday, April 6, 2024

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.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

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.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

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