Challengers(4/22/2024)

For the last ten years Zendaya has sort of been Schrödinger’s movie star in that she very obviously has a huge following but has essentially been untested as an actual leading lady in a theatrically released motion picture.  She gained a bunch of Gen Z popularity through a handful of Disney Channel productions in the early 2010s which seems to have been what gave her all her career momentum and she really became a star amongst the non-teenybopper population through her Emmy winning work on HBO’s “Euphoria,” where she plays a cynical teenage drug addict.  Unlike her co-stars Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney though she hasn’t really sought out star vehicles on the big screen, possibly because hustling in indie roles almost seems beneath her.  She’s instead opted to appear in blockbusters like Spider-Man: Homecoming and its sequels or the Dune movies but in supporting love interest type parts, which have certainly added to her resume but in typical 2020s fashion those are projects where the franchise is the bigger star than any of the actors in them.  Her only real starring role in a movie has been in the two person pandemic era Netflix movie Malcolm & Marie, from “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson, which is perhaps not coincidentally one of the only projects she’s made to date where she isn’t playing a teenager.  Of course it’s hard to gauge how popular a streaming movie like that is so it remains to be seen if she can be a draw unto herself and be the huge Gen Z movie star she seems destined to become.  That is until now, as she’s finally found a star vehicle working with director Luca Guadagnino on a film called Challengers, which will be something of a test both for her drawing powers and if non-genre cinema for adults can have much of a life at the box office at all.

Challengers begins in 2019 and converges on the final match of a small scale “challengers” tournament occurring in New Rochelle, New York between a guy named Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and another guy named Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor).  These two are in very different places in their careers.  Donaldson is a major star player whose won Grand Slams but is recovering from an injury and is playing in this rinky dink tournament largely as an exercise to get his confidence back by beating some scrubs who aren’t on his level.  Zweig on the other hand is a formerly promising player whose descended into mediocrity and is only barely a professional at this point and is having trouble scraping together enough money for a hotel stay.  The two have a lot of history, however, much of it involving Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a formerly amazing player whose career was cut short before it began due to an injury.  She once dated Zweig but left him for Donaldson, to whom she is now married and also coaches.  This single match between Zeig and Donaldson will serve as the framing story through the movie as we get flashback to both the events immediately leading to this match and also to the three character’s shared past and their history of competing with each other both on the courts and for the affection of Duncan.

Challengers was written by a playwright and novelist named Justin Kuritzkes and while this is his first screenplay cinemagoers will still have a sort of familiarity with him as a person through the work of his wife Celine Song, who made the film Past Lives last year which featured a character played by John Magaro who was almost certainly based on Kuritzkes.  So you’ve got both husband and wife writing back to back movies about love triangles amongst ambitious well off professionals who come in and out of each other’s lives culminating in a present tense meeting.  It does not take too much imagination to conceive of this screenplay emerging from whatever insecurities the events Past Lives depicted brought out in Kuritzkes, at least as a starting point.  The two of course approach the topic in very different ways with Past Lives having clearly been an autobiographical with a rather chill and realistic feel while this is a bit more heightened and involving a lot more direct competition between the two men who are literally and figuratively competing for the affection of the woman in question and also some subtext (and text) implying that they may be a bit into each other as well.

Directing this screenplay is Luca Guadagnino, an Italian filmmaker who has largely been working on English language productions starring American and British actors for the last ten plus years but whose films retain a certain intrinsically European sense of wealth, decadence, and sexuality just the same.  His last film Bones and All was a bit of an exception to this as it involved a road trip through Middle America, but this film set in the wealthy world of tennis and its related institutions is a bit closer to what I’ve come to expect from the guy.  This has been sold as a fairly sexual movie in which Zendaya has a threesome with these two guys during their younger years, but that’s not really the case.  That potential threesome gets aborted and while sex and sexual jealousy are a theme through the movie but there isn’t really that much skin and I don’t think there’s even a single actual completed sex scene to be found.  But that’s not to say that the film doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of these characters’ intense three way horniness and the ways it evolves over the course of their lives and affects their competitive drive on the court.

There were stretches of Challengers that felt like it was among the best films of the year, but I did feel like it fell short in a couple of places.  For one, I think Guadagnino got a little too cute in places and went way overboard in trying to pull a few too many tricks out of his bag, especially when filming that final tennis match.  It feels like he thought simply letting tennis play out would get boring and instead tries a bunch of camera tricks that make sections resemble a series of Nike ads more so than a straight drama.  I’d also say that while I quite liked Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music as tracks unto themselves I did find them a bit louder and more intense than they needed to be and felt like this movie might have benefited from a bit of a lighter touch in the music department at times.  This should not, however, obscure the film’s many other strengths.  Kuritzkes’ screenplay is very fun as a piece of writing unto itself and this rather impressive young cast does a lot with it, successfully portraying their characters at various ages and allowing the audience to like their characters flaws and all.  It’s exactly the kind of hip mid budget filmmaking for adults we’ve been begging Hollywood to give us and the movie mostly delivers on that in exciting fashion.
**** out of Five

April Round-Up 2024 – Part 2

Abigail(4/18/2024)

I should say before I begin, that I think this movie has been done something of a disservice by its advertising campaign which gives away the secret of what the deal is with the character of Abigail, which I think is kind of meant to be at least something of a surprise in the movie.  Granted I’m not sure how you’d effectively advertise the movie without giving that away given that it’s basically the high concept of the film, and this review will also go forward under the assumption the reader has seen those trailers and know this secret.  There will also be another little semi-spoiler in there as well.

Abigail is a film produced by Universal Pictures as part of an initiative that’s meant to bring adaptations of Universal Monsters movies to the screen as stand-alone modern horror films which started promisingly with 2020’s The Invisible Man but it hit a snag with 2023’s Renfield and The Last Voyage of the Demeter (if you want to count that one), both of which tried to stripmine Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel for ideas and to some extent that’s also the case with Abigail, which is actually being touted as a semi-official remake of the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter despite basically having nothing in common with that movie besides being about a female who is nominally the offspring of Dracula.  Instead the film feels more like a spiritual sequel to Ready or Not, a previous film by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (members of the “Radio Silence” Collective) which also dealt with people being hunted down while trapped in a mansion.  In this case the people being hunted down are members of an assembled team tasked by a mysterious underworld figure to kidnap a wealthy child for ransom purposes.  The tables then turn on them when it turns out this kid was a vampire and the abandoned house they were told to bring her to was a trap to allow her to hunt them down for sport.

The film pretty much plays out how you’d expect from there and with varying degrees of success.  The movie assembles a reasonably good cast to fill out the team of kidnappers with people like Melissa Barrera and the late Angus Cloud and the film also has Giancarlo Esposito in a small role as the guy who hired the team.  Some of the side characters are less successful though with Dan Stevens delivering a performance that teeters between being enjoyably over the top and just being kind of cheesy.  Young actress Alisha Weir is also effective as the titular teenage vampire, though I do think the filmmakers might have miscalculated a bit in putting her in a balarina outfit through the whole movie, which I don’t think is as scary as they think it is.  The movie does have some strong moments throughout though including a cool gore effect that’s recycled from the aforementioned Ready or Not and the basic twist on the Vampire mythos here is a good one.  I was pretty close to giving it a pass but the movie has a bit of a weak action oriented ending and culminates in one of the most undwhelming cameos I can think of and that left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.  Ultimately I’d say it’s a step down from Ready or Not and just not good enough to compete in a fairly competitive horror marketplace, but there is fun to be had with it and it may tip the other way amongst though watching it a bit more generously.
**1/2 out of Five

Evil Does Not Exist(4/25/2024)

Looking back, the ascention of Drive My Car into Oscar contention is kind of wild.  The Academy is a lot more receptive to foreign cinema than they used to be but even compared to other international movies they’ve gone for like Parasite and Anatomy of a Fall, Drive My Car was a pretty challenging and “artsy” choice and its three hour runtime a clear barrier for a lot of people.  For his follow-up Ryusuke Hamaguchi has made a film with a much more manageable running time of 106 minutes, and yet I’d argue that this will prove to be an even less accessible movie to most audiences in some ways, including to myself.  The film is set in a rural community outside of Tokyo which finds itself mired in controversy when a company buys a plot of land intending to build a “glamping” (glamorous camping) operation which will bring tourists to the area.  The community isn’t completely against this idea but have some serious objections to aspects of it like the size and location of the septic tank and the level of overnight supervision that will be ongoing.  Among the strongest objectors is a local handyman named Takumi and the two PR reps from the company come to the conclusion that winning him over to their side will go a long way towards getting approval for the project.  All of that is interesting but that plot takes up less of the run time than you might expect.  Other portions of the film are this more meandering material about country life which I found much less interesting.  In some ways the film is almost jarringly unwilling to dedicate itself to either being a plot based narrative or an exercise in slow cinema and its unwillingness to pick a lane in some ways undermines both halves effectiveness.  And then all of this is leading up to a very strange and rather abrupt ending that left me kind of baffled.  I think there might be something here I’m missing, there’s a good movie in there somewhere and I wouldn’t say I regret giving it a go for the parts that work but the movie is just presented in a way I didn’t really vibe with and I’m not sure what to make of it.
*** out of Five

We Grown Now(4/28/2024)

The movie American Fiction features a fictional book within the film called “We’s Lives In Da Ghetto” whose very existence infuriates the film’s protagonist sight unseen.  The outlook of that guy is not, however, entirely endorsed by that movie and when we finally meet the author of the offending book we find that she’s actually not the grifter he assumes her to be and the book sounds like it may well actually be a thoughtful exploration of poverty.  The new film We Grown Now has a title that’s perhaps dangerously close in syntax to that fictional book but like that book it’s actually a pretty thoughtful work that I suspect Thelonious “Monk” Ellison would approve of if he gave it a chance.  The film is set in the Cabrini-Green housing complex in Chicago during the 90s and follows two elementary aged kids living there who have somewhat different outlooks on their lives and who may be on different trajectories in life.  The film it will likely be compared to is last year’s One Thousand and One, which also looked at black life in the 90s in another major city, but that movie covered a longer span of time and had a bit more of a gimmick to it while this one is even less plot driven and is more of an observational character study with a keen interest in the time and place it’s set in.  The movie generally finds a good balance between presenting a sympathetic and in some ways even nostalgic depiction of life in Cabrini-Green without being oblivious to the less than pleasant aspects of life there.  I might argue that the film could have stood to have a couple of other little plot twists or maybe a couple extra character development steps as it does feel like there’s maybe an ingredient or two missing, but maybe it was better to play it safe and keep things stripped down.
***1/2 out of Five

April Round-Up 2024 – Part 1

Monkey Man(4/4/2024)

Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, came with a lot of preliminary buzz despite kind of looking like a John Wick clone set in India.  The movie both is and isn’t what it looks like.  The most interesting thing about the film, by far, is that Indian setting.  Dev Patel shoots Mumbai in a gritty fashion and also seems to be speaking to some of the class dynamics in the country, though he’s perhaps a bit vague on this front.  You get some notion that he’s calling out the right wing Hindu nationalism that’s sweeping the country but the exact issues he’s subtweeting feel a bit evasive.  The film’s villain seems to be some sort of right wing spiritualist but we don’t hear much about Islamophobia or caste-ism and the film instead makes the ultimate motivation here revenge for a death caused by some standard movie villain land grab.  The film also takes its sweet time telling you this and goes a pretty long time without telling you what this guy is up to and why you should root for him, which is a problem because he doesn’t have a lot of personality beyond being this stoic revenge seeker in typical action movie fashion.  As to that action, during the film’s first half it seemed like the John Wick comparisons were perhaps unfounded as the main character felt less like a super assassin and more of a sloppy revenge seeker like the guy from Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin or something, but then he goes through a training montage and suddenly does become something of a master combatant in time for the film’s climax.  That climax is fairly satisfying as an action sequence but doesn’t necessarily set itself apart from “the field” the much as modern action flicks go.  On the positive side, I did mostly dig Dev Patel as an actor here and there are some cool scenes to be found in the movie.  Had I seen it in a festival or something I might have found it to be a refreshing surprise but I came into it having heard it was a pretty big deal and in that context I was a bit disappointed.
*** out of Five

The Old Oak(4/13/2024)

The last three or four movies from 87 year old legend Ken Loach have felt like they could be his last and recent interviews by the director have suggested that his latest film The Old Oak “probably” will be his last film.  If that’s the case then it does feel like something that deserves a bit more fanfare because Loach has been a real fixture in British film for well over half a century.  Loach has long been something of a vanguard for highly political cinema, but political cinema on a very down to earth and human level, focused on bringing empathy to the lower classes in society and displaying potential avenues for uplift for them and it’s been fascinating to see him bring that energy into the 21^st Century.  This new movie is set in an unnamed village Northern England that’s been struggling since the closure of the mine it was built to serve and focuses on the tension that arises when Syrian refugees arrive in the area, much to the consternation of the xenophobic locals.  The film is told from the perspective of the owner of the local pub, the titular Old Oak, who has the “pleasure” of hearing those drunken locals drone on about how all their racist opinions of these people.  He doesn’t agree with them but also doesn’t feel inclined to argue against them given that they’re paying customers, but he starts feeling less inclined to be neutral once he befriends one of the refugees in question.

The Old Oak is a movie about one of the central dilemmas of our time: how to reconcile support for the working class when the working class is being vocally “problematic.” Its probably not to hard to guess where Ken Loach comes down on the question given his rooting in old school left wing ideology: he views racism and xenophobia first and foremost a threat to working class solidarity that’s rooted in misplaced frustrations with the economy and misunderstanding and he’s perhaps a bit naïve as to how easily this can be overcome through everyone getting to know one another.  Still it is admirable that Loach remains pretty clear eyed about how the working class is far from guiltless when it comes to how people like Syrian refugees are treated when they arrive in areas like this and he paints a fairly nuanced portrait of their behavior and also creates an interesting character study out of the film’s central protagonist.  I do wish he’d achieved a similar level of nuance with the Syrian characters however.  They, and the woman who most prominently represents them in the film, border on being Poitier-esque “model minorities” who largely exist to by sympathetic people who anyone would be crazy to think ill of.  Ultimately though I maybe can’t too mad at Loach for wanting to end his career with a little bit of kumbaya uplift.  This isn’t his best film by any mean but it does hold its own and if it is the end of the road for Loach it’s a fitting enough farewell.
***1/2 out of Five

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell(4/14/2024)

I was not quite sure what to expect from Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a new Vietnamese movie that’s earned quite a bit of praise but it’s got a strange title, most of the plot summaries of it I’ve heard have been vague, and it’s from a first time director who isn’t a brand unto himself.  The film is about a guy named Thiện who learns early on in the film that his sister in law has died in a motorcycle accident, effectively orphaning his nephew given that his brother (the child’s father) is out of the picture with no one sure where he is.  From there we spend most of the movie in his home village, where Thiện has gone to bury his sister-in-law and to set the family’s affairs in order.  We then watch him very slowly mourn his loss while also ruminating on his rural past and contemplating the role he’ll have in the nephew’s life.  We watch this happen for a very long time too because this movie runs a full three hours and is very willing to meander at various points.  This is all by design of course, just about every review of the film uses the term “slow cinema” and that’s certainly correct.  I hesitate to compare it to Apichatpong Weerasethakul for fear that I’m drawing too much on shared Southeast Asian settings, but there’s a similar languid pace and there’s also some linkage between this and some of auteurs coming out of Taiwan like Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.  Unlike those movies though this is coming from a first time director and that’s perhaps what’s most impressive about it.  You would expect something this confident and ambitious to come from a veteran who’s developed a style like this for years but Phạm Thiên Ân seems to have hit these heights right from the jump.  I’m pretty sure we’ll hearing more from this guy in the future and I’m glad I’m getting in on it early.  As for this movie?  Well, I was really impressed with it stylistically but I’d be lying if I said I thought I really “got” it.  The vibes are there but eventually I did kind of hope we’d get a more concrete point to the whole thing and in that third hour when it starts to really abandon the family plot and go into this kind of woozy odyssey by the main character I did start to feel kind of lost.  I’m not entirely sure if that’s on me or on the movie though, and it was ultimately a journey I don’t regret taking.
***1/2 out of Five

Civil War(4/8/2024)

A24 has been successful for a lot of reasons but among the biggest keys to their success is their ability to generate conversation, and they sure generated a lot of conversation when the trailer to the Alex Garland directed thriller Civil War dropped.  Part of that conversation had to do with the film’s place within the A24 business model: this was clearly much more expensive than most of the movies they put out and would be seeking to be a much bigger mainstream hit.  But the bigger conversation had more to do with the movie itself and what it was doing.  It’s no secret that the United States is presently being ripped apart by partisanship and cultural warfare and that there’s a specter of dictatorship on the horizon if a certain someone finds his way back into office.  With that as a backdrop any movie about the country being torn apart by actual literal warfare is going to be pretty loaded.  There were plenty of debates about how the alliance the film posits between Texas and California against a seemingly dictatorial president would even work or how such a realignment would happen given the existing political cleavages in the country and also how such a war would even function but the bigger question was what exactly the movie was even trying to say by positing such a conflict.  Personally, I had some pretty strong reservations but I was more than intrigued enough to give it a shot, especially given that it was coming from an interesting voice like that of Alex Garland.

The film is set in some sort of alternate timeline of the present day or near future and posits a world in which the United States has been in a state of civil war for a while when the film begins.  The nation has been divided into the “Loyalist States,” the “Western Forces” lead by California and Texas and also something called the “Florida Alliance.”  The exact makeup and ideologies of these forces are left vague but we know they are in opposition to a seemingly dictatorial unnamed President played by Nick Offerman who’s said to be in his third term or later in office.  We follow this from the perspective of Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a war photographer who we’re introduced to as she photographs a protest that turns violent on the streets of New York.  During that scuffle she meets Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a women in her early twenties who also has a passion for news photography and idolizes Smith.  The war is apparently in its late stages with the Western Forces primed to move in on D.C., prompting Smith and a colleague named Joel (Wagner Moura) to drive down to that city to get a final interview with the president and both Jessie and another veteran journalist named Sammy (Stephen Henderson) decide to tag along.

As I mentioned before, I think the basic alternate universe premise behind this movie just does not make a whole lot of sense.  Releasing such a movie during this particular moment of polarization and in an election year no less instantly makes you assume it’s trying to act as some sort of cautionary tale about where current conflicts could be heading but the movie never quite “goes there.”  We don’t get a clear idea what political ideology the film’s unnamed fictional president belongs to beyond his having some dictatorial tendencies and the states that are said to be on his side and opposed to him do not really seem to follow modern partisan lines and that alliance between California and Texas seems particularly eyebrow raising.  In some ways this might have made a bit more sense if they’d dropped the whole “war between the states” terminology and just made this some non-geographically aligned “rebel alliance” against the regime in power, though one also wonders how such a group could get a regular army with advanced armaments and a seemingly conventional hierarchy of power.

It’s not entirely clear from the outset which side we should be rooting for through all this, which is probably partly by design.  It’s not always entirely clear what side the various soldiers we encounter are fighting for as many are not in uniforms and the ones who are wear fairly interchangeable camouflage fatigues and it’s also not entirely clear what the “Florida Alliance” is in all of this and both sides do some questionable things throughout.  As a viewer of a certain political outlook I’m generally inclined to view the idea of a violent rebellion in this country with a lot of suspicion given who were the “rebels” in the actual 19^th Century Civil War and also because the people in modern America most inclined toward anti-government militarism (paranoid right wing “militias”).  I do not get the impression from watching the movie that this particular rebellion is rooted in paranoia as this president does appear to be legitimately totalitarian but the movie does withhold a lot of the information you might want in order to really pick sides.  In some ways this mirrors the complexity of a lot of civil wars in the real modern world line in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad legitimately seems like a butcher who deserves to be taken down, but where there also seemed to be extremists among the resistance who may well be even worse than the people they’re bringing down if they prove to be the ones taking power when all is said and done.

Of course I suspect that if asked Alex Garland would tell me that getting this into the weeds about the sides in this Civil War is a mistake and that the real focus here is on the visceral feeling of what the sight of such a conflict happening in modern America would invoke.  In a lot of ways the Alex Garland project this most closely resembles are the 28 Days Later in that this sort of a post-apocalypse movie even if the apocalypse is locally contained.  In fact the interplay between the Dunst and Spaeny characters as they take a road trip across this war torn landscape is not too far from the whole Children of Men/The Road/Logan/“The Last of Us” formula that pop culture has been using pretty regularly lately.  That’s not a criticism per se, this is a clever enough riff on the idea, but it’s definitely there.  The arcs of these various characters in the group are not too hard to predict but the actors flesh them out well enough and their journey works well enough for its intended purpose of showing off different aspects of the film’s world without giving us too much of a bird’s eye view of things.

When the combat does pop off in this movie it is pretty effective and tense.  The violence here is brutal and a bit disturbing, but certainly still a spectacle, and the film’s soundtrack features a lot of notably very loud gunshot sound effects.  I will say, for a movie that’s trying very hard to scream modernity there is something a bit old fashioned about its conception of modern combat.  We’re given little indication here that drone strikes exist in the world of the movie and there’s a level of small arms fire that seems a bit out of step with where most contemporary battles are going, but maybe that’s for the best cinematically.  That spectacle mixed with the novelty of seeing this kind of material is the main reason to see this movie and it’s definitely a good enough reason.  I do not know that this is something I can really take all that seriously however; on some level I think this is more of a glorified zombie movie than it is a real cautionary tale about political divisions run amok.  But is that isn’t an inherently bad thing, I like zombie movies and finding a new spin on society falling apart in a disastrous conflict is a smart thing to do.
***1/2 out of Five

Home Video Round-Up 4/17/2024

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (4/2/2024)
	When I heard that Ethan Coen was using his time away from his brother to make a documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis I was intrigued both to see what a Coen Brother would do with the documentary format and also because Jerry Lee Lewis is a complicated and controversial figure who would be interesting to analyze in a post #MeToo and post “cancel culture” era.  But then it just kind of never seemed to get an official release that I heard about and I was surprised to find it while randomly browsing through Amazon Prime Video.  Apparently it just got dropped there with no promotion or fanfare at all two months ago.  Actually watching the movie though I kind of see why A24 opted to punt on this one though as the movie itself, while not incompetent or anything, very much is not delivering what most people would want from a modern look at the musician.  The film could perhaps be called “Jerry Lee Lewis In His Own Words” or something to that effect as its approach is to almost entirely tell his story through archival interviews with the man himself.  There are no music historians or any other modern figures weighing in at all and the film is almost bafflingly uninterested in diving deep into the most controversial aspect of the man’s career: his marriage to his thirteen year old cousin.  The movie seems to spend all of four minutes on this career altering event which is almost entirely addressed through an evasive interview he gave about it in which he expresses no regrets.  We get no context to what lead to it and what its fallout was and hear nothing about it from the woman in question despite there being no shortage of quotes from her given that she wrote two memoirs on the topic and there was certainly time in this 74 minute movie to expand on such a major topic.  I’m not saying the movie needed to entirely focus on this or turn into some unforgiving screed but to mostly just ignore the elephant in the room feels like journalistic malpractice.  Beyond that issue, well, there are some interesting quotes uncovered here and there’s certainly interest to be found in the central figure but I maybe would have liked something that probed deeper than what Lewis was willing to share in his public interviews and the film can be messy with its timeline and flips between subjects in strange ways.  I can’t say I got the impression from this that Coen is a natural fit for the documentary format and would never have guessed he was involved in this had I not known ahead of time. ** out of Five
Self-Reliance (4/3/2024)
Self Reliance is a movie that saddles itself with kind of a crappy and vague title which doesn’t really speak to the high concept that it otherwise rather leans on.  The film is a comedy (of sorts) about a guy who is given the offer of being a participant on a “dark web reality show” in which various assassins will be tracking him down and to try to kill him for thirty days and if he survives he’ll win a million dollars.  This is said to all be captured on hidden cameras placed by a crew he’ll never say and the trick to all of this is that these assassins after him will only strike at him if he’s completely alone, so if he’s in the same room as anyone else he’ll be safe.  He accepts this offer in part because he expects it to be easy to always have someone around but it turns out his friends and family don’t believe him about this whole situation and think he’s crazy and refuse to play along, forcing him to find other solutions.  The film was written, directed, and stars Jake Johnson, an actor I’m not really that familiar with despite him having had small roles in a handful of big movies.  He acquits himself here pretty well as a performer and well enough as a writer and director though I wouldn’t say I was exactly “wowed” by him in any of these roles.  The basic concept is sort of like a comedic take on David Fincher’s The Game, although I wouldn’t call it a parody of that film and while there’s enough of an absurdist tone here to comfortably call it a “comedy” it’s not necessarily a movie that’s reaching for laughs every couple of minutes.  That might throw some people who aren’t quite sure how to take this, possibly myself included, but I did ultimately find the movie to be an engaging enough watch with an original enough concept to keep me going with it. *** out of Five
The Greatest Night in Pop (4/9/2024)
	“We Are the World” is one of the lamest things in pop culture history; a completely inane and maudlin song that uses the pretense of charity to stroke the egos of a bunch of millionaire pop stars who seek to “help” Africa in the most shallow ways imaginable while doing nothing to advocate against the systems that are causing famine and injustice in the first place.  The song itself completely sucks and anyone involved in it automatically loses two points from their coolness scorecards as far as I’m concerned.  So as you’d imagine a documentary that looks at the making of this song while operating under the assumption that the whole project was basically a good thing is not exactly going to get my unreserved approval.  That having been said, The Greatest Night in Pop, which functions as a retrospective “making of” about that whole song does still have its moments.  The film gathers interviews from various performers and behind the scenes figures on the track including some of the big names like Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen to reminisce about the night and as vacuous as that project was “We Are the World” was at the very least a fairly impressive logistical achievement in getting all those people into the same room and keep them functioning as a team even if only for one night.  Make no mistake this movie is a complete puff piece; the closest thing you’ll find to criticisms of the endeavor is that Sheila E. was basically only invited and strung along in order to lure Prince into showing up, beyond that the movie very much believes in this as an act of legitimate charity which is kind of dumb.  My general hate for this song makes it impossible to really endorse the movie, but if I’m being honest there are more than enough fun showbiz stories here to make this a pretty engaging watch. **1/2 out of Five
Orion and the Dark (4/15/2024)
The sole credited screenwriter on this straight-to-Netflix animated movie produced by Dreamworks Animation is Charlie Kaufman.  Yes, that Charlie Kaufman.  This isn’t something that Netflix is heavily promoting because, well, most people don’t know who that is and the people who do know the name probably don’t view him as an obvious choice to entertain nine year olds but it is true and is the main reason to watch the movie.  The writing is identifiably Kaufman’s too: it’s about a protagonist with crippling anxiety, aspects of it are clearly deconstructionist, and it also involves this fairly meta framing story that emerges at a certain point.  However, Kaufman and Dreamworks do ultimately prove to be strange bedfellows and there are long stretches of this movie that feel less like the work of one of our most innovative writers and more like a third rate Pixar ripoff.  The film’s basic story, about a fearful child learning to overcome his fears after going on an adventure with a personification of “the dark” and other anthropomorphized night entities like “dream” and “insomnia” is in fact a very lame premise and it does not avoid many of the pitfalls you’d expect from something like that.  So the film will often seem to go into “animation formula” autopilot for certain stretches only to suddenly win you back from time to time with an interesting idea from Kaufman and I’m not sure if this is by design as some sort of statement about how mainstream animation often work or if it’s indicative of a creative struggle behind the scenes.  I’d also note that the movie has issues visually.  The animation here is, to be frank, second rate.  I wouldn’t say the film looks horrible but its clearly trying to ape the Pixar/Dreamworks look on a much lower budget and the character designs on most of these “night entities” are lousy.  Ultimately there are too many failures of execution here to really make this a movie I can recommend without pretty big reservations, but that script does have fun ideas in it and there is something consistently amusing about the movie’s wild inconsistencies and I feel like engaged me more than a lot of better movies do. *** out of Five
Frida (4/17/2024)
	Though this has the exact same title as the 2002 Julie Taymor film about the same subject, this is actually a recent documentary account of the life of Frida Kahlo which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.  The film takes an “in her own words” approache, eschewing talking heads and modern historian interview in favor of having the film be “narrated” with Kahlo’s own writing from diaries, letters, and old print interviews which are read in voice over by actress Fernanda Echevarría.  Occasionally the film will also use quotes from other contemporaries of Kahlo but for the most part it sticks to letting her essentially tell her own story.  This is accompanied by a mix of stock footage and photographs from Kahlo’s life but also with her artwork and the film occasionally makes these elements blend together in some striking collage like ways.  The story itself is not fundamentally different from the one told in that aforementioned Taymor film (which is itself a good if somewhat Hollywood-ized version of the story) and I’m not sure I learned a whole lot new from watching this.  There also isn’t anything inherently innovative in its presentation, which is kind of like Ken Burns but on steroids, but the execution is really solid and that makes up for a lot.  Making historical documentaries entirely out of stock material like this is not easy and this one manages to find just the right balance to  jazz up the source footage without turning into a try-hard eyesore as these things can often be if they try too hard to avoid being a real documentary.  I think it was pretty well done work, one that’s certainly worth watching if you’re interested in Kahlo or the era she came from. ***1/2 out of Five

The First Omen(4/6/2024)/Immaculate(4/7/2024)

Most people would be happy to tell you that The Exorcist is an important and influential horror movie and yet on some level the sheer magnitude of its influence still somehow feel under-rated in that it’s a movie from over fifty years ago which still regularly gets blatant ripoffs like The Pope’s Exorcist or Prey for the Devil released almost every single year during some of the slower box office weeks of the year.  But this year something seems to have shifted and we’ve instead gotten not one but two horror movies in a row that have realized that there are other devil movies from the New Hollywood era that they can try to monetize.  First we’ve got a movie called Immaculate looks to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby for inspiration but opts for a convent in Italy for its setting and then we’ve got The First Omen which… also looks to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby for inspiration and also opts to set itself in a convent in Italy… but it’s branded after the 1976 thriller The Omen.  Honestly it’s kind of wild how closely these movies that came out within two weeks in the spring of 2024 twin one another and given just how much of an apples-for-apples comparison we’ve got between the two I felt like this was a good opportunity for me to pull out the “double review” format that I haven’t used in a while.

Unlike the other movie I’m looking at today Immaculate is a non-IP property whose debt to a previous movie is less official and it was put out by the cool indie distributor Neon, but it can claim to have the bigger star at its center in Sydney Sweeney, who plays a young woman from Michigan named Cecilia who seeks to become a nun and has been sent to work at a convent in Italy which doubles as a hospice for elderly women of the cloth.  While there she sees some odd things going on and gets some strange visions but things really kick into motion once it’s discovered that Cecilia has become pregnant despite having maintained her vow of chastity, which is determined to have been an immaculate conception by the people running the convent.  However it become clear quickly that these people do not have her best interests in mind as they become increasingly controlling of her every move.  A similar conspiracy seems to be happening in The First Omen, which also looks at a young American woman aspiring to be a nun who also travels to Italy (in this case Rome) to take her vows.  This being a direct prequel to the Richard Donner film The Omen it is set in the early 70s and in prequel fashion seeks to explain how Damien came to be born and what forces led to his being handed off to the American diplomat played by Gregory Peck in that movie.  This will play out in a similarly conspiratorial convent, this one an orphanage, that may be seeking to find a mother for the devil.

Let’s start by going into The First Omen, which is in this rather odd position of being an extension of a horror franchise that I’m not sure people were really asking for a prequel to despite there being some pretty clear unanswered questions for a prequel to address.  The original The Omen is pretty well remembered but is not a movie that should be taken as seriously as The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby.  It was a movie that was plainly made to exploit the success of those other two movies and it has some cool kill scenes, has some fun with the creepiness of the kid in it, and has an all-timer score by Jerry Goldsmith but otherwise it’s kind of dumb.  I kind of get the impression that the people making this prequel aren’t huge fans of the movie either because this doesn’t seem that interested in looking or sounding like the original film and when it does choose to echo the original it does so with hesitation.  When I think of The Omen I think of pretty bold widescreen compositions and tons of gothic music and this doesn’t really do that.  One could argue that’s a good thing as trying to hard to cater to nostalgia could be kind of cringe as well but I’m kind of mixed on what it tries to replace that style with.  The film does try to mirror a couple of that movie’s kills, but a lot of its more memorable images feel more like something out of Jacob’s Ladder than The Omen and it also barters in some kind of out there body horror.  In fact the film’s willingness to “go there” when it “goes there” in terms of graphic imagery is probably the best thing it’s got going for it.

Immaculate, by contrast, while still a movie that’s plenty violent is a bit less creative with its bloodletting.  However I’d say it makes up for this by nailing the sense of paranoia leading up to the bloodletting better than The First Omen does.  Both are essentially movies that posit sects of the Catholic Church being complicit in the conspiracies befalling these expat nuns to be becoming anti-Madonnas, which is something of a subversion of how these devil movies usually go given that the Holy See is usually the cavalry coming in to save the day at the end of these things.  Nell Tiger Free and Sydney Sweeney are both pretty good in their respective films at portraying these innocents who become unwitting incubators and find themselves fighting back against the control being exerted on their bodies.  Both movies could be seen to be post-Dobbs decision parallels to one degree or anther but I think Immaculate is a bit stronger in this regard because the pregnancy is front and center in that one whereas The First Omen kind of delays that aspect of its story in service of trying to hide what is in fact an extremely obvious plot twist, especially given that this is a prequel and we know exactly what all this is leading up to.  Immaculate by contrast has a much more successful twist which actually takes things in a more interesting direction.

Really though, the main reason that Immaculate works better is just that it’s a tighter and more intense than The First Omen, likely in part because it’s about a half hour shorter.  I cared more about the Sydney Sweeney, I thought she reacted to the situation she was in more logically, and when the movie really ramps things up in its third act it starts to get legitimately intense leading into a really good finale.  That’s not to say it’s a perfect horror movie by any means.  It has a kind of a weak villain and probably could have stood to have a stronger supporting cast, and like the film I’m comparing it to it sort of feels obligated to add some kind of cheap jump scares and kills to the proceedings to make sure audiences don’t get bored, but I was overall impressed.  As for The First Omen, well I admired some of its audacity and appreciated that it was at least trying to do something with the assignment it was given but at the end of the day it kind of lived down to the reputation of the original The Omen in that it’s kind of a middling movie that’s only occasionally elevated by a couple of cool isolated scenes. So I have a pretty clear favorite between the two in this comparison but man, the fact that two films that are so similar are coming out back to back like this does kind of hurt both of them.  I feel like things could have maybe been scheduled a little better all around.

The First Omen: **1/2 out of Five

Immaculate: ***1/2 out of Five