Home Video Round-Up 5/9/2024

Road House (4/23/2024)
	Doing a remake of the 1989 cult classic Road House seemed like an inherently terrible idea to me.  That original movie was remembered more for its oddness than from any innate quality and that wasn’t really replicable and its base story otherwise doesn’t provide much material to build a new story with.  So I went into this new version with extremely low expectations but can say it turned out to be a somewhat pleasant surprise insomuch as I found it to be a reasonably entertaining if rather “mid” viewing experience.  Unlike most remakes these days, this version of Road House does not seem that interested in using the original film’s IP as a means of attracting old fans and instead feels like more of an old school remake that is targeted at new viewers unfamiliar with the original.  There aren’t that many callbacks or Easter eggs about the original film and it changes up a number of things about it like relocating the story to the Florida Keys and giving the protagonist a new backstory.  Jake Gyllenhaal proves to be a pretty smart casting choice in the lead as, like Patrick Swayze before him, he’s someone who’s muscular enough to be a credible fighter but isn’t necessarily a dedicated action hero and has more of a sensitive side to him.  The movie also has a somewhat over-qualified director in Doug Liman, a guy who doesn’t always get the best material to work with and can be inconsistent because of it but who’s generally a reliable journeyman behind the camera and knows how to put together a decent action scene.  The movie also features an enjoyably silly performance by MMA star Conor McGregor and it uses its Florida setting pretty effectively.  At the end of the day I don’t think this is going to be all that memorable, but at the very least it competes well with the kind of working class action movies you get from the Liam Neesons and Jason Statham of the world this time of year. *** out of Five
Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told (4/26/2024)
The “Freaknik” was a gathering of sorts that happened in Atlanta during the 80s and 90s which was sort of a bacchanal that served as spring break festivities for historically black universities at the time.  The documentary looks to chronicle the rise and fall of this celebration and make a case for its importance to the city and to black culture more generally during the era.  I can’t say I’d ever heard of this event before this movie came out (my knowledge of black youth culture in the 90s tends to be of the Northern variety) and the movie made a decent if perhaps not overwhelming case for it being something that mattered at least to the generation that experienced it.  The film is largely made up of talking head interviews with various people who attended the events or lived in Atlanta at the time and they discuss how the event grew from a small gathering into an increasingly large crowd and how things grew increasingly debauched over the years and delve into the positives and negatives of that.  When discussing the morality of the event the interviewees frequently compare it to the white spring break festivities that happen in places like Daytona, which is a fair point, but perhaps ignores that those events happen in small communities that are kind of built for events like that and have tourism based economies rather than a major metropolis with a lot of other things going on like Atlanta.  The film itself doesn’t feel particularly cinematic and despite only being about 82 minutes long it still kind of feels like it’s straining for material at a certain point.  It will probably appeal more to people with local connections or nostalgia for this event and time. **1/2 out of Five
Spaceman (4/30/2024)
	Adam Sandler has done enough work outside of his usual comic shtick at this point that people are no longer popping their monocles when he shows up in something that isn’t entirely goofy, but his newest movie Spaceman still probably goes further in that direction than anything he’s done previously.  Movies like Punch Drunk Love and Uncut Gems might not have been normal Sandler movies but they still had elements of comedy and were riffing on his established persona in certain ways but there’s not much of that at all in Spaceman, which is a pretty straight faced work of science fiction.  The film concerns an astronaut who’s alone on a ship investigating a cloud cluster that’s appeared near Jupiter and upon arriving starts getting visions of a giant spider on board who speaks to him.  The tension of the movie is whether this spider is purely a manifestation of his psyche as he cracks under pressure or if there actual is some sort of alien psychic communication going on here.  The film is based novel called “Spaceman of Bohemia” by Jaroslav Kalfař, a Czech American author who writes in English but made the novel about Czech characters and the movie maintains this, having everyone speak in American English while having names like Jakub, Lenka, and Hanuš which just sort of feels strange throughout.  That’s distracting but the presence of Adam Sandler here is just generally an even bigger distraction.  He’s not doing bad work by any means but he’s not doing great work either, certainly not great enough to distract you from the fact that you’re watching Billy Madison having a mental breakdown in space and I’m kind of not sure why this casting choice was made at all.  As for the material itself, well, it’s kind of an interesting science fiction premise and it goes in some interesting enough places but I wasn’t really feeling the CGI spider and it just generally failed to “blow my mind.”  Mileage will probably vary though and I could maybe see this hitting me better on a different days. As it stands though it just seemed kind of mid. **1/2 out of Five
Spermworld (5/3/2024)
Spermworld is a documentary which looks at the very strange sub-culture of men who make several sperm donations and thus become the genetic father to potentially hundreds of children.  They aren’t doing this by making donations to sperm banks to be given out anonymously either, they’re meeting the potential baby mamas and then producing “donations” in the bathroom which are then applied with turkey basters or something.   Why so many women are apparently seeking these services when there are presumably any number of other more traditional way to conceive children is discussed in the film briefly but never quite fully explained.  Instead the film seems more interested in the donors and their unusual lifestyles.  We spend much of the time following three donors, and in particular one guy who says he’s produced over a hundred children and travels the country visiting them, which seems like a terrible idea for all involved but the baby mamas seem to be happy with the arrangement for some reason.  The is pretty cinematic as docs go and avoids stuff like talking heads and voice overs in some kind of clever ways but this approach can be a bit of a double edged sword at times as there are some unanswered questions here and also some of the interactions feel a touch staged.  By the end of the film I don’t quite feel like we’ve gotten to the bottom of what’s making all these people tick but there are definitely some interesting moments along the way. *** out of Five
Rebel Moon – Part 2: The Scargiver (5/9/2024)
	I’m someone who often has a compulsive urge to finish things once I’ve started them, which is the part of my personality that drove me to watch this second part of Zach Snyder’s two part Rebel Moon project despite having thought that part one pretty much completely sucked.  Had I needed to actually pay for a movie ticket to do so I probably would have just let this go, but since watching it was as easy as pressing play on Netflix I was willing to finish this on principal.It’s pretty well known that the idea behind this whole series was to make Seven Samurai but in the Star Wars universe and that once Lucasfilm turned that pitch down Snyder tried to “file off the serial number” and make it as an “original” film.  The first part covered the recruiting of the warriors who would take the place of the samurai to defend a village against the galactic empire while this part covers the actual village attack part.  So like a lot of second parts of two part movies this ends up feeling like the climactic action scene of a normal movie that’s been stretched out over the course of an entire feature film with only some cursory story at the beginning and end.  Usually that’s a bad thing but the story of Rebel Moon is so un-engaging that a more strict action focus is probably for the best and because of that I would probably consider this a slight improvement over the first movie.  In fact had that first movie done a much better job of getting me to invest in this world and these characters I could see a lot of this being a lot more satisfying.  Snyder does know how to film an action scene and is able to give some of these sequences some heft, but a lot of it was to no real effect because I barely even remembered anything about any of these characters despite it having only been something like four months since I saw the first movie so it all felt pretty empty.  If they were going to insist on making this two movies they probably should have just put them out on the same day because whatever interest would have carried over from Part 1 pretty much dissipated in the wait.  So, this whole endeavor was a real waste of both money and goodwill for Zach Snyder because even his craziest fans don’t seem to be into this thing and it kind of exposes why this dude usually works in comic book adaptation because world building is actually something he’s pretty bad at. *1/2 out of Five