M3gan (3/4/2023)
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M3gan was something of a surprise hit when it opened in the first week of January and went on to make almost a hundred million dollars (domestic) on a rather modest budget and it got pretty decent reviews too, albeit hedged reviews that mostly seemed to just be surprised this January release had anything going for it at all (that it was a bit of a silly little break from covering this endless award season also likely helped a bit). Personally I got to it late and with slightly higher expectations as a result… the movie is, fine. The film’s story is fairly predictable if you’ve seen the trailer and the basic story is almost identical to the recent 2019 remake of Child’s Play (smart toy decides to protect the child they’re assigned to by killing perceived threats) but there’s maybe a bit more of an edge of slight satire here. The film kind of functions as a timely rebuke of A.I. in the age of ChatGPT, though that was likely unintentional given the timing. Instead this is probably meant to be more of a statement about the way technology affects children who are exposed to it at a very young age, like kids being “raised” by iPads handed to them to keep them distracted by their busy parents. There’s something to that but this isn’t necessarily the most elegant or subversive version of that idea. It’s also not particularly effective as a horror movie. I actually watched the “unrated” version of the movie that’s currently streaming on Peacock but it still seemed pretty damn tame and didn’t really engage very seriously in suspense filmmaking. There’s enough here to make M3gan a passable enough viewing experience, but I can’t say it’s left me too interested in the inevitable sequels or future work from this filmmaker.
*** out of Five |
The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker (3/18/2023)
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This documentary showed up on Netflix as one of the first movies to be released this year. It looks at the life of Caleb Lawrence “Kai” McGillvary, a drifter who attained viral fame after he intervened in an attack, coming out as something of a hero in the incident and conducted a rather colorful interview with a local news affiliate at the scene of the crime. This propelled him to some talk show appearances and there were attempts made to make him the star of a reality show, but it soon became apparent that this guy actually had some pretty serious mental illnesses and was likely homeless for a reason and there’s a not insignificant chance that all this attention was not in his best interest. Eventually he became embroiled in another case and is currently in prison. This documentary is likely correct in viewing “Kai” as a figure whose story says something about media and culture in the 21st Century and it is interesting that time has progressed enough that this particular era of online virility has become “history” to be looked back at. However, I feel like the documentary kind of holds back its punches when it comes to comes to really indicting its interview subjects when it comes to their role in exploiting “Kai” and when it comes to the two crimes at hand (the one where Kai came off as a hero and the one where he came off as a villain) the film doesn’t really pull back enough layers to really come to conclusions as to what went down. It’s ultimately just a documentary that feels a bit too weak and surface-level to get to the bottom of things and kind of has the whiff of Netflix conveyer belt production to it. Hopefully when the time comes to make the Antoine “Bed Intruder Song” Dodson documentary they take their work a little more seriously.
**1/2 out of Five |
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You People (3/21/2023)
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We all remember Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the seminal 1967s comedy in which a white woman reveals to her parents that her finance is a black man, but what if the roles were reversed and they wanted to do a story in which a black woman reveals to her parents that her fiancé is a white man? Well good news, there’s a movie about that as well, it was called Guess Who and it came out in 2005 starring Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher, and Zoë Saldaña and it’s not very well remembered. But okay, a lot has happened since then, what if we wanted to make a movie about interracial relationships that has more modern sensibilities and is maybe a bit harder on the cringey condescending white liberal parents? Well, that exists to and it’s called Get Out. But okay, what if you wanted to combine the modern take on cringey boomer liberal parents while also doing the racial role reversal idea of making it about a white man with a black woman and also want to do it as a straightforward comedy without horror elements… well, I guess the new film You People is for you then. It stars Jonah Hill as a thirty something dude who runs a podcast about “the culture” who meets a woman played by Lauren London and eventually asks her to marry him, but the meeting of the parents on both sides becomes kind of a nightmare. The black woman’s father, played by Eddie Murphy, is in the Nation of Islam and has very little patience for this schlubby underachieving caucasian who wants to join the family. Meanwhile the white guy’s mother, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is this deeply cringey rich lady who gets diarrhea of the mouth whenever in the presence of African Americans.
This was funded by Netflix, but it doesn’t have the look and feel of a Netflix release necessarily. It’s no one’s idea of a visual marvel but it does for better or worse look like what you would have expected from a theatrical comedy from roughly 2005-2013, you know, back when comedies were still allowed to have theatrical releases. I will also say that the film is pretty effective at capturing the very specific brand of cringey social awkwardness that arises when clueless white people interact with fed up black people in the 2020s… in fact it might be a little too effective at it. Some of these interactions are so intensely intentionally cringe inducing that it’s almost hard to laugh at them because you’re being hit by too much second hand embracement for all these characters. On the not-so-positive end of things, I think Eddie Murphy was kind of miscast here. Murphy is known for being smooth and mischievous, not grumpy, and this character is supposed to be grumpy as hell. I think maybe at some point they re-worked the character to be less of an “angry black man” stereotype but I’m not sure they ever landed on what the replacement for that was supposed to be because the character we’re left with doesn’t quite work comedically. In fact I got “re-worked in post” vibes form a lot of the movie as there are a handful of characters here that seem to be introduced only to not really be used elsewhere or they sort of show up out of nowhere later without having gotten a proper introduction.
But I think the bigger problem here is just that the central romance between the Jonah Hill and Lauren London characters really just doesn’t work. Hill has that “schlubby guy feels mismatched to attractive co-star problem that a lot of movies get criticized for and even if you look past that these actors just don’t have chemistry and I didn’t buy this relationship, which is kind of a problem because its critical to propelling this movie. So that’s a big problem, but I wouldn’t say the whole movie is a waste as there are parts of it that really do work. Julia Louis-Dreyfus does a great job of capturing everything that’s annoying and clueless about over-privileged white womanhood and some of the side cast members like Sam Jay and Deon Cole do some good work here. There are funny moments along the way, but the movie ultimately feels ramshackle and not always in a charming way, but we don’t get a lot of comedies like this so I don’t want to be too hard on it even if there are enough drawbacks here that I don’t know that I can really get behind the project as a whole.
*** out of Five |
Pamela, A Love Story (3/29/2023)
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Pamela Anderson is, frankly not someone I find all that inherently compelling. The peak of her career was a little before my time and I was always a little mystified as to why this person, who’s main claim to fame was being a pinup model, always seemed to garner so much press. I can’t say I’d normally feel compelled to watch a documentary about her but it’s early in the year and there aren’t many new documentaries out yet so I’m going to take what I can get. This is one of a couple of projects recently that tries to fit Anderson in with the trend of re-evaluate the scandalous women of the 90s, suggesting that they were mistreated by the sexist culture of the time, and yeah I think there is an argument to be made there. That is not, however, what the documentary is entirely focused on. The film was authorized by Anderson and made with her full participation so it sort of takes the familiar profile doc structure of “follow a person around with a camera for a couple months and intersperse this footage with the story of their past life.” That story is almost entirely told through interviews with Anderson herself and occasionally her now grown sons along with archival footage and they don’t appear to have sought out interviews with any of the other principals involved, namely Tommy Lee. The film is probably at its best during the “modern” sections where we peak in on what Anderson is like now as she looks and sounds pretty different from how she did during the peak of her fame and has a pretty folksy and unguarded interview demeanor. I wouldn’t say we get the most objective take on her career from her (she seems to rather over-estimate how much unrealized potential she had as an actress) but she is pretty blunt and believable in her accounts of what her various marriages were like and her somewhat odd willingness to enter into and out of them. Where the film falters a bit more is in its structure; it reaches what feels like a natural stopping point at a certain point but then suddenly keeps going, possibly because they finished the film only to then start filming again as some developments happened in Anderson’s life (namely the release of the “Pam and Tommy” series on Hulu, which competing streaming service Netflix feels rather excited to trash) and her casting as Roxie in a run on Broadways’s “Chicago.” All told this is a pretty run of the mill doc of the kind streaming services are filled with, but it gets the job done and if this subject interests you, you could do worse.
*** out of Five |
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Boston Strangler (4/3/2023)
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For much of last year 20th Century Studios almost completely abandoned theatrical distribution and basically became a content generator for Hulu while patiently waiting for that legacy contract with HBO to finally expire. In October they finally started putting some movies into theaters but if the film Boston Strangler is any indication they aren’t above sending stuff straight to streaming if they don’t seem like they’ll be big profit generators and that seems to be exactly the determination that was made in the case of this true crime account looking at the titular serial killer from the perspective of a journalist who viewed themselves as having held the Boston P.D.’s feet to the fire. The movie this plainly wants to be is Zodiac but director Matt Ruskin is no David Fincher and this movie is no Zodiac. Ruskin doesn’t really do much to establish the film’s time period separate from the police and journalistic milieus, that or they just didn’t have the budget to fill the screen with such details, and the whole movie is just generally kind of lifeless. Keira Knightley isn’t exactly “bad” in the lead but her character doesn’t really have much personality beyond being “determined” and if you compare the journalistic process details here with what we see in something like She Said it really feels lacking. Eventually the film gets into something of a true crime conspiracy theory in the ending, which is at least interesting on paper, but by the time we get there I’d pretty well checked out of this one. Not recommended.
** out of Five |