Monkey Man (2024)

 

This is a pretty standard Revenge film but done in the style of a movie from India. That makes sense because it is set in India, features actors who are from India, and calls on many Hindu Legends and Indian myths to fill out the story. The most unusual element of the film is that it was written and directed by the actor Dev Patel, who also stars in the film. Patel has been a frequent subject on this site, I really enjoyed the version of David Copperfield that he participated in back in 2020, and although The Green Knight was not my favorite film of its year he was quite good in it.

The film can roughly be divided into two parts, both of which are told in a nonlinear fashion. There are frequent flashbacks that slowly reveal the motivation for the Revenge plot, and the perpetrators that deserve to have vengeance rain down upon them. Patel's character has a clever plan in the first part of the film, but of course the best laid plans often go awry. When this section of the film ends, there is a strange transition to the second part of the film, where his character is transformed through Supernatural means into an even stronger avenging angel, mimicking a character that was in a story told to him as a child by his mother. That by the way will probably give you some idea of why he is seeking Revenge.

The movie is full of martial arts flourishes that are so popular these days. There are rapid fight sequences against multiple opponents, and there is frequent use of materials in the scene as weapons. It all looks fairly standard for the kinds of films that we are used to at this point. In fact, the character of John Wick even gets name checked in the movie. While Patel's character does engage in vigorous combat, there are some interesting ideas included in the story. For instance the main character that Patel is trying to kill is a corrupt police captain, who is lauded by a religious figure, who seems to have a strong influence in a political movement in India. Of course it turns out that the police officer is not the ultimate power, but rather that position is held by the duplicitous religious leader, who uses his influence to gain power and wealth for those in the Inner Circle. There are frequent references to the poverty that exists in the country, and that is juxtaposed with the lifestyle of the guru and the police captain.

As I said the film could be divided into two parts, and it is the second part that gave me the most trouble in providing a wholehearted endorsement of the movie. In trying to create a cultural Touchstone, Patel has included some characters that seem less believable and extremely unusual, at least in the American culture. Having read John Irving's a son of the circus, I know that there is a tradition of transgenderism in the Indian subculture. What seems strange here is that there is a collective of these individuals who have their own Temple, and seem to understand how to draw on the forces of the Gods more effectively than anyone else. It just seems very odd, and when an army of transvestites shows up at just the right moment to assist in the climax of the film, it makes everything that happened in the first part of the film feel like it is from a completely different story 

In the long run I would recommend the movie, with some reservations. It is not as strictly action based as it might first appear, but there are some terrific action sequences, and when you get to the end it definitely fulfills our expectations of a Revenge film. There are characters that basically vanish from the story halfway through, who could probably have been useful in making the transition to the more fantasy-based power issues in the second part of the movie. For those not familiar, like me, some of the cultural references will feel alien and be difficult to understand. By the end of the movie it will make more sense, but that's a long time to wait to completely comprehend what is going on in the movie that you've spent 2 hours watching.

The Untouchables (1987) Revisit

 

This movie is as hypnotic as any DePalma film, with the added advantage that it is straightforward and to the point. Maybe it is just good guys versus the bad guys, but when the Good Guys are lead by Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, I don't know how anyone can turn away. Throw in DeNiro as Al Capone and you have a heavyweight fight that would break pay per view records if it were a boxing match.

Even before the first scene, the movie is pulling you in with a haunting and propulsive theme played over artistically rendered Titles. Ennio Morricone was Oscar Nominated for the score of this film and it should have been his. The background themes are  great at accentuating the heroes in their glory moments, and the action scenes are supplemented with exciting motifs that come up in various sections of the film. There are plenty of opportunities for the music to make an impact on you.

The botched opening raid is a nice way to set our expectations at a different place. Later, when the group of Untouchable Law Enforcement agents swoop down on smugglers at the Canadian border, we are amped up to see the results after the earlier futile effort. The key set piece is the train station shootout with the slow build and all the closeups. DePalma has studied the Serio Leone films meticulously and lets those beats play out at the same agonizing and tension filled pace as we got in the Spaghetti Westerns. Every complication adds to the suspense, every effort to get the accountant and keep him alive makes our anticipation of Andy Garcia as Stone worthwhile. Costner plays it so cool in this scene in comparison to some of the early moments of the film. You can see the character arc in his demeanor here.

Of course Sean Connery is the lynchpin for the film. His world weary folksiness and Chicago cantankerous nature were a perfect realization of the character. The combination of his story and that of Charles Martin Smith gives license to Eliot Ness to get a little dirty, in spite of his white knight image. Charlie Martin Smith and Billy Drago are the unsung heroes of the cast, one showing the exuberance of a puppy dog and the other reflecting the darkest elements of the Capone organization. Maybe Capone doesn't go flying to his death, but we know that his empire has crumbled because of the turning of his own tactics against him.

Filmed in the 80s, DePalma and Company make Chicago look like fifty years earlier, and the soundstage sets match up so well with the exteriors, you can believe it was all shot in the time and place depicted. This movie is just a lot of fun. Fidelity to the real story is lacking, and the conclusion in the court is a bit baffling, but you won't care because everything else is so rousing.   

Jesus Christ Superstar (Revisit 2024)

 

It's Easter, so it's time to revisit Jesus Christ Superstar. Much like "Jaws" seems to come out to theaters around July 4th each year, "Jesus Christ Superstar" surfaces on Easter Holiday and lets us take in the story of Christ's sacrifice and enjoy the hippie rock staging of the whole thing. I have written before about both Carl Anderson and Ted Neely in these roles and there was nothing in today's screening to dissuade me from my belief that they embody the whole spirit of the show.

As you can see above, director Norman Jewison did some creative things in making a film out of s stage musical, The camera angles, still frames, and zoom shots all jazz things up. Choreographer Robert Iscove, goes full tilt with the hippie  chanting and arm waving that reflects some of the styles of the day. Although there was a stage musical done from the concept album, most of the staging in the film is original. You can see some of the things I'm talking about in the above clip.

Jewison used locations throughout Israel and the West Bank . The caves, ruins, and deserts are all integrated into the story with visual flare, from overhead shots, camera movement and the occasional insertion of contemporary military equipment as a backdrop. Those scenes sometimes make what is an eternal story feel fresh and relevant to the time.

The musical finale is staged with electricity. Judas dropping from the heavens in his white fringe shirt, and the dancers moving in synchronicity against a night sky in the ancient ruins, looks spectacular.

You can find previous posts on the film here,  here, and here. Hope your Easter is one that inspires you the way this movie inspires me. 

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (2024)

 

We have a winner for the stupidest movie of the year. It will take something colossally awful, like "Five Nights at Freddy's" to displace this from the list of dumb movies of 2024.  This is a perfect example of making up stuff as you go along. It's as if we are listening to a story being told by a parent to a small child, and every time the kid's attention starts to wander, the parent throws in something else that they hope will keep the kid entranced. Well, I am not a little kid, and most five year olds I know will see that this is a bunch of nonsense.

There are at least five movies in this franchise, and it feels like they are racing one another to be the most forgettable. One reason that this is true is that there are no characters that you can care for past a superficial level. I literally had no memory of the main characters in this film, being in the previous movie. There is an attempt to make us care about Kong, by having him bond with a mini Kong, but that did not work the way it should. I did sort of enjoy Godzilla curling up in the Coliseum in Rome, like it was a cat bed, but it did not endear him to me.

Every location in the movie has to have a title card, because we would not otherwise recognize Egypt with the pyramids or Rome. The real reason that there are so many label cards is that there are so many hidden worlds that we keep traveling to. Not only is there a Hollow Earth, but there is a subterranean Hollow Earth,  which has its own secret valley of giant apes. That section  is different from the hidden world of the Iwi people and the Temple of Mothra. How are they all collected, well get ready for an exposition dump when the scientist starts translating the hieroglyphics they find. It reads like a pretty sophisticated and detailed narrative, in spite of the fact that they are barely pictographs. 

It is so convenient that the Monarch Research group was working on an enhancement for Kong, that just happens to fit the one part of his body that is nearly destroyed by a Titan he encounters. Oh and it was very thoughtful to have it at the observation station that was destroyed, since no contact with the surface world is possible. This is just one incredulous moment followed by another. Unfortunately, none of them is very interesting.

Do you remember how impressive the dinosaurs were in that first "Jurassic Park"? Well now everything on the screen is supposed to impress you, and it looks cheesy.   When I had students discover PowerPoint, they all wanted to use every feature, the the presentations lose focus as a result. Same effect here. There are too many creatures, in too many environments, doing too many things that it just becomes boring.

It sounds like I hated this movie, I don't. I would only hate it if I had high expectations and cared about any of it. That was not the case. Go stream "Godzilla Minus One", and save this movie to put your toddlers to sleep by. 

Late Night with the Devil (2024)

 

I almost pulled the trigger on this with one of my streaming services, but on the podcast, one of my guests did say it was playing in theaters, which I had not realized. I immediately went in search and found a screening in one of our favorite venues, and boy am I glad I did. This is an early contender for top film of the year, and seeing it with a sold out audience was fantastic because when a horror film hits, you can feel it in the people around you, and I definitely felt it.

David Dastmalchian plays Jack Delroy, a late night talk show host in the 1970s, who has had great success but can't quite climb the mountain of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. The Halloween episode of his show in 1977, will feature some macabre guests and stunts, and as you can probably guess, it does not go quite the way it was anticipated. The film is presented as if it were the video record of that nights show. With the exception of an seven or eight minute prologue feature, which is made to look like a short documentary, the film plays out over the course of what would be a ninety minute late night show. Setting it in the seventies gives the staging a verisimilitude that a contemporary setting would lack. Nowadays, a huckster like the character Christou, would be doing YouTube or TikTok readings for his psychic demonstrations. There is a character, Carmichael Haig, that is based on James Randi, a magician and psychic skeptic, who made numerous appearances on talk shows of the era, debunking paranormal phenomena. His skills are used to help extend the mystery we are witnessing, but he becomes the subject of debunking as well.   

A horror film can only be said to be successful if it frightens the audience. The fact that Delroy's audience is subjected to some unpleasant surprises, offers us a couple of jump scares, but more importantly, an aura of dread hangs over the interview and demonstration of  parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell, June's subject Lilly D'Abo. Lilly's back story is highlighted in the film with another documentary short that is presented as a film clip on the show. The two film segments do a lot of exposition in a way that makes perfect sense for the media that we are watching. The combination of behind the scenes video with what was purportedly broadcast, allows the story to play out in a more narrative form than it would otherwise be able to achieve. 

Like most 70s films, this is a slow burn with the climax pulling out all the stops to make the show frightening. Although the effects and actions have been seen before in a dozen other horror films, they work really well here. The use of practical effects helps the movie as well, and when the events are shown as they might have appeared in the television camera, they seem even more creepy. There is a little bit of a twist in the wrap up, that feels a bit conventional but it ties everything together pretty well, and the seeds for it were planted early on. 

Dastmalchian is convincing as  a desperate TV Host but especially as a skeptic turned believer who is frightened by what he sees. Australian teen actress Ingrid Torelli is chilling as the subject of possession that drives most of the film's second half. All the other actors have been well cast and they get to play with the effects and the story to make their characters interesting. There is a hypnosis sequence that is pretty startling. Directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes, have made the found footage style film work by dropping it into the late night TV venue of the 1970s. Lots of clever touches here and there. The AI controversy that has popped up is a nothing burger that you can safely ignore without surrendering to Skynet. Find this film in a theater and treat yourself to some genuine scares and a really well made film. 

One of the LAMBs has an interview with star David Dastmalchian, you might want to check out.

Ghostbusters Frozen Empire (2024)

 

I'm a few days late on this one. I did see it a second time, and I did a Lambcast and edited a YouTube version of the podcast since then, so I feel a little like my thoughts are already out there for interested parties. Still, I am going to do a short post here, and I will include the link to the video for more detail.

This is the least of the "Ghostbusters" franchise, with the exception of the 2016 version featuring a completely different cast. That movie is not worth remembering, but this one will be eventually. I think in the race to include as much as possible, they overstuffed the meal and it takes it a while to digest. I liked the movie well enough the first time through, but my second viewing was more encouraging, and I think the film will grow on people as it ages.

Fan service is crammed into the film, and I am a fan so I don't really have a complaint, except that some of the things this fan likes get short shrift. As we discussed in the podcast, the series has moved from horror comedy to supernatural adventure films for kids. There are only a few of the snarky asides that made the first two films of the franchise so great, and most of those are provided by the newest cast member, Kumail Nanjiani. 

There are not as many laughs in the film as you want, and it lacks the warmth of "Afterlife" which made that film work so well. The big bad is a big nothing in the film, and the "Frozen Empire" scenes come late in the movie and they don't really exploit the concept as well as they could. There are some inconsistencies in the characters and that will tick off the purists, but most of those are just rushing to get the plot to move forward. This is a mild recommendation, but still, a recommendation. Let the movie grow on you. Maybe in a few years it will acquire enough of a cult status that it will deserve some "Fright Rags" merchandise. 

The Fugitive (1993) Re-visit

 

Color me amazed that I have not written on this film before. I was sure there was a Fathom Event where I had commented on the movie, but I can find no trace of it on my site. I feel a little like Deputy Gerard, I don't have any clues as to where to look, and my memory is escaping. The film on the other hand has not escaped my memory, this is a movie that I have seen dozens of times over the years and it has had an indelible impact on me for some personal reasons that I will mention at the end of this post. I have used the phrase "Black Hole Film" in the past, to describe a movie which has a gravitational pull on me that I cannot resist. "The Fugitive" is one of those films. If I happen across it, my eyes and ears lock on and I am captured for the time remaining in the movie.

There are so many things about this film that deserve attention, I can't really get to all of them and keep this post at a reasonable length. That said, let me pick out four or five elements that are worth drawing your attention to and highlighting. First of all are the two lead performances by Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Both men add credibility to the story, but they also engage us with small moments and line delivery. Ford has the most screen time but maybe the lesser amount of dialogue, at least until the exposition dump at the end. In the scene where he is being interviewed by the cops after the death of his wife, he conveys the frustration that a distraught man is likely to have. I may have written about it somewhere else, but Harrison Ford has his crutches as an actor and the two biggest are his hands. He gestures in small, self contained moments that draw our attention to him. The way he shakes his fingers or twists them around to underline a point are common. He also does a lot of pointing. In this film it is all fitting. Look at the way he holds his notes in the telephone booth as he is making calls to the one armed men on his list of subjects. It is distinctive, and a way to get us to focus on him rather than the background. When he gives up the gun on the reservoir waterfall, his hands don't simply shoot up in response to Gerard's command, they show hesitation and thought and desperation. Ford has always been a physical actor more than a vocal artist, and this film is a perfect display of those talents.

Meanwhile, his counterpart, Tommy Lee Jones as Marshall Gerard, is full of flummoxed emotional moments, controlled and calculating facial expressions, and a vocal range that reflects someone, unlike Dr. Kimble, who is trying to stay below the radar, is in fact trying to dominate every interaction he has. Jones won his Academy Award for this role and those who like to engage in revisionism have suggested that it was not maybe a correct choice, they are wrong. This character is a success because of the actor who embodied him. With a commanding voice and sardonic sense of humor, Jones steals every scene he is in. It helps that he has all the best lines in the film and he is surrounded by a cast of characters that feed his character's personality. He can get snarky with his underlings, and get away with it because they all respect him. When he and Joe Pantoliano are verbally jousting with Jeroen Krabbé as Dr. Nichols, they both smile and say they are smart guys too, and we can see how in tune the team is with the Big Dog. Jones has the punctuating speech where he instructs the searchers as to their task and finishes with..."Go get him".  Later, Gerard has the famous comeback when Dr. Kimble confronts him and declares his innocence, Gerard spits back, "I don't care". The script and the supporting players all made Jones performance one for the ages. 

Director Andrew Davis was a veteran action director who had worked with Tommy Lee Jones on his two previous pictures. His control over the pace of the film and the little bits that he was able to add to the script are of critical importance to the movie working the way it does. The improvised escape through the St. Patrick's day parade was his idea, and he meticulously worked with tech experts, engineers and production designers to get the train/bus crash sequence done in the one chance they had to get it right. Those are not miniatures or photographic effects, that's a real train.  By the way, on the big screen, which is where this viewing took place, Alamo Drafthouse as a St. Patrick's Day event, it looked fantastic.

I will leave all of the other characters and the script to another time, I sure hope to see this again on a big screen, so there should be another opportunity. The personal note that I mentioned earlier is one of the reasons this film means so much to me. It was the last movie my best friend and I saw together. My friend from High School, Art Franz was dying of cancer in 1993. He lasted a while longer than doctors thought because he had a positive attitude, in spite of the ordained fate. In that last year, I took every opportunity I could to go with him to the movies. He and I were both huge James Bond Fans and he worked at a movie theater when we were back in High School. We saw this movie a little over a month before he finally succumbed, and we had both loved it. Exiting this world with this as the last theatrical experience of your life is pretty good. Miss you buddy.