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.
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.
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.
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.
I have been a little negligent as of late, keeping up with my posts as quickly as possible after seeing the movie. This post comes four days after I saw this great family film, and I am sorry I can't do more to promote the movie and save it from the discard pile that it appears to be headed for. Mark Wahlburg and a dog should be a sure thing for most family audiences, but I suspect that the sports based setting may not be as interesting to people on the big screen, since they see this weekly on their televisions.
Frankly, I am a sucker for a dog movie. It is probably a good idea for me to create an inventory of films I have covered on the site that feature a canine co-star. A couple of years ago, Channing Tatum made his directorial debut with a dog film, simply named "Dog". I liked that one quite well and it would make a good companion film for this movie. Both feature dogs that have some health and psychological issues, but one is a straight drama while this movie is an adventure film as well. There are some beautiful scenes of a race around the jungles of the Dominican Republic, but I did end up worrying about current events in Haiti, which shares the island with the setting of this movie.
Wahlburg plays a long time race figure, who while widely respected, has never come in first in the grueling endurance challenges that these races present. After a humiliating loss, and a two year break, he attempts to return to competition, but his resources are low and sponsors are wary. As we watch him struggle to put together a team for the race, we also see a street dog, struggling to survive in the third world nation, frequently abused and usually starving. The back and forth between these two stories is a nice parallel which pays off in the second half of the movie. When the race starts, the two characters come together in a surprising way, and it would be nearly impossible to buy it, if it had not really happened.
The race presents dramatic challenges, and the dog is included in these as the progress deepens. There are a lot of tense scenes and some lighter moments with the dog. The two both make sacrifices for each other, and at the end, the race results become less important than the survival story of a man's hope in a dog's lifeforce. Having recently lost a beloved pet, there were moments in the last act of the film, that I was not prepared for and which evoked some strong emotional responses from me. Even without this personal history, I think the turn that the film takes will be an emotional wallop for most audiences. In the long run, the less you know about the real story, the stronger the conclusion of this film will play.
Mark Wahlburg has become a very reliable actor, and his presence in a film like this makes the story work. Unfortunately, it looks like the audience is missing out on this, probably bad marketing decisions about the release date, and the fact that streaming is going to eat all of these kinds of movies alive in the next few years. Look, this will work on your television, but like most films, it will work better in a theater, and you should go see it now before it gets pushed off of the screens by whatever is coming next week.
You would think that a film from one of the Coen brothers would draw a lot more attention and interest from the film community than this slightly misbegotten exercise in excess has received. I didn't hate the movie but I was surprised at how over the top some of the things were in the film, and that the director's choices were also obviously designed to provoke and be distinctive, without being particularly creative. Ethan Cohen has created another crime drama about off-center characters, and crimes gone bad. From the makers of Fargo and No Country for Old Men, this is natural except that the comedic elements are created to accentuate the odd instead of using those odd elements to highlight small parts of the story. The result is an over full collection of vulgarities, violence, and elegant dialogue that would work a lot better if it was used more sparingly.
I had originally planned for this to be a film that we covered on the Lambcast. Unfortunately not a single one of the podcasters or bloggers of our 2,000 members signed up to talk about it. This should have been a signal to me that there was something not quite right about the project. I read after deciding to cancel the podcast, that the original title of the project was Drive-Away Dykes. The change in title was probably designed to avoid putting off people who didn't care to have that element of sexuality front and center in their crime story. However, a title change doesn't change the script, and we still get lots of lesbian love, phallic foreplay, and some of the most vulgar and descriptive language that you can imagine. While there are moments of nudity in the film the vast majority of those things that sexualize the film are in the dialogue. And they are not sexy but rather obnoxiously provocative.
I'm not sure that this is a film that will be embraced by the LGBTQ+ community, because the stereotypes in the film seem to be at odds with what would be a more inclusive approach. There is a caricature of a lesbian relationship that seems particularly offensive, and there are sexually based sequences that seem to cater to offensive stereotypes about lesbians. I am also dubious about the desirability of flexible phalluses as the love toys preferred by committed gay women. For a movie about the empowerment of lesbians, the perspective it takes seems to be one of amusement rather than real agency.
Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Vishwanathan, are the two leads and each of them has some pretty effective moments in the film. Qualley was familiar to me from “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, where she played Pussycat, the hippie girl that gets Brad Pitt's character up to the Spahn Ranch where the Manson family is living. Vishwanathan, was very appealing 3 years ago and a fill my liked quite well, “The Broken Hearts Gallery”. In this film she plays a more innocent character to her partner’s Wild Child. The story involves a mis-matched pair of women who take a road trip and inadvertently have in their possession what at first seems like a McGuffin. Later the secret does in fact get revealed. You might think it was drugs, because of the violence involved and obtaining the suitcase with the soon to be revealed contents, but unlike the mystery of the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, we finally see what the contents are, and it's another one of the crude jokes that the film is based on.
The girls are pursued by a team of inept criminals, similar to the pair in Fargo, or Pulp Fiction. Their dialogue is also frequently over the top, with just enough wit to make it interesting but not enough to allow it to be compared to some of those sparkling sequences in those other films. When we discover what the whole Enterprise is about, it makes even less sense, because most of this could be dismissed without anybody having to be murdered or any money exchanged. A simple denial would be more than sufficient to eliminate the risk that the ultimate antagonist seems to feel exists. We have no providence for the relics, except some perv collectors. The movie has a couple of prominent actors in secondary roles that might almost count as a cameo. Pedro Pascal shows up at the start of the movie, and then a part of him continues to be a present in the film. He was perfectly fine but I'm not sure why director Cohen thought that it was necessary to have such a well-known actor in the part. Conversely when Matt Damon shows up near the end of the film, we understand his casting because the film needs someone with some charisma, to become the antagonist that the movie needs at this point. Once again though, his motivation seems to be highly exaggerated. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, it is a legitimate strategy for public relations. It just doesn't seem to have been considered.
I probably already given away more than I should have about the film. There are three or four transition sequences that feature psychedelic visuals and remind me of a Saul Bass James Bond title sequence. They don't make much sense, until the end, and even then they don't really do much to make the film interesting, they mostly just make it weird.
There are plenty of films that go over the top as a stylistic choice to try and make the movie interesting to a specific audience. I enjoyed the movie “Shoot ‘em Up”, from more than a decade ago, but by the time it was finished I was bored by the excess. This film provides excess on a different subject, and I was bored by it in the first 20 minutes. There is some clever stuff here, and I think you will laugh a few times, but I also think you'll shake your head and say " I've seen this before”. There's nothing new to see here, it's recycled and overdone. You'll forget about it almost immediately, which is not something I've said about many Cohen Brothers films before. Perhaps Ethan needs his brother Joel, to rein in the more preposterous elements of the movie, and make it feel less like a cartoon and more like a satire of crime dramas. That is really what it wants to be. You can safely skip this, but if you watch it at home later, maybe you should send your parents to bed before it starts, trust me it's a little awkward.
Completing one of the great film projects of my lifetime, Director Denis Villeneuve delivers a terrific part two to the "Dune" stories he began three years ago. Actually it was four years ago, we got delayed a year by Covid, and this film was delayed by six months due to the actor's strike. Maybe those were not bad omens but rather good luck charms. My original review of the first film was positive, but muted by some less than favorable comparison to the David Lynch version. As a film, "Dune Part One" is more successful, but less vibrant than I had hoped.
The biggest reservation I had about the first film, was the surface level storytelling of the Harkonnen adversaries. That flaw has been redeemed substantially by the story choices made with this film. To begin, Baron Harkonnen, played by Stellan Skarsgård, is more than a floating figure in the background. We finally begin to see the long game he is playing. The murderous political life of Geidi Prime is revealed, and when he indulgences in his vices, we get a significantly greater reason to have distaste for this fearsome antagonist. The complexity of the Harkonnen plot is extended when Feyd-Rautha's character appears on screen. Feyd is the figure actually being groomed to take over Arrakis and maybe a lot more. That he is the Baron's nephew does not eliminate the subterfuge that takes place in the family, and is an additional plot that the Baron ids cooking. I might be a little critical of how vociferously he is cheered by the crowd, especially when we see his murderous behavior towards his servants, but the culture seems to be a martial one , so maybe the actions are viewed in the same way the Spartans of ancient Greece might view their own behavior toward the weak.
Back on Dune, Paul and Jessica are finding their way into the Freman culture, which is frankly also brutal, but without being cruel. The Fremen are more fatalistic and many of them are fervent believers in the narrative that has been set out over thousands of years by the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. Fanaticism is very dangerous when mixed with messianic expectations. The fact that Paul's genetic background is leading to fulfillment of both Freman Prophecies and Bene Gesserit genetic manipulation, is probably an unexpected consequence of Jessica's disobedience in providing a son to the late Duke Leto. I liked the slow way that the prophetic arrival of a messiah is being introduced to the native population of Dune. It is much clearer in this version of the story that the Bene Gesserit have nurtured this mythology with the intention of using it. One of the differences in the film version and the original text, is the way that Chani is depicted in the context of this prophesy. She is something of a heretic by rejecting the story, and she turns the religious drive behind it, into a suspect of political proportions. It is her contention that adhering to the religious fundamentalism is what has held the Fremen down. The awkwardness of that attitude however is revealed as it is the prophecy that finally liberates the forces of the Freman as an army capable of being lead by the outsider Muad'Dib. It is also a little strange that she can accept Paul's prescience, but reject the description of that very thing in the stories of her people.
The slow take on the prophesy is not limited to Jessica and the Freman. Paul does his best to resist the call of becoming the Kwisatz Haderach. He has visions of the devastation his ascension to power will result in. Having followed his story, we want to see justice for House Atreides and revenge on the Emperor and especially the Harkonnen. It is clear that the Harkonnen are evil, and that at the very least the Emperor is a Machiavellian ruler with no moral compass except power. The problem is that it looks like Paul will fall into the same patterns, and do so for the sake of Fremen Paradise. In the end, Paul is not the hero of the story, he is an instrument of chaos, the likes of which will change the universe, the question is, will it be for the better? The sequence where Paul takes the Water of Life, is dramatically well played, but it is the moment when he confronts the Fremen Cavalcade that his threat becomes realized. It is both awe inspiring and frightening, a fact that he recognizes with his own words in the script. Screenwriters Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts have adapted Frank Herbert's novel in a more expansive way than was done with the David Lynch version. Having twice as much time, they still trimmed elements that are not essential for this story. The timeline in this film is different, and the easiest illustration of that is Jessica's pregnancy and the fact that Alia only appears in a flash forward for a brief few seconds.
When it comes to the technical aspects of the film, I found nothing deficient. The sequence when Paul conquers the Sandworm is one of the most impressive scenes in a science fiction movie. The sense of realism is overwhelming, with the sound design of the moment a big part of that. The scope of the visual, combined with the enveloping sound, lets the audience experience the ride, almost as a participant rather than just an observer. The power of the worms also comes up in the conclusive battle as they crash though the shield walls and mountains of Arrakeen. The story, for those of you unfamiliar, will not be spoiled here, but suffice it to say, we get a clear sense of what desert power is.
There are still many production touches that I prefer in David Lynch's vision of the story, but the choices that Director Villeneuve makes are completely appropriate for his. I think the desert environments, the tents and Sietches of the Fremen, are vastly superior to what we have had before. The black and white palate of Giedi Prime is startling, but when we enter the halls of the palace, the slight color pops make it all much more intriguing, and there is a sense that the culture reflects the supposed black sun of their system.
It is easy for me to predict that this will be one of the top films of the year, since it is unlikely that anything comparable is likely to be released any time soon.
