I commend Francis Ford Coppola for taking an idea he wanted to do for 40 years, putting his money into it and bringing it to the screen. But this is an experimental movie overstuffed with his fancies which does not resonate with an audience. He brought it to life through his will, but he is the intended audience. It may not matter to him if no one else watches it.
This doesn't work as a musical or a villain movie but it held my attention for most of its running time. The massive flaw in the production is that it's not supposed to be this horrific a musical.
The wasted life is a goldmine for an operatic performance. That's what Arthur Fleck's (Joaquin Phoenix) life is. A grinding misery that gets more miserable in increments. Every day the sun rises life takes a razor blade to Arthur's soul and shaves off another thin slice. But then there is love, and music, and comedy and tragedy. Or there would be if this was a better written movie. This is where it all falls apart. The love isn't love. It's someone who wants you to be your worst self. The musical numbers neither fit into what's happening nor propel the story forward. They're well lit karoeke numbers. Nothing here is funny. Even when we step into Arthur's inner life, where he should be everything no one else sees, he remains as unfunny to the viewer as he is when shuffling along Arkham's halls.
Your actor won an Oscar for an interesting take on a tired comic book villain. The hit movie you made had nonsense ideas about wounded men and their fragile egos projected onto it. You think to yourself "we don't want to encourage this." So you, correctly, say this broken man can't kill six people and expect to prosper.
But does it have to be so shallow? I'd have read this script and sent the writers off to watch Pagliacci. Several times. And if an opera about a tragic figure in deep emotional pain who swings from manic clowning humour to powerful murderous rages in a gritty setting can't improve the script? They've failed.
This should have been a musical about a tragedy. It's just a tragic musical. A big movie that's too oppressive to be anything but small.
The Substance
About 25 minutes into The Substance we're introduced to Sue. A younger version of Demi Moore's network television fitness goddess. It's a writhing in pain, blood-stained introduction. I sat there in the dark and thought to myself, "The third act is going to be wild." It was. Because this is a movie of ludicrous escalation.
Sue (Margaret Qualley) is so refreshing she's the condensation on the Coca-Cola can. Her firm buttocks enter the shot several times before she does. Her breasts defy gravity. Everything is tight. But she has the arrogance and appetites of youth. While this movie is positioned as a feminist body horror it is a movie about a parasitic system.
A female-centric movie for the Wednesday Addams audience, this film is overstuffed and unfocused. The team seem afraid of never getting another shot at this. So, they crammed as many plot ideas as they could into the running time. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t.
The Deetz women are not having an easy time of it. Lydia (Ryder) has grown from a flourishing teenage goth girl into a timid celebrity medium. Seeing ghosts is not a gift. Beetlejuice has been tormenting her from the periphery of her vision for decades. Lydia is an unusual protagonist for a movie like this. There is no expectation that her life will get better here. It did in the first movie, but now we find a woman weighed down not by a problem but by the disappointments in her life.
Terminator Zero Few sci-fi franchises are as limited as The Terminator. It’s not like it has anything novel to say about AI or humanity's hubris. Humans unknowingly reach the pinnacle of their culture and creativity. They are then sent back to scrambling in the dirt for survival after that culture and creativity burns in nuclear fire. This is in every Terminator movie and this anime series.
The wrinkle the producers of this show introduce is the rhetorical appeal to another artificial life form to act on humanity’s behalf against Skynet. Malcolm Lee, its creator, makes poor arguments for human survival. Again hubris. If we were looking to enlist an artificial champion we would hope our most talented minds would engage with it to build our case. But no, here we have the heartbroken computer scientist who can’t muster enthusiasm for his own children. This is the man who thinks he can use philosophy and rhetoric to prevent the AI he has built from agreeing with the army of red-eyed metal skeleton killers on the way.
This movie is cinematic depression. Not that it makes the viewer feel hopeless, worthless and low in energy. But what the audience watches is a hopeless, worthless and low energy movie.
Putting aside Brandon Lee's ability to stir..feelings..in generations of teenage Goth girls who have discovered the 1994 movie every week since it came out, The Crow as a media property has a simple formula. It is a tale of vengeance, redemption and the supernatural told in a style that drips with atmosphere.
I liked it. This is a well-made popcorn horror movie. It is not interested in big ideas. It's about tension. Alien was a movie about skilled labour in a claustrophobic jump scare-filled small space with a monster. Aliens brings in corporatism, adds a larger space and more monsters. Prometheus is about the elite, their ideas and what it means to not be one of them in David's case. Set between Alien and Aliens, Alien Romulus is about the working poor and their life that is already horrific.
It isn't that this movie is terrible, it's that it gets boring. The Borderlands series is darkly irreverent. It's gory in a visceral "ewwwhhh" and laugh way. It's funny in a "well this will hurt" way. The movie has none of that. It's Borderlands with the life rung out of it.
Yes it has the colourful character design, eater eggs and the 1080p CGI makes Pandora look like the dusty trash pile it is. But just as the CGI falls apart if you look at it in 4K the characters and nods to games are shallow too.
An unfortunate miss. It looks too sharp in that Doctor Who/British children's TV way. The cast doesn't gel and it lacks the dark undertones of the original movie. The absence of delight and absurdity in humour drags the production down. Some of the jokes land. But this is a show about burglars with a cosmic map of time and space on the run from order and chaos. The ambition on screen here isn't enough.
Bruce Timm's Batman Caped Crusader is an iteration on the Dark Deco style of his work on Batman: The Animated Series. This like that show has a villain/monster of the week format but unlike that show Gotham itself is not a character. Bruce Wayne is good, but Hamish Linklater hasn't found Batman's menace yet.
The villains are..okay. I enjoyed the Boris Karloff spin on Clayface. Christina Ricci's Catwoman is an entertaining spend-thrift kleptomaniac. Even more entertaining was her long-suffering housekeeper. If they don't put both of them together again in a second season that would be an unforgivable crime. As for the rest? Forgettable. And in Harvey Dent's case, boring. It feels like we've seen Two Face's origin as often as Batman's.
Better than the ill thought out slop Marvel has been releasing but not close to the heights of the finest entries. There is no story to spoil and the villain is underwhelming. The only spoilers you need to beware of are cameos and pop culture jokes. This is a fan service movie on steroids for long-time fans. It builds on Deadpool 2's finale and then tucks itself into the Disney+ era of Marvel.
The good news is dumb big budget disaster movies are back. The bad news is the same as the good news. Twisters has a lot in common with the 1996 original. The plot is nonsense, the characters are paper thin and you'll never think about the movie again after seeing it.
Unlike the Jan de Bont movie with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton the leads here have no chemistry. Something I put on Daisy-Edgar Jones as Glen Powell had chemistry with several co-leads in past films. He has good chemistry with Maura Tirney in this movie. And she's onscreen for five minutes and plays Daisy's mother. The romance in this movie is undercooked and there isn't even a hint of comedy. After hours in the cinema I still did not understand why these two stay together at the conclusion.
With the trashed audience scores you'd be forgiven for thinking something has changed with The Boys. But the only thing that has changed is the show runner trying to distance himself from a part of his audience for his career.
Here's a Stan Edgar moment. No one wearing a red hat can damage that career. However, those in the entertainment industry unsophisticated enough to believe the show runner wrote this show for "undesirable people" can. So, in that position, you produce the work you always have, reaffirm your support for...whatever, and move on.
This is one of the better fiction series currently airing. A reworking of the novel of the same name, and drawing from Anne Rice's body of work, a wonderful sense of unease flows from the screen. This isn't a show that tries to be clever, it is clever. It can also be funny, dreadful, supernatural and humane.
The dialogue crackles as an older Daniel Molloy, his body failing him, trades venomous barbs with art world magnate Louis de Pointe du Lac. Louis might be immortal but his psyche hasn't aged well. There are cracks in the foundations and this second interview is Louis' attempt at a talking cure. The hostility flows in equal measure to the hypocrisy as both men excavate Louis' past of blood and fire.
This is a kids show. The plot nor the characters have any sophistication and the story operates on a level just above a 90s television sitcom. Instead of twin sisters separated at birth and reunited as teenagers it's twin sisters separated as children and reconciled in their early twenties. Neither set of reunited siblings can wield a lightsaber so it's not that far away from the TV show Sister, Sister. It's Sister, Sister: A Star Wars Young Adult series.
A stunt show movie as flimsy as an empty bucket of popcorn but it has a summer romantic comedy charm. It's very early 2000s in its Hollywood commentary. That kills the momentum after the first hour as it is not presented well enough to hold interest.
For what the producers were looking to do it needed action, humor and adventure. It has plenty of action, with bone-crunching stunt work. Gosling and Blunt deliver humour with skill, but there's a large sucking void on screen where adventure should be. The lack of adventure comes from a weak script. With several different elements crammed into the second half of the movie it feels like it was the product of several rounds of studio notes and reshoots. If there was an adventure here it was overwritten in later drafts and edited out in post production.
What do you want and how much do you want it? That's the question faced by the horrified guests on "Night Owls with Jack Delroy." Delroy (David Dastmalchian) has everything a successful talk show host needs. He's articulate, comfortable bantering with the audience and has a comfortable rapport with his celebrity guests. He does the shallow opening monologue, makes jokes at the expense of the band leader/sidekick, gets into the audience, and conducts interviews. This is the work done by every talk show host night in and night out. The difference between success and failure is how many viewers like the host as a person.
The spaghetti western turns post-apocalyptic in this high-budget production of a gritty tale. We have cringe-worthy but endearing optimists. Antiheroes whose cruelty disfigures them more on the inside than radiation has on the outside. Striving zealots of gleaming order and anarchic savages who'll wipe themselves on the drapes. And that's just the first two episodes.
The show's burnt out 2150s are mirrored by an alternate 1950s. Bing Crosby croons as one of our protagonists walks across endless scorched dust. Johnny Cash sets the pace for a bone-crunching fight. Violence here can be comical, but it's always bloody.
This is the dumbest movie in a franchise that includes the brainless Godzilla: King of The Monsters. Kaiju fights are awesome. Everybody knows this. Even if you don't know it you do. But this movie is so dumbly dense it's a Saturday morning cartoon playing in the heart of a neutron star.
When we meet Kong, we see how clever he is. The Hollow Earth is a lurid and dangerous Playstation 2 CGI environment. The prime ape has mastered tactics and tools. Local wildlife doesn't know what's hitting them. He's Kratos from Sony's God Of War, no family no home and a big axe but for the first hour there are no stakes. It takes more than 60 minutes before the driving force of the story appears.