This is what happens when people are allowed to make smart movies. When a studio (go A24) backs up something new, something strange, something rather mad in the best sense of the word.
Everything, Everywhere All at Once is as manic and exciting as its title suggests. A proper kitchen sink of a movie, loaded with brilliant ideas and terrific gags. It’s oh-so-cleverly written, perfectly acted (especially by the marvelous Michelle Yeoh), and it doesn’t stop.
A24 must have gotten dizzy and passed out the first time it saw its latest. The studio is notorious for movies that can be generously described as slow-paced. EEAaO moves like it’s on cocaine. But it’s genius, through and through. Quite possibly the cleverest handling of multiverses on screen.
It’s also an absolutely gorgeous movie, a real visual feast. A feast for all senses, really. Your brain will thank you, your eyes will thank you. It’s an exciting movie. AND it is wildly exciting to think that a movie this smart and original can blow up this much with the general population. Why, that’s positively optimistic : )
EEAaO is on track to be the movies with the most awards of all time. And well deserved too. Easily one of the best movies I’ve seen all year and in most recent years, too. Certainly one of the most original. Don’t miss out on this one!

Til Death Do Us Part is a terrible movie. Worse yet, it doesn’t seem to be aware of it at all. It just goes on and on (for much too long) for no apparent reason.
And the thing is, it didn’t have to be terrible. It has something of a decent plot, buried there underneath all the garbage. You got your basic “assassins on love” scenario. They belong to some mysterious assassin academy, referred to as the :University” where pupils graduate to become teachers. These two are teachers, the best of the best. They even get the University’s okay to get married. But then what’s love and vows to these murderous lunatics.
So, in unnecessarily and clumsily handled alternating timelines, you get the happy couple and … the not so happy couple.
In one timeline, they are honeymooning all over each other, while meeting another, older couple (yes, that is where Jason Patrick is at now, and to think he was in proper movies once upon a time).
In the other, the bride has fled the coup, and the groom sends his seven groomsmen to bring her back. The groomsmen are a bunch of all strategically diversely cast nobodies and fairly useless as assassins. They are led by the former pretty boy actor, Cam Gigandet, and Orlando Jones is in there too. Both are probably bemoaning the loss of their careers.
The lead couple are proper nobodies, so much so that they don’t even get the top billing. They spend entirely too much time dancing, because the actress playing the bride comes from a dance background. She can also fight. Which is good, because she can’t act much. The groom just mostly stands there looking handsome (he’s just okay, really) and slowly speaks of love.
Cam Gigandet eschews scenery with his own attempts at dancing. There are low-rent crooner style tunes all over the soundtrack. But none of these men, dancing or not, can really damage the indestructible bride, though they do their best to (very graphically) beat the crap out of her.
If done right, this might have been funny. It isn’t. Everyone takes themselves entirely too seriously. The writing is wooden—in fact, you can chop wood with the bride’s harsh features. The writing is worse. The pacing is atrocious, especially for an action movie. Even the fights are paced terribly.
The cinematography is tolerable, but it can only do so much on its own.
Like a bad marriage, this movie has no reason to be. I still can’t explain watching the entire thing until the end. It was a sort of incredulous trance. But a complete waste of time. Maybe my review will help you save yours.
​
And remember, there already exists a perfectly awesome movie with bride and a bunch of murders, Ready Or Not from 2019. It does everything right, everything this movie fails to.

So, yeah, baby. Divorce!

​Violent Night is a perfect Christmas movie for the modern audience. It’s loud, strategically dumb (more on this later), and very, very violent.
Which is to say it’s far from a perfect movie, but a sledgehammer wielding Santa is exactly the sort of thing people will pay to see. And pay they did, because they movie did well in the box office, and already has a sequel in the making.
Amid the middling cast, Santa is a perfect choice. Sure, the actor had to put on all that weight he finally dropped for the fourth season of Stanger Things, but it seems to have paid off. People want their Santa jolly and with some girth to him. Mind you, here it looks like extra padding on a muscle, enforced by the backstory of Santa being a marauder of yore in his previous life.
And he doesn’t quite know how he got to be Santa or why he’s doing it. Only that he no longer enjoys it, disappointed and disillusioned by all the annoying, overprivileged and overindulged brats out there. We get that much from the opening scene where he drinks, drives, and hurls. In fact, the scene set up the movie perfectly.
Moving on to a Christmas celebration at a mansion of an insanely wealthy and proportionally b*tchy matriarch and her two adult children with their families: the good son and the idiot daughter. The thing is, someone’s got the idea to hit that particular place up for all its worth while Santa gets stuck and stranded there.
The thieves are comically evil, and John Leguizamo is only so believable as a man who can hold his own against this behemoth of a Santa, but since the movie is deadest on echoing one of the most famous Christmas classics of all time, complete with a precocious kid setting up traps, it doesn’t matter. The point is that Santa finds his sledgehammer and gets his groove back. It will be a very, very violent night.
The strategic dumbness comes in when Santa has no idea time and again why he does what he does or how what he does works. It’s kind of clever in a way, because a. it saves the writers from having to come up with something more, and b. it creates for an interesting Santa character. Disenchanted and tired of it all but perpetuating the cycle.
So, there you have it, a bombastic, ridiculous actioneer with reindeers and things. A Santa story unlike any other, saved by and large by Santa himself, played with whim and zeal and all of that by a believably tired, believably kickass, perfectly ho-ho-hoing character actor. Merry Christmas to all and to all a …violent? night 😊

​Wes Anderson has apparently surpassed being a movie writer/director and became a brand. So hip, so precocious, so very trendy that stars are lining up to work with him, and the audiences clamor in anticipation. And for what?
Not much, going by his latest, Asteroid City. A movie so crammed with potential that it disappoints viscerally. 103 minutes of technicolor brightness, witty quips, and deadpan staccato dialogue in service of … apparently reminding us how quirky Anderson is and not much more.
The main question for me after watching this was, Can Wes Anderson actually do anything else other than Wes Anderson movies? Or is he so stuck in his rhythm and pattern that he can only continue to produce more of the same, until his work comes across as a caricature of itself? Much like its dialogue precisely rattled off in un-lifelike uniformity.
It was cute at first. Royal Tenenbaums, for one, is an absolute classic. But now it’s all too predictable, too glibly self-satisfied to properly enjoy. Asteroid City is cutesy and dioramic and witty in that wink-wink-nudge-nudge way but ultimately as empty as the desert its set in. And don’t you want more?

Okay, so how do you talk about serious subjects in this day and age and get away with it? Apparently, the answer is it go pink. Bubble gun pink!
Mattel has toyed (bum dumz) with the idea of making a Barbie movie before, but it never panned out. Largely because it’s a weird thing to make a movie out of a toy and have it be interesting. When children play with toys, they invent their own realities. But what do adults do?
Adults, as it turns out, do what Greta Gerwig did. They co-write and direct a subliminally clever movie that’s all Barbie all the time, but also hits on all the modern hot topics. Specifically, it hammers on gender equality. You know, that tragically still-non-existent thing.
Barbies in their Barbieland had thought they took care of the gender equality but turns out they didn’t. When one of them gains sentience/awareness of the real world and ventures into it, she gets a proper shock to the system. And then with her pretty doll eyes wide open, she sets out to reform and reeducate the rest of the Barbies and save them from the patriarchy that her man/doll/bf dragged in from the real world when he dragged along on her adventure.
That’s what makes the story pop, really. Barbie alone would be tots adorbs and all that, but it’s Gosling’s toy boy with perfect muscles and no clue (or genitalia, though to hear him say it,  he has “all the genitalia”) that brings in the hilarious dynamic and balances out the story.
And then there are amazing production designs, choreographed dance numbers, and singing to make this into a proper crowd-pleaser.
And somewhere along the way, Gerwig rather cleverly pushes the message. And it’s such a good, important one.
The thing is, it is absolutely destined to fall on deaf ears. The roughly gazillion people who went to see the movie making it Barbillion dollars, by and large just wanted to be entertained. They may well be the same people who underpay their female employees for doing the same jobs or restrict women from having control over their own bodies. What they will take away from the glitzy spectacle of Barbie is … well, a glitzy spectacle.
Good on Gerwig for trying. She certainly got rewarded for it, making her now likely one of the most popular and in-demand movie directors and yes, female movie directors, breaking all sorts of records, particularly for the latter category.
It’s impressive, it’s important.  She’s obviously immensely talented. There are so many clever bon mots and hilarious jokes in the script, if you’re paying attention. But ultimately, while Barbie the doll was revolutionary in her way and time, Barbie the movie isn’t.
It’s very well made and wildly fun and perfectly cast and you should by all means check it out, but in the end, while the credits to the beautifully melancholy song by Billie Eilish (and Finneas), you may be reminded that while Barbieland can be saved rather easily, the world we live in may be well and truly f*cked.
Or you may just get the song stuck in your head. After all, it’s what it was made for.

​“The Netflix Effect” strikes again. That’s right, people it happened. David Fincher has finally made a dud. Who’s think that was possible? The man has an impressive of a track record as they come. But either Netflix gave him enough movie to have a Fincher movie and he relaxed and dialed it in or it’s a genuine decline in quality. Only time will tell.
For now, what you have is a heavily-narrated tale of an assassin whose latest kill goes wrong. As he finds himself on the receiving end of his employer’s lethal reach, he fights back. Then audience gets to follow him from one killer to the next. Yep, they are all a bunch of killers here. Most more interesting than the protagonist, who is as beige of a lead as his outfits.
I mean, this isn’t a man you’d want to spent time with really and still you’re stuck for something like 120 minutes as he narrates every detail of what he’s doing, often repetitively. This is, though, he just isn’t that interesting. Or, frankly, that good at his job, hence the predicament he finds himself in in the first place.
The Killer has a talented, thoroughly wasted lead. Why get an actor that’s killed, only to watch his do a stoic, emotionless face is anybody’s guess. Presumably, it looks good on paper.
The movie looks great and has exactly two fun things about it: an epic, brutal fight scene and description of Tilda Swinton as a Q-tip. Because of course. The rest is time wasted waiting for the movie to get good or for Fincher to live up to his potential or something and there’s just ….
Unlike Netflix’s other recent “serious movie” duds, namely May December (also reviewed on this website), this one didn’t get particularly good reviewers anywhere and will likely not be winning awards any time soon.
Save yourself some time and skip this, forget it exists. Watch any other movie by the director instead. Or just some other movie. Something that doesn't go for style over substance quite so heavily.
The only thing this Killer slays is time and promise.

May December is exactly the kind of movie that wins awards. In essence, it strives to be great so hard that it forgets to be good.
And why wouldn’t it be great? It’s got a great director and two incredibly talented leads.  It’s inspired by a wildly scandalous story. It has all the trappings of greatness and yet …
The movie is a dud. Yeah, sorry. I’m sure my opinion is in a minority. The movie scored off the charts with reviewers, and I know it will get oodles of awards or at least nominations. But watching it was a drag.
The last thing I’ve seen from the director was Carol. Carol was sublime. This movie was too slow-paced, too overt, every emotion exaggerated and telegraphed for the faraway seats with a hideously jarring score that belonged in a giallo movie or something from the ‘70s * (which it was, actually. The director has inexplicably chosen to recycle a 1971 soundtrack.).
The plot wasn’t original either, but you knew that going in. It changed just enough facts to avoid a lawsuit, but all the tabloid basics were there. The too-young boy and a much older woman who get together despite all odds and raise a family. The course of true love and all that … Except that the movie finds them 24 years later with the youngest of their kids about to flee the nest, and the man/boy character at 36 may finally begin to analyze his life or may just be in the mood for something strange. By far the most tragic character here, he’s also the most obvious in the way he is directed, from the stilted, reticent manner of moving to speaking. Not quite an old, not quite a boy, trapped in-between by a relationship that had been his entire life. Still waters but with a restless undercurrent beneath.
Throw an actress in the mix, who is doing research before shooting a movie of their life, and things get …complicated.
Everyone's been praising Charles Melton's performance, and it is objectively good. But make no mistake, the show absolutely belongs to Julianne Moore. The rest are second and third fiddles to her passive aggressive manipulations and devastating pathos. A lot of Melton's performance is physical, the way he folds up and flabs up his CW-stud (he of Riverdale fame) body into a lesser than and dials his chiseled face to aloof amicability.
It's a good performance and will likely advance his career to the next level of serious acting, but it doesn't seem all that Oscar-worthy.
Moore, though, she blisters.
Portman's holding her own, but her job is mainly to observe and mimic. 
And everyone seems to have gotten the same directing memo of overdoing it.
This could have, should have been compelling, so the final result is a real disappointment. No matter how terrific the acting is, the movie is just so freaking “look at me, I’m a serious drama vying for awards” pretentious. I love drama, I don’t mind slow movies, but this was overindulged on both accounts. I call it “The Netflix Effect.” Netflix who’s always been quantity over quality simply doesn’t seem to care that much about what they put on screen so much as it checks enough boxes. They were probably looking for a serious respectable movie to offset the copious amounts of garbage they put out and glad to grab this one. But this isn’t about that so much as it’s about good directors who do their worst work for Netflix. Just recently David Fincher who’s never done a less than great movie had his dud, Killer, on there.
It will likely continue to occur, movie business is, after all, a business. And I’m sure there is an audience out there for May December who will ooh and aah over it, because it is the sort of movie discerning taste are supposed to ooh and ahh over, but if you take a step back and observe it with a critical eye, you’ll see that for all his royal bearing, this emperor has no clothes.