A mysterious illiterate orphan with terrible money management skills arrives to the big city, where he proceeds to sneak around the sewage system and pop up to feed strangers chocolate.
Yep, that is one way of looking at Wonka, the prequel, the movie meant as a companion piece to the 1971 version. And it might be more along the lines of Dahl’s writing with its underlying darkness, but for the undeniable fact that it isn’t how Wonka plays. Onscreen, Wonka is pure cinematic delight. A tour-de-force of such cinematic joy and joie de vivre that it’ll melt even the most crust-hearted viewers like …well, chocolate. Chalamet, a man/boy beautiful enough to rock an almost-unibrow is cast perfectly as a whimsical young magician chocolatier with an outsized dream. He sings, he dances, he charms. He wins you over completely, just as he ultimately wins out the city with his chocolate delights. The rest of the cast is perfectly amusing too, including Grant’s hilariously pitch-perfect (almost is that taking away jobs from actors of diminutive stature?) Oompa-Loompa. (Side note: I’m confused about the accents. Most of the cast speaks with English ones. Wonka, despite his British mother, doesn’t. Neither does Key. Both actors surely could manage, so the question remains: why didn’t they? For that nice uniform quality and basic logistics.) Anyway … The movie sets are truly masterful. Masterpiece each and every one. The movie is meant to be a spectacle in the best possible way—a feast for the sense the way chocolate is, and it is genuinely spectacular. It makes you feel childlike wander while possessing adult-like appreciation. A real feat. All in all, Wonka is a thing of beauty. Come with him, and you’ll be in the world of pure imagination!
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What is this, the second or third Aquaman movie? Doesn’t matter if you don’t know the answer, the movie doesn’t expect you to, and handily offers a primer in the opening scene. I don’t spend a lot of time in Marvel Universe, and every time I do, I am reminded of why not.
The movie is big dumb fun, as the rest of them, with the stress falling heavily on the dumb part. Inexplicably this o-so-basic script took four people to write, including Jason Momoa, and one can’t help but wonder if the extent of his contribution was bro-ing the production up all the way to the very stupid ending – the mike-grabbing “I’m Aquaman!” The production is bombastic if you’re into CGI. That’s why credits for these movies take up like fifteen minutes. The acting (though the movie casts talented actors) and dialogue are pretty much irrelevant, everyone’s here for the special effects show. The plot has to do with a lost kingdom no one talks about and awakening its evil ruler – i.e. if the eyes start glowing green, beware. Mostly it’s just one fight scene after another and the opportunity for the Aqua-brothers to mend their fraught relationship. Patrick Wilson (who while impressively ripped is and looks very obviously older than Jason Momoa) plays nevertheless his younger brother. Speaking of age logistics (and I know movie business has been trying to mess with it for a while now, defying all reason), but do Atlanteans not age? Or is it a weirdly slowed down process? Because otherwise how is it that a 56-year-old (studiously un-aging) Nicole Kidman is playing a mother to 50-year-old Wilson and 45-year-old Momoa again? If Atlanteans don’t age, why are they all stuck at that specific age? If it’s slowed down, how does that work? Or does it simply stops at a certain age as Nicole Kidman and her agents would love you to believe? Especially since she was last seen in Expats playing a mother of a three-year-old. I’m sure there’s an audience out there for this sort of fare. Inf act, box office numbers tells us so. The movie has about doubled it’s 200-some million-dollar budget, despite rather underwhelming reviews. People want dumb. That much is obvious. Dumb and completely divorced from reality, despite a hastily thrown in environ=mental message. So if you’re in a mood for a Bro-ey (in every way possible, from the brothers drama to the ornamental uselessness of the female characters) extravaganza, go for it. Otherwise, you’re not missing much, outside of Momoa’s outsized charisma and musculature. While many reviewers stated expressed an opinion that the second season of Tourist doesn’t quite hold up to the first one, I would beg to differ.
I mean, the first season was great, don’t get me wrong, but the majority of it hinged on the fact that Jamie Dornan’s character did not know who he was—a suspense bit impossible to maintain in full, especially in a show dedicated to finding out just who that character is. With that in mind, season two is a perfect continuation of that journey. The two leads are now together, as a proper couple, despite certain aesthetic disparities (I mean, come on, that’s Christian Grey, people). The two of them are very much in love and have both become tourists now traveling wherever the wind takes them, until a letter from Ireland finds them and they decide to go there and find out more of that origin story. The pan goes off the rails from the get-go with our favorite amnesiac getting kidnapped. And from there on it’s Tourist, the Gangs of Ireland edition, with Eugene Cassidy (real name finally found) at the very center of it, stuck between two warring clans with an ancient grudge. Mama Cassidy played by the always formidable Olwen Fouéré is a force to reckon with alone, but there’s more, and the revelations keep on coming, while the former Probationary Constable Chambers gets into a mess of her own, assisted or hindered by the troubled diminutive local cop played most charming by Conor MacNeill. Also, her former fiancé is back, traveling to Ireland to win his woman back or drink Guiness trying. He’d been woke-educated (hilariously so, just watch him mansplain Mansplaining) and is mostly here for rather effective comic relief. All in all, it’s very entertaining. Action mixed with mystery and dark comedy in a way that actually works, aided in no small way by a very talented cast. As an armchair traveler might say, well worth a visit. Right down to one final whopper of a twist at the very end. Guess they’re hoping for season 3. I wouldn’t say no to it either. The House is the sort of movie you hope to find hiding among the piles and piles of garbage on Netflix. And then you do, and it’s … pure magic. Everything about this stop-motion animated triptych of stories tied around the same house is pitch perfect.
From the meticulous animation that mind-boggles with its creative choices and precision to strange, terrifying, and even hopeful script of each tale, this movie is spellbinding. Macabre, gothic, trippy tones dominate throughout despite a rather uplifting ending. What’s more, as horror, it really works. It’s genuinely disturbing! The opening story of a young girl whose family moves into a strange, ever-changing house built by a mysterious architect is a claustrophobic wonder of a nightmare. The middle story of a home flix-and-flip gone to Hell is skin-crawlingly, viscerally upsetting terror. And the final story as if to make up for it all is a rather lovely melancholy tale of finding a balance between holding on and letting go. The fact that the first story features people and the other two animals doesn’t even faze. It all somehow just works. Right down to a custom-made and absolutely perfect closing song performed by a multi-talented artist who also provides one of the lead voices for the movie. The song goes something like, "This house. I don't know what this house is." And that's exactly right. It's different for everyone, and that's the beauty (and the horror) of it. What makes a house a home? Do you dare find out? This is likely much too weird to become a classic, but it really ought to be. Watch this. Wath this right now. Well, wait until dark and then … Simply put, Spaceman is a bad adaptation of a good book. For those who crave more than a sentence long explanation, the reasons are listed below.
I read the book nearly six years ago now, upon realizing I’ve not read much Czech fiction. The book was excellent. Moving, resonant, clever, it homed in precisely on the zeitgeist of 1989 Czechoslovakia as a country waking up from a long, strange dream and presented a protagonist, Jacub, not only weighed down by the dream but also but nearly unbearable loneliness. He goes to space reluctantly to redeem his family name, racing against the clock to beat out a different communist-regime spaceship on the same mission. Stripping the novel of all its sociopolitical context, the movie adaptation focuses instead on loneliness and isolation that Jacob struggles with in space instead, making it nicely dumbed down and easily digestible for the general population. And then, largely because the general population is dumbed down and because it is apparently more valuable to hang a movie on a recognizable celebrity than a genuinely suitable actor, they cast Adam Sandler as Jacub. Now, this isn’t a slight against Adam Sandler, who despite specializing in dumbed-down comedies, is actually s surprisingly good dramatic actor. This is to say that he is very, VERY wrong for Jacub. Two decades older than his on-screen wife and LOOKING it, while also not looking even remotely Czech or astronaut-material, Sandler is distractingly out of place here. It almost makes me wonder if he was hired based on the fact that his character spends about 90% of his time on-screen in baggy shirts and basketball shorts, which is notoriously schlubby Sandler's go-to uniform. It’s rather like casting 56-year-old Nicole Kidman as a mother of a missing 3-year-old in the recently released Expats. Yes, she is a star a production can hang upon, but she is still a very wrong star for that production. Here, it is even more inexplicable, because the movie actually features an excellent choice for Jacub—a very talented Paul Dano, who has the right look, age, dramatic pedigree, and would have knocked this role out of the park, except that the powers that be thought to use his as voice actor only. And so we’re stuck watching Sandler pine for the always terrific Carey Mulligan, a romance about as believable as someone sincerely claiming to try to do a faithful, credible page-to-screen adaptation here. What a shame, what a waste of potential. What a tragic reminder that while there is no business like showbusiness, showbusiness is first and foremost, a BUSINESS. Apparently, someone wanted to make an Adam Sandler movie more than they wanted to make a great movie. As is, it’s far from great. Not even particularly good, really, despite the brilliant ensemble cast. Slow, tonally uneven, the production can’t seem to agree on the mood, message, or even an accent. It’s pretty but soporific at best and disappointing all around. Do yourself a favor and read the book instead. I should start by saying that I have not read the book this mini-series is based on and, frankly, having seen the mini-series have no desire to do so, so this review is exclusively for the screen adaptation.
Expats, shortened from The Expatriates, the novel’s original title, because who can possibly contend with all those extra syllables, takes place in Hong Kong. That was the main appeal of this production for me, the seasoned armchair traveler. Hong Kong isn’t a place I’d want to visit in person. It doesn’t look particularly attractive, and it is much too vertical and overpopulated. But it’s interesting to see on screen. In Hong Kong, the story follows three women. Mercy, Hillary, and Margaret. The first one is young and single, the other two are older and married. Or rather, the story follows two families and Mercy, the hapless idiot woman-child who crashes and burns through them. Again, no idea how this was in the book, but on screen, Mercy is the sort of tedious obnoxious annoying representative of the younger generation that makes you want to smack her right off screen. Despite having an American citizenship and a prestigious degree, she blunders through life, wasting it. Her excuse is mommy didn’t love her enough. Seriously, that’s Mercy’s entire existence summed up. Whe is 24 by way of snarky 17. She squanders her time doing catering gigs and living in a shitty apartment. Then she meets Margaret and her kids and manages to lose her youngest. And sure, people keep saying how it could have happened to anyone, but let’s be clear here: Mercy deliberately lets go on the very small child’s hand in a very busy market because she is too busy texting and trying to figure out if she should charge this nice family for taking her out to eat. Afterwards, Margaret is understandably distraught, which she proceeds to (non-deliberately) take out on her family: husband and two kids. Also, her accusations alienate her bestie, Hillary, who lives in the same posh highrise and is going through her crap as her ten-year marriage is falling apart. The marriage started to fall apart because after jointly deciding on no kids, the husband, David, suddenly changes his mind. And when Hillary doesn’t get on board with that, David begins to drink again and hook up with Mercy. Yes, Mercy again. You cannot avoid that wrecking ball of a girl. To make matters worse, Mercy gets knocked up by David, and inexplicably, despite having no support system, job, income, maturity, etc., decides to keep it. Mostly because she’s just that kind of an idiot. She breaks up with David and manages a short relationship with a lovely local girl to who she blatantly lies about her situation. Meanwhile, Margaret turns into the kind of woman who is straight-up toxic for her family, so her husband suggests to move back to NYC. And when she changes her mind last minute, he is all but relieved to leave her behind. What she thinks she is going to do alone in Hong Kong is impossible to know. She has no job or apartment. She doesn’t seem to be actively looking for the kids i.e. hiring private detectives or putting up posters. She just kind of walks and looks around, which for a person of Nicole Kidman’s formidable height might be a good tactic, especially in Asia, but still … Hillary is possibly the only one here who gets something of a happy ending … or at least a bright new rug by the end. Do we learn much about these ridiculously wealthy, privileged women, except for the fact that their lives are a mess? Not really. All of the women in the show have shitty husbands, except for Margaret who ruins her own marriage. There is also a heavy exploration of the upstairs/downstairs dynamic from a place where people seem to have live-in maids like it’s perfectly normal. The two maids the story focusses on, Margaret’s and Hillary’s, appear to be experiencing something like Stockholm syndrome, complete with uncontested blind royalty, even though their employers hold all the cards, and play with their fates as carelessly as children might with things they don’t understand the value of. It’s easy to see why a book like this would gather the attention it did and adaptation it got: it checks SO many boxes, which is how the modern publishing industry works. In tone, for me, it’s way too women’s fiction. Way more so than a straight-up drama. With Mercy running everything. As a mini-series, it’s wildly uneven. Which is what happens when you get too many writers. The last episode is especially off tonally. It was given to the book author to write and mostly serves as a reminder that just because someone can write a book, doesn’t mean they can write a teleplay. The acting is good. But the casting is questionable. Once again, the powers that be seem to be confused about how age works. Sarayu Blue as Hillary is excellent and can just about pass for 40, while being much closer to 50. Her onscreen husband is notably well-hung and not shy about it. Margaret’s husband keeps his clothes on, fit as he looks, but is somehow celebrating his 50th birthday and looking mid-40s at most. But Nicole Kidman is well into her 50s. How exactly do we buy her as a mother of a three-year-old? I’m sorry, are we still pretending that whatever she has been doing to herself to stop the time is working? She looks terrifying. Sure, the show needed a star to hitch itself onto, but was there no one more appropriate? Really? Anyway, this review is already much too long, so let’s wrap it up. The show, for all its numerous faults, is strangely compelling to watch, but the ending is so unsatisfying that it takes a lot away from it. Do it for a Hong Kong trip, maybe. Maybe. I’ve put off watching this movie because I saw an absolutely scathing review of it in New York Times. But then it was all over the award shows, and curiosity got the best of me. I’m glad it did, too, because NYT’s notorious highb row can raise itself so far that it’ll slide right off its smug face. And most faces do not look good without eyebrows.
Anyway, the movie …yes, the movie was oodles of fun. Emerald Fennell, who became the new IT writer/director with Promising Young Woman, came back with its distant cousin, Promising Young Man aka Saltburn. Because that’s how the world works these days—in general, people are not imaginative enough to not want more of the same thing they’ve had before and enjoyed. Though to Fennell’s credit, she throws in enough variations, making her movie something like a cross between Talented Mr. Ripley, and American Psycho—the Crazy Rich Caucasians edition. The psycho in question is positively Dickensian-named Oliver Quick, and sure enough, ladies and gentlemen, this is a picaresque of sorts. Oliver becomes obsessed with Felix, a charismatic and gorgeous scion of a wealthy family, and strategically (by pretending to be a sort of Dickensian urchin) ingratiates himself into Felix’s and subsequently his family’s attentions. Once Oliver is invited to stay at the family estate, the eponymous Saltburn, all is right in his world, and relaxing, he starts to slip. And slipping, he starts to do other things. Soon, it’s tragedy after tragedy, with Ollie in the back with a knowing glint in his eyes. The curious thing here is that while on the surface the movie is an interrogation of rampant privilege, at its base, it’s actually a tale of a young psychopath. The ridiculously, laughably over-the-top wealthy aristocratic Catton family are indeed amusingly oblivious in their moneyed eccentricity but far from evil are actually warm and kind to Oliver. The more the story unrolls, the more you see that they are actually the victims of their good graces. And Ollie, humble, baby-blue-eyed Ollie, is the proverbial snake in the grass. Much like the Cattons, the movie can get over-the-top with some of its excesses, but always amusingly so, albeit at times also cringingly so. The actor who plays Oliver is remarkably committed, going to some outrageously wild length to convey his character’s particular brand of insanity. Rim job on the bathtub drain – sure. A full-on naked dance scene – absolutely. It’s most impressive, but then he has to work twice as much to make you forget how incredibly old he is for his role. The casting is the only aspect where the movie truly falters. Of course, movie business has for ages denied …well, ages. But the thing is, if art is meant to imitate life, then perhaps a bit more attention must be paid. Enough to make it seem credible … or at least, not distracting. The lead of Saltburn is distractingly old-looking for bis age. Oliver is meant to be college-age, early years. The dashing Felix—Jacob Elordi—passes the muster. The Cattons are played by Pike and Grant, with something like a two-decade age difference between them. Plausible, though in real life would be a stretch (teen pregnancy stretch for Pike to have mothered Ellordi). That neither the lead nor Pike have aged at all something like 14/15 years into the future is highly suspect. There are some peculiarly baby-faced actors out there who can probably pass for nineteen at thirty, but this movie did not cast any of them. Which is a fault, but boy, can he dance naked! Anyway. The movie is just over 120 minutes, but never lags or drags. It’s genuinely fun, the way movies about obsession tend to be, and well worth a watch. And just you try and not get “Murder on the Dancefloor” song stuck in your brain. 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 😊 |
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