grinningelvis Reviews

The Creator (2023)

Completely Empty

[4/10 · 22 May 2024]

The Creator isn't very good. It isn't smart. It isn't exciting. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and there are next to no emotional entanglements that can justify its 140 minutes of screentime. It's not just that everything in The Creator has been done before and done better, its that Gareth Edwards seems to believe that the juxtaposition of stunning vistas and floating machinery merits a pass on intellectual and interpersonal banality. The actors feel robotic - especially the humans and especially John David Robinson - and the set pieces repetitive and predictable. It's an extended chase scene that sprinkles its shoot-em-ups with visions of synthetic humans being tortured. We're told that this has consequences but none of them are detectible onscreen. Everyone here is just going through the motions as if preprogrammed by an AI to deliver the bare minimum action film experience.

What's alarming is that this is an amalgamation of Edwards' films into a single thematic unit that isn't worthy of any of its disparate parts. There are plenty of rebel politics, third-world exploitation, and monsters, but not an once of soul. While Monsters and Rogue One both had momentum and curiosity, Creator is closer in form and execution to the clunky, uneven Godzilla and less satisfying. Given an $80mil budget and a 2 hour cut, we see the strain of self-importance everywhere - an insistence that big themes are being explored. But all things being precious isn't a particularly compelling philosophical argument when every creature living and synthetic is designed as a weapon. Remove the fancy window dressing and The Creator is about as complex of a machine as a pulley. There are plot holes here that suggest the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to even read their own script.

Fallout (2024– )

Everything Clever About This is Dumb

[3/10 · 17 May 2024]

Based on a video game? Never would have guessed. This seems exactly like the kind of clever noise a few dozen up-and-coming TV producers at Amazon might come up with when their job is on the line. "Bring me something violent and fun that will cost a lot of money and grab the attention of the unwashed masses. Preferably the unwashed gamer masses. Something like 'Last of Us', but with zingers. One-liners and more explosions. Maybe some CGI bugs? A cute girl or two? And how about a semi-famous co-star who always plays the semi-famous co-star? Make sure there's at least one lowly underdog we can hire a minority actor for, but make them comedy relief with a heart. Robots and zombies if possible."

If it were any fun at all, Fallout would be a low-stakes delight. Beautiful production design and game actors, a pedigree and a budget. But it's all so instantly dumb. Badly written, choppy, and nonsensical, Fallout's attention span is shorter than the ads that precede it. Action comedy is hard to land. Both have to be tight - the filmmakers have to establish tone. Fallout insists on being taken seriously all the while slapping the audience with vaudeville-level pratfalls and gags. It's more fun watching real-life 'fail' vids than a team of artists trying to recreate them.

The Menu (2022)

Leftovers of 3 Star Meal

[6/10 · 17 May 2024]

The Menu isn't particularly good. Certain courses are lean and tasty, but as a whole, Mylod's film isn't much more than a reheated satire that shifts a little too quickly from icy comeuppance to a milquetoast lecture on class and capitalist culture. While The Menu flirts with self-awareness, it's also guilty of the same arrogant detachment it accuses its victims of embodying. The film suggests a body count but what's supposed to matter is the sense of dread that comes with each progressively clever course, a set-up that loses its irony as soon as we see our first drop of blood. Each of the diners at this exquisite charade is a broad type and a simplistic target. From philandering philanthropist to haughty restaurant critic to empty influencer, each represents a bare-bones assumption of corruption and delusion, but the screenplay can't be bothered to play by its own rules (John Leguizamo's gregarious actor's crime? Making a disappointing lowbrow movie - wink wink). Once the sacrifice begins, every single actor on screen becomes a concept the movie can't be bothered to serve. At a certain point, the line between dread and dark comedy doesn't blur exactly the way the filmmakers intend. Whereas, say, Rian Johnson's Knives Out (obviously an influence here) presented a wide array of types inside a theme and managed to deliver interesting wrinkles, everyone in The Menu is just waiting around to die. It's in the film's preachier moments that we realize that the offenders may not really be so bad as their supposed crimes. That makes Ralph Fiennes ennui-packed performance seem just a little less menacing. He's mugging afterall, just like Anna Taylor Joy's "Margot" is earmarked from the first scene as our inevitable Final Girl. The menu of The Menu isn't exclusive or refined, just expensive. And if you revel in its many carnal delights, there's a pretty good chance you'll feel full only to find yourself going through the drive-thru on your way home.

I tried to cram in as many eye-rolling allusions as possible when writing this review. Unfortunately, that seems to be what Mylod's team did here as well.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Half a film

[5/10 · 15 May 2024]

The Xenomorph is gonna do what the Xenomorph is gonna do, so the only metric for quality in an Alien movie is the relative aptitude of the lambs to the slaughter. Alien: Covenant is populated with non-characters, the most annoying of which is the wan "religious" captain played by Billy Crudup. He's meant to be a mirror to the ethical emptiness of the film's true villain, who it turns out - quite unsurprisingly- to not be the eponymous Alien but a member of the crew. So the noise that gets us from Point A to Point B is just more of the same; a waiting game to see who meets their end and who gets a fanciful monologue. It's no surprise that Fassbender gets the majority of the play here. He's the only star capable of bringing life to such thin writing.

This is a shame because Covenant is, superficially, some of the best directing Scott has done in years. The first half of the film manages to extend the foreboding greyness that similarly made one half of Prometheus so effective. But like that film, Covenant can't translate the inevitable violence into existential gravity. None of the characters register as sympathetic or even interesting which places the emphasis on a dull AI parable about finding meaning without human agency. It's a Kubrickian trick buried deep in braindead pandering so that no plot ever really emerges. It just sits there, and Scott can't be bothered to give any satisfactory answers for the multitude of mysteries he's created.

The movies are filled with splatter horror; we all know where to find it. But after Cameron's Aliens, we know that we should expect a little more from this particular blend of action and horror. And after six or so films, we really deserve a better hint at the answers Prometheus was supposed to provide. If the Xenomorphs in your film are a yawn and their creators unworthy of deeper exploration, we need a little more than a double-crossing robot to carry 2+ hours. And that runtime feels extra long when the story and the third ending all fail to congeal into the release the first half builds toward.

There's a muddled explanation as to what planet the Prometheus survivors crashed onto and why and how it went wrong, but really, it's the only thing we want to know. That the film ignores all of that to deliver exactly the same droll clichés of it's forefathers is damning. It turns out that the franchise can't even be saved by its own father - and that's a weird mirror into the Covenant's emptiness.

The Red King (2024– )

Staggeringly banal, hilariously lowbrow

[2/10 · 28 April 2024]

"The Red King" is generic in just about every way that matters. It's loaded with tropes - some very old and some very new - and all of them are bad. From the self-righteous cop fallen from grace and excised to a podunk assignment to the lavish conspiracy so obvious that the reveal is actually stunningly simplistic, Red King has next-to-no original thoughts and few compelling performances.

Red King seems to think that its audience hasn't seen Wicker Man or Midsommar, nor has read any British poetry or folklore. It also assumes that if you have, you're going to find a pub called "John Barleycorn" a snapping allusion. It's all quite embarrassing.

Marc Warren is serviceable the grieving drunk father and Mark Lewis gets to play his typical round-faced racist, but the problem lies in Anjli Mohindra's sergeant. We never quite get a beat on who she's supposed to be or why. It's not the actress's fault, but rather the scattered, threadbare characterization. And the script fails pretty much everyone.

In the end, it doesn't really matter who was murdered and why. It's all setup for an elaborately stupid gotcha that doesn't tickle the heart or the brain. It just lies there, stupid, on the rug, desperately wanting to be petted.

Babylon Berlin (2017–2025)

Diminishing returns

[7/10 · 27 March 2024]

Babylon Berlin manages to keep all of its absurdities swirling about in such a self-serious manner that you barely have time to catch your breath and realize how hokey it all is. When the momentum stalls -especially after the crescendo of the first novel and the closing of the second season - the show just kinda floats away into nothing, dangling Nazis, fake deaths, and labyrinthine conspiracies as a smoke screen for logical storytelling. The noir tropes tend to overtake the gritty realism of much of the narrative and what you're left with is an unsatisfying porridge - warming, but it's all a little too wet.

When the show concerns itself with the harsh realities of German poverty, Weimar decadence, and the subtleties of government and social politics that would lead to Nazism, it's all fascinatingly heady and inspired. The production design is simply the best television has seen with period detail, costuming, and impeccable cinematography and editing. But too often, Babylon Berlin's technical prowess can't justify its wild narrative business and convoluted subplots. It's easy to get lost or to care at all about many of the intertwining double-crosses and shady deals. Each season seems desperate to populate the Berlin underworld with broad clowns and eccentric kingpins whose only purpose is to wind up inside of a chalk outline.

The cast is superb even though the scripts are often repetitive in tone. The women get the worst of it, though one of Babylon Berlin's off-kilter strengths is how it melds perversity and sexual freedom into the paradoxes of the conservative state. Much of the bare flesh onscreen is more about tone than purpose; often that means the female characters are punished for their indiscretions and transactional sensuality. At times, it's downright sticky, especially when, y'know, National Socialism is involved. Babylon Berlin has no problem with killing off a character the second they've had a moment's grace.

The author of the books wants to push the series right up to 1938, meaning there could a lot more of the show to explore, but by Season 4 the formula is showing signs of exhaustion. The Macguffin cases that prop up two or three characters at a time have often killed the flow and the seasons get long. That's when the show's pretentious flourishes - seamlessly executed in the early episodes - become real points of contention. As the bodies pile up, the musical numbers get dreadfully dull, no matter how exquisite the costuming may be.

Widows (2018)

A Distilled Mess

[5/10 · 24 March 2024]

Steve McQueen is known for icy detachment and pretension. Gillian Flynn is known for bombast and snarky genre reversals. It's an unlikely pairing, and it looks like everyone wants to come out to play. The film is packed with Grade-A actors. But what do any of them have to do? True to genre, the film uses bursts of violence to suggest stakes. This is, in theory, a heist movie. But "Widows" wants to be more, and the heist takes a backseat to nearly two hours of swamp. "Widows" wants to insist it's "about something", dragging the audience through empty melodrama and papery political nonsense to arrive a convoluted nothing. Its snail's-pace gaslighting; a beautifully photographed, laughably fragile farce of girl-power that for all if its portentous trappings reduces its characters down to neat tropes. After all, it's a heist movie. But the more these characters talk the more we realize we know nothing about them aside from their victimhood. "Widows" wants to imagine a handful of Carmela Sopranos as avenging ronin who light candles for the dead - virgin wh*res complicit in their husband's crimes and doomed to fulfill their dreadful mission, but the film seems to be all window-dressing. There's nothing behind the curtain to suggest this movie learned much from its obvious model - Mann's "Heat."

True Detective: Night Country: Part 6 (2024) Season 4, Episode 6

Silence of the Lame

[1/10 · 19 February 2024]

You'd have to be a true detective to get to the bottom of how this garbage got the greenlight. After a laughably pretentious and garbled build up, TD4 just dissolves into something truly despicable - a whimper inside of a whimper. By now, we understand that the True Detective formula is all macguffin - a murder mystery that explores the "thin blue line" between justice and obsession. The cops are always antiheroes, the villains always surprisingly banal in the end. TD4 seems intent on exploiting that formula to its logical limit and then some. And then some more. Not only is the finale absurd, it's downright insulting - scotch-taping a tongue-firmly-in-cheek explanation to the icy shenanigans that ends up implicating evil corporations, ancient bacterium, ghosts, daddy-issues and abused housewives.

"There is something out there calling me," says an "actor" while shivering in the dark and you just know it's all going to get much much worse. The finale grasps so hard for emotional resonance that it just makes you realize how little investment we've placed in these characters. It's one thing to write unlikeable, morally complicated roles, but these are cardboard clichés upon which auteur Lopez drapes her toothless pseudo-spiritualism. They open their mouths and dead air comes out. It's written that way, it's a ted that way, and it's all stunningly racist, sexist, and silly, leaning hard on the abuse of women, native identity and violence as justifications for its many jumbled messages.

I feel like I was the real victim of True Detective 4. I held out hope for at least 2 episodes that it could redeem its shaky first steps. It's not a good thing when you genuinely do not care to watch the last forty minutes of a "murder mystery", but ultimately, I got a couple of real belly-laughs out of the resolution.

"Shake it up baby, twist and shout." There really is no bottom for Issa Lopez and her insulting butchery of this franchise. Just plain awful.

True Detective: Night Country: Part 5 (2024) Season 4, Episode 5

Corporations Are Bad and Other Deep Thoughts by Issa Lopez

[1/10 · 16 February 2024]

"It's over! Just let it go! It's time," she says.

Oh, if only. Put it out of its misery.

Season 4 has been a formless, tasteless mess, but Episode 5 sinks to new lows. It's a belly-flop; the weakest writing of the season desperately trying to piece together a story out of the breadcrumbs of non sequiturs that came before. Drenched in hackneyed cliché and pretentious muck, Lopez trades in the D-grade horror tropes for more music-video montages, laborious sound editing, and cheap, violent twists. The episode devolves into corporate cover-ups, police lies, and nonsensical showdowns all of which amounts to exactly nothing. Witness our flawed heroes as they brave the cold night to...well, we don't know. Some people live and some people die. Some people make bad cop shows with CGI polar bears and ghosts.

Someone please explain to me what Jodie Foster saw in this trash?

True Detective: Night Country: Part 3 (2024) Season 4, Episode 3

The Dregs

[1/10 · 30 January 2024]

Mulder and Scully travel to the Black Lodge to find a guy who can't be found with any computer, Rook. Stupid kid. You think cases get solved by po-leese work? Nope. You wanna crack this case? Try talking to the dead.

There are heaps of clichés and head scratchers here, but I have to admit to being hooked by the show's central conceit: how the hell is Lopez going to come to any logical dénouement? If ep 2 hinted at bare-bones police melodrama, ep3 shows you exactly how tiresome this genre can be. Essentially the whole episode is a series of the cops answering phones, badly interviewing people they know are lying to them, and storming off to question more liars. Oh, and occasionally there are ghosts.

The eyerolls get deeper, piling on body horror instead of plot, clumsy character slog instead of depth. By the time the episode creaks to his ludicrous (and ludicrously convenient) climax, we recognize an unfortunate new wrinkle in this disastrous season that maybe we were in denial about in previous episodes: TD4 is deeply racist. This season plays mysticism as a central theme yet can never be bothered to actually make any connections to or explanations of its Native context. Nor is there really any subtext. We see people praying, we hear dialogue about pollution and abuse, we see tribal markings and tattoos, but every single detail is in service to the "you wouldn't understand" trope.

You're right: we wouldn't understand. So when big revelations come in the form of "you wouldn't understand" one just accepts that really, there's nothing to understand. This is all just a device. Just a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the story - that the central mystery - is really quite dull, and ice zombies and one-eyed CGI polar bears don't really add much to the intrigue.

So what is TD4 thus far? Marginalized people need to stick together? Except that seems to be exactly the very concept the facts tell us is ridiculous and untenable. While Season 1-3 often used cop-show clichés to examine the personal psychology of their tortured detectives, Season 4 seems content to just say "they're women, isn't that enough of a character trait for you?"

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

A very small world

[6/10 · 29 January 2024]

It never seems to occur to anyone in "Worst Person In the World" that a different Oslo may exist. This is a day-glo version of the universe where everyone's pithy soul-searching is inseparably synced to their privilege. Julie is worthy of our interest but not our judgement, and if you accept that, you've passed a certain cinematic purity test and get to playfully wallow in life's hard lessons.

As a result, Ari Kaurismaki's Oslo simply doesn't exist. It can't. Then life would be icky and unfair and good people would live quiet, desperate lives.

I thought more about that other cinematic universe than I did Julie's in Trier's long, often mannered film, mostly because these very aloof characters are generally busy obsessing over cartoon buttholes and the gentlest subversion of the rom-com standards to really warrant much consideration on their own. While that may give them the aura of "authentic", no one is particularly likable. Nor should we expect them to be. But investing in Trier's universe also means that you have to care more about cocktail dresses and the drunken whims of a self-serious, twenty-something chameleon who supposedly finds equal merit in surgery, psychology, and fine art. Meeting Julie, I ain't buyin' it, and one wonders why the cynical artist and supportive shadow-mother don't just turn away like her callous father has.

I mention Kaurismaki not because his should be the only Olso narrative to exist but because his is so very unique and suggests a world that is simultaneously more mundane and fascinatingly deeper than Julie's bourgeois existence. In his films, morose types struggle with identity and disappointment in equally specific ways. They rarely speak to their own fugue states but we understand them with laser focus. "TWPITW" has a slew of narrators, none more grating than the actual voiceover who tells us exactly what we should know about Julie when the film needs to hone in on one of it's many writerly ironies. In Triers world, class certainly exists, but only insofar as it serves Julie's next act of alienation.

I wish I found any of these characters as interesting as every other critic seems to have, but by the time "TWPITW" is rushing toward its conveniently syrupy Cancer Year revelations I was actively rooting for a hard comeuppance. We know all along that Julie will succeed because there is never a second's doubt. Everyone wants her to win because otherwise the film wouldn't exist at all.

Bottoms (2023)

Strangers With Superbad

[8/10 · 28 January 2024]

Seligman and Sennot's "Shiva Baby" was housed in such a specific, empathetic world that at first "Bottoms" absurdist satire is extremely jarring. This is a world where, instead of cringey mitsvah angst the whip-smart humor is centered around horny pansexual adults-playing-teens and grunting, perfectly manicured footballers who never change out of their pads and tights. It's a satire of less-competent satires - a female fisheye of how clumsily Hollywood handles teens, sex, and gender and how so often the story is little more than titillation with emotions sharpied on a piece of cardboard. Juxtaposed with "Barbie" (which was lauded for its game actors and prescient writing), "Bottoms" feels a whole lot sharper in both the targets it chooses and the sincerity of its nastiness. Rather than attempt to dramatize the complexities of sex and gender politics, "Bottoms" explodes them, unconcerned with good taste or the audiences it might inadvertently offend. "Bottoms" owes a lot to "Strangers With Candy" and it's every bit as vicious and hilarious, unapologetically willing to try anything for a laugh. If you're willing to plumb the depths of teen sex comedies and real-life tragedy (guns, rape, and violent depression are all fully lampooned here), Seligman is happy to provide some truly inspired schtick. And just like "Barbie", the flashiest male role ironically steals the show from protagonists charged with heavier lifting - Marshawn Lynch playing the girls' divorcé advisor is genuinely hilarious, displaying a comic timing and deadpan delivery that puts many trained actors to shame. Plenty of scenes are stolen by Lynch, idly standing by, simply nodding his head to the chaos unfolding.

Saint Omer (2022)

A light-touch masterpiece

[10/10 · 25 January 2024]

Saint Omer isn't flashy melodrama. In fact, it's barely a story. Rather, this is a delicate, complex parable about motherhood, identity, and history that uses race and sensationalist underpinnings to arrive at something astonishingly humane. The most fascinating thing about Saint Omer is that there are stories within stories within stories, and rather than tell (as so much dumbed-down contemporary cinema insists upon), director Diop patiently shows. It's a masterclass in suggestion, unreliable narrators, and family politics framed inside of linear courtroom drama. Saint Omer not only posits the question of how we frame literature and media into a self-narrative, but how in doing so one often conveniently obscures very specific truths about themselves and why they relate to the material. In the end, Diop's protagonist - a successful intellectual mother-to-be - comes face to face with her own expectations. The moment of realization is subtle, the conclusions so moving that the film silently screams it's hard-won message, leading the viewer to a conclusion as sublime and challenging as the myths of Medea it frequently references. Why would a woman kill her own child? Diop suggests that we all know the answer, we simply can't speak it out loud.

Brilliant, sophisticated, brutally intelligent and self-aware. This is top-tier filmmaking.

True Detective: Night Country: Part 2 (2024) Season 4, Episode 2

Don't confuse the spirit world with mental health issues

[4/10 · 23 January 2024]

Bad Writing, meet your friend Bad Acting. Mix in a few Native clichés and you got some of Qavviks homebrew. Ennis comes alive!

It's Season 4 of True Detective. Everyone is having sex with everyone else and now we know why they hate the Beatles. Sure, there's now the bare bones of an actual cop procedural, but don't be fooled. This is a show where sisters have intimate conversations about mental health in the grocery store so that everyone in the small town can listen in and cold cases are solved by ghosts and convenient phone videos.

Truly Netflix-level stuff. Not a hint of the True Detective brand. And that's a problem because what distinguished TD from the gazillion other cop shows was airtight direction, great set design and fabulous acting. Too much of Season 4 is bad soap opera logic piled on top of head-scratchers like "why is there conveniently no ice on that window?" and "do people really talk like that?"

Can't wait for Jody Foster to pull the mask off the phantom to see who he really is...

True Detective: Night Country: Part 1 (2024) Season 4, Episode 1

True Detective: the Real Ghost Hunters of Alaska

[2/10 · 17 January 2024]

Do you remember that sinking feeling you got halfway through the pilot of True Detective 2? That feeling that "oh my, something is missing here. Somebody didn't take the time to really read this one through"? Similarly, True Detective 4 leaps out of the gate with a disastrous, groan-inducing slog of a first episode.

Life on the Rez is a popular trope these days and TD4 wastes no time establishing two very tired, very exploitative clichés - almost a dozen before the opening credits (here tracked by Billie Eilish, joining the ranks The Handsome Family, Leonard Cohen, and Cassandra Wilson, our second indication that TD4 wants very badly to be an outlier in this stoic brand). Some bad-CGI elk commit suicide and we're off, a clumsy, irritating hour of police procedural by way of Twin Peaks. But it looks and feels a lot more like a slew of its own weak competitors like Dark Winds and the truly abysmal Two Pines - ham-fisting Native issues of depression, poverty, mental illness and a mess of sudsy mysticism and hokum down the viewer's throat in a predictable po-leece package.

The real problem is that Issa Lopez's take on the TD formula seems to want to blend a healthy dose of campy horror on top of the campy Native clichés, ala The Terror, or, y'know, Twin Peaks. The show winks hard at a dozen reference points, notably The Thing and every horror movie of the last 20 years. I suspect if this series holds out long enough we can all look forward to Ari Aster's Beau solving beheadings in a Navajo casino. Laugh, but it's likely in development.

TD4, or "Night Country" is desperately seeking vampires to help flow some blood to its small brain. It's the kind of bad script that delivers character-point lines like "I hate the Beatles" and "my dad would kill me if he found out" as both developments and cliffhangers. I feel bad for Jodie Foster and John Hawkes trapped in this dismal affair of cops who are too-committed/not-at-all-committed to what is obviously a terrible job. Moreover, the script offers no relief from the offensively droll "if the victim were white" trope, given that the show has done absolutely nothing to establish the relationships in this small town between the indigenous and the white. Why are any of them there? What do they do for jobs? How do some of them magically have cell phone service while others do not? How can a murder go unsolved when, in fact, that is the whole point of the series?

If these were the only problems with Lopez's script and direction, one could be convinced to stick around. But all of the jump scares and quirky exposition become even more grating when the show leans into its "detective" work. This town has resources: both local and state police plus helicopters for a population that seems to number in the dozens. And because its always night here on the Arctic Circle, no one ever sleeps. Instead, they solve cases by looking at pictures (what detective show worth its weight doesn't have at least one scene of grisly-victim photos or A Beautiful Mind-connect-the-dots overheads?) and begrudgingly acknowledging each other as human beings.

For better or worse, the True Detective franchise has pedigree. Even when it misses the mark (like the slogging Season 2) it manages to present a crime worth solving. For Lopez and Night Country, we're presented with Jeffery's ear from "Blue Velvet", announcing that just under the surface of this quaint, cheerful sunless depression hole at the top of the world, things are so bad that elk kill themselves. And elk aren't the only awkward CGI animals to show up. It's all laughably racist and tired. It just doesn't work.

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

Aster in Aspic

[3/10 · 8 January 2024]

There's a pretty good chance I simply do not like Ari Aster, but I beg you please, please tell me if there is anything redeemable about this endless and endlessly grating film. Maybe it's Amy Ryan? Parker Posey? Or Richard Kind? Or the sheer ballsiness of convincing a studio to fund a three hour drug-paranoia-therapy-mommy joke? Truly, some brave people decided to go ahead and let Aster be Aster. But as witnessed in the third acts of his two previous films, this director has no ability to control his own worst impulses, and Aster's worst impulse is to bludgeon his audience.

After a while, the line between tragedy and bad joke becomes nonexistent and one begins to wonder if Aster has a single ounce of compassion for any of his topics, characters, or - again - for the poor sods that continue to believe in him and fund his off-kilter horror-comedy yawns. But what's more nauseous about "Beau Is Afraid" than the actual movie itself is what it says about this new rank of auteurs - the supposed mavericks like Aster, Chazelle, and Jordan Peele - who seem to think that obscure Twilight Zone parables, slick production design, and throw-it-at-the-wall shock theater is a cinematic voice. At a certain point, "Beau" isn't clever or cruel or compassionate, but constipated - three hours of a director tugging at our sleeve and asking "do you see how cool I am?"

The Last of Us (2023– )

Pretty worn out stuff

[6/10 · 8 December 2023]

Confused by all of the praise heaped on this shockingly standard zombie apocalypse story? Well, that makes at least two of us. There is nothing original here to note and nothing that hasn't been done better in the countless Romero knock-offs that have seem to have infected everyone's taste lately. I assume much of the appeal comes from the gun-crazy survivalist camp that know nothing about "Lone Wolf and Cub" and have no patience to read "The Road." "LOU" isn't as good as either, nor is it really even a mediocre Romero clone. There's some nice window dressing - particularly an unmasked Pascal, a tragic arcade date, and a brief Offerman interlude - but if "The Walking Dead" hadn't already exhausted these already exhausted storylines it might be easier to overlook the show's frequent reliance on genre tropes. It's sincere enough, and somehow that makes it all the more cynical.

Babylon (I) (2022)

BabylYawn

[4/10 · 7 December 2023]

"Babylon" wants to big, bad, and bold, but it only ever really achieves bad. Now, I have 512 characters to fill here, so I'll do what Damien Chazelle did: boobsdrugsboobsorgycelebritycameocelebrityslummingboobsdrugsdepressiondepressiondepressionboobs. Cameoboobsdrugscomedydepressionboobsorgybutstuffdrugsdepression. Drugsorgydepressiondepressionboobsviolencedepressiondrugsboobs, Chazelleboobsdrugs tongue-in-cheek insight into Old Hollywood emphasized by thoroughly modern trappings to express exactly nothing. This is drudgery, really. The horse is dead 20minutes in and there's two hours and fifty minutes to go, all to arrive at an offensively glib happy ending.

Truly awful in a way only Damien Chazelle can achieve.

Elvis (2022)

Ain't never caught a rabbit.

[1/10 · 22 November 2023]

You expect plastic junk from Baz Luhrmann, but "Elvis" plays like a feature-length commercial for the latest reboot of Zima. It's staggeringly offensive - so much so that its genuinely difficult to get a beat on exactly what its intentions might be. Is "Elvis" meant to be a satire? And if it's not a comedy, what in fact does Luhrmann think is so riotously hilarious about his characters and scenarios? No, "Elvis" is next-level exploitation trash - wholly unconcerned with anything but spectacle and suggesting that Elvis Presley himself was no deeper than the murky imagination of Colonel Tom Parker.

Woe the embarrassing performance by Tom Hanks, here donning a Corman-calibur cheese monger costume that feels more like audition takes subbed in after an actor dies midway through production. There's a whiff of 70s William Holden, but a stronger smell of sulphur. The makeup is dreadful, the accent is dreadful - and that's the best thing about the performance. The pap and crap ultimately distracts from just how lousy and erroneous the script often is, with Hanks milling his flabby, two-bit Mephistopheles act about as far as humanly possible.

Colonel Tom is the real protagonist here. The film can't be bothered to let Elvis finish a song. Mostly, we just get a sweaty Austin Butler who seems just about as naive and silly as the movie wants us to believe the real Elvis must have been. It's all a little difficult to stomach if you have any knowledge of Elvis's career or any fondness for human emotion.

What's more troubling is the film's insistence on platforming the film's message on America's deep and complex racial history. Luhrmann doesn't have much use historical accuracy unless he can chop up the bits for use in yet another nonsensical montage. Sure, he name-checks Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Little Richard, but one gets the sense that Luhrmann can't really tell them apart. Elvis Presley was one of the most complex artists of the 20th century, but Luhrmann keeps him well-contained - caged in by the excesses which, after twenty or so minutes of screentime, become exceedingly tedious and shrill.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

They Fight.

[2/10 · 25 October 2023]

Somebody thought it was a good idea to wedge some painfully dull melodrama in between the violence. What's with all this talking? This upsets me, because - simply put - every line of dialogue just means one less killshot to the head. The idea that these cardboard characters supposedly have "inner lives" is hilarious. The only "inner" I care about is their CGI blood.

Honestly, I didn't really watch this movie, or any of the John Wick movies. I'm sure they exist, but nothing here registers in the permanent memory. I think a guy fell down some steps. Mostly they play in the background while I go about thinking on better movies and not killing people. But I thought it important to add a review here because I was astounded at how this artfully dumb and endlessly repetitive series continues to justify incredibly long screen times. Donnie Yen talks a bit. Ian McShane phones in his McShaneiest version of McShane. Is that Clancy Brown? He seems to be doing something. Oh, a fight scene! But 3 hours of this?

My question for the John Wick universe is why? Video games already exist, and you get to control the character. Isn't that more fun than three hours of bladder-control tedium?

Hey look, Donnie Yen's not dead yet! What hour is this?

Immortal Beloved (1994)

Immortal Beloved is a sled

[5/10 · 17 August 2023]

What you learn about Beethoven in this hilariously pretentious costume drama is that he wasn't nearly as interesting as Mozart, and if you learn that it's unintentional. "Immortal Beloved" has a groan-inducing structure and execution; it's "Citizen Kane" in frilly wigs and broad-acting in 18th century Vienna, and not much actual drama or insight to shake that withering comparison. The film can't be blamed for being saturated in the pomposity of "Serious 90s Historical Drama" - ie Oscar Bait. It certainly is of it's time and manages to get some of the costumes and set pieces right. But it's also desperately flat, often conflating Beethoven's -and really, Oldman's- ego for personality. The composer's genius is taken as a given, and so we mostly see the actor spitting and twirling and overacting to express this incredible genius. To say that it's light on historical accuracy is pretty damning then, because not much happens beyond flashes of female nudity and men exasperatingly stating exactly what's happening in each scene as it happens. The flashes of imagination are predictable, as when Beethoven flops in front of a parlor crowd when he loses his place in a piece and can't reassemble the orchestra, an embarrassment all played out in silence and mocking, laughing faces. The problem with that scene is that we the audience are laughing to. Up to this moment, we've been given no reason to love the composer and no reason to defend his genius. Occasionally his music plays, occasionally someone reminds you of his genius and his temper, but mostly the film just stumbles through the same tired scenes neatly contained in the most average of biopics.

C'mon C'mon (2021)

Another gem from Mills

[9/10 · 31 July 2023]

"C'Mon C'Mon" doesn't feel written so much as improvised. It's too honest and mundane and sweetly candid to be a film constructed of a script, sets, lighting, scenes and editing. It just sort of happens. You know as you're watching it that this is the "Mike Mills Touch." A gifted and always nuanced filmmaker, Mills has established himself as a true outlier - a believer in quiet, humanistic cinema that seems to coax effortless, often magical performances from his stars.

Here, the stunning work by Phoenix and Norman deserves to be recognized as all-time great. These feel like real people we just happen to have stumbled upon, and if the movie isn't very interested in giving them a cohesive narrative, the performances push forward more truth and emotion than anyone would seem capable of writing.

"C'mon" isn't 'about' anything. It isn't nearly as charming and creative as "Beginners" or as compact and earnest as "21 Century Women". It's its own thing - profoundly human and un-busy, complicated and shockingly simple.

Oppenheimer (I) (2023)

Much Ado About Nolan's Ego

[5/10 · 28 July 2023]

"Oppenheimer" is about nebulous men struggling with identity. We're told that the problem is morality, but the finished film - the sum total of Christopher Nolan's vision, script, direction, and ego (so much ego) - has little to say about the catastrophic technology it supposedly chronicles. It barely registers as a biopic, and it certainly isn't a meditation on history or even the bomb. Instead, it's three hours of a director insisting that he has something important to say, but that you should be smart enough to understand what that is without him having to accomplish it.

And that is a problem that no one seems to be mentioning in their rapturous reviews of "Oppenheimer". What exactly is it all about?

The entire film is so monotone and self-serious that one often forgets why any of the talking heads are important. They all speak and act like the same character. And honestly, they aren't particularly important. Edited linearly, "Oppenheimer" would be a quite simple, drab film. The performances are great, the roles thankless. So much so that when the only characters that suggest real people are not on screen - Downey's frustrated Lewis Strauss and Damon's General Groves - we feel their absence. Murphy does admirable work, as does Krumholtz as Isador Rabi, but really, these are flat, rote characters that gain empathy through persistence, not necessarily precision. In fact, that's the game that "Oppenheimer" plays: it only ever manages to emphasize the grey areas of it's central ethical dilemma.

To that end, the bomb really doesn't matter. The devastating after effects of the device are measured in terms of its function as science and as a scientific albatross around Oppie's neck. The human cost - and the cost on Oppenheimer himself - are given passing glances, leaving us to the real meat of the film, which is, in fact, conference rooms. "Oppenheimer" is about men talking. Make no mistake.

This makes for a tortuously obtuse and often offensively glib first hour. With the intrusive, often silly Tangerine Dream-esque score highlighting every petty argument and special-effects-imagining-the-cosmos scene and the spot-the-celebrity platforming, the only sign of humanity we get is literally writhing human flesh. Female nudity is a plot point for "Oppenheimer", though as in most Nolan productions, women barely exist. Here are two of Nolan's three female types: tragic trollop and tragic nag. Really, these could be any two actresses. They don't matter. Make no mistake, this is a film about men talking.

The second hour is genius. Cross cutting between the genesis of the bomb and the political machinations surrounding it, you get the sense that Nolan has really found a moment of true excitement. That sets up an incredibly disappointing third act which reveals exactly how weak Nolan's script is once it literally loses the power of nuclear annihilation. Everything, in fact, comes together over a very famous meeting that, historically, never happened. Poetic license? That's a problem when you waste 3 hours browbeating the audience with conference room minutiae and a script lifting from actual government documents.

"Oppenheimer" - in an ironic note that I've seen leveled against "Barbie" - is a film that wants to have it's cake and eat it too. We're told that the bomb is loathsome and dreadful and unethical pornography, and so Nolan knows that we have to see it. And we want it big and messy and full of ejaculate. Never mind that 300,000 human lives were what Oppie saw every time he closed his eyes - no - Nolan returns us again and again to the conference room, where petty insults manifest in conspiracies and smirking. Lots of smirking.

So what has Nolan accomplished here? The same end that he arrives at in each of his films: stolid detachment, pseudo-intellectualism, and stunning cinematic craftsmanship. Unfortunately, the movie is only worth an 90 minutes of inspired filmmaking. The rest is simply pretentious fat. Or rather, the rest is Nolan's insistence that he has something so important to say, but never gets around to it in 3 hours. Oppenheimer may be an infinitely interesting human being, but as a film character, he's cardboard, no matter how hard Murphy works to give him wrinkles.

Defenders of Nolan (and they are Legion) will explain to you that this is a great anti-war film, but it tells a lot more than it shows. It's not a satire and as a history lesson, it certainly omits large sections of the timeline that may have provided some drama, like say, the fates of Daghlin and Slotin. Frankly, this is the same tiresome walk and talk that weighs down the typical Aaron Sorkin history lesson, somehow rendering all of the characters and all of the audience to the same level of "look at how smart we are just for having experienced this."

None of this matters if the film moves you emotionally. I felt nothing during these 180 minutes. Certainly, I didn't come away with a greater understanding of the scope of the bomb, nor did I learn much about Oppenheimer. I learned a lot, however, about how meticulously exhausting Nolan is when Downey Jr isn't on screen.

Barbie (I) (2023)

Awkward, brilliant, anti-popcorn movie

[7/10 · 27 July 2023]

The most surprising thing about Barbie is that the joke gets old so quickly. Then, after it stops beating the audience over the head with its obviousness, it settles into a self-assured groove. It's the rare case in which the third act is actually better than the first two. The jokes land harder once it sheds the need to be all things at once - a twist neatly mirroring the film's central crisis moment.

As it plays out, the first half of Barbie is surprisingly drab. It's a feat of production and winking self reference that threatens to turn into a painful civics lesson and a generic every-genre-all-at-once lecture. It's not nearly as weird or jarring as it needs to be, and ultimately, the Barbie world is as lifeless as the titular character.

But then, something interesting happens: Barbie actually starts landing some punches. It's no accident that a turn happens with the introduction of a fairly obvious twist - the introduction of a strange character played by Rhea Perlman. And Perlman is the perfect actress to fill such a role. She's small, unglamorous, and crone-ish, consistently cast as either a venomous tough or as a matronly sieve. In Barbie, she's a literal chorus, and her existence in the film suggests a knowing concession between the Corporate Barbie toy empire and the relationship that so many women have with her, and themselves.

These are the topics that have long churned in Noah Baumbach's films combined with topics that have defined Gerwig's features, yet the movie doesn't work like anything the two have accomplished separately. Barbie feels like Ladybird by way of The Life Aquatic, and when it allows itself to go full-blown existential, it manages a sort of cinematic brilliance that it's rival blockbuster (Oppenheimer, of Oppenheimer, looming so large over everyone's attempt at pretension) simply can't manage. The film has deep flaws, but heart is not one of them.

It's a magical thing to see Margot Robbie cry, and while her performance really isn't particularly consequential to the plot, it does present emotional heft to a screenplay that is both dullard and brilliant by design. Robbie, like Charlize Theron, is a beautiful blonde archetypal actress who just happens to be profoundly intelligent and intense, even when the film literally mentions exactly how we are not supposed to look at her as "average" while begging us to see her as just that. It's a neat trick to pull off a genuinely flattering disrobing of stereotypical beauty. It's a joke Robbie is in on, and a passive exclamation point that co-star Ryan Gosling owns.

I like watching actors having fun onscreen. I actually never expected to experience this in Barbie, especially when it shoehorns in less-than interesting roles for Will Farrell and Kate McKinnon and quickly exhausts its post-subtlety messaging. Farrell and McKinnon are supposed to be two anarchical characters. Both fall flat. We've seen it all before, and here they lack any acidity whatsoever. Their roles feel tired after countless Toy Storys and Lego Movies treading on the politics of child/adult expectations of reality. They almost seem like add-ons from the corporate execs they lampoon - especially troubling in that McKinnon is supposed to represent anarchy. But Robbie and America Ferrera eat up the screen, both inhabiting a particular idea that seems to have genuinely spring from Gerwig's best instincts. There are scenes that - in an overwrought and exaggerated cinematic world - seem to actually exist in real life. To get caught by surprise seemed impossible as the first act ground to a halt.

Barbie is a little too blunt for its own good, which strangely ends up being a good thing. At just under two hours, the bludgeoning messaging stops being funny and you feel the fatigue that we're supposed to understand is the source of Barbie's angst. In that, the ending isn't a reach so much as a confident nod to where Gerwig has taken the audience. If it's rare to see a actresses having fun in a Hollywood film, it's especially rare to see a female director genuinely flourishing by being just exactly who she is.

Interstellar (2014)

Silly, pretentious, and just plain insulting

[3/10 · 19 May 2023]

As Nolan's movies grow increasingly cold and limp, it's nice to return to the 45 minutes or so of Interstellar that actually work, though the moments of real emotional and intellectual substance here are so randomly scattered throughout the film, it's hard to really say that any of it works at all. It's pretension sold as insight and nowhere is that more obvious than in Nolan's core belief that every bit of gadgetry and scientific marvel he's decorated his surfaces with is, in fact, insignificant in the face of love. If you buy it, chances are the movie had nothing to do with your conclusions. It's an often laughable mess, so self-serious and calculated that the runtime becomes a sort of joke. It's bad science-fiction based in cheap melodrama, and bad melodrama wasted on good science fiction. It's a Beckett play - much ado about, what in the end, is nothing.