[10 for 10... that's 10 movies which we give ourselves 10 minutes apiece to write about. Part of our problem is we don't often have the spare hour or two to give to writing a big long review for every movie or TV show we watch. How about a 10-minute non-review full of half-remembered scattershot thoughts? Surely that's doable? ]
In this edition:
Bloodshot - 2020, d. (Prime)
The Wrong Missy - 2020, d. (Netflix)
and start:
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It's been many months since I watched BrAd Astra, and I don't quite remember the specifics of its plot, but the impression lingers. BrAd Pitt is a decorated astronaut following in his legendary father's footsteps... the father who abandoned his family to take a long-range mission deep into space from which he wasn't really expecting to return. But the space agency has received a transmission from BrAd's dAd and now BrAd wants to be on the mission that is set to rendez-vous with him. But he's not allowed to go so he has to sneak his way through many different pit stop in order to get there.
James Gray doesn't know what he wants out of this film. He has epic sci-fi budget and production values, and a script that's paced like a pulpy James Bond-style action-thriller, and yet the tenor of the film is sad, sombre, introspective. They don't match, these tones. When lunar buggies are having projectile fights across the surface of the moon, this doesn't feel like the lost little boy going to find his daddy movie that it is.
Gray wants that emotion of being a child grown into a very successful man still feeling the effects of being abandoned by his father to be the centerpiece of the film. But the script wants its action and adventure and a hero to lead it. BrAd Pitt should be a leading action hero. It's rather astonishing how infrequently he is. He is good looking, very much so, in his mid-50's and in impeccable shape with an action hero's physique. But Pitt really likes acting, and in this role he has his actor's hat on, not his action hero hat. You never forget on Pitt's face that his drive is to go confront his dad, which I guess is good acting, but it doesn't make for the most enjoyable romp.
I like this film, a little bit. But I should like it more. If it were more... spirited, more interested in the excitement and adventure, it would be tremendous. As is, it's a confusing spectacle.
[10:21]
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I remember as a 9-10 year old watching The Man With One Red Shoe with my friend on VHS and wondering "where's the comedy?". At that time a film with Tom Hanks meant it was something funny, and while, maybe not fully for kids, but at least somewhat family friendly. We didn't know what this was...I don't think we understood the story and certainly if there was comedy we weren't getting it either.
Rewatching it now 25+ years later, well, I understand the story but I'm still wondering where the comedy went. It seems like it was attempting something towards funny but it never really gets there. The soundtrack clearly doesn't understand the film it's supposed to be accompanying. The story itself is dreadful, the stakes feeling really low and uninterested in developing the characters. There's also a certain type of 80's cinematic comedy that tried to be realistic but have the most preposterous of gags (like this film has zero concept of how plumbing works) and even then there are too few gags as to ever establish any tone for them. It's just dull.
I was about to rehash the plot, one of government agency in-fighting and mistaken identity, but it's really not worth hashing out. Carrie Fisher's in this, giving a lively performance, but she's better paired with Hanks in the Burbs. It's also got Lori Singer whose role is very poorly written and Singer's confusion about how to play it shows. There's also a Belushi in it, but not the one anyone wants. What a dud.
[14:26]
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The Old Guard is a faithful adaptation of the comic book (its creator, Greg Rucka, also wrote the screenplay) that is a thoughtful, mostly likeable story about a group of immortals who are warriors trying to make a genuine difference in the world by acting as mercenaries. The bad guy of the piece is Big Pharma and capitalism. It doesn't have a lot to say about big Pharma, nor capitalism, except to say they will steamroll over their own grandmother to make a buck, but that's not a very unique spin.
The draw
then is these warriors themselves and their peculiar gift of being
unable to die...almost. the story smartly needs to find other ways of
raising tension and stakes, and does so with some success. Nile (KiKi Layne) is the new blood who is sort of the audience guide into this very intimate world of immortals. She's a soldier who gets her throat slit during a confrontation, but obviously survives much to the befuddlement of the medical staff, and her colleagues and friends look at her warily. Already she's becoming an outsider. Andy (Charlize Theron) is the leader of the band who has lived for thousands of years and has seemingly given up on living, or caring, following the mission because that's all she has left, but no conviction. Her advice to Nile is sober and dark, abandon all attachments and don't form any new ones. But things change when the immortals are exposed, and a big pharma company is going to stop at nothing to figure out how these people are living so long.
The action is good but not screamingly innovative, so this film either needed to tone it down on the violence and gunplay and focus even more on character, or try something really unique to really stand out. Charlize Theron is the obvious lead and, while not delivering her best performance never fails to make her presence known on screen. As is this falls into secondary action vehicle in the Taken/Luc Besson mode, enjoyable enough. A sequel is definitely teased and I wouldn't mind another.
[21:31]
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With both Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead, you know this film is going to be pretty charismatic, and yet Project Power is absolutely stolen by young Dominique Fishback as Robin. She's a runner for a New Orleans gang, specializing in a drug called "Power" that gives the imbiber a superpower for about 5 minutes. It could also be randomly fatal. Levitt is a police officer who is friendly with Robin who uses Power to help stop crime or out of control junkies. Foxx is a very skilled individual who knows a lot about the origins of the drug, the menace it poses if it branches out of its New Orleans trial period and doesn't care. He's trying to find his daughter who is somehow wrapped up in all this.
The story negotiates Foxx, Levitt and Robin's lives very well, as they keep criss-crossing in different ways but they don't all hit the same apex until late in the film. It's a good-looking movie but it has a lot of outdated super-hero/action movie tropes, and even kind of an oversaturated Tony Scott-esque aesthetic that make it feel like it's a production from the early 2000s and less a modern superhero-ish fable. But not a lesser one because of it. It's pretty engaging and entertaining.
Where the film fails, though, is in its internal consistency. It doesn't establish the rules of Power very well, except to say that one gets a power for 5 minutes and then might die afterwards. There's no rhyme or reason for what power someone gets, and its effect doesn't seem consistently 5 minutes long, and the why and how and when someone dies is also unclear. I think the film is trying to say "hey, it's in beta testing, of course these things are all unanswered" but that seems a cop out. Especially since it seems like some people get the same power every time they take it. This inconsistency in the effects of Power drove me nuts throughout the movie and diminished my enjoyment of it. Otherwise, I though that Fishback was incredible and liked that the film really did center around her as its unlikely hero.
[30:18]
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I was around 11 years old when Working Girl came out. I was not its target demographic. I was quite aware of its existence, however, thanks to a Mad Magazine spoof which I'm sure I read a dozen times, but never truly got all the jokes because a) I didn't see the movie, and b) I was 11. Mad Magazine is an illustrated comedy anthology of adult humour for pre-teens. I also was keenly aware of Working Girl because it starred nerd royalty in Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver. But nerds don't want to see these two in a romantic comedy about a breathy, blonde secretary (Melanie Griffith) trying to find a place in the toxic male environment of stock trading on Wall Street. We wanted (still want, actually) to see Ford and Weaver in a big sci-fi action-adventure epic.
Anyway, I don't think I've really thought about Working Girl at all in the past 30 years. I've certainly never had any genuine desire to see it, and yet, it cropped up on cable as I was thumbing through channels one lazy Sunday (I rarely every channel surf anymore) and I happened upon the film while the opening credits were rolling. I'm not sure what I missed but I didn't really care, and, in fact, I didn't really have much intention upon staying on that channel and watching the movie.
But I did. I got sucked in. It's Mike Nichols, he generally knows what he's doing. It's a proto-feminist comedy, but it doesn't go for big or cheap laughs. If anything it's not really going for laughs at all so much as just carrying a light tone for what is ostensibly a drama with romance. I appreciated that it didn't shy away from the flagrant sexism that someone like Griffiths would have faced in the industry she's in, and that it's not embracing said sexism but demonizing it. It's too bad that it has to pit Griffiths and Weaver against each other, however, which is where the feminist angle falls apart, but the best parts of the film are the way it objectifies Ford more than it does Griffiths (the best moment in the film is Ford's shirt-changing scene). Honestly, this was very enjoyable and holds up as a solid artifact of its time. It's not presenting anything about the 80's with rose-coloured glasses, and it doesn't even seem to like the whole industry its highlighting, but it does care about its lead character which is what we're investing in. I'm sure there's a stock broker joke there somewhere but I've got to keep moving.
[45:28]
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Message from the King has been sitting in my Netflix watch list for four years. I have some that have been sitting on there longer, but not many. The reason I put it on there is obvious if you think of 2016 me... it's Chadwick Boseman, Black Panther, king T'Challa... in a movie called Message from the King about an African man taking on whomever he needs to avenge the death of his sister. That man goes by the name "King", but is he actually T'Challa in disguise? No, I know it's not, which is probably the reason why it didn't get watched.
Boseman's death this year, just one of millions of sad passings in a truly godawful year, was heartbreaking. He kept his illness hidden from public, and presented the stoic visage of a king wherever he went and in whatever he did. He seemed more than just a good, if not great, actor, but a genuinely good man. I felt obligated to start into some of his non-Marvel repertoire as a result of his passing, starting with the long-lingering Message from the King.
Boseman employs virtually (but not exactly) the same accent he used for playing T'Challa, but he carried himself much differently. Where T'Challa seems to move fluidly, King here is more a forceful, blunt object. He's smart, and resourceful, and clearly versed in rough-and-tumble fighting and interrogation. He roams the streets on L.A. without any concern that he's a foreigner, or that he doesn't really know them at all. It seems to him all streets, no matter how grimy, are familiar to him. In the same way, the criminal element also seems familiar to him, such that even the most hardened thug senses danger from him.
There's not a lot to this movie in terms of complexity, but it is an involved movie. That we never really get to know King at all (we get just a little glimpse of his true self at the film's conclusion upon his return home) and that impacts our investment in his journey somewhat. There's certainly a justified motivation for what he's doing but at the same time we don't know the tenor of his character until deep in the film...is he a good guy doing bad things for a good reason, or is he a bad guy doing bad things to bad people because that's what he does?
It's not something I'm bound to return to, but it's a satisfying one-time watch with a really good Boseman performance.
[Hey, Toasty just did this too]
[1:00:06]
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I run hot and cold with Spike Lee's movies, often throughout the viewing of the same movie. Da 5 Bloods is a complex and muddled film, absolutely amazing in most regards, but very, very messy at times. The last film of Lee's I watch that seemed to have a singular, solid vision attached to it was Malcolm X. This one is bristling with ideas but doesn't know always where to put its focus.
Four American Vietnam war veterans return to the South Asian country to retrieve a box full of stolen money (intended as a payoff by the CIA to a village for their cooperation in the war) that they had buried. The return to Vietnam drags up a lot of memories, and also forces the men to confront their role in the war.
All four men are Black men who were forced into service for America, against an enemy who hates them less than their own countrymen. Returning to the country they meet descendants of people they may have killed and even soldiers who they may have fought against. It's a sobering experience, one which triggers Paul's PTSD many, many times. Delroy Lindo, playing Paul, is a MAGA-hat wearing blue blooded, capital-A American, full of entitlement and deluded American exceptionalism. Lee, through Paul, tries to find a rationale behind Black support for Trump, and though he finds a reason, he doesn't like it, or seem entirely convinced, and I think someone having PTSD-triggered delusions are they only way he can rationalize it. But Lindo nails the role, and with Jonathan Majors stepping in as Paul's son, there's some amazing work going on between them. Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis round out the quartet, while Chadwick Boseman haunts their memories as their de facto leader back in the day (I love the decision Lee made to continue to use the septuagenarian actors in the flashback sequences as their younger selves. No de-aging or anything of the sort.) That Boseman passed away shortly after the premiere of the film lends an unintented gravitas to his role as this kind of legendary figurehead these men hold onto.
The film is a 155-minute journey which works most of the time, but the violence it descends into in the third act is cartoony and betrays the honesty of the film. It turns these veterans back into soldiers in kind of a dumb way, and makes some of the character arcs seem forced or melodramatic.
There's no shortage of Vietnam War film, and most of them try to convey the horrors of that war succinctly. What they often fail to do is reflect upon it, and its impact both at home and abroad. What happened to America and Americans afterward, and this film does that. As well, it tells some of the Black experience of being part of that war, and of being a veteran. There aren't enough stories examining the Black experience in America's military and their many, many wars.
[1:20:00]
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There's one good, solid laugh in this otherwise slimy, bludgeoning comedy. It's a physical bit that involves kids falling out the back of a station wagon. So much else meant to be funny seems to be a product of its time, as if it's railing against prudishness and decency (oh they're hacking into tv broadcasts to air lewd, vulgar, violent ads for a used car lot that a] we're supposed to suspend our disbelief that they're actually effective at driving customers in and b] that there would be no repercussions to doing so...mmmkay, what reality is this supposed to be?) There's an undercurrent about how all political and government structures are inherently corrupt, but there's no actual joke that results, and certainly doesn't have much of a point to make about it.
The performances in Used Cars carry the film where the comedy does not. Kurt Russell specifically has perfect slimy charm...he should be repulsive but we like him anyway. This film would be unwatchable without him.
The story has potential, but the execution keeps
letting it down. It should be either a much darker comedy or a much
sillier one and it never picks a path. I guess as the 70's closed out there wasn't perhaps a place yet for really dark comedy, and Airplane had hit big so going silly was kind of a rage. The silly just doesn't work here.
There's is surprisingly one really neat action sequence in which a caravan of hundreds of old, beat-up 70's cars races through the Nevada desert , and at one point Kurt (yeah, it was really Kurt) is walking over the moving vehicles and jumping between them. It's actually pretty impressive. I don't think there's another scene at all like it until you get to maybe Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015 (35 years later). Even then, it's a much different look and feel and context.
I'm not a big Roger Zmeckis fan, but this film also doesn't feel much like the polished, broad-strokes production he would become known for. It doesn't make it any better, it's just to say it doesn't really fit well with what's to come from the director.
[1:25:26]
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I started rewatching The Chronicles of Riddick last weekend, a film I had convinced myself I loved, but haven't watched in over a decade. Turns out I still love it. Vin Diesel is so comfortable in Riddick's skin, and gives a virtually effortless performance. The character is kind of charming, but not intending to be. He's believably gruff, even more believably tough, and the fact is Diesels ego hadn't kicked into overdrive so everyone in the film isn't intimidated by him, and that creates scenario after scenario where they regret not using more caution around him. It's not that Diesel is a good actor in it, so much as it's so specifically made to his own limitations that it leans into his strengths and away from his weaknesses. Nearly every other Diesel performance is just the same thing (even Riddick, the third film in that series, just feels like Dom Teretto in space.) Which is all to say, his performance in Bloodshot is sadly just more of the same. It's not a new, different character. It's just Vin Diesel in a different situation doing his same schtick, and the film caters to Diesel's limitations.
Now you know the answer to the question, "what if Lifetime wanted to make a superhero movie?"
It's very obvious this was shot as a hard R and neutered to a PG-13.
There's a clever
story buried in this but it's executed like it's a low-budget
direct-to-video knock-off production rather than the start of a tentpole
action franchise or superhero universe starter. It's a story that
could have been full of surprises, but it telegraphs everything. It's a
movie so intent on delivering it's tale on the most basic of terms that
it never seems to even try for innovation. Even the things I haven't
seen before feel like derivatives of things I've seen before. And there's absolutely no sense of comedic timing. Anything indeed to be funny falls deathly flat.
If you want to get a sense of the promise of this film, watch the trailer. It's rather good and implies a farm more creative film than it actually is.
[1:34:03]
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The Wrong Missy is a stripped-down, far more superficial, very, very basic rip on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, lacking any nuance and semblance of what real relationships or emotions are like.
I don't remember the last time I watched a Happy Madison film, but it's been well over a decade perhaps even two. I outgrew the type of loudmouth fratboy dick and poop and barf humour that Sandler and his stable trade in (which is to say that there IS actually non-fratboy dick, poop and barf humour that I do actually find funny from time to time), so why on earth turn back on that wondrous track record now?
I like comedy podcasts and Lauren Lapkus has been in my ears for a long time with a wild array of wonderful, weird and, yes, sometimes unlikeable characters on many improv shows over the years. Do I think she's above a Happy Madison joint? Not at all, but I still thought that I should at least give her first major starring role a chance, despite what production house it came from.
Honestly she's fine, but her "Missy" character isn't really anything but an aggressive annoyance until 70 minutes in the film when she drops the act and starts sharing something real with David Spade's sad sack businessman who likewise isn't much of anything other than a put-upon cipher.
Out of all of this are some occasionally funny moments, which I was surprised by. But at the same time, like most Hapy Madison comedies it reaches so far into an unbelievable reality, where nobody acts like people really act, and things physically happen that would kill people or derail the entire timeline of the story such that it's never something I could truly invest in. I didn't care about Spade's predicament because he was too spineless and weak to do anything to get out of it. I didn't care about Missy because the film doesn't want us to see her as a person until Spade's character can validate her. And the turn when suddenly Spade does star to fall for her (given everything we were presented with) is beyond unlikely.
Lapkus is good, not great, but she does bring an aggressive, abrasive trainwreck energy that isbcaptivating yet also off-putting. The script and the role are pretty weak.
