Reel Views, Review

The Weight

Set in the Depression-era Pacific Northwest, the new quasi-Western The Weight stacks the cards against its protagonist quite heavily in its opening moments. We’re introduced to God-fearing mechanic Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), joyriding his Ford Model 18 through the Eugene countryside with his daughter Penny (Avy Berry) in the backseat, but the good times don’t last. The two return to their apartment, where they’ve just been evicted and while going into town trying to sort things out with the bank, Samuel gets into an altercation with undercover cops and is sent to prison as a result. Months later, he’s transferred to a labor camp in Deschutes, where Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) breaks inmates in while they’re forced to break rocks on the rough landscape. When Samuel is dubbed “Hercules” after leading an effort to dislodge a particularly difficult boulder, Clancy has another job in mind for him.

Along with Samuel’s fellow prisoners Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen), Clancy tasks Samuel with a dangerous mission to recover government gold and sneak it through the treacherous wilderness. Under the intense supervision of Clancy’s lackeys Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), the crew is flown up to the Black Hawk Gold Mines and charts out on a five-day trek back to Clancy’s outpost. With bag straps dug deep into their shoulders from the heavy cargo, the quartet of convicts with their two babysitters maneuver around the tricky terrain and accrue Indigenous runaway Anna (Julia Jones) along the way. Samuel has a guarantee from Clancy that once the job is done, he’ll sign his release papers and Samuel will be reunited with his Penny but the gold in tow is bound to generate the wrong kind of attention.

Working from a sturdy script by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, seasoned editor and first-time director Padraic McKinley is a bit like Samuel, metaphorically making his way through a forest of storytelling rife with obstacles. During the journey, he indeed gets tripped up by artistic choices that are over-calculated for the kind of movie this is. Given McKinley’s long career in editing, it’s disappointing that The Weight feels fussed-over when it comes to how certain sequences are cut. It’s a sword that cuts both ways, as certain takes feel like they go on too long and others are rushed, to the extent that the action in some of the latter can be difficult to track. There’s a storm-set scene at night, lit by lightning flashes several seconds apart, where it’s difficult to discern exactly what’s happening until the sun comes up the next day. Some of the intentional long takes, particularly one where Rankin and Singh discuss socialism, don’t benefit from a conversational pace or the accompanying wide shot.

The cinematography from Matteo Cocco often favors a depth of focus so shallow that it obscures most of the lush nature surrounding our beleaguered smugglers. It plays great for close-ups, especially on Ethan Hawke as our harrowed hero, but the intensely fuzzy edges don’t work as well in medium shots and certainly not in wider shots. Some of the handheld sequences, like a grueling riverside skirmish late in the film, are thrilling in the way we’re thrust into the action, but another such scene shortly afterwards falls victim to a camera so shaky that it misses a crucial gunshot. Cocco’s reliance on natural lighting certainly tracks, given how much of The Weight takes place in the woods, although it means that the nighttime shots have to rely too much on campfires and lamplight with limited visibility.

Despite these technical aspects, the movie works overall due to the elemental endurance of what a parent will overcome to be reunited with their child. Ethan Hawke wears the conflict of the scenario beautifully, conveying Samuel’s knowledge that once this task is complete, Clancy could go back on his word and keep him imprisoned. Russell Crowe makes a meal of his brow-beating overseer and Julia Jones brings a grace to her Anna that contrasts well with the rough-and-tumble cons and cronies in her midst. Like the rickety rope bridge at the center of The Weight‘s most tense setpiece, Padraic McKinley’s latest effort is not the most structurally sound piece of cinema but it gets its point across nonetheless.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Resident Evil, starring Austin Abrams and Zach Cherry, reboots the horror video game franchise wherein a hapless courier is tasked with delivering a package to a remote hospital and soon finds himself caught in the middle of an mutated creature outbreak.
Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom, starring Justin Fletcher and John Sparkes, is a stop motion animated comedy following the titular sheep as he attempts to save Halloween when the flock’s farmer suddenly goes missing while a beast wanders the woods.
Opening at Cinema Center is The Samurai And The Prisoner, starring Masahiro Motoki and Masaki Suda, which tells the true story of a warlord who rebels against a ruthless unifier by barricading himself and his clan inside Arioka Castle in 16th century Japan.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

It Ends

Between the surprise blockbuster Backrooms and the video game adaptation Exit 8, liminal horror has been all the rage this season and at summer’s end, we get one more entry with It Ends. Though the source of the specific scares from these three films varies, each is set in its own unnerving purgatorial in-between place where the laws of nature and physics don’t apply. From an allegorical sense, these movies all use seemingly endless corridors of repetition to represent anxieties about crushing monotony and being unable to change one’s current state. It’s also a subgenre that conveniently dovetails with independent cinema, as minimal spaces typically translate to a sparse number of shooting locations that can work nicely with smaller production budgets. In his feature debut, director-writer Alexander Ullom has the subtext down but doesn’t have quite enough in the narrative gas in the tank to fill up 90 minutes.

It Ends centers around three recent college graduates Day (Akira Jackson), James (Phinehas Yoon), and Fisher (Noah Toth) as they’re picked up by for a fast food run their friend Tyler (Mitchell Cole) in his Jeep. While the passengers bat around an animal-based thought experiment about which options would be best for attack or defense, Tyler misses a turn on his GPS. When he circles back, it’s clear he didn’t overlook anything, as the road remains sandwiched between tree lines and goes straight as far as they can see. Confusion soon turns into paranoia when it becomes clear to all four that no matter how they got on this road, it appears they’re stuck on it with no end in sight. Days turn into weeks as the group attempts to navigate off the impossibly unending highway without feeling hungry or tired in the process. Naturally, they ponder over the philosophical possibilities that led them to this terrifying predicament and try to keep their psyches intact as they search for their way home.

Structurally, It Ends settles into the rhythm of a time loop movie à la Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, where characters are trapped within a temporal snow globe and must find a way to escape. Where those films become typified by the variations in their Möbius strip-like plotlines, Ullom’s existential thriller becomes stubbornly defined by its repetition. Aside from the dazzling action scenes, what makes a movie like Edge Of Tomorrow work is that Tom Cruise’s soldier tries a smorgasbord of tactics on the battlefield that would get him killed, if he weren’t stuck in a “live, die, repeat” cycle. Exit 8, which hinges on the unnamed protagonist’s ability to spot “anomalies” within levels of a looping subway corridor, similarly realizes that the audience craves these breaks in the pattern to break up the malaise. While I can appreciate the likelihood that Ullom is intentionally omitting these footholds from his screenplay, there’s not enough on the page to keep the film engaging on its own terms.

Out here in the real world, time marches on and as I age, so becomes clearer the disturbing reality that I’m no longer in my twenties and there’s now a whole generation of adults who were born after 9/11. Whatever Millennial-Zoomer gap that exists in my brain doesn’t typically preclude me from enjoying the output of young filmmakers but it’s fair to say the characters in It Ends weren’t exactly folks I’d want to be stuck with on a road trip. Given the scenario, perhaps no group of people wouldn’t wear on me psychologically across thousands of “motionless” miles but the manicured sociolect between these four grated on me. Making memes so you don’t lose your marbles is as fair a coping strategy as any but the precious dialogue, particular a scene where three characters volley around “fair, but” statements, made me want to reach for a sick bag.

The quartet of twentysomething actors certainly do their best with the sparse storyline and carve out archetypes that allow us to note the personality differences as they pile up. While Tyler and James air on the side of practicality and outthinking the problem, Day and Fisher become more resigned to their fate and seek a moral repentance for absolution. Akira Jackson is the standout in terms of performance, as she’s given the most fleshed-out character of the four and also has the funniest line reads of the film. If Jean-Paul Sartre had been born 100 years later, perhaps No Exit would’ve included the line, “You have negative drip, and you get no [ladies], and you [freaking] stink.”

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Practical Magic 2, starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, reunites a multi generational family of witches, cursed to be loveless for centuries, as they attempt to break the spell by confronting dark secrets and sacrificing for each other.
Runner, starring Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson, finds a former soldier and his unlikely partner becoming the targets of a ruthless cartel while racing to complete a critical medical delivery and save the life of a little girl.
The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield and Jamie Bell, tells the true story of the Peasants’ Revolt that inspired the legend of Robin Hood, as a rebellion leader forms an army of the people to face against the tyranny of King Richard II of England.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Woo!: Broken Arrow

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

For many years, the only thing I knew about Broken Arrow, John Woo’s second Hollywood swing after 1993’s Hard Target, is that it was the only movie about which Roger Ebert convinced Gene Siskel to change his mind. The “thumb twist” occurs on a glorious February 1996 episode of Siskel & Ebert & The Movies, in which Siskel also admits to an envious Ebert that he walked out early on the Chris Farley comedy Black Sheep. Siskel opines first on Broken Arrow, citing high-energy action scenes for his admitted half-hearted endorsement, but Ebert’s rebuttal, outlining his disappointment around story and characters he found to be boring, led Siskel to confess, “it doesn’t work.” While I appreciate that Ebert put together a convincing enough argument to get Siskel to go from “thumbs up” to “thumbs down”, I wish one had convinced the other to join their “thumbs up”. Broken Arrow isn’t Woo’s strongest work but it remains, as Siskel originally observes, “simply a lot of fun.”

The movie stars John Travolta and Christian Slater as rival Air Force pilots Major Vic “Deak” Deakins and Captain Riley Hale, respectively. The pair spar in a boxing ring over intense opening credits, with Deak schooling Hale on all things “rope-a-dope”, before receiving their next top-secret mission. They’re tasked with flying a pair of nuclear weapons through the Utah desert on a stealth bomber to determine if the radiation on-board can be detected by external instruments. As Deak and Hale fly under cover of darkness, we cross-cut to scenes introducing park ranger Terry Carmichael (Samantha Mathis) as she heads home from her shift, and henchmen completing on-ground misdeeds at the command of Members Only jacket-wearing Mr. Pritchett (Bob Gunton). It turns out Deak is working with Pritchett to steal the nukes and threaten the US government with them to secure a huge payday and, naturally, it’s up to Hale and Carmichael to foil the blackmail plot.

The title of Broken Arrow is derived from the flagword for when a nuke goes missing; as a DoD agent, played by Frank Whaley, points out, “I don’t know what’s scarier: losing nuclear weapons or that it happens so often, there’s actually a term for it!” Whaley and Travolta had briefly squared off two years prior in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the iconic indie that served as an adrenaline needle to the heart of Travolta’s stalled career. Tarantino helped Travolta get on John Woo’s radar in more ways than one, as the Hong Kong action aficionado screened a copy of Woo’s The Killer for the Vincent Vega actor. As great as that film is, watching a subtitle-free version while Quentin Tarantino translates the lines from Cantonese to English in real time sounds like a nightmare to me. Nevertheless, Travolta was gung ho for the gun fu gem, declaring “I want to be Chow Yun-Fat!” upon the movie’s conclusion. Get in line, Johnny.

I can’t say I detect much Yun-Fat in what Travolta is serving up as Deak — Hale not referring to him as “Deak The Freak” at any point feels like an oversight — but he’s certainly channeling something. Clearly relishing his first time playing an outright villain, Travolta gets to flick cigarettes and bark through clenched teeth at Bob Gunton, whose Warden in The Shawshank Redemption was an even bigger SOB than Deak. It’s also fitting that he spends a fair amount of screen time rubbing his face and chin, as if to contemplate contingencies in his high-stakes plan. Unarmed nukes travel by air, land and water in Broken Arrow, with the payload traveling via helicopter, Humvee and hydroplane at various points in the story. Deak’s evil scheme accounts for a hilarious amount of wrinkles and obstacles but fortunately, Woo settles on a train as the setting for the majority of the movie’s climax. Even more fortuitously, a character falling far out of the locomotive triggers use of a stock sound nicknamed the “Howie Yell”, a legendary guttural scream superior to the done-to-death Wilhelm Scream.

Sonically, Broken Arrow offers its own legacy, with excerpts of the chest-puffing music score by Hans Zimmer that went on to pop up later in sequels to Scream and Speed. “Deakin’s Theme”, which Zimmer describes as “big man” music, is spearheaded by a vibrato-heavy guitar lead set to the sinister strut of its titular character as he enters a locker room. The Morricone moment brings home the Western influence on Woo’s Utah-set actioner, although the film undoubtedly feels of a piece with the action auteur’s oeuvre. No scene is packed tighter with a panoply of Wooisms than the cockpit duel where Hale and Deak wrestle for control of the B-3 bomber. Between gun tussling, intense eye close-ups and an operatic choral score, the only thing that’s missing is a flock of doves to strike the plane’s windshield and engines.

Fairly or unfairly, Broken Arrow has gotten left in the dust compared to 90s action contemporaries like The Rock, which came out a few months later in the summer of ’96, and Face/Off, Woo’s follow-up that arrived just a year later. It shares a similar plot with the former, involving a decorated military man ransoming the United States with their own covert weaponry, and a star with the latter, as Travolta returns to the baddie territory he established with Deak. Both of those movies also feature Nicolas Cage, who, it needn’t be said, is a much more manically magnetic screen presence than Christian Slater. Then again, neither of those movies feature Slater attempting to whitesplain the Ali-Foreman Rumble In The Jungle match to Delroy Lindo.

Reel Views, Review

The Rivals Of Amziah King

It’s difficult to imagine the first two feature films in a director’s filmography being as diverse as the initial pair from Oklahoma-based writer-director Andrew Patterson. His debut, The Vast Of Night, is a small-town sci-fi mystery that plays like a 90-minute Twilight Zone episode, marked by audacious oners, a minimalist story and its cast of lesser-known actors. His follow-up, the crackling country-fried caper The Rivals Of Amziah King, blows out the story of a beekeeper and his stolen hives into a 2+ hour crime saga, buzzing with crisply-cut storytelling and the ineffable star power of Matthew McConaughey. Why his first live-action leading role for a theatrical release in six and a half years hasn’t elicited more fanfare (and more robust distribution) is both puzzling and disappointing. This is some of the finest work of his career, on par with his stellar “McConaissance” run in the 2010s.

McConaughey plays the titular rascally business mind behind King Honey, which gets its product from hives and equipment that Amziah owns and operates in rural Oklahoma. King also moonlights as a mandolin player, recruiting bluegrass musicians to fill venues from drive-up food joints to potluck-hosting ballrooms with their dulcet tones. Grabbing coffee at a diner one morning, King’s served by his former foster daughter Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass), whose mother recently passed away. A born-again Christian, Amziah sees their meeting as a chance to right the wrongs of his past and takes Kateri under his wing as he teaches her the ways of beekeeping and farming. When King’s hives are stolen out from under him, shady magnate Dob McCoy (Kurt Russell) is pinpointed as the primary suspect and a plan for retribution is hatched.

Metaphors about colony order for a tight-knit Southern community may seem obvious for a movie ostensibly about bees but The Rivals Of Amziah King gets it honest. Explaining the roles of the three primary players of a beehive — the drones, the worker bees, the queen — apiarist Amziah aptly sums up their way of life: “Everybody lookin’ out for each other. That’s a healthy hive.” It’s a core value to the storytelling here, which makes excellent use of an ensemble cast, including Tony Revolori and Rob Morgan, who step up when the “honey” hits the fan. Whether it’s pushing a barrel off an overpass at just the right time or lending a pickup truck hearty enough to power through a stream, the characters all do their part to retrieve the pilfered hives. Even in a far-fetched fable like this one, it’s heartening to watch folks coming together for the greater good and if it’s also to share the occasional music performance, all the better.

Befitting its wily protagonist, The Rivals Of Amziah King gets charmingly sidetracked from its primary plotline but even the tangents add their own sweetness and flavor to the cinematic meal. As an example, there’s a detour at a bee-infested elementary school that doesn’t advance the story but shows us a different side of Amziah outside of his apiary. He and Kateri are called on during an emergency when a swarm of bees in a classroom has made its way through the ventilation system, leading to panic and an evacuation by students and teachers. Arriving in his beekeeping veil and smock, Amziah assures the petrified principal, “this whole scenario is way more melodramatic than it needs to be,” and gets right to work. McConaughey, if no one else, has been the on-screen embodiment of “cool, calm, and collected” for decades now but his specific brand of confidence makes that setpiece sing.

I’m not sure how much mandolin McConaughey learned for The Rivals Of Amziah King — I’ve only heard tell of his eccentric bongo playing — but he certainly pulls off the band scenes (like the one over the opening credits) convincingly. King’s apprenticeship of Kateri doesn’t stop at beekeeping, as he prods her to join in with group harmonies during impromptu music performances with company over in his living room. I’m not sure exactly which parts are technically music score and original songs written for the film but in any event, the music throughout Patterson’s rollicking sophomore effort is infectious as all get out. If you consider yourself a fan of the Soggy Bottom Boys from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, you need to make a beeline for the soundtrack on your music streaming platform of choice. As for the film, if you can’t catch it in theater, it’ll be available to rent starting September 15th.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Onslaught, starring Adria Arjona and Dan Stevens, follows an army sniper as she struggles to protect her young daughter from an army of genetically engineered super soldiers who escaped from a secret military facility.
By Any Means, starring Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, sees a notorious mafia hitman and a young Black FBI agent teaming up to investigate the murders of civil rights leaders in 1966 Mississippi.
Fall 2: Deadpoint, starring Harriet Slater and Arsema Thomas, centers around a pair of rock climbers who plan to conquer a treacherous plank walk in Thailand but a sudden rockslide leaves them trapped at a terrifying height of 3,000 feet.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma

On the surface, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s first three features circulate around the era-specific screens in which characters lose themselves and find their way back out, transformed. We’re All Going To The World’s Fair‘s centerpoint is a computer monitor anchored in the nascent 2000s Internet days of fanfiction and forums, where I Saw The TV Glow involves its protagonist’s connection with a half-remembered 1990s television show. Schoenbrun’s latest effort, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, reckons with the sempiternal effect the slasher genre — specifically entries from the 1980s — had on the silver screen and the future storytellers sitting in front of it. Upon the success of their Sundance smash in 2021, Schoenbrun was offered to reboot the Leprechaun horror franchise and, like Charlie Kaufman with Adaptation., writing about the experience yielded a richer result than just sticking to the script.

Set to a cloudy cover of “Nightswimming”, the sublimely ornate opening credits of Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma depict the rise and fall of the titular, Friday The 13th-mirroring slasher series. Looking for fresh blood, the studio behind the Camp Miasma property hires queer filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) to paper over the problematic past attached to the franchise. To clarify her complicated feelings about the project, she journeys far up the west coast to meet with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who portrayed the final girl in the inaugural Camp Miasma movie. It turns out Presley actually lives in isolation on the snowbound campgrounds where the films were shot and carries psychic wounds from her time embodying the character. As the two spend more time on the premises of the haunted Camp Trivoli, the worlds of the real and the cinematic intermingle.

As much as Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is playing in the sandbox of the slasher milieu, the fundamentals of its story call back to darkly funny and mysterious film noir tales going back decades before the horror subgenre was birthed. Specifically, the film points to Sunset Boulevard as an inextricable influence, even being overtly referenced in dialogue a few times before Kris meets Billy at the otherworldly camp. Sure enough, Billy’s entrance near a flickering projector is worthy of a classic femme fatale, with her hat brim pulled down low and her breathy Southern drawl trickling out slow. As the two watch the Camp Miasma movie in which Billy starred, she even sports Norma Desmond’s signature jeweled headwrap and seems to stop just short of saying, “I am big; it’s the sequels that got small.” Gillian Anderson does a outstanding job of giving her former screen star an outsized off-kilter presence while also grounding her in warmth and woundedness.

Schoenbrun’s first two movies were emotionally heavy affairs and while there’s, of course, nothing wrong with that, I appreciated the sense of play they brought to this new project. Scream has long been thought of as the standard-bearer when it comes to satire in horror but now on its seventh entry, it’s satisfying seeing Schoenbrun take swipes at the machine tasked with scaring up dollars at the box office. When Kris chats with her agent, played by Sarah Sherman, she’s literally displayed in her phone as “Your Agent”, just as Kris is labeled “Your Client” in hers, a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the industry’s transience. While Kris is thrilled calling to say she wants Billy to be the lead in her project, the agent is careful to manage expectations, walking through a racquetball area with the phrase “THIS IS YOUR PLACE” plastered on the wall.

But Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is mostly a love letter to, more than a deconstruction of, the slasher classics that clearly had a strong impression on Jane Schoenbrun in their youth. Kris and Billy represent two camps when it comes to approaching these films, with Kris intellectualizing the images to death and Billy absorbing them on an ephemeral level. For every Kris in the audience, pointing out split-diopter shots and poorly-aged cultural depictions, there’s a Billy whose jaw is on the floor at the sensuous power movies can have. As someone who routinely analyzes film — I’m doing it right now as I’m typing this — I found freedom in embracing the complicated and messy feelings Schoenbrun has about this corner of cinema.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Coyote Vs. Acme, starring Will Forte and Lana Condor, is a live-action/animation hybrid following the efforts of Wile E. Coyote as he enlists a billboard attorney to sue the Acme Corporation for repeatedly selling him alleged faulty products.
The Dog Stars, starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film set after a virus wipes out humanity where a former civilian pilot and a hardened Marine team up against roaming scavengers and hold onto the possibility of a better future.
Idiots, starring Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr., is a crime comedy following two down-and-out drivers as they transport a wealthy teen to rehab, but their simple job spirals into a chaotic journey of drugs, danger, and crime as their passenger derails their plans.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Tony

Adapted from the first couple chapters of Anthony Bourdain’s incendiary memoir Kitchen Confidential, the new biopic Tony, about the culinary iconoclast’s early years, could’ve been titled A Portrait Of The Chef As A Young Man. Instead of covering Bourdain’s entire life and career, most notably his rise to fame through foodie docuseries like No Reservations and Parts Unknown, director and co-writer Matt Johnson focuses specifically on a formative summer in his subject’s youth. Despite the limited scope, Johnson nonetheless captures Bourdain’s thorny essence better than the well-intentioned but messy documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, made three years after his tragic death in 2018. It’s not a film that re-writes the book on biopics but as is, it’s a strong coming-of-age tale about a bold and brash brat who, to paraphrase the movie’s epigraph, “was badly in need of a good butt-kicking.”

On campus at Vassar College in 1975, 19-year-old Tony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) pitches a prospective Kerouac and Orwell-inspired novel to a fellowship board that he’s confident will help fund his writing project. Even though he overestimates their enthusiasm, Tony’s still buzzy enough after the meeting to brag to his high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones) that he’s on his way to become the next great American novelist. Even after he gets the call that he’s been passed over for the grant, he lies to his difficult-to-impress mom Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk) about the opportunity and heads up to Cape Cod, where Nancy is working for the summer. When Tony makes it to Provincetown, the insouciant hooligan has next to no money and doesn’t even show his face to Nancy when it appears she has a boyfriend already.

Dejected, Tony wanders into seafood spot The Flagship and gulps down enough oysters and beers to make a pitiful pass at the waitress serving him. The restaurant owner (played by Antonio Banderas) throws him out when he can’t pay but after Tony follows him home like a lost puppy to crash on his hammock, the head chef takes him on as a dishwasher at the restaurant. Woken up by a bucket of cold water every morning, Tony earns his keep in the kitchen alongside similarly sophomoric staff Sal (Leo Woodall) and Stavros (Stavros Halkias) all summer long. He washed ashore as a writer but as weeks of observing cooks prepare dishes go by, Bourdain begrudgingly becomes more interested in making his way in the world as a chef.

Still best known for his breakout role in 2023’s The Holdovers, Dominic Sessa channels a similarly petulant energy here as he did in that new holiday classic about a boarding school student forgotten over winter break. Given that both take place in 1970s New England, Tony could be considered a summer-swept companion piece to Alexander Payne’s caustic but cozy film, with Antonio Banderas taking over the reluctant mentor role from Paul Giamatti. The biggest difference between the two comes down to Matt Johnson’s narrative proclivities, which aren’t as focused on a student-teacher dynamic and mirror the wing-it ethos of his flighty protagonist. Tony spends a fair portion of the story chasing after Nancy and going barhopping with Sal before settling on the worldly wisdom of the unnamed chef who took a chance on him. Sessa is a perfect fit for this role but Banderas is particularly exquisite as the film’s gentle center.

Following up on his Oscar-worthy work in One Battle After Another last year, cinematographer Michael Bauman gives Tony a distinct visual flavor both in and out of the busy kitchen where Bourdain cut his teeth all those years ago. There are beach-set sunset shots of a soul-searching Tony looking out at the waves that are simply the most gorgeous images I’ve seen on screen all year. But along with editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, Bauman crafts compelling montages that give us atypical glimpses into what makes Tony tick. Compared to the visual style, I wish Johnson and his three credited co-writers had applied a similar level of narrative invention to Tony, which still falls prey to several biopic tropes. It’s not the most unique dish out there but it’s well-plated and will fill you up just the same.

Score – 3.5/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Insidious: Out Of The Further, starring Amelia Eve and Brandon Perea, is a supernatural horror sequel following a young mother raising her daughter in her childhood home who discovers she can travel into the Further, a purgatorial realm of lost souls.
Mutiny, starring Jason Statham and Annabelle Wallis, is an action thriller which finds a former special forces operative on the run as he works to uncover an international conspiracy after his billionaire industrialist boss is murdered in front of him.
Spa Weekend, starring Isla Fisher and Leslie Mann, involves three stressed-out friends who plan a quiet, luxury getaway in Palm Springs for pampering and relaxation but their peaceful trip is upended when their chaotic friend crashes the vacation.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

One Night Only

If one watches the opening minute of One Night Only without audio, it would be easy to wildly misconstrue its tone and intentions. Atop an aerial shot of the New York City skyline comes an overlay of exposition text: “Three years ago, premarital sex was outlawed in the United States, except for one night a year.” It’s only after the follow-up (“It’s been a lot.”) that one could surmise this sets up something other than a bleakly dystopian thriller, and unmuting to hear a bubbly music score transition to a “Love Is In The Air” cover clarifies things further. Somehow, this is a romantic comedy, the latest from Friends With Benefits and Anyone But You director Will Gluck. Every romcom needs a hook, whether it’s no-strings-attached partners falling in love or a modern Much Ado About Nothing riff, as with Gluck’s previous features in the genre. But his latest effort simply can’t outrun the dire ripple effect behind its disturbing setup.

A couple hours before the annual 12-hour “chastity mandate” is lifted, we meet pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner) and jingle singer Allie (Monica Barbaro) as they finish up their days’ work before the big night begins. They each have their own plans in place: Owen to spend the evening with his girlfriend Malika (Maya Hawke) and Allie to try her luck at the bars with bestie Jacinta (King Princess). Their best laid schemes go awry and the pair of strangers bump into each other on the street, their meet-cute foiled by tempestuous sushi recently eaten by Owen that finds its way onto the sidewalk. Spontaneous vomiting certainly isn’t a great first impression but, wouldn’t you know it, these two keep running into one another as they scurry around New York all night trying to find flings before the morning sun rises.

Gluck knows he’s got some ‘splainin’ to do in regards to how the unsettling world of One Night Only came to be and the way he effectively “tee-hee”s totalitarianism teeters on psychopathic. News broadcasts inform us (and remind the characters) that the authoritarian resolution was passed as an effort to “reserve sex for the sanctity of marriage”. If this alternate universe wasn’t off-putting enough, it’s also outlandish enough to envision a Congress that actually passes laws. The mandate is enforced by biosensors that measure neurochemicals triggered during intercourse; somehow, every American was okay being outfitted with them on their wrists. If you’re single, your insignia stays red all year and the cops are called if you try to do the deed any time except for the big night, during which the embedded symbol turns green.

Given the film’s high-concept eeriness, it would be wise of Gluck and his screenwriter Travis Braun to desperately move past the facets of this puritanically petrifying premise and get on with the romance. But One Night Only goes through some effort to steep us further into this setting as Owen and Allie journey on through the night. Consider a setpiece at a bodega, which finds the storekeeper nonchalantly charging $200 in cash for a single condom encased in an anti-theft display container. Even in a fundamentalist fascist nanny state, there’s still room for good old-fashioned toxic capitalism. If surge pricing wasn’t enough, we’re also treated to companies casually kowtowing to the government decree, evidenced by signage like “the night you’ve been training for all year” in the window of an Equinox gym. “It’s a literal nightmare,” Allie laments in a dimly-lit bar, and if you’re self-aware enough to have your character describe the universe of your supposed “comedy” in such terms, why would you trap them in it?

Monica Barbaro, who broke out as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown two years ago, is One Night Only‘s lone bright spot, calling upon her singing chops once again to pitch pharmaceutical copy to the tune of pop hits like “Brave” and “A Thousand Miles”. It’s a hard-fought gag that counts as one of the few that actually lands, although it’s rich of the movie to take swipes at medication ads when it’s lit and shot like one. Callum Turner, who was decent in last year’s in-all-ways superior romcom Eternity, comparatively seems to be putting in much less effort than his co-lead. Barbaro imbues Allie with a level of charm that makes rooting for her on this chaotic night easy, so much so that Owen actually feels like an afterthought as opposed to a crucial part of the narrative. If you’re relegated to one date night this year, please don’t spend it going out to see One Night Only.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The End Of Oak Street, starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, finds a family of four banding together for survival when a mysterious cosmic event uproots their street from suburbia and transports their neighborhood to a location with prehistoric creatures.
Nimrods, starring Mason Thames and Mckenna Grace, is a road movie that finds three teenagers travelling to Los Angeles under the false pretense that their band Analog Dogs is opening for legendary punk group Green Day on New Year’s Eve.
Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie, starring Carter Young and Hayden Chamberlain, finds the titular crew of search and rescue dogs landing on a mysterious dinosaur island after a storm, where the team faces its biggest rescue mission yet to save the island from a volcano.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

In the ten years that Spider-Man has officially been a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney has certainly made the most of its agreement to share the rights for the seminal superhero with Sony. Not only did they create a trio of standalone features between 2017 and 2021 but the webslinger also featured heavily in already teeming Avengers: Infinity War. Picking up directly after the gambit of No Way Home‘s conclusion 5 years ago, Spider-Man: Brand New Day finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) reckoning with the magic spell that wiped his existence from everyone’s minds. Holed up in his apartment, he watches helplessly through social media as his best friends MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) go off to MIT after he’s removed from their lives. Desperate for meaning, he buries himself in work as Spider-Man and works overtime to rid the city of its cyclical villains.

The film’s subtitle connotes a turning of the page for this series, a way to recontextualize Peter Parker’s relationship to Spider-Man after he commits such a staggering sacrifice to protect the ones he loves most. Taking over from Jon Watts, who directed the first three Tom Holland-starring Spider-Man adventures, Destin Daniel Cretton spends the first 15 minutes of Brand New Day setting the table for a very different kind of MCU tale before it’s back to business as usual. A new superpowered threat emerges, wreaking havoc downtown at the superhuman-policing Department Of Damage Control, led by Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman). Unable to handle it alone, Spider-Man calls in favors from vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) and fellow Avenger Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), who’s been teaching quantum mechanics at a local university while keeping “the green guy” within him at bay.

Like the still series-best Spider-Man: Homecoming, Brand New Day shines most when it sets its focus on the entangled relationships in young Peter Parker’s life. In past cinematic chapters with this character and other superheroes, a chief conflict has been concealing one’s alter ego from friends and family. Like the Tillman-starring Apple TV series Severance, it’s an extreme example of maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Since the events of No Way Home (to put it mildly) put Peter’s personal life in shambles, it makes sense that Spider-Man would become a workaholic escape for someone petrified of starting over with best friends. We see how painful that process can be when Peter invites himself to a packed party at Ned’s place. Not only does Peter have to reintroduce himself to his best friend but he’s also unrecognized by the love of his life as she smooches with a new boyfriend.

Being the marketing juggernaut that it is, Disney does a terrific job pitching the “this one will be different” message for every new entry in the MCU. Like Doctor Strange, they cast a well-financed spell on us where we forget how surefire their formula is and how unlikely it is, no matter what figurehead creative forces are brought in, that they’ll stray from it. The context varies for each property but in the instance of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the implication is that we’ll get a more “back-to-basics” iteration of Spider-Man who’s picking up the pieces and trying to figure out who he is in this new paradigm shift. When Peter visits another familiar face from other MCU fare, she deems his personal problems as “small potatoes” that don’t require Avenger-level intervention. Frankly, that’s fine by me. I’d prefer to see Peter deal with his issues himself but franchise obligations necessitate appearances from The Punisher, The Hulk and perhaps newly-acquired characters from the larger universe of Marvel comics.

Even though the movie has far too much going on from a plot perspective, given that it has to tie in storylines from Disney+ shows of the past several years, Brand New Day remains reliably entertaining output from the most reliable entertainment film franchise around. Holland remains outstanding in the lead role and his real-life marriage to Zendaya gives their scenes of lost love a metatextual poignancy and gut-punch for our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Being pulled in from the Punisher series, Bernthal is a terrific addition as a gruff, bull-in-a-china-shop foil to our still doe-eyed and altruistic protagonist. I wish there was more time dedicated to the conversations between Peter and the people he wants to remember him but I’ll have to wait another day for the truly character-forward stories the MCU so often promises.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
One Night Only, starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, is a romantic comedy in which two strangers in New York try to find love on the one night of the year when pre-marital sex is legal.
Super Troopers 3, starring Jay Chandrasekhar and Kevin Heffernan, is a comedy sequel reuniting the titular goofballs as they work to bring down a pernicious new drug ring against the backdrop of an upcoming wedding between one of the Troopers and the sister of another Trooper.
Ice Cream Man, starring Ari Millen and Charlie Zeltzer, is a slasher set in an idyllic suburban town that descends into madness when a mysterious ice cream man serves sweet treats that turn children into homicidal maniacs.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

My thoughts on the movies