Reel Views, Review

The Furious

After premiering in the Midnight Madness lineup of the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, the dazzling martial arts symposium The Furious is ready to blow the minds of the masses. Thanks to the John Wick series, which is also distributed by Lionsgate, general audiences have become acclimated to intricate and sophisticated fight scenes directly inspired by Hong Kong and Indonesian action cinema. It’s perhaps unfair to regard the Keanu Reeves vehicles as a “good start”, as they’re strong entries in their own right, but if the Wicks are the warm-up, The Furious is the full workout. Not only does the film feature the year’s finest combat choreography but unless you’ve been lucky enough to catch anniversary screenings of Ong-Bak or The Raid, it features what may be the most relentless hand-to-hand you’ve ever seen in a theater.

After a blistering cold open marked by spectacular splits and scorpion kicks, The Furious settles on single father Wang Wei (Xie Miao) and his daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) living together in modern-day Bangkok. While at the barber one day, the two get into an argument and when Rainy storms out to the street, she’s lured away and kidnapped by criminals posing as garbagemen. The local police offer no help when Wang Wei seeks assistance, forcing him to take matters into his own hands (and feet) as he chases down his daughter’s captors. Teaming up with Navin (Joe Taslim), an undercover journalist investigating the same trafficking ring that claimed his wife, Wang Wei will stop at nothing to infiltrate the powerful network of lethal gangsters responsible for snatching Rainy.

From the perspective of story and dialogue, the latter of which is primarily in English, The Furious has very little you haven’t seen before in action movies either from the United States or originating outside the US. The actors all do what they need to do to establish the stakes: in the case of Xie Miao and Yang Enyou, selling the early moments of bonding and in the case of Joey Iwanaga, who plays big baddie Pak Lung, selling his villain’s despicableness. Despite the lack of character depth, director Kenji Tanigaki manages to conjure up memorable quirks to disperse among the stock combatants. Fans of martial arts films will likely recognize genre mainstays Yayan Ruhian and Brian Le, the former of whom sports a maroon tracksuit while wielding a bow and arrow and the latter of whom rocks overalls while refusing to die. When his unconscious thug wakes up after taking a sledgehammer hit to the head and wanders through the woods, I half-expected to hear a “ki-ki-ki, ma-ma-ma” to indicate a Jason Voorhees-brand of immortality.

Despite the generic title, The Furious appropriately sports a relentless, fast-and-furious pace, commencing with Wang blazing down Bangkok streets barefoot, chasing down a garbage truck with Rainy and her abductors onboard. Most modern martial arts outings would be lucky to have 1 or 2 sequences as thrilling and unforgettable as just about all the setpieces gathered here. One such scene, set at an ice factory where one of the villains freezes insubordinates in large blocks of ice, hammers out a dizzying array of hits and blows with jaw-dropping ferocity. Even in settings familiar, like a furtive nightclub where dirty deals go down, there’s a supplemental element like an octagonal MMA enclosure upon which Kenji Tanigaki and his team can stage acrobatic and elaborate action. By the time Wang and Navin make it to the crime syndicate’s packed headquarters, fittingly called the Snake Pit, the comparisons to The Raid feel both inevitable and earned.

The entire pan-Asian cast of The Furious is eminently gifted when it comes to delivering bone-crunching realism in their hand-to-hand conflicts but Xie Miao is a particular standout in his most prominent role yet. Co-starring in productions with legends like Jet Li and Chow Yun-fat in the mid-90s, he hasn’t had a lead performance capable of catapulting him to that next level until now. There’s an inertia to his fighting style that’s riveting and infectious but even more thrilling may be the split-second interruptions in his rhythm by way of pump fakes with either fists or feet. Whether he has more starring roles in the tank or not, this movie is an outstanding showcase for his tenacious physicality and will no doubt inspire on-screen martial artists down the road.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Disclosure Day, starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, follows a targeted whistleblower as she unravels a massive government conspiracy and races against time to bring about an extraordinary event that will change human history forever.
Stop! That! Train!, starring Ginger Minj and Jujubee, involves two train stewardesses who must work with the snooty first-class crew of the new luxury passenger train upon which they’re working to prevent a disaster in the midst of a massive storm.
Jinsei, starring Ayumu Nakajima and Eri Kamataki, is an anime feature about a man who becomes a J-pop idol, an outcast, a leader and an oracle in a 100-year chronicle spanning the past, present and future.

Reel Views, Review

Backrooms

Psychologically, there will always be something unsettling about being alone in a large space intended to play host to activity that isn’t happening and to people who aren’t there. It’s almost like these places shouldn’t exist unless there’s more than the hum of fluorescent lights to fill them. Backrooms, the debut feature from 20-year-old Kane Parsons, brilliantly keys in on the unease we feel when we enter areas that overwhelm with their stifling sense of vacancy. The decline of “third places” (a term for shared social environments besides one’s home or one’s workplace) was accelerated by the pandemic six years ago, though signs of communal fracture were in place before that. There are abandoned shopping malls, storefronts and, of course, movie theaters whose remaining function is the resounding reminder of what we’ve lost.

Set in San Jose in the early 1990s, Backrooms stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, the hard-pressed owner of discount furniture store Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. Grimacing at the TV when ads for his competitor Big Wayne’s Furniture Barn come on, he dons a pirate outfit and makes employees Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell) shoot a commercial, but it seems unlikely to move the needle. Clark spills his guts about his business failings, dissolved marriage and alcohol troubles with his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve), who attempts to navigate him to better emotional surroundings. Drawn to the basement after closing his store one evening, Clark discovers an entrance to a hidden wallpaper-covered room that serves as a foyer for a seemingly unending amount of adjoining spaces. After spending excessive time in the extradimensional area, Clark’s absence from the outside world inspires Mary to go in and look for him.

Adapting from a 4chan-inspired web series he began in January 2022, Kane Parsons is working with a reported $10 million budget and puts every dollar of it to marvelous use. As one may expect from the title and premise, the set design of Backrooms is effectively the star of the movie. Working with production designer Danny Vermette, who has collaborated with Osgood Perkins on his three most recent films, Parsons visually renders liminal spaces eerie in their prolonged sense of abandon and uncanniness. Furniture and props are sunken into the floor and walls, as if they’re being devoured by the fluidity of time and the persistence of memory. In addition to Dalí homages, the incredible sets also recall the impossible architecture found in the work of graphic artist MC Escher. Along with visual effects and an off-kilter music score co-composed by Parsons, the movie connotes the crushing cosmic horror of occupying a realm impossible in its vastness.

In terms of the story that forefronts these creepy interiors, screenwriter Will Soodik has the unenviable task of not spelling out too much about the titular locale but not withholding too much information either. It’s a difficult balance that he mostly pulls off, although the in-session dialogue between Clark and Mary fast tracks character development that would be better shown and not told. As well-realized as the unnerving aesthetic of Backrooms is, the script could have benefited from a similar level of detail when fleshing out who these people are and what draws them into this limitless otherworldly chasm. Nevertheless, Academy Award nominees Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve fill in the gaps nicely with a pair of performances percolating with fear of the unknown. Their tête-à-tête within the confines of a provisional dining room recalls the tense interactions between Jack and Wendy in The Shining.

As for more contemporary touchstones, Backrooms most frequently reminded me of Alex Garland’s Annihilation, following a group of imperiled scientists while investigating a zone called The Shimmer. The film also contains echoes of fellow A24 mind-bender Enemy, which sports a similar sickly shade of yellow cinematography and deals with protagonists attempting to break themselves from detrimental patterns. Whether or not Backrooms likewise concludes with an oversized spider cowering in the corner of a room, I’ll leave you to discover. It’s no secret that movie theaters have been more sparsely inhabited as studios desperately shuffle to try and fill auditoriums across the world. There’s harmonious irony in the fact that a movie set in an unending array of empty rooms could so thoroughly fill spaces designed to bring us together.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Masters Of The Universe, starring Nicholas Galitzine and Camila Mendes, reboots the 1987 sword and sorcery film about a young man on Earth who discovers a secret legacy as the prince of an alien planet and must recover a magic sword to return home and protect his kingdom.
Scary Movie, starring Marlon Wayans and Shawn Wayans, reboots the horror parody franchise in which two friends once again find themselves caught up in mayhem involving killers, monsters and supernatural creatures.
Power Ballad, starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, is the latest musical drama from John Carney in which a washed-up wedding singer and a fading boy band star create a song during a late-night jam session that the latter turns into a pop hit.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Mandalorian And Grogu

Cobbled together from a jettisoned fourth season of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, the unmemorable The Mandalorian And Grogu hobbled into theaters this Memorial Day weekend. It’s the first theatrical Star Wars release in 7 years — incidentally, 2019 was also when the first season of The Mandalorian was released — but doesn’t arrive with the fanfare typically befitting an entry from the multi-billion dollar franchise. With 10 seasons of live-action Star Wars shows already available to stream at home, audiences understandably need to feel compelled to go out to the theater when there’s already so much to dig into on TV. Each Episode of the Sequel Trilogy, and even 2016’s Rogue One, cleared that bar but this cinematic adaptation of the saga about a helmeted bounty hunter and his adorable sidekick doesn’t pass the Knee-Crack Couch Test.

Picking up where the third season left off, The Mandalorian And Grogu finds Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his foot-tall companion Grogu working under Commander Ward (Sigourney Weaver) of the New Republic. She tasks the pair with finding Janu Coin (Jonny Coyne), a former Galactic Empire leader now operating as a crime lord somewhere on the dissolute planet Shakari. To get more specifics on his whereabouts, Ward consults with the Hutt Twins, descendants of Jabba from Return Of The Jedi who are looking for his son Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White). With the help of streetwise food stand vendor Hugo (voiced by Martin Scorsese), the Mandalorian discovers Rotta is working as a gladiator in a fighting pit run by Coin and endeavors to free the slug champion from his proverbial chains of servitude.

The film opens with a bleary setpiece victimized by the same style of concrete mixer color grading that has plagued Disney’s live-action output since 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and disproportionally affected 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. Thankfully, the rest of The Mandalorian And Grogu isn’t as dim and drab as its snowbound opener but it doesn’t exactly instill much confidence from the outset either. After the successful mission, The Mandalorian turns in a holographic bounty card to Ward, she hands him a new card for Coin and the movie’s titular pair scurry off for another adventure. From there, the main characters are shuffled around like playing cards flipping through a deck, hitting the barebones story beats required to keep things moving but doing so in dramatically inert fashion.

Like its corresponding series, The Mandalorian And Grogu has plenty of action scenes where “Mando” gets to show off his sharpshooting and hand-to-hand combat prowess; him stating “I try to avoid violence” at one point essentially counts as a laugh line. His fights with all manner of space aliens and Stormtroopers are undoubtedly the high points of the film, most notably a nocturnal skirmish with metal-brimmed assassin Embo. It’s a sequence that feels particularly indebted to Westerns like Once Upon A Time In The West and the “Man With No Name” Trilogy that inspired director and co-writer Jon Favreau when creating The Mandalorian. That the movie strings together several well-choreographed conflicts while avoiding Easter eggs and memberberries should be enough to put it in the “W” column as a Star Wars outing.

But like any suit of armor — even the protagonist’s beskar-crafted uniform — there’s always a weak spot, and the plotting and pacing of The Mandalorian And Grogu is undeniably its fatal flaw. There’s a narrative cohesion and sense of consequence missing from this movie that makes the proceedings feel perfunctory and dull. Nearly all scenes of dialogue simply feel like filler, akin to unskippable ads in between songs on the free tier of a Spotify membership. The closest Favreau and his co-writers Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor get to character development is with Rotta The Hutt but Jeremy Allen White’s voice work is so bland that the pathos lands with an intergalactic thud. As much as Baby Yoda mightily strains to lift the film up with the Force from his tiny hand, his precious efforts are all for naught.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Backrooms, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, adapts a sci-fi horror YouTube series in which a therapist ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient.
Pressure, starring Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser, follows General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg as they face an impossible choice: launch the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing World War II altogether.
The Breadwinner, starring Nate Bargatze and Mandy Moore, finds a supermom switching roles with her breadwinner husband after she lands a Shark Tank deal and he struggles to adapt as a stay-at-home dad to their three daughters.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Obsession

After releasing micro-budget chiller Milk & Serial for free on YouTube two years ago, 26-year-old sketch comedian Curry Barker has graduated beyond the confines of streaming with the new horror outing Obsession. Picked up by Focus Features at TIFF last September for a reported $15 million price tag, it’s the kind of high-concept buzzy title that competitors A24 and NEON may still be kicking themselves months later for not securing. At the same time, the fact that there are enough promising Gen Z filmmakers around to trigger these kinds of bidding wars among distributors with their projects is a good problem to have. It represents not just an investment in future cinematic storytellers but a commitment to creative forces that audiences have come to know through platforms like YouTube and Reddit.

In Obsession, reserved twentysomething Bear (Michael Johnston) slaves away at a local music shop and harbors a longtime crush on co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette). It’s enough of an open secret among his other co-workers and trivia mates Tim (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sarah (Megan Lawless) that he practices spilling his guts to Nikki when they’re around. With hopes of replacing a necklace Nikki lost, Bear wanders into a gift shop and finds a One Wish Willow trinket that promises to grant the owner their greatest desire. After another frustrating night in the friend zone, Bear impulsively wishes that Nikki loved him “more than anyone in the entire world.” Much to his surprise, the magic behind the kitschy novelty toy kicks in but it doesn’t take long for her amorous affection to turn ominous and even dangerous.

In effect, Obsession is a suffusion of two well-worn tropes in the romantic and horror genres: a boy being too shy to tell the girl he’s pining after how he feels and the “be careful what you wish for” tale. In his writing and direction, Curry Barker uses these familiar starting points as a way to investigate the dark underpinnings behind these touchstones. When Bear casts his wish, it’s not as though Cupid shoots his arrow at Nikki and a romance slowly builds. Her entire personality turns on a dime and we learn that her real self is in essence a prisoner to this new possessed and obsessed version of Nikki. Some of the film’s scariest moments occur when the “real” Nikki pops back to the surface for terrifying interludes where we realize she’s essentially being held captive in her own body. It’s a horrifying concept that Barker explores within his take on the classic The Monkey’s Paw short story.

The quartet of young actors all add distinctive touches to their respective performances but Inde Navarrette’s work here is simply sublime. Under Bear’s seemingly innocuous spell, Nikki becomes unsettlingly possessive and violently co-dependent, erratically dithering between dewy-eyed obsequiousness and explosive neediness. As the affected version of Nikki for most of the movie, Navarrette hits notes of desperation and frustration that give Obsession a plethora of sustained uneasiness and well-earned beats of humor too. When Bear draws a Jenga piece at a party and is tasked with planting one on the person sitting to his left, Nikki’s remedy to the situation is both hilarious and creepy. I hadn’t seen Navarrette in anything prior to this but her commanding and unforgettable work here will rightfully open more doors for her in the future.

Though Curry Barker certainly pushes his story to gorier and more emotionally visceral lengths than we often get with typical tales of twisted wish fulfillment, its ending is telegraphed relatively early on. Interactions with both the employees where Bear procured the cursed charm and employees of the company that produces the One Wish Willow are marked by wickedly cavalier candor but serve to remind us of this film’s inevitable conclusion. But before that point, Barker sustains a timbre of absurdist tension that feels like a sketch from I Think You Should Leave and an episode from Tales From The Crypt got mutilated in a blender together. Like fellow YouTubers Markiplier and RackaRacka, who have also made the leap to theatrical horror filmmaking, Curry Barker has demonstrated that he won’t be ignored.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Mandalorian And Grogu, starring Pedro Pascal and Jeremy Allen White, continues the Star Wars saga of the titular bounty hunter and his cuddly companion as they traverse the galaxy to rescue the son of a powerful and notorious crime lord.
I Love Boosters, starring Keke Palmer and Naomi Ackie, is a crime comedy which finds a group of shoplifters (known as “boosters”) as they take aim at a cutthroat fashion maven after she steals their designs.
Passenger, starring Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell, is a supernatural horror film following a young couple who witnesses a gruesome highway accident and soon realizes they did not leave the crash scene alone, as a demonic presence won’t stop until it claims them both.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

All Is Farrell: Horrible Bosses

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

At this point, it’s cliché to say that actors look “unrecognizable” in certain roles but when Colin Farrell appeared as The Penguin in 2022’s The Batman, it was an apt adjective. Sporting a fat suit, gold tooth and facial prosthetics that took hours to apply, his rendering of a mid-level crime boss with an aggressively recessed hairline was strong enough to warrant a lauded HBO spin-off series in 2024. As memorable a role as it’s been for Farrell, it’s not his first time sporting a combover to play a corrupt narcissist in charge. That honor goes to 2011’s raunchy comedy Horrible Bosses, in which Farrell portrays Bobby Pellit, one of the three head honchos that terrorize a trio of hard-working average Joes. “Playing Pellit was all about channeling my inner douche,” Farrell commented in the film’s production notes, and his work as the unhinged heir to a chemical company is a big part of what makes the crime caper work 15 years on.

The opening of Horrible Bosses introduces us to pals Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), and Dale (Charlie Day), who routinely commiserate with each others’ workplace woes over beers. Nick is under the thumb of David Harken (Kevin Spacey), a sadistic executive at a financial firm who belittles and shows contempt for everyone under him. Conversely, Kurt gets along great with his mentor Jack Pellit (Donald Sutherland) but a fatal heart attack puts his incompetent son Bobby in charge of Pellit Chemicals. Dale gets the least amount of sympathy from his buddies regarding his situation, where he’s sexually harassed on a daily basis by his superior Dr. Julia (Jennifer Aniston) at her dental practice. At the bar one night, the boys take to a cockamamie plan in which they each kill their respective bosses to alleviate the abuse they’re all suffering at the hands of three psychopaths.

If their ruse sounds a bit familiar, it’s a comedic riff on Hitchcock’s classic Strangers On A Train, which is name-dropped explicitly by Kurt and mixed up with Throw Momma From The Train by Dale. They’re aided in their plot by “murder consultant” Dean Jones (Jamie Foxx), who adopts a colorful, tough guy nickname so as to not be lumped in with the 1960s Disney leading man of the same name. Among other actors in Horrible Bosses, Foxx represents the film’s “time at club/impact at club” ratio, wherein performers score lots of laughs with limited screen time. Ioan Gruffudd is a whiz-bang wonder in his cameo, portraying an all-business gentleman whom Dale hires via Craigslist for “wet work” thinking he’s a hitman. Comedy legend Bob Newhart even shows up in the movie’s coda as a seemingly harmless CEO harboring a terrible secret that he asks Nick to overlook with a wink.

Likewise, Farrell is comedically efficient on-screen as Bobby, who is introduced as “Dipshit Cokehead Son” by the movie’s enormous text overlay. We first hear him snorting lines in — and holding up the line to — the company bathroom, from which he storms out and grouses to his dad Jack that he can’t get any privacy. He’s a nuisance that Kurt tolerates in a job he otherwise loves but Jack’s passing automatically puts blowhard Bobby in the big boss’s chair. He rolls it out into the hall to confront Kurt when he’s “three hours late” to work after acting as pallbearer for Jack’s funeral, which Bobby presumably did not attend. The screw-up scion wastes no time taking an axe to his father’s company so he can line his own pockets; “this is just an ATM to me!” he blurts to Kurt in their first pow-wow with Bobby at the helm. It’s made clear that they’re all now residing in the “State Of Bobbyville”, which he revises to “The United States Of Me” soon after.

Being a studio comedy from the 2010s, Horrible Bosses and its director Seth Gordon presumably gave plenty of latitude for the central actors to play around with improv during their takes. But as evidenced by the outtakes over the end credits, it seems Farrell may have taken advantage of the opportunity even more than Aniston or Spacey. The bloopers feature what appears to be a deleted scene involving Bobby’s trip to the pharmacy, wherein he pesters a beleaguered pharmacist with queries like “do you like karaoke?” and “do you have MDMA?” He makes full use of his gross haircut too, heaving his combover as he sneezes into his open hand and shows it to the defeated druggist. Primarily for plot reasons, Bobby’s time in the movie is abbreviated in comparison to Julia and David but as the most crudely exaggerated of the titular heavies, Farrell works hard to sell lines that are designed to horrify.

The actor also contributed ideas toward the conception of Bobby’s garish fashion and ostentatious lifestyle, particularly an affinity for Asian appropriation through nunchuck twirling and Chinese dragon decals. He brags at one point that he’s a green belt and has “Kung Fu Fighting” as his ringtone at a time when people still selected those as extensions of their personality. When our protagonists visit Bobby’s vacant house for recon, they find his man cave packed to the gills with samurai regalia and katanas hung on the wall. They’re possessions of a self-stylized “master of the universe” so obnoxiously self-involved that we can’t really feel too bad about him getting what he deserves. The Julia and David subplots in Horrible Bosses haven’t aged especially well — the former due to its cavalier attitude regarding sexual assault and the latter due to the presence of Kevin Spacey — but Colin Farrell’s performance as the boisterous Bobby makes the horrible hilarious.

Reel Views, Review

The Sheep Detectives

Based on the international bestseller Three Bags Full by German crime writer Leonie Swann, The Sheep Detectives counts as one of the year’s biggest surprises thus far. When I go into a theater, I do what I can to give myself the best shot to enjoy what I’m about to watch. I typically avoid clips and trailers when I can; I inevitably see footage for upcoming releases either in theatrical pre-roll or scrolling through social media but I don’t seek out promos. If I can go into a movie knowing only a brief synopsis of what I’m about to see, that’s the ideal scenario. Going into this film, I knew it was a live-action murder mystery with CGI talking animals. Right, wrong, or otherwise, that sets my expectation bar relatively low, even given the fact that I don’t consume many G and PG-rated offerings. This is a rich family entertainment, packed with genuine intrigue, warm humor and wisdom around worthy themes.

The Sheep Detectives opens with voiceover from George Hardy (Hugh Jackman), a staid shepherd who prefers the company of his flock over the complications of human interaction. Though he tends to dozens of sheep, he has names for all of them and while he’d rather not pick favorites, he nevertheless has two: Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Sebastian (voiced by Bryan Cranston). Every night after the day’s chores are done, George sits outside his mobile home in the meadow and reads whodunnit novels to a captive ovine audience. Little does he know, the smartest of the sheep have been taking mental notes and Lily especially seems to know the endings before they’re even read. Unfortunately, their collective knowledge of murder mysteries becomes useful when George is discovered dead by fellow herder Caleb (Tosin Cole) one day.

Dim-witted officer Tim (Nicholas Braun) arrives shortly on the scene and it’s clear to Lily and company that he needs all the help he can get in solving the crime at hand. With the help of the world-weary Mopple (voiced by Chris O’Dowd), Lily and Sebastian make the trek outside their field to listen in on George’s will reading in the nearby English town of Denbrook. Gathered with George’s attorney Lydia (Emma Thompson) are George’s daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon) —traveling across the pond from America— along with local townspeople like persnickety innkeeper Beth (Hong Chau) and priest Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). Putting their hooves and horns together, the sheep must follow the clues to untangle the mystery of which of these seemingly innocuous interlopers know what happened to their departed leader.

The quaint English setting and computer-generated animal cast may quickly call to mind the George Miller Babe films from 1990s and while those still certainly hold up, The Sheep Detectives features special effects that show how far we’ve come. The rendering for each of the creatures —be they Icelandic Leadersheep or North Country Cheviot sheep— is exquisitely detailed and charming in its flourishes. I got a kick out of how expressive each of the sheep’s ears were, flickering and twitching in ways that mirror how they’re feeling at a given moment. Of course the voice cast does an exceptional job bringing these CG creations to life, led by beautifully affecting work from Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the lead role. As the foil to Lily’s lively determination, fellow Seinfeld alum Bryan Cranston provides a gruff, cynical cadence to Sebastian’s timbre.

In the cinematic world, screenwriter Craig Mazin has hung his hat on entries from raunch comedy franchises Scary Movie and The Hangover but in the television realm, he’s spearheaded critically-acclaimed fare like Chernobyl and The Last Of Us. Being rated PG, The Sheep Detectives obviously steers clear of the four-letter words from the sophomoric comedies but doesn’t get as dramatically heavy as his TV output either. The humor is often droll and calls attention to the differences between how these talking sheep see the world compared to the humans bickering around them. But by the film’s conclusion, Mazin and director Kyle Balda weave together powerful themes about belonging and memory that will resonate with audience members of all ages. Filled with tenderness and twists in equal measure, The Sheep Detectives is a sheer delight.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Obsession, starring Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette, is a supernatural horror movie in which a music store employee buys a supernatural “One Wish Willow” toy and wishes for his childhood friend to fall in love with him.
In The Grey, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill, is an action thriller involving a secret elite team of agents who are tasked with reclaiming a vast fortune stolen by a ruthless tyrant.
Is God Is, starring Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, is a revenge thriller following twin sisters with disfiguring burn scars as they’re ordered by their bedridden mother to kill their abusive father who caused their scars.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Hokum

Three features in, Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy seems to have found his niche. His first two films, Caveat and Oddity, are supernatural horror movies set in Ireland that intersect human folly and folklore to give the mystical elements a moral grounding. The filmmaker’s latest offering, Hokum, falls in line thematically with those two projects but by sticking with familiar narrative territory, McCarthy has refined how he tells his spooky story. This is his most narratively compelling and consistently unnerving effort to date, led by a familiar face and several others that may not be as familiar to American audiences. It’s also one you’ll want to see with a crowd, not only because it’s best enjoyed in a dark, distraction-free area but because there are different moments that may generate the biggest scares among the audience. Caveat and Oddity both had one jump scare that was clearly meant to be “the big one” but Hokum has a few that could qualify.

The film stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, a morose author of a popular book series involving a conquistador and his journeys. While drinking and writing late one evening, he has a nagging feeling of unfinished business in addition to writing the epilogue of his latest novel. His late parents requested that their ashes be spread at the hotel in rural Ireland where they honeymooned, so Ohm makes the trek to honor their wishes. He’s surly with the staff, including the desk clerk Mal (Peter Coonan) and bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell), but his interest is piqued when bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) tells him the honeymoon suite has been locked off by the hotel’s owner Cob (Brendan Conroy). He claims that the room has been haunted by a witch for years and he doesn’t want to risk letting the evil out. After Fiona goes missing during his stay, Ohm suspects she may have gone missing in the haunted quarters and breaks in to confirm his theory.

Adam Scott is likely best known for his television work as sympathetic protagonists in Parks And Recreation and Severance but his character in Hokum is markedly pricklier. He brusquely refuses to sign one of his books for a fan and when Alby confesses he has aspirations to write, Ohm burns Alby’s hand with a hot spoon and mocks, “You’re gonna need thicker skin than that if you’re gonna make it as a writer.” During the initial part of his stay at the Bilberry Woods Hotel, you’re almost hoping some terrible creature of Irish myth comes out and devours this guy. But in time, we find out what drives him to drink: a tragic accident in childhood that permanently fractured his relationship with his parents. Scott does excellent work shifting Ohm’s arrogance and ego in the first act to a care and curiosity when the one person he opens up to at the hotel disappears without a trace. By the time he makes it up to the room, he’s about as petrified as we are.

Teaming up again with Oddity cinematographer Colm Hogan, Damian McCarthy does an outstanding job filling Hokum with mostly-static frames of dimly lit halls and rooms where we’re forced to reckon with what waits in the shadows. One reason McCarthy excels at delivering superlative jump scares is that he sets them up with patient shot selection where our eyes slowly adjust to differing levels of darkness. But for those wary of artsy “slow burn” horror that goes nowhere, believe that McCarthy knows how to pay off the moments of silence and stillness brilliantly. The overall pace of Hokum feels more brisk than McCarthy’s previous films but it reflects a confidence in storytelling rather than a director trying to rush through things. This is a filmmaker who’s honing his craft and refining the ways he can chill us to the bone.

True to its title, the otherworldly aspects of Hokum tend to be the most compelling and the more formulaic human-based mystery takes over a bit too much of the third act. There’s a specific sequence set around a ringing bell that’s tense for a time but ends up feeling more contrived as it plays out. But like the possessed wooden golem in Oddity, McCarthy again populates his tale with memorable ghouls to keep us up at night. Will O’Connell does double duty in a nightmare scene as Jack The Jackass, a demented children’s show host that sports Pennywise-like bulging eyes and surrealist anthropomorphization out of a David Lynch offering. If you’re someone who’s always looking for more things that go bump in the night, Hokum is happy to oblige.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Mortal Kombat II, starring Karl Urban and Adeline Rudolph, is an action sequel in which martial arts combatants from the Earthrealm battle in a high-stakes contest designed by the tyrannous emperor of the Outworld.
The Sheep Detectives, a comedy mystery starring Hugh Jackman and Nicholas Braun, follows a flock of sheep as they work together to solve a murder case after their beloved shepherd is found dead.
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard And Soft: The Tour is a 3D concert film directed and produced by James Cameron, featuring performances from pop superstar Billie Eilish during the Manchester, England dates of her Hit Me Hard And Soft tour last year.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Mother Mary

It’s said that holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. As the new psychological drama Mother Mary opens, it’s clear that fashion designer Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel) has more than her fair share. After years of crafting bespoke costumes for pop singer Mother Mary (played by Anne Hathaway), their creative collaboration is cut short, leaving Sam shamed and stunned. She retreats to the English countryside and picks up the pieces, continuing to consult for clients who don’t perform for thousands of screaming fans but provide steady business nonetheless. Sam and her team are surprised to see Mary turn up at Sam’s home, rain-soaked and white as a ghost, years after their partnership ended. Desperate for Sam’s help, she says she needs a show-stopping dress for her comeback tour that kicks off in three days; it’d be a difficult request under normal circumstances but given the context, it’s more in the area of “unthinkable”.

Though she’s shaken, Mary attempts to ingratiate herself with Sam by saying she hasn’t changed since they last saw each other; Sam insists that she has, shooting back, “You’ll see what the years have made of me.” She hasn’t listened to Mother Mary’s music since their relationship dissolved and she doesn’t plan on breaking the streak, making Mary perform the taxing choreography for her new song “Spooky Action” without backing music. Her jagged movements read as those of a woman possessed and as the two women move forward with their improbable joint effort, they confide in one another that they’ve each been haunted by a spectral figure adorned in elegant cloth. Their only chance of cleansing themselves from the lingering spirits is to navigate their turbulent shared past and find a way forward together.

Mother Mary is another moody, metaphor-laden affair from writer-director David Lowery, operating here in a similar vein of his other A24-distributed existential dramas A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Quality-wise, his latest effort falls somewhere in between those two, occasionally labored in its personification of the central analogy but frequently stunning in its craft and execution. The movie has two very different locations that function as a pair of “home bases” for most of the runtime: the blindingly-lit packed arenas in which Mother Mary performs and Sam’s spare barn-turned-workshop. As the two women rehash their past, the set design brilliantly merges these vastly different locales seamlessly and in stunning fashion.

If Mother Mary isn’t quite a horror film and not exactly a music movie either, it’s best categorized as a tense two-hander between a pair of actresses operating at a mutually high level. Anne Hathaway does a great job belting out the film’s original tunes — penned by Charli XCX and Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff — but even aside from the music, this stands as one of her finest performances to date. It helps that she has the marvelously magnetic Michaela Coel, who flawlessly conveys Sam’s bitterness without making her seem cruel or petty, as a scene partner. Their work together is marked by restraint, a fierce determination by both characters to redirect their emotions and to delay words unsaid just a little bit longer. As good as the play-like production design is, Hathaway and Coel are the reason to see this movie.

The tête-à-tête angle of the film ultimately coheres better and is more psychologically compelling than the supernatural elements, which take hold around the halfway point during a séance sequence. David Lowery’s imagery, involving the ghost in fabric that haunts both Mary and Sam, can get redundant and heavy-handed down the stretch. The music score by frequent Lowery cohort Daniel Hart sets the quieter scenes well but there’s one particular montage where the composition was so bombastic that I actually had to stifle a chuckle. Seven features in, Lowery has proven himself to be a filmmaker who takes chances with his storytelling, in haunted tales like this and in his takes on fantasy adventures like Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy. Like Mother Mary wears a halo on her head for her sold-out performances, Lowery wears his heart on his sleeve when committing his vision to the screen.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Devil Wears Prada 2, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, reunites a legendary fashion magazine editor-in-chief with a pair of her former assistants, who have since risen the ranks within the industry.
Animal Farm, starring Seth Rogen and Gaten Matarazzo, adapts George Orwell’s satirical fable of anthropomorphic farm animals as they rebel against their human master and hope to create a society where all animals can be equal, free, and happy.
Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, follows a group of international passengers en route from Los Angeles to Shanghai as they’re forced to make an emergency landing in shark-infested waters.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Over Your Dead Body

As anyone who’s been in a serious relationship can attest, weekend retreats with significant others don’t always go as planned. More than one such plan goes awry in Over Your Dead Body, an action comedy from The Lonely Island alum and MacGruber director Jorma Taccone. The film’s couple, Dan (Jason Segel) and Lisa (Samara Weaving), have been married for seven years but their seven-year itch has taken a turn for the deadly. We learn early on that Dan plans to kill Lisa during their trip out in the wilderness, prepping an alibi with his co-worker and his dad Michael (Paul Guilfoyle) by saying that Lisa is planning on partaking in a rigorous hike over the weekend. As he sneaks up on her in the cabin, she parries his chloroform-soaked rag with a stun gun; it turns out she’s been making plans as well.

We flash back to a few days earlier, where Lisa is preparing a fabricated story of her own, telling a friend that Dan plans to go hunting during their time away. It’s not clear exactly how Lisa thought out disposing of Dan and by the time the pair come to learn of their mutual murder plots, it’s obvious neither one is a criminal mastermind. As they scuffle for a shotgun, a blast hits the ceiling and a trio of interlopers falls from the attic. If things weren’t fraught enough, Michael’s cabin was serving as a temporary safe house for escaped convicts Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), along with their crooked CO accomplice Allegra (Juliette Lewis). They tie up the squabbling couple, whom they saw bickering from the attic, and try to patch up their dysfunction for long enough to shake them down for cash before they continue to evade capture.

Over Your Dead Body is an English-language remake of Norwegian Netflix offering The Trip and given the amount of twists and turns in both stories, your best shot at enjoying this American re-do is not being familiar with the original. The distributor IFC is wisely playing up the fact that the movie comes courtesy of 87North Productions, the company behind action comedies like Bullet Train and Violent Night. What starts out as a tale of desperation amid marital strife gradually gives way to a cheeky wam-bam fight for survival, where blood is spilled in mostly cartoonish and comedically-colored fashion. Since co-founding 87North in 2019 and producing the Bob Odenkirk actioner Nobody in 2021, David Leitch has seemingly cornered the market on a brand of bone-crunching action fare with yucks between the ruckus.

The primary reason Over Your Dead Body doesn’t work lies in director Jorma Taccone’s inability to find a tone that works for the material. Jason Segel and Samara Weaving are talented actors but they’re saddled with characters obnoxious and petty enough that we’d be okay with either one of them being offed, except that it means the other would succeed. Once they’re interrupted by the fugitives, it becomes easier to root for them as a couple with renewed purpose but the preceding domestic scenes, where they argue about Scrabble words and how to mince garlic, are torturous. In the way Pete and company serve as de facto marriage counselors for Dan and Lisa, Taccone seems to be shooting for an update of The Ref but lands on the timbre of a home invasion thriller. There’s a specific scene set around the basement billiards table that’s particularly icky and doesn’t mesh at all with the playful anarchic vibe that Taccone is going for.

He and his editor Jeremy Cohen put together fight sequences that feature laudable stunt work while also tracking with the bombast from other 87North projects. The best moments in the movie come not from the actual combat sequences but from characters trying to pick up the pieces — sometimes literally — after the fact. A scene where Allegra fruitlessly tries to reassemble fragments of her foot builds to the funniest punchline in the whole film, one that wouldn’t be out of place in a gorier The Lonely Island sketch. Like his troupe mate Akiva Schaffer, who helmed the hilarious The Naked Gun last year, Taccone has a killer grip on slapstick humor. But with Over Your Dead Body, he hasn’t proven to have nearly as high a command over darkly comic premises or action setpieces.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Michael, a music biopic starring Jaafar Jackson and Colman Domingo, covering the life and career of pop icon Michael Jackson, from his involvement in the Jackson 5 in the 60s to his early solo career in the 70s and 80s.
Also coming to theaters is Mother Mary, a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, involving the fraught relationship between a costume designer and an international pop star on the eve of her comeback performance.
Premiering on Netflix is Apex, a survival action film starring Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton, following an adrenaline junkie whose rock climbing expedition is thwarted by a fellow adventurer who’s made it his mission to hunt her in the wild.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

My thoughts on the movies