All posts by Brent Leuthold

Reel Views, Review

Code 3

The medical dramedy Code 3 is a bit like if the Emmy-winning series The Pitt had an episode that stepped outside the titular emergency room and just focused on the paramedics who rush patients to Dr. Robby and his crew. Like that show, the film envelops us in the world of these workers as they navigate the perpetual pains of their profession, mainly associated with the build-up of emotional trauma from the horrors they’ve seen. Granted, there’s more humor here, and it’s more of the fourth wall-breaking variety than interpersonal chatter, but director Christopher Leone’s aim remains to put us in the shoes of the medical community’s most unsung heroes. Leone penned the script with Patrick Pianezza, who worked 12 years as an EMT and brings to the screenplay the kind of world-weary wisdom you can only really get from firsthand experience.

Code 3 takes place over the final 24-hour shift of 18-year veteran paramedic Randy (Rainn Wilson), who gets a surprise job offer from a medical insurance company after a seemingly disastrous interview. He’s much overdue for a career change, beyond burned out and suffering panic attacks in a job where most people don’t make it past 5 years. After he gets the call, Randy is ready to leave right away but his dispatch manager Shanice (Yvette Nicole Brown) tasks him with showing the ropes to ride along trainee Jessica (Aimee Carrero) on his final day. Along with Mike (Lil Rel Howery), the only driving partner who’s been willing to put up with Randy’s surly disposition over the years, the trio zoom across California highways responding to all manner of non-stop emergency calls and try to keep their heads on straight in the process.

During his 9-season tenure on The Office, Rainn Wilson got plenty of opportunities to talk directly to the camera and Code 3 makes quick work of handing him the reins with an opening voiceover. “So…how’s your life goin’?” he asks, as we see an ambulance blaring past numerous cars en route to a crime scene. “I am your best friend on your worst day,” he continues, although his tone doesn’t exactly convey the geniality and inspire the assurance one might hope. We soon learn that Randy doesn’t exactly have an ideal degree of proverbial bedside manner, arriving on-site praying for a potential drug overdose to instead be a disturbing the peace matter so he can let the cops deal with it. Disgruntled, he assesses the OD victim while grilling a tagalong med student and then turning to the audience to remind us of our mortality. As dark as the humor on The Office could be, it never quite got to cut-to-black existential crisis levels of nervous laughter.

As director, Christopher Leone threads a fine needle with Code 3 between dark comedy and procedural drama in his depiction of EMS workers putting everything they have into their job. It also provides insights into hierarchies within the medical community and takes well-deserved jabs at a healthcare system that’s as disheveled as the psyche of our broken-down protagonist. This combination is best typified by a slow pan around a hospital, beginning with an arrogant surgeon played by Rob Riggle, which overlays the average salaries for everyone on staff and calls attention to how comparatively undercompensated paramedics are. Centered around three characters on the chaotic front lines, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the film can also at times resemble a war movie, specifically The Hurt Locker in a notable narrative parallel.

Along with tone-controlled direction and a trenchant script, the performances in Code 3 feel of a piece with the lived-in ethos of the engrossing project. Wilson does an outstanding job dappling drips of hopefulness upon the overwhelmingly cynical canvas that is his beleaguered tech’s mindset. Before roaring into a searing monologue aimed at everyone with whom he interacts on a daily basis, Randy asserts that he builds emotional walls not to keep people out but to keep all of the bad experiences in. Howery’s role doesn’t have as much dramatic heft and is more within the actor’s wheelhouse of comic relief but it’s certainly a welcome salve for the often intense proceedings. His hypothetical conversation as a Subway customer with would-be sandwich artist Randy isn’t quite the year’s funniest scene to invoke that ubiquitous eatery but it’s an easy second.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Him, a sports horror film starring Tyriq Withers and Marlon Wayans, involving a young athlete as he descends into a world of terror when he’s invited to train with a legendary quarterback whose charisma curdles into something darker.
Also coming to theaters is A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, a romantic fantasy starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, telling the imaginative tale of two strangers and the unbelievable journey that connects them.
Streaming on Hulu is Swiped, a tech biopic starring Lily James and Dan Stevens, centered around the life and career of entrepreneur Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and former CEO of the online dating platform Bumble.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Lurker

Writer-director Alex Russell is best known as a writer and producer for acclaimed TV series Beef and The Bear but based on his feature debut film Lurker, I would’ve assumed he worked heavily on HBO’s The Idol. As terrible as that show was, at least it grasped the concept of how the music business works and had ideas about the corresponding pitfalls of fame and greed. This movie wants to treat the industry as window dressing for a character study about the lengths one will go to for their 15 minutes of fame but it’s so clueless about the context that the story rarely feels believable. You can certainly make the tale of someone trying to con their way to the top work — see the numerous adaptations of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” for evidence — but in their deceitfulness, the central character must be compelling.

Our titular toady here is Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), who clocks the presence of pop star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) in the store where he works and quickly switches the song playing on the speakers. Oliver’s ears perk up and he asks who put it on, to which Matthew nonchalantly fesses up, saying it’s music to which he grew up listening when it’s actually a pick he made based on a post on Oliver’s Tumblr. Matthew further ingratiates himself to Oliver’s crew, making nice with pseudo manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu) and offering to help videographer Noah (Daniel Zolghadri) shoot footage of Oliver and his blokes on tour. Matthew’s friend and co-worker Jamie (Sunny Suljic) is intrigued by the networking and accepts an invite to party with Oliver and company but Jamie’s rise in the ranks among the posse quickly draws Matthew’s ire. What will Matthew do to stay top-of-mind for Oliver?

The screenplay for Lurker is very inconsistent in its depiction of how famous its mononymous musician actually is. Oliver performs the kind of melancholy R&B made popular by major artists like The Weeknd and Frank Ocean but the crowds for which he performs aren’t arena-sized. It’s noted that he has one album and is probably taking too long to come out with a follow-up, which would put him more in a category with acts like Jai Paul or Miguel. But after Matthew’s spent some time shooting video for Oliver, he’s spotted by two girls in the boutique where he works and asked what it’s like being in Oliver’s entourage. Why a pair of strangers would recognize a music video director for an up-and-coming singer is a one of many details about Oliver’s cultural cachet that’s glossed over. Even in Los Angeles, I doubt people who work alongside an enormous star like Taylor Swift would get noticed in public. Without looking it up, do you know who directed Miss Americana? Neither do I.

Even people, like myself, not in the music industry understand the general social structure and syndicate surrounding artists like Oliver. Even for smaller signed acts, there are managers, there are assistants, and a bevy of other roles assigned by the record label to protect their investment. Besides Shai, there are literally no corporately-mandated folks that seem to be around Oliver running the business side of things. The closest thing to antagonistic pressure Matthew gets in his slippery scheme to infiltrate Oliver’s retinue is in the form of one of Oliver’s closest mates, played by Zack Fox, who presses Matthew during their green room introduction. Beyond that, Matthew barely gets any pushback from anyone until things have properly gone off the rails and up to that point, his influence on Oliver’s creative output grows exponentially for no discernible reason.

Despite their faults, recent portrayals of sociopathy like Not Okay and Saltburn (the latter of which, incidentally, also stars Archie Madekwe) understand we have to commiserate with some aspect of these protagonists. Even though Alex Russell and his editor David Kashevaroff spend loads of time on Théodore Pellerin’s face, desperate for reaction shots of Matthew that will somehow endear him to us, his character remains a cold creep. Save Jamie, everyone in Lurker is either stupid, staggeringly self-involved or simultaneously both. Oliver is a fool for bringing a stranger like Matthew into the fold so quickly, Matthew’s plan to maintain control isn’t particularly well-thought-out and all the people around them seem too dim to care. If sociopaths are neither smart nor sympathetic, they don’t belong as the main character in your story.

Score – 1/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Long Walk, starring Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, is a dystopian horror thriller centered around a group of teenage boys competing in an annual contest where they must maintain a certain walking speed or get shot.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, starring Hugh Bonneville and Laura Carmichael, is an historical drama concluding the cinematic trilogy of the aristocratic Crawley family as they navigate financial trouble and potential public scandal as they enter the 1930s.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, starring Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, is a mockumentary sequel that sees the titular hair metal band getting back together 40 years after the initial film for one legendary final show.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Splitsville

Like fellow relationship comedy Oh, Hi! from earlier this summer, the outstanding screwball farce Splitsville opens on a car-confined couple belting out lyrics of soft rock duets to one another. The former features the Parton-Rogers classic “Islands In The Stream” and the latter opts for the Loggins-Nicks hit “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend'” but in both scenes, life seems to be perfect. You’re en route to a weekend getaway and you’re singing cheesy pop songs with your partner; what could go wrong? Oh, Hi! takes a bit longer to unpack that question but Splitsville answers it early and often, with a car wreck and accidental public indecency being just the first of many misfortunes. 14 months into their marriage, Ashley (Adria Arjona) has considered divorce so thoroughly that she’s handwritten a letter she’s finally built up the nerve to read to Carey (Kyle Marvin). Pulled over on the side of the highway, Carey decides to run away as she starts reading it. After all, if he can’t hear her message, then they can’t be over.

After trekking on-foot for some time, Carey finds his way to the beach house of his best friend Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson). They’re happily married with a son, so surely they must have the answer for how he can keep things going with Ashley. Carey finds the supposed secret of their success is that Paul and Julie are in an open marriage, an agreement with which the two seem comfortable as long as they don’t have to hear details about the other partners or the trysts. Paul gets exponentially less comfortable with the arrangement when Julie chooses to sleep with Carey while he’s at their place trying to forget about Ashley. All the while, Ashley has taken Carey’s running away as tacit permission to take on other lovers and as luck would have it, Carey expresses his desire for their relationship to be open past monogamy.

Written by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, and solo-directed by Covino, Splitsville is a hilarious highwire act that feels like it could spiral out of control at any moment but never does. The script is a thing of beauty, packed with consistently clever and sneakily insightful exchanges about the trickiest dynamics of romantic relationships. As Ashley’s suitors stack up, they begin hanging around the house, even after she seems to have lost interest in them. Carey unwittingly ends up befriending some of them, playing video games and listening to records with some of the gentlemen in an increasingly crowded apartment more akin to a himbo harem. He even lends an ear to their romantic woes with his wife, as a clueless chiropractic hopeful laments “it feels like the universe is out of alignment and I’m not able to adjust it.”

Covino corrals an impressive amount of comedic performances from the sprawling cast while concocting bravura sequences you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a swinging indie comedy. A visually dense montage of Carey and Ashley’s home life once the latter takes on the company of other men employs a head-spinning but steadily-paced 360 degree camera motion. A slow-motion dolly shot — one that would feel right at home in Rushmore — across the front of a private school takes its time showing Julie and Carey canoodling in the carpool drop-off before eventually settling on Paul’s dejected face. There’s even a knock-down drag-out fight between Paul and Carey set within the sun-dappled opulence of a Hamptons home that is both sidesplitting in its comical escalation and accomplished in its choreography.

All four members of this quartet, along with single-scene-stealers like Nicholas Braun and Tyrone Benskin, make this material sing but I was particularly impressed with the performances from Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona. Marvin is a new face to me and following Splitsville, I thought to myself “where’s this guy been?” He has the sadsack puerility of John C. Reilly’s goofier characters and understated sensitivity found in Will Ferrell’s dramatic roles, so perhaps it’s no surprise that we just became best friends. Arjona certainly made her mark with leading roles in three releases last year but this is the best work that I’ve seen from her so far. Playing a young woman contorting her personality manically in an attempt to find herself within the arms of other men, she mines wicked humor from her character’s desperation. In a year alongside other terrific comedies like Friendship and The Naked Gun, Splitsville may be the finest yet.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Conjuring: Last Rites, a supernatural horror sequel starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, concluding the saga of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren as they take on one last terrifying case involving mysterious entities they must confront.
Being re-released in theaters is Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway smash biographical musical about one of America’s foremost founding fathers and first Secretary of the Treasury.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Highest 2 Lowest, a crime thriller starring Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright, remaking Akira Kurosawa’s High And Low as a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot and conflicted by a life-or-death moral dilemma.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Honey Don’t!

Following last year’s road caper Drive-Away Dolls, writer/director Ethan Coen continues his creative collaboration with wife Tricia Cooke in what is purportedly the middle chapter of a “lesbian B-movie trilogy”. Though the characters and story don’t overlap from its predecessor, Honey Don’t! once again stars Margaret Qualley, this time playing pertinacious private investigator Honey O’Donahue. She exchanges tips with dim-witted detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), who informs her that one of her recent clients just died in a cliffside car accident. Working with police officer MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), Honey traces the client’s last whereabouts to the emergent Four-Way Temple, led by the charismatic Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans).

Too often, Honey Don’t! feels like a B-side to a B-movie — incidentally, the Carl Perkins song that gives the film its title was also a B-side — but more in the sense that it feels like leftover parts as opposed to a companion piece. Like many Coen Brothers movies, Drive-Away Dolls featured a labyrinthine mystery with colorful characters but the case here isn’t as satisfying in its resolution and the parts don’t feel as fleshed out. Talented supporting players like Billy Eichner and Talia Ryder pop in for a few scenes but their presence doesn’t end up affecting the plot in a meaningful way. Chris Evans certainly makes a meal of his pseudo-cult leader role but there’s not much on the page to his hypocritical holy man schtick that’s unique from what we’ve seen before. And even in a comedy, it’s hard to take Charlie Day seriously as an officer of the law.

The primary way Honey Don’t! distinguishes itself from Drive-Away Dolls is in how it treats the sapphic storyline between its primary protagonists. The relationship that develops between Honey and MG has a thornier (and a word that rhymes with “thornier”) dynamic to it than the more wholesome one shared by Jamie and Marian in Dolls. The film is comparatively even more sex-forward than the already unchaste previous entry and Qualley and Plaza certainly put all of themselves into these characters. In addition to the physicality of the acting, the pair get the lion’s share of the script’s pithy pitter-patter dialogue, as when Honey and MG discuss the differences between crochet and knitting over drinks and more at the local watering hole.

Individual scenes in Honey Don’t! have passable pleasures on their own terms but they just don’t add up to much when it comes to contributing to a cohesive and cogent story. Shuffling through tropes like hasty kidnappings and drug deals gone wrong, the crime aspects of the film play like a Coen kineograph of reliable plot elements rather than thought out narrative. Through lines about quirky behavior and running jokes are basically the closest thing resembling character development that the film has. The undercooked script falls apart most in the third act, which tries to stitch everything together with a would-be payoff that neither feels earned nor makes much sense.

As underwritten as it is, Honey Don’t! never drags and is rarely dull, mostly due to Coen’s snappy direction that, like Drive-Away Dolls, completes its mission in under 90 minutes. The movie is set in present-day California but there are loads of retro flourishes, from the sepia-toned set design in Honey’s office to the throwback costume design, that give off 70s flair. No word yet on what Go, Beavers!, the proposed trilogy-capper, will be about but my hope is that no matter what, Margaret Qualley will, as she does in the first two entries, get to drive a cool vintage car in it. Honey Don’t! has style and swagger for days but its titular PI needed a more worthwhile case to crack for her first time out.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Caught Stealing, a comedy crime thriller starring Austin Butler and Regina King, centered around a burned-out ex-baseball player who unexpectedly finds himself embroiled in a dangerous struggle for survival amidst the criminal underbelly of 1990s New York City.
Also coming to theaters is The Roses, a dark comedy starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, updating The War Of The Roses as a tinderbox of competition and resentments underneath the façade of a picture-perfect couple is ignited when the husband’s professional dreams come crashing down.
Premiering on Netflix is The Thursday Murder Club, a crime comedy starring Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, following four irrepressible retirees who spend their time solving cold case murders for fun and find themselves in the middle of a whodunit.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Relay

A corporate espionage thriller that stays sharp until its final act, Relay stars Riz Ahmed as Ash, a shrewd New York-based fixer who’s found a rather brilliant way to stay anonymous when brokering deals between clients. Communicating via the New York Relay Service, he sends messages electronically to relay operators and they read them to the third party on the line. They reply back, the operator types their response and Ash is able to read what they say. Of course it’s more cumbersome than a 1-on-1 phone call but has the crucial benefits of concealing Ash’s identity and being completely untraceable, thanks to protection from ADA laws. Whether he’s making demands of corporate goons or giving detailed instructions to the whistleblowers they’re trying to silence, Ash is able to type it all out from anywhere in the city with his portable teletypewriter and the person on the other end can’t even hear his real voice.

His newest contact is Sarah (Lily James), a research scientist who gets fired from biotech firm Cybo Sementis for asking too many questions about a disturbing report linking their insect-resistant crops to human side effects. While Ash’s clientele would typically request protection after the proverbial whistle is blown, Sarah instead wants his help to return the documents she stole after leaving the company. She says she’s followed everywhere she goes, she doesn’t feel safe in her apartment and she just wants her life back. To paraphrase Joseph Heller, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you, and the company has indeed hired thugs, led by Dawson (Sam Worthington) and Rosetti (Willa Fitzgerald), to make Sarah’s life hell until she coughs up what she knows. Through his unique communication method, Ash parlays between Sarah and the henchmen while working diligently to operate as a ghost during the process.

Relay gets off to a bit of a slow start — spending too much time on the tail end of Ash’s previous case with not enough of a narrative justification for doing so — but it’s certainly gripping once it gets going. I was reminded frequently of two movies that incidentally both star George Clooney, the first being legal thriller Michael Clayton and the assassin slow-burn The American secondarily. While his manner of cajoling conglomerates and counselors in the former is face-to-face and his character barely says five words in the latter, both films follow protagonists living life in the shadows. Riz Ahmed obviously isn’t at Clooney’s level of fame but he certainly has the acting chops to pull off a captivating lead like this. In one scene, Ash communicates in ASL with a deaf document forger, recalling his spellbinding work in 2020’s criminally underseen Sound Of Metal.

The film works best when it’s operating as a streamlined cat-and-mouse and less so when it’s trying to work other dramatic angles. Hell Or High Water director David Mackenzie and his writer Justin Piasecki relish the opportunities to explore how Ash uses procedural loopholes to stay a step ahead but falter when they foist a romantic subplot on the two leads. It feels particularly inorganic in context and was clearly added to make the later scenes of peril hit harder given the burgeoning connection between Ash and Sarah. Relay‘s worst offenses come in the third act, which tries too hard to outdo itself with out-of-left-field plot developments that threaten to derail the good will that was built up before them. Without saying too much, there’s a poorly-edited climactic foot chase that makes little sense geographically and even less sense narratively.

Up to that point, the movie finds the most success in keeping its worlds small and stealthy: the interior of a crowded surveillance van, a dimmed shoebox apartment, the back of a bustling bodega. New York City is a perfect place for Ash to stay hidden in plain sight and as with a myriad of conspiracy nail-biters before it, this film gets the most out of an urban setting where unexpected distractions are plentiful. Relay‘s raison d’être revolving around segmented conversation also fits in nicely with the tenuous lines of communication that exist between passersby in an overcrowded metropolis. Though Mackenzie and his team sacrifice intelligence in favor of simpler storytelling down the stretch, this is a mostly taut thriller with a memorable hook and an engaging central performance.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Eden, a survival thriller starring Jude Law and Ana de Armas, telling the true story of a group of outsiders who settle on a remote island only to discover their greatest threat isn’t the brutal climate or deadly wildlife but each other.
Also playing only in theaters is Trust, a horror thriller starring Sophie Turner and Rhys Coiro, following a Hollywood actress who hides in a remote cabin after a scandal, only to find herself betrayed and fighting for survival against someone she once trusted.
Streaming on Hulu is Eenie Meanie, a heist thriller starring Samara Weaving and Karl Glusman, centered around a former teenage getaway driver who is dragged back into her unsavory past when a former employer offers her a chance to save the life of her chronically unreliable ex-boyfriend.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Weapons

The chilling mystery Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger’s follow-up to 2022’s out-of-nowhere camp hit Barbarian, finds the The Whitest Kids U’ Know alum following the sketch comedy-to-horror filmmaking path paved by Jordan Peele. It’s a formally and narratively more ambitious movie than his previous effort, telling its twisty-turny tale through the eyes of six different characters, each contributing their own fragments to the master narrative. At times, the chronology overlaps and we see the same scene from a different perspective but Cregger mostly uses the technique to parse out bits of information until the entire picture is filled in. While it falls victim to the logic gaps and plot holes that have plagued multi-layered stories before it, the film is a freaky fun puzzle box to unlock and contains some of the year’s best scares to boot.

Set in the fictitious small town of Maybrook, Weapons opens with elementary school teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) arriving at her classroom with only one of her 18 students, Alex (Cary Christopher), in attendance. The ensuing police investigation reveals that the other 17 kids all woke up at 2:17 AM the previous night and ran out of the respective houses, vanishing into the dark. As days and weeks go by with no further understanding of what caused this tragically bizarre event, the parents of the missing children like Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) gradually turn on Justine and press the school principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) for answers. Also feeling the pressure from desperate townspeople are police captain Ed Locke (Toby Huss) and his son-in-law officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), the latter of whom is looking to rekindle a flame with Justine.

Through creepy bookend voiceovers, the first of which sets up a story in which “a lot of people die in a lot of weird ways”, Weapons percolates with the unease we feel collectively when faced with the unimaginable. In the wake of tragedy, we can’t accept that there is no solution and no way to prevent its future occurrence. The fractured narrative underscores the social fissures that the disappearance creates between the people of Maybrook, who have a much more difficult time working the problem separately than if they had done so together from the start. As the storyteller, Cregger delights in patiently putting the pieces together while simultaneously including numerous terrifying moments designed to make us jump out of our seats. A night-set scene, in which Justine is asleep in her car, is a masterclass in how lighting, sound design and a petrifying performance can lend themselves to a perfect horror setpiece.

Like many horror outings, Weapons‘ spookiest scenes are set in the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole town should be asleep but its citizens are burdened by somnambulance and unshakeable nightmares. But even during the daytime moments, cinematographer Larkin Seiple is able to carry over a half-awake nerviness to the shot composition that makes everything feel that much more unpredictable. Much like DP Roger Deakins accomplished in 2013’s Prisoners — another small-town thriller centered around missing kids — Seiple drenches each frame with a visualized version of the dread and dreariness that fill our characters. If you can see this film in IMAX, it’s worth the upgrade to get a better glimpse into the shadows and darkness on the edge of town.

Given its story structure, Weapons doesn’t have quite as much time as I’d prefer to more deeply develop its characters but the talented ensemble does a great job imbuing their roles with ardor and unexpected bits of humor too. Josh Brolin and Julia Garner turn in reliably great work crashing up against one another as types they’ve played before, the former as a gruff everyman looking for justice and the latter as a troubled young woman looking for solace. Besides another actor whose presence is best left to be discovered, the movie’s secret weapon may be Austin Abrams as a drug addict who’s more credible than the rest of the community seems to think. Weapons doesn’t quite hit all the ambitious targets it’s shooting for but it shows that Cregger is anything but a one-hit wonder after Barbarian and has the chops to go the distance as a filmmaker.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Nobody 2, an action comedy starring Bob Odenkirk and Connie Nielsen, following a former lethal assassin whose violent past catches up with him once again, this time on summer vacation with his family.
Also playing only in theaters is Witchboard, a horror remake starring Madison Iseman and Aaron Dominguez, involving a cursed spirit board which awakens dark forces and drags a young couple into a deadly game of possession and deception.
Streaming on Netflix is Night Always Comes, a crime thriller starring Vanessa Kirby and Jennifer Jason Leigh, telling the story of a desperate woman who sets out on a dangerous odyssey, confronting her own dark past over the course of one propulsive night.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Naked Gun

In some ways, a reboot/legacy sequel of the Naked Gun films makes sense. With humble beginnings as the short-lived ABC series Police Squad!, the franchise took off with the release of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988 and generated two sequels that also hit big at the box office. To say that the movies don’t follow a strict narrative chronology or cohesion goes without saying, so you can basically go with just about any story upon which screenwriters can throw the most jokes. But since the complete original comic trio of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker and star Leslie Nielsen are no longer with us, it seemed unlikely that a remake could actually recapture the magic of the spoof comedy dynasty. So it’s quite surprising that not only is The Naked Gun as good as the 1988 original but it may even supersede it.

The film stars a fantastic Liam Neeson as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., son of Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling badge from the original trilogy. Kneeling before a plaque of his dad in the Police Squad station, Drebin Jr. remarks “I want to be just like you but, at the same time, completely different and original.” His investigation into a fatal car crash in Malibu brings the deceased driver’s sister Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) to his office, claiming that her brother’s death was no accident. The investigation leads Frank to tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston), whose electric car model is the same as the one found at the crash site. But Drebin uncovers an even more nefarious plot in the process, one involving a device that can beam an audio signal through cell phones that turns bystanders into barbarians with the hit of a button.

Where The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult were partially undone by plotlines that were needlessly complicated, The Naked Gun opts for a more straightforward storyline that even those under the age of the PG-13 rating could follow. These movies aren’t about developing compelling characters or generating thought-provoking themes; they’re about generating as many laughs as possible. This new entry not only succeeds at that goal but also does so at a laudably brisk pace. The 85-minute runtime is padded by a fourth wall-breaking mid-credit gag and end credits that pepper in phony acknowledgements e.g. Set Dressing as Ranch, Italian, French, Russian. There’s an under-appreciated craft to editing a comedy like this, keeping the pacing fast while still firing off more than enough comedic beats to keep the audience from feeling like they were cheated out of a longer production.

Director Akiva Schaffer, who also helmed more conceptual parodies like Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, doesn’t just get the timing right with The Naked Gun but he also nails the spirit and tone of the best ZAZ collaborations. There’s a vaudevillian energy not just in the pace of the comedy but the variety of comedic styles that Schaffer and his co-scribes Dan Gregor and Doug Mand employ throughout the film. While it mainly riffs on police procedurals and the tropes therein, the mechanics of getting those jokes to land travel through the gamut of comedy genres from the absurd to prop work along the way. Not only is the movie not afraid of potty humor but the best quote from the whole thing even has the word “toilet” in it.

As threadbare as the plot is, The Naked Gun doesn’t work unless you cast correctly for Drebin, given how inextricably linked Leslie Nielsen is with the original films. In fact, the project actually flailed for years when a direct-to-TV sequel starring Nielsen fell through and a re-work starring Ed Helms (thankfully) never manifested. Fortunately, co-producer Seth MacFarlane saw the potential of Liam Neeson after directing him back-to-back in comedies A Million Ways to Die in the West and Ted 2. Neeson is simply sensational in this role, his grizzled gravitas and presence in innumerable actioners over the years lending itself perfectly to deadpan deliveries and tough guy pratfalls. In a time when most straight-ahead comedies have been relegated to streaming services, it’s a joy to watch an uproarious comedy like The Naked Gun in the theater, laughing with strangers in the shared darkness.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Weapons, starring Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, is a horror mystery involving a community sent reeling when all but one child from the same classroom in town mysteriously vanishes on the same night at exactly the same time.
Freakier Friday, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, is a comedy sequel reuniting a mother and daughter who inadvertently switch places once again but this time, a daughter and stepdaughter are now mixed up in the body swap madness.
Sketch, starring Tony Hale and D’Arcy Carden, is a fantasy comedy about a young girl coming to terms with the death of her mother whose sketchbook falls into a strange pond and brings her drawings of strange creatures to life.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

20th Century Fox comic book characters continue to make their way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the first film from Marvel Studios to feature the legendary superhero team. Like Superman earlier this month, this is a movie that already assumes you get the gist of these heroes and their powers, so it opts for a speed run through their origin story. Four astronauts — Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) — survive a cosmic ray blast while in space and come back to Earth with unique abilities. Reed is able to stretch his body into impossible shapes, while his wife Sue can turn invisible and project powerful force fields at will. Ben’s skin has transformed into rock and given him superhuman strength, while Sue’s brother Ben has the ability to manipulate fire and fly.

Together, they make up the Fantastic Four and are held in high esteem as celebrities to the general public, so the news that Reed and Sue have a baby on the way is met with an outpouring of excitement and support. But the hoopla isn’t long lived, as a creature known as Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) gives the Four a heads up that her planet-devouring boss Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson) is hungry and Earth is next up on the menu. Attempting to reason with the gigantic cosmic being on behalf of humankind, the Fantastic Four discover that Galactus will spare their world in exchange for Reed and Sue’s unborn child. The pair rebuff the giant’s offer but after returning home, they find their adoring fans are much more willing to sacrifice the newborn if it means saving the lives of every other human. Desperate to find another way, the team works day and night to develop a plan to get rid of Galactus for good.

One of the primary ways The Fantastic Four: First Steps stands out both from previous on-screen iterations of this cosmically-converted crew and other MCU entries is its retro-futurist setting. Taking place in an alternate 1964 where flying cars exist alongside Volkswagen Beetles, every inch of the film is covered with rich details about what people in the past thought the future could look like. Production designer Kasra Farahani crafts immaculately-rendered props and sets that reflect the technological optimism and collectivist spirit of the early 1960s. It’s neat to see a Times Square that at once looks accurate to the period and is nevertheless peppered with technology that still doesn’t exist in 2025. An aerial chase scene midway through the film leverages this juxtaposition seamlessly, as a character wirelessly broadcasts audio signals to TV monitors within their breakneck pace proximity.

While I appreciate the whiz-bang zip of that particular sequence, I wish the pacing of The Fantastic Four: First Steps didn’t consistently try to match the velocity of the mid-flight superheroes. Director Matt Shakman forgoes the typical Marvel Studios production logo and goes right into a brisk catch-up montage on how the Fantastic Four came to be. But within the sub-2 hour runtime, it feels like Shakman and his quartet of screenwriters pack in too much incident and too few occasions for the characters to breathe. Shakman’s resume thus far is primarily within the realm of TV — including his work on the MCU series WandaVision — and had there not been 15 other MCU shows since that inaugural entry, perhaps Fantastic Four would’ve worked better within a television framework. This is our first time together with these performers as the Four and outside of an early dinner scene, in which Ben correctly deduces that Sue is pregnant, we don’t get enough of a sense of how their personalities colorfully bounce off one another.

The cast does what they can to punctuate their scenes with clues as to what makes their cerulean-sweatered superheroes tick. Pascal and Kirby have both romantic chemistry and tension as soon-to-be parents trying to reckon bringing a son into a world getting more cosmically horrifying by the day. I’m still not completely sold on Quinn as an up-and-coming star but he does his best bringing the brashness out of his hothead hero, even if it doesn’t quite top what Chris Evans did with the Human Torch in the past. Moss-Bachrach isn’t given much to do as The Thing but he shows a sweet side of the character we haven’t seen before and his naturalistic voice work is absent the obvious choice to go gravelly. The Fantastic Four: First Steps isn’t as marvelous as it could be but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson, is an action comedy reboot about a detective following in the footsteps of his bumbling father, who must solve a murder case to prevent his police department from shutting down.
The Bad Guys 2, starring Sam Rockwell and Marc Maron, is an animated sequel reuniting the crackerjack criminal crew of animal outlaws, who are pulled out of retirement and forced to do “one last job” by an all-female squad of bandits.
Together, starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, is a body horror movie involving a couple who move to the countryside but find themselves encountering a mysterious force that horrifically causes changes in their bodies.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Dafoe? Dafriend: Wild At Heart

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

When we lost David Lynch earlier this year, it felt like a flame that would never stop flickering was suddenly snuffed out. Suffering from emphysema, the 78-year-old director’s health reportedly took a turn for the worse when the Sunset Fire’s proximity to his house necessitated that he evacuate. There’s a tragic irony in the fact that some of Lynch’s most evocative images prominently involve immolation, like the shack burning in reverse in Lost Highway and the candle flickering monstrously in Jeffrey’s nightmare in Blue Velvet. There’s that infamous on-set photo of him filming The Straight Story where he’s smoking in front of a house on fire and one of his short films is even titled Fire (Pożar). But of his features, flames can be found most prominently in his twisted romance road movie Wild At Heart, which opens with a title card ablaze and peppers in numerous close-ups of stricken matches and cindering cigarettes.

The film tells the love story of snakeskin jacket-wearing bad boy Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and his vivacious sweetheart Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) as it finds itself through various stages of tumult. The main source of obstruction for the star-crossed lovers is Marietta (Diane Ladd), Lula’s viciously overbearing mother who has never approved of Sailor and even goes far enough to send men after him. After Sailor spends almost 2 years in prison for killing one of the attackers hired by Marietta, the couple decide to hit the road to be free from her controlling menace. Plotting a spontaneous trip from North Carolina out to California, Sailor and Lula have the future in their eyes but Marietta hires seedy detective Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) to track them down and bring Lula back home safely.

This being a David Lynch movie, there are plenty of strange detours, mercurial pitstops and eerie non-sequiturs in the journey that make this anything but a traditional road trip. Its manic-depressive push-pull tone is perhaps best typified by the range in soundtrack choices from speed metal band Powermad and The King himself, Elvis Presley. In a five minute stretch, Lula pounds her feet on a motel bed as we crossfade to her dancing shoes bouncing to heavy guitar chugs but after a scuff-up with an interloper, Sailor belts out “Love Me” in the mosh pit. Another standout on the soundtrack is Chris Isaak’s moody masterpiece “Wicked Game”, whose initial release didn’t garner much attention but shot up to number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its inclusion in Wild At Heart.

Of all the wayward and wild weirdos Sailor and Lula meet along the way, the most chillingly memorable is the criminally creepy Bobby Peru, played indelibly by Willem Dafoe. While at a string light party in Big Tuna, Texas, Sailor and Lula cross paths with Bobby as he slithers across the yard behind three topless women hootin’ and hollerin’. He’s dressed in all black with slicked back hair, his mustache as thin as the strings of his bolo tie. But his most defining characteristic are his undersized teeth, which we first get a glimpse of as he bites on a cigarette while cheekily clarifying to Lula and Sailor that his last name is the same as the country. Lynch wrote in the script that Bobby was to have grubby and stubby chompers but Dafoe didn’t expect to have dentures molded and created for the character. Once he had them in, he later explained that they unlocked something primal and lascivious within him and became “the key to the character”.

Lynch lingers on Bobby’s creepy smile the longest after Lula responds that she’s 20 years old; we can see the hostile lust in his eyes, even if poor Sailor can’t. Scored by a slowed-down version of Chris Isaak’s “In The Heat Of The Jungle”, Bobby bitterly recalls his Marine days before vulgarly excusing himself to go to the restroom. If that wasn’t off-putting enough for Lula, he barges into her motel room the next day to finish the job, loudly urinating with the bathroom door open. Things only get uglier from there, as Bobby takes advantage of Sailor’s absence and violently coerces her into asking him for sex. It’s a repulsive act and even though he involves Sailor in different criminal pursuits, Bobby does get what’s coming to him and then some by the end of Wild At Heart.

Across hundreds of wide-ranging film roles, Willem Dafoe has made a permanent mark on film history with his impressively expressive face and turn-on-a-dime theatrics. Lynch utilizes Dafoe’s talents perfectly in this fever dream of a film that is still one of the master filmmaker’s more straightforward accounts. Bobby Peru has echoes of Dennis Hopper’s horrid villain Frank Booth from Blue Velvet but Dafoe gives Peru a sort of twisted sex appeal that makes it all the more horrifying when sexual assault is introduced into the story. It can be hard to watch someone behave so repugnantly in a movie and yet the fact remains that you can’t take your eyes off them. As such, Bobby Peru remains one of Dafoe’s most magnetic performances.