Reel Views, Review

My Old Ass

In the spring of 2020, popular YouTube comedian Julie Nolke started a sketch series called “Explaining The Pandemic To My Past Self”, in which a version of herself a few months in the future checks in with herself in the past. Being a tumultuous pocket of time, there’s a lot to go over and the comedic conceit is centered around just how much can change in a short period. The new coming-of-age dramedy My Old Ass from writer/director Megan Park, expands this premise out to feature length and in the process, stretches out the amount of time between the two versions of the same person. In doing so, it speaks more broadly to the desire everyone has to use fantastical foresight to have more control over the future of their personal lives. The potential poignancy of the scenario seems like it would be easy to mine for pathos, so it’s strange that this movie fumbles the weightier aspects of its story.

On her 18th birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) takes a boat with her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) to a nearby island, where they plan on celebrating with psychedelic mushrooms. After drinking the spiked tea, Elliott’s friends go off on their own “typical” trips and while Elliott waits for the effects to kick in for her, a future version of herself (played by Aubrey Plaza) appears out of nowhere. Though initially skeptical, teenage Elliott soon feels convinced that she’s not just hallucinating but is actually being reached across time by her future self. After imparting some bits of wisdom about their family and their future career, the 39-year-old version of Elliott gives a vague but stern warning before she disappears to avoid anyone named Chad. Sure enough, a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White) starts working at Elliott’s family’s cranberry farm and she has to decide whether to ignore her own advice or pursue a relationship with him.

One of My Old Ass‘s major miscalculations is in sidelining Aubrey Plaza for the majority of the movie, as younger and older Elliott primarily spend the story communicating via phone by voice or text. Even though they don’t look especially similar to one another, Plaza and Maisy Stella have a fun rapport with one another and I’m not sure why Megan Park doesn’t feature them on-screen together much. Oddly, Maddie Ziegler’s character isn’t present much in the film either, a shame since Park directed her and Jenna Ortega to great effect — drastically different subject material aside — in her previous feature The Fallout. Stella and Percy Hynes White certainly have enough chemistry to make the romantic thrust of the narrative work but there isn’t much about watching their mutual crush develop that feels unique to this movie.

Outside of the relationship between Elliott and Chad, Park also spends time fleshing out Elliott’s relationship with her family, particularly her mom and her younger brother (played by Maria Dizzia and Seth Isaac Johnson, respectively). While the screenplay does its best to imbue these bonding moments with heartfelt meaning, the sentiment just doesn’t land as well as it does in other coming-of-age tales like Dìdi from just a couple months ago. Where that film had a distinct sense of time and place that directs the protagonist’s evolution, My Old Ass grasps at millennial touchstones with era-specific music cues and a flashback sequence evoking a mid-aughts pop music heartthrob. It’s a cute scene but it doesn’t ultimately tell us much about the character or why this particular memory is important to her.

Despite this, My Old Ass is amiable enough and with a runtime under 90 minutes, it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. There are nuggets of wisdom to be found about the passage of time and how Gen Z is dealing with growing up. My favorite scene involves Elliott confessing to Ro that she has a crush on Chad, when she’s previously only seemed to be interested in pursuing relationships with girls. The pacing of the conversation is considered but comedically compelling all the same; Ro reminds her that she told her to use labels when they’re useful but to ditch them when they no longer feel useful. I wish Megan Park was able to string more scenes like this one together to give the kick My Old Ass in the pants it needed to make a bigger impact.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, which finds the protagonist of Joker institutionalized while awaiting trial for his crimes and falling crazy in love with a fellow inmate.
Also playing in theaters is White Bird, a coming-of-age period drama starring Ariella Glaser and Orlando Schwerdt, about a troubled young student who is struggling to fit in at his new school after being expelled for his treatment of a disfigured student at his previous school.
Streaming on Netflix is It’s What’s Inside, a horror comedy starring Brittany O’Grady and James Morosini, following a group of friends who gather for a pre-wedding party that descends into an existential nightmare when an estranged friend arrives with a mysterious game that awakens long-hidden secrets, desires, and grudges.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Substance

If the body horror subgenre has a guiding principle, it’s in the terror of our infinite consciousness being inextricably tethered to malleable mortal flesh. Most films in the category find humans attempting to circumvent their natural form and being punished in gruesome ways for their transgression. The Substance, the provocative new satire from writer/director Coralie Fargeat, abides by this thesis — “you can’t escape from yourself,” as a sinister voice on the phone warns at one point — but pushes the subgenre into thrilling new territory by taking on the beauty industry and the impossible standards society places on women. In the protagonist’s quest for physical perfection, imagery is evoked that isn’t merely ugly but downright horrifying. It’s as gnarly a parable about self-acceptance as you’re likely to see this year, or any other year, for that matter.

The opening shot of The Substance makes it clear that the star of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is fading. As the cracks of her respective Hollywood Walk of Fame emblem have manifested over the years, she too finds the passage of time difficult to take when her long-running aerobic TV show is canceled on her 50th birthday. After a car accident, she learns of a mysterious serum known as “The Substance”, which promises Elisabeth a “younger and better version” of herself. Upon first injection, a new being is birthed out of Elisabeth’s spinal column, a younger counterpart who chooses the name Sue (Margaret Qualley) and shares Elisabeth’s interest in sexualized fitness routines. Sue parlays with Elisabeth’s skeezy TV producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) and she seems to be well on her way to stardom but there’s a catch: the regimen for The Substance dictates that Sue and Elisabeth switch bodies every week.

Inevitably, this protocol is abused and the equilibrium between Elisabeth and Sue is irrevocably thrown off. The temptation of staying in Sue’s body beyond the week-long timeframe proves too great and the results become dire in short order. It’s difficult to pick a favorite stretch of The Substance, easily one of 2024’s finest, but the initial fracturing of Elisabeth and Sue’s journeys provides the film’s most biting commentary. While Sue spends her week titillating viewers with her new show Pump It Up, Elisabeth desperately grasps for fulfillment through overindulging on junk food. She even accepts a date with a high school acquaintance who is, frankly, not nearly as good-looking as she is, but thanks to the humongous Sue-featuring billboard outside her window, Elisabeth spirals into debilitating insecurity. It’s a heartbreaking scene and Demi Moore pulls it off perfectly.

If The Substance was primarily just scenes where we’re asked to have sympathy for Elisabeth, Moore would already be doing the best work of her career but what puts this over the top is how much more is asked of her. At the outset, she has to sidestep the grotesque behavior of demeaning male executives who no longer see her as relevant and by the end, she steps into corporal grotesqueries that are best for viewers to experience for themselves. To an extent, I imagine Moore brought personal experience from aging in Hollywood to this role and it requires so much vulnerability and rawness to make the narrative cohere. It’s as compelling and committed a lead performance as I’ve seen all year and my hope is that Moore is in talks for Best Actress when Oscar season kicks in.

Following up her brutal debut Revenge, Coralie Fargeat demonstrates impeccable control over a story that could go terribly wrong in the hands of someone who wasn’t as passionately intelligent about the material. She’s making a movie that is, in large part, about the female form but the nudity is clinical and considered in the way that Jonathan Glazer was for 2013’s Under The Skin. The sexually-charged imagery is intentionally over-the-top and draws attention to the futility of pursuing physical perfection, as Margaret Qualley herself is performing with prosthetic enhancements. Fargeat also tips her hat to a handful of classics, with liminal spaces right out of The Shining and a pivotal music cue from Vertigo, another movie that involves female doppelgängers under intense male scrutiny. The Substance is a shot in the arm for those who have been bored by recent horror offerings.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Wild Robot, an animated sci-fi film starring Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal, about an intelligent robot who is stranded on an uninhabited island after a shipwreck and subsequently bonds with the island’s animals.
Also playing only in theaters is Megalopolis, an epic science fiction movie starring Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito, centering around an idealist architect in a decaying city, who is granted a license by the federal government to demolish and rebuild the city as a sustainable utopia.
Streaming on Paramount+ is Apartment 7A, a psychological thriller starring Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest, involving a struggling dancer who finds herself drawn into dark forces by a peculiar couple promising her fame in 1960s New York.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Transformers One

Fittingly, the Transformers franchise has undergone several metamorphoses since the animated television series debuted 40 years ago, with the corresponding The Transformers: The Movie being released in 1986. After five Michael Bay-directed live action movies, a Bumblebee spin-off and standalone sequel last year, the alien-robot hybrids return to the big screen in animated form with Transformers One. Coming over from the world of Pixar, Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley brings a more playful touch to this origin story that doesn’t skimp on either the fast-paced action or platitude-laden speechifying. It’s the kind of reboot that succeeds at making a case for a kid-friendly Paramount+ series based around these characters, even if it doesn’t make for the most satisfying film on its own terms.

On their home planet of Cybertron, robot friends Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) spend their days trading wise-cracks while mining for raw material known as Energon. In hopes of working their way up from the mines, they make a showing for themselves in the Iacon 5000 race and catch the attention of their intrepid leader Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm). Desperate to locate the coveted Matrix Of Leadership so they can transform like their Prime heroes, Orion and D-16 team up with fellow robots B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key) and Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) to venture to Cybertron’s surface. But when they arrive, they uncover secrets that will forever change the fate of their planet.

Though their screenplay follows the formulaic beats we’d expect from a scrappy superhero saga, writing trio Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari punch things up with well-dispersed beats of humor. While it’s not as consistently funny or visually inventive as 2014’s The Lego Movie, Transformers One does possess a similar sense of play that coheres nicely with both movies’ origins in the toy world. The quartet of protagonists don’t gain the ability to “transform” until about halfway through the story, so there’s a more palpable spirit of reinvention when they gain their powers. Once that moment occurs, there’s a clear delineation of motivations between the altruistic Orion Pax and absolutist D-16 that fracture their friendship and set their courses for the rest of the narrative.

Even for a theatrical animated spectacle, Transformers One has a particularly stacked ensemble voice cast that also includes veterans like Steve Buscemi and Laurence Fishburne. Brian Tyree Henry, who’s also lent terrific voicework to the ongoing Spider-Verse series, is the standout here as a character whose disillusionment is believably transformed into rage and thirst for revenge. Chris Hemsworth channels similar notes of lovable oafishness that his MCU co-star Chris Pratt played for his lead role The Lego Movie — that is, until Orion Pax completes his evolution to Platitudenus Prime in the last 20 minutes or so. Scarlett Johansson and Keegan-Michael Key bring the no-nonsense resolve and comic relief chops, respectively, that are very much in their wheelhouses.

Down the stretch, Transformers One suffers from the same symptoms that have befallen many a prequel before it, where the third act moves too quickly in order for everything to click into place for the next chapter. Formative events fly by like fighter jets zipping through the sky and voiceovers are backed by urgent crescendos from the music score to underline their importance. But the ride up to that point is colorful and exciting enough for those who don’t have much experience with the world of Transformers to feel like they joined in at just the right time. Transformers One doesn’t reinvent the wheel but given this franchise’s popularity and longevity, perhaps it doesn’t have to.

Score – 3/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Never Let Go, a survival horror film starring Halle Berry and Percy Daggs IV, concerning a family that has been haunted by an evil spirit for years, whose safety and surroundings come into question when one of the children questions if the evil is real.
Also playing in theaters is The Substance, a body horror movie starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, about a fading celebrity who decides to use a black-market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.
Premiering on Netflix is His Three Daughters, a family drama starring Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen, involving a trio of estranged sisters who come back together to care for their ailing father in his New York apartment.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Michael Keaton was one of the highlights in last year’s superhero goulash The Flash and at the tail end of this summer, he’s back reviving another character from a different 1980s Tim Burton classic after a lengthy hiatus. Fortunately, Burton has returned for directing duties as well in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a legacy sequel that could have easily been a soulless excuse to pilfer from the bio-exorcist’s bedeviled brand but instead feels like a proper successor. Following a Dumbo remake that feels like it was workshopped within an inch of its life, it seems Burton is having real fun behind the camera again and the spirit of play is infectious. Sure, the storyline is too busy and the pacing gets away from him but when it comes to Burton movies, I’ll take amiably anarchic over anemically anonymous any day of the week.

Moving on from her goth teenage phase in Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) now uses her ghost-communing powers to host a talk show about haunted houses with her television producer boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). A death in the Deetz family brings Lydia, stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) back to the small town of Winter River for the funeral. All the while, Lydia is plagued with pop-up visions of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), who has been carrying a flame for her in the afterlife while running a call center of shrunken head pencil-pushers who help the recently deceased with their questions. Various circumstances dictate that Lydia begrudgingly utter the titular demon’s name thrice and once she does, the real world and afterlife intermingle in appropriately kooky ways.

Screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who worked with Ortega on the wildly successful Netflix series Wednesday, pack their script with enough plot threads and fun characters that in another life, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could’ve been a Max miniseries. At feature length, it moves at a blistering pace and even though there are plenty of imaginative ideas on the page, Burton probably would’ve done well to cut out some of the excess. After a pitch-perfect introduction, Monica Bellucci wanders around the rest of the movie as an undead jilted ex-lover looking for a way into the plot but never really getting there. Willem Dafoe is another welcome presence as ghost detective Wolf Jackson, a stunt-addicted action star when he was alive, but Burton can’t really decide how to handle his character either.

Jackson’s signature catchphrase is “you gotta keep it real” and Burton seemed to retain this ethos in regards to practical effects vs. computer-generated work in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Much of the predecessor’s fun came from the demented creature design and creative use of stop-motion animation, among other peculiarities that make it one-of-a-kind. There are obviously more special effects in this sequel — after all, the entire budget for Beetlejuice‘s visual effects was $1 million — but the focus is still on tactile aspects like macabre costume design and creepy makeup as opposed to spitting everything out of a computer. There’s a musical number in the third act that kills and there’s even an extended Soul Train bit that commits fully to its goofy conceit.

What I appreciated most about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to cater to a wider audience or reinvent itself for a new generation. Just like the original was its own thing when it came out, this movie has a go-for-broke spirit that Hollywood seems to be lacking when it comes to franchise moviemaking. The returning cast also seem giddy to be returning to their characters after a long break, with Keaton especially shining once again as his uncouth undead trickster demon. Ortega is playing a little bit too deadpan as the third-generation Deetz but given that her storylines center around a neighborhood crush and trying to reunite with her deceased father, her playing things straight isn’t much of a hindrance. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice caps off a summer of surprisingly strong sequels like Inside Out 2 and Twisters that prove follow-ups don’t have to fall back on familiarity to succeed.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Speak No Evil, a psychological thriller starring James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis, about a family who’s invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, unaware that their dream vacation will soon become a nightmare.
Also playing in theaters is The Killer’s Game, an action comedy starring Dave Bautista and Sofia Boutella, involving a veteran assassin who fends off a hit he placed on himself after learning the terminal medical diagnosis he received was incorrect.
Streaming on Netflix is Uglies, a science fiction film starring Joey King and Keith Powers, set in a future post-scarcity dystopian world in which everyone is considered an “Ugly,” but then turned “Pretty” by extreme cosmetic surgery when they reach the age of 16.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Deliverance

If there was ever a golden age of exorcism movies, we’re certainly not in it at this present moment. The reception for The Exorcist: Believer last fall was so lackluster that Universal Pictures scrapped plans for a proposed trilogy, while the Russell Crowe-led The Exorcism barely contributed to this summer’s box office haul. Now dropping on Netflix is The Deliverance, another dud of the subgenre that tries in earnest to tackle challenging subjects like poverty and alcoholism, before succumbing to the hoariest clichés in the possession movie playbook. It comes from director Lee Daniels, who broke out 15 years ago with the Oscar-winning Precious but has since struggled to capitalize on its success. This time he teams up with his The United States Vs. Billie Holiday star Andra Day, whose performance here is one of the film’s lone bright spots, as was also the case for the duo’s previous collaboration.

Day plays Ebony Jackson, a struggling mother of three whose husband is overseas serving in Iraq and whose ailing mother Alberta (Glenn Close) has clung closer to religion after her cancer diagnosis. For the third time in a year, they’ve relocated to a new house and Ebony has found a job at a salon to support her sons Nate (Caleb McLaughlin) and Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins) along with her daughter Shante (Demi Singleton). Everyone is doing what they can to make the new arrangement work but soon, flies and strange smells begin emanating from the decrepit basement. As is common for these types of films, the children begin exhibiting strange behavior and after several disturbing incidents, Ebony and Alberta are convinced that they’re being haunted by demonic forces. They reach out to the reverend of their church (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to intervene and save their family from the clutches of the devil.

The Deliverance is based loosely on the true story of Latoya Ammons and her family, who claimed paranormal activity occurred in their Gary, Indiana residence in 2011. Because Indiana lacks the tax incentives and financial breaks that other states have in place for filming — the reason why even films that take place in our state often aren’t shot here — the adaptation was filmed in and takes place in Pittsburgh instead. As a storyteller, Lee Daniels seems to be most in his element when he’s covering the hardships and personal demons of Ebony, a protagonist as prickly as Precious was in the 2009 movie that shares her name. Andra Day gives a powerful performance as a mom who turns to the bottle when her back is up against the well, finding the humanity in a character who can be difficult to like, to say the least.

If The Deliverance only functioned as a family drama, it would still have issues overcoming the on-the-nose and tin-eared dialogue in the subpar script from David Coggeshall and Elijah Bynum. But around the halfway mark, the movie crossfades into a full-blown horror movie and the proceedings go downhill fast from then on. The tell-tale signs of demonic possession are belabored and the special effects rendered to demonstrate physical impossibilities are extremely unconvincing. It all leads to an inevitable climax where Ebony and the church pastor must confront the devil through an immured loved one. It’s a common occurrence in exorcism films that in these heightened moments, possessed characters will say offensive things to throw the religious interveners off-kilter. The Deliverance contains a line read that’s an all-timer of what I assume is unintentional comedy.

Besides Andra Day, no one else in the qualified cast can seem to find their footing. Omar Epps pops up as a chemotherapist who has the hots for Alberta and Mo’Nique portrays a comically evil social worker — “I got you now, Ebony Jackson,” she snickers in her first line, stopping short of twirling a proverbial mustache. But no one is more lost here than Glenn Close, who has been nominated for an Academy Award on 8 different occasions but has yet to secure one; she was a lock for Best Actress in 2019, until Olivia Colman came out of nowhere to pull out the upset. Since that time, she’s turned in some ponderous performances but she’s never looked as completely out of place in a movie as she is here. We can only pray that in the future, Netflix and other studios will deliver us from disoriented dreck like The Deliverance.

Score – 1.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a horror comedy sequel starring Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, which reunites the infamous bio-exorcist with the Deetz family after a portal to the afterlife is accidentally opened once again.
Also playing in theaters is The Front Room, a psychological horror film starring Brandy and Kathryn Hunter, telling the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother.
Premiering on Netflix is Rebel Ridge, an action thriller starring Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson, centering around an ex-Marine who grapples his way through a web of small-town corruption when an attempt to post bail for his cousin escalates into a violent standoff with the local police chief.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Sing Sing

Now playing at Cinema Center, the new prison drama Sing Sing stars Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo as John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate at the titular New York jail. He’s on the steering committee for the prison’s Rehabilitation Through The Arts (RTA, for short) program, a real-life initiative that sponsors a theatre group for the incarcerated. After completing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Divine G and the rest of the group set their sights on their next project, which they decide should be more comedic and modern after just finishing Shakespeare. The volunteer director Brent (also Oscar-nominated Paul Raci) decides to take a pass at a script, which the group agrees should implement disparate themes from time travel to Egyptian pharaohs and a couple monologues for good measure.

Joining the group is Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), who auditions for the role of Hamlet — albeit, a variation on the typical Shakespeare version. Divine G, who just finished playing Lysander and is typically the lead in the plays they put on, is surprised when the committee chooses Divine Eye for the central role. Watching the relationship between the “Divines” develop is one of Sing Sing‘s inimitable treasures, beginning as a reluctant tutor-pupil narrative but slowly morphing into something richer and more meaningful. Divine G has been around for a while and written several of the scripts the theatre group has used for its productions, so he has trouble hiding his jealousy when Divine Eye comes onto the scene. Their conversations start with consternation, segue to reconciliation and eventually blossom with mutual admiration.

Like Divine Eye, most of the characters in Sing Sing are played by men who were formerly imprisoned and some of whom were members of the real-life RTA. Naturally, this gives the stellar ensemble cast an organic sense of collective purpose and effortless believability. Together with cinematographer Pat Scola, director and co-writer Greg Kwedar often frames the inmate characters in close-up, reclaiming the humanity and individuality that the prison system has taken from them. Film is a format of faces and seeing Sing Sing in a theater is to meet face-to-face with people we don’t always get to see on screen. Two characters I was drawn to most are Dino and Carmine, the former a quietly wise colossus and the latter a somewhat neurotic type who sports a nervous tic of wiping his brow, even when there’s no sweat present.

Sing Sing does indulge in dramatic clichés here and there, most notably through a handful of montages that showcase the actors running lines and sets being assembled for Breakin’ The Mummy’s Code, the production they’re putting together. Fortunately, they’re scored by Bryce Dessner, one of the guitarists in the rock band The National, who has also written music for quite a few independent movies over the past several years. I’ve generally enjoyed some of his film music so far but his work here stands as his most transcendent and life-affirming yet, enough to make one’s eyes swell even when it’s not accompanied by moving images. The themes tend to coalesce around Divine G’s mindset at any given point in the story, often hopeful and tender but tense and choleric in the wake of an unexpected tragedy with one of the RTA players.

Understandably, the emotional lynchpin of Sing Sing is Kwedar tapping into what makes programs like the Rehabilitation Through The Arts so vital to quality of life for those in prison. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recently-released Netflix doc Daughters, which also centers around incarcerated men but involves a different program that allows them to reunite with their daughters for a special “daddy daughter dance” event. Both films beam with undeniable empathy and hard-fought optimism, showcasing a segment of society that is too often portrayed with preachiness and artifice when present in the movies. Sing Sing is a quietly moving reminder of the power that creativity and expressivity have in even the most dispiriting of settings.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is AfrAId, a sci-fi horror film starring John Cho and Katherine Waterston, involving a family who is selected to test a new home digital assistant device that develops self-awareness and interferes with their lives in disturbing ways.
Also playing in theaters is City Of Dreams, a thriller starring Ari Lopez and Renata Vaca, which chronicles the true story of a Mexican boy whose dreams of becoming a soccer star are shattered when he’s smuggled across the border and sold to a sweatshop in the United States.
Streaming on Netflix is The Deliverance, a supernatural horror movie starring Andra Day and Glenn Close, concerning a family living in an Indiana home who discover strange, demonic occurrences that convince them and the community that the house is a portal to hell.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Alien: Romulus

One would be forgiven for having trouble connecting the narrative dots between the Alien films, which make up a franchise that has now spanned across six decades. To keep things relatively simple: the latest entry, Alien: Romulus, takes place chronologically between 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, the two movies that still stand as undisputed twin peaks of the series. Despite this, director and co-writer Fede Álvarez peppers in references to plenty of other chapters in the series, including an iconic face-off shot from Alien³ and creature design callbacks to the Engineers from Prometheus. After two Ridley Scott-helmed tales that bent more towards hard sci-fi, Álvarez has seemingly been brought on to bring these movies back to their horror roots and has mild success doing so.

Our story begins on the desolate mining colony Jackson’s Star, where Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her surrogate android brother Andy (David Jonsson) brave the planet’s perpetual absence of daylight. Dreaming of a way out of their squalor, Rain reconnects with ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), who have access to a scrappy spacecraft from their mining jobs. They come up with a plan to fly up to decommissioned space station Romulus and gather the necessary cryopods and fuel cells for their years-long exodus to the distant planet Yvaga. Their mission is complicated, inevitably, by the presence of the deadly xenomorph creatures onboard, who were recovered from the wreckage of Nostromo spaceship from the inaugural Alien film.

Opening with a dynamic and propulsive prologue that juxtaposes the silence of space with the beeps and boops of an awakening spaceship, Álvarez transitions to a strong introduction of characters and their circumstances. Even though Jackson’s Star is a gloomy locale, there’s some brilliant storytelling at hand as Rain’s work contract is unexpectedly extended by the barbaric Weyland-Yutani corporation. Even though Andy is a robot — he prefers the term “synthetic human” — it’s clear that he has a strong bond with Rain and his programming by their dad has allowed for a sweeter demeanor and pun-laden jokes. Later in their journey, the plot necessitates that Andy get an “upgrade” to his processing system and David Jonsson does a terrific job modulating his performance to accommodate the drastic shift in personality.

If Jonsson’s work represents the most well-rendered android character in the franchise since Ash (portrayed by Ian Holm) in Alien, then it’s a shame that Alien: Romulus doesn’t do much new with any of its other characters, human or otherwise. Filling out the cast are Spike Fearn and Aileen Wu, the latter portraying the pilot of their Corbelan vessel, but in a space slasher like this, it’s pretty obvious that not every character is going to be with us the whole runtime. Isabela Merced is a talented young actress on the rise — she’ll appear as Hawkgirl in Superman next year — and while she’s certainly served better by the material here than she was in Madame Web earlier this year, there’s similarly not much interesting about her Kay either.

Where the rote characters and familiar story beats as the narrative progresses count against the final product, Álvarez does everything he can to make up the deficit on the directing side. As he’s proven with his 2013 Evil Dead reboot and 2016’s Don’t Breathe, he certainly knows how to build up tension and pay it off with some genuinely squirm-inducing punctuation marks. The most effective setpiece overall involves a zero gravity effect out of the fizzy lifting drink scene in Willy Wonka and an elevator shaft, even if the sequence ends with a bit of eye roll-inducing fan service. Hot off a musical score for Twisters that is among the year’s best so far, composer Benjamin Wallfisch infuses homages to Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien compositions, with fluttering flute flourishes that imply the majesty of outer space and trumpet blasts remind us of its danger. Alien: Romulus doesn’t do much to move the mythology of the Alien saga forward but it’s a serviceably suspenseful journey back to the place where no one can hear you scream.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Crow, a superhero remake starring Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs, following a murdered musician who is resurrected to avenge the deaths of himself and his fiancée.
Also playing in theaters is Blink Twice, a psychological thriller starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum, involving a cocktail waitress who travels with a billionaire tech mogul to his private island for a luxurious party, where things begin to go wrong after her friend vanishes.
Streaming on Peacock is The Killer, an action remake starring Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy, reimagining John Woo’s classic about an assassin who tries to make amends in an effort to restore the sight of a beautiful young singer.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Dìdi

The outstanding new coming-of-age tale Dìdi is one that, at the outset, draws easy comparisons to other recent films in its subgenre like mid90s, Eighth Grade and several other titles in A24’s library. But the more time spent with writer-director Sean Wang’s directorial feature, the more it reveals its own unique notes of compassion and humor to distinguish itself from its ilk. It’s difficult to know how much this period piece will play for those who weren’t teenagers in the mid-aughts but since I was born in 1989, many of the cultural footholds from the era landed effortlessly for me. Folks in my generation don’t want to hear it but 2004 was 20 years ago, which has historically been the average nostalgia cycle for pop culture fixtures to come back around. If Dìdi is trying to pander to millennials, well, all I can say is that it does so as artfully and authentically as possible.

Our story takes place in the summer of 2008, centering around the 13-year-old Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) and his Taiwanese American family living in the suburbs of the Bay Area. His father continues to work in Taiwan so that his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen) and sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) can afford to live in America. Though he feels different from the majority of his schoolmates due to his ethnicity, he’s very much a “normal” teenage boy in many ways. He has close friends but finds himself drawn to hanging out with other groups. He’s interested in girls but doesn’t know how to talk to them. He loves his family but also feels embarrassed by them as well. All of these messy contradictions swirl around in a hormonal whirlwind as Chris’s first year of high school looms in the fall.

Also living in the Wang household is Nǎi Nai (Chang Li Hua), Chris’s grandma and Chungsing’s mother-in-law, a dynamic which echoes another account of Asian immigration to the United States from 2021’s Minari. Nǎi Nai is both naive to how actually modern teens pass their time — she doesn’t understand why Chris can’t “play with crickets by the creek” like when she was little — and critical of Chungsing’s parenting. It’s a perspective that gives Dìdi a more mature reprieve from Chris’s antics and depicts the hardships that other generations go through so that their kids can have it easier. Joan Chen is particularly excellent at conveying the balance of affection (the film’s title is taken from the pet name she has for her son) and distance mothers struggle to give their rambunctious teenage offspring.

Most of the events in Dìdi are seen through Chris’s eyes and like the best films about growing up, we’re brought back to times in our lives when we felt how our protagonist feels. The emotional ups and downs, where life either feels like it couldn’t be any better or couldn’t be any worse with hardly any room in the middle, are captured expertly by Sean Wang throughout. The joy of skateboarding with your friends, the embarrassment of saying the wrong thing to a crush, the bittersweet sentiment around seeing an older sibling going off to college; we feel it all with Chris. Films like Lady Bird and The Edge Of Seventeen have done a terrific job capturing the female side of this age and conversely, parts of Dìdi feel specific to how young boys interact. They blow things up, they call each other names and even get into the occasional dust-up.

While teenage boys being violent and vulgar isn’t a phenomenon specific to 2008, the movie does a terrific job capturing the details that pertain to this specific time and place. For instance, teenagers had moved on from MySpace to Facebook at that time but were still using AOL Instant Messenger to keep in touch since Facebook Messenger hadn’t been rolled out yet. YouTube was in its infancy and was still about regular people uploading what are essentially home movies as opposed to being the massive video platform that it’s since become. Text messaging was certainly around but still novel as a form of synchronous communication, where one numerical keypad typo sent to a pretty girl could send things into a tailspin. We come back to these movies, in part, to feel young again and with Dìdi, Sean Wang has crafted a small gem of teenage angst and splendor that will undoubtedly be treasured for years to come.

Score – 4.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Alien: Romulus, a sci-fi sequel starring Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson, involving a group of young space colonists who, while scavenging a derelict space station, come face to face with the most terrifying life form in space.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Jackpot!, an action comedy starring Awkwafina and John Cena, is set in the near future where a “Grand Lottery” has been newly established in California where the “winner” can be killed for a multi-billion dollar prize.
Premiering on Netflix is Daughters, an award-winning documentary centering around four young girls who prepare for a special Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers as part of a unique fatherhood program in a Washington, D.C. jail.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Trap

After an excellent turn in last year’s phenomenal Oppenheimer, Josh Hartnett returns to the screen with more compelling work in Trap, a ludicrous thriller that’s lucky to have him at its center. The surprisingly unclever cat-and-mouse saga comes courtesy of inescapable auteur M. Night Shyamalan, whose bleak Knock At The Cabin last year sported a similarly strong lead performance by Dave Bautista. By comparison, this latest effort is unmistakably pulpier and not tied down by Knock‘s apocalyptic glumness but also doesn’t seem to be tied to any kind of reality that resembles our own. Suspension of disbelief can be crucial to making certain convoluted movies work but Trap is playing in a different arena altogether. If it were competing in the Contrivance Olympics, it would easily win a gold medal.

Hartnett stars as Cooper Adams, a seemingly earnest father to teenage Riley (Ariel Donoghue) who scores big points by winning tickets to a sold out concert fronted by pop megastar Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). As he and his daughter make their way to the floor seats, Cooper becomes curious about the increased police presence inside the venue and when buying a T-shirt for Riley, a merch vendor fills him in. It turns out the show was actually planned by the FBI so they could nab a notorious serial killer known as The Butcher, who is expected to be somewhere in the audience. It’s at this point we learn that Cooper himself is actually The Butcher, a fact that is obviously kept from Riley and everyone else in his life. We see the majority of the preceding events through his eyes, as he desperately tries to evade security while trying to find a way out of the arena without arousing suspicion.

At least at the outset, Trap inadvertently mirrors In A Violent Nature, another recent film that follows the perspective of a serial killer, albeit with different motivations for each of the twisted protagonists. But the horrifying beauty of that movie lies in its simplicity in terms of narrative structure and visual storytelling. Shyamalan’s is obviously the more commercially friendly of the two, and arguably has an even more tantalizing elevator pitch than Nature, but as has become an issue in Shyamalan’s more recent work, it can’t pay off its setup in an equally satisfying way. All of the promotional material for Trap lets us in on what would seem to be the movie’s biggest twist, which naturally causes the audience to ask “okay, so what else is there?” The answer, sadly, is not much else.

Trap is at its best when we’re in lockstep with Cooper’s thinking and we’re forced to empathize with the manic plight of a killer. Naturally, this is where Hartnett shines the most too, vacillating between cold-blooded psychopathy and dorky dad energy around his daughter and a clingy parent who keeps engaging with him. Shyamalan has a way of not only writing but directing an uncanny way of speaking that can ring hollow in his more serious efforts but here, Hartnett indulges this idiosyncratic delivery style and makes a meal of it. It works because Cooper himself is putting on a show for everyone in his life, which Shyamalan extenuates with close-ups that depict Cooper desperately trying to bury anxiety with a chipper veneer.

But there’s only so much that Hartnett can do and Trap simply doesn’t have enough tricks up its sleeve to make Cooper’s attempted exile worthwhile. Without giving too much away, the film shift’s narrative subjectivity away from Cooper around the hour mark and suffice it to say that the quality of acting from the rest of the ensemble isn’t at Hartnett’s level. I don’t inherently have an issue with Shyamalan casting his daughter Saleka as a pop star who comes off like an amalgam of Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo but let’s say her musical ability outstrips her acting talents and leave it at that. M. Night’s other daughter Ishana made her directorial debut earlier this year with The Watchers, which certainly had its issues but showcased a promise of growth. With Trap, M. Night Shyamalan reminds us that he may be imprisoned in his own mindset of enticing storytelling that can’t stick the landing.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming only to theaters is Borderlands, an action comedy starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart, adapting the popular video game for the big screen with a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
Also playing in theaters is It Ends With Us, a romantic drama starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, involving a young woman who begins a relationship with a charming neurosurgeon, who soon reveals a darker side that reminds her of her own parents’ fraught relationship.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is The Instigators, a heist comedy starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, centering around a botched robbery that causes two thieves to go on the run, dragging along one of their therapists in the process.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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